News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about HBO's Silicon Valley? by gkoberger on Sunday April 06, 2014 @11:45PM (#7544527)
I actually liked Betas, which is Amazon's Silicon-Valley-based show. I hated it at first (it made me cringe a lot), but then I realized it wasn't that the writing was bad. Rather, it was so spot on, it made me cringe because I know people (and companies) like that.

Once I realized they were in on the joke, I liked it a lot better.

They clearly knew SV culture really well. There were a lot of great references, and many scenes were clearly shot in SF.

http://www.amazon.com/Pilot-HD/dp/B00CDBX1PA

Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about HBO's Silicon Valley? by yzzxy on Monday April 07, 2014 @01:52AM (#7544850)
I felt beyond the specific area, it was extremely good at capturing the weird zeitgeist of millennial culture - not the living-with-parents-unemployed-loser stereotype, but the confused generation of people who grew up along with the internet. I can't really think of a specific instance of this, but the characters on the startup team had very specific, subtle character traits that I associate with people I know who are 20-30 right now.
Re:Ask HN: How do you feel about HBO's Silicon Valley? by swanson on Monday April 07, 2014 @11:26AM (#7547011)
Maybe it's just the HBO polish but Silicon Valley seemed to be better overall than Betas. At least in the pilot, I had empathy for Richard (the lead in SV) - Tre (the lead in Betas) always seemed like kind of a dick to me. The self-aware parody seemed just a bit too high in Betas; so far, SV as much more restraint.

Once SV fleshes out the supporting characters and the main arc, it will be interesting to see if my opinions are still the same.