skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can get any of the Interzone anthologies there are some excellent examples of cyberpunk short fiction, and other sub-genres.

(This is Interzone the magazine, before it went to TTA press. I have no idea what it's like now; this isn't a judgement about what they're doing. But I remember reading some excellent stories way back.)

I also strongly recommend Bruce Sterling - a great author and seems a bit under-appreciated.

Snowcrash is an amazing book. I dislike the way Stephenson does exaggeration but that's just me.

"MirrorShades" was the anthology. I think it was good.

J.G. Ballard wrote excellent stories about people and places who are on their way to a cyberpunk future.
I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US. Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure some things.

Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different units.

Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."
It's also on Netflix. Scrabble champs have no job and now money and scrape together funds to travel to events. It seems like a lifestyle that no one withing a few standard deviations of neurotypical would desire.

Elite Scrabble feels an unrewarding life goal.
Charlie, I accept the point entirely.

BUT it is interesting that a lot of people missed the possibility of personal technology in their imagining of the future (2001, Floyd using a video phone to call the kids, Gibson, Asimov et al)
> 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation

No. It's approximately one minute of arc, that is, 1/60 of one degree.

In fact the speed of the earth's rotation at the equator is more like 15 nautical miles per minute.
I would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don't want to have to eyeball 0.33333....) or if they just avoid dividing things by three altogether.

Because the truth is, your perspective is a political one more than a practical one. The whole idea of "officially" adopting either system is somewhat misleading- regardless of politicians or zealots decide, most craftspeople would use rules that easily divide into three, most programmers would often reference things in terms of base-2, and most people would still prefer 24 hours in a day. There is no general-case optimal winner that applies to all measurement and work-flow situations.

In the case of base-2, international bodies have already found a nice dual-system ( http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html ). A simple solution for (for example) carpentry that would give the best of both worlds would be to define a unit that is exactly 1/60th of a meter. Let's call it a "sixer." Now someone crafting things can have all the convenience and easy division they need (here- cut this at 1/5 of 1/3 of a meter- no problem!) and still have it unified with the meter at some scale. There would be issues- but it's situational, which is my point.
Code is a weird one because there are times when it's correct (e.g. "encryption codes"). But when it's used to mean "software" it should never be "codes", IMHO, though I guess there's a minority in disagreement.
I do not really understand the "physically" part, could you provide a demo with AND without ?
That very true. Agility refers to flexibility and freedom from silly processes, or at least those processes which do not contribute to the product. Now, I get to code only 20-30% of my day. Rest goes in updating white boards for all team members across geographies, providing status to managers who are not on team, creating detailed status reports for each associate in team, creating defect sheets and fish bone diagrams for auditors etc. etc...
I didn't enjoy either of the sequels nearly as much as Altered Carbon. I don't think you'd miss out on much if you skipped them.
I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when the precision you need is much better provided by degrees.

Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Or if we demanded that logicians and cs professors only prove things using turing machines, instead of picking the model of computation that best suits the problem. If there's a case where the english measurement system is more convenient, people should use it.
I find that extremely difficult to believe without some sort of external verification. Consider that the Rømer scale from 1701 had 60 degrees between freezing brine and the boiling point of water.

Any technology which can find 60 divisions can find 100 divisions.

For that matter, Pierre Vernier invented his calipers nearly a century earlier, and William Gascoigne the micrometer in the mid-1600s, so I doubt that 100 divisions was a hard thing by 1725.

(To be certain, 64 divisions is easier than 100, but I believe it was reliably possible to do the latter in the early 1700s.)
You are misquoting. "Photographic" is a misnomer because exact images are not recalled. But extensive detailed recollection does exist, as the SA article explains.
I totally agree about requiring :as or :refer to specific functions, but it still seems like the clojure team prefers naked `use` over `require refer all`, so should the style guide be changed to allow naked `use` in some circumstances?

I guess a popular example is `(:use clojure.test)`
Snow Cradh's silliness is a feature: Stephenson was taking the piss out of Gibson.
I don't read very much paper books, for some reason I always found it uncomfortable, straining on the eyes and tiring. I recently got into audiobooks. Listened to Neuromancer, the first three of the Dune series, The Positronic Man, the first Foundation book, Burning Chrome, and the Steve Jobs Biography. Just started listening to The Last Theorem today.

Audiobooks are amazingly convenient and you can definitely find time to fit them into your life. You can listen to them while walking around, on the bus or subway, while grocery shopping, while cooking, and even in the bathroom.

I also think that audiobooks might be a good way to practice your focus, in the way that mindfulness meditation teaches you to do. You try and pay attention to the audiobook as best as you can, and if you're prone to anxiety and rumination, this will at the very least help provide a useful distraction and quiet down inner chatter.

Thumbs up for audiobooks, helping me get more culture into my life.
SketchFactor app for unsafe areas in racism row
As I understand it, employer-provided health insurance was first introduced by Ernst Abbe through his oversight of the Carl Zeiss company, in Germany.

Abbe is one of my favorite unsung tech heroes.
What drives Danny Thompson?
Most of the world already drives on the right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic
For a low-status game like Scrabble, what makes him unique is that people with similar brainpower cluster in more lucrative or rewarding vocations.
I'm saving up for a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USCGC_Hamilton_(WHEC-715)

If the Philippines can buy them for a few million I think a U.S. citizen should be able to. Never liked Yachts but I need an armored boat in my life. Mostly for trips to Japan.
Productivity is over rated. It made sense in a scarcity based economic worldview when we didn't have the technology and know how to create abundant wealth.

How do one measure productivity?

Is it based on number of (quantity) of products produced and service offered?
I'll take 2 BRDMs please. Bad ass.
I've always thought a four-day week makes a lot more sense than five... 4:3 on/off is a much nicer ratio than 5:2.
Data is valuable. To historians it is intrinsically valuable, but it's also instrumentally valuable for machine learning. Even the terrible stuff can inform language models for understanding the good stuff.
A computer would only play perfectly if it were coded perfectly. Any nuances to the play style would have to be known by the programmer, and coded into the system. And that doesn't even count plain old bugs that would cause mistakes.
This is the biggest thing I miss from my consulting days. I would never work a 5-day week. It would either be a 3-day or 4-day week, leaving lots of time for travel, family and hobbies.

Sadly, I could never see our clients accepting any business day where we are not available during regular business hours.
Also, switching to metric units for measurement doesn't mean you have to switch the physical size of parts: there is nothing in the metric system requiring that you use round numbers in manufacturing. Canadian engineering, for a mixture of historical reasons and ties to the U.S., measures in metric but often has parts with suspicious sizes like 101.6mm.
You think that working in hundreds of centimeters is easier??

I guess the system one first learns is the system that feels easiest.
Why not? Because capitalism. New technology will continue to automate away more and more jobs, from manufacturing to the service industry. This could be one of the greatest achievements in human history, leading to that so-called "leisure society" futurists talked about, but that would require a massive overhaul of most countries' economic systems.

All those gains in productivity mostly enrich the owner class while the rest of us have to fight even harder for the jobs that haven't (yet) been eliminated by technology.

In the U.S., it's hard to imagine getting a single conservative lawmaker to sit down at a table and have a frank discussion about wealth redistribution or a minimum income or public ownership schemes, possible solutions to this problem. That makes me worry that the inevitable transition away from our obsession with the free-market and pursuit of capital will be painful rather than celebratory. And that things will have to get worse before enough of us can consider implementing solutions that make things better.
> Lockheed destroyed a half-billon dollar space mission by clinging to imperial.

If anyone wants more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
This interpretation is error-prone. (seq 1), for instance, throws an IllegalArgumentException at runtime. Meanwhile, (seq nil) returns a falsey value even though in many cases it's possible to transparently pass nil in place of a collection of any kind.

Essentially, seq already assumes that its argument is seqable. Don't use it to test an argument of unknown type for seqability; prefer something like the seqable? function from core.incubator [1], or a different core function like coll? or sequential? where the semantics of one of these will do.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/core.incubator/blob/master/src/ma...
Note the pictures of the real products for sale don't always look like the flashy ones at the top:

http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/wla_42.html
Mapillary [1] is a crowd-sourced Street View-like with a cc-by-sa license, but it’s far from being usable for now (not enough pictures).

[1]: http://www.mapillary.com/
Yeah ... last time I had this question I said: I just want you to be aware that I'm not going to be comparing this position to my current position, I'm comparing to other positions being offered, and based on my market info I'm looking for $X.

That way they have a number at least... But in this type of situation, the interviewer is expecting to have the upper hand, and they are probably going to act like it.
Give 240cm or 360cm a name (like STL for "standard-timber-length", 1 stl = 240 cm) and you're effectively doing the exact same thing as the imperial system. Then it's just a popularity contest (which is fine and appropriate and metric wins except for wrt time) but at least conceding the fact that base-10 scaling of units is not intrinsically superior for all units & situations.

Edit: If the argument is that metric is more intuitive (less memorization because of consistent scales) then I think that's a great argument. If the argument is that it's more standardized and more widely adopted, I think that's also a great argument. But I think that the argument that the metric-system is somehow superior intrinsically because only scales of powers of 10 are worth naming (as the name implies) is a poor argument, as you've helped illustrate.
> I would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don't want to have to eyeball 0.33333....) or if they just avoid dividing things by three altogether.

I would love to hear from someone that uses the imperial system how they determine exactly 1/3 of 10 inches and how they eyeball 1/3 of 5/6 of an inch.... My point is it is easy to find measurement scenarios that would make life a little harder for either system. 12cm (metric) for example is trivial to divide into 1/3, 2/3, 1/2, 1/4, 1/6 etc etc. 4.72 inches (imperial equivalent of 12cm) would be harder to do.

Besides there are very easy geometric methods to divide a line exactly into any number of equal parts, even if you do not know its actual length precisely.
The present is full of CNC machines, and yet cars are not milled out of billet aluminum.

It's rarely worthwhile to fabricate something, when you can readily produce it from bulk forms like lumber or bar stock.
The famous opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.", has not stood the time. Nowadays that would probably mean a blue sky.
Have a burger delivered to you
Why? I'm a fan of William Gibson but I'm not familiar with Cory Doctrow although I hear his name often. Is he considered much less skilled than Gibson?
25 minutes for all of your moves.
It seems to be back up now. The cross check to make sure I didn't have enough money to actually buy something probably cleared to lift the block...
How does it relate to sanctions?
Score 5: Funny
PSA: Bountysource charges a 10% fee whether or not your bounty is earned
I heard about Bountysource on HN and I thought I'd give it a try. I pledged $100 for an enhancement to a project I like and I opted for a 90 day limit. The 90 days came and went. Bountysource didn't refund my money. I emailed them asking them to do so and they did. But they didn't refund my money to my Paypal account (through which I had paid the bounty up front). Instead they refunded it to my Bountysource balance. They then charged me $10 to move the funds back to Paypal.

So, shame on me for not reading the fine print--I assumed I'd get all my money back if the bounty wasn't successfully claimed. I don't find the policy unreasonable--they gotta support the site somehow I suppose. But now that I know I'm charged for taking money out, I'm less inclined to put money in. Seems to me they'd be better off charging only when there's a 'win' for everyone to feel good about.

Anyway, caveat emptor.
Whoops, yes, sorry.

Two books at $15 each, or three books at $10 each.
That's not virtualization; it's namespace isolation. There's a small performance impact if you're using NAT, but otherwise the kernel networking stack is used, so there's no performance penalty.
How Twitter Killed My Fish
w/r/t The Protestant Work Ethic:

The book only gets a one-sentence mention in the article, but much, much more could be said. Particularly, it presents overworking as a form of paranoia.

Working was framed as a duty to God and since we didn't know if God existed, we were to work hard, just in case. Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality, we can stop justifying overwork in this way.
Yeah, the snake-case thing is annoying when deserialziing JSON.

Javascript is usually drinkingCamelCase, and JSON that isn't looks really weird.
It's not as widespread as Wikipedia yet, but OSM is one of the few community built resources to be used by everyone using computers.
I really liked Mirrorshades, if for no other reason that it showcased a variety of styles. It's been a while since I read it but I recall thinking it pretty good. It might have been what got me to read Rudy Rucker's stuff.

You can read all of Rucker's short stories (which I find to be better than his novels) here:

http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/
My grandfather used to service and collect money from juke boxes, they used 45s in his day. When the song went out of rotation it usually ended up in the trash, however he kept a large number of them. Put them all in similar size boxes so that they stood upright. The interesting part to me was that collectors wanted these not for the songs but for the sleeves.

Vinyl is interesting and for older folks it can take you back to your childhood. I am long past my days of listening to equipment, I want my music as clean as I can get
It isn't really a service I need, I just wanted to compliment you. That is a beautiful website.
It doesn't, this is Ukrainian business
Haven't tried it myself, but I like the idea of working a 9/80 with every other Friday off. One interesting effect is that those who are in the office on Friday end up feeling more productive or relaxed since there are fewer people around. I also wonder if every other Monday off might be better in some cases.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=semdh-j8V6w
http://www.sovietarmor.com/catalog/armored/mi_24.html

If only...
Everything on a map is data. You probably mean labels and business names. For road networks etc I found OSM to beat other maps by a lot.

Also keep in mind that the way business can be added on Google Maps for example are all but foolproof.
One cheap test I like to do when with friends is to order a flight of something, have each person taste it in turns, then have one person shuffle the glasses around while the others aren't watching, recording how they were shuffled (if you want everyone to participate, just have a second person do a second shuffle).

It's then everybody's job to taste again and see if they can put the glasses back in order. So far, nobody I've done this with has performed better than chance with vodka tastings and people barely perform better than chance with red wine tastings, even when they're 3 different varietals.

The test tends to come out after at least a few drinks though so most people's palates are at least somewhat compromised.
One of the biggest practical hurdles to that sort of wealth distribution is simply that there is a whole world of people outside the US ready and willing to accept investment and residence from the owner class.
Lakka: DIY retro emulation console
Point taken, though "usually" also means "not always." For example, http://www.mathem.se/varor/fransyska-o-notstek/fransyska-nat... is 1220 grams and https://www.handla24.se/hovslatt/pc-60-288-flskfil-frsk.aspx is "about 570 grams".

That's 43.6 and 20.4 oz, respectively.
Vernor Vinge's True Names should be on that list as well.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1280983.True_Names
Makes sense to me, although I suppose there's probably an argument to be made in favor of the uniformity that comes with using :require for everything.

(:use clojure.test) is probably a worthy exception – 90% of the time I see :use in the wild, it's in exactly that context :)
I understand why you would think so, as I haven't heard the usage anywhere else in the software world that I've been, but it is a standard usage in that community; it's not hard to find examples [0] [1] [2] [3].

[0] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f_src/f_src.html

[1] http://www.unige.ch/~hairer/software.html

[2] http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/openadf-automatic-differentia...

[3] http://math.berkeley.edu/~strain/Codes/
The same can be true for drinking a Coca-Cola. I was talking about Silicon Valley, not Atlanta.
It's exactly what I'm thinking about lately. A lot of colleagues of mine work 4 days a week, from Mon - Thu, and have 3 days off. It is a HUGE difference compared to the 5:2 ratio.

It's not that I don't enjoy my job, but it sound so much sane to me. I hope next year I'll have saved a little bit of money I currently need so I'll be able to do a 4 day working week.
> Now that we've (largely) shifted our beliefs from a Christian god to more diffused spirituality

Where did you get that from? A quick google search says about 3/4 of Americans identify as Christian, and about 62% are members of a church congregation.
Ask HN: Where to report fraud phone calls?
Today I got a robo call asking me to visit Verizon78.com to save $78 off of my next bill. The web page looks pretty good, but I am not a Verizon customer, so I am sure this was a fraud phone call. I can report it since I am not on the do not call registry, but I am not sure if that is the correct place to deal with this.

Can anyone with better web skills than me also pick apart their web page? All of the links look like they point to the regular verizon site, so it is a convincing fake page.
Alright, I'll respond to you here again when I've wrote something.
Awesome! When I finish up a tutorial I'll post back here.
Heinlen's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Friday especially got quite a lot right.
Univocity – data integration API for Java
But is that public domain data any good? Mappers in the US are still using MapRoulette to clean up Tiger imports etc.

I think it's also that many Europeans, especially Germans, are very sceptical of google while in the US google gets a lot of love, especially these days with fiber.
No paywall link: http://bit.ly/1yh5c0D
yes (as can a lot of the other top players). though due to the element of luck in the game, the right question is whether he would have an overall winning record after repeatedly playing quackle (also yes; as of now he's definitely better than the state of the art ai)
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner is 10 years older than Neuromancer and considered one of the first cyberpunk novels. Amazingly, it still holds up and feels plausibly futuristic, even to this day.
I have been fortunate enough to work a 4x10 shift for my employer for the past 6 or 7 years. At this point, the shift and hours are almost worth more to me than the actual job I am doing since having the three days off makes for a much more relaxed weekend. Being off for one or two weekdays when most everyone else is at work is also a definite plus since it makes getting errands done and just going out and being a "tourist" in my own city much easier.
I think that working in IT allows you to earn enough money to sustain a four-day week, even having a family.
It makes no difference to me. If I described $2.40 as 240 cents, would you suddenly be incapable of dividing it up evenly?
That is a weird pricing plan: what does 125 texts mean? After that, I just run out...permanently?
I like Paterson, but I always appreciated Charles MacLean's more relaxed delivery -- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC6CEFB7B0C73A51D
I'd guess about half of that identify as Christian because it's socially unacceptable to be agnostic. Church communities have more uses than simple religious worship. Ask any salesman.
I would love some kind of job board for "lifestyle jobs". Thats jobs with 2 or 3 day work weeks and a 9-5 schedule. I might go as low as $60k (+ benefits) if it was offered.

The closest thing to achieve that now is freelancing.