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The Graduate "One Word: Plastics"

Lance Ehlers · 718.7K views · 2007-11-09 · 0:58

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Overview

The famous scene from The Graduate in which a family friend gives Benjamin the career advice 'one word: plastics'. It is a roughly one-minute film clip.

On Hacker News

Used as a joke or shorthand reference when HN discusses the next big technology or career trend.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2023

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What people said

refulgentis · 2023-08 · Joke / meme

They still do. HN is way behind on ONNX and I'd go so far as to say it's the "Plastics."[1] of 2023. [1] [VIDEO]

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ChrisMarshallNY · 2020-04 · Reference

I deleted my rather cynical post, about how we can "age out" of frontline programming, and will replace it with this rather sunnier treatise: Open source work. I was a manager for over 25 years. I'm a really good manager. I could probably be an ideal CTO. But I don't love it. I love writing code. As my management track progressed, I found my technical work deprecating. It did teach me to be a lot more "strategic," and "architectural" in my approach, but I found that I was sitting down and banging out code less and less. To make things worse, I kept reading about how the tools and techniques were progressing to levels far beyond what I had learned. I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract (where the employer insists that they own the ideas that you come up with in the shower before work), so I was free to write software in an extracurricular manner, as long as I didn't use employer time and/or resources to do so. So I started to do open source. In the beginning (about 25 years ago), there wasn't a good infrastructure for shared configuration management, so most of the work I did was published "after the fact" (otherwise known as "deliverable"). I would make the source available, "on the side." Nowadays, with things like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket, you can actually run a distributed collaborative open-source (or closed-source) project, with the process open. It also works great for single-engineer projects. The result, these days, is that I have a GIGANTIC po

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nymph · 2014-04 · Joke / meme

"Benjamin, I want to say one word to you. Just one word … ” "Yes … What is is, Mr. McGuire?” "Plastics.” [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Lance Ehlers, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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