Teenager in the US at the same time.

Yep, this is exactly what we did with our 8-bit machines and modems at the time.

We were global even then.

EDIT- LOL. I guess the HN downvoters have proof this isn't what we were doing back then???

Apparently this happened many times in many places. You can't fire that many people. Who would replace them?

It's not like people just stop working after they're fired. You can just hire replacements from the people who were fired at other schools. Everybody wins!

Their peers will learn that 'screw ups' on whatever arbitrary scale, which are as common as human, will be punished by loss of employment, plus all of the negatives that status carries. This will teach them to become militantly risk averse and, by proxy, utterly afraid of and resistant to change. Meanwhile, the folks you let go, the ones who truly learned the lesson, end up using their newfound experience to improve processes elsewhere.

OK. Sure.

Downvote away. And this will keep happening. Grats on that.

Keep fighting with reality, let's see how that goes.

Even the most careful, thoughtful, and professional person will screw up at their job sometimes. It's only if the same screwup is made twice that jobs should be on the line.

The first time is a learning experience, the second time is a demonstration of incompetence.

If you can all your competent people the first time they make a mistake, suddenly you won't have competent people anymore in your misguided quest for perfection.

I wonder if the same applies to say... Google. That they're kept afloat by less than 1% of their users.

I'd counter that if you watch the films on this list and don't understand why Lee included them, you're not likely to be a good film director.

But this is a list for aspiring directors - If I'm currently aspiring to be a better director, then some level of explanation would be beneficial to me

It's a list for aspiring directors who are part of the NYU Graduate Film program http://tisch.nyu.edu/grad-film/courses ... and they get three years of context.

You could ask for context from any university reading list... http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/offerholders/... ...they're of passing interest to people looking to be 'well read', but are provided mainly for the students, and the context is the course.

I think that was my point. As a reader of this list, it is of passing interest. Take the course this list accompanies and I will receive much better context and substantially improve my understanding of their inclusion.

Well, no. You stated it was list of films someone enjoyed.

But that's not what it is. It's a list that one of the top living film directors on the planet thinks that directing students at one of the leading film schools in the world should watch.

That's a different thing entirely.

Each one of these films has things directors can learn from by just watching them. Film being a visual medium and all.

Sure, some lectures can provide context, but the movies themselves are the actual content.

Fair point. I'm sure he did enjoy them as well as their content being of notable worth.

I very much doubt the list, and the act of watching them is the whole lesson Spike is trying to impart. The lecture series would complete the educational message.

Not really. If these movies don't stimulate your directorial imagination, a few words aren't going to help.

You could say that. But the message—arguably—would be much better received with information.

Better received by who? For film students, the films themselves are the information needed.

The interruption of art is deceptive with nuance and esoteric means. Simply reading Shakespeare doesn't provide someone with understand of the proposed wisdom behind the text.

No French cinema? Breathless is on there, as well as 400 Blows and Day For Night.

Lee picked it because it's exceptionally good cinema.

Do we know this? Perhaps there's one scene that stands out; or he feels that the visuals are perfect but the story is terrible; or it's an example of how you can make great movies but still be hated; or ...

They certainly would have understood corporate legal status, and done so much better than nearly everyone who comments on it today.

And honestly I don't think it would take most of them very long to grasp the implications of mobile phones, the internet, and encryption. The Founders whose names immediately come to mind were some very intelligent and mentally agile people. While our technology may be incomprehensible to them, the social frameworks into which it fits is not.

"I'm talking about the period between its invention and the development of cinema."

Right. Which should absolutely scream to an entrepreneurial crowd there's an immense opportunity here to develop the VR version of cinema.

The time you want to get into an emerging technology is precisely this stage. The groundwork has been laid but the direction is not yet set.

That's the puzzling part to me, that HN isn't all over that aspect of things.

I take a less optimistic view on it - we're in this limbo state where the technology exists but no good application has been found or developed.

Now, it can either achieve its Eureka moment and blossom into something really useful.

Or it can continue to wallow in obscurity finding at most a few niche applications.

Not every technology that is invented is destined to become world-changing like cinema or antibiotics. There are plenty that become the Betamaxes and Segways of history. At one point the Segway was also heralded to be the Second Coming of transportation.

Part of the problem is that the groundwork has been laid but nobody has the slightest idea which direction to go in. To be clear, it's not that we have a wealth of choices ahead of us and can't choose which one, it's that we have so few choices ahead of us that look genuinely promising.

- VR workspaces/entertainment spaces (see: 50 foot theater screen in your living room!)

- Cockpit-style VR gaming experiences (flying, driving, etc)

- Room-sized VR gaming experiences ("experiences" might be overselling a bit, all are tech demos where the room-size motion tracking feels more like a bug than a feature)

- ???

It seems pretty likely at this point that #2 (cockpit style gaming) is likely to succeed, at least moderately, but all of these other things are being tried but just aren't that interesting.

I don't think any Eureka moment is needed to find high value applications to implement. Just nobody has executed well enough yet.

Even if you think conservatively and consider only vr-ifying apps we already have: For VR, some types of games (Elite Dangerous, Until Dawn), applications directly related to design of real physical environments and objects. For AR there many obvious industrial applications even with simple overlaid indicators, eg in inspection and manufacturing. In AR games there are also many quite obvious concepts that should work (think eg party games or outdoor games) and you would be way off to say "we haven't come up with any worthwhile games" at this point.

This is what I was getting at. It's like people are waiting around for someone to do it. Aren't we the ones that are supposed to be doing it?

I'm much more interested in an AI that optimizes audience stats than one that optimizes in-game stats.

I predict a twitch stream of an AI playing various games. Watching it fail and succeed on various games and situations would be very interesting. Maybe a couple devs to do a voice-over.

If you haven't seen it already, you might be interested in subreddit simulator https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator which is pretty much that but for upvotes on reddit. It's at most kind of amusing at times for now

Vaguely related is the Salton Sea in southern California. It's been a large lake in the geological past, but it most recently filled in due to some bad irrigation planning in 1905. It filled up in about 2 years.