skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" films as really being fantasy. Essentially they are works of fantasy or dramatic fiction re-skinned with lasers and aliens instead of magic and goblins (to a great or lesser extent).

So dune is a great book but it is 90% fantasy, there is only a little bit of research done by the author on desert ecosystems.

My favourite real science fiction author is Arthur C clarke. some good books by him...

earthlight

the fountains of paradise

islands in the sky

the sands of mars

rama

songs of distant earth

Also would recommend accelerando by Charles Stross and the mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson
Most of Asimov's books, specially:

* Foundation Series / Robot Series / Empire Series

* The Gods Themselves
reminds me someone had put together a way of entering directions into google maps, then seeing a 3D view of the step by step navigation. Anyone remember what the url was for that?
What Do HSBC and Anthem Have in Common?
HdrHistogram: A better latency capture method
I maintain a community created list of Sci-Fi novels worth reading:

https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-scifi#novels
Beware the "new drug menace moment"...!!! You think you know weed? I bet you thought that "skunk" weed was just a slang term! Hah! Thank god the BBC has our backs and keeps watch for dangerous stuff like this.
Yeah, absolutely. Get that question wrong on the interview process, and you're never going to get that job.

"So Mr submarine captain candidate, will you really launch missiles should the worst happen?"
lol. This is awesome. Thank you!
Which other asset classes are you thinking of? I think that most transactions in cash equities, spot fx and futures are now done electronically.

I'm sure that a large proportion of derivative trades are still done over the phone, but that's because they tend to be (a) quite customizable and (b) quite hard to price.

It is incredible that treasuries are still traded over the phone, however, given how (relatively) easy they are to price. Even treasury futures, which are harder to price due to the basis and optionality, are mostly traded electronically, which tells me that there must be some parties with a pretty strong interest in keeping bond trading a "closed shop".
This benchmark is indeed very interesting.

I think I may have failed to express my point, though. I'm not building a message queue, as it is certainly a very hard problem that has been engineered for years by people way smarter than me :) I'm merely leveraging the goodness of their implementations (in my case redis, but RabbitMQ is also an option I've considered explicitly in my post).

The chat is a contrived example to show that even under high load, full-scale flux over the wire is a reasonable option. As for "any kind of serious load", well, maybe my example fails to meet the requirements, but unless I'm building Facebook, I think I've faced something serious enough to be able to think about my next step.
Philip K. Dick (Ubik, Man in the high castle, Flow my tears the police man said)

Frederik Pohl (Gateway, the Space Merchants)

Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed, Left Hand of Darkness)

Iain M. Banks (Culture novels)

You will find many Sci-Fi treasures by just going through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
That's what lawyers are for, I hope he had a good one.
I don't understand why you would want to be your own bank at all? A proper bank will have some level of security as well as the scale to not fall over if a single branch is robbed. Surely being your own bank will not give you any of that security? You'll just doing extra work to make yourself a target?
a company giving away its product for free, while their privacy and transparency pages are both 404. I think I'll pass on that one.
Scala – Over 400 resources categorised by Ivano Pagano
Isaac Asimov Foundation (beside mangas!)
Translated my Octave code into Lua: more advantages for scientific computing
Israel targeted by pro-Gaza 'Operation Arid Viper' phishing and malware campaign
oh dear did the nasty man rain on your parade I thought this was Hacker news and not some Macbooks and MBA echo chamber.
It's a real shame that millions of our tax dollars go to putting a single guy in prison for a year, when they could be much more effectively put towards prevention and prosecution of violent criminal activity.
Snow Crash
edit : and Ambient, by Jack Womack
This really comes off as a puff piece, likely the deluge of Apple puff pieces we will have to suffer through leading up to the watch going on sale.
The three stigmata of palmer eldritch
That's a spurious distinction because it depends on defining artificial.

In the end, the number of people who are truly inflated (which is the correct term I believe) are so few that this is an argument about over-eating discussed during a famine.
Virtual cadavers may help surgeons save limbs and lives
There are some excellent books in this thread (makes sense that the HN community would know their sci fi) - a short story addition to the list is "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Totally changed my opinion technology's impact on the modern world.
There is a segment of the population who will read anything, as long as it is related in some way to Apple. Some of them are on HN, too.
Neal Stephenson, Anathem

Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons

Greg Egan, Diaspora and Permutation City

Frank Herbert, Dune

Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy

Vernon Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky

[Note to Hollywood: can we please have a Culture movie?]
Of course you can make a much stronger case against MU for hosting child abuse material, this isn't a copyright issue.
One of the read-worthy books which immediately came to mind is Neverness [1] by David Zindell. It is actually the 'prequel' to a series ('A requiem for Homo Sapiens' [2]) which I have yet to read, but it stands by itself as far as I'm concerned.

If you like SF, mathematics and deep ideas, this might be a book for you.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/968997.Neverness

[2] http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/399921.David_Zindell
You've been downvoted not because you're wrong but because this is a technical forum. No well-educated psychologist in the world would disagree with you.
Apparently the study does not measure how many people got psychosis after the use of cannabis. So now I am wondering how does one measure the "risk of psychosis"?
Cool idea,

If I wanted to sign up and get an app;
Do my gym users have to download your app then search for my gym? Or do I get my own App that they search for in the app store?
As I understood it from my very limited studies, there are five reasons for incarcerating somebody: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, and restorative justice.

If somebody is judged by their peers to have broken the laws approved by their peers, then they receive the punishment deemed suitable by their peers.

As I say, my knowledge of this comes from a brief college-level history about 20 years ago, so may be outdated, naive or just completely wrong.

But I think in the case of Bernie Madoff, incarcerating him was justified to deter similar financial frauds in the future. I suspect (and judging by some of the comments on this page, it might have worked) locking up Andrus Nomm is an attempt to discourage programmers from working for firms like MegaUpload.
The Space Merchants

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
If that's supposed to be an advertisement for Interlude, then it's not very effective.

The constant hissing is extremely annoying, in Chrome the video time bar only works in the upper few pixels (which i discovered only by accident), the skips from perspective to perspective come very surprising and it is unclear whether they skip to indoors views because they think it's more impressive, or because all the outdoor cameras dropped dead before the impact.

The only interesting information i got from that page is that the impact apparently happened at ~68000 km/h.
I've just finished the first three Culture novels.

Consider Phlebas starts great, but loses a lot during the rest of the book.

The Player of Games is okay, but by far not as good as people told me.

Use of Weapons is excellent. I'll have to re-read it in a few months.
Infographic: Host Your Website on Google Compute Engine in 7 Minutes
didn't expect anyone to mention this book... but it's been a long time favorite of mine. I first read it in my teens, when I was heavily into asimov, vance, dick and other classics :)
My favorite story of Jonny Ive happened in the summer of 2008. At the time I was in the student internship program at Apple, and as part of the program each of the executives at Apple would sit down in Town Hall for a chat with that year's group of interns. Some of the executives would come with a slide deck briefly explaining what they did, something about the company, etc. Johnny just came in, sat on a stool in the middle of the stage, said "What would you like to know?", and started taking questions.

About 20 minutes in to the conversation, one student asked him: "Why are so many of Apple's products white?" I think all of us expected some long explication of the clean and unassuming quality of white as a color.

Instead, Johnny closed his eyes, took a breath, and said (as best as I can recall), "Imagine something that doesn't exist. Imagine something completely new. A new shape. A new device..." After a beat he continued, "Can you imagine something like that?" At this point he was obviously doing the very thing he was suggesting we all try. Then he opened his eyes and plainly said, "Well...when I do they're always white!" Then he laughed like a little kid and said, "I guess that sounds pretty ridiculous, huh?" and moved on to the next question...
Once upon a time I would have agreed - but these days I find poor characterisation stalls my suspension of disbelief just as much as dodgy physics.

So my current favourite is Fiasco by Lem. The physics at least sounds convincing and the characters are all too human.
> Why only the UK?

Retirement of UK air-delivered Sunshine was based entirely on cost grounds, regardless of loss of flexibility.

Nuclear handling processes, storage, maintenance are all very expensive. The decision was made to concentrate these costs in the Trident force where they are partially shared with the USA. All the associated knowledge and skills have been lost from the Royal Air Force and will not return.

Every now and again the Ministry of Defence issues a 'report' on how SLBMs are the most cost-effective solution for the UK, willfully ignoring their complete non-usability.
Greg Egan - Permutation City

Peter Watts - Blindsight
How to hack a bank in 2015 – phishing is no longer about small fry
You're not screwed. If you're within commuting distance from San Francisco shoot me an email: artem@buildzoom.com. We are hiring smart engineers with potential.
'Deep Six' (short story anthology) and 'Wind-up Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi.
No, we provide a full branded and customised app for your gym which is searchable in the App Store. The mobile app is currently iOS only; however, we are working on providing an Android version shortly.
A Fire Upon the Deep
A Deepness in the Sky

both by Vernor Vinge
How big of an expert on deserts do you have to be that Dune stops being interesting? Unless you still find it valuable emotionally or philosophically and just reject is as 'science fiction' I think it's a bit sad to just flat out get rid of such an interesting book!
Node.js and JavaScript Flow (part 2) – Fibers and Generators
And I find this very worrying.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.
Neal Stephenson "Anathem"

Stanisław Lem "Cyberiad", "Solaris", "Futurologists' convent"

Greg Egan "Permutation City"

Jacek Dukaj "Black Oceans"

Iain M. Banks "Algebraist" (I read some books from culture series, but IMHO culture is just too overpowered to make an interesting story possible - you basicaly read to see at which point they will show their full superiority, and it doesn't work for me)
Are plea bargains allowed in the Dutch justice system? I know they're not in at least two neighbouring countries.
Neverness is not a prequel since it was written before A Requiem For Homo Sapiens.

That sort of sloppy thinking would get you killed as a pilot. :-)

Also, autocorrect really doesn't want to let me type Neverness.
If you're building a large scale chat service you are implicitly also building a message queue.

And as for the high load you haven't actually experienced high load until you put this into production with a million users.

To make that clearer: you can design a system for any number of users, the only relevant question is how it held up in practice and as long as you haven't had a million concurrent users you just don't know (and probably it won't).
PowerShell: Better phishing for all
Top 3 for me, would be
1. Ender's Game

2. 2001 Space Odyssey - I sit down with Arthur for Tea at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka - He gave me a copy of his article in which he first described telecommunication via satellites

3. Snow Crash
That reminds me of one reviewer who described the weirdest aliens in any science fiction novel as the human characters in a particular Robert L. Forward novel....
What to look for in a co-founder
Dune - Frank Herbert

There's something mystical and very powerful about this book and the theme of conquering fear. It also reads surprisingly well considering how dense some of the political and technical descriptions are.
I'm sure you know this, but you never say so which makes it a bit frustrating: what you refer to as "real science fiction" is commonly known as "hard science fiction" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction).

The "opposite", i.e. what you refer to as re-skinned fantasy, often falls into the "space opera" subgenre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera). For instance, "Star Wars" is often referred to as being space opera.
There is an interesting asymmetry between the two parties.

To the prosecutor it is just a day job, whether the guy spends 1 or 10 years in prison won't really change anything to his holiday plans. To the defendant, he is playing with his own life. He will have to be locked in a room with thugs for many years, away from his family or any prospect of a normal life.

So both parties have a very different risk aversion in that game. So the prosecution plays with that.

Now if you inflicted a significant pain (career progression, financial penalty) on the prosecutor every time he sent someone to court that turned out to be judged innocent, then you would even this "game" and would probably end up with a more fair bargain.
The world needs more meta-cloud-services as long as google and other big cloud services continue to have proprietary services.
no i really dont... and i dont care lol
I completely agree.

Especially the "streamlined" programming, with the wealth of existing modules for all kind of peripherals make it incredibly easy to prototype most things. In that regard, it's also a very good replacement for the "parallel printer port" to which most hobbyists used to attach their simple peripherals in the old days.

And for the crowd that needs everything a little "less dumbed down", you get eval-boards for selected 8- and 32bit MCUs for so little money... on which then you can run your handcrafted assembler code to your heart's content.

Now, if we could only get the FPGA world away from their ugly proprietary synthesis tools...
I agree but I realized that the fantasy opens the door for unconventional thinking for us scientists.

By the way, I got the chance to have tea with Sir. Arthur C. Clarke at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka when I was only 18 years old... He gave me a copy of his article in which he uses physics to show that telecommunication by satellite is possible. It was a great experience.
That's absolutely shocking.
Seconded! This is a fantastic book. Be warned: the English translation of the sequel is not yet released (and you will want it).
Prey is a novel by Michael Crichton - @everyone
That's a petty strawman. I think most people around here care more about the Android ecosystem of builds centered around those file sharing sites. Or the vast amounts of technical documentation. If there were abuse material there too, not a single soul wouldn't want that removed, but that's an unrelated problem. You don't need to remove the former material just to remove the latter.
Since the OP asked about books not authors my favourite book is "Foundation and Earth" (Isaac Asimov), "Childhood's End" (A.C. Clarke) and Solaris (Stainslaw Lem).
The Culture Series is definitely some of my favorite reading. You can really feel the humor.
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The market in general is not aimed at small investors, with some exceptions (governments usually have ways to buy their bonds, some tax freindly areas like munis in US are ok). Often minimum sizes are large, the documentation is complex, issues are all different, and so on.
Top Mistakes in Starting an Online Business – #4 Is Deadly
Should You Be a Programmer?
I'm loving the whole Nomad theme going around at the moment. Its made me really think about where I want to be and I have a feeling its going to be anywhere and everywhere.

What I haven't seen much of is horror stories on working remotely -- specifically from people traveling around the world. Does anyone have any links?
> The Matrix is an implausible just-so story with quasi-religious undertones

Actually, no. The question is simple: Can a universe with a least a few intelligent individuals be simulated? (Grand Auto Theft also does not simulate the whole city but only a selected "view"). The answer to this is probably "yes".
But then you have another problem: If a universe can be simulated, it is mathematically FAR FAR more likely that you live in a computer simulation than not since billions of worlds with trillions of individuals are getting simulated.

> and it's a concept that exhibits quite a few glaring holes the closer you look at its practical implications

Be my guest and elaborate.

> holes which seem like they are in disagreement with
> daily observation and hence should lend themselves to
> falsification.

Actually, you are right and wrong here. First, I don't see "disagreement" with daily observations since there is only one known idea how to test the hypothesis. And then you are right, this thesis can be tested:"To avoid stacking (i.e. simulations within simulations), the termination of these simulations is likely to be the point in history when the technology to create them first became widely available, (estimated to be 2050)."

Actually, there is a movie preceding "The Matrix" that is much much better: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070904/
Interesting that you mention Dune here. I have a similarly strict approach to classifying works as sci-fi for myself as OP and Dune is the worst offender of everything I consider sci-fi.

To me, Dune is some new-age mumbo jumbo. It's fanatasy in space. Or it is contemporary social criticism (the whole thing is a metaphor for the oil industry, no?), but it's definitely not sci-fi.

By the way, I loved the first half of the book. The world building is fantastic, the characters are interesting (and the villains are really villain-y) but after the Duke dies, the whole book goes down the toilet and becomes a series of random adventure-in-the-desert encounters that couldn't be more shallow and predictable.

That being said, I'm probably too young to get it's larger impact on the "genre" (I heard that it's something like the defining space opera?).
I always missed a good web framework in C++. I tried Wt, but didn't like its 'desktop app philosophy', so I dreamed of creating one.

Why I didn't do that? Because web framework must be feature rich. Rendering templates and maintaining sessions is no longer fun; today people expect the frameworks to solve their countless high-level problems, such as Paypal integration, i18n, currency manipulations, etc. Needless to mention that the code must be rock solid and well documented.

What's my point? I appreciate your effort, but I'm afraid you need some greater powers to be involved in development of features. Keeping fingers crossed for this to happen!
Provision Tor Relays with Ansible
React with Christopher Chedeau and Jordan Walker (Podcast)
When I read your comment I'm strongly reminded of myself ten years ago. I held almost exactly the same view on hard scifi, and was similarly obsessed with Arthur C Clarke. But I've since loosened my definition of scifi for a couple of reasons:

a) I now think of scifi as any work intended to do more than tell a story or explore a world. Focussing on just hard scifi causes great works of social and sociology fiction like The Dispossessed to be left without a clear pigeonhole. Which is a great pity, IMO.

Perhaps the biggest chunk that gets miscategorized is cyberpunk; works like Snow Crash and Hardwired are clearly about more than whether the ending is happy or sad, or whether the hero gets the girl. Doesn't seem right to categorize them as fantasy. Better to narrow Arthur C Clarke into the sub-category of hard scifi. Loosening my uptight definition caused me to better appreciate Snow Crash in particular on a second reading a decade later. It's aged wonderfully.

You could even imagine a book with fantasy 'props' that feels scifi-like. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no doubt it can be done. (Any recommendations from others?)

b) Not even everything Arthur C Clarke wrote was hard. Rama series, c'mon! Kim Stanley Robinson is a great author, but I fail to see how he's 'more hard' than Asimov or Heinlein. Somebody described the Red Mars series to me as a reality show with dune buggies, and that seems about right. You certainly couldn't call it 'more hard' than Anathem.

Anyways, for hard scifi readers the top author today is probably Greg Egan. That I think everybody can agree on. I have other recommendations elsewhere on this thread.
Can anyone with any sense of Darwinian evolution not believe that having children is the goal of life?

I can. Life doesn't have a goal. It's not some kind of plan. It just happens.

Can anyone with any emotional sense at all not believe that a lasting relationship with another is not the highest of pursuits?

I can. A lasting relationship with another? A fucking guinea pig can do that. Humans are capable of so much more.
There's seems to be a clone from Harris Semiconductors, starting at ~$5....

https://octopart.com/search?q=CP80C86
Prequel in the sense of being named 'A Requiem for Homo Sapiens 0'. I think I'll find my way through the manifold yet...
Null-A is probably the Van Vogt's most famous book, but others are great as well, I loved "Slan" from the same author : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan
Nice idea, this seems like something that effectively parcels out an exotic AirBNB that has good internet for a monthly rate, which is something more easily accomplished by the traveling tech worker by simply setting search filters on AirBNB. If there was a way to immediately sign up for a month I see there being the possibility of someone impulse buying a space.
I wonder why no one mentioned "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy" (Douglas Adams) yet. I died laughing twice while reading it.
Lord of the Light

Dune

Neuromancer

Hyperion

Snow Crash

Use of Weapons

Pandora's Star / Judas Unchained
Didn't read the whole thing yet :). But glancing through it it seems that I really have some stuff to learn about Javascript internals.