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Comment by swampthinker | Hacker News Reader

There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories, and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real life.

What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate.

And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.

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This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards.

Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.

"Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detec...

Likewise, all the doctors I know say Scrubs is the most realistic show about being a doctor.

How can it not be? Every other program about being a doctor has so much personal drama and sex going on, they barely have time to look at patients. (Except House MD, but he's obviously unrealistic, even in the show itself.)

Episode about how unrealistic House is was one of the high points of the later Scrubs seasons.

In a similar vein, I believe that "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is the most realistic portrayal of the dark ages that I know of.

Funny, I had the same feeling about Christianity watching The Life of Brian.

"Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all." - Muhammad Ali

> Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.

Similarly medical professionals seem to agree Scrubs is much more closer to reality than the "dramatic" Grey's Anatomy. Another show that comes to mind is Malcolm in the Middle.

Good comedy can be a mirror. It reflects reality, makes you laugh, and then makes you think. I think all of those shows you mentioned would lose something if they weren't uncomfortably close to what they're making fun of.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

-- Mark Twain

See also "You couldn't make it up."[0]

[0] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-cou...

Surely you've heard, "it's funny because it's true"

Supposedly a court jester could state the facts with impunity...

By far the most unrealistic thing about "Silicon Valley" is the complete lack of technical obstacles and setbacks faced by any team in the show. But that's eminently forgivable -- no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging.

Everything else is so on-point that it can be uncomfortable to watch as a denizen of Silicon Valley.

>no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging

Although they could potentially throw in a sequence designed to show that aspect. 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. As you alluded to, the reality of working through difficult problems would not make for good TV.

> 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Then you see them slowly click. Press backspace once. press the 3 key. Click again, and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

I think you mean:

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Oh my god I am such a fucking idiot."

No, that's when Gilfoyle, who's been watching from the side, says "You are such a fucking idiot."

If you want a bit realism there you might casually show the clock to make the user realize that while it was 2 minute on camera the actual time was much more.

You could pretty much do it as a B-plot for an entire episode, and just end it with someone walking by the screen and saying something like: "find" "what?" "you wrote fond."

Add profanity as necessary.

For me it's more like "FUCK! ME!" when I notice a typo'd variable name or what-have-you.

  Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the 
  entire run of the show.

HBO is the same network that aired this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg

And that one 2-3 minute clip would be passed around every year after the holidays when yet another relative asks if your startup life is anything like Elon Musk or The Social Network.

Lets not forget we got the Mean Jerk Time because of a technical obstacle.

Obviously not a 3 week debugging issue, but still at least some notion of a technical obstacle...

Yeah that would be an artificial cliff hanger for sure. It's about the human interaction and politics.

Yeah, but networks are keen to air bullshit debugging sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CtzaSzO2cE

They did kinda sorta almost delete everything. (ok, less realistic than a fencepost error or something. Just sayin')

Their servers did catch on fire.

Maybe it's just that I've only ever worked for YC companies since my first job (which was owned entirely by one person), but it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board - trying to force them to do things, installing a veteran CEO, and hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. Those are all things that I know happen in startups, but a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product.

That said, 90% of what I see on Silicon Valley is remarkably accurate.

> it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board ... hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product.

That wasn't the board, that was the CEO.

> a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product.

When did they? They fought, they whined, they tried to form a conspiracy, and finally they bargained and compromised. I don't recall them ever giving up.

At least Pied Piper has some real technology to bring to the table (a compression algorithm).

Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just building a business around a CRUD application (see AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).

  > Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just
  > building a business around a CRUD application (see
  > AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).

I think you vastly underestimate the technology that goes into the parts of Uber we don't see -- the logistics of dispatching and monitoring a couple hundred thousand drivers (or so?) in real time.

Yes, so advanced that new versions by competitors that do the exact same thing seem to pop up weekly

Scale.

End of discussion. What works for 100 customers/drivers does not work for 100,000

In the grander scheme of things, that's scale and concurrency. Nothing about the code is particularly novel or difficult.

>In the grander scheme of things, that's scale and concurrency.

I actually laughed out loud. I'm just the Postgres team would love your insight into how they can implement master-master replication because "it's not novel or difficult."

Right, but those are problems solved by database technologies. Uber can follow pretty well-defined patterns at this point to scale up. Especially since they have a natural sharding point built into their product (each city).

Pretty much this. Like Uber's unique problem is master-master replication?

True, but there's something to be said for companies that execute well. Providing a smoother service or more intuitive/sleeker product can be the distinguishing factor that makes a company stand out, and you want cycles of that mixed in with cycles of innovation.

Not that I'm making an argument that Uber itself executes particularly well. I have no idea about that.

How is AirBnB or Uber just CRUD applications? Seems to me there's a lot more than that involved in launching a nationwide rental or taxi service with a two-sided market. You have to solve regulatory issues (or ignore them strategically), routing and pricing algorithms, user trust issues, etc.

These two businesses in particular highlight that it's a lot harder than you think, otherwise the market would be saturated with clones.

That's after it's huge. Uber 0.1 was probably just WhatsApp to a couple of drivers.

And early Google was 'just' a search engine, something that already existed in some forms, that looked totally unlike the Google of today. You are correct, but what are you trying to say? All companies are going to be 'lame' early on by definition.

No, Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivial. These other co's only got technically interesting after scale, which is generically true. Since you don't know whether the startup will succeed, you'd better enjoy the work, eg scraper (FB 0.1) and forum software (0.5).

There are any # of co's not lame early on: Google, Adobe, Zee Aero, Joby, Viv/Siri, Cruise, Magic Leap, DeepMind, Vicarious…

> Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivia

Indexing and rating web pages based on links back to pages. Basically a massive "outer join" on the web. Basically a software implementation of how academic papers are rated, but technically a massive data processing exercise - not just a good idea in theory but required a great deal of engineering skill to implement.

Worldwide.

You realize that Uber has to solve a huge multifactor optimization problem?

How so?

Spoilers follow.

One fairly recent episode involves pretty much throwing away all of the hard technology that the engineers want to work on in order to make an appliance that's easier for the sales team to sell. They came up with the idea after one of the engineers says something sarcastically like "yeah we could just ignore all the tech and make a dumb box."

cough Facebook cough

Facebook is not a CRUD application.

Facebook is a graph theory application.

i think it's one of the reason it's so hard for me to watch it -- the comedy/cringe parts hit too close to home.

You should also check out Betas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/), a light-hearted SF startup culture comedy show by Amazon. Sadly, it never got a second season.

In SV, one of the characters asks a call girl if she takes bitcoin. She says "I hate this fucking town." It's funny.

In an episode of Betas, on character slaps a bitcoin down on a table to place a bet. It showed how well they they did their research.

That's Mike Judge satire. It's always absurd but yet quite accurate

Isn't this just normal satire? I thought satire generally refers to works which exaggerate with the intention of highlighting the true absurdities of some person or group of people.

Agreed, but for me his satire is always somehow even more perfect.

I've often heard the same about Scrubs. In a sea of medical dramas in TV, the light and warm-hearted show Scrubs is considered to be the most true-to-life... Apparently.

I think it feels like a "more accurate satire" because it mixes things that are overexaggerated and underexaggerated, and only by a small amount in either direction. So some of the strange realities (an executive Rollerblading into a meeting) are mixed with dialogue and behavior that is only slightly more absurd than reality.

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.

Have you looked into British shows? They have a lot of realistic comedy, like The Royle Family, the original The Office, The Thick of It and, in a way, Yes Minister.

Related - Veep is based on The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci writing and producing both)

What I've seen and heard of SV reminds me of when I posted an article by "Fake Lennart Poettering" (me), about getting around lkml hostility to systemd kernel suggestions by building systemd as a unikernel that chain-loads Linux and intercepts some of its system calls and replaces them with more systemd-friendly versions.

Someone replied: "This is like the movie Idiocracy: so close to reality that it isn't funny."

A dubious vindication of Mike Judge's satirical skills: reality catches up so quickly with his satire that it fails at comedy.

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