Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus (2021)
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The 'Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus' is a detailed online course plan that explores the tech industry and culture through the lens of the TV show 'Halt and Catch Fire', sparking a supportive and nostalgic discussion among HN users.
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- 01Story posted
Aug 24, 2025 at 4:19 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Aug 24, 2025 at 6:15 PM EDT
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70 comments in Day 1
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Aug 26, 2025 at 10:40 PM EDT
3 months ago
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There really wasn’t any need for half the dumb shit they did in that show. It didn’t add to the drama, it just made the whole thing feel completely fake. Which is impressive considering they’re writing largely about real world computing history.
And don’t get me started on the characters themselves. I think I liked maybe half the cast. The others made me cringe every time they were on screen.
It’s such a pity because they could have just as successful show if they refined it a little.
What are some tech shows that you like, or dramas, for context?
Mr Robot was a different beast because that was literally about criminal and hacker culture. So you’d expect a little action in that regard.
To put it another way: you have shows that have strong enough writers where they don’t need gimmicks to keep your attention. And you have shows that are intentionally about the gimmicks. Then you have shows that aren’t about the gimmicks but the writers don’t have enough confidence in their work to avoid putting them in anyway.
Shows like The West Wing, House of Cards etc aren’t about gimmicks and don’t need them.
Shows like Stargate are about the gimmicks. And that’s ok too because you know it’s meant to be silly drama.
But shows like HCF feel like they should be executed like HoCs, yet they’re written like Mr Robot, Stargate, etc. So it’s very jarring to watch every time another gimmick gets thrown in. Maybe I expected too much from that show? But it just felt like they didn’t have any confidence in people’s attention spans.
Can you elaborate a bit about the gimmick(s) in Halt and Catch Fire? I think it's a drama, so there are human concerns and interactions, but that's like, what tv shows are? I don't know what you mean specifically.
> Shows like The West Wing, House of Cards etc aren’t about gimmicks and don’t need them.
The West Wing is statist propaganda for liberals. House of Cards is statist propaganda for neocons.
> Shows like Mr Robot are about the gimmicks. And that’s ok too because you know it’s meant to be silly drama.
I actually really appreciate that every hack shown on Mr. Robot had a real world POC and used actually existing tools and techniques. The storyline is hokum and gives hackers a bad name, but black hats are kinda supposed to have a bad name. Elliot is kinda gray hat, but he definitely violated CFAA multiple times and would probably be dead or in jail irl.
So much of the “drama” in that show was completely redundant and over the top too.
Things like setting the truck alight for no reason other than “I’m so emo”. Affairs that are talked about for one episode then forgotten about. Suicides that didn’t touch on mental illness and instead focused on an open source (you could have done that without the death) and thus that death felt completely redundant, mishandled, and there just for another cliffhanger.
I get the need to make things exciting. But the drama didn’t feel earned. It felt shoehorned because some executive was worried people might get bored about a show which uses the computer industry as a backdrop.
It’s a kind of myth making, I suppose. Folks want to feel like their own lives are meaningful and exciting, and so they seek out content that is familiar and validates their life choices. Lots of folks in the tech industry are passionate. Others want to want things, but their get up and go got up and went. Halt and Catch Fire is a kind of wish fulfillment for tech folks, but there aren’t unqualified happy endings in the show, so the successes of the characters do feel largely earned by them, even if the dramatic hurdles do seem somewhat overblown or unrealistic. I’ve known enough folks in the industry to see all kinds, from very stable geniuses to shameless sycophants. Most are just regular people, but they rarely make for good television, so regular folks are the side characters or spouses. The viewers are here for drama, not realism.
(I think it's a solid B-tier prestige series; I don't hate it).
HCF created drama in places it wasn’t earned. And did so just so that episodes could have cliffhangers.
Think of it like a shower scene in a movie. More often than not, it has literally no relevance to the movie. It doesn’t further the plot. It’s not even part of the story. It’s just there so that it can be used as a clip in the movie trailer.
Well HCF was full of stuff that, admittedly wasn’t there for trailers (or at least I don’t think they were), but they also added nothing to the story. They were just there to artificially add some drama. But that drama wasn’t earned.
For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death. Instead you ended up with interesting plot themes being overshadowed by this one lazy plot device.
The show was absolutely full of stuff like that. Things that were completely out of the blue and if it made it to the cutting room flow then the show would have flowed just the same without it.
Depends on the movie. Once I studied films and film theory (just in undergrad, not trying to claim any special authority on the subject), I appreciated more how these interstitial scenes are meaningful. It's all part of mise-en-scène. It lets the scenes feel alive and lived in, and not just a 2D image flying by at 24ish FPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise-en-sc%C3%A8ne
> Mise-en-scène has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term". Ed Sikov has attempted to define it as "the totality of expressive content within the image". It has been criticized for its focus on the dramatic design aspects rather than the plot itself, as those who utilize mise-en-scène tend to look at what is "put before the camera" rather than the story. The use of mise-en-scène is significant as it allows the director to convey messages to the viewer through what is placed in the scene, not just the scripted lines spoken and acted in the scene. Mise-en-scène allows the director to not only convey their message but also implement their aesthetic; as such, each director has their own unique mise-en-scène. Mise-en-scène refers to everything in front of the camera, including the set design, lighting, and actors, and the ultimate way that this influences how the scene comes together for the audience.
If you've seen many horror movies, you know to expect a jump scare, but because the actual original scare in a shower scene[0] is so played-out by now, audiences expect it, so it has to be subverted.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_(1960_film)
Edit:
Just was going over the thread again to see if there were any new posts, and I glanced over your comment again and wanted to reply to this point, because I agree with you and I think I didn't acknowledge this, and it really brings your point upthread home and validates it.
> For example, the suicide was very poorly handled.
I completely forgot about that part. Good call-out. Mental health issues and self-harm, especially imagery of it, are not plot devices to be used carelessly. Representation matters, and yet it's so hard to do well because those being represented need understanding also, not just seeing triggering stuff on TV and movies. That definitely didn't feel earned, and it didn't land well. I don't know how else it was supposed to feel though, considering the seriousness of the issue. It's a hard topic to put to film. Thanks for mentioning it.
It's just the cat
But they don't have a cat...
It’s dramatic. But it doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good drama.
If they’d replaced the backdrop with any other normal drama setting and almost nobody on here would watch it because they’d think the show was stupid.
Stuff like setting fire to a truck, and then never talking about it again afterwards, has absolutely nothing to do with tech nor stories about people. It’s just a dumb gimmick thrown in because the network doesn’t believe their audience has enough of an attention span to watch the show otherwise.
I’ve discussed my thinking in the other responses so won’t go in-depth here. But to summarise:
The general story had real potential but was marred (in my opinion at least) with cliffhangers that felt jarring and unnecessary to the underlying story.
I think their point was that in HCF, the off the wall dramatic swings felt more like jumping the shark. In HoC, it felt totally in character for Spacey to do that. It was just better written and acted, despite the intensity of the violence being much higher, because it made sense in the context of the story, and it didn’t in HCF, at least not to me.
I thought Micro Men was way better executed as a comparison point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
As far as tech driven shows are concerned, Silicon Valley and IT Crowd are personal favorites but they're really more comedies.
Agreed with your point about SV and IT Crowd. There does seem to be a real lack of drama using tech as the backdrop which isn’t either a comedy nor non-fiction.
It just had too much of that early 2000's cable TV style drama. Which I understand is required since it was on network tv. I honestly think if it was made again today as a netflix/prime series it would be a lot better.
Edit: removed spoilers
Cameron "it's all in the eyes" Howe annoyed the shit out of me at pretty much all points, which I understand is how they wrote the character but it walked a line of almost making me quit the show. As with the show as a whole, though, she brought me around a bit in the last few eps.
The length of the plan seems like a DnD campaign in terms of length though, it's roughly 3 months of consistent activities, but it may be worth it.
While I love both shows to death, I feel HCF really nailed a lot of the emotional and interpersonal aspects that come with entrepreneurship, venture capital, and engineering leadership.
It was also great watching HCF with my dad who started his career during the tail end of the show, and could call out a number of the technical aspects (eg. PBXes, the COBOL vs OOP wars, the search engine wars, etc).
When donna pointed out how popular chat was, cameron wanted to kill it because it wasnt her idea, even if it was perfectly in line with her vision for what computers could be. To me she's just an arrogant narcissist
I used to be overly pedantic about the kinds of things programmers often obsess over—like micro-benchmarks, the whole “I use Arch, by the way” attitude, and other obnoxious quirks. But this quote stuck with me and helped me move past that shallow, one-upmanship view of computers. Great show to ones who haven't watched yet.
Take the phone industry. They're happily gouging developers, taking large sums of app sales. But at the same time, a smart phone isn't a smart phone without apps. Everyone has different ones installed and ones they highly depend on that aren't from Apple/Google. It's the program that makes the tool.
But this kind of thing is happening more and more and can only happen because consolidation. It maximizes profits for today but at the cost of higher future profits and better products. It's funny how there was a strong counter culture early on but it feels like that was lost.
In season one, Joe and Gordon are the main characters, with Cameron a small step behind them. Donna and Bos were firmly secondary. In season two, Cam and Donna became the focus, Bos became more prominent, and we got a bunch of new characters. Joe and Gordon were still important but clearly had less focus on them. I have to wonder if the plan was for each season to introduce new characters who would be set up to be the season after that's main focus. The Mutiny crew could have been pioneers of gaming in the third season, with some Donna and Cam still there, and special appearances by Gordon and Joe. The new characters from that season could be the main of the internet/virus season. For consistency, Bos could have been the common thread in all of the companies as the business manager going along for the ride as the main characters innovated.
Maybe that wasn't the plan and I'm just spit balling but it would have been a nice way of handling the advancing technology without making the same characters the titans of industry constantly. Not sure how well the fans would have reacted to their favorite characters, even Cameron, being relegated and eventually ghosted.
On the negative side, I also thought that sometimes makes for sloppy writing and the feeling that the characters are basically cosplaying history.
In fairness, I didn't notice this until my 2nd time watching the series.
Some models needed a hardware hack to turn it off, maybe those ones were off.
> The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ ⓘ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two women have names.[2]
All of the characters had flaws, but I appreciated the representation. Though I suspect the flaws were added for dramatic effect. Perfect people doing perfect things doesn't make for drama.
I read the production designers used old issues of Texas Homes, D Magazine and sears catalogs as visual guides, and it really shows through. I had a very strong nostalgic reaction. The only thing missing was an avocado green refrigerator.
I think it would be fun to take some of the shots and then try to find photos of places, people and things that might have influenced the designers.
With the second I expect a CTA for a course, with the end result being some type of qualification, perhaps conformance to the startup mentality of the key characters, to help people form groups. The point there is to advance projects and also set yourself up as an authority.
At the moment it feels like a not-so-strong mix of the two.
Looks like it's 404 since February. [2] Any idea what happened?
[1] https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/c...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://worldwide...
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25912241 - Jan 2021 (173 comments)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=halt+and+catch+...
I’ve rewatched it last year and, like a really good book, I found myself liking a different set of characters than on my first watch. There’s truly a lot of depth there. And a lot of humanity, which is something we sometimes forget about the tech industry.
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