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Comment by twox2 | Hacker News Reader

I think you should give Hackers a chance... it is silly and full of hollywood tropes, but it definitely captures the hacker culture of city hacker kids in the 90's. I also think the film pays homage to well known hackers from the 80's and 90's, all the handles of the characters in the movie are named after real people and there are even references to the types of textfiles/books we all shared at the time. If you can suspend your disbelief it's great.

But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?

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I never really got why Hackers was always lumped in with Wargames and Sneakers. The vibe of Hackers always seemed way different, with all the "cool dudes wearing sunglasses" and skateboards and flamboyant outfits and EDM music. I mean I like the movie, but it was less of a realistic "computer hacking" movie and more of a "too-cool people partying" movie, much more like Swordfish.

In my experience the movie did a pretty good job of capturing the fun of being a "hacker kid" growing up in NYC in the 90's.

Yeah maybe I'm just being old and grumbly.

Although the vast majority of our crews were skaters/BMXers, we were much more low key and much less flamboyant.

It was at a time when the feds were just starting to take some hacking incidents seriously. At that point in time, if you got caught, you'd usually just get a stern talking to by some authority figure, be it a local cop and/or one of the heads of the org you infiltrated.

I may give Hackers a watch this weekend and try to appreciate it for what it is. I was already adulting by the 90s, so while I was still on the field, I didn't pay much attention to 90s hacker culture, except for who was getting arrested or informing.

By buddy and I were teens doing BBS stuff at the time and walked out of Hackers when they were talking about their FOUR TEEN POINT FOR BEE PEE ESS modems. Snuck in to Braveheart. Don't regret that decision.

Did you ever swim in the pool on the roof?

Only when it sprung a leak. Funny enough, there were a few of us that would go hang out on the roof. The stairs were gated, but it was the kind of gate you could reach your arm through and open on the other side. It's a big school though, and in reality there was a pool on the ground floor... so the pool on the narrative would fall apart in real life :D

I did give it a watch tonight. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought -- 90s fashion and the outlandish hacking scenes aside. It had a decidedly east coast feel and the club reminded me of nHc-west.

Great cast too :)

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