Hacker Cinema
Silicon Valley
2014 · TV series · 28 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by Dave Krinsky, Mike Judge, John Altschuler
In the high-tech gold rush of modern Silicon Valley, the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success. Partially inspired by Mike Judge’s own experiences as a Silicon Valley engineer in the late ‘80s, Silicon Valley is an American sitcom that centers around six programmers who are living together and trying to make it big in the Silicon Valley.
134 positive36 negative15 mixed481 neutralfrom 666 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
748 comments on Hacker News
Did Gemini created this Silicon Valley TV show episode script? Makes so much sense...
He said the following in 2019, at a StrictlyVC event, “The honest answer is we have no idea, we have never made any revenue, we have no current plans to make revenue, we have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you.
It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley it really does I get it, you can laugh, it's all right, but it is what I actually believe is going to happen”
Whether or not that’s his current view, who knows, but everyone who’s invested in OpenAI since should have known that this was at least part of his mental model.
https://youtu.be/gjQUCpeJG1Y?is=--fubVyvQnC8rgse
Not everyone dreams to found the next unicorn, real life for most of us isn't the Silicon Valley TV series.
Just like not every cook wants to be a Michelin star with molecular cuisine, a tiny food drop in the middle of a gigantic plate.
Small digression. Silicon Valley never ceases to deliver top quality entertainment. We desperately need Season 2 of Silicon Valley series.
On a serious notes, this seems like a desperate attempt to sway public opinion, but hey, Apple is no saint either. This will be a fun season.
> >...and I've also built and scaled consumer mobile apps solo to 20k+ downloads
>>I highly recommend watching HBO's Silicon Valley.
Before watching it, can you explain what you meant in reference to his comment? Thanks.
>Any advice?
Yeah, don't put YC on a pedestal. Whatever ship the supposed prestige was on sailed a long time ago, then sank.
One would hope that would create a habitable reef, but in practice it's probably closer to an underwater super fund site.
>...and I've also built and scaled consumer mobile apps solo to 20k+ downloads
I highly recommend watching HBO's Silicon Valley.
> The shared "hacker house" scene in SF is really weird, though.
The startup incubator in Silicon Valley, the tv series, was good comedy.
Another story I'd probably see on the Silicon Valley TV show, not real life.
Silicon Valley (the TV show) memed about it with its tabs vs spaces bit. It used to be a thing for sure. It has been a good 10 or 15 years since I had such a discussion. Automated linting and formatting tools largely killed it in my experience.
Sometimes it feels like we're living in an episode of Silicon Valley, the show.
The silicon valley TV show even had episodes on this! Man I miss that show. They'd have so much funny material nowadays if they came back.
That's actually exactly how I feel about Anthropic.
They play such a PR game, trying really really hard to be seen as the good guys. It feels as another satirical episode of Silicon Valley. It's very clear they are all money and power motivated while also pretending to do all of this for the good of humanity. I have rarely seen that level of hypocrisy and cultish behavior from leadership and employees there.
I would honestly just prefer if they were honest about being power and money hungry instead of playing that game of AI Safety.
Silicon valley season 6 was on point.
This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. I wish that show was rebooted, they'd have so much funny material nowadays.
The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance.
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the gregarious), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Woz against the belief grifters, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
Sounds like a title you’d read on the satirical version of HN in a TV show like Silicon Valley
i will watch tv show <Silicon Valley> again
Wow this crazy -- "Built-in Pomodoro timer" means they are literally replacing a $5 plastic tomato-shaped mechanical timing device with something that costs $220 and features WiFi and app integration. What could be more antithetical to the original pomodoro ethos, I don't know. It's like an episode of Silicon Valley.
HBO’s Silicon Valley looks more and more like a documentary every day. The out of touch antics of Gavin Belson or Peter Gregory are fucking spot on.
The guy who created SV actually WAS a software dev in SV back in the late 80s though (albeit briefly). And obviously had a career of fairly subversive, out there humor (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, King of The Hill, Idiocracy).
BBT was created by someone who just did a bunch of other sitcoms.
I couldn't stand BBT either, but I knew by default that Silicon Valley was going to be good.
They say Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than a comedy, and now we have one more way life imitates art: A growing army of Erlich Bachmann's.
Reminds me of the silicon valley episode where every company repeated the phrase “making the world a better place”.
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
There are obviously tonnes of accurate stereotypes in the TV show Silicon Valley, but one of the ones I think about often is when Richard calculates how much money Russ Hanneman has made investing his billions... and it works out to less than sticking it in the bank.
You've got all these silicon valley guys running around "venture investing", the truth is it's more of a life style than a money making exercise. They made their money decades ago, and now they're just sort of hanging around desperately trying to tell everyone how clever they are.
Krazam is legendary. This first Public Memories episode feels like a cross between Portlandia and Silicon Valley. Looking forward to seeing more!
My first think after reading title was "Silicon Valley" series (2014) and episode with Gilfoyle and taking control of smart fridges ;) Sorry. A but out of topic, but I had to mention ;)
"HCF":
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.
https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/
Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!
I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
> I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
I really like Halt And Catch Fire but it doesn’t count since it also depicts the 80s. So, since Mr. Robot already got its mention, how about Silicon Valley? ;-)
Reminds me of the TechCrunch episode of Silicon Valley TV show. Everyone was there to make the big buck but all collectively pretended they were doing their work for the good of humankind.
This guy and Rob Pike should have a talk.
That's always been the case, in software and elsewhere.
Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.
So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?
Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.
If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.
So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.
I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
Ha! It’s the trick Richard used in Silicon Valley season 5 episode 1 (2 years before the blog post) to bankrupt “SliceLine” and buy out their devs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_season_5
> If it were satire, what do you think it would be satirizing?
Think of the most terminally online drama you've ever witnessed: the hysterics people work themselves into over what (to outside observers) seems utterly inane and forgettable, the multi-page Tumblr or 4chan posts that become the sacred texts of the "discourse", and the outsized importance people ascribe to it, as if some meme, album cover, or Qanon drop is the modern incantation of the shot heard around the world.
The people wrapped up in this stuff tend to self-select into their own communities because if you're not involved with or amenable to caring about it, why should they spend time talking to someone who will just nod, go "huh, that's wild", and proceed to steer the conversation elsewhere? In their eyes, you may even be a weirdo for not caring about this stuff.
So when I read:
> I’ve got a lot of interests and on any given day, I may be excited to discuss various topics, from kernels to music to cultures and religions. I know I can put together a prompt to give any of today’s leading models and am essentially guaranteed a fresh perspective on the topic of interest. But let me pose the same prompt to people and more often then not the reply will be a polite nod accompanied by clear signs of their thinking something else entirely, or maybe just a summary of the prompt itself, or vague general statements about how things should be. In fact, so rare it is to find someone who knows what I mean that it feels like a magic moment. With the proliferation of genuinely good models—well educated, as it were—finding a conversational partner with a good foundation of shared knowledge has become trivial with AI. This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people.
I'm imagining the more academic equivalent of someone who got wrapped up in Tiktok drama or Q nuttery but couldn't find a community of kindred souls and, frustrated with the perceived intellectual mediocrity surrounding themself, has embraced LLMs for connection instead. And that's just hilarious. If Silicon Valley was still being produced, I'm sure this would have been made into an episode at some point.
The bits about not generalizing and engaging in fallacious reasoning are also quite amusing since, while yes, the average person likely would benefit from taking (and paying attention in) a couple introductory philosophy classes, expecting all humans to behave logically and introspectively is fantastical thinking.
Game of thrones will be. No main character is safe since Ned Stark was killed on TV.
No ending was going to be good. Sopranos had a controversial ending too.
Silicon Valley captured the feel of the bay area and did a good job with satire.
2000s would be easier, I think 2010 is about the switch to super hero movies.
Silicon Valley (TV show) had a similar themed intro style
The tv series Silicon Valley has a good episode where they discuss the importance of a start-up not having any revenue. Being pre revenue apparently means unlimited potential, with any level of revenue being bad, as you always have to grow it.
Jumping on to agree with Severance and make a few more.
Silicon Valley - for me the funniest (and painful to watch, sometimes) to show. Schitt’s Creek - heart warming, wonderfully written, very funny bite size episodes perfect for cosy Christmas times.
I just re-binge-watched Silicon Valley in its entirety, with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, so I could get all the interconnected characters and sub-plots and cultural references together in my head better than the first time I watched it in real time at one episode per month.
It really should be required viewing for anyone in the industry, it has so much spot-on social commentary, it's just not "tecthical" not to be fully aware of it, even if it stings.
https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Tethics
>Meanwhile, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) comes up with a code of ethics for tech, which he lamely calls "tethics", and urges all tech CEOs to sign a pledge to abide by the tethics code. Richard refuses to sign, he considers the pledge to be unenforceable and meaningless.
>Belson invites Richard to the inauguration of the Gavin Belson Institute for Tethics. Before Belson's speech, Richard confronts the former Hooli CEO with the fact that the tethics pledge is a stream of brazenly plagiarized banalities, much like Belson's novel Cold Ice Cream & Hot Kisses.
>Once at the podium, Belson discards his planned speech and instead confesses to his misdeeds when he was CEO of Hooli. Belson urges California's attorney general to open an investigation.
>Richard mistakenly thinks that Belson is repentant for all his past bad behavior. But, as Ron LaFlamme (Ben Feldman) explains, Belson's contrite act is just another effort to sandbag Richard. If the attorney general finds that Belson acted unethically during his tenure as Hooli CEO, the current Hooli CEO would be the one who has to pay the fine. And since Pied Piper absorbed Hooli, it would be Pied Piper that has to pay the fine.
I’m imagining the folks from Shin Godzilla.
I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.
Sad news. HBO has a veritable treasure trove of TV shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Silicon Valley etc. Even their more recent ones like White Lotus, How to With John Wilson are leagues above Netflix. Only HBO can bet on artists’ vision like that.
I cancelled my Netflix subscription 7 years ago, 99% of their content is algorithmic drivel. Mindhunter, Dahmer, House of Cards were something I liked but nothing beyond that. I knew they were trash once I saw the sheer number of spinoffs they have just on Pablo Escobar. They had had one decent run of Narcos but then they just tried to extract every drop of juice out of that one persona. Most of Netflix dramas are just the equivalent of abhorrent and ugly graffiti. Their shows are Exhibit A in what happens if you give into algorithmic drivel and have no human touch to curate them.
HBO has some timeless TV classics that I keep rewatching every year even though I have watched them multiple times. Netflix can’t produce TV dramas like that, ain’t in their blood. Completely different DNAs.
Netflix does deserve all the plaudits wrt to their streaming experience though.
I recently got into the show "Silicon Valley" after never making it past season 1. Really loving it..... and thought this was the Pied Piper company too.
Initially read the headline and thinking it would be about a certain TV show about Silicon Valley. Not disappointed
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-15/openai-has-a-business-plan
> There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :
>> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.
> It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.
> On a pure science-fiction suspension-of-disbelief basis, this business plan is perfect and should not need any updating until they finish building the superintelligent AI. Paying one billion dollars for a 0.2% stake in whatever God comes up with is a good trade. But in the six years since announcing this perfect business plan, Sam Altman has learned [2] that it will cost at least a few trillion dollars to build the super-AI, and it turns out that the supply of science-fiction-suspension-of-disbelief capital is really quite large but not trillions of dollars.
> [1] At about 31:49 in the video. A bit later he approvingly cites the South Park “underpants gnome” meme.
> [2] Perhaps a better word is “decided.” I wrote the other day about Altman’s above-consensus capital spending plans: “'The deals have surprised some competitors who have far more modest projections of their computing costs,’ because he is better at this than they are. If you go around saying ‘I am going to build transformative AI efficiently,’ how transformative can it be? If you go around saying ‘I am going to need 1,000 new nuclear plants to build my product,’ everyone knows that it will be a big deal.”
This. We really have hit Internet bubble hype levels, this could be a Silicon Valley episode. "My pitch deck is one slide. 'It's AI... IN SPACE!'"
Pretty sure most of the quotes regarding the connection of porn and tech come from people who just watched that episode of Silicon Valley.
A lot of it was clearly exaggerated for dramatic effect for a comedy TV show, and people run with it as fact.
I'm sure that Gilfoyle's prank in Silicon Valley had its basis in a true story, like most of SV's episodes. i.e. I'm sure this has been done quite a few times ever since Mark V. Shaney.
So was House MD (well researched). Or Mr Robot. Or Silicon Valley. Heck, even Futurama did its research to the point they proved a new mathematical theorem for a joke. But being entertaining is always the priority for a TV show. Sure, maybe talk with the creators and get their inputs and insights, but don’t base your opinions on policies so heavily on simply watching the show. They’re called “dramas” for a reason.
In the TV show Silicon Valley, there’s a joke that Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, the perennial underperformer, did his undergrad at ASU. But I guess that’s one thing the show got wrong, because Arizona State University finished among the top three American schools in the world finals.
> An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.
I don't think it was money that caused this, but that many beloved tech giants were intentional built as fraternities by college dropouts and recent college graduates, many of whom did not themselves join a fraternity in college but got soaked in a lot of the atmosphere of them. It's most obvious in the case of Facebook, as publicly documented in things like the movie The Social Network, but it's a foundational DNA strand in Microsoft and Google and nearly any other big tech company that still prefers to call its headquarters/office park a "campus". (It's kind of a through line in the HBO show Silicon Valley too, how much tech companies intentionally copy the "pizza and beer and all-nighters and weird dorm room living" college vibe.)
(The presumption that most of these company executives never were themselves directly involved in college fraternities is that fact that they allow/encourage/build hazing rituals. Fraternities have had somewhat strict anti-hazing education requirements since the 1990s and most Universities have also had strict No Hazing Policies since around then. Since 2024, that education and policy enforcement has spread outside the Greek System to all students at most major Universities that get federal funding directly or indirectly, but before that it is certainly easy to understand how many might have missed the messages and education if they only saw fraternities from the outside.)
General Magic (movie)
Halt and Catch Fire (series)
Silicon Valley (series)
Nowhere near the same quality and actually (mini)series but:
- Halt and Catch Fire (actually pretty good quality and full series)
- The Playlist (creation of Spotify)
- The Dropout (creation of Theranos... do not get advice from this one though)
- WeCrashed (about WeWork, haven't seen this one though)
- Silicon Valley (silly comedy but might work)
Also some TV/movies/docs you might find in YouTube:
- Pirates of Silicon Valley (movie about bill gates and steve jobs)
- Project Code Rush (about the beginning of Mozilla)
- Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with geeks (doc about a startup by Joel Spolsky of StackOverflow fame).
Oh and also those two Steve Job movies that came out side by side.
Here's a few:
Brainstorm - shows the progression of developing technology (in this case a device that can record and playback a subjects' experiences.)
Real Genius - College antics with a bunch of kids developing a stronger laser
Silicon Valley - mini series again about silicon valley culture/developing new tech - also how ideas are discovered and others stumble upon similar, etc.
American Experience: Silicon Valley - documentary of early silicon valley and the people who started the companies
How else do you think designers can justify their inflated rates? Wrap it in in a fancy word salad to elevate it and sell it to wealthy urbanites.
Reminds me of that scene[1] from the Silicon Valley TV show where that designer was tasked to design a server box and he started the meeting showing random pictures to the CEO with some bongo drum soundtrack in order to "establish a common vocabulary" lol, or the brand manual of the infamous Pepsi logo redesign fail[2] full of made up geometrical nature BS stories that the agency pulled out of their ass to milk Pepsi, which I'm sure is what the satire form Silicon Valley was based on.
At this point, I think designers just operate on the basis of "a fool an his money are easily parted".
[1] https://youtu.be/qyLv1dQasaY?si=yUwQU-9EQL3QMxbi&t=6
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/hspqgd/pepsi_logo_redesign_brand_manual_from_2008_is_the/
Which makes Silicon Valley, the TV show, even funnier.
Wow. Now I have to go back and watch Silicon Valley season 1. Thanks for the reminder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxsPLXX1QLI
The “human heater” was literally a mock idea for a competition in the sitcom Silicon Valley. The jury canned it. https://youtu.be/Di3fPj0pUbQ
Is Thomas Middledich (the central character in the TV show Silicon Valley) really the Chief Creative Officer?
Jeri Ellsworth as Technical Advisor is also a solid member of the C64 community.
If by Documentary, you mean a new Silicon Valley sitcom, yes , all the ingredients are there: The AGI believers, the doomers, the "cure all diseases" people, the board drama, the money grabbers, the VC dance , the poaching, the lawsuits for copyrights ... there s a whole new universe of caricatures
For the love of God, can we get a reboot of the Silicon Valley television show? Just on AI. Like when they wrapped it, they wrapped it on AI usage. So, it's got the perfect arc for a reboot that focuses perfectly on AI.
Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.
Relative to the sweatshop workers he relied on to avoid sewing his own shirts.
For the same reason we don’t need 9,000 operating systems, it’s trivial to copy-paste, we don’t need Ive, Altman. The main audience is Millennials and younger and they know how this all works. There’s no generating hype when it’s more of the same; our brains normalize and simply cannot find novelty in it.
SaaS competition was faked through cheap financing since every solution can be tuned for performance and features copy pasted. It’s software after all. We weren’t trying to be the first to save a bunch of stranded people. Just unicorn before the hype bubble for your business popped.
This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives.
“I hate programmers. They make everything so complicated.” Silicon Valley TV show is how people see software engineers. Asocial children.
They don’t doubt there’s value in medicine research and real stuff logistics using software but have a sense it’s just serving software company employees more so than humanity at this point.
And politics reflects public sentiment. Software workers do not have the same tax write off benefits as other classes of workers anymore. Along with end of ZIRP, these moves are due to a lot of discussed away from the public, global pushback to tech bros running the world.
Because this is not about tech, this is just politics. /s
One thing I've learned since last year; a lot of the tech bros seem to really love fascism. Many others go along to get along. And some hide behind a veneer of "impartiality" to continue to stay in their bubbles. Looking at you ycombinator/hackernews.
Things have changed, but some of these people love it; more money and power for themselves. Some are afraid of rocking the boat, and some choose to maintain willfull ignorance.
I feel like I'm living in a black mirror/silicon valley hybrid tv episode.
It's a quote from a character from the TV show Silicon Valley. Russ Hanneman is a SV billionaire who made a lot of money putting "radio on the internet". He's intentionally a wild card character acting as if he has enormous business insight while often being at least partially if not fully wrong in his ideas. It's a parody of SV business ventures not having any real plan to make the business profitable, they're just wanting to show crazy growth in metrics like user counts to justify extreme valuations to sell the company and walk away before the music stops. "I don't want to make a little bit of money every day, I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once."
The next couple of lines:
"Pintrest, Snapchat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money for every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years and that Jeff Bezos is the king"
https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Russ_Hanneman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
As recently as the Silicon Valley tv show, the joke was that every startup pitch claimed they were “making the world a better place”.
I once worked at a company that'd acquired a virtual-office company. I wasn't around for the acquisition, but it really smelled like one rich person bailing out another's failed investment (or someone on the board had a bunch of money in the acquisition target, or something along those lines).
To justify owning the useless damn thing, they insisted everyone use it, basically like Slack if it ate 3-4x the resources (really saying something, given Electron already eating 5-10x the resources it ought to need for any given task), monopolized a screen when in use, and added all the awkward elements of physical environments to virtual ones for no reason ("is it weird if 'I' 'sit' in this chair 'next to' this other 'person' when there are other chairs available in the room?", or "oh shit where's that meeting room 'physically' located, again? I think I'm lost...") while removing none of the awkwardness of virtual interactions.
Truly, bizarrely pointless. It was like some shit out of the Silicon Valley TV show, so absurd it was hard to believe it was real. I swear to god, I'm not making this up, they even had in-world presentations, so you could add all the fun of having a bad angle on a screen or being too far away to comfortably read the text to the joy of a Zoom screen-share. Totally nuts. Luckily you could also maximize whatever was being presented, but... hooray, your best feature is that I can ignore all the things that make your dumb crap distinctive? What a win.
This is what I think of every time I see anyone trying to promote Zuckerberg's weird, bad idea. I assure you, being in VR goggles would not have made the experience either more productive or more pleasant. Nobody who's ever tried to work like this even for one week could possibly think it's a good idea to invest in it.
There's a reason the Silicon Valley TV show's humor was so biting.
Obligatory "Silicon Valley" TV series clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
The BBC podcast of "Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick" was really hilarious, and maybe they can do another episode about the story of Sophia and PKD.
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-dick
Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!
Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI
Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!
> All this lacks is the grand finale where the misunderstanding is revealed and they kiss & make out.
Don't despair. It could still happen! Somebody just has to make a Stanislaw Lem robot.
Hanson Robotics: Philip K Dick: Research Robot:
https://www.hansonrobotics.com/philip-k-dick/
There's a funny story about that robot (and a hilarious parody of a guy who worked on it in HBO's Silicon Valley).
BEGIN NSFW DIGRESSION
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311690
DonHopkins on Nov 17, 2023 | prev | edit | delete [–]
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/the_character_of_ariel_in_the_current_episode/
>The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
You can tell he's a serious person, because he pioneered combining AI with blockchains:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
>Career: Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a project which was founded to distribute artificial intelligence data via blockchains.
>He once received a grant from Jeffrey Epstein.
>Sophia the Robot: Goertzel was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and OpenCog, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Experts in the field have treated the project mostly as a PR stunt, stating that Hanson's claims that Sophia was "basically alive" are "grossly misleading" because the project does not involve AI technology, while Meta's chief AI scientist called the project "complete bullshit".
Well at least she's SEXY and EASY TO CONTROL! I can't wait for Epstein's flight manifests are released, to see if Sophie is on it! I hope she didn't leave her head in the overhead bin.
END NSFW DIGRESSION
So apparently the PKD robot's head was lost after David Hanson accidentally left it in an overhead bin of an airplane: "Hanson suspects the head was either stolen by an unscrupulous baggage handler or fell victim to an overzealous security guard who called in a bomb squad." The bomb squad may have even blown it up with another robot! I wonder if it got lucky and found its way to Poland to search for Lem's robot head.
Wired: Losing One’s Head:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161221090733/https://www.wired.com/2006/04/losing-ones-head/
Now Philip K. Dick’s Missing Android Head Has His Own Radio Show:
https://gizmodo.com/now-philip-k-dicks-missing-android-head-has-his-own-ra-5166449
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:
https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-dick
Bring Me The Head Of Philip K. Dick's Simulacrum Paperback – April 21, 2021:
https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Head-Philip-Dicks-Simulacrum/dp/1087963842
The lost robotic head of Philip K. Dick has been rebuilt:
https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-robotic-head-of-philip-k-dick-has-been-rebuil-5731075
Made me think of that Silicon Valley episode with the Patent Troll.
I don't remember it exactly, but I think near the end Richard solves the situation by building a (fake?) music app that detected that the song that had made the Patent Troll rich was actually a ripoff from another song that Richard had acquired the rights to, so now Richard could technically sue the Patent Troll for all the money he had made...
If anybody has a link to that scene it would be great.
I don't want to discourage you, but people have "cheated" on remote technical interviews for decades. It's a staple of the industry, HBO made like 5 Silicon Valley episodes about this.
'Silicon Valley' was a practically a documentary. It's just a gold mine of absurdity out here.
In terms of "what should be done?", and I the only one who thought of the Silicon Valley episode where they immortalized Jing Yang on a "smart" fridge?
In many ways it's the same as it ever was.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
Silicon Valley TV show
Middle out compression is what the guys in the TV show Silicon Valley invent.
This sounds like a line from a Silicon Valley type TV series used to establish "character am smart"... and I love it.
It’s funny how often Silicon Valley (the tv show) gets referenced. There are so many painfully accurate cliches.
"I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are"
- Silicon Valley Season 2
I believe this was parodied multiple times in season 1 of Silicon Valley.
> https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4
I have never seen anything more cringe or ridiculous than this video.
Bill Gates has said publicly that he's a fan of Silicon Valley, the tv show that pokes hard fun at the startup culture. But it's Microsoft that's beyond parody...
The Samsung recipe AI totally reminds me of the silicon valley jian yang hot dog app episode. Lol
Lmao, not as bad as the silicon valley episode where Jared gets stuck in a robotaxi, taken to a container, and then ending up on an island.
This reads like a bit from Silicon Valley the TV series... is this parody?
Good lord. I don't care if Silicon Valley was wrapped up in 2019. They need to make another episode which is nothing but a reenactment of this blog post.
They really need to bring back Silicon Valley for new episodes.
Is this surprising? almost 10 years ago even Silicon Valley (the TV show) made fun of the fact that the main guys' company was only one of many compression startups their investor invested in.
The TV show Silicon Valley lampooned all these ideas a decade ago. The weird thing I’ve noticed is that when Bay Area tech people watch that show, they don’t seem to understand that they’re being made fun of. They think they’re being celebrated. That’s how thick the bubble is.
I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it's funny because of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs / resting & vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show's office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current/former Bay Area tech people.
Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Silicon Valley TV show is a documentary
Was this the plot of a silicon valley episode?
I've been re-watching Silicon Valley the last few weeks and just watched the Nucleus live stream episode 2 days ago, pretty funny seeing it in real life.
I'm re-watching the show Silicon Valley and this name would have been a perfect product name in one of their episodes.
I thought about Huli from Silicon Valley TV show, and couldn't but think "Gentlemen, and lady, of the board"
I know theres this whole joke about being pre-revenue on the Silicon Valley TV show, but getting investors in order to be able to build a business which becomes profitable after goes back a long time. Like a really long time.
That's even more niche: not only do people have to read beyond the headline, they must also be familiar with a nerdy TV show that first aired a decade ago (Silicon Valley).
"Is it Apple Maps bad?" --Gavin Belson, Silicon Valley
After the fiasco from their initial app launch, I'm sure they would have preferred not to be a meme in a sitcom if possible on this go round. It is possible to release too early
I don't believe I've seen anything in the TV show Silicon Valley that wasn't based on something IRL. Dig around on anything that appears in that show, and I defy you to find something that the writers just pulled out of their ass.
I was actually converted to tabs after hearing Richard Hendricks' argument against spaces in Silicon Valley, the TV show. Really didn't think I was going to be challenging my own preferences when watching that show.
Silicon Valley, the show, is a documentary. https://youtu.be/Q1QPXyebhiY?si=5YWYlCuI2aJ2fu-l&t=474
did this happen before or after the silicon valley episode
Sure but there is still a particular communication style that prevails, and people adopt it, or try to adopt, to fit in. It’s less about the accent or vocabulary and more about the tone.
A lot of this was parodied pretty effectively by the Silicon Valley TV show.
Wasn’t this an episode of Silicon Valley?
Machine learning would make that task fairly trivial. Much like the TV show Silicon Valley, but instead of "not hotdog", "not headphone" and then treat it like a keyboard.
remember that from the Silicon Valley (HBO) episode. :)
"Office Space" was a 1999 movie based on Mike Judge's Silicon Valley experience from the 80's. "Silicon Valley" was his updated take on it I suppose.
Of course, that is because in case you are a unicorn on next pass they didn’t throw you under the bus. So you’ll chat with them and like them.
It’s the expression: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
The Silicon Valley tv series has this great when Eric Baurich goes from begging to being mean and that’s is a great example of this.
Same for anything, employment, dating, friends, etc.
The TV series "Silicon Valley" does not disappoint.
> I chatted with them for maybe four minutes, like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re still sitting here! How’s it going?’
> That night, while at dinner, he got an email from Google saying he had been terminated.
That is almost like out of a Silicon Valley episode, but gone dark.
This article reads like an episode of Silicon Valley
I had to check if it was April 1.
Any of the creators of the "Silicon Valley" TV show want a pitch for a new season?
In the Silicon Valley tv show, the solved that by moving engineers to the garden roof.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Silicon Valley TV series desperately needs a reboot.
I remember reading a long time ago about how slowly and deliberately the royal family moves. It also matches how characters like James Bond or Don Draper are nonreactive, never startled, always moving correctly. On the other hand, nerdy and anxious characters are always fidgety and clumsy. The main character in Silicon Valley is the best example.
I love how much you can learn about body language from movies, even if the scenes are written around the characters. I don’t Like YouTube PUA types, but Charisma on Command had a really good deconstruction of Don Draper and his demeanour.
Another film favourite of mine is a scene where Clark Kent removes his glasses while talking to Lois Lane who is off camera. His entire body language turns from Clark Kent to Superman.
Abed in Community also does it a lot when he becomes Han Solo or the guy from My Dinner With Andre. You can really see the differences because the same actor is playing different people.
Love that show, love the creators. But it’s definitely not for everyone. Its pseudo premise about being a Silicon Valley style satire but for gaming is an obvious (and clever) ploy to write meta plots about what is like to be in charge of creative a TV show, not a game. Anyone showing up for the minds behind Sunny will be happy (like me). Anyone showing up for a new Silicon Valley or deep cut references to the gaming industry will be only mildly entertained.
Is that the one from the Silicon Valley episode with Burger King?
Silicon Valley was a documentary
Seems like Silicon Valley is less TV show and more documentary as time goes on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
Denpok? I swear it reads like a skit from the Silicon Valley satire TV show. I thought Mike Judge was exaggerating but now I see he's just imitating the SV reality.
I think execs and managers at Google are just high on their own farts at this point.
The opposite view on that state, is that spying is effective, because many technologies require huge amounts of work by the developer, yet can be stolen relatively easily with a document overview theft.
The same reason there's all those jokes in "Silicon Valley" (the TV show) about the "brain rape" episodes and End Frame of Season 2, where all they do is lure Richard into a meeting and then get him to put the whole algorithm up on the board.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(season_2)#Episodes ("Runaway Devaluation")
It’s uncanny how much of the current stuff has been predicted by the sitcom -“Silicon Valley”
Well, the main thing is for it not to end up like in the recent episodes of Silicon Valley
This headline reads like a story element from the Silicon Valley TV series.
I was thinking Mike Judge's TV show Silicon Valley as well as Office Space
>Hyperbolic, sexualized language isn't helpful here.
Nor is pearl clutching. It's an obvious, overt reference to a Silicon Valley episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
>Why didn't Masimo counter Apple's offers and pay their employees what they are worth?
So let the $3T company do whatever they want?
And this is all a distraction regardless -- Apple's boorish behaviours are just a sidenote to the reality that they're using unlicensed technology, and now it's going to hurt.
Though to go back to my prior comment, it's actually kind of a funny claim given that Apple draped all of their employees in non-competes, and actually sued when they actually went to work with competitors. You know, in addition to the secret, infamous agreements they made with competitors not to poach each other's employees for the purposes of pushing wages down. It makes the "pay your employees what they're worth" argument a little hollow as a defense.
Also watch Season 4 of “Silicon Valley” :)
At a certain scale you don't need to make OKRs fun and playful - there are enough VPs that all the OKRs read like an episode of Silicon Valley.
If you're big enough to have company level OKRs that were written solely by folks that haven't opened a text editor in 10 years simply get out the popcorn and a can of beer. There are going to be some hilarious ones in there.
Not that I have any insight into any of the events at OpenAI, but would just like to point out there are several other reasons why so many people would sign, including but not limited to:
- peer pressure
- group think
- financial motives
- fear of the unknown (Sam being a known quantity)
- etc.
So many signatures may well mean there's consensus, but it's not a given. It may well be that we see a mass exodus of talent from OpenAI _anyway_, due to recent events, just on a different time scale.
If I had to pick one reason though, it's consensus. This whole saga could've been the script to an episode of Silicon Valley[1], and having been on the inside of companies like that I too would sign a document asking for a return to known quantities and – hopefully – stability.
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
Why is this subject giving me Silicon Valley season 2 flashbacks with every update?
It seems ironic that the research paper that started it all [0] deals with "costly signals":
> Costly signals are statements or actions for which the sender will pay a price —political, reputational, or monetary—if they back down or fail to make good on their initial promise or threat
Firing Sam Altman and hiring him back two days later was a perfect example of a costly signal, as it cost all involved their board positions.
There's an element of farce in all of this, that would make for an outstanding Silicon Valley episode; but the fact that Sam Altman can now enjoy unchecked power as leader of OpenAI is worrying and no laughing matter.
[0] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/decoding-intentions/
This ordeal reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where Richard is replaced by an empty chair, temporarily.
The whole thing is like a bad episode of Silicon Valley
> I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.
Sure, sure...
But some general state of mind around all that AI's is strange. So WE-MUST... The AGI !!1
Money, yeah, some, but for did we do the same with eg. cars ? Public hearings, regulations, push AI chips into everybody phones before it is even working or phone companies have their own AI systems ?
And just some strange feeling: is OpenAI roleplaing Silicon Valley movie ? Even names are similiar, in places :)
This whole situation turned out to be an episode from Silicon Valley HBO.
I find the whole drama absolutely fascinating to watch unfold, it feels like an episode of Silicon Valley; I hope they make a new spinoff based on that story.
Reminds me of the very ending of the show Silicon Valley. Crazy twist and great last two episodes of the show.
This is surreal! Are we watching Silicon Valley season 7? Laurie Breem is this your doing? Are going through every CEO you can find in an attempt to get Sam Altman to realize he was the right person all along?
A few comments comparing this drama to an episode of Silicon Valley has resonated most of the weekend with me.
I think a lot of people are getting sucked into the drama and how it's like an episode of "Silicon Valley".
> This obsession with one company
You're probably right. With one company controlling the direction/narrative, what could possible go wrong? :)
Silicon Valley is really a great show. Working in tech, I often think of it. Especially whenever there's a new great idea from management that nobody saw coming and feel like the beginning of a new episode.
Im assuming they mean Silicon Valley the TV show [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
I just posted a link to a Silicon Valley episode on youtube that implies that he fucks a robot, so let's see how that one goes... ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311627
PDSCodes 27 minutes ago | unvote | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
Turn that on it’s head - was he standing in the way of a commercial sale or agreement with Microsoft!
He may not be the villain.
But who knows, it feels like an episode of silicon valley!
DonHopkins 22 minutes ago | prev | edit | delete [–]
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/the_character_of_ariel_in_the_current_episode/
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
I can do anything I want with her - Silicon Valley S5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MPk85tMhc
>That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
That "handsy greasy little weirdo" Silicon Valley character Ariel and his robot Fiona were obviously based on Ben Goertzel and Sophia, not Sam Altman, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
The character of Ariel in the current episode instantly reminded me of Ben Goertzel, whom i stumbled upon couple of years ago, but did not really paid close attention to his progress. One search later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/8edbk9/the_character_of_ariel_in_the_current_episode/
VIDEO Interview: SingularityNET's Dr Ben Goertzel, robot Sophia and open source AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbltBLaFeI
Turn that on it’s head - was he standing in the way of a commercial sale or agreement with Microsoft!
He may not be the villain.
But who knows, it feels like an episode of silicon valley!
Didn't this happen in a Silicon Valley episode?
reminds me of the convo i had with the ceo randomly after an episode of Silicon Valley and he asked about security because they hacked a fridge...i said yep, super easy; we had a bigger budget the next week :D
This is what popped into my mind instantly when reading the parent comment as well!
For anyone who has not seen the movie Office Space, you need to see it. While you are at it, also watch the series Silicon Valley.
I don't understand your second sentence but you might want to look at Office Space - it's a movie about software developers made by the same creator as Silicon Valley (Mike Judge).
Quote from Silicon Valley sitcom. Probably intended as a response to a different post, not as a top-level post.
Like the first episode of Silicon Valley
I don't expect it to make its investors money because most VC-style startups don't make money and also because it seems to me to be kind of a dumb idea for a few reasons.
1)Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think their IP has any kind of protectable moat. I really can't see that patent surviving any sort of challenge. So if tehy figure out a business model that works it will get cloned cheaper.
2)It's an actuarial fact that people overpay for insurance relative to expectation but here they are essentially selling a partial mitigation for a very high severity very low probability event[1]. So the expectation is very low and is highly subject to model calibration error. Potential customers are not going to value this well and I don't see people paying them enough to stay in business.
I could easily be wrong about both of those things.
I know about selling the mission "Making the world a better place with extensible mobile, social, local middleware APIs" etc as I think the TV show "Silicon Valley" parodied it. Just in this case I dont' really see either the mission or the commercial reality making much sense.
It's interesting that the board of advisors has Ben "I'm gonna bring the mammoth back to life" Lamm and David "Make the statue of Liberty disappear" Copperfield on it. So they've got Barnum and Bailey going for them at least.
[1] "I'm selling you a backup that would survive even if humanity gets wiped out" isn't a business proposition. Noone cares about what their backups do under those circumstances so they won't pay for it.
It does feel likes this is straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.
I remember in one episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin was lecturing Richard on a similar topic along the line of “so you don’t want your startup to be an big corporation, and what’s next for you? Taking vc money? going Ipo? And then becoming a big corp?”
> But for me the marketing video is over-produced, form-over-substance, and I can't stand the voiceover or overall tone. It's saccharine.
Wow I just watched it and it's hilariously outdated. I feel like it would be a satirical one in the TV show Silicon Valley or something. Very early 2010s
"Silicon Valley". It's not a movie, but a documentary TV series about startup scene in '00 ;)
I can imagine someone in the show Silicon Valley asking this question. It sounds like it could be right out of an episode.
Is this out of a Silicon Valley episode? “It’s okay—comeback” after getting laid off? Alumni event?
Everything is upside down.
The film really reminded me of what silicon valley, the series, would be like if it was set in that time frame. I thought it was funny.
Anyone remember the Silicon Valley episode on "Ruinous Empathy?" I think that ep sums it up tidily, frankly.
Empathy is important. Sure, too much of it, like anything else is bad. But not showing it at all is worse.
Does the TV series Silicon Valley no longer make sense in today's culture?
Because they are "women engineers" (Silicon Valley sitcom reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY).
You can't make this stuff up. Like an episode of Silicon Valley but in real life.
Y'all are literally unironically pitching The Box from the TV show Silicon Valley.
What is the problem being solved here? Apple already offers a solution – iCloud.
Why would they want to sell you a box for offline backups?
I remember when "silicon valley" came out, and after watching a few episodes I thought it was so stupid and unrealistic... This isn't how startups operated.
Then I talked with other people in the startup world who said it was a perfect match.
That's when I realized that I just worked at competent places.
This isn't legal/enforceable in California. Your own work on your own time on your own equipment is your own property. It's messier if you're building a direct competitor or using proprietary knowledge.
There's a whole Silicon Valley episode on this.
Yeah! I feel like I'm reading a script of an episode of the TV show, "Silicon Valley"! (ANY episode, lol!) * Pied Piper FOREVER! *
> A bot like this can make thousands to tens of thousands of requests per second.
You don't need to use a bot to do this, Twitter literally did this to themselves through their own buggy code https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639474671754723
If Silicon Valley was still being produced, this would make for a great episode.
There's enough comedic content in this article for several Silicon Valley episodes.
Season five (I think) of Silicon Valley covers ‘radical candor’ it’s very painful and is a bit like this.
Here's a rant by a person that is annoyed that redditors are not understanding the fediverse:
https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59927/rant-Why-is-this-so-hard-for-people
And they still state that it's easy and the other posters are scratching their heads as to why don't people understand this. "Whyyyy???"
They don't seem to understand that the average user doesn't find it easy to use. That's the biggest hint, but instead are acting like everyone is stupid but them.
That's why the fediverse is going to get a bump for a bit during this reddit situation, but then calm down as users aren't going to want to stick around. The same happened when others were leaving Twitter.
This fediverse situation reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode in which they're testing an app with a focus group. The group just doesn't understand the app and find it too complicated. Richard tries to explain the app to them, but it's too technical for them to comprehend.
I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is:
1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc.
But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files.
I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
The Silicon Valley TV show had a pizza startup that met a similar demise [0], bringing the show closer to documentary than fiction!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYu-d6y5HRo
While I actually found your comment pretty funny, and do certainly find it tiring how people pretend as if some cookie cutter SaaS start up will change the world (personally made me think of the very first episode of Silicon Valley on HBO), I honestly don't think there's a parallel between people being overzealous and/or naive in thinking some basic productivity app will change the world and the subset of the cryptocurrency fans who honestly present blockchain as a solution to just about every problem that exists around the world.
I’ve never successfully made it through a full episode of either Portlandia or Silicon Valley because they’re both just too real for me not in a good way.
Yes it looks like something out of that Silicon Valley TV show
It is such a cliché that if the TV show “Silicon Valley” was still around it would have to be a subplot.
I assume it means they’ve already bought all the cars, planes, boats, wristwatches, and art they can think of.
I like these shows/movies that chase something like:
* Jobs (2013)
* social network
* halt and catch fire
* silicon valley
* the internship
there's more can't think of right now
I'm looking forward to seeing this when it streams
It’s feminists. They feel free from social pressure, and social pressure keeps women to have long hair and be beautiful, so they do the opposite, they have short hair, tattoos, piercings and blue hair, and they program. There’s an episode of Silicon Valley where they hire blue haired programmers. Also, the industrial complex persuaded them that dying their hair means they are free, so lowerclass people, who don’t understand the ways of marketing, tend to do it way more.
Title: Aviato: The Rise of the Disruptive Startup
Aviato is a prequel to the HBO hit TV show, Silicon Valley. The story follows the journey of a young entrepreneur, named Nelson "Nate" Chatwin, who wants to make a name for himself in the world of tech. He dreams of building a company that will disrupt the airline industry and make air travel more accessible to everyone.
The story is set in the late 1990s, when the internet was still in its early stages and startups were popping up all over Silicon Valley. Nate is working as a software engineer at a startup, but he is restless and wants to do something more. One day, while sitting in a coffee shop, he overhears a conversation between two pilots about the challenges of booking flights. That's when he has a Eureka moment and comes up with the idea for Aviato - an online platform that connects travelers with affordable flights.
Nate starts working on Aviato in his spare time, but he soon realizes that he needs more help to bring his vision to life. He recruits a group of talented engineers and business-minded individuals to join his team. Together, they work tirelessly to build the Aviato platform from scratch. They encounter numerous challenges along the way, from funding issues to technical glitches, but they never lose sight of their goal.
As Aviato gains popularity and investors start pouring in, the team faces new challenges. Nate struggles to balance his work and personal life, as his marriage falls apart due to his obsession with the company. The team also faces pressure from rival startups and industry giants, who are threatened by Aviato's disruptive business model.
Throughout the series, we see the rise of Aviato and how it becomes one of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley. We also see the personal and professional sacrifices that Nate and his team make along the way. The series ends with Aviato's launch and its early success, setting the stage for the events that unfold in the original Silicon Valley series.
Overall, Aviato is a compelling story about the power of innovation, the challenges of entrepreneurship, and the human cost of building a successful startup. It's a must-watch for fans of Silicon Valley and anyone interested in the tech industry.
silicon valley tv show once again too accurate for comfort with its tres comas tequila.
Or they embed the ads in the programs as “product placement”. You see this on late night TV and I rewatched episodes of “silicon valley” and it seems all over that (Tesla, big gulp, Fage yogurt, burger king…)
In the Silicon Valley TV show, Richard also gets the Hooli board to sign a document, which Gavin (Hooli CEO) has 2 hours to object to, but he's off doing a triathlon.
> Mike Judge did Silicon Valley already.
I've seen Silicon Valley episodes, it is not at all in the same spirit as Office Space. Office Space spoke to the absurdity playing out in offices throughout the nation. Silicon Valley speaks to the VC-fueled privileged absurdity playing out in ... SV.
> Mike Judge's current work is a soon-to-be reboot of King of the Hill.
That's really unfortunate, King of the Hill was such a mediocre/milquetoast message, at least from what little I saw.
Speaking personally, the fate of Docker, Inc. was clear to me when they took their $40M Series C round in 2014. I had met with Solomon in April 2014 (after their $15M Series B) and tried to tell him what I had learned at Joyent: that raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making.
I could see that I was being too abstract, so I distilled it -- and I more or less begged him to not take any more money. (Sadly, Silicon Valley's superlative, must-watch "Sand Hill Shuffle" episode would not air until 2015, or I would have pointed him to it.) When they took the $40M round -- which was an absolutely outrageous amount of capital to take into a company that didn't even have a conception of what they would possibly sell -- the future was clear to me.
I wasn't at all surprised when the SVP washouts from the likes of VMware and IBM landed at Docker -- though still somehow disappointed when they behaved predictably, accelerating the demise of the company. May Docker, Inc. at least become a business school case study to warn future generations of an avoidable fate!
- Bryan Cantrill, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460504
This article again?!
I have few things to pick on this time:
> Job Loss Prediction: 5%
Has anyone lost their job yet to ChatGPT?
> the full-stack generalist is gone, as well as the product team and mobile developer. Niche fields like video gaming and medical software are now under threat. Developers transition to other engineering fields like robotics and biotech. All of this commences the age of the super SME (subject matter expert) — non-technical users with deep business knowledge who build businesses directly through AI.
So far in my career, developing software to solve problems for customers I’ve had to interface with SME’s. As described usually someone who is non-technical but not always. Eventually after a few years on the project I know the same amount as the SME but usually more. I know more because I also understand the software system. So I’m not a software developer. Nor a programmer. Im a builder. I’ll pivot to being that SME who builds businesses through AI.
Others of us may go into other engineering fields if they feel like it.
Also high technology is usually not solvable by AI. ATM it only knows what it’s been told.
> Long-held competitions between frameworks will be decided by which is the most AI-friendly. For example, imagine one could safely upgrade a legacy JS codebase to React with a single button click, but doing the same migration to Vue would take a week. Even if there are viable reasons to choose Vue, ultimately frameworks that adapt quickest to AI integration will prevail.
Might be true in some types of software development. A business where software isn’t the core sure. If the business needs a CRUD app sure. But software is a large domain that encompasses multiple types of business. There is a reason why certain technologies are used.
> For example, imagine you inherited a slow-performing code base written in Python. Your IDE suggests it be translated to Rust. You click “yes” and redeploy, and the app is suddenly 10X faster.
Ridiculous statement. Python can be fast. This is very much dependent on what you’re doing. Also good luck getting scipy functionality in Rust. And if a refactor like this was this easy and that critical to business it probably would have already been done.
> Coding in an IDE will die off. In fact, the “code” is nothing more than an implementation detail, forgotten more with each passing day. The sole focus of these products becomes the human-AI interaction.
Already true today. Replace human-AI interaction with senior-junior developer interaction. As I’ve moved up in my org code is nothing more than implementation details. I’m focused on selecting technologies and ensuring interfaces between large software components developed by different teams working together to solve a problem. I may dive into code here/there and give my 2¢ on how something should be done. Looking forward to AI being my new junior devs. And my junior devs becoming seniors.
> Software is now unrecognizable. Business rules are maintained by AI-powered SMEs. AI-native standards are globalized. Code no longer resides in static repositories — it is ephemeral and dynamic.
A good idea and I can’t wait. Someone should build a quick POC where you write a .d.ts file have a “compiler” use GPT to implement all the declarations.
Cybersecurity is going to grow. AI will make mistakes.
> Imagine your future self owning a digital business. You create and maintain it through an AI-powered design platform.
As the article implies, if anyone can use AI tools and no need for a technical person, would businesses exist? Would everyone have a business then?
Here’s an equally valid thought since we’re just speculating here:
Me: Create me an iPad app to watch YouTube without ads. AI: deploy to mdmglr’s iPad? me: Yes me: actually, create season 6 of Silicon Valley and stream it to my iPad AI: now streaming on your iPad
So it’s not going to be just developers, it will be writers, actors, etc.
There is a convergence between motion capture, game engines and generative AI that is coming soon.
> Feeling down — anxious about this future? That’s ok! You’re not alone and it’s not all doom and gloom. Stay tuned for my follow-up article about how to prepare for and thrive in this brave new world.
And now the real purpose of this article. Instill fear and be the one to have a solution. The writer should have the most fear, outputting low quality articles will be the first job ChatGPT will be doing.
What a respect-worthy man, and a lucky man to have been born at the beginning of an age of exponential innovation. Also, from all that I've read about him he gave back to the world in equal measure and was the best of a past generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
For anyone who has interest / time and lives in the Bay Area, watch this PBS program for the history of the "Fairchildren" and the roots of Silicon Valley. (of which Gordon Moore was one of the "traitorous eight" who contributed to making SV what it is today) If you live, drive, work around the area, there are so many landmarks and legacies of this phase of history that you can still see today (but only if you keep an eye out and take a little effort to learn the past).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/#film_description
(links to Amazon Prime, Apple TV there, and you can also find this on your favorite BitTorrent source...)
I'm getting strong Hooli "get me a middle-out compression algorithm - we go live in 1.5 months" vibes from Google when it comes to Bard. It's amazing how relevant and prescient the tv show Silicon Valley can be even to this day.
"In a rare moment of humanity, one of your friends calls you. AI knows all about your friends and their recent events so had already summarized talking points. In case you can't be bothered, AI will carry out the actual conversation, it's trained in your voice."
This is the premise of an episode of Silicon Valley where Guilfoyle trains an AI to act as his chat agent surrogate based on his historical transcripts, and then his colleague creates another one and they end up just conversing with each other.
as always, Silicon Valley covered/predicted this https://www.vulture.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-4-episode-2.html
> “You’re doing what Bob Iger does at Disney!” Jack tells Gavin. “He makes every manager wear the Goofy suit one day out of the year.”
It's like that Silicon Valley episode where Richard explains middle-out on the whiteboard and they just steal his code.
These sorts of posts are genuinely comical!
>When I started Kapwing in 2017, it was cool to be a tech entrepreneur.
… to you. It was cool to you to (categorically) be a tech entrepreneur. I think it is possible that “tech entrepreneur” as a monolithic “cool” category only ever existed inside the minds of that same group.
>Why Do People Hate the Tech Industry Now?
Again… I think it’s possible that the author’s perception has shifted, and as such their perception of humanity has shifted with it.
I have a few questions for anybody here that feels like SVB/other recent events has unveiled some sort of new or previously hidden disdain for self-described tech entrepreneurs.
1. When was the first time you heard the term “tech bro”?
2. The TV show Silicon Valley was developed a decade ago by Mike Judge (the creator of the wildly popular comedy King of the Hill) and aired its first episode not long after. Who was the intended audience?
Was it: A. People that the show was about
B. A much larger group of people that had already found tech “culture” to be comical or absurd in their own life experience regardless of their involvement in the industry
(It’s B)
As a fan of the TV show “Silicon Valley”, if I was the person that got to name these FDIC takeovers I’d just put the word “New” in front.
“New Silicon Valley Bank”
“New Signature Bank”
> Is that really a common approach in SV startup culture?
Yes, absolutely.
As a founder, especially at the start of your company, you're responsible for _everything_. You need to figure out how to do product roadmap planning, and sales, and marketing, and hiring, and HR, and run payroll, and work with investors, and manage an office... anything that can help shortcut a decision that isn't fundamental to the unique opportunity your business is going after is very welcome.
Where an established company might have a whole role (or even a whole team) who are responsible for selecting a bank account, you need to get one setup RIGHT NOW because you just landed your first investment check and you need somewhere to put it!
Have you seen the TV show Silicon Valley? There's a scene in the first series where they've just landed their first cheque, but they don't have a bank account yet so they have nowhere to pay it in!
This happened to us when we founded a YC company back in January 2011. We went to the Mountain View branch of Silicon Valley Bank because someone told us that they would know what to do with us. They sorted us out.
We did not pause for one second to check who their Chief Risk Officer was.
Why did the Turks tolerate crappy construction in an earthquake zone? Large businesses are by definition hard to compete with.
As for why they do it, businesses are fundamentally amoral. Take your average Silicon Valley entrepreneur and transplant them into Somalia with no way to leave, and they'd be figuring out the ideal way to capture cargo ships and hold their crews for ransom. Then if said crews were raped by some misbehaving underlings, they'd try to disguise it to maximize the profits.
It's the meta joke behind the entire Silicon Valley TV series. Some characters are more likeable than others, but almost all of the key players are fundamentally incompetent/insecure/exploitative people that you wouldn't want in your life given the option.
I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech.
I don't know anyone who does what I could consider "fake work".
Unless you think anyone who doesn't measurably and immediately impact the bottom line is doing "fake work".
Benioff seems like an unlikable villain from the TV show Silicon Valley
It totally was a Silicon Valley b-plot, Season 5 Ep 5
For those who find themselves suddenly with unexpected free time I recommend taking the opportunity to watch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)
Pirates of Silicon Valley (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
And a couple of really long walks to recalibrate. This too, shall pass.
This is such a known situation that HBO's Silicon Valley did a whole bit on it in the show. Be thankful you've managed to avoid it in your 9 years in the valley!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/silicon-valley-episode-christian-tech_n_5adf58e3e4b061c0bfa243fc
indicator
Same with 'The silicon valley'. When something becomes a movie, it's already ending its hype cycle
"Silicon Valley" was a documentary
>It's very possible that a judge will rule that AI models do not violate copyright.
Somehow we have managed to come full circle to the first episode of HBO's Silicon Valley.
The Silicon Valley is an amazing documentary, gets so many things right :)
Gavin Belson feelings.
Silicon Valley (the TV series) should be re-categorized as documentary.
Nice PR/buzzword soup they got there, the article is almost entirely devoid of substance.
The part on "Responsible AI" reminds me of the "Tethics" episode of Silicon Valley, brought to you by the people who own ~30% on the online ad market.
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
> Interesting! Can you share an example or two of such an observation?
It's really nothing as elaborately intelligent as it may sound.
Just that the experience of a movie or series can be good/bad for entirely different reasons for me.
A really serious scene like Joe Pesci getting upset in Goodfellas [1] makes me smile because of how the tension of the scene keeps building, despite being a very serious scene (and not being funny at all although actors in the scene are laughing).
Watching Anthony Hopkins in the Restaurant scene of Westworld [2] deliver so much more than just the content of his dialogue is just stunning for me to watch, while for others it might just be a scene like many others.
Or even more basic, I already have to laugh just watching Gavin Belson in the series Silicon Valley, just because the character is crafted to be such an awful tone-deaf person...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL9rSwrsMHw
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dagzaFjHU4
You know, I've never actually watched Silicon Valley, but I still recognized the quote because I've caught clips here and there on YouTube. I suppose now would be the time to binge-watch it.
It's a quote from the TV show Silicon Valley
You're probably right about that, I have noticed a pretty good line up on there when we had it for Silicon Valley, Game of Thrones, and Barry.
But I'd expect that of HBO also. They were the original channel to go to if you wanted to see great movies when I was a kid.
You're responding to a low-effort joke based on a plot line in HBO's Silicon Valley TV show.
> I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side
It's been a decade since I helped with GPM storage, but one thing I can say is that Google won't dedup anything without the OK from lawyers on _both_ sides, with all the consequences that ensue. Somebody could turn this and similar launches into a TV show, but it wouldn't be as funny as Silicon Valley. On the contrary...
I’m thinking of the Silicon Valley episode where Gilfoyle writes an AI to talk to Dinesh so he’ll stop bothering him while he works and how useful that would be for my job.
On top of my head:
- the epbf episode where one of you started talking like back in the old days you treated servers as pets and not as cattle
- the episode about auditing startups where most of the talk you were carried away and even said somethin “let’s continue or we won’t finish” or something
- oh and that Silicon Valley tv show stuff that just keeps popping every other time
It’s like that uncle of mine that I meet every Christmas who is always “back in my days” (I remeber when we…) or “in my old hometown they used to” (here at changelog we…)
but that’s just my personal opinion. Time is scare these days so I’d like to get as much info as possible.
But hey, I’m sure there are millions that adore you, cause in general the guests and topics are great
I have actually seen some of those, including two (Silicon Valley and Game of Thrones) to fruition. Those two are actually excellent examples of what I am talking about, and you even called it out by cutting off the later seasons of Game of Thrones.
The types of TV series that are not episodic seem to always devolve in this way towards worse quality and inter-character romantic relationships, not to mention having cliff hangers at the end of every episode. It's a tension and resolve tactic that gets pretty annoying.
There’s a joke in the first episode of Silicon Valley where some mundane startup oversells their mission as something about enabling humanity to thrive. I saw an interview with Mike Judge where he said it was just a copy of an actual experience he had where a founder was telling him all these grand visions about how he was going to lift up humanity and Mike thought it was some sort of charity. But when he asked again what the company was, it was a todo app! Mike didn’t name the company, but I Googled the mission statement he mentioned and it was clearly Asana.
>they seem to be nothing but wealth signalling to peers
I recommend to watch the Silicon Valley satire TV show. It really has such scenes where tech billionaires do insanely wasteful purchases just because one of their tech billionaire peers already has done something similar, just to maintain their status and ego among the SV elite.
They also make fun of SV tech workers who feel they need to own a Tesla with Ludicrous Mode and the exclusive rims to show success.
It's great satire, though it feels more like reality sometimes.
I hope they ditch any attempt at making it serious or realistic. Just have it Silicon Valley style and every episode starts with some wacky attempt at making a big scoring trade which ultimately fails and the episode ends with someone going. Don’t worry, we only lost 200mil, but we’ve gotten 400mil user deposits in the same time, all we need is one great trade and we can cover the whole!
Repeat and rinse for every new episode, until people get tired of the series and they cancel it, which then leads to the final episode where it all blows up, SBF sits down looking defeated, says sorry and then some financier goes, that’s alright, honest mistake, here’s 300mil let’s start up FTX2 fade to black.
Does recruiting a whole team from another company actually works? I wonder if it is common practice for startups that come and go to move entire dev teams like they do in the show "Sillicon Valley" in Season 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
Diversify. Not everyone is a fan of Marvel. But I would happily watch a new episode of Silicon Valley or Friends level show every day.
I wish Mike Judge made a show about FTX and crypto. :) that would be hilarious.
Is this some kind of satire? I really can’t tell. Did they not make an episode about this on Silicon Valley?
To clarify, when I first think of new package management I think of something that does reproducible cross platform builds, and something that sounds like rent seeking crypto, is the last thing I will think of.
There is an episode of the Silicon Valley series where the team tries to increase their VC funding by becoming increasingly toxic and abusive with the VCs they meet, and they end up signing with the biggest offer they got, after one of them literally puts his genitals on the table during negotiation.
Turns out this was hitting very close to the truth. That show was great to show how much a clown world SV can be.
Any sufficiently large crypto scam is indistinguishable from an episode of "Silicon Valley" (Clark3's Law)
Yea, maybe Google has people that can camp out on a roof to "rest and vest" like in the tv show Silicon Valley, but every startup I've ever worked for had half or a third as many developers and every other position (even sales, HR, etc.) as would be required to do the jobs properly.
Maybe it's good if the BigCo's get hit hard in a recession, so some of the startups that do stuff other than advertising can get some of those sweet, sweet "10x programmers".
I still feel very bad for all those laid off, I've been laid off 2 times in the past 3 years due to startups closing and that probably isn't the end of it for me either.
Silicon Valley is not a documentary but entertainment.
People outside SV think its full of smart people, but when you work there, you will see how real the TV show Silicon Valley is. I am convinced if not for the money, a lot of people would leave.
Unfortunately, in startups, everything is much more complicated than it seems. Try watching the movie Silicon Valley and read this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33269154. Only a few people in the world were engaged in exclusively specific things and there was no Amjad there. I wrote as a programming language author and software pioneer. Too many coincidences and big money greed
Sounds actually like something from the TV show Silicon Valley.
For some reason this reminded me of Gevins blood guy...
Sorry but is this a f*ing satire article? Ex-google ex-apple guy calls up his VC friends to ask how to raise a $5M (!!!!) seed round?
For god's sake. It's something straight out of the Silicon Valley TV series.
This reminded me of the episode of Silicon Valley where Gilfoye and Dinesh build chat bots to take their place for all the boring work chats. Then, the bots end up chatting with each other causing a feedback loop that overloads the building's power.
I find the idea of two bots having a conversation on Zoom while both people are doing actual work hilarious.
This would be perfect as a Silicon Valley episode.
I thought they solved this on that Silicon Valley documentary?
Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. The technology was an easily copyable algorithm, but the business plan was an incoherent and vague competitor to a giant yahoo/google type company, to be built from scratch.
From your link:
>"Within days of the announcement that the Twitter board had accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer, Benioff, who is currently worth more than $6 billion, sent Musk a cryptic text about his own vision for the platform, writing on April 27, “Happy to talk about it if this is interesting: Twitter conversational OS—the townsquare for your digital life.”
Wow. This is like something right out of an episode of Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley." These people might be extremely wealthy but jeez they are basically buffoons. I'm guessing Beinoff only shares his "A" material with Musk and he obviously felt that "Twitter conversational OS" was worth sharing. You couldn't get any more Gavin Belson than either "conversational OS" or "the townsquare for your digital life.”
That seems to be changing, though, for many popular (expensive?) shows. Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, all the recently-new Star Trek series, The Expanse, The Mandalorian, The Orville... They all have seasons in the ballpark of 10 episodes.
I tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside.
All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.
Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".
I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.
I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
Relevant Silicon Valley episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAxzkl2cmNY
Silicon Valley was a documentary.
> philosophers
Sounds like something from Silicon Valley, the TV show.
This vaguely reminds me of Silicon Valley season 3 episode, where Hooli CEO throws entire Nucleus team under the bus, to „take responsibility“.
Cracks me up, just how close SV (series) is to out there..
The show 'Silicon Valley' really hit the nail on the head in the episode where a character was horrified to have been outed as being Christian. Maybe only Donald Trump unites more of the tech community in their hatred.
I have seen Superpumped and liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance as TK. Of all the series about computers/IT I would also rate Halt and Catch Fire at the top. Of course, Silicon Valley would take the top spot for a sitcom that touched on topical events/culture.
This is so out of the Silicon Valley episode. I love it. God speed George. Down with patent trolls. I'll buy a comma AI just to support George. Even though I can't even use it. May be I'll gift it to someone.
Most "tech" shows or hacker scenes are akin to the police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and medical shows that generally don't bear much relationship with what it's like day-to-day for cops, lawyers, or hospital workers. (Hence shows/films like The Wire and Reno 911, My Cousin Vinny and Suits, St. Elsewhere and Scrubs stand out.)
As a founder of a venture-backed startup with first-to-market tech that went through an accelerator in Palo Alto in the 2010s, Silicon Valley is basically entirely accurate. Actually tamer and more restrained than reality in many regards, at least anecdotally.
Silicon Valley (the satire TV show) already covered this exact scenario. Mike Judge is a brilliant writer.
https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ?t=17
That corporate nonsense sounds more like Elon Musk companies to be honest. I guess the running joke from the world of Silicon Valley (TV Show) is that all companies say they are "making the world a better place"
The real question is: Are they SoMoLo or MoSoLo or LoMoSo?
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
I have long viewed Mike Judge[0] as the anti-Scott Adams. He works with many of the same topics but the result is far, far funnier. And he does not try to shove any particular political point of view at the expense of basic humor.
In reviewing Idiocracy, Salon stated, "Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism".[73] A writer for the libertarian magazine Reason seems to agree, comparing King of the Hill to the anti-authoritarian point of view of South Park and The Simpsons, though he calls the show more populist, noting the disdain King of the Hill seems to have for bureaucrats, professionals, and big-box chains.[74]
Still, Judge denies having political messages in his shows, saying in an IGN interview about King of the Hill:[72]
"I try to not let the show get too political. To me, it's more social than political I guess you'd say, because that's funnier. I don't really like political reference humor that much. Although I liked the episode "Hank's Bully" where Hank's talking to the mailman and he says, 'Why would anyone want to lick a stamp that has Bill Clinton on it?' To me that's just like more of a character thing about Hank than it is a political joke or anything. I don't want to do a bunch of stuff about the war, particularly." [Wikipedia]
[0]King of the Hill, Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, Idiocracy, Silicon Valley
isn't this roughly the business model of "Pied Piper" from Silicon Valley the tv show?
The TV show Silicon Valley also satirises the aggressive, egotistical CEO (a character called Gavin Belson).
Belson spends some time at a Buddhist retreat which seems to impart nothing from his experience. The attraction to Buddhist ideas are only at shallow, surface level.
He also employs a full-time spiritual adviser. Even the adviser looks out for opportunities advantageous to him and manipulate situations.
It's a cynical (but honest?) look at personality traits in tech.
I know you're being sarcastic, but Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway at Hollywood Studios opened recently. It's really well done. There's also a new uber-stylized show called The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse on Disney+.
(That being said, there's never really been much Mickey media. This is the first ride featuring him, and he's never had his own full-length movie. Mickey is way closer to a trademark, in my opinion, and has always been that way.)
Fun fact: the guy who plays the Tres Commas VC in Silicon Valley is the current voice of Mickey Mouse.
The character Russ Hanneman on the TV show “Silicon Valley” took it a step further stating that having no revenue to speak of makes a company more valuable. It’s satire…but is it?
Like most VC questions, the answer is in Silicon Valley (tv show).
"Why the f* didn't anyone tell me I could take less?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsmmznL9sFg
Having worked at several startups and having tried to create my own startup I can honestly say...
Silicon Valley is SO perfect. Even the picture of Lena on the wall and the binary on the shirt!
I swear to God I know Gilfoyle. His conversation with H.R. is dead on.
I stop the show to yell to my wife...OH, MY GOD, They got the REAL guy! He's NOT an actor!
I know someone at a startup that can't watch it. He can't get through season 1. He claims it is too real to acknowledge. It makes him anxious.
Kudos to the writers / producers.
Isn't this the plot of a silicon valley episode after pied Piper pivots to be a chat app?
Given the verbatim quote from the first paragraph of the wikipedia page, I'll assume you've read it:
"The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information."
You'll note that "consistent", "risk-adjusted", and "beat the market" are all in quotes, because they are not well-defined technical terms, at least thusly contextualized. What Wikipedia's over-simplification in the first paragraph says is that all available information is incorporated into asset prices.
Now even that's more than a little nuanced than one might conclude, because not only is there considerable controversy about how quickly and by what mechanisms this incorporation into prices takes place even in you buy into this malarky, but Eugene Fama himself would sound like Greenspan in front of Congress trying to explain how a defunct Chinese wireless company goes up 47,000% in year on the back of a different company having it's IPO [1].
But I'm really going to hang this on your use of the word "misplaced", and no, I don't think a playful comment with actual information in it ([1] again) is misplaced in a thread full of playful comments about Silicon Valley the TV show. I think grab-the-first-paragraph-from-wikipedia-and-be-a-killjoy-pedant is misplaced.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/investors-appear-to-trade-wrong-zoom-company-shares-before-ipo.html
In Bangalore, India, workers put on Smith face masks as they posed for selfies with the man himself. Fittingly, the tour culminated in San Diego, the home of TurboTax, the software that transformed the company’s fortunes. There, Smith arrived at his party in a DeLorean, and as he walked a red carpet, cheering employees waved “Brad is Rad” signs. To Smith’s delight, his favorite rock star, Gene Simmons of Kiss, emerged.
I have no words to describe what I just read. That's straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley.
I mean there's a Silicon Valley episode where Gavin has a "blood boy."
Their advertising video felt like something straight out of the TV show "Silicon Valley":
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X1oHp-VvhDE
> But mostly it's middle aged middle class professionals - dentists, doctors, lawyers, some software developers - buying equipment as a hobby in itself, because buying is a lot easier and less stressful than creating.
This hits a bit too close to home.
I thought that it was a nice touch in Silicon Valley (the TV show), for their corporate lawyer to have a fancy Gibson Les Paul guitar (with a bunch of autographs on it) in his office that he touched exactly once on camera. All while having no amps or pedals or speakers or anything else to use it with at all.
> Isn't that extreme?
What do you think smart phones are? That's exactly what they're optimized for, in addition to mass distraction and aimless and feckless doom scrolling for dopamine that is.
I can't post because i triggered the algo:
> My wife and I use Apple's "Find My" feature to keep tabs on when each other will be home. Makes it easy to time dinner so it's hot for everyone.
The Silicon Valley TV series was great not just because it called out the Valley's BS tropes and made fun of it's absurdity, but because Judge really had the best material write itself: this is a prime example of what I could see an episode's plot being based on.
A (smart) phone being used not to actually call each other, but as the spy device that it is.
Sadly, in it's latter seasons it went into a territory it's writers neither understood or articulated well but appealed to the lowest common denominator: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
Grandma’s Boy and Office Space for movies.
Various aspects of The IT Crowd, Silicon Valley and Mythic Quest for TV shows.
The most knowledgeable hackers were consulted for 'The Matrix' (0-day SSHv1 CRC32 scene), 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' (a surprising homage to the actual PWN Phone, some micro details only a hacker would know, etc).
But these are more of side devices. No movie captures the culture as such — neither the original meaning, nor the illegal, nor the current business.
'The Social Network' attempted to take on a particular narrow aspect of it, and while the results are mixed, it did capture some of the real vibe.
TV — of course 'Silicon Valley', since it was already mentioned. The 'jerking off' algorithm was researched by a real team, and some of the members are here.
Silicon Valley is a TV show, not a movie, but it seems to get pretty close to representing the evolution of a startup for a series which appeals to a lot of people. It's less focused on hacking as a plot device than, say, Mr Robot, and more focused on the business side of running a software company (so the technical details as explained by characters ring a little flat).
I moved to SF 5 years ago from Canada. I worked at a small startup that got acquired and now at a pre-IPO company of about 1500. I had worked in a small city in Canada previously. I moved in my mid-30's which is later than a lot of people but I had always wanted to move and work here when I was younger but didn't due to low self-esteem and thinking I wasn't good enough as a software engineer to "make it here". It's the biggest regret of my career that I didn't move here when I was young. I ended up finally moving because I realized I was in a "now or never" situation as I could see the window closing due to being married and my wife wanting to pursue her career options.
I really like the ambition here as it fits me. I strive to the best I can and I find a lot more of that here than back home. Maybe I've been lucky but I've generally worked with kind people so far. I haven't seen anything that would be featured on an episode of "Silicon Valley". Maybe it's because I moved here later and have a better eye for avoiding that type of stuff, I don't know.
I've had a chance to work on a couple great projects and all-in-all, it's been a great experience for me so far. I'll probably be here another 5 years or so before moving back to Canada.
I felt reminded of the parties in the HBO TV series Silicon Valley.
> I feel like it would be possible to write software to tell artists if a song is in danger of copyright infringement of other registered songs.
I'm trying to decide if you (as a joke) plagiarized this idea from the popular TV show Silicon Valley.
Edit: https://youtu.be/sj9hesuQV6s?t=49
Yes. See Silicon Valley, Season 2, Episode 2.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
https://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley-Season-2-Episode-2-Runaway-Devaluation-Do-large-companies-and-VC-firms-really-brain-rape-early-stage-startups
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(season_2)
I'm pretty sure this was an episode on HBO's Silicon Valley. The character's Tesla drove itself onto a container ship with the driver stuck inside, unable to get out of the car.
I’m pretty sure that was pitched in an episode of Silicon Valley, except microwaves
People outside of tech still don't believe me when I tell them that Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than comedy.
Silicon Valley had an episode about a similar idea and it didn't end well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzvFiR_Dts
A number of those images are from the TV show Silicon Valley, a show satirizing the industry.
Similar search in Google images also tend to match various stereotype (basketball player, hotel housekeeping, etc). Google will generally reflect what's on the Internet.
I was about to reference the Silicon Valley episode but decided to peek into the article first. Turns out it’s in the first sentence
People are driven by a desire for mastery, or the enjoyment of their colleagues and/or customers, or the actual impact of the work.
The fact that most businesses aren't saving the world, they are just making money is why so many pretend to be about saving the world. See: Silicon Valley's episode in season 1 about TechCrunch Disrupt.
Yes you are right but put yourself in the shoes of the people who vote for these anti-immigration policies. Decade after decade of decline does not give them the freedom to care if some startup that they may never hear of gets created in one of them "coastal elite" cities.
All they see is probably what they watched on the TV show Silicon Valley or what they hear in the news. I fully believe that if things were improving for them, they would be welcoming immigrants with open arms (or at least not minding them). However that is not the case. So in an environment where there isn't abundance but scarcity, it is a zero sum game.
Would love to see Meta step into the "child labor" controversy. Isn't that an episode of Silicon Valley? Their videochat platform is a hit but all their users are underage - they agree to sell to the bad-guy-VC just before the lawsuits show up.
The Silicon Valley TV show quite vividly portrayed that era of tech, especially in the earlier seasons.
Is this the end of Silicon Valley and the tech utopia - when HN also starts acting like a paid media with vested interests like Fox News or CNN . Assuming of course that Ryan’s accusations have any truth to it. Then again HN moderators and leaders are people and have their biases and I would not expect them to be truly altruistic. Maybe they shafted Bolt.
Edit- Whether there is any truth to it is another matter but I applaud Ryan’s guts to bring this to the forefront. It reads like an episode of the show Silicon Valley.
> do you think google's making the world a better place?
Silicon Valley, season 1 episode 1: "But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility."
Mike Judge is a genius.
This reads like an episode from Silicon Valley.
Sounds like something straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.
There is some value in presenting information in a way that regular people would take the time to read and understand.
The key here is you are being spied on by your government in the heart of NYC and AT&T is helping.
The video with this article takes the motif further with a sort-of X-Files like presentation and set of mysterious sounding voiceovers.
From the start, I thought this building reminds me of the one Will Smith’s character reported to in “Men in Black.”
To some extent all information in news is editorialized for an angle that draws the reader in.
Could it be the truths of this story are so well known to you that it is hard to enjoy the way this is presented? Perhaps, in the same way the TV show “Silicon Valley” is unattractive to some startup founders as too close to home?
Intellectual and physical work differs a lot. True. Writing a book may take years, while writing the words mere days.
This, however, should not be an excuse, but a cue to get better at that 'thinking stuff'. Improve it. Train it. Learn.
And with all that, strongly ask yourself if that 'backburner time' must be paid. A bricklayer needs 10+ hours off to rest his body, so he can lay bricks for another 8 hours tomorrow. Should we pay him 18 hours?
My answer to both is that when I efficiently ponder and backburn ideas, it is 'work'. But when I'm binging Silicon Valley Episode 5, it is not (unless I can prove that this helps me bring the problem closer).
If you've ever seen the TV show Silicon Valley, "Big Head" played this archetype very well. There are always a few people in every company who do so. Consider yourself lucky in some ways; you probably haven't rocked anyone's boat, which might catapult you to management and beyond!
If you don't go to management, it's probably worth doing another 5 hours of Leetcode each week. Regardless of how much work you do, the career lifespan at most companies is less than ten years. So you will have to prove you are a coder 4-5 times in your life, and probably at least once when you are over 50.
This same country almost just passed a cannabis legalization referendum.
It brings to mind episode 8 from season 2 of Silicon Valley:
> When Jian Yang nonchalantly reveals Monica’s smoker status to one of her co-workers, Erlich scolds him. “This is Palo Alto,” he begins. “People are lunatics about smoking! We do not have the freedoms you have in China!” Sure enough, Laurie corners Monica at the end of the day to perform an “anti-smoking intervention” complete with stuffed animals and the now-immortal line, “No one ever died from secondhand heroin.”
https://www.vulture.com/2015/06/silicon-valley-recap-season-2-episode-8.html
The Onion just can't catch a break, can it? Reading this article is like reading a transcript from a lost episode of Silicon Valley.
You were brain raped. Bill Gates was famous for this. There was even a Silicon Valley episode about the practice.
I don’t think there’s a fundamental need to “make the world a better place”, like in the Silicon Valley TV series.
> I do know of two cases of "fake programmers" (...) the person was able to sneak under the radar at Google for multiple years before someone realized that the person never actually wrote any code and tasks only got completed when they got someone else to do the task. The person who realized eventually scheduled a pair programming session, where they discovered that the person wasn't able to write a loop, didn't know the difference between = and ==, etc., despite being a "senior SWE" (L5/T5) at Google for years.
I thought this only happens in tv shows. Was it more like Big Head from HBO Silicon Valley (the company forgot about the employee) or Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can (conman who managed to fake his identity and credentials)?
Don't you realize that HBO made a whole TV show series that made fun of people who say stuff like that?
Erlich Bachman Vs Psilocybin. (Making The World a Better Place.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLvzyb3_Uc
Silicon Valley: Making the World a Better Place | SXSW Convergence 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9Dvd_NEBg
OH GOD this is hilarious! Zach Woods is so perfectly in character that I'm afraid he may actually be as deeply disturbed as the character he plays on the show. His impression of the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the Grindr empire was perfect! The setup starts at 3:40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Woods
I won't transcribe his NFSW joke, but later there's some excellent clean discussion too (starting at 13:18):
Steven Leckart (Moderator, Writer and Filmmaker)> You guys need to understand, these guys get pitched all the time by Silicon Valley. Like, we were in the back room, and there were guys from a -- can I say who it is? Should I say who it is?
(Off Camera)> Naaaaaw!
Leckart> But like this tech company that we've all read about in the news is coming up and like handing business cards, and cornering them, and telling them all about their, like, business strategies. And there is no hint -- it's like a deer in the headlights, right, like? Like you are just going to take this conversation and find a way to weave it into the show. And I sort of wondered, like, does Silicon Valley, are they just completely out to lunch about what you're doing? Like, why does anyone talk to you about this stuff?
Martin Star (Bertram Glfoyle)> They want to be a part of the show.
Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.
Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.
Technical Motivation:
- Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019) - The Social Network (2010) - The Imitation Game (2014) - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017) - Iron Man (2008) - Primer (2004) - The Martian (2015) - Hidden Figures (2016) - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)
"Sales" Motivation:
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)
Honorable Mentions:
- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.
- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.
gotta say the article sounds like that scene from the Silicon Valley TV show where they try to design the server case[1] but the themes are pretty nice at least, I like the sand colored one
[1] https://youtu.be/F6Srzcm8EEg
Everytime someone mentions VR, i got reminded of the same scene of hbo silicon valley sitcom on why VR tech won't work unless there is a significant breakthrough: It needs a 1000 usd dollars rig to run smoothly plus the VR equipment.
What facebook is doing is preparing for the inevitable... they are going to break his company for monopoly reasons, therefore he needs zuckerberg to be seen as the CEO of something else, kinda what google does with alphabet were the founders basically run alphabet and have someone else run google in case they need a someone to put the blame on why "google shows first the image of trump when searching for idiot".
In all seriousness, this looks like an Hooli ad from the Silicon Valley TV show. I can really picture Mark Zuckerberg as a real life Gavin Belson surrounded by minions telling him all day long how great this Meta thing is.
In a way the story would make a great movie for this reason. If they got funded because of it, it would be like a Silicon Valley episode.
> What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
This reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode about the pizza app, Sliceline. Solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved, and has to do with pizza.
First there were the blood boys. Now this. Rich people are going to need people around just to increase their longevity.
Too bad the show Silicon Valley ended. This would've been perfect for an episode.
This could be a movie with Dinesh from Silicon Valley as Microsoft’s CEO
Edit: ok wait this could be an episode of Silicon Valley although I haven’t see the last season
I think most of these companies would be right at home in an episode of Silicon Valley
Reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where the stunt driver miscalculated and Dinesh and Gilfoyle had to decide whether to tell him:
"Let Jeff die"
Strengths - One less billionaire in the world
Weaknesses - Possibility of being fired
Opportunities - Dissolve blue origin
Threats - Possible legal action
Seriously, I've worked at companies where everyone loved whiteboards, and I've been doing this work for almost two decades, but doubt I've seen more than 100 total lines of even pseudocode written on whiteboards, outside lectures or interviews. I doubt I've written more than a dozen such lines myself (again, barring interviews). Maybe some places work very differently from what I'm used to? TV shows and movies, even ones that are relatively down-to-Earth (Silicon Valley) love having programmers write code on whiteboards, so maybe that is how lots of us operate, I've just managed to never be around that kind of culture, somehow.
[EDIT] of course there are other, practical reasons a show or movie might have their characters do that, but I'm just offering the possibility that that more closely reflects common programmer experience than what I've seen first-hand does.
Yes. Anyone who wants to relive an early ignition of one bridge should read the HN thread on the Rocket announcement.[0] No one is sympathetic with respect to the Rocket/Docker spat; both companies behaved poorly -- and it was increasingly clear that the energy at Docker, Inc. was going to spent fighting others rather than building a business.
Speaking personally, the fate of Docker, Inc. was clear to me when they took their $40M Series C round in 2014. I had met with Solomon in April 2014 (after their $15M Series B) and tried to tell him what I had learned at Joyent: that raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making. I could see that I was being too abstract, so I distilled it -- and I more or less begged him to not take any more money. (Sadly, Silicon Valley's superlative, must-watch "Sand Hill Shuffle" episode[1] would not air until 2015, or I would have pointed him to it.) When they took the $40M round -- which was an absolutely outrageous amount of capital to take into a company that didn't even have a conception of what they would possibly sell -- the future was clear to me. I wasn't at all surprised when the SVP washouts from the likes of VMware and IBM landed at Docker -- though still somehow disappointed when they behaved predictably, accelerating the demise of the company. May Docker, Inc. at least become a business school case study to warn future generations of an avoidable fate!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8682525
[1] https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/season-02/1-sand-hill-shuffle
> Makes me think of the series DEVS where a big Silicon Valley company also uses their security force in a similar manner, I never thought that would be the part that was the most accurate.
This was my first thought when I read about the eBay accusations last year. That said, I've worked for a broad spectrum of Bay Area companies and I think pretty much everything environmental and atmospheric in DEVS was accurate. It was a better take on tech companies and their personalities than, say, "Silicon Valley," and watching it gave me a lot of uncomfortable deja vu. Highly recommended if you are in tech, ever watch TV, and haven't seen it.
Sounds like a plot from Silicon Valley (the TV show).
This was a long thread but it was very entertaining. Read like an episode of Silicon Valley.
Mark Cuban is the basis of the Russ Hanneman VC character in the TV show Silicon Valley. Russ makes it a point to put his name on anything, including bespoke tequila.
That itself may be a reference to Mark Cuban appearing in an episode of Entourage as himself, promoting an investment in a tequila brand.
This dude is funny as shit, he could well be a character in the Silicon Valley TV series.
The fact that he is being serious half of the time makes it funnier, IMO.
In a sitcom like "Silicon Valley" I can imagine Google having to defend their algorithm in court, and prove he actually is a serial killer...
Silicon Valley, season 1
He even wrote his own fanfic episode of Silicon Valley!
https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/04/the-founder-of-firefox-wrote-his-own-screenplay-for-hbos-silicon-valley-and-its-hilarious/
In the TV show "Silicon Valley", the Weissman score measure the compression, not the speed.
In reality, the Weissman score does not exist.
I highly recommend this serie if you haven't seen it :)
A balloon wall? Hahahahaha, is this an episode of Silicon Valley? Forcing people to commute in order to wear masks at their hot desk? Google needs to admit reality that WFH is a reality, rather than trying to lever people into the office.
It's a vignette from an episode of Silicon Valley, in which one of the characters demonstrates an "awesome" app that can identify a hot dog, from the phone camera.
It does this well.
Unfortunately, the hot dog is the only thing that it can positively identify. Everything else is "Not A Hot Dog."
"Are you really not familiar with parabiosis?" (https://youtu.be/hBA0AH-LSbo)
There is no way I can separate this research from 'The Blood Boy' episode of Silicon Valley.
Wow. This was straight out of the Silicon Valley TV series.
this feels like an episode from the Silicon Valley show lol
It goes like this, one of the programmers of the app, hack a smart fridge to irritate their roommate. Then one fine day, just during their biggest demo to an insurance data company, their garage looses power where their servers are located, they hastily build a mobile data centre on a truck. They try to transport it over to their friends lab at a college. Upon reaching there, they notice they forgot to lock the door, and find that their entire equipment got scattered all over the road. Cue some emotional scenes they get a call from insurance guy saying them the app perfomed perfectly well. Shockingly to these people they realise when one of the programmer hacked the smart fridge he accidentally linked their software to the smart fridge and the smart fridge via its network uploaded the "malware", there by the entire content into its network of all smart fridges there is on earth. Thats when they realise the power of distribution and they go P2P.
Silicon valley season 2 last episode and season 3 first episode, should do, to get this.
This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box").
When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aired :) ). It was in 2011, and we didn't have the RasPi back then so we used something called the SheevaPlug [1] . It didn't have a display port, which we'd needed later on, but it was great for plug'n'play'n'forget installation. (Actually one of these is still running at one of our first customers, even though the backing service has been shut down ~5 years ago. Probably nobody knows any more what it's doing and they just think 'better not touch'.)
It's the easiest and most logical way to deliver some of the software/services. It mostly depends on whether it's something you want to interact with on your own machine (and a single machine) or whether you want to have it always running and/or multiple people to access it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
I don't remember the details, but I think that season 2 kind of retroactively ruined season 1. They used to have all those O'Reilly and EFF stickers, and working at a help desk at the time, it felt very authentic. Then everything got super nice in season 2 -- leather couches, people were dressing nicely, etc. It kind of lost its charm. You can't rewatch it because you know Denholm is just going to randomly jump out of a window.
(Having said that, I think "Fire" was a memorable episode that is still amusing. The 0118911881999119 song, "it's off, so I'll turn it on... AND JUST WALK AWAY".)
It might have been ahead of its time. Silicon Valley was well received and is as nerdy and intricately detailed as Season 1 of the IT Crowd. "Normal people" thought it was far out and zany. People that work in tech have been to all those meetings. And, a major character was named PG!
My guess is it a mix of speculation and showing off. You might buy it to boast about it like the tres commas art piece in the Silicon Valley sitcom (remember it’ll be someone rich buying it) or buy it to sell to someone else in future, a greater fool so to speak.
Both of the passages you quoted read as coherent and even convincing.
Sure, terms like "epistemic" or "unconscientiousness" may be a bit unfamiliar, but they have specific meanings that are clear in the passage, and are used to make a salient argument.
The use of jargon does not equate to obfuscation! For example, these two statements are very different:
"Making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints." (Silicon Valley season 1 episode 6)
"And then there are other aspects of complexity that come into programming with any of these more commonly used statically typed languages, which have to do with the complexity in the language space." (Rich Hickey talk)
If you aren't familiar with the jargon, they're both unintelligible, but if you are, one sounds silly and the other does not.
Sounds like straight from the Silicon Valley TV show, where the startup ideas were all just to prefix established companies and services with "Chinese".
So this would be "Chinese Android".
That show featured great satire. And, at times, a very accurate one.
Sounds oddly like Russ Hanneman from TV show Silicon Valley. Wonder if they got the story from this.
Guy throws away stick with hundred million on it and goes to the tip to find it.
"That's not a thumb drive, that's a thumb! Put it back!"
This seemed straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.
Sounds like something out of the Silicon Valley TV show.
I'll call out Silicon Valley as having a great finale too. I still watch the final documentary every now and then. one of the greatest satires I will probably ever see.
There was a scene/episode in HBO's Silicon Valley where they go to a pornsite operator conference that was b2b. Other than their hilarious made-up names for each website and their niche, it was just another boring business conference.
Aha!: https://imgur.com/a/j1Hhq#QhdMwoQ
It's about as SFW as this discussion is.
I was hoping to like it as much as Silicon Valley, but didn't.
Although check out the special Quarantine episode, #10 I think. That was my favorite.
For the most part it's a similar style after. I found it amusing overall just seeing the game development industry being satirized, just like I enjoyed HBO Silicon Valley in that way even if it wasn't necessarily a great show. Episode 5 specifically though comes out of left field, and is one of the best episodes of television on the platform.
But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned.
It doesn't seem to be satirising something that actually needs to be satirised, as there is not a significant number of startups in the real world actually operating like this. A startup that operates like this wouldn't (barring a major mistake) get funding from YC or any other competent investor.
The Silicon Valley sitcom is funny and successful because it satirises stuff that really does happen in the startup/tech/VC world (I know, I lived through much of it myself), but it noticeably doesn't stereotype founders as utterly clueless and hapless the way this piece does.
With the sitcom, anyone who knows the startup world can point to real-world people/events on which the people/events in the sitcom are based. I don't think you can say that about this post. It's hard for me to believe the writer of this really knows any significant number of real-world startups.
So much this. Networking(where you went to school and work) and luck(your country, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, your looks, your accent, being at the right place and the right time) are worth more than your CV and side projects but this is rarely mentioned in this field as it's always touted that tech is a pure meritocracy.
One can often read sour vents on reddit on devs who lose hope, get depressed and burn out after being unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs for so long while they keep grinding leetcode and churning projects on github because the internet told them that SW development is a meritocracy and the key to success is putting enough hard work in your free time even though there's devs coasting on six figure jobs who haven't written a line on github in their life on their free time.
Nope, it's definitely no meritocracy, the tech world is just as unfair as the rest but has much better PR about it: watch Silicon Valley TV series made by the satire comedy genius Mike Judge(Office Space, Idiocracy) where billionaire tech magnate Gavin Belson would always sugarcoat his hostile business decisions with talks of buddhist spirituality, endangered animals and making the world a better place while his true motivation was only the accumulation of more fame, wealth and power.
> If Silicon Valley (the satirical TV show) had a book version, it would look something like this.
This can't be farther than the truth. I advise you at least try to peruse it a bit before resorting to such commentary. The point isn't to make money at all.
Nothing, but the actual engagement with any of these ideas is approximately 0%. In a work presenting itself as the collected Almanack of Wisdom by a Wise Man, one would hope to see more than pithy collection of buzzwords and advice, all centered on "Getting rich." If the primary reason you're interested in Buddhist techniques is to make money, I think you may have missed the point.
If Silicon Valley (the satirical TV show) had a book version, it would look something like this.
I hear that kind of thing from two types of people: nontechnical people who are looking for a contrarian hot-take, and technical people who subscribe to the "credibility hierarchy" that's correlated to how close you work to the metal. They make fun of that nonsense in the first episode of Silicon Valley and it's probably one of my favorite jokes in the series [1].
1. https://youtu.be/kXQE2uGnR_U?t=19
Reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode about Tethics where Richard is forced to sign Gavin's pledge for exactly this reason even though he's in strong disagreement.
It reminds me of Gavin Belson's "Tethics" from the Silicon Valley TV show.
I'm guessing Brad Smith hasn't seen the Tethics episode of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRUQh_EHoQ
It reminds me of the early episodes of “Silicon Valley” where an endless parade of would be entrepreneurs proudly declares how they want to “change the world!” (to the point where it becomes comically tedious).
“Aggressive independence” for its own sake (at scale) can simply degrade into its own form of ironic groupthink.
That's not the fault of VCs or even private equity. That's the fault of decisions made at far higher levels: congress, the executive branch, and the Federal Reserve. These decisions create vast macroeconomic riptides that just drag everyone else along.
One of the things I've come to believe after being around for a while and watching a lot of humans is that we are much more at the mercy of our environment and the forces therein than we think. Individual humans are very very small, and their decisions are largely driven by the socioeconomic context they inhabit. Incentives matter a lot.
Today there is effectively a Cold War between the US, China, and to some extent other nations and nation-blocs over who can print the most money to hep up their economy the most to generate the most GDP growth. All those metrics are financial in nature. You get what you measure. You also get ghost cities (China), crazy asset bubbles (America), predatory leveraged capital (everywhere), and a financial economy increasingly disconnected from value creation, but those things are not being measured so nobody (in the political class) cares.
This creates an incentive structure best parodied in the Silicon Valley TV series: your company's product is not its product. Your company's product is its stock. The goal is to soak up as much of that financial capital as possible, because that's where the money is.
Jenkins.
Has a UI that was cool when the Internet was first switched on. They made Jenkins Blue, to be fair, but for all that it eats an ungodly amount of memory (at least when I was using it, dunno if that's changed).
Needing to configure Jenkins to work with other services means I won't be productive for a while; this yak has a hell lot of fur. I have to write extremely detailed notes for myself on what and where to click just so I can do something again (i.e., if something breaks and I need to reconfigure/migrate/etc.).
There was this scene in HBO's Silicon Valley S1, in that episode where they hired this leet hacker kid who turned out to be no more than a skiddie. The kid broke their work and Richard Hendricks had to fix everything and the scene where everything got fixed featured Richard watching his Jenkins build go green. I find it very amusing that to achieve verisimilitude, they had to eschew years of Hollywood "hacker" portrayal, and have Richard stare at the iconically ugly UI of Jenkins. Real life can be cooler than Jenkins but other tools just won't feel legitimate, no?
>These laws exist to promote free thought. They punish those who seek to pry into our most private spaces and turn America into a place like East Germany.
If you're going to argue that journalists blowing the whistle on the private conversations of the ultra-rich and powerful about how to reign in journalism with the Stasi, that's a great recipe for getting people sold on the idea that privacy itself is a tool used by the powerful to escape scrutiny.
It reminds me of that bit in the Silicon valley TV show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zQpN28xa4)
I found this out the hard way (that the social status of computer scientists outside of the Valley is nearly zero) in my late twenties, when I was starting to look to get married. I'm now changing careers. I realized that women (and society in general) cared absolutely zero about my profession except for the fact that it made good money. Even if you do become obscenely wealthy, you rarely garner any real respect in mature society -- you are viewed only slightly above oil princes and gold-laden rappers -- rich people with no taste. That's really unfortunate because computer science is such an intellectually stimulating profession, but that is not how people see it.
[Spoiler Alert] There's a great scene at the end of Silicon Valley's last episode where Gavin Belson, the failed tech CEO, leaves tech to become a more artsy-fartsy writer with a passion for the arts. Only then does he actually start to be noticed by organizations outside the Valley. Even the stars of the show, Richard Hendricks and gang fade into obscurity at the end of their startup journey - not even future generations of tech people have heard about Pied Piper. I think that is a brilliant portrayal of the reality of most people in tech - they have almost zero historical significance, ride on the waves of economic cycles, and even if they are obscenely rich (like Bezos), they just don't matter to progression of human culture. Even Elon Musk gets much less respect outside of technocrat circles than we think. On the other hand, everyone respects the like of Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling, or Barack Obama.
I've felt similarly about why traditional university education tends to have value, and why coding bootcamps cannot generally convey the same value within six or twelve weeks.
I coded a lot in university, but realistically, probably less during coursework than a very intensive bootcamp would, and certainly on things that I don't even begin to touch anymore (OS, AI, databases (not accessing, writing one), compilers, etc). The value was never in the coursework, really; as the professor says to Peter Gregory in the first episode of Silicon Valley, the true value of a university experience is intangible.
This is like something from a silicon valley episode.
Just trying to make a reference to Silicon Valley (TV show).
I think Silicon Valley (the TV series) is a good snapshot of that culture for the future. Sure, it's all fiction, but a lot of it is closer to reality than you can get with real stories without violating NDAs.
> The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup.
You really can't come up with a better set up to an episode of Silicon Valley.
"I Want to start a start-up! But I have no idea what to start or how to start it. Can you tell me everything I should do?"
So tethics then?
https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/silicon-valley-recap-season-6-episode-5-tethics.html
This reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode where the start up 'Sliceline' sells repackaged Domino's pizzas.
Don't recall if they explicitly stated 'they'll make it up in volume.'
This reminds me of the SliceLine episode of Silicon Valley Season 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txl90NEl92U
Its even better, DoorDash is doing this without even switching boxes.
There's an episode of Silicon Valley where Pied Piper bankrupt an unrelated start-up using this method so that they can hire their developers.
I have a vague sense that this exact scenario with pizza was covered in the Silicon Valley sitcom...
"Making the world a better place" is one of the original jokes in the Silicon Valley tv show because it's such an absurd goal. If they are doing something illegal they should go to jail, but as long as they aren't actively hurting others, being a middleman in a transaction is something that many, many people do to make money.
Love this! Plus I didn't realize Silicon Valley was already on Amazon Prime, which means it's binge watching time!
Ok, finally seems like the right place to share my pitch for a Silicon Valley spin-off:
Gavin Belsom, and a bunch of other billionaires, flee to New Zealand only to find it’s crowded with all of the people they know (and despise). So now they’re stuck with each other.
It’s like Galt’s Gulch from Atlas Shrugged meets Gilligan’s Island.
First episode ends with someone coughing, cuts to Belsom’s distraught face, obscure hip-hop track plays.
As a follow-up, anyone have any books written about the Dotcom era? I was still fairly young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of it and I can’t find any books or shows that cover it. Lots of stuff from the 70s/80s/early 90s (Masters of Doom, Cuckoos Egg, Halt and Catch Fire, Pirates of Silicon Valley), and lots of stuff from modern Silicon Valley (Bad Blood, Silicon Valley, the various Steve Jobs movies/books) but it seems like the startup world from 1995 to 2002 is just a blank space waiting to be filled.
What about Yahoo and Amazon and Pets.com and Webvan and eBay? What about stock being used for toilet paper and employees wheeling their Aeron chairs home when the company folded? What about Enron? How did 9/11 impact the Dotcom bust? Hell, what programming languages/frameworks were they using?
It's a reference to the Silicon Valley sitcom: https://youtu.be/cB7dInljmO4?t=23
Even in the US, it heavily depends on where you live. If you are in one of the big west coast cities, I would imagine you can observe a situation similar to Europe.
I felt like that joke from one of the more recent seasons of Silicon Valley, where the episode revolved around one of the characters "being outed" as a christian, was very on point, from what I have personally observed both in SF and Seattle. A bit of background on the episode: one of the CEOs of partnered companies owned a gay dating site. No one had any concerns or issues with that, but as soon as some people found out that the CEO was christian, all hell broke lose and the following quote was dropped "You can put micro doses of LSD in your cereal and people will call you a pioneer. But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian."
P.S. The show is obviously pretty tongue-in-cheek, no one seriously claims you cannot be Christian in those areas or that you would face hostility due to it. But people will definitely be questioning it a bit.
The root cause of this is the "American rule" of costs. It's no where near as viable to troll when you have to pay their costs when you lose (especially given that frequently the plaintiffs are lawyers themselves, so aren't actually spending any legal fees to troll).
The case portrayed in the TV show "Silicon Valley" was illustrative: "best just to settle because it'll cost us less", because the mere act of suing itself financially damages the victim, often severely, given lawyers' typical rates.
But not so under the "English rule": it costs you nothing if they lose.
> Why not to look for a job at NGO, or get involved in a non-profit startup instead?
You're seriously asking why a lowly-paid Amazon employee doesn't look for a NGO or a non-profit startup job instead? No offence, but is this satire? It seems like a Silicon Valley episode to me.
Massage credits. I'm surprised they didn't mention these in a silicon valley episode. :)
Reminds me of the Silicon Valley TV show sketch where the only goal of every single startup is "to make the world a better place".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
I see someone at Mozilla watched the "Silicon Valley" Tethics episode.
Silicon Valley (TV Series) calls it 'brain raping'. Although this also includes getting you to reveal IP. Worth watching that episode.
I believe that's also not one but two episodes of Silicon Valley. The second time they believe they've figured out how to avoid it happening to them again.
There's an early episode of Silicon Valley where they go through something similar.
It's also an American thing even though they don't have a word for it. It was even referenced in the Silicon Valley Season 1, where Bighetti is "sent to the roof" to do nothing, because the CEO does not believe in firing people.
Those clips could be outtakes from the TV show Silicon Valley.
There may not be much overlap with the tech-bro/silicon valley (the TV show) folks, but there is a huge amount of overlap when it comes to "hackers" (in the sense that "Hacker News" uses the term).
It's also a lot less about actual motorcycles than the title would imply.
As the fallout of WeWork being bailed out played out in the public eye it was obvious that there were tremendous problems at the company. But this article really goes into detail to show the true dysfunction that existed.
I mean a CEO that skipped board meetings entirely? An entire board that basically sat quietly as valuations grew ever further out of touch with reality and that the first time they brought it up as an issue was already after the failed IPO had been halted, really is something straight out of an episode of Silicon Valley on HBO.
Funny, it deeply resembles the last episodes of "Silicon Valley"
More seriously, the generalized compression algorithm can be one of the keys or even one of the definitions of generalized artificial intelligence
And Kolmogorov’s complexity was present by a subtle reference in the very last episode ...
No, cloud stuff in a box kind of product, i.e. software, hardware is obviously secondary to it.
People are confused because of the comedic level of bullshit (reminds me of "the box" from a Silicon Valley tv show episode).
Wow, I just watched the ColdFusion video on We this morning. It's interesting watching this huge disaster in real time, instead of years later.
The blame seems to be on Masayoshi Son, of Softbank, for anointing their founder Adam Neumann. He sounds like a character from the tv show Silicon Valley.
https://youtu.be/QHQTzeve7OM
This is getting worse than any silicon valley episode
This feels like the most recent episode of silicon valley...
Or maybe you guys in the Valley could stop offering your labour to FAANG, who then sell that information for profit to Intelligence agencies and go back to the cypherpunk and cryptoanarchist roots of the Valley and help create an alternative?
The recent episode of Silicon Valley was so typical of my short stay there of the collective mindset (#Tethics) in the Valley, which was just a summer; my family is actually from San Jose (multi-generational), but they have since divested and left to the South (where I'm from) for good because of the BS politics and police state that emerged from what was once a really awesome culture in the late 60-80s and less so but still decent mid to late 90s.
I personally moved to Boulder and rode a decent wave, but to be honest with Google coming here and a lot of its cohort following in masse with the large campus it feels about the same now.
Maybe Silicon Valley - the HBO TV show? Not "live action" but all this stuff keeps happening over and over again, just with different logos on it..
> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.
This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley.
I am clearly undereducated on some of these
> 21. 'Privacy' and 'Confidentiality' are synonymous.
> 50. The error message 'No space left on device.' means you are out of disk space.
> 54. 'main' takes two arguments, argc and argv.
> 62. Dropbox is a suitable backup solution.
> 69. Zuck is a genius.
> 76. HBO's "Silicon Valley" is satire, not a documentary.
> 77. Jokes about recursion are funny jokes about recursion.
> 94. There is a "real world".
Zuckerberg reminds me of Richard from the Silicon Valley TV show.
He’s this quirky guy turned billionaire that looks like someone who wasn’t naturally a leader figure growing up yet is still CEO of one of the biggest companies in the US somehow.
I love it how they decided to spend the money fighting the patent trolls. I started reading the article because the title reminded me of Richard in the Silicon Valley TV series. Happy to read that in the real world the patent trolls got busted!! :)
Reminds me of the patent troll episode from Silicon Valley series. Good job CloudFare!
“We just sat down this season and started writing and just felt it out and just decided we had a really good way to go out this season,” Judge said. “So that was that” (https://www.slashfilm.com/why-silicon-valley-is-ending/)
And then he has some movie ideas: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/silicon-valley-ending-mike-judge-hbo-1202049734/
This really reminds me of "Tables" from the Silicon Valley TV show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWOGbu5BcT0
Great attitude. Interesting correlation with the episode S06E01 of Silicon Valley released this week, on the same topic :)
“To all the people that worked for me and whose money I took, you’re fucking welcome,” he said. “We did the job we were asked to do. But just like Michael Jordan had a decision to retire and go play baseball, I chose to retire and go play baseball. Now, I may come back to basketball, but this is my decision. I am not your slave. I just want to be clear. My skin color 200 years ago may have gotten you confused, but I am not your slave.”
LOL. This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. A billionaire invoking slavery in his self defense.
So Mozilla thinks that laws proposed to voters are so immoral that we should purge people over them.
“He had it coming to him”, they’ll say, justifying the purge, for defending that a child need two parents of different sex because kids are enriched by both viewpoints, which is as perfectly valid as an opinion as saying that speech should be censored aggressively when not agreeing with other viewpoints. Both are opinionated opinions. Only one is not democratic. And that’s a trend across a specific sprout of unicorns and SV companies.
The Silicon Valley TV show even realized it and made an episode about the hero outing a “gay Christian”, until the episode turns into understanding that the problem isn’t that he outed a gay, but a Christian, which is something that apparently the Silicon Valley (and the HQ of Mozilla in Australia for that matters), aren’t tolerant with.
I’m for democracy. Mozilla isn’t supporting equal democracy... for Christians. In my opinion it is more complex than that, Mozilla probably have little opinions about this problem but buckles under specific powerful group pressures and agrees to implement their purge, without due process and fair trial. Instead it’s replaced with “He had it coming”, which reminds me of the darkest ages of the last century. Due process for every accusation is an essential pillar of democracy, and Mozilla hasn’t amended it manners to support this principle.
Misleading title. Better title: To keep data safe, companies must recruit more women and men in cybersecurity.
Summary: Silicon Valley (HBO) Episode "The Lady" (2015)
Richard: All right, but just to be clear, our top priority is to hire the most qualified person available.
Dinesh: But it would be better if that person was a woman, even though the woman part of that statement is irrelevant.
Silicon valley (TV show not place)?.
> Why turn a $1.00 into $1.10 this year when you can turn it into $15 in ten years?
Because there's a very good chance you go bankrupt in year 3, turning your $1.00 into $0.00 instead of $15.
> Being "profitable" is irrational and stupid. [...] Profitability is a very narrowminded view of how to run a company.
What a weird, weird thing to say. As if it were straight out of the Silicon Valley TV show.
This all reads like an episode of Silicon Valley. Unbelievable.
I end up doing this organically with HBO. When Westworld/Silicon Valley/Game of Thrones comes out I'll subscribe. But after that, there's usually only 1 new movie on there that I'm interested in so I cancel it.
Considering the actual compression quality of HBO is much worse than Netflix or Amazon and the app sucks to use, it seems like they don't have the resources at HBO to actually do streaming well.
Overall, it doesn't really seem like an efficient way to buy content for either them or me. It's like if a studio made their own DVD player.
I think it was in the Silicon Valley series where one of the t-shirt had a print in binary ASCII with 'bitcoin' in it, don't recall the episode right now...
I didn't translate it real time tho, man ascii and a couple of minutes... ^__^;
There was a binary background in Silicon Valley season 5 episode 5, I paused it and spent a couple seconds decoding the first letter. Moments after I said it, my SO read out the entire message.
I had no idea she knew how to do that, much less do so in freeking real time.
A couple of reasons:
- some people are allergic
- some people were mauled by dogs in the past and a strange dog can trigger their PTSD
- some dogs are unpredictable and may shit/piss on the floor if they get scared
- some dogs bite
- some small kids/toddlers don't (and shouldn't) know how to handle strange dogs and may do something (like pull the dog's ears or something) to set the dog off
- some dogs bark for no reason and become a nuisance
Your freedom ends when other people's freedom starts. I'm sure your dog is the most well behaved (everyone's dog is, of course) but we live in a society and we should put people first. The whole dog thing is out of control in the US. Don't mention France, they don't even come close to the concentration of dogs in the US. If you let people bring dogs everywhere, you reach state in the Silicon Valley episode (search for it) when you realize you're living in a kennel. For example: https://i.redd.it/y180b44x5oi31.jpg.
The other problem IMO is that a large number of dog owners are irresponsible and thus ruining it for everyone. Stuff like not obeying leash laws, not picking up the poop, leaving their dogs alone in the apartment to bark all day long, etc.. Last year there was a case of someone who took their dog hiking in a national park nearby. No dogs allowed, of course but as you said, his dog was more well behaved than humans! The dog was unleashed and it was attacked by a mountain goat and thrown off a cliff. I guess the owner couldn't show the dog's `Emotional support animal certification` to the goat in time to save his life.
All the cultish language around "raising the world's consciousness" is particularly bizarre. Like an episode of Silicon Valley made real.
Referring to a CEO by his first name is a red flag, too.
This makes me think about something.
I don't work at a FAANG company, nor have I ever been to SV, nor do I know anyone who works at one of the many enormous tech companies around SV.
In the TV show Silicon Valley they have characters who sit around unassigned doing nothing at the Google-like company in the show. Does this actually happen? Are there people hired at these companies who just don't have a project? Its entirely feasible that Google could afford to do this just to create a dearth of engineers in the area.
That's how I feel about Silicon Valley (the TV show), despite liking it a lot. It had a strong story in season 1 (and somewhat 2), and it has plenty of great jokes and relevant commentary. However, I cannot recall anything about the overall storyline past season 2 at all, because the rest of the seasons follow the structure of:
episode 1: set up the direction for some conflict/direction of the season.
episode 2 - episode n-1: a bunch of filler material with wild movements and swaps with no particular direction.
episode n: after all the wild moves, the characters and the story ended up back in pretty much the exact same place where it started.
If you care just about the story, you can legitimately skip all seasons after 2 and jump straight into the newest one without missing out on any actual story development, minus some minor references and newer characters. Which is a shame, because of how strong and directed the story in season 1 was.
An excellent series indeed :) , binge watched it after Silicon Valley. Ironically the series ended with Yahoo! at its peak and back then I was interning at Oath ( yahoo under Verizon ) and could see the post glory phase at the purple tech giant in Sunnyvale
> You could also imagine why it might be hard for Netflix, Spotify and Prime movies to compete in India
Till a certain extent. Netflix, Prime Videos, Hotstar etc have much more variety and higher quality and some are VERY AFFORDABLE. Prime videos and Hotstar (HBO, Game of thrones, Veep, Silicon Valley like shows) can be had for $14 USD per year EACH. So upwardly mobile Indians can subscribe to multiple OTT streaming services (I do Netflix, Hostart, Primve Video + Apple Music). For the price of one Spotify sub in US, you can subscribe to 5-7 music streaming services in India.
For the rest, Indian creators on YouTube have pretty much surpassed every big name streaming company. TVF, Timeliners etc have created content which resonates with 18-35 year olds on an emotional level. Netflix et al. will never have that emotional connect so easily.
This is the sort of thing I would have dismissed as too over-the-top if it had happened in an episode of Mike Judge's TV series about Silicon Valley.[a]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
This is obviously a teaser for Silicon Valley - Season 6.
This reads like an episode of Silicon Valley translated from French with Google Translate.
> "Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.'” When the crowd erupted with laughter (it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was serious), Altman himself offered that it sounds like an episode of “Silicon Valley,” but he added, “You can laugh. It’s all right. But it really is what I actually believe.”
How will @sama deal with a guaranteed-return, but immoral path laid out by the AI? E.g. "Here, assassinate X so you can mine this oil in the following ways." What if it isn't obvious that the "Golden Path" has serious flaws?
The only way I can think of is to run adversarial agentswho can simulate, but not act (i.e. under duress) against the mastermind to kill of "dark roads" that end in bad situations, and force the mastermind to obey them (somehow).
the best kind of followup for this after the infamous iA web trend ones would be the layout of the introduction to the TV series Silicon Valley, with it's small conglomeration of brand firms and animation of change as companies buy/sell/open/close in short period.
I thought it was pretty good-- a welcome change from completely unbearable 'let's point and laugh at the nerds' shows like BBT. The archetypes in the Silicon Valley series are hyperreal-- but I swear I've worked with (or hired or fired) every character in the show at one point or another.
And the tech aspect isn't cringeworthy. They did some homework. I've only seen seasons 1&2, but I approve.
Any clue what the holdup is for production of new Silicon Valley episodes? I just read they're not starting production of the new season until summer 2019, and it's already been a year since the last season ended.
> My day to day life is very unlike the TV show this place is based on
I always thought the show Silicon Valley was based on the place but your way round actually explains a lot.
Straight from Season 6 of "Silicon Valley" . Coming soon to HBO near you.
They must have missed that episode of Silicon Valley
watches season 5 of silicon valley
Reading this comment page I honestly feel like I’m in an episode of Silicon Valley
> Swisher’s questions about Twitter’s complex abuse policies, and Dorsey’s subsequent responses, were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at.
Ha! I need to see this episode of Silicon Valley
Ask yourself this: does the offer sound more like a legitimate business proposition, or more like a plotline from the Silicon Valley TV series?
> The wasting of talent does not always look like someone languishing in a position below their abilities. Waste of talent can also look like someone expending their creativity pushing addictive services or building products for an audience of pampered elitists.
Oh, my heart bleeds for Silicon Valley-type (the TV series) programmers. Sniff.
There’s an episode of Silicon Valley that talks about how hard it is these days to be a Christian and work in the valley.
For workplaces, I think that ship has sailed. But it probably won’t help you with awkward thanksgiving or high school reunion conversations yet. All the kids I know hang out with the atheists but I can’t tell if that says something about these kids or kids in general.
Office Space is kinda being remade today with each episode of Silicon Valley they make.
I was making a joke out of the "silicon valley" tv series. To my surprise reality is no different.
There was a line from the first season of the TV show Silicon Valley: "Are you kidding? [Rich VC] would spend a million dollars just to mildly annoy [competing VC]!"
Silicon Valley Season 5 Episode 4
This depends on your jurisdiction, and in many places precedence has been set by case law.
But generally, unfortunately, no. If you create something "on the clock" or using your employer's hardware (even in your free time), then the copyright is typically implicitly transferred to your employer.
EDIT: This is actually covered in season 1 of Silicon Valley... Yeah, legit reference, I know ;)
Wasn't there a Silicon Valley (the HBO show) episode about something similar?
Ah, found the episode: Season 2 Episode 2, "Runaway Devaluation".
Reminds me of an episode of silicon valley where they write some of their implementation on a rival company whiteboard.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Silicon Valley. Have been telling people who don't work in IT that it's pretty much a document from season one, and they refuse to believe me.
Honestly, that's hysterical even for HBO's Silicon Valley. As someone who has never lived in or experienced Silicon Valley, I always assumed the show was a bit of an exaggeration. But people like this are proof that it's not. It's a documentary with a comedic element.
LOL, this sounds like from the Silicon Valley TV show. Please everybody tell your parents you're using such a service and see how they'll break down in laughter ;)
Next episode of Silicon Valley: we find out that they are literally using “machine learning” - adding those words to resumes to get them picked up by recruiters.
In all seriousness I think it would be interesting to explore the latent space of their model, and try to explain it- what does it think the magic words are?
By this report Google is 56.6% white.
My experience is that white male Americans are roughly 25% of the Silicon Valley workforce, but if you bundle in white immigrants and women you might reach 40-50%.
As I remember the TV show, the main characters are 80% white, and the Indian guy is the whitest one I've seen.
Small sample, I know, and I'm not offended. Just a little bored...
oh man, they definitely should have used that. it fits right into the show in every way. i am laughing just reading a straight account of what happened.
silicon valley is really insufferable. i don't understand that place at all and don't ever wish to be there. and i am often reminded of adam curtis' documentary all watched over by machines of everlasting grace. i wish he would do another one along these lines.
Man, you need to get better co-founders! I agree that Silicon Valley often hits painfully close to home, but that's precisely what makes it so fantastic.
My own startup has been mostly outside of America, but we get enough brushes with Silicon Valley culture -- or, worse, wannabe Silicon Valley culture -- to make the show really resonate.
Even closer to home, for me personally, is the Australian comedy "Utopia" (or "Dreamland", depending on the market). It's about a municipal urban development corporation, which is basically my startup's customer group. One episode features a sendup of what my own startup does (online collaborative infrastructure planning and stakeholder engagement) -- or, more to the point, what some of our would-be customers want it to do. You can tell that the writers know what they're talking about. Damn near killed me to watch it. Highly, highly recommended!
I’ve only seen one episode of the show a couple years ago, and I basically found it boring. Keep in mind I’ve never been to Silicon Valley.
All the comments here make it sound like a depressing place to be
In office space Peter Gibbons, our white Alpha, and the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
In King of the Hill, our white Alpha, Hank Hill, the only guy with any common sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from all falling apart in a world that has gone Haywire.
In Idiocracy, our White Alpha, Joe Bauer, the only guy with any sense, tries to stay sane and keep it from falling apart in a world that has gone haywire.
In Extract, Joel, our down to earth White Alpha, tries to stay sane and hold it together in a world that has gone haywire.
And in Silicon Valley, well- you get the idea. I love Mike Judge films, he is an astute observer and hilarious. but his ouvre is not broad. He's got a formula, and it works, and that's fine.
A few months ago I wrote a certain story here and to my surprise I received a call from Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show. We had long discussions about silicon valley and his new book coming out (I'm featured in it). A few weeks ago he was in LA and we had another long discussion about the show.
Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.
I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!
My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"
All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.
If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.
In 1999 we were working a very long shift waiting for the batch process on the AS/400 to go through and our FTP "edi" trNsfers to Sun to complete (an ftp script written for us by these four hacks, who founded linuxcare after this episode) (sifry, dibona, etc)
We decided to go grab a beer and play pool while we waited for this new thing to execute based on this new language sun was having us convert everything to, XML...
While at the pool place these girls in lingerie were walking about selling raffle tickets.
We asked what they were for.
"We are putting ourselves through school and we are selling raffle tickets for the lingerie we are wearing, for $5 a ticket."
"I see, where are you ladies going to school"
"Oh, we go to silicone valley college..."
----
I wish this was a scene in Silicon Valley... it was ridiculously funny.
Reminds me of Steven Tyler reacting to Spinal Tap:
Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"
To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
HBO's Silicon Valley isn't a comdedy, it's a documentary. I've met archetype on that show, and have been a couple of them myself.
Silicon Valley
The Internship
The Circle
It's possible to get a somewhat accurate view from watching these, but you have to know which parts to completely ignore. I kind of wish there were "this is accurate" edits of those shows and movies.
Office Space and Silicon Valley, sure, but Idiocracy has aged _horribly_.
That movie is full of memes that haven't been relevant since the mid-00s (and specifically, the humor in the movie has a distinct Bush-era vibe which straight-up feels foreign in 2018... it feels like a period piece even though it's set in the future), and I lost whatever enjoyment of it that I had left when actual Neo-Nazis began using the movie to promote their pseudoscience about race and intelligence.
I haven't watched the show much, as I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years and I don't see much besides a superficial resemblance. I saw a bit of an episode where a few 'brogrammers' were making fun of the main character like it was a 'mean girls' high school, and I thought it was ridiculous. Then I saw another bit where one of the characters was threatening a kid for his Adderall prescription and, again, thought it was moronic. I haven't watched much else.
I compare the show to Entourage: Amusing to those outside Hollywood, but completely ridiculous to anyone who actually works in the industry.
This is a pretty great article on the same subject from the New Yorker in 2016.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley
My favorite part:
>>>
During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
Has this been in an episode of Silicon Valley yet?
When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.
> The letter was in response to a New York Times report that Android creator Andy Rubin received a $90m exit package despite facing misconduct allegations.
Woah, holy shit, a $90M exit package? It's like Bighead in the Silicon Valley TV show, except 4.5x more. The writers for that show picked a crazy number and reality comes along and over-quadruples it. Granted, Bighead did not create Android, or anything, in the TV show. But an severance package of that size is still absolutely ridiculous.
The TV show Silicon Valley explained it all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
This no legal advice, but in the USA to make a Satire you should be able to use the VW name. The same way the Silicon Valley series uses real company names on their episodes.
Another prescient episode from Silicon Valley already covered this horribly distopian idea.
CI/CD - most companies say they do it, but in reality they don't
Cloud - hate this world even after all these years
Senior Developer - a rank that can be anything from 3 years to 10 years experience
This is one of my favourite clips from Silicon Valley TV show, it is very relevant to this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
>"The meeting I attended started with an employee lighting a candle in the center of the circle to dedicate the session to a cause, and then proceeded with a series of free-association prompts. A moderator asked us to tell a story about our names or a memory related to summer. Outside the round room, morale at Snap has been low recently. Inside it, employees were connecting with each other, at times emotionally, about their childhoods, hopes, and fears."
This could be scene from an episode of HBO's Silicon Valley. This seems more like an exercise in humiliation than morale boosting. What's next Ayahuasca ceremonies, shaman, drum circles, primal scream therapy?
I would quit before I participated in any of this nonsense. This CEO sounds like a real piece of work. This is why you shouldn't buy stock that withholds all voting rights from public shareholders.
I went to Founders Field day in 2016, and I have to say from the vibe of that event this doesn't surprise me at all. It was literally like being in an episode of Silicon Valley.
I do worry what this means for their incubator program though. They've been one of the few funds willing to throw a lot of dumb money at VR projects that just sound cool, and I'm all for that.
The title reminds me of a Silicon Valley (HBO) episode. I can imagine a big whiteboard, and one of the product ideas on it is called New Chrome.
There might be clauses in those Tinder founders' employment contracts with Match.com that any intellectual property that they came up with during their employment belongs to Match.com.
There's a similar plot in the Silicon Valley TV show (Piped Piper v.s. Hooli).
Maybe it's those sunglasses and that pose, but their new mascot in the douchey dot com white dude costume sure nailed the "Chad" stereotype! Right out of central casting, as Trump would say. Which episodes of Silicon Valley did he play a Hoolie Brogrammer? ;)
Is that from the TV show, or the actual Silicon Valley? I didn't watch the show, could someone explain the reference?
Hagiography, meet Silicon Valley. "Would Android exist without General Magic? Absolutely not!" An overstatement which perfectly summarizes this film.
Oh, I see. I use spaces and vim (I do, but who cares). Let's start a flamewar. /s
Every time I think about tabs/spaces, I think about that episode in Silicon Valley [1]. Hilariously accurate, I have the exact same feeling when somebody uses the mouse to copy something or navigate. The cringe makes me feel alive (I guess this is the ultimate reason for those flamewars. And neurotic tendencies, of course).
[1]: https://youtu.be/SsoOG6ZeyUI
Lots (rich) of people from Silicon Valley have second homes there. Its lampooned on the tv show Silicon Valley.
HBO also has Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, John Oliver, good documentaries from time to time...
Hotz always reminds me of those kids using Adderall in the TV series Silicon Valley.
There was an episode of Silicon Valley this year where they blackball a guy for being Christian. Haha funny.
A guy I know taught himself a new framework by writing an app that gives you biblical footnotes. He was super proud of it and planned to put it on his resume. I smiled and congratulated him for doing such a good job, and kept my fucking mouth shut. I wanted to warn him that some people would pass him over from it. I hated that feeling.
When I was a kid I belonged to a weird religion people liked to make fun of. I was always on the outside and tried to make space for people, as best I could. I was best friends with the new kid (the only one with divorced parents), and ate lunch every day with smartest girl in my grade school (even though I wasn’t quite sure yet that girls weren’t gross) and the only black boy. We colluded to protect the new girl from being bullied for having the audacity to transfer into our busybody district in the sixth grade, and for being a little erratic.
Then I was an atheist in a place where people weren’t. My college roommate and most of his friends were Family, in a time and place where that wasn’t safe. Our neighbor came out to us after he pledged at a fraternity. We were horrified, worried for his welfare.
My ex wife was bi, half of our friends went to Pride every year. Some of them were poly. My SO has transgendered friends and we know three transgender kids.
And this year? This year I’m starting to feel like I have to make safe space for Republicans (I’d be terrible at that, trust me) and Christians. It feels weird. I haven’t even figured out how to process this yet. I don’t think it’s a good feeling though. This doesn’t feel like better. It feels like the bullied becoming the bully.
Netflix takes the shotgun approach, put out as much programming as possible and something will stick. Amazon has yet to provide anything but a bad UI/UX on top of tv or music I can find from a much better competitor.
Silicon Valley, Westworld, Vice, and Game of Thrones are worth it plus a steady stream of new movies. Not to mention their older shows. HBO’s quality is much higher than Netflix and Amazon doesn’t even compare.
Silicon Valley is tongue-in-cheek?
I thought it was a documentary!
I wish this didn't bother me so much, but ever since the Silicon Valley Episode where Big Head says: " Jesus! Why is it so expensive here? Look at this place, it's a shithole.", I can't seem to find a good answer to this question...
I certainly count myself fortunate to be able to afford to live here with my family. But I can't see the value of moving people to the area (as I was contemplating moving team members from out of state here). Even at six figure salaries they'd have to share an apartment to be able to save anything at all.
- Better weather, but LA is arguably nicer & less expensive.
- Better community of techies who somehow inspire you to do better? After being here for a year and attending meetups and community event, I know for a fact that's not true. Despite the density of people here, people are surprisingly disconnected, chance encounters are rare at best. Most of the interactions seem shallow at best and conversations often seem transactional.
- Better job prospects for devs? I guess for a software engineer it'd come down to better job prospects, but to be honest, it's not like the rest of America sucks for software jobs.
- Better social life? This may be availability bias as I am not single and live in the 'burbs with my family, but every single person I know seems pretty miserable & isolated. A couple of them actually moved out of the area because of the poor quality of human interaction/dating. It seems everyone works all the time. (Which works great for me as I'm on the employing side).
+ If you run a tech company & have enough money to move here and hire from the local talent pool, it's a decent proposition.
+ Relative to other places in the country it's pretty diverse and progressive
Some might say access to VCs and funding etc, but that seems to take some pretty serious effort and it might be a better idea to make the hike up from Gilroy or Hollister and not spend a 6 figures in rent for the privilege.
I think the area is beginning to emulate the inequalities that I saw growing up in a 3rd world country. The amount of homeless working people in the area is mind boggling. It seems like most people in the area are just too busy/too successful to do much about it (I include myself in this group unfortunately). California has been having an exodus of residents, but mainly middle class down. I don't see how this is sustainable long term.
*https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=silicon-valley-2014&episode=s01e01
was at a startup where the split was 72.5/10/10 (eng)/7.5 (me) when we got into an incubator; investors tried to convince the ceo that we should do an even split iirc, but he felt the business was built up enough that the equity split was fair. we were all dumb kids (oldest was 21), and didn't know what we were doing. when the 16 hour days with no pay were too much for me, the lack of equity made it very easy for me to walk away.
i would never do a split like that again, and would not recommend it. i still can't watch Silicon Valley because it reminds me of those times haha.
Implement the thing they are attempting to make the in the comedy TV series Silicon Valley and have a torrent style decentralized internet. Except use computers as well as phones.
> I don't have any idea why the top comment here is about Christianity.
People around here don't like Christianity. See the TV show Silicon Valley S5E4.
You wouldn't see a thread about the merits of being Japanese, female, or vegetarian in a tangentially related HN post. People put religious identity in another category for some reason.
So, not necessarily inspirational, and some kinda gross things came out about the author recently, but Disrupted by Dan Lyons was pretty good. It's about his time at HubSpot, which kinda seems like it was almost a parody of startup culture and drinking the Kool-Aid. He later went on to be a writer on Silicon Valley for seasons 2 & 3, and says he would pitch some things that actually happened, and get shot down because they were "too out there and unbelievable".
Silicon Valley on HBO is a good 'documentary' :D.
I wonder if the idea for this attack came from Silicon Valley tv series
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching (ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full 1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
There’s no shortage of startups hoping for this, but it looks like more hype than hope. The one that first comes to mind is Arivale, which seems like it was named right out of Silicon Valley season 1.
Muneeb Ali, Blockstack co-founder here. I'm a technical consultant to the Silicon Valley show (season 5) along with my co-founder Ryan. So yes there is a link to the show but the project is not based on the show :-)
Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These apps can scale to millions of users today. We're excited about enabling developers to build new apps like decentralized social networks.
They want it built on their tech here: https://blockstack.org/. "New Internet" aye? Is this an based on an episode of Silicon Valley?
There is a documentary on HBO about this effort called "Silicon Valley". It is in the 5th season.
The basic challenge is that smart people keep making really poor choices which are very funny but also counter productive.
Background:
Born in Russia, grew up in NC, live in SF currently, moving to NYC next week. Incredibly excited to leave SF, to say the least.
The good:
Innovation and energy everywhere. You can feel it in the air, especially since every billboard in SoMa is a tech startup.
I've met some of the smartest people in my life here, and have been really lucky to work on some exciting projects.
Neighborhoods are VERY divided and have their own feel, almost like separate cities.
Decent amount of high quality restaurants.
Availability to high paying jobs
The bad:
HBO's Silicon Valley no longer becomes funny, it's just a documentary at this point.
The homeless - they're everywhere and feel empowered to be aggressive on a scale I've never seen. I live in Nob Hill, and have been in a few altercations (though very much not the case when I was in the Marina).
Dating pool for a hetero male is meh at best. Most bars are filled with 75-90% guys, with few exceptions in the Marina.
Tech is everywhere - at first this was a good thing, but now it's unbearable.
Everyone seems to be incredibly sensitive and emotionally charged.
Weather isn't as good as SoCal, and is pretty "eh" majority of the time.
Expensive af.
TLDR:
Amazing career opportunity for young/mid-20's for a few years. You'll meet great people, work on exciting stuff, and raise your income level. Leave after a few years.
Feel free to ask more
It’s meant to be a light hearted read (I think). And it is resonating with a lot of folks because it is fairly accurate. Kind of like how my wife (not in tech) thinks of HBO’s Silicon Valley as a comedy show while I think of it as a documentary.
Portfolio companies using other portfolio companies for various reasons is really common. Sometimes it's that they give discounts or freebies to each other. Sometimes it's some personal preference or relationship of the VC giving a favor. It's not necessarily nefarious.
This exact thing just happened on the latest episode of Silicon Valley with Eklow Labs.
http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-5-episode-5.html
I would only refer to Episode 4-5 of Silicon Valley in Season 5.
This will be the mistake we will make when we introduce a technology we think it is smart enough to make decision for us and turns out all it does is read words faster than us and interpret them literally.
Even with the closing statement of "AI winter is coming soon." I can see Watson having a problem understanding that statement even with context.
Did you miss Silicon Valley season 5 episode 4? ;)
I'd say more appropriate for a TV series, where each episode the hero finds something else more depressing about this future. Maybe like the TV show "Silicon Valley" but with much darker humour.
I think I'll need a 1000mg at least...
The article reads like an episode from Silicon Valley complete with TJ Miller clone boy.
"He signs his emails with emojis–a bear, a red heart, a sun–describes himself on the company’s website as an 'escaped circus bear' and favors collared shirts unbuttoned to the sternum, revealing a tan wilderness of chest hair."
Really... This is the guy who's going to save everyone from their smartphones?
"Take back control of your content and unlock your sources of inspiration for just 5€/ Month."
Sounds like a tagline for a "Silicon Valley" episode.
PBS has a great documentary on the Fairchildren called "silicon valley"
Are you following the Silicon Valley TV series? In the first episode of the last season they use a botnet network to hack a pizza application, they create a lot of users and generate thousands of orders. They manage to put the pizza company in bankruptcy.
That's just a TV show, but the example is so good.
"charging deep discount price of $5 with the help of $65 Million VC money"
Your comment reminds me of the pizza company in the most recent episode of Silicon Valley.
LOL. This is the part of the Silicon Valley episode-bar-scene where the fight breaks out.
Thank god OC didn't mention "Just like you move from tabs to spaces."
Is this an article or the outline of an upcoming Silicon Valley episode? It's hard to tell.
I think that location was also shown in an episode of Silicon Valley.
So, you want to be like Erlich Bachman from "Silicon Valley" sitcom? :)
Once upon a time comedy was just for fun, now, if you are screenwriter for a sitcom you have to be carefull because someone, somewhere will take your foolish ideas seriously...
Honestly, we need more "Don't try this at home" warnings.
I really think there should be an HBO Silicon Valley - Enterprise spinoff :-)
Interesting thought, although these merger/acquisitions play out over quarters and years. Not really conducive to a 12 episode season every year. And seems Silicon Valley has already had a touch of this type of narrative :)
That I guess is a subtle nod to the company Pied Piper in the series Silicon Valley [1].
In the last season one of the characters built an app called "SeeFood", a Shazam for food:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNyi3nAuLb0
The app ended being used at Periscope to detect penis which explains the ending for the website too.
Since watching the comedy "Silicon Valley" my perception of blog posts and histories in here has changed for the best.
This reminded me of the montage on season 1 where everybody talks about changing the world when presenting their apps/services...
What episode of Silicon Valley is this?
The genius of the Silicon Valley show is making what is essentially almost a documentary sound like parody.
It's like an episode of HBO's "Silicon Valley". I honestly laughed out loud when I read "Kik pivoted to blockchain technology".
Cant wait for the work of silicon valley movie
Huh, I don't understand. If it's so easy why don't they do it? Oh the "value of store" goalpost pivot. Right!
Let me add some reality checks here. Irrespective of the fees problem - I know Segwit, Lightning network etc will solve everything, the real reason they don't is because Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is difficult for people to understand and use.
Most of the discussions about bitcoin et. al forget at the end of the day your system should be able to cater to a layperson. Currently, looking at Bitcoin discussions reminds me of this scene from Silicon Valley TV series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml92QEqE-RQ
Can't help but being reminded of this Silicon Valley episode: https://youtu.be/dvn-hpZdElo
The Silicon Valley television show had the best parody: a deep learning program trained to find hot dogs for a foodie program repurposed for a phallus porn detection program.
Silicon Valley (TV series) does a pretty good job in my opinion.
Yes Minister was a comedy show like HBO's Silicon Valley is a comedy show -- a farcical quasi-documentary
Yes, Minister was fed leaks from British government that became plotlines.
In Mountain View, just off Castro street, AFAIK. Their name isn't even on the building. Super low-key. An external shot of the building was used in the show Silicon Valley as a stand-in for the Pied Pier office in season 2 or 3 (where Jack Barker is the CEO)
He just saw the Silicon Valley episode
I doubt it. User growth is used as a metric to measure future ad revenue. Fake profiles aren't going to generate a lot of revenue from those ads. Facebook would simply need to make a statement about deleting a bunch of fake profiles, but they don't expect revenue to dip.
However, that is not the case for a pre-revenue or pre-profitable business. Those startups are dependent on VC funding, they might lie about users and usage to get more funding (see Silicon Valley Season 3). *This is 100% inappropriate and should not be done. You will burn credibility with investors, for your current venture and any future ventures. It's better to shut down a venture and move on, than to lie about your metrics.
Even though this story is horrible, it reminds me of a silicon valley episode
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/1/15504692/hbo-silicon-valley-season-4-episode-2-terms-of-service-recap
Are they prescient or does things never change?
> I can't think of any tech companies that promoted themselves as a force for social good rather than a pure business.
It's actually a trope for SV companies. It was lampooned in season 1 episode 1 of the show Silicon Valley:
> And yes, we're disrupting digital media, but most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.
http://siliconvalleyism.com/silicon-valley-quote.php?id=206
Just watch how Silicon Valley tv series evolved. It started with noble idea. In 4th series they recorded all video calls on their network, stored medical records on botnet of hacked phones and fridges...
Straight out of Silicon Valley (the TV show)..
That's season 3 of Silicon Valley right there.
Why can't anybody work on some kind of blockchained database software? I wonder if it would be doable... The Silicon Valley TV show had this. I've also thought about it, but I'm not sure it would be fast enough and redundancy could be tweaked... so only for backing up data...
I don't know but storing data in a cloud which resides in user computers sound like the perfect solution to those kinds of legal issues. The whole feature is having data that cannot be suppressed or accessed by a private party.
Did you watch Silicon Valley episode 1?
If you still don't know what to do after that, just watch some more episodes.
Just because it is in the TV show doesn't mean it's not based on real stuff. Silicon Valley is satire and they have some of the best consultants in the business. A lot of stuff on the show is close to reality.
Sometimes it gets it so close I kind of cringe because I've been through similar things in real life.
The tabs vs spaces argument comes to mind.
Edit: to stay on topic. As other people said, I would take a lower valuation in a heartbeat if it gives away less equity and it is enough money to get me to another round (or exit) at a higher valuation owning more of the company.
This is a plot point in season one of Silicon Valley, for whatever that's worth.
The ICO craze seems like perfect material for the TV show Silicon Valley, especially after FileCoin has become a real thing.
The fact that the silicon valley episode was based in reality is super disturbing...
> Many programmers who enjoy programming will have a preference for hiring other programmers who also enjoy it. That doesn't mean they can't hire dispassionate programmers but that still doesn't erase the preference for passionate programmers.
Exactly, and it isn't just 'Work Ethic', I wanna work with these guys [1] in 'Silicon Valley' tv show who would go around doing a Jerk off calculation just because it is a fun calculation to do. Not just people with strong 'Work ethic'.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY7aQEhIxYA
Silicon Valley, Halt & Catch Fire, Scorpion, Mr. Robot. Lots of TV shows center around programmers. As with doctor shows however they don't focus on the medicine but the interactions of the people.
This is the sort of thing that Silicon Valley (the TV show or the place) produces because they tend to be so out of touch with reality of 90% of the world's population.
It doesn't even grind the salt FFS.
You're also taking them at their word that they do intend to start their own companies, I think to a lot of folks in the Valley this sentiment is the same as the "I'm going to quit and write my novel" cliche from the 20th century.
What's the line from the first episode of Silicon Valley "I don't want to become a Hooli-lifer"?
Some of the HBO ones from Silicon Valley had to be sponsored. If they weren't they're missing out for sure. Definitely, think tv shows and movies are the way to go here. A McDonalds gif just doesn't feel right. Almost all of my friends just share clips with captions from shows.
Yup. This was the subject of a recent episode of the documentary Silicon Valley on HBO :p
Can you post some of these reddit links?
I'd imagine several small businesses these days would opt for the "vote manipulation" marketing since its easy. (The Silicon Valley TV show had a similar plot point).
i certainly have to agree entirely with what you said. i just recently got into watching silicon valley and have been binge watching it, and you definitely have a point with how the analysis in the top answer is very reminiscent of the mentality that Peter Gregory would so frequently display.
I guess it's never going to happen, but wouldn't it be pretty cool if Netflix/HBO/Spotify provided a content mirror on the aircraft? Could probably only carry a subset of all content, but pretty cool to just open your app and get some nice Silicon Valley episodes man-in-the-middle delivered to your device of choice.
So the long version of this story is that the app was released in partnership with the HBO Go / HBO Now team, and using the terms of service they used for these apps (which are only available in the US & Canada). We’ve been working with lawyers to release the app worldwide without running afoul of any local laws, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that will get cleared this week, we just gotta make sure our terms of service are up to par… After all, we wouldn’t want to fall prey to something we made fun of this very season ;) http://www.vulture.com/2017/04/silicon-valley-recap-season-4-episode-2.html
> "Yes, algorithm. The word you hardly knew until HBO's Silicon Valley focused an entire show about the immense power and responsibility that comes with creating one."
Hard to imagine, but possible.
Surely in 2017 the average person would know what an algorithm is, outside of any tv show. Right?
It it a reference to the TV series Silicon Valley (season 4).
Yep. I asked about work life balance when evaluating offers and my future manager told me "Just look at the delta between when breakfast ends and dinner starts. For us, it's 8 hours. For Uber, it's something like 11."
It might be an inconsequential recommendation. But it is representative of the broader culture.
And yes, it's absurd that silicon valley tech companies feed us three meals a day. That HBO show Silicon Valley is a documentary not a comedy.
I am still waiting for Silicon Valley TV show to pick up this vast subject of Myer's tenure at Yahoo into one of its episodes.
I bet 10 bucks that this gets written in to a Silicon Valley episode this season.
Binge watch 'Silicon Valley' from your AirBnb.
Also, not to mention transfer learning is a big one.
Case in point, the silicon valley "not hotdog" classifier which they stopped at hotdog or not due to lack of training data when in reality they could've just used a pre trained net on imagenet. Lol, I was literally cringing through that episode so hard xD
The whole thing is from the Silicon Valley TV show. I'm fairly sure that the two pillars are Sales and Engineering, but you're making me actually go watch Season Three all over again to find out if Barker referred to Growth and Manufacturing as pillars too. YouTube clips on that particular part of the series are sparse.
Edit: Yep, Barker refers to Engineering and Sales as the two pillars of success in S03E02, and Growth as the "foundation" of the CToS. Compromise is the "shared hypotenuse". Jack was fired before they could discuss Manufacturing.
> Or startup founders driving for uber.
So it really happens? I though it was joke in "Silicon Valley" TV series S04E01.
Now you too can have your own blood boy. Careful that your donor has good habits, or your cholesterol might go through the roof. At that rate, you might die by 120!
For those of you confused, it's a reference to a recent episode of Silicon Valley, which actually covered this.
Thought Silicon Valley TV show was a comedy.
Wow, something like this was in the second latest to episode of Silicon Valley, titled "Blood Boy"
You'd think so... But a lot of people see Silicon Valley, see the TV shows and movies, hear the stories of a dozen people in a 10'x10' room working 30 hour days and ordering in pizza for every meal and becoming rich... And they think that's a model to follow.
When, in your mind, "more hours = more product", then it's not a huge leap to think that the abusive and ridiculous parts of the "Silicon Valley Model" are the reasons for their success, not that the success happens despite it.
I've run across several local (and very far from Silicon Valley) businesses that try and model themselves after the Silicon Valley startups, thinking it's some key to success. But the parts they model aren't the parts that, arguably, actually lead to success - exploring new ideas, MVPs, failing fast, making industry connections - it's the workspace design and cultural attitude towards hours and work/home balance.
We have several local web development shops that try and act like Silicon Valley while pumping out $3k brochure websites, and can't figure out why they're not rich yet.
A little funny like Silicon Valley episode , saw the news from GitHub CEO yesterday saying our goal is zero downtime and now it's down
To me, Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington sound like joke parody names for clueless rich overprivileged frat boy brogrammers, from an episode of Silicon Valley or The Simpsons.
When you can't even trust your own Blood Boy [1] not to get stoned, eat twinkies, and write a tell-all expose about you, how are you supposed to hire an employee trustworthy enough to handle all of your most sensitive keys and information? (Let alone three of them, one for each company.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/22/15676696/hbo-silicon-valley-recap-season-4-episode-5-the-blood-boy
The spamming of this site by these kinds of projects has gone far enough that it has now been parodied in a television series:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/6cy0x3/the_guys_conspiring_in_reddit_vote_rigging/
Quote on the whiteboard by the character "Gilfoyle" in "Silicon Valley":
HACKER NEWS!!! Get friends to upvote
One would have to be extremely naive to think that anyone except friends of the authors would upvote a link to a changelog for version 0.17.0 of a "new programming language" on this site.
Is it from Silicon Valley (tv show) ?
It's a little in-joke https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en-gb
Even spoofed on a recent Silicon Valley episode.
Silicon Valley season 3. I love how that TV show is skewering the entire Valley and shows how ridiculously predictable we are.
Yes, and CA really doesn't want non-compete clauses, so they invalidate the severability clause as well.
By the way, the Silicon Valley HBO show can be remarkably accurate on things. It's rare that a TV show gets things like this right, where people in the business don't.
I just happen to know lots of attorneys in the space. I am not an attorney or giving legal advice. Talk to your attorney for that.
DANM! I wanted to start learning NN and write an app after watching the Silicon Valley episode. You beat me to it. Congrats.
I always find it strange when apps like this are made unavailable in certain countries (in this case, the UK).
Video, I understand. From a consumer perspective it's crappy, but I do understand that licensing agreements for video are generally geographically restricted. But an app that goes along with a TV show? I can't see Sky (the UK network broadcasting Silicon Valley and most other HBO shows right now) distributing Not Hotdog.
It would be fun to play with it while the novelty is still fresh.
this sounds like a parody worthy of an episode of Silicon Valley
> More often than not, wonderful things are created out of hatred for the status-quo.
Example? Cos I'm not a fan of the rationalisation of the World Wars as "okay but it did advance technology a lot."
Hatred is what imbalances the status quo. In fact when hatred becomes the status quo, then we've lost the plot as humanity.
The Internet is a beautiful idea, but as an ever-evolving real world system, we can no longer afford to idealise it. We do have responsibility to steer it somehow, in order to battle entropy.
In the idealised Internet, free speech is truly free. But when we talk about the Internet now, is it really the one that we dream it to be? Most people on the Internet are actually spending their time in a small number of ecosystems, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube. Each of these has its own set of rules, which ultimately defines how we communicate and therefore the limitations. I daresay that currently they are fertile ground for hatred - and it's not entirely their fault, it's just how the nature of the systems work.
I guess I'm still fresh from watching Silicon Valley's latest episode, but the way I see it, there is no quick remedy to tackle hatred - we need an Internet 2.0 to give ourselves another chance to build a much more neutral and open net.
> even renting out San Francisco’s AT&T Park
Now I get the opening scene in Silicon Valley Season 2 Episode 1 where they're at the baseball stadium.
This happened in the popular tv show silicon valley but it's much more likely that your idea wouldn't result in something worth stealing. For example, I know of a successful start-up that migrates cemetary data into a modern database and then sets up a site with it that allows users to view plots of land as well as buy them.
Is Google going to hear about this and take over the funeral management business? It's extremely unlikely. Instead, what could happen is that the start-up one day grows very large and is acquired by a company, which then may have competition from Google or FB, if it turns out the market is so large that it's worth competing over.
I would recommend that you pursue your ideas because generally you won't make the next Instagram. And even then, you'll probably be acquired before you have to compete with Google.
The show needed to pivot. I think they painted themselves into a corner with the plot. If someone did create a new better compression technology, they would just patent it and live off the royalties. Or just sell a binary library to every software vendor on the planet.
Personally I preferred the show Beta's for it's prospect of a social network trying to get established. There would be a lot of mileage in that.
Having said which Silicon Valley Season 1 Episode 8 was pure genius in terms of comic hilarity.
Don't forget season 4 of Silicon Valley starts on Sunday :)
> [Novogratz] recalls that Buterin, ... showed up late, which struck him as shocking -- and a bit ballsy. He figured it was worth paying attention to Buterin.
The lesson is to be impolite? I think I saw this in an episode of Silicon Valley.
It reminds me of the episodes of Silicon Valley where the new CEO pushed really hard for a physical box and a licensing deal to deploy the box. There's one quote in the article that makes me think the actual tech here is the "organic fruit delivered to your home" (though I'm not sure how that's revolutionary or even novel, either), and the squeezer is a dongle they stuck on there, I guess to make it more obviously a luxury product? I'm not really sure.
To me, it just reeks of a classic Internet of Shit kind of model, where tech is imposed on a product not because it makes the product better, but because it makes the product more expensive and exclusive.
I mean, Keurig has had a ridiculously successful run doing the same basic thing: Stick a low cost commodity product into a pricey DRM-protected package and sell expensive devices to extract the commodity product from said packaging. Coffee makers have never been hard to use, and yet, somehow Keurig sells billions of K-cups. So...maybe these folks figured they'd reproduce that model, and maybe their investors believed they could do so.
Juicers have a small episode arc in "The Empty Chair" !
I forget the exact line but it has something to do with "why does he have 2 juicers"
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/silicon-valley-almost-painfully-eager-get-back-for-236800
I really hope a reference to that makes it to season 4 of HBO's Silicon Valley
Is this the trailer for season 4 of HBO's silicon valley? It sure could be
This reminds me of the Silicon Valley episode (S3E1) where Richard Hendricks was going to be in charge of an app for adding mustaches to people.
Yet another example of how the tv show, Silicon Valley, hits the nail on the head [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAEAbqrE5Zw
"Nobel worthy scientists and engineers"? You'd never hire one to make you a native ad!
Native ads, integrated or disguised as creative content, are impossible to block. Creative professionals, like film directors, visual artists, writers and even ad executives are the main innovators of native advertising.
I would argue native advertising is where most of the relevant innovation in ads occurs. Not at Google.
Creative content? Not at all Google's expertise. The best engineers are the least equipped to understand appealing creatives.
- Google acquired YouTube, whose basic premise was pirating, not creating, creative content. Despite having the largest video audience in the world, Google could never make something like Netflix's House of Cards.
- They're years away from delivering a compelling experience for Daydream. Never mind a game. Every NYTimes subscriber who received their Cardboard probably threw it away.
- The folks who worked on Make with Code privately describe their Google partners as insufferable.
- The folks who work on Google's creative ad campaigns—video & design—have variously described their Google partners as aloof and stifling.
- Despite its huge penetration, Google Music has no role in music culture. No musician I know thinks about how many plays they get on Google: they worry about Spotify, Hype Machine and other things their manager actually uses. A music manager wouldn't be caught dead with something as uncool as a Google Music subscription.
Indeed, I would argue that Google's culture is toxic to artistic creativity. If they wanted to hire some writers and directors, what would they do: administer a white boarding test? Laughable! That's assuming the people at e.g. ATAP even follow up with their own recruits (which they don't).
Serious creatives are anti-conformist. Google as an institution is something serious creatives criticize and lampoon, not celebrate. Have you seen Silicon Valley? Read Circle?
Listen, I might hate David Eggers's writing. But nobody writes a book about how Netflix is a cult.
I couldn't agree more about your analysis of Idiocracy. While the movie is entertaining, I found it surprising that it ignored the developing world (where intelligence/IQ/appropriate-proxy is increasing and poverty decreasing).
The whole movie seemed to be a cheap dig on stereotypes of rural/redneck behavior rather than any meaningful look at society. The conclusion that it hand-holds the audience is that the "wrong" kind of Americans don't respect intellectuals enough and they will ruin the country. The movie literally ends by the educated savior being respected for being smart.
I don't agree with your indictment of satire in general; I consider Idiocracy to be pretty ham-fisted in that regard. Especially compared to much better Mike Judge works like Office Space and Silicon Valley.
I really didn't read this as an attack or polemic on code interviews. It's just a fun parody. Like how the TV show Silicon Valley some times pokes fun at actual Silicon Valley, but isn't an attack on it.
Sometimes you'll have a really good product, that no one wants ... See Silicon Valley TV series.
thanks! But was thinking something more along the lines of Silicon Valley (the TV show) but in writing?
I, along with my co-founder, are working on a shopping platform for furniture and decor seen on the set of movies and TV shows: https://www.seenonset.com
Startups definitely like to deck out their offices with some of the nicer high-end designs. Even Y Combinator's home page image carousel has the likes of the Bertoia Diamond Chair and the Nelson Saucer Pendant Lamp on show! Though a lot of startups go for the replica route - I know Airbnb went with replicas in their Dublin office.
The show Silicon Valley (https://www.seenonset.com/tvshows/174/silicon-valley) is a great example of what we do.
I prefer movies, over this stretched story arc that is quite common with series. To meet the goal a few episodes of each season are just filler with little going on. I don't want to waste my time watching TV series. I would prefer movies, but not the boring super hero recycling movies of late but high quality good 1990s style action and comedy movies that rarely get produced.
One of the few series I completely watch is "Silicon Valley", though it also contains some fillers, but at least the series is satire and funny.
I feel like this is a promo website for season 4 of Silicon Valley.
If there isn't yet a Silicon Valley episode featuring a thinly veiled expy of this gentleman, I can't imagine why not.
Well, I can only try to convince you, not your girlfriend.
I can see it bothering her. For her information if you want to share this thread, in my research marijuana is less addictive than soda: if you drink 3 liters of soda every day then suddenly stop and don't get caffeine from somewhere else like coffee, then due to the caffeine withdrawal you would have a headache for a day. (That's it.) it would be uncomfortable.
Have her read the comments disagreeing with this article:
https://teens.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/marijuana-withdrawal-real
You will not be "addicted.". (Waaay less than caffeine or tobacco.)
You can read people's own reports there, including peoplr in a similar situation as you who lead happy lives.
That said, the smoke itself could be uncomfortable, and you don't want to get high, so I am not saying this is a solution or anything.
Also the enforcement practices in your area are a different matter, and if people you actually know served jail time, then perhaps the enforcement is not lax enough.
In that case I can see what you mean.
(Btw pot now figures in TV shows, like Silicon Valley, too. It's "normal".)
> Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Carla played by http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/cast-and-crew/alice-wetterlund/index.html was a prominent woman coder with none of what you described exhibited.
Granted, I can't think of any other female coding characters on that show.
Did you mean the HBO "Silicon Valley" show or a Bravo TV series with the same name (later re-branded "Start-Ups")?
I was watching the "Silicon Valley" TV show and was surprised how women are presented. Whether they are coders or non-tech, the theme went like this:
Women who Code: always ask fellow men for help with their coding skills or just appear to not know what they were doing. Present them as sex objects, where men are thinking of them just for sex
Women who can't code: generally presented either as stupid, dumb or as assistants of men who knew better.
It seem that Hollywood is also complicit in presenting women as sex object. But I wasn't sure if this really is the truth about the culture in general in SV.
Greg remind me of Jared in the Silicon Valley TV show
Cool project. I do something similar for the daily free ebook from Packt. Also for when new episodes of Silicon Valley are posted.
Tiny detail - you can do the regex match case insensitive and avoid the call to lower() for every string.
re.match(..., re.I)
This reminds me of a scene from the popular TV show Silicon valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
Smartphones, youtube, facebook and many other success stories had exponential growth. Once a product/idea goes big, there will always be people who do not like something about it. Thats the cost of making a product that everyone can use. A better example is the idea of money itself. Its an invention used by almost everyone in the world, We still have people who absolutely hate money with passion based on their own principles that are right for them. Overall it did more good to humanity.
We have created an economic world, where good ideas travel faster and share the rewards with everyone. Its a good thing. The alternative would be a hierarchical society where some other parts of the society will always be left behind.
WeWork offices make me feel the same way. Feel's like I'm living in the Silicon Valley TV show.
Wasn't that a thing on Silicon Valley (the TV show)?
"But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility."
-Silicon Valley, Season 1, Episode 1
You are now literally reprising a joke from Season 1 of Silicon Valley.
> I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series
Netflix exists solely because people want to binge watch their favourite series.
They're betting that once people have finished binge watching all of Friends in a weekend and are wondering what to watch next, they'll pick a Netflix Original™ from the list of suggested shows.
I don't have Netflix and rarely watch series (except those like Silicon Valley) but I know a lot of friends who do have Netflix and will happily spend an entire weekend watching a series from start to finish.
Hollywood, as we know it is dead for 10+ years. The mass of super hero movies is appalling.
Where are the action movies and funny comedies, that were so great in the late 1980s, 1990s and earlier 2000s.
Last year's San Andreas was pretty good, but so many other movies are just boring, unfunny, too dark, too shaky camera, too much CGI, etc. That TV series got too much attention by Hollywood studies hurts movies a lot. The only TV series I saw last year was Silicon Valley, I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series - I would trade TV series for great movies all day.
It's fun to have your own extension, isn't it? then you can host http://hooli.xyz as well, which is good fun too (It's the parody website of the equivalent of Google in the TV show "Silicon Valley", which in itself is a good amount of self-irony).
I bet this will be in Silicon Valley (the TV show).
Can't wait for Silicon Valley Season 4.
Another point WRT Silicon Valley episode that has lessons for the real world. Developer will do a much better job on a project they picked rather than one that was assigned to them. This might be a lot of the advantage tiny, new startups have over the giants.
Very important point on good tech managers.
Strong engineering orgs hire managers who could do and have done most of what their team does. Most TPMs at G, for example, have CS degrees.
Non-technical managers have the organizational leverage to undo any amount of design & planning that skilled people underneath them set up. It's the brain equivalent of having ADHD -- your executive control shuts down and that sabotages long-term goals.
If you've never lived through this, watch the beginning season 3 of silicon valley where their new CEO wants them to 'just build a box' and gets angry when the conversation gets any more specific than that. (If you have lived through this, don't watch it -- it's too real).
Direct link to (redacted) complaint: https://www.scribd.com/document/335725243/Pompliano-v-Snapchat
The General Allegations reads like the synopsis of a Silicon Valley episode.
OP should watch the documentary Silicon Valley, Season 2 Episode 10 :-)
After reading [0] today, I feel happy that someone decided to write this up.
Over the last year, I've seen a dozen colleagues who have created startups just to fleece money from VCs (if you can call them that) who have lots of money and no clue about tech in general (the ones who have seen shows like Silicon Valley, movies like The Social Network and Uber's evaluation and want to make a quick buck this time around).
I don't believe there's a bubble, but if this continues, we'll soon have one real quick.
[0] - https://www.saastr.com/22-reasons-i-wont-fund-you/
I mean, that's an even more frugal waste of money. Still, the fact they even had something like that is the problem. It's like something from an episode of Silicon Valley.
You just introduced me to pied piper and that silicon valley sitcom. :(
I should have listened when someone said HN is just noise now.
I wish they were more upfront about it as well. Of course, then Silicon Valley (the tv show) wouldn't have the fodder for jokes that it now does.
ttam, i hear Silicon Valley is supposed to be a really great show about that too. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
I had the same use case as you, so I built a similar app except instead of a GUI, it sends me a text message. Right now I have it fire when a new episode of Silicon Valley is posted.
I really should polish it up and release it. This is the second or third thread where other people have mentioned a similar need.
It's unusual for an acquihire to have real agency in a big company. It's usually the middle management route - or worse - the limbo of having nothing real to do like the parody scenario in the Silicon Valley tv show.
Thank you. Look, this is not a place for video editors (in specific), i.e. you're literally on a startup forum. I don't know if you have any experience with startups other than via Shark Tank, but after reviewing after you've written I've come to the conclusion that your calling the show a lie is completely unwarranted, and informed more by your prior experience e.g. "We edited it so that he never came back down and that she was calling her daughter's name... as if they were up there naked or something... That is where the "lie" is most evident." -- but you did not give any examples of anything nearly that bad as regards the deals.
You may not know this, but in normal negotiations with startups, there are many, many meetings involved over a very long period of time. So many deals fall through that there had to be a Handshake protocol invented just to keep VC's to their word - https://www.ycombinator.com/handshake/
"Silicon valley runs on handshake deals." Yeah, due dilligence gets done afterward, not on the spot! Of course all pitches are rehearsed very, very heavily. I mean these are actual businesses that were built for a decade at times, you know?
I think you go way too far writing "with just enough truth to keep 'suspension of disbelief' aloft." These are real businesses that continue whether or not anyone ever films them again. They're actual deals. A lie would be if these businesses (and their sales numbers, etc) were fabricated out of thin air and did not actually exist. Example: Silicon Valley, the show, like Pied Piper. If Pied Piper were presented as reality, and its numbers shown as reality, without even so much as existing - that would be a lie.
The most telling is that you call Mark Cuban, who is by no means a celebrity first and investor second, a "talent". He's not some actor playing a role on Shark Tank.
So I simply am not on board with your original comment that I replied to - it goes too far.
You should have simply said that the interactions were heavily edited, and represent deals that continue after the part that is aired.
A lie would be if an actor were playing the character invented for the "talents" you mentioned, but these people did not exist in real life, were not really business people at all, let alone actual investors investing in startups with real deals, or if the businesses were fabricated.
So after reviewing what you've written I would suggest that you tone it down a bit. I had skype conversations with the businesses shown. My conversations had a startup on the other side - I wasn't talking with some character, like Homer Simpson. They also matched what I saw on screen (more or less, of course, heavily edited.)
These are businesses first, and short shark tank segments only incidentally. They're not lies or fabrications.
It was a bit over the top and reminded me of the Silicon Valley TV show which he cited as an influence.
The "sensible argument" is that ads allow small "content creators" to "monetize" their content.
I think this is mostly a fallacy. I know of many developers, bloggers, musicians, film makers, etc who put their content out into the public domain because that's what they want to do. There are "monetizing" opportunities above and beyond advertising that seem to work well, but the lowest common denominator, and by inference, the lowest form of media, are generally ad-driven.
People argue with "yeah, but what about game of thrones and silicon valley". I reply with "yeah, but what about keeping up with the kardashians, jersey shore and the latest CSI franchise".
The gold / dross ration is 1 / 99. We can easily lose most of the ad driven content in the world without losing entertaining content.
I may be a statistical aberration though. I'm obviously not the "target audience".
Your comment made me think of the episode of the show Silicon Valley (in the current season), where the engineers want to build a scalable platform rather than a box (appliance). The negotiate with mgmt to let them work on the platform after they have worked on the box :)
As an aside, I thought this episode was very well done. The engineers believe their algorithm will get better over time as it ingests more data (hence, a scalable platform is the way to go). A box won't learn, and benefit from these improvements. However, large companies want boxes (servers/appliances in their data center) and aren't in a position to have their data leak out (for statutory or competitive reasons in many cases).
This whole thing sounds like it was thought up by Jared from the Silicon Valley TV series
I recommend watching Silicon Valley a HBO series which in my opinion is geared towards engineers. They have covered this topic very succinctly.
Engineering or rather sometimes over-engineering things might make it super easy but not intuitive to use.
Obligatory clip from Silicon Valley (Season 3): Tabs vs Spaces
(Some potential storyline spoilers if you haven't seen Silicon Valley) https://youtu.be/SsoOG6ZeyUI
This is becoming better than an episode of Silicon Valley on HBO. I hope they release a video statement countering the claim where you can clearly see they have coke out on the table.
The CEO of this "company" is basically Russ Hanneman without the money. Instead a boat load of debt.
I think updating people with push events on topics they care about is a great concept.
I've built a related tool to send me a text message when a new episode of Silicon Valley is released online. It also tracks when the local snowboarding resorts have opened for this season, as the date varies widely and shockingly enough their advice is "check our website every day"... get real. It's been immensely valuable to me personally.
As far as validation goes, and I'm saying this intentionally without clicking through to look at your prototype, it's just: Do you have users? How much are they using? Really you want to know is it providing significant value to them, but that's harder to measure at this stage. Then eventually, are people willing to pay for it?
I would recommend you create a single-page marketing site, it doesn't even need to use any tech, just pure html and css, that explains: what the problem is, use cases people would have, some recommendations from early stage users eg your friends, and a sign up button. That's what most startups do.
The PBS movie "Silicon Valley" is an excellent documentary that discusses them at length.
Building a cool thing and changing the world are two very different things. Some individuals sincerely believe that working on any startup is intrinsically altruistic and 'changes the world' - Silicon Valley (the TV show) lampoons this and correctly so. You are not "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers"
"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.
That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?
That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
I must say, I loled at this:
> hello is the first social network built on loves, not likes.
I know that the intention is great; it's just that I automatically pictured this as a scene in "Silicon Valley" (the TV show).
This reminds me of "Silicon Valley" episode whent there was TABS vs. SPACES fight :)
They will once Silicon Valley takes them to task for it. Just like season 1 pretty much wiped "making the changes world a better place" from the lingo of SV companies.
Great work. Ensuring bit-by-bit identical output and compressing an extra 22% is amazing.
> For those familiar with Season 1 of Silicon Valley, this is essentially a “middle-out” algorithm.
I really wish that every single compression-related blog post would stop referencing Silicon Valley.
Reminds me a lot of that Silicon Valley episode where Richard broke up with his girl-friend because he preferred tabs whereas she preferred spaces.
Once again, Silicon Valley the real place is better satire than Silicon Valley the TV show.
Pied Piper = name of the startup in Silicon Valley TV series
"... The team rushes to produce a feature-rich cloud storage platform based on their compression technology.."
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
> Today that would be like, "hey come out here and get a job at Instagram, and them after-hours we'll work on our own thing"
Why is it absurd? It's not uncommon today. It's basically the plot of season 1 of Silicon Valley on HBO (replace SGI/Instagram with Huli).
It's like a scene out of a Silicon Valley episode.
I watched a few episodes but could not get into it. Too breathless. The kind of people Silicon Valley rightfully mocks.
I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist quoting it in full.
“Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote.
Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.
Absolutely. I don't like movies or TV 99% of the time. Especially comedy shows with vulgarity and goofy humor, not my thing at all. But the accuracy and relatability of Silicon Valley make it very enjoyable and funny for me. Every episode has a couple things that hit home.
Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I usually want TV to be).
Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.
I stopped after the first episode. It match ZERO percent of any of my silicon valley experience. Have never seen a backyard party with famous band. Have never seen a famous band with "nerds" not watching. Have never been to an SV party where hot women stand around looking to pick up rich SV men.
Maybe it gets better but I didn't give it the chance.
(The last episode of Silicon Valley referenced the tabs vs. spaces debate with exaggerated examples of hitting the space bar four times to indent. This probably isn't a serious question.)
Don't forget 'a joy to work with'.
Sounds like a line from a new episode of HBO's Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley on HBO often shows real UIs.
What's interesting is that one episode in Season 1 was using Jenkins (a continuous integration tool) and they took the logo and name but made a new UI that was simpler with a giant progress bar. My guess on the reason is that showing the full Jenkins UI wouldn't allow casual TV viewers to grok it quick enough.
Vouching for this, since it's a plot point in the latest Silicon Valley episode and not a random request of preference.
Yes, This was demonstrated in the Silicon Valley HBO show. Hooli had the employees sign a contract which could not be enforceable legally. The episode where Gavin Belson is in a arbitration hearing room surrounded by a bunch of Hooli lawyers and gets his ass handed over to him by the arbitration judge. David beats Goliath in the court of law.
I don't remember actual details but I am pretty sure someone here can shed more light on this.
this is an interesting head scratcher from the third episode of the third season of silicon valley
in it the ceo of hooli, a standin for all sv bigcorps, complains that hooli search's first result for his name is bad press on him
he says he wants his engineers to change it to good press
they respond, 'are you asking us to modify the underlying algorithm? that would be unethical'
the ceo agrees, 'that would be unethical, and that is why i would never ask any hooli engineer to compromise the integrity of our underlying algorithm'
and then goes and asks another division to 'exploit' the algorithm by creating a swarm of referral links to positive press on him
what's interesting here is this requirement to retain the integrity of the algorithm completely ignores the fact that the algorithm is itself flawed and easily exploited
a similar problem to google search is youtube's current issues with dmca
Speaking of, if you've watched last week's Silicon Valley episode and are in the valley, is it really true that recruiters send you gift baskets just to lure you to an interview?
This kinda perfectly aligned with current episodes of HBO's Silicon Valley.
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home.
I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley.
Most comedies are just joke delivery mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
Silicon Valley on HBO did just have its Season 3 premier yesterday. Could this (hopefully) be some huge fake marketing stunt?
Hahahaha. I'm picturing HBO Silicon Valley 'doors go like this' guys look of disappointment if he funded a film for $200m and nothing blew up.
Silicon Valley[0] is quite funny if you get the culture references. And sometimes it is also quite spot-on in its critique.
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Like the Silicon Valley TV show, the truthfulness of the specifics of this story aren't really the important part. If public perception of startups is as childish frat house like cults, that is a problem whether or not specific startups are in fact childish frat house like cults. I mean that is the exact reason why we use the phrase "frat house" as a pejorative regardless of the merits of specific fraternities.
Does anyone have more context on Dan Lyons?
After reading this article, and the one from Fortune[0], and his post on LinkedIn[1], it feels like he's out there scraping together blatant PR for his new book. And it makes me honestly wonder whether he went to work for HubSpot looking for a story to write in the first place... and being a writer for the "Silicon Valley" TV series doesn't really help his credibility in that sense.
Disclaimer: I really don't know anything about this story. Something just feels off. Maybe HubSpot really is that bad, who knows.
[0]: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-companies-dont-even-bother-lie-dan-lyons
---
Edit:
After listening to the interview from @CPLX's response[2] I have to agree, he doesn't seem outlandish or anything. And all of the points he makes about HubSpot's content model being complete spam I agree with. I've definitely never liked interacting with HubSpot as a consumer, that much I know.
I feel like in these scenarios he's incentivized to get outlandish PR for his book, so some of the things I'd take with a grain of salt--sentences like, "The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall." But there is probably a lot truth to his story as well.
@ghaff also summed it up well: "That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage."
[2]: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/05/473097951/laid-off-tech-journalist-joins-a-start-up-finds-its-part-frat-part-cult
Sounds like the startup was run by Russ Hanneman. It's eerie that the characters in Silicon Valley (the TV show) can be pointed to real life people so easily.
I had big problems with the "Angel List" web site, because it was extremely flakey and appeared to be a typical piece of garbage that some dime-a-dozen huckster with very little experience had just thrown together after watching the Ruby on Rails Make Your Own Trendy Dot Com Crud Web Site in 10 Minutes screencast.
Major features were totally broken. Many things about the design were devoid of thought and just haphazardly thrown together, as if I was using a mock-up that was nowhere near ready for prime time. Obviously whoever implemented it and runs it had no intention of using it themselves, and puts no time into maintaining the site or supporting the "customers" (who are actually the product). The only "design" apparent was in the most shallow surface details and of the least meaningful kind.
Their support is absolutely non-existent. I heard nothing back from them whatsoever, after sending several emails. Lights are on but nobody's home. It has the feel of yet another ghost town scam web site run by a sociopathic all-talk-no-chops frat boy "idea man" who long ago went on to something else after pissing off and driving away all their developers who worked for free on the promise of equity, and is now letting it run on autopilot. Too many self described "Serial Hacktrepeneurs", not enough programmers.
Because I encountered so many problems that I have no control over but should, it's an embarrassment to be listed with so many glitches that I am unable to work around, which cause investors to see my profile in such a haphazard state. Their carelessness makes it look like I'm the one who's careless.
I hope Silicon Valley does an episode parodying AngelList, or at least somebody writes some fanfic about it. [1]
[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Silicon-Valley/
Do you watch the new Silicon Valley TV show by Mike Judge? If not, do it now. In short, STEER CLEAR!! Or otherwise you will get your butt sued bigtime!
There is, ironically, a Silicon Valley episode where this is explained satirically [1]. That the person responding to you basically repeats this argument says something - not sure what exactly.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
I am speechless. If this is worth 300M$, I guess this script is worth at least 1/10 of that: https://github.com/github/hubot-scripts/blob/master/src/scripts/gif-me.coffee
300M$ valuation with no income at all and the source of revenue being ad based, it sounds like something straigth from the Silicon Valley tv show
I really hope the writers of Silicon Valley somehow work this into the show.
Unfortunately Uber's timing is such that it'll probably have to be season 4.
Felt like I was watching an episode of Silicon Valley, just needed the Hooli logo at the end. Think I threw up a little at some parts (am allergic to cheese), great comedy though, would recommend A++
These developer descriptions sound like they are coming from the "Silicon Valley" tv show.
These all sound they belong in the TV show "Silicon Valley". :)
Great comment, especially the first paragraph. All one needs to do is watch the PBS documentary "Silicon Valley" to see how true this was. The space race was the driving force behind Fairchild and its many "children" that went on to become what is now Silicon Valley.
I wrote a parody of Theranos as a TV pilot that is increasingly becoming true: http://www.pricks.com/
(I'm sharing this here because the Hacker News community seemed to enjoy my Season 3 premiere of Silicon Valley [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179894], but apologies if others feel it detracts from the discussion.)
Yeah it reminds me of that one episode of "Silicon Valley":
"No one told me that I didn't have to take the money!"
His Charity is so great- that He simultaneously saves the world's poor while providing fodder for season 3 of Silicon Valley.
You may know me as the founder of Aviato, from the hit TV show 'Silicon Valley'.
Yes I've heard about it. It was even mentioned in "Silicon Valley" TV series. I guess it did the trick before internet era. Now you can be paid for looking at cute cat pictures whole day ;) Joking aside I was skeptical about this being a way to force someone to quit, but after some unbelievable boring projects I totally get this. You just cannot for longer time periods just play billiard, table football, browse HN.
I guess it depends what you're in to and how much you consume. I really like dramas and avoid reality tv. I also tend to watch one episode of something only during weeknights. The last few series I've worked through have been: * The Knick * Parks and Rec * Orphan Black
Next I plan to catch up on the most recent seasons of: * Orange is the new Black * Silicon Valley * True Detective
I seem to find new shows faster than I can catch up to old ones.
Yea, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Pop culture like tv shows Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley are showing that it's actually cool to be geeky or into tech and startups.
Oh wow, I read the article and completely missed that. They were talking about the TV show "Silicon Valley" just a few sentences before mentioning her, and I assumed that they were describing a fictional startup with her playing the founder.
It's from a TV series called Silicon Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
In Silicon Valley TV series they solved this problem by blackmailing the neighbor.
The honest answer is that I have no idea. My process here was, I was on vacation in Big Sur and started jotting down things I thought would be funny for a Silicon Valley episode. When I got home, I downloaded a trial version of Scrivener and took about two days dumping those ideas into a script. Originally the two subplots were entirely separate, and then I went on a walk and thought of a way to combine them at the end. The script happened to come to 31 pages, which is about right for a 22-minute sitcom, so I just called it a day. It was not a very deliberative process in terms of how much material to include in one episode.
There's also putting radio on the internet.
I know it's a little weak to reference a fictional TV show, but the Silicon Valley investor who made it big with radio on the internet then spends the rest of his career flailing around with no idea what he's doing is more real than the mystical Great Man Unicorn.
Reminds me of the episode of Silicon Valley mentioned in this Techcrunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/03/when-silicon-valley-is-too-much-like-silicon-valley/
Every time they show a terminal the actors are typing live, unlike most shows/films like say Silicon Valley where the screen is a video.
If you enjoy this, check out the PBS documentary "Silicon Valley" [1], which was based on this essay.
1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kzit5-Ulx_4
The title reads like something out of Silicon Valley (the TV show). "We're changing the world by providing location-aware in-app database technology for everyone."
I think the problem may be that people will have more and more binge watching alternatives in other platforms too. For example, right now in HBO and AMC I could watch The Brink, True Detective, Vice, Halt and Cath Fire and Humans, a few weeks ago I could add Silicon Valley and Games of Thrones, so I'm definitely consuming less Netflix right now, actually I'm considering joining only when House of Cards or Lillyhammer have a new season.
Was this inspired by the last 2 episodes of Silicon Valley?
This was a fun read. Stuff I found interesting:
1. The shift from cheaply produced, low quality content, to higher quality "must see" shows. It is definitely the must see shows that have drawn me to HBO and Netflix. I don't just randomly watch whatever's on HBO--I have it for Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, etc.
My use of Netflix is a little more dual-purpose though; there's certainly Netflix-produced shows that I like a lot, but I often find myself nostalgically surfing Netflix to watch old shows like ST:TNG, or to watch favorite movies again. Even though HBO and the different TV providers offer on-demand viewing, there's something about their offerings that makes me much less likely to browse their libraries and watch random content. The paradox is that Netflix's UI is on average worse than theirs, so my preference of browsing shows on Netflix is not a usability thing, it's an emotional thing.
2. The comments about how Netflix has commoditized time since we no longer have to watch shows at a certain time each week. And how this is borne out by their strategy of releasing all episodes at once for shows they produce. I've found, like the author, that releasing them all at once reduces some of the fun and anticipation of watching a new episode and talking about it with your friends. I've also noticed that I tend to binge watch shows when new seasons drop, and tend to fast forward through less exciting parts of the episodes a lot more than normal, since I feel I have to get through the whole season so I can talk about it with my friends. I get really impatient by the time I'm 80% through the season. But at least this shows how aggressively they are committed to giving people their time back and letting them consume the content on their own schedule.
3. I had no idea HBO was producing so many projects at once. Hollywood Reporter said they are working on over 100 projects right now. I didn't consider that Netflix and Amazon could position themselves not just as alternatives to people who couldn't get a seat with HBO, but could also potentially produce the show and get it online faster (e.g. steal good projects from HBO with the promise of fast results, not just taking their rejects). I still think HBO will on average produce higher quality shows for quite some time since they have so much practice at it, but it sounds like they are spread very thin. I would love to read some analysis on how HBO produces their shows and what their org structure is like there.
"Cultural fit" - I forgot this term existed outside of the HBO television show "Silicon Valley".
Hi everyone, the other day while watching Silicon Valley TV show, my friend thought that it would be hilarious and educational to create a website like urban dictionary for all the lingos from the show. So we created one. Hope you enjoy it, feel free to add some words on the website and let us know what you think!
This dynamic would make an awesome, kick-ass tv series offshoot of HBO's silicon valley. Real shit.
This looks like something that would have been on Silicon Valley (TV Show)...
This would make a great episode plot in HBO's Silicon Valley.
Is it a coincidence that the presenter Mark Passio looks like and has the same interests and persona as Gilfoyle on Silicon Valley (TV series)?
You are absolutly right. Threatening to kill people would not be funny at all. Of course, humorous hyperbole on the other hand...
I'm guessing you don't see a lot of sitcoms like Silicon Valley, Big Bang Theory, or comedians like Luis C.K., Sara Silverman et. al. Which is tragic, because they are awesome.
Not, of course, to suggest I'm as funny as that (clearly), just someone who's providing observations on Sift from using it in real world production applications (unlike almost all of the posts above this one).
Judging from the downvotes, few readers understood your Silicon Valley show reference[1]. I forget which episode you quoted from.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
Eh. I mean yeah there are companies designed from the ground up to be bought out in just a couple years, yes, but there isn't anything wrong with doing great work and getting bought out by people improving the world too, right? It seems like in that case you're both trying to "improve the world" and you're teaming up.
In a recent episode of Silicon Valley, the billionaire president of a company said to his employees "I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place, better than we do."
That's probably a fair assessment, but a bit beside the point: if they were watching it on their television that fails the analogy as the cable company wouldn't be shaking me down for it. As a matter of fact, I have an HBO Go subscription via iTunes and I don't watch the show - I mostly got it for Silicon Valley and some movies, and I wanted to support what I think is a move in the right direction.
> Interestingly, the people i've worked with who have cared the most about getting stuff right are actually the Silicon Valley (TV show) folks.
Shouldn't be surprising since Mike Judge used to be a programmer himself.
Silicon Valley is easily my favourite comedy and arguably favourite TV show of the last few years.
I live in the North of the UK so I have no idea how accurate it is in terms of culture but it certainly does a fantastic job on the technical accuracy.
Some movies care, some don't. It's very hit or miss.
When The Internship was being filmed, I got asked numerous times for appropriately licensed code for a given scene. They would tell me what the scene was about, i would go and find code that made sense for it. You would think nobody would care about that in a comedy.
Some of the bug fixing people are doing here and there (some was cut, some was not) is actually me fixing bugs in the same code in vim. They wanted it to look completely real.
Interestingly, the people i've worked with who have cared the most about getting stuff right are actually the Silicon Valley (TV show) folks.
Thanks! I found out a little bit about the founder(I think)--forget his name, but he seems legit. He's a founder of vagabond.something, and was a player in Skype. I listened to his podcast, and he was pretty grounded in reality. I heard he was given 5 million a few years ago to get this thing started; which doesn't seems like enough to manufacture your own chip? After every job posting, the company is offering a Mac book pro retina as an incentive to join the company. For some reason I started to laugh, but you need a laptop to work, and why not a Mac book pro retina? What I got out of the podcast is the TV show Silicon Valley just might be a documentary. I guess I didn't realize just how important Silicon Valley has become, and seems akin to an amusement park in some ways. No wonder rents in the Bay Area are beyond staggering. The podcast I watched was about vagabond.someting--not this company.
> There are many indicators I see, people who talk about being manages during a technical interview, etc. all bad signs.
What if you were proud of the promotion to "manages" and you want to highlight the fact that you were given this promotion because of the level you were performing at?
Is it not a sign of a quality candidate?
I feel like you just watched last week's episode of Silicon Valley and internalized it.
I feel like this needs to be incorporated into an episode of Silicon Valley.
The bit about not actually having a real product in production reminded me of a recent episode of the show where it was mentioned that sometimes it is better to not have a real product and revenue because then valuations can be blown way out of proportion in the frenzy without any real revenue benchmarks to base them on.
this reminds of a recent episode of Silicon Valley, the eccentric billionaire Hanneman says, "If you show revenue, people will ask how much, and it will never be enough, It’s not about how much you earn but what you’re worth.....”
Initially i didn't see the sense in the Whatsapp acquisition, i think it was purely defensive, as well as the data FB could get their hands on.
> it seems everything must be world changing these days to sell
The TV show Silicon Valley has done a good job of satirizing this religion-style promotion of products in the tech scene.
Context:
Exchangel is a fantasy angel investing site with real companies, Pied Piper is a fictional company on a real TV show (Silicon Valley on HBO).
I don't like it. This article looks to me like an ad piece. It has very little substance.
There is something bothering me in this article and the "startup culture" in general. Everyone thinks they make the world a better place. Silicon Valley's (the TV series) satire is spot on this. No matter what half brain dead app someone creates, it's supposed to revolutionize and "disrupt" some meaningless aspect of our lives. Of course technology helps the man overcome many problems, be smarter, healthier etc. But it is no panacea. We have the technology of the 21st century with the education of 1500 as to what to do with it. So everyone is making apps for cats or creates a temporary and indivudual-based solution for "problems" that we shouldn't have all along (creating additional problems). This is a huge waste of potential. If you really want to make the world a better place focus on the things that matter. At the very least be honest with what you are doing. Someone wants to make money and that's fine. The probability that the the world will benefit from it is most of the times incidental.
In some weird way am glad this was on HN.
</rant>
This reads like an onion article. This material is ripe for an episode of Silicon Valley.
I thought that 'holacracy' was a made up word from Silicon Valley (the TV show) where they have a fictional company called Hooli, but apparently it's a real thing.
Spoiler Warnings ahead.
The TV show is (paradoxically?) more vulgar but also more good-natured (being a comedy) than the real thing.
For example, no one would call a VC a "choad-gargling fuck toilet" in a pitch-- VCs share notes more than is appropriate or legal, and have black-balled people for less-- and I doubt that a group of typical startup engineers could pull off a flawless 3-minute dick joke like the one in Season 1's finale. So, the TV version of the Valley is more overtly vulgar. The real thing tends to be crass and exclusionary, but you're not going to hear words like "shit-riddled anal wasteland" or nicknames like "Cunty" very often. The show focuses on superficial abuses that are funny rather than the long-lived, subtle, and often subversive ones that characterize the actual Valley.
Another discrepancy: when Richard achieves a record-breaking "Weissman score", the entirety of TechCrunch disrupt is in awe. In the real Valley, 95% of them wouldn't know what a Weissman Score is. The technical literacy of the people in the show is actually much higher than in the real Silicon Valley. At one point, there's a reference to a "DFT" (Discrete Fourier Transform, I presume) and I'd bet that only 1% of investors and 5% of SV founders know what a Fourier Transform even is.
The show gets far more right than I would have expected, and more right than it gets wrong. One of the things that is true to life is the purely political promotion of Bighead (an incompetent engineer who gets a great job because the CEO of Hooli wants to fuck over Pied Piper). That happens a lot and I'd love to see his career grow and for him to become a VP, a founder, or even get promoted into the investor ranks. The part that isn't true to life (or, at least, very common) is his humility and self-awareness. He knows that he's mediocre; whereas most people who benefit from political or aggressively aspirational promotions tend to believe they actually deserved it, and get quite arrogant.
Another thing that's true to life is Russ Hanneman's unethical use of information, when he poaches an engineer that Pied Piper wants for another company. That may be the core ethical flaw of Silicon Valley: a complete lack of respect for the idea that there are things that one should not do with others' information. That sort of ethical looseness is common and spot-on. Likewise, the herd mentality of the VCs around Pied Piper hits reality exactly.
Finally, you have Erlich Bachmann and Russ Hanneman (inspired by Sean Parker and, some have said, Mark Cuban). Bachmann is a jerk, superficially, but still a bit too good-natured to be a real player, as we've seen in the recent episodes. Russ Hanneman hits the archetype of the Silicon Valley billionaire ("three comma") on the nose. That said, even he's more self aware than most real SV billionaires.
Obviously being a comedy TV show, there are certain elements of fiction to make it entertaining. However, the show in many ways actually does highlight the state of Silicon Valley or any startup tech mecha area like San Francisco. It is a perfect parody of the current state of startup culture and tech investment. After a recent stint with a large startup in Seattle, I can honestly say there are a heap of elements from the show that mimic real life (from incubators to work until you pass out culture).
For those not watching. This is from the latest TV episode of Silicon Valley from HBO.
PBS has a great documentary covering the rise of Silicon Valley:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
With so much media coverage about startups from tech pubs like TechCrunch to TV shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley, it may seem like running a startup is all about glamorous product launches, huge rounds of fundraising, and overnight successes.
But the overnight startup success is an absolute myth.
In reality, running a startup isn’t glamorous at all, nor do overnight successes ever happen. Rather, startups are full of repetitive tasks that need to be done each day and small steps that need to be taken consistently over a number of years.
Here are some of the tasks that we grind through each day to keep making incremental progress on ribl.
I remember that brand. Is this from the Silicon Valley TV series? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
The video looks like something directly out of the TV show "Silicon Valley".
I felt the same. It had the surface qualities of a series about nerdy/geeky computers in the 80s. But missed the essence. I identify much more with Mike Judge's work in Office Space & his Silicon Valley tv series.
Sounds like the premise of the latest episode of Silicon Valley (season 2) The raised more than they they needed, sold for less. Founders got nothing. Literally the same :)
If there is something of value, then you'd probably want to protect it somehow.
VCs are in it to make money just like anyone else and if your idea (like a detailed one with implementation and specifics) is good, you can expect them to poach/take the idea similar to what Huli did in the TV series Silicon Valley.
PS. If your idea is consumer-tech, it may have less value than say a patent on some powerful way to extract 100% energy from solar power (or more industrial stuff).
that's frightening. Sounds like one of pitches in the last episode of HBO's silicon valley.
The "Silicon Valley" TV show :P
It's all about who you know. That's all that matters in the startup world.
How is texting a pizza order to Magic, who then text it to a pizza company (Introducing a middle man) making the world a better place?
It's so well suited to startup founders though - Hey I'm way too busy and important to do menial things, I need a personal assistant on my phone that can do things for me while I'm saving the world by making some crappy website, which will never make any money, but will get bought for billions by some bigger fool because we know people who know people.
Magic sounds like it's right out of "Silicon Valley" (The TV Show).
I'd be surprised if anyone remembers Magic in a years time. Either that or it'll get bought by Amazon for $20bn. Or maybe both...
I can't tell if this is a joke, but I'm going to humor you.
I think your money would be better spent on, say, therapy to help you deal with your issues of belonging. One movie starring an Asian-looking man is not going to fix your identity issues, nor is any external event.
Asians are less than 5% of the country, so there aren't as many accusations of racism when movies are missing them as when movies are missing African Americans. Also, the "Asian American" statistic includes people from the Indian subcontinent. So if you feel like you're in a country that has very few people who look like you, you're right! If you were white in China, you'd feel the same way.
Regarding Asian actors: John Cho has had a fairly successful career, and it's only on the upswing. The Netflix show Marco Polo is absolutely full of Asians. Lucy Liu is the star of a TV show and many movies.
I find it ironic that you're crying about discrimination, but you mention several times that you want to see a male playing a lead role. Everyone wants the world to be in their image, but it never will be. Do what you can to change it, and if you can't, don't make yourself miserable.
Edit: Main characters in Silicon Valley, The Big Bang Theory, Heroes, The Last Air Bender, and probably lots of other films are Indian. Ben Kingsley is super-famous and half Indian.
Nevermind, just realised you are talking about that TV show Silicon Valley.
If you haven't already, watch Silicon Valley (the Mike Judge TV show). There's a whole episode where you see startups trotting out these "Changing the world through [buzzword buzzword buzzword]" mission statements. It's so accurate it's scarily funny.
The fact that the tv show Silicon Valley exists, as much as I love it, really shows that were in a big boom right now. It's starting to feel a lot like the dot com era again.
Coming soon to an episode of Silicon Valley I'm sure
Is this an episode of "Silicon Valley" in the works?
Meh. It is better than "Silicon Valley" which is just utter todle but accurate? I don't believe so, but it is a TV show after all aimed at a larger demographic than would find the realities entertaining.
Let's put it this way, I actually get annoyed watching "Silicon Valley" while I don't watching "Half and Catch Fire."
The TV series Silicon Valley has proven eerily prescient. First Weissman scores turn out to be real, and now Nip Alert comes to life.
> Thinking about your girlfriend? Send her a yo to let her know you care.
> Yo has the capacity to change the way humans interact with each other.
You could easily put this into the script for a Silicon Valley episode to good effect.
The Yo joke keeps on getting funnier. First 1.2 million dollars of funding for an app that allows you to send, "yo" to your friends and now this hack. What the hell was the money spent on? It certainly wasn't security. I'd imagine the developers threw a massive party with kegs and thousands of pizzas with the funding money because lets be honest: Yo is an MVP product that is not refined nor innovative and could be built by a 14 year old with a Udemy course on Objective-C. The fact it supposedly took 8 hours to build and started off as an April Fools Day joke says it all, right?
I like stupid apps and things like this, but the fact this received funding just reminds me of 1999. Apps like this shouldn't take funding, they're short-lived hype apps, they're not the next Twitter or Facebook. Can the bubble just pop already please? Save the VC funding for startup ideas that actually deserve it. This is the pet rock of mobile apps.
At least Mike Judge has a plot he can adopt for season two of Silicon Valley though.
We have a wonderful system of checks and balances. It does, however still require competent people to run them. It so happens that in the legislative brace we have an intelligence oversight committee. It is chaired by none less than Senator Dianne Feinstein from the great state of California.
Unfortunately she has acted more like the biggest cheerleader and defender of the NSA rather than a "check" or "balance." Now the good people of California will have a chance to vote (or not) for her reelection should to 80 year old choose to run again in 2019. In the mean time they can write to her to let her know of their dissatisfaction (I've done so - got a reply as well).
Of course one could choose instead to just complain on internet chat boards and ignore the political process and then continue to wonder why our politicians are not reflecting the will of the people. And why we don't have good oversight. Next time you vote (you do vote, right?) please spend at least as much time reviewing a non-partisan voter guide like that produced by the Secretary of State as you do on the latest episode of "Silicon Valley".
Remember - in a democracy the government is only as good as the people we elect. And reelect. And reelect. <sigh>
I can't tell if you're joking or not - personally, I cringed and felt like I was watching an episode of Silicon Valley for much of that video.
Fodder for a "Silicon Valley" episode? Whoops, sorry, you said "real-world"...
> The cute design minimizes fear about the risks of self-driving vehicles
I'm sorry but no cute design can repair the damage done by this episode of Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eAONrlcfJg
Sorry Mr. Car
>'Am I the one in a bubble here or are the writers of this article in some strange feedback loop?'
It's not just these writers...
When's the last time you saw something that wasn't described as beautiful or revolutionary? You know it's bad when Silicon Valley spends an entire scene on the breathless "change the world" superlatives of startup culture [1].
1: http://readwrite.com/2014/05/20/silicon-valley-hbo-episode-7-proof-of-concept-recap
Settle down guy, people are just discussing their feelings about the situation. People do get on forums and discuss episodes of silicon valley after they have aired, and they discuss it with their friends/coworkers in real life.
Are these comments not the appropriate place to voice our feelings/insights/experiences with the subject of the post??
Seriously! How are people giving "advice" to this guy? It's not a F#$%ing blog post, it's a work of art... Do you guys write in to HBO after every episode of Silicon Valley?
It's an great piece (IMHO) & if it helps you reflect, then it's done its job. It's not a problem do be solved (yes, I know... that's what we do... but really though....)
Seems like I should've seen this on the latest episode of Silicon Valley.
A sub-plot of Episode 3 of Silicon Valley; a genius one at that.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-peter-thiel-sesame-seed-scene-from-silicon-valley-i-1567814812
I'm writing a book on naming your startup. Part of the process is checking for trademarks and secretary of state registrations. If you follow Silicon Valley (the hbo show) they actually dealt with this a few episodes ago.
I thought this article would be of use to everyone out there who wants to avoid trademark messiness. Hope it's useful.
If you watch Silicon Valley (HBO) episode 1, there is a character who is fairly adamant about NOT going to uni / doing CS!
Great show. It's very sad that Christopher Evan Welch, the actor who brilliantly portrayed Peter Gregory character (main VC investor in Pied Piper) passed away (after filming just 5 episodes):
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/rip-silicon-valley-christopher-evan-welch-2014-4
The idea of not being able to express what your company is about was kind of covered in silicon valley episode 4 haha
I highly doubt he is oblivious to the show so I'm wondering if he truly didn't think of it in the moment (unlikely) or he purposefully link baited the title on (not that he would need to) but for anyone wondering: no, this isn't a blog post with the stark comparisons of how the TV show Silicon Valley effects us in reality.
In "Silicon Valley," at least (have not yet seen "Betas"), the people who toss around Aspergers jokes tend to be unsympathetic rubes or dolts, like the farmer in the third episode.
To an extent, yes, the audience is meant to laugh at the protagonist's expense when these jokes pop up. But he's getting the last laugh in the end, and the show makes that pretty clear.
For whatever it's worth, the show's leads really don't come across as having Aspergers. They come across as being socially awkward, perhaps even to a painful degree. But Mike Judge & co seem pretty sensitive in drawing that line. They might go for a cheap laugh every now and then, but we're not meant to take those "diagnoses" literally.
It's not just journalists. Both Amazon's Betas and HBO's Silicon Valley could not resist the temptation to make Asperger's jokes in their first episodes. HBO's Silicon Valley's usage even made it into the trailer. To be fair, I suppose an argument can be made that the shows are reflecting the common view of people in technology.
It's weird to me, because I don't think being nervous around people you're not familiar with is at all odd. Plenty of people I have worked with are very shy around new people, but absolutely open up as you get to know them. I don't think many of them at all are with any significance "on the spectrum", ignoring the trivial argument you can make for everyone being on it to unnoticeable degrees.
It shouldn't be compared to Big Bang Theory. That show is a typical paint-by-numbers sitcom, the kind that CBS has been cashing big checks on for the past decade. They aren't particularly funny. I think Chuck Klosterman wrote something that these shows are "in the form of funny", which means that they follow a common comedic timing and use the laugh track as a cue. Once you start looking for it, you always see it.
The three camera and laugh track are usually indicators that the show probably isn't "smart funny", but it's not always true. I can watch Seinfeld reruns and pick out the camera cuts, laugh tracks and joke timings, but the show is still pretty clever.
But most people capable of making shows of Seinfeld-quality aren't going to go do a CBS sitcom. Seinfeld's set up was mostly a relic of its era. Today, you can get a single-camera comedy greenlit thanks to the cable channels. Even networks took some chances. I don't watch too many network shows anymore, but I know Scrubs and Arrested Development were single camera shows without laugh tracks and they were on NBC/ABC and Fox, respectively.
As for Silicon Valley, I was expecting more from it. It's a Mike Judge show and the reviews were very positive. I've only seen the first two episodes, but they were at least good enough to make me want to watch more. It sometimes takes these shows a while to build the characters and build enough background for more jokes to connect, but at this point, I'm more worried about the story lines being thin than the comedy. That's what ultimately lost my interest in Entourage. That show started out as being a fun 30 minutes, but it was very superficial and once you realized that the plots were ridiculous and the characters didn't make that much sense, it became tedious to watch. Since both Entourage and Silicon Valley are both based on specific, unique cultures, I think they're fairly comparable.
Does Silicon Valley have a laugh track? I don't remember one from the first episode, but I watched that a couple of weeks ago.
Often (not always, though) shows with laugh tracks are an entirely different level of "not funny". It's bad when the show creators have to rely on cheap psychological gags to trick you into enjoying yourself. Silicon Valley operated at a higher level than that, although I still found a lot of its humor just referential and not too humorous or too easy. Honestly, just reading hacker news every day provides you with way more satire than the show does... I didn't watch anything past the first episode, so I can't speak to the story which you seem to like - I was just looking for a comedy show.
But tastes do differ. Especially when it comes to comedy. I'm glad you liked the show. I wouldn't compare it to Big Bang Theory, but I wasn't a fan.
I love this show. Not only does it accurately portray the SV startup scene, but it has a well-written story line. You can't really compare this to Big Bang Theory. I've seen nearly every episode of Big Bang and that is way, way more sitcom-style than Silicon Valley. Big Bang has a lot of nickle jokes related to science fields, with situational comedy surrounding the characters thrown in. Silicon Valley is not a sitcom, and the episodes follow a well-researched story line.
I second your feeling about Big Bang Theory, but I don't think SV is that bad. Personally, I liked the competing show "Betas" a lot better because it had subjectively more soul and better dramaturgical timing, but other than that Silicon Valley is mildly entertaining. Compared to BBT there is not a lot of pretentiously presented flavor text with at best a tenuous connection to real science, so I think Silicon Valley might at least have better expert consultants than most professional-themed drama and comedy shows. That still doesn't mean one can or should expect total factual accuracy from a TV show, it's still just entertainment - it just has to be enough to make you believe for a few minutes.
This is very true, the new Silicon Valley show Episode 1 is free on YouTube (son clued me in) but that isn't how acquisitions always work out, the word dilution rings loudly.
"Look for us on episode 6 of Silicon Valley, with Kid Rock guest-starring."
I thought the satire was well-aimed, and my wife and I laughed out loud a few times. My nit is that I was hoping for it to feel less "sitcom-y" for an HBO production. Looking forward to AMC's Silicon Valley drama that's coming -- I believe that one is set in the early 90's, and more of a drama.
It's funny. Much funnier than most of the crap that passes for comedy on TV these days. I think the show is in danger of being a bit too cartoonish, thenagain silicon valley itself is danger of becoming too cartoonish.
I understand that a lot of stereotypes about geeks and silicon valley are true. But someday I'd like to see a show or movie about reasonably attractive, successful, well-adjusted people who happen to work with computers. I see these kind of people all the time in my social circle and it saddens me we/they aren't reflected in pop culture.
I think it's odd that tech people are comparing this to the Big Bang theory. Big Bang theory dumbs down all of the jokes at the expense of not conveying a genuine culture. This is why it is massively successful in the general population and regected by geeks.
Silicon Valley seems to be the opposite at least based on the first episode. There are at least 4x as many subtle tech memes as there are jokes.
When you have billionaires in Silicon Valley comparing the 1 percent to Jews during the Holocaust, and all that shit…
So I haven't seen it yet, and I do plan to watch the first episode. But quotes like this — from one of the producers — make me not want to bother. Yes, this quote is justified, because SV is full of billionaires like Tom Perkins, and not struggling, creative people just trying to get by.
The reason I'm hesitant about this show is that it seems to be mocking something that isn't worthy of mockery: people genuinely trying to make the world a better place. You can laugh all you want at the What's App buyout, but assuming that the ridiculous events that make the news are the reality of life in the Bay Area tech industry is ignorant, isn't it?
Maybe the show isn't as caustic as I'm assuming it is. Maybe I'll love it. I really liked the Amazon series Betas. But the premise of this show — which seems to amount to "SV is full of assholes" — doesn't sound promising.
That's interesting. Maybe it's 'cause I've just watched the first episode of Silicon Valley but, for most people, even if you're not doing something obviously good for the world, there's huge internal pressure to feel as if you're making a big contribution to some big picture things that matter.
That, I think, is why you get lots of "xyz startup is changing the world!" rhetoric. Because whether or not it is true, people worry about the optics of what they do, and need something meaningful to point to. To actually care about ethics involves making painful choices of the sort that it sounds like you've done. Say, choices that keep you from dying on the inside, but which are still painful. So kudos to you.
It sounds like both sides (the people involved with the show and the people involved with silicon valley) should both lighten up a little.
If the show is off-base they should accept the criticism and move the later episodes toward a more realistic satire.
If google has a 6 person circular bicycle they conduct meetings in, expect there to be a joke. Smart people are weird, own it.
But... Don't make up a strawman who is looking to get rich without actually building something amazing, while being a weirdo slob that is completely clueless. There are hundreds of start ups on AngelList that are making a difference in the world while being completely professional.
That being said, I'm assuming they only screened the first episode? I wouldn't rush to judgement.
Goodness me. I have seen it all now. I do hope peer-to-peer poo sharing finds its way into an episode of that new HBO Silicon Valley series.
I don't think it's a lie. Most web apps will not change the world. As a community, I think we should be okay with that.
Mike Judd was interviewed recently about Silicon Valley, his new show, and he remarks about the difference between Hollywood and the valley:
Silicon Valley, more even now than when I was there, they’re always talking about how they’re making the world a better place. And maybe in some ways they are, but it’s just funny. Like the richest, most successful people in our business, in Hollywood — just picking an example, J.J. Abrams or [producer] Joel Silver — they’re like, you know, "I want to make really cool stuff. I love what I do." They’re not saying "I’m saving the world through my movies."
While I don't think the comparison to Hollywood of all places is apt I do understand the spirit of what he's saying. Why can't we just enjoy what we do instead of kill ourselves trying so desperately to impress everybody else?
Perhaps that fact alone is enough to lead to serious burnout.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/14/5496482/mike-judge-silicon-valley-interview-sxsw-2014
Note that this show is terrible.
They are trying to make Silicon Valley and startups look like Hollywood and scriptwriting. The first episode has the main characters (startup co-founders) hanging out at a trendy bar and programming there. Of course one is a stereo-typical aspie guy with no social skills but is a genius with computers. Then they go to a house party thrown by a big name VC that I think is supposed to be Ron Conway; the house is filled with professional models glomming all over the VC and everyone is generally gorgeous. The guys sneak in to pitch him on their new social networking app that somehow has data "hacked" from some government database or something. They just know that if only they can get 5 minutes of their time with this VC, they will be able to land funding-- which will... make their business successful somehow?
You know, exactly like real startup life.
Bah. Good sentiment, bad blog post.
If you watched a documentary about Silicon Valley, and came away thinking that Noyce invented the transistor.... either you have a listening problem, or PBS has a fact-checking problem. Noyce was 21 and still a junior at Grinnell.
Also, just because YOUR attention is on silly little so/mo/lo startups doesn't mean they're the focus of Silicon Valley. Seriously, how many people are employed by all the Y-Combinator companies put together? Now, how many people are employed just by Google, in the Bay Area alone? And it's not like Google is the only company doing worthwhile things, but even if it were, that'd be sufficient to disprove your catastrophizing.
There are lots of awesome companies, large (e.g. Google) through small (e.g. Khan Academy), doing awesome world-changing things. In some cases they're hiring PhDs, in other cases they're hiring passionate dropouts, whoever can make the awesome happen. Just because a bunch of illiterate idiots write a lot of smoke-and-heat-but-no-light articles about faddish "apps" doesn't mean that's really where all the action is.
Ignore the idiocy; keep your eye on the stuff of value. Of course, if what you value is hype, then I take it all back.
Hello! Fellow Alaskan?
Have you heard about Mike Judge's upcoming show on Silicon Valley? I actually kind of assumed that's why this documentary was released at this time
http://betabeat.com/2012/12/silicon-valley-finally-gets-the-tv-treatment-it-deserves-from-the-dude-who-wrote-beavis-and-butt-head/
Silicon Valley : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/
Director & writer is Mike Judge who is known for his animated series Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill as well as the classic Office Space.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
"A thoughtful show about Silicon Valley could show "
The purpose of this TV show is to sell advertising and make money for the network. Nothing more than that. That's their (Bravo's) business model. And they are executing it brilliantly. Many of their shows are tremendously popular and have inspired spinoffs as well.
reposting my comment from that post
I find the show distasteful but it is as accurate a portrayal of Silicon Valley as Jersey Shore is of that particular geo/demographic. In a way, this shows you how mainstream Silicon Valley now is - instead of just being portrayed as nerds and VCs, this shows that there exists many, many flavors of people/lifestyle here in the Bay Area.
Let's be clear - this is a Bravo show, not a Ken Burns documentary. A realistic portrayal of this place would have a bunch of people staring in front of their text editors all day. Or attending meetings and whiteboarding things. Not exactly riveting television.