[mportela]

This movie is the reason why I became a programmer.

I watched it when I was starting in high school and got inspired by it. Then, I literally googled "How to become a hacker" and found this incredible page by Eric Raymond [0], which I used as an mentor throughout my high school and college years. I ended up developing the recommended hard skills (learning programming, UNIX, open source culture...) but also the "points of style" (martial arts, science fiction, meditation, music). In fact, when I was trying to search for a hacker community online, I stumbled upon Hacker News and haven't left ever since!

As expected, I didn't become a black hat hacker as in the movie but, to this day, I still believe this movie changed the course of my life.

[0] https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

[crsv]

Same. This film made me believe that it was possible to be cool and find a social group that were all in to tech. I grew up in a really rural area so this revelation of possibility, whether actually practical or not, heavily influenced my trajectory in life and in tech. It’s still one of my most sentimentally favorite movies of all time.

[rashthedude]

You and I share the same exact journey as to how we got there. I've had random conversations over the years with other developers in my age bracket and many of them cite Hackers as the reason that piqued their interest in computing. What this movie lacks in authenticity it makes up for it with an amazing cast, good score and lots of fun.

[anthk]

I can't stand the ESR view on hacker-supposed media, music or martial arts. And I say this as a former Shotokan branch graded Karate alumnus. On music I can shift from psychodelic rock to Tangerine Dream to hard rock to electronic avant-garde jazz.

On sci-fi, OFC I like it, but the mistery genre it's really fine as it's pretty close to debugging a problem but with real life issues.

On tech, Unix philosophy and Emacs are polarly opposite. Unix it's focused on multiprocessing parallel tools doing the work for you (preferabily scripted) where the less code your run, the better; while Emacs wants you to reuse Elisp functions everywhere, with an always-loaded philosophy and not lightweight at all if you have tons of modules in memory. Also, Emacs it's single threaded, so Emacs is very prone to be I/O locked, while Unix will spawn background subprocesses like nothing not affecting your main task at all.

[bradbeam]

Likewise.

The exposure to the hackers manifesto was inspiring.

[DustinBrett]

Even the word manifesto was new to me and got me interested in what that was about.

[ethbr1]

Right? "Manifesto"?

Obviously commie bullshit.

(Oh, 90s. And when you've got Wendell Pierce and Marc Anthony as your throw-away characters, props!)

[throw1234651234]

Which martial art? Also, what are your top 3-5 books?

E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep

[secretforest]

Good old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it was that good, and years later read it again and got more from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness", how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.

[DustinBrett]

Same story for me, Hackers was great inspiration and I still watch it often. Hack the Planet!

[roughly]

Same - this is one of those generational films for certain kids of a certain era.