The Social Network: (In)accuracies regarding the Computer Science (2011)

Mark's browser at the time was actually Firebird 0.7, not KDE Konqueror. It made him particularly easy to identify in server logs.

Regarding gender balance, it's worth noting that CS161 has been taught by Margo Seltzer (an excellent professor, and a woman, though the professor in the movie was male if I remember correctly) for years. See http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/teaching.html.

If you want to talk about inaccuracies, it's probably good to know that his last name is Zuckerberg, not "Zuckerburg."

A fuller discussion of the many problems with the film and the book it's based upon can be found here:

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=149115776&...

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/8l0iwprb/massachusetts-dist...

The answer to the second virtual memory question is wrong. Actually there is not enough information to answer the question. For 16 bit virtual addresses and 256 byte pages a single level page table will have 256 entries, but how large is an entry? It will be at least one byte because of the status bits but it also has to contain the frame the page is mapped to and there is no information about the number of frames. Assuming physical addresses are not wider than virtual addresses, frames do not overlap and page table entries are multiple of 8 bits wide, a reasonable assumption is that page table entries are 16 bits wide and therefore the page table occupies two pages or 512 bytes.

   0x0400 being the first 1K of memory). The breakdown of the 8 bytes is inconsequential for our example

'8 bits is inconsequential for our example'

The same way inaccuracies about tech in movies irritate people like Jeremy, the fact that people like Jeremy even care in the first place irritates me. I know he admitted to it being pedantic and not the point, but I can't help but scoff in absolute surprise when I read that fellow programmers apparently pause films whenever a shot features a desktop monitor to make sure that all the elements on the screen make sense.

What the fuck, dude. You're not watching the results of efforts to seem technically correct ( or the results of efforts to portray Facebook -- that would be a 2-hour instructional video on how to use and the history of facebook.com's UI and features. Nor the results of efforts to portray the foundings of Facebook, either -- that would be 2 hours of Mark Zuckerberg and Co. sitting at computers typing code, maybe some business-y and legal paperwork stuff towards the end of the film) .

You're watching the efforts of concocting and creating an elegant story that pieces together elements and scenes and bits of dialogue; the efforts of producing a story that uses genius character development and interaction and conflict and some of the wittiest, fast-paced dialogue I've seen in an film, all to emotionally affect the viewer in some way.

So who gives a shit if IRL Zuckerberg -- oh, for the rest of this post I will differentiate IRL Zuckerberg from tSN Zuckerberg by using those prefixes -- because those are two veeery different people, because tSN isn't a documentary and it's perfectly fine if the studio executives asked for a movie about Facebook and Aaron Sorkin delivered a very witty, fast-paced dialogue-focused story about fleshed-out, 3D characters and their beautifully complicated developments, all meaninglessly attached to the Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook names. -- anyways, who cares if IRL Zuckerberg's intentions weren't as closely tied to women and money (which is an incredibly immature way to see tSN Zuckerberg's intents, btw, I'd say they were more focused on getting recognition, fame, feedback and, subconsciously, getting Erica back. If you pay attention you notice Sorkin made sure to get across the fact that tSN Zuckerberg doesnt care about the women or the money for their own sake, but for the sake of recognition and getting his massively arrogant and pretentious judgments about himself qualified. But I'd have to go into a full review of the film to delve into those elements).

Who gives a shit if saying "LAMP" was off. Who gives a shit if the hacking competition was not realistic.

At the end of the day, it's still a brilliant story and that brilliant story could only be told if the writers were more focused on masterfully adding, removing, and resolving plot elements and character developments than focused on fucking going to hackathons in order to portray them more realistically.

And those scenes still do their intended jobs perfectly . OS scene's intent was to portray and further the idea that tSN Zuckerberg was a precocious CS prodigy, but he has ego problems hindering his ability to interact with other humans regarding that advanced skill. It still does that perfectly, so what if the actual CS is wrong. Hacking competition scene still does it's intention perfectly, which is to portray tSN Facebook and the environment that tSN Zuckerberg was creating as a fun, exciting environment with a lot of potential for growth.

And if Sorkin/Fincher and co. have to spend more time on the scene's additions to the core story and character development than they spend time on technical accuracy, so be it. I'd rather see Sorkin's interpretation of the hero's journey told through the lens of an arrgant, precocious teenager. Not like I'm watching the movie to make sure they accurately portray hackathons in the first place.

And this reminds me of all the people that criticize tSN by saying it's trying to say that creating a tech startup involves a lot of money and parties and sex and drinking -as well as the members of the exploding SV startup coolboy brogrammer "social webapp" hypeshow shitfest that exist because of that massive misinterpretation of the film's intentions. Again, that's not what the film is saying, or is about.

It's about a precocious prodigy who's incredibly arrogant because of his skills. When his arrogance and pretentiousness gets in the way of his human interaction and connectedness, he goes down a road of trials in an effort to get what he had with Erica. At first, he thought recognition (both in terms of social relevance, money, and women) would get him that -- and this is why he thinks mentioning Facebook when he meets up with Erica again in the restaurant will make her attracted to him again, and why he's so hurt when he realizes that's wrong ("WE NEED TO EXPAND!", he aggressively demands, as he thinks the answer to the connection he had with Erica is MORE recognition and relevance). Later, he meets a man who has the energy he thinks he wants and a thousand times more (Sean Parker, who's portrayed as someone who has all the social relevance, sex, and money that Zuckerberg wants), and latches on to him. Later, his conflict and dick behavior with the Winklevi (promising to work on something and then not working on it, even if tSN Facebook was nothing like tSN ConnectU and the tSN lawsuit was bullshit) and tSN Wardo (sort of letting tSN Sean Parker backstab his own best friend and replace him as lead business guy and money hustler in the company, even if Wardo didn't respect the potential FB had the same way Zucks did) further help him develop into realizing his initial goal (social relevance, money, sex) will never get him what he wants (human connection). At the end of the film, we see the protagonist finally notices the error in his ways and become a better person (the significance of "Go home, Sean." and the heavy implication of him being the one who called the cops, and finally him adding Erica as a Friend on Facebook). This all told using brilliantly fast-paced dialogue and fleshed-out characters. And all of that is far more beautiful and significant than whether the fucking hackathon was portrayed correctly.

I'd have to do a scene-by-scene analysis to really get across my point regarding the film's quality and it's character development and how it's sorely misinterpreted by techies and SV brogrammers, which isn't what I came into this thread to post.

So trust my ability to expand on this brief divulgation I left here if you want me to PROVE how good the film really is and how it's not about, or trying to be about, irl Mark Zuckerberg or irl Facebook or an inaccurate representation of the experience of starting a startup.

And if you don't trust that I have that ability, ask yourself this question (meant for blog author and anyone who enjoyed the film "despite it's inaccuracies", which I assume is a lot of people cause the film got raving reviews) : why do you think you enjoyed tSN more than the other "bad Hollywood representations of the tech industry"? Do you think it's really because the film is slightly more accurate than the other films and because Mark uses Emacs? No, there's obviously something about this story that intuitively attracted your inborn senses to appreciate good films (because good films are those appreciated by a lot of people, by tautological definition), even if you don't understand that intuitive attraction.

This was the first film that was able to convey a non trivial mathematical point to me simply by having viewed it.

The idea of assigning ELO ratings to girls' attractiveness based on a set of 1 to 1 comparisons, rather than taking an average of multiple 1 to 10 ratings gives a much better sense of their relative attractiveness.