
Interview with Ed McManus, Technical Advisor for HBO’s Silicon Valley [audio] - gibbiv
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silicon-valley-on-hbo-ed-mcmanus/
======
henrik_w
Interesting story on the making of Silicon Valley (the show) from the New
Yorker: [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-
va...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-
silicon-valley)

~~~
novia
_“Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told
me. “They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re
mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will
never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it
kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he
was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be,
because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice
for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw
him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says
‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and
instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like,
Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big
deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants
a picture with.”_

This scenario cracked me up. It's difficult for me to mentally separate TJ
Miller from his character, Erlich. I'm imagining this playing out on the show,
with Erlich Bachman paying a woman to pretend that she didn't know who Musk
was, all so he could somehow build up hype for Pied Piper.

~~~
ithought
I love TJ Miller and particularly liked what he did at the Techcrunch awards.
But that's a silly anecdote.

If you didn't know who Elon Musk was years before 2014, and your proud of
being in some mindless film, I can't take you serious as a critic of culture.
What do people pay attention too?

It's fine to be dismissive and sarcastic to people who deserve it but you
can't just wantonly dismiss everyone without facts when you apparently spend
most of your time mesmerized by pop culture, sports etc.

~~~
novia
I interpreted the anecdote a little differently. It seemed like TJ Miller was
acknowledging that the woman definitely should have preferred to have a
picture with Elon Musk, but for some reason there are many people who are more
interested in entertainment than in anything Elon Musk is working on. I think
he name dropped Yogi Bear 3D to highlight how ridiculous the celebrity worship
is, not because he was proud of being in the mindless film.

As for him not immediately recognizing Musk at the party, I was thinking Musk
might have looked a bit different from his photos when seen in real life. By
the time the woman handed Musk the camera, Miller had already figured out that
the person he was talking to was a very big deal.

~~~
mavelikara
"It's kind of weird--the values. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine. I'm
probably worth a lot more than Jonas Salk. That's pretty weird. I didn't cure
polio; this guy did. I walk into a bar and a whole bunch of people know who I
am. Jonas Salk probably can't even get laid. Now, figure that out."

\- Billy Joel

~~~
novia
I looked up a picture of Jonas Salk, and I can guarantee you that man got
laid.

------
gibbiv
I think this is a story about working really fucking hard and then naturally
having cool things come your way as a payoff. What you want might be 4 years
away, but opportunities you don't think a lot about like this can be yet
another motivator.

~~~
mattmanser
Judging by the outcome, he's done a really great job on Silicon Valley.

But you sound like you're falling for Survivorship bias.

~~~
mysterydip
Agreed. There are plenty of people who work hard their entire career and don't
get any kind of windfall. Of course there's a lifetime of choices and
circumstances spicing up the mix so who can say how much is one vs the other,
but the point is they are out there.

I think the underlying point trying to be made though can be summed up by this
quote from a movie clip I saw channel surfing in a hotel the other day: "You
want the job after this job, but you need this job first."

~~~
trevyn
I think this is the problem: People _expecting_ windfalls: "a large amount of
money that is won or received _unexpectedly_."

There exists a reasonably reliable path to success for most people:

\- Look at the people whom you consider to be successful who got there mostly
through hard work.

\- Do what they did, think about the things they think about, obsess over it.
Let it consume you. You won't be good at first, but keep doing it. It will
take time.

\- Don't think you know better.

\- Try not to spend too much time or too many brain cycles on recreation or
non-work-focused friendships/relationships. (If you choose to do this, that's
fine, but recognize that it is a _choice_ that will define your future.)

That's about it.

~~~
lotsofpulp
That might work, assuming you grew up with a decent education, a stable home,
in a safe environment with a supporting network of friends/family.
Unfortunately, this does not apply for most people.

~~~
trevyn
I disagree. The thought that you have unique roadblocks is, in itself,
disempowering.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I agree with idea that one should not focus on what is holding them back, but
I was responding to the claim that there is a reasonably reliable path to
success for most people, in the sense that success conveys "a windfall" or
otherwise making you financially secure and independent.

However, there is no reliable path for a woman in Saudi Arabia, or poor child
with drug addict parents, or the family of the lowest caste in India who have
no assets. Surely they can help little by little and better their future
generations, but they will by and large be gone before anyone gets a
"windfall".

------
11thEarlOfMar
True story: My HR manager came in and said he finally understood what Scrum
was after watching Silicon Valley.

~~~
rusk
That's "Cynical Scrum" i.e. "Scrum in the real world" \- it's not supposed to
be like this but as presented in SV is a common degenerate pattern.

~~~
thomastjeffery
A degenerate pattern can still be a great reference if you have already heard
the theory. It's like reading bad code to understand a paradigm.

------
SippinLean
I was hoping they would speak to the inspiration for Richard's "decentralized
internet" plot this season; if it was Ethereum or something similar.

~~~
adamnemecek
More like urbit.

~~~
laretluval
Agreed. I'm wondering if Richard will get mixed up in far right politics in
this season.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
They can't do that _after_ Peter Gregory died ;-).

~~~
dmix
Libertarian != far right

Unless I'm missing something about Peter's character that indicated he was far
right?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
So without hitting real-world politics _too_ much...

The idea is that Gregory was based on Thiel. Peter Thiel _did_ in fact join
the Trump campaign and administration as an advisor. The Trump campaign _was_
, in fact, far-right -- which is part of why it took the Republican Party by
surprise in the primaries.

However, Gregory died when his actor did (of blessed memory).

I think that a good _Silicon Valley_ storyline on this subject would have been
a great use of the character they had. I don't want them to introduce a
replacement character to hit a plot-point, after going through the trouble of
mourning Peter Gregory and replacing him with Laurie Bream. For me it would
cross the line from affectionate parody into, in a sense, appropriation of
Thiel's life.

The other issue would be that the show has no plans of actually giving us
hard-biting political satire. That's not its thing in the first place.

Maybe if they picked it up with Laurie delving into far-libertarian and far-
right politics _as_ a part of inheriting Raviga Capital from Gregory? Maybe he
left some will saying whoever runs the company has to get involved somehow
under certain conditions? Then they can at least make the comedy of this all-
business-all-the-time character Laurie seeing how Gregory's weird hobbies play
out. Hmmm... and it could turn out Russ Henneman was involved in it, too, so
she'd have to swallow her hatred for the guy and do weird stuff alongside him,
lest other Raviga partners accuse her of failing to carry out Gregory's
wishes.

~~~
blfr
_The Trump campaign was, in fact, far-right_

The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-
anything. Trump's a mainstream American politician by definition.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>The winning candidate in at least a semi-functional democracy cannot be far-
anything

The Weimar Republic in 1933 seems like a pretty good counterexample to that.
Incidentally, it shortly stopped being the Weimar Republic and became known
instead as the Third Reich.

~~~
dmix
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-much-for-donald-
mussolini-14...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-much-for-donald-
mussolini-1490653551)

Having read a number of books on WW2 era Germany, attempting to compare the
politically chaotic post-WW1 Germany, including the economic crisis, deep
nationalist tensions, and the daily murders and gang fights in the streets of
the capitals of Germany between the fringe nationalist socialists vs communist
parties compared to America in 2016/17 is incredibly dubious.

And even ignoring the numerous lack of comparisons to the political
environments _before_ the elections and the differences of the subsequent
assent to power that Hitler took compared to Trump, the differences _after_
the elections are countless. Most notably how the courts (via a republican
judge) quickly shut down the dubious middle east immigration ban - probably
the only far-right policy Trump managed to push into reality - which
demonstrated that checks and balances are far from being sequestered. An
essential 101 indicator of proto-fascism.

This type of fear mongering is becoming less and less persuasive. Even though
there are real and significant problems with the current administration it's
not helping anyone to blow them out of context and pretend you're this
vanguard against some modern version of Nazi germany. That's more likely to
lose you support than help you achieve anything.

If anything the anyone-who-supports-Trump-is-a-Nazi brigade did more to help
elect him than prevent it. I've read a number of profiles of people who voted
for Trump and who now regret it who said they voted for him merely as an
affront to what the opposition represents, rather than actually supporting
him. Peter Thiel seems to fit into this category.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I wasn't making that comparison. I was pointing out that getting elected
doesn't make a candidate centrist, especially when that candidate doesn't win
a majority. Hitler's NSDAP got about a third of the seats in the Reichstag to
put him at the head of government in 1933. Trump got about 46% of the votes in
the US Presidential election of 2016. Neither of these needed to be
_mainstream_ to win, even though Hitler is a great deal further right than
Trump.

The error is to claim that Hitler became "center-right" or "middle of the
road" upon becoming Reichskanzler. The center didn't move ultra-rightward
(remember: the Communists _also_ did well in that election), an ultra-rightist
happened to win the plurality in a heavily polarized election.

~~~
dmix
What policy has Trump enacted that demonstrates the current administration is
(functionally) far right? The difference being of course that it went beyond
rhetoric of a political (marketing) campaign and beyond the checks-and-
balances of the US government?

If it is purely a matter of some random emotional tweet Trump made or some
journalist filling in the gaps between what Steve Bannon may or may have not
meant when he said x, then I will remain unconvinced that the US government is
at any risk of being comparable to 1930-40s era fascist regimes.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>What policy has Trump enacted that demonstrates the current administration is
(functionally) far right?

There's Betsy DeVos' new move to eliminate Income-Based Repayment plans for
student loans, and many state-level bills to criminalize any protests that
interfere with economically significant business (including labor pickets).
And of course Jeff Sessions trying to restart the Drug War when basically
everyone else just wants it ended. Remember, "far-right" doesn't just mean
"fascist". It also just means "extremely capitalist" or "authoritarian in a
conservative or capitalist cause".

The American Right has actually spent a lot of political capital treating
Trump as _outside_ movement conservatism, as an _aberrant_ far-right movement
_hijacking_ the Republican Party. They still have some of the William Buckley
spirit to them, in which the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan get purged
rather than integrated.

------
lllllll
Really funny "interview" of the actress/actors @GoogleHQ
[https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY](https://youtu.be/QOXup8chEoY)

~~~
Geee
Do you honestly find that funny? I thought that was quite the opposite. In
fact, the interview could be the definition of "not funny".

------
minimaxir
A television first was McManus's use of a real GitHub account/repo on the
show, which also accepted pull requests after it aired:
[https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai](https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-
ai)

------
apeace
> I remember watching Season 1 and Season 2, and thinking, why are these guys
> building their own servers? It doesn’t make sense. No one in this sort of
> world does this.

I didn't react that way. I imagined that their workload was extremely CPU-
intensive, and (due to their incredible compression) did not require a
datacenter-grade network connection. So it makes financial sense to invest in
your own hardware. Amortizing the cost of that hardware, a company like that
could be saving tens of thousands per month versus AWS.

But of course, you need an expert "systems architect" like Gilfoyle on your
team ;)

Also, the scene at the end of season 2 where all the servers catch on fire was
an incredibly memorable moment. I got emotional, being so invested in the
characters and having my own memories of "putting out fires", and it was
cathartic to see that team succeed and win the day.

~~~
skrebbel
Umm, it was explained well in the story. Hooli was supposedly a major customer
of all cloud providers and Gavin had pressured them to not sell VMs to Pied
Piper. So they had no other option.

The only hole in that story is that there's always too many hosting providers,
you can't pressure all of them. But hey, it's a TV show.

~~~
eanzenberg
Also.. why would you place your proprietary "winning" algorithm on a machine
owned by your biggest competitor?

~~~
j_s
This is a real concern for FPGA programmers considering Amazon EC2 F1.

------
salemh
Fun interview! Remember in the future to ask your guests to get closer to the
mic. Perhaps their was noone listening to audio, but he got pretty soft ~15:00
and on.

In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating
the microphone."

~~~
CharlesW
> _Perhaps their was noone listening to audio, but he got pretty soft ~15:00
> and on._

In case Craig or the person responsible for the audio sees this, you can help
ameliorate this by tuning the dynamic range compression. Because the signal-
to-noise ratio decreases the further you get from the mic, the recording may
also benefit from some de-verbing and noise reduction first. (If you don't
have good tools for this, ping me and I'll be glad to help.)

> _In the immortal words of Joe Rogan during his podcast, "pretend your eating
> the microphone."_

Plosives become a problem if you get too close. If this inspires anyone to get
on the mic, good general guidance is "put your lips one to two fists away from
the mic".

------
systemtest
I really hope they bring back HBO in my country so I can start watching this
show. I hear it's awesome.

~~~
thomastjeffery
This is how fighting piracy is illegitimate. They should put their efforts
(funding) into _competing_ with piracy, not litigating it.

------
bko
Wish he was in charge of some of the on screen code. One of the most cringe
worthy screenshots from the show: Richard using a Sony running osx writing
Python in a Java file with in a variable with font

[https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg](https://i.redd.it/qr65kfjahpty.jpg)

~~~
bengoodger
It takes special effort to configure a variable width font in a code editor. I
have to wonder if they do this to troll observant people like you :p

~~~
woobar
It takes zero effort in IntelliJ (pictured above).

I remember reading a suggestion about proportional fonts in a discussion on HN
about code editor preferences. Switched to them several years ago and never
looked back.

~~~
thomastjeffery
I can see the appeal, so long as characters like l1I are distinguishable, and
indentation was done well.

------
svantana
As someone with PhD studies in Information Theory, I always found the whole
"compression breakthrough" very far-fetched, I wish they had chosen another
technical basis for the show. Never mind that compression of any and all files
is impossible (see pigeon hole principle) -- while it could theoretically be
done for "normal" files (video etc), it's extremely unlikely that a black-box
method such as theirs (as in, they don't have any prior knowledge of the
files' structures) would beat out white-box methods (such as video
compression) by such a large margin.

It's a bit like writing a best selling novel in a language you don't speak:
theoretically possible, but just so far from normal reality that it's hard to
suspend disbelief.

~~~
eduren
While I agree that the compression breakthrough doesn't make much sense
realistically, I think it makes a great premise for the show.

The plot needs Richard to actually invent something revolutionary (and thus
fail to get it off the ground time and time again), that is also simple enough
for the audience to understand. Any algorithmic breakthrough that is real-
world feasible would either need too much vague handwaving from the writing
("A brand new way to compute data!"). Or be close enough to reality that
neither the layman nor the expert is happy (imagine the show having to explain
why the big-O of Richard's new magic sorting algorithm matters).

Compression is the logical choice because it's:

1) easier to explain why fitting more data into less space is significant
(laymen already have some rough visualization of compression),

2) lends itself to being "black boxed" in the plot ("Look at all the companies
we can build with this one breakthrough"),

3) just barely feasible enough that if some SV nerd actually did make the
discovery, then events would play out roughly the same as the show depicts
(winning techcrunch, getting funding)

~~~
monocasa
And I'd add that most compressors make a lot of assumptions about the general
case that reduce that real world compression ratio when compared to
theoretical maximums. That's why stuff like kkrunchy can't be beat in their
domains (first and last rule of optimization, "know your data inside and
out!").

If someone was to stumble upon a heuristic that gives you noticeable gains for
general compression as well, it could be close to as game changing as
Richard's stuff is. Obviously we have a good handle on "theoretical maximums"
thanks to information theory and so that end of the plot is BS, but looking
past that embellishment the show isn't outside the realm of possibility.

