Hacker Cinema
Gold Rush
2010 · TV series · 41 min episodes · 17 seasons
Follow the lives of ambitious miners as they head north in pursuit of gold. With new miners, new claims, new machines and new ways to pull gold out of the ground, the stakes are higher than ever. But will big risks lead to an even bigger pay out?
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3 comments on Hacker News
Hot take: the problems here are cultural.
Consider these data points:
1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever creative license is taken here, you still have people who will take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of the proceeds.
The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can dismiss.
3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. It just... is.
4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example, the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the population is cruel, even reprehensible.
EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
Don't judge me, but during a coding session, I got caught up watching "Gold Rush" on whatever channel it comes on.
After sort of passively watching it while doing other things, one of the episodes in the marathon was a "behind the scenes" sort of thing, where they showed that drone cinematography is used, basically, in like 80% of the filming done for that show.
They send the cameramen out in two-person teams, one to fly the drone, and the other to operate the camera, with an Oculus-looking visor on so that they can simply see the camera as through a viewfinder.
The "intent to generate income" is not only there, it's at some point in the past.
Wow, that is a beautiful design :)
I wrote something similar for http://giby.tv, though it's not really a core feature for me and it doesn't recognize geographical restrictions, which seems to be a primary motivation for you guys.
You guys make it look easy, but I think there are a lot of subtle gotchas that others might not realize about this sort of TV data, for example:
Different sources of data (Netflix, Wikipedia, Network sites, iTunes, etc) often disagree about what's correct, and there isn't really an easily accessible canonical source. Sometimes an episode will release weeks earlier in one country than another (e.x. Fox recently delayed a new episode of House, despite it airing weeks earlier on another network in another country). Sometimes iTunes will just give completely incorrect information about dates.
Lots of series names are reused by remakes. String matching by series name will often lead to mismatching, for example, the 1961 series of 'The Defenders' with the 2010 series of the same name. Or the US version of The Office with the UK. Sometimes sources will disambiguate for you and append something like (US) or (UK) at the end. Sometimes they only carry one version and don't bother.
Sometimes a series will rename itself after airing a few episodes/seasons, like 'Gold Rush Alaska' -> 'Gold Rush' after the first season. Not all content providers will have the new name.
And episode titles are even worse. If you thought an episode had a single name that everyone always agreed on, you would be sorely mistaken.
Anyway, if you're interested in this sort of thing you might also be interested in tracking new episodes of tv shows at http://giby.tv, or finding links for specific episodes i.e. http://giby.tv/series/House or http://giby.tv/series/The%20Office%20(US) :)