Hacker Cinema
The Pursuit of Happyness
2006 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Gabriele Muccino
A struggling salesman takes custody of his son as he's poised to begin a life-changing professional career.
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26 comments on Hacker News
Steven Conrad also did Perpetual Grace Ltd (he also wrote the screenplay for Pursuit of Happyness, which is the scariest movie I've ever seen).
I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks.
The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.
I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s. After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.
It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any problem, when problem solving itself will soon be solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years, mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.
So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.
I had an amazing conversation with Kamran Ahmed, the self-taught developer and entrepreneur behind Roadmap.sh, a platform guiding over 1.25 million developers through their learning journeys.
Kamran shares how he built this massive community while working full-time, and eventually transitioned it into a thriving business.
Takeaways
Roadmap.sh is a platform that provides learning paths for different skills and technologies, helping beginners and intermediate developers navigate their learning journey.
The platform offers free content and resources, making learning accessible to everyone.
Kamran started roadmap.sh as a side project to help students and developers find their career path, but it has grown into a successful business.
The decision to transition roadmap.sh into a business was prompted by the need to provide more features and support for the growing community.
The platform aims to be the go-to resource for learning, providing comprehensive roadmaps, courses, and projects for various roles and skills.
Roadmap.sh offers curated learning roadmaps for developers, with a focus on making learning accessible and generating revenue.
The team behind Roadmap.sh is lean, consisting of two full-time members and one part-time member.
The tech stack includes Astro, Node.js, MongoDB, Postgre, Redis, and is deployed on AWS with CloudFront for fast page loading.
The design of Roadmap.sh has gone through several iterations, with the founder continuously improving and experimenting with the design.
Having a good eye for design is important for indie hackers and developers
Building side projects is a great way to learn and gain experience
Persistence and consistency are key to success
Roadmap aims to integrate AI to make the user experience even better
Top movies: Pursuit of Happyness, Source Code, and Dark Matter
Top books: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and Scott Adams
Top podcasts: Masters of Scale, Syntax FM, and Founders
This was an insightful and inspiring conversation!
Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/djg-GPWQ
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/d4qZV7dN
I've been thinking about the flip side of this, the incomprehensible waking life.
For me, daily life is an unending series of setbacks, negative reinforcement loops and disappointments. I know going into nearly all endeavors that they will end in some kind of failure, but decide to be brave and enter them anyway. I understand that this is the opposite of manifestation, and that I am creating self-fulfilling prophecies. But feel that a neural net would create a model of reality that matches my lived experience of suffering, so there's a basis in fact here. That this is truly all there is unless something changes.
A small example: I decided to go on the Bacon app to see what walk-on gigs are available in my city to raise some quick cash. There are 2: garbage man and warehouse worker.
Now, I knew going in that the odds were grim, and that the gigs would be things that nobody wants to do. Had I gone in with a positive mindset, and imagined fun afternoons helping people set up for events or something, is that what I would have received? I just don't know. I've experienced both, but an overwhelming percentage of the time, the negative outcome matches the prediction of my negative mindset.
Another small example: the other day I helped an acquaintance with handyman work for $100 for an afternoon, but got a traffic ticket on the way home that skimmed away 2/3 of what I had earned.
It was an uncanny reflection of my experience of hustling, similar to movies like The Pursuit of Happyness. Two steps forward and one step back. Another day older and deeper in debt. No win until the end - but the epiphany never comes.
Where i'm going with this is that what we think of as "the real world" is the dream. Or in my case, the nightmare, or at the very least the night terror.
Whereas in our dreams, we can be anything and do anything. Not only that, our subconscious provides rich plot lines far more creative than what our ego comes up with as it co-creates this 3D realm. I often wonder if the point of daily suffering is actually to dream in the spirit world where source consciousness originated.
Except in my case, my dreams are mostly night terrors as well, spilled over from the suffering of my lived experience. I know why, it has to do with sleep apnea, and living a sober life after decades of self-medicating, and finally doing shadow work in middle age. But I just wish that the sun would rise on this long night of the soul, because my basic beliefs in hope for a better tomorrow are growing more tattered with every news cycle and seeing the very worst in humanity expressed in the most powerful and influential people, who are unwittingly bringing about hell on Earth.
Reminds me of a dialogue from the movie: "The Pursuit of Happyness"
Interviewer: What would you say if man walked in here with no shirt, and I hired him? What would you say?
Will Smith: He must have had on some really nice pants.
Go has some really nice pants i.e Simplicity with good enough performance, backed by big corp.
Simplicity scales!
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
This resonates for me in middle age, after rarely having more than $2000 free and clear despite a lifetime of hard work. I've lived movies like Pursuit of Happyness and In Time, but without the financial epifany. All I do is work.
If capitalism worked, then prices would get lower over time with increased per capita productivity. We got a brief taste of that for the last time in the late 1990s, but most people stopped getting raises after that, and now duopolies provide nearly all name-brand goods and services. As it stands now, it's pretty much over. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that homes, vehicles, food etc will ever decrease in price now.
We can generally agree on the causes being stuff like regulatory capture and not enforcing antitrust laws. But those aren't root causes. The real problem is power imbalance from wealth inequality. To address that directly, we could either provide more wealth to the working class via UBI or redistribute wealth from the owner class via taxation. Note that neither of those have been tried at a national level in anyone under 50's lifetime.
Which means that the national debt was planned. It represents the share of wealth transferred to the owner class, skimmed from the working class as a result of trickle-down economics.
The next 2-3 US elections are going to be really important though. Young people have a chance to democratically vote to substantially raise taxes on corporations and billionaires. This won't be so much anti-capitalist as trans-capitalist.
I say that because socialism and communism require a roughly 6 hour workday to provide enough labor for the system. But the median value of labor will never rise again, because of AI and automation. Meaning that work hours will increase as pay decreases. Which is self-evidently unsustainable. Which means that the traditional alternatives to capitalism will most likely not be viable, but will still be used as straw men against the political left by politicians to lure in low-information voters.
I believe that we passed the tipping point around the time of Bush v. Gore in 2000, when we were set to widely roll out renewable energy and electric cars, but chose not to (see Who Killed the Electric Car). Instead we invaded the Middle East at the behest of the owner class to protect established industries around fossil fuels. We're only achieving some semblance of self-sufficiency 20 years later despite capitalism, not because of it.
Admittedly, I don't have much faith in the political system to correct itself. So I sympathize with the political right's sentiment that government bad. But the government is We the People in the US, so that's like saying people bad. Which is othering and division. As we grapple with the actual truth of our struggle and stop blaming victims for our collective plight, I have faith that we'll solve these problems, perhaps summarily. Until then, I'm manifesting a more independent/off-grid lifestyle in an attempt to provide resources that capitalism has so far failed to provide me beyond a subsistence level.
The proof of everything I'm saying is in the failure of any billionaire to challenge the status quo in a material way. They claim that their money is tied up in stock and they pay themselves a trifle. Yet we watched as Musk made $44 billion liquid to buy Twitter. Their FUD should be a rudder for the rest of us towards real answers and strategy.
Now I go back to my toil, hoping to win the internet lottery but knowing deep down that real work is in service to others. My separation from the real contributions to society that I would have made by following my heart is like being poor twice.
Since we're talking movies, I'll throw in a handful of movie titles that I find inspirational and /or uplifting as well:
Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa
Vision Quest
Tin Cup
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Social Network
Rad
Hackers
Wargames
Iron Man
The Man Who Knew Infinity - based on the book of the same name, which I also recommend.
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.
At least there is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
It’s definitely dependant on the motivation whether it’s glamour, status, paying off debts, or wanting to change the world.
But the thing is, work (ethic) is essentially the only thing that one can control.
Other people may be more talented, or have more intelligence but work ethic comes from within. Just like being disciplined and working out and exercising (which is also similar as the motivations to train vary widely).
I remembered this from Will Smith talking about it. His movie pursuit of Happyness is relevant to the topic https://youtu.be/05nOroFYIF8
Sorry, only 200 people in line? That's a staggering number and looks more like something from 1981, Los Angeles in the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness".
Not something that should happen in our modern world.
I'm from Europe as well and remember seeing this mentioned in more than one US movie.
For example, there is a scene in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_Happyness where the main character sells blood for money.
You can find several websites that mention this "money making strategy": https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/make-money/240-month-selling-plasma/
We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.
> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."
I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)
I have written non-trivial code in Rust and Go. The thing about Rust is that it needs a bit of perseverance and experience of writing a bit of non-trivial code in Rust to really appreciate it. Writing tutorial like code won't cut it.
Life-cycle of a Rust developer: https://imgur.com/kNkV7jm
Good, bad and the ugly: https://imgur.com/udNcZXa
With Go, in my head it is best explained in terms of the scene in the movie: Pursuit of Happyness
Boss: Chris. What would you say if a guy walked in for an interview, without a shirt on, and I hired him? What would you say?
Chris Gardner: He must have had on some really nice pants.
People (including me) find lot of issues with Go in terms of some choices in the language. But boy it does have some really nice pants and that is the ease of writing networking services + Go routines
This is why I hate the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"[0] with a passion. Really hate it.
[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
Example lists:
- show me english scifi movies on netflix
- english movies about aliens released after 2000
- english movies about lawyers on netflix or hulu
- best hindi movies on netflix
- hindi drama movies on netflix released after 2000
- clint eastwood movies on amazon prime or hbo released between 1960 and 1980
- movies based on true stories on netflix
- johnny depp fantasy movies on netflix
- the pursuit of happyness
- movies similar to the pursuit of happyness
- movies on jfk released after 2000
- english movies currently playing in theatres
Pursuit of Happyness is definitely one of my favorite.
Another one which I regularly watch is Shawshank Redemption. A choice quote from the movie:
Hope is a good thing, may be the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Chris Gardner was 27 or 28 and homeless when he became a trainee at Dean Witter Reynolds. If the name isn't familiar, a movie was based on him called The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), played by Will Smith.
If you meet the hiring manager's qualifications, you'll probably get a call for an interview. Just be sure to be ready to explain why they should take you.
I strongly recommend watching Pursuit of Happyness - specially since it's based on a true story.
Check out these threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450702, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4060887
Also my personal list of favorites that entrepreneurs should watch (although not necessarily about technology):
Glengarry Glen Ross - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/
Moneyball - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/
The Pursuit of Happyness - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
Jerry Maguire - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116695/
Catch Me If You Can - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264464/
"EDIT: There were lots of people just like him that weren't crazy-successful."
I'd be curious to hear examples of people who spent a day wearing a sandwich board with their resume in the financial district, and did all the other things this guy did, and did not end up achieving some level of success.
He reminds me of Chris Gardner, who inspired the movie Pursuit of Happyness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_Happyness
For inspiration, I tend to prefer movies rooted in a real life story. A couple of movies already mentioned that fall into that category: The Pursuit of Happyness and October Sky. I also really like Shine, Cool Runnings, and Take the Lead.
Favorite scene from Shine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-QrSc_Jw3g
Sneakers (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/8710). The film's aged a little, but it's nice to watch a fairly funny hacking film that doesn't dress up hacking into 3D flying GUIs, Hack the Planet or hacking a TLA with a gun put to your head, while getting head.
Brewster's Millions always cheers me up around Christmas, as does Trading Places (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/9749), both of which are slightly business related (although not exactly real-world related).
Someone else posted the pursuit of happyness (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/7605), when I stick that on it comes across as a bit schmaltzy for me but has a good message.
A beautiful mind (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1112) is another great film about an incredibly smart but tortured genius who makes a massive contribution to economics.
Catch me if you can (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1798) is based on the true story of a fraudster who ripped off banks for tons of money and did all kinds of amazing things with it. It's a great romp and I'd highly recommend a first watch.
Life is beautiful (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5583) is hardly an uplifting film but is incredible and if it doesn't make you thankful for what you have, then I'd question whether or not you have a soul.
I think a great movie for all entrepreneurs is "Pursuit of Happyness": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
For those that didn't know, it's based on a true story of a homeless black man that became a millionaire entrepreneur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_gardner
I just happened to watch "Pursuit of Happyness" last week, and if you want inspiration for attaining work/life balance, that story provides plenty. According to Wikipedia, most of the events happened in one form or another. And some of the techniques he used to get more work done in fewer hours than his younger, single fellow interns was pretty impressive. All while picking his son up from day care then standing in line to get a spot in a shelter every night.
If you ever think your situation is too tough to continue or that you can't make time for both your kids and your profession, this movie is a pretty good rejoinder.
It sounds like his family was probably having money problems (they owed more than they had in the bank, or they weren't able to support their lifestyle).
In that context, perhaps his wife was threatening him to "get a stable job that provides us income, or else I'm doing to divorce and leave you."
A good movie to watch on the subject: "The Pursuit of Happyness" (2006)