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Comment by meira | Hacker News Reader

I didn't watch second season yet, but first season isn't "too real" for me. But it is still a good highly fictional show.

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I only watched a few episodes, but the whole "She needs to learn to hack in 24 hours" bullshit was a little too much for me. Everything she was doing could have been a script. There was 0 reason to have her punching in commands like that, and either way that's simply using Linux.

'python hack-it.py' would have sufficed. If you haven't seen it, it wasn't much better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4 and at least that was entertaining.

[SPOILERS]

Except the basic CLI knowledge prepared her for when she needed to run some emergency commands e.g. to restore the network connection. I'll allow them a tiny bit of artistic license here, it certainly added to the tension.

If bouncing a network interface is hacking, I'm Captain Crunch. Maybe the other episodes are better, but that ruined it for me.

I think he wrote "emergency commands" not "hacking commands". Because she's inside the same network, she can send those commands from her cubicle, so she needed to know how to do it.

The show emphasized many times that "she is learning to hack" to the point of ad nauseam. Nobody who has a clue would ever call it that. In reality, she was learning to use Linux.

Side note: Why is everyone using Kali Linux all the time? Does anyone (who isn't 14) really run that as a daily driver? They use it to surf the web and check their email. It makes no sense.

> They use it to surf the web and check their email. It makes no sense.

There's a scene where we can see Elliot running CentOS on his personal laptop. Not that lends any realism (CentOS is more common on servers, not PCs) but it does show their awareness of Linux beyond Kali.

Maybe because it's easier to boot it everytime from USB wherever you are than to have an OS installed with information about you on it. Also, I guess they use it daily for hacking purposes and happen to check the mail on it.

according to wikipedia "Draper is renowned for his lifelong intolerance of tobacco smoke and his poor personal hygiene."

so joke is on you :)

> 'python hack-it.py' would have sufficed. If you haven't seen it, it wasn't much better than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4 and at least that was entertaining.

Hacker (film) was painful to watch. So much cheesyness.

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