I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.

Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.

I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.

The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which

I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.

The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.

I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.

I'm a huge fan of buckaroo banzai but there is like one scene with a computer in it.

Von Neumann was a hacker since his childhood, not just after computers were invented. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for being a hacker 340 years before computers were invented.

"Sneakers" and "War Games" were my favorites, because they were so realistic and thought-provoking. "Tron" was my favorite from the "magic disguised as computers" category.

I often tell people that if they want to see a fun movie, see Hackers, but if they want to know what hacking is like, see Sneakers.

... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.

I tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside.

All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.

Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".

I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.

I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.

Very much agree, many people I've talked to about Hackers don't seem to get this "it shows what it feels like", and get hung up on interpreting details literally, like the favorite complaint "screens don't project a sharp image onto the wall behind you".

I also like Swordfish for this. Him dancing at the keyboard while programming is very much what it feels like when you have a good hack going.

I suppose it all depends on when you grew up and got into computers. I always thought Hackers feeling/vibe was kind of clowny and not representative of computer enthusiasts and hackers. The hackers I grew up exposed to (mid-80s, early-90s) were not cool kids riding rollerblades with wacky hairstyles saying "duuuuuude" and listening to techno. Wargames and Sneakers were a lot closer to the actual vibe. Normal clothes, quiet, careful and a little paranoid, typing into monochrome terminals, and so on. Maybe the scene changed later, but it just seemed like Hackers was too focused on coolifying and popularizing an activity that wasn't really cool or popular.

I do suspect that the scene changed by the mid-90s. Although, it might also be that the American scene was a bit different from the European scene? It's worth mentioning that the movie Hackers was made by a Brit, and perhaps his vision was more influenced by the European scene at the time, despite the movie being based in NYC?

I came of age during the height of the demo scene in Europe, and enjoyed the pre-warez offshoot where pirated games always included exciting intros/cracktros. So hackers making electronic music and cool visuals was the baseline that every noob had to meet to be "elite". Of course in real life we still all wore "normal clothes" and lived careful, quiet lives - but the dream was to be these rockstars that the movie Hackers turned to 11.

For reference, I grew up and got into computers in the mid-80s. Yes, Sneakers and War Games was much more like what my reality was, though even more boring and low key. But, I'm still going to go with Hackers being much more like what I felt like inside. :-)

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I literally dance at my stand-up desk when I'm deep in some gnarly code. My co-workers make fun of me for it, but also, when I stop dancing they ask me what I figured out.

The scene where Zero Cool's hacking the TV station, and the LED clock is ticking off minutes every few seconds, is the best and most accurate illustration of "flow" I've ever witnessed.

> I tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside.

I'm going to borrow this, it will make many future discussions much shorter than with my current approach of floundering around this sentiment.

Sneakers really doesn't get enough love, probably because I'm not sure people knew what to make of it. Names so big the billboards couldn't hold them all, but doing things with computers that didn't make sense to your average viewer. So punk, even if half of them are in suits. I love Hackers, but it's like a generational sequel to Sneakers.

I re-watched Sneakers a few months ago based on comments like this. I didn't really enjoy it when it came out and I didn't enjoy it this time either. Not sure why it doesn't work for me.

Truly sorry to hear that. I guess not everything can be for everyone. But maybe there are some movies out there you do enjoy more!

+1 for Sneakers. I'd add the original "The Italian Job" to the list as well.

The bus at the end, right?

What about War Games ?!

War Games resonated with me a lot. That montage of him trying to find the password was great. Looking things up the library, sadistic microfiche, news papers and getting BUZZ ERROR, BUZZ ERROR, BUZZ ERROR over and over. If you'd like to fill your days with that, programming is for you.

Only if your corn is raw.

I take pills and cook the corn.

Not a movie but have you seen Mr. Robot?

Fight Club is the same plot in movie form right? Unreliable narrator, secret society (starting with "F") of anarcho-capitalists bent on bringing down Big Credit, cheesy hacking lingo etc?

The creator of the show doesn't hide that Fight Club is an influence.

The hacker stuff is pretty legit though. Characters use Termux on their phones, Kali Linux, python scripts etc

The first season of mr. robot borrows a hell of a lot from fight club, but it diverges as the show goes on. One of the rare shows that sticks the landing.

Mr. Robot has a lot of obvious nods to its influences, and that's fine. I loved the series, hated the ending thouugh.

I notice no on has mentioned "The Net". With good reason, if I remember correctly.

Just hold down the control key when you click the Pi symbol on this website and BAM instantly you've hacked the FBI database.

It's a great "cheesy movie night" movie. It's aged terribly, Angela is a 1337 hacker because she orders pizza ONLINE!

Sneakers was the better movie. More accurate, better actors, better plot.

Antitrust was fun. Not good, but fun.

What about "Three Days of the Condor"?

I reco the German "23" (not that horrible American flick).

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

you didn't love swordfish?

I hated it. IIRC, there is this part where the main character is trying to assemble a virus, shouting "compile, compile, please compile... YES!".

I wasn't convinced about this hacker having problems to compile a program...

OR

There is another possible explanation but I have to check dates since I think the movie was released way before the first version of Rust!!!

Vulnerability discovery and programming are different skill sets. I've seen terrible code written by talented security researchers.

I liked one bit of that movie, when Hugh Jackman is pacing around muttering "I'm too old for this shit" and finishing a bottle of wine during a coding session.

That "building the worm" scene has got to be my favorite depiction of software development of all time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY

I mean, it got the "% of spoken words that are profanities" part correct.

Why did I just watch that again. I knew it was going to be pure cringe, but I clicked it anyway.

lol -- brilliant. Notice he was using Github Copilot -- that's what all those green blocks are. He' just got the 31337 CLI version.

Oh, man. I forgot how much I hated that particular scene. It was almost as bad as the "60-second crack" scene.

I hated it, personally. The special effects were so bad that I lost my suspension of disbelief; and the ending where John Travolta (it was a long time ago) was part of a super-secret organization that was so secret that no one knew about it nearly made me laugh.

That was not a bad movie. Prior to the movie, I read about the Carnivore and the Magic Lantern program. Then heard them mentioned in the movie, and thought "Ah! Nice".

My dad always used the ball bearing explosion scene to demonstrate his surround sound system to guests :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiHZWeeoEUg

The only good part was Halle Berry...

'23' is a great movie. 'Who am I' deserves a mention too.

Do you have any tips for finding 23 with English subtitles? Obviously I'm trying Google (and excluding "Number 23" and attempting to exclude "23 blast" (Google is treating my minus as a plus when excluding both)).

That movie is on Archive.org, so maybe you could try to look for subs for those specific titles.

https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-...

https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_-

The second one says part II but is the complete movie.

I always forget about archive.org, thanks!

Just posted a Sneakers story yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858840

I still remember being awestruck by Sneakers. It made a lifelong impression on 13(14?) year old me. I'll never forget watching it for the first time.

What about The Core where he has to "hack the planet," and is able to do so because "his Kung Fu is strong."

> "his Kung Fu is strong."

Was this a reference to Mitnick's phone calls to Tsutomo?

"Antitrust" was a fun movie as well.