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I'm guessing some on the hacker news crowd already know this but the author neal Stephenson also wrote Crytonomicon which was the prerequisite reading book for

I'm guessing some on the hacker news crowd already know this but the author neal Stephenson also wrote Crytonomicon which was the prerequisite reading book for the PayPal mafia back in the days. I've personally only read his book reamde but the accuracy in detail in the novels really reflect quite deep understanding of the tech world including the shadier parts

KineticLensman 7y ago
I love as a book Cryptonomicon but ...Spoilers.... the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions. I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….
- alchemism 7y ago
  As far as predictions go, out of all of them I’m still of the opinion that The Diamond Age has aged the best.
  - noufalibrahim 7y ago
    Perhaps but snow crash was still the most entertaining. :)
- komali2 7y ago
  SUPER SPOILERS . . cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines? The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe. Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.
  - bediger4000 7y ago
    > horde of Linux users less than 2% of all desktops are linux. There is no horde of Linux users, much to my personal dismay. This is a myth.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Ok, so of 2 billion desktops (estimated 2015), that's 40 million Linux users. Of that number, the cross section between "Linux Users" and "readers of Neal Stephenson's works" are probably quite high. It doesn't take much to be faced with a "horde" as any person popular among a niche crowd can easily attest to.
      - smhenderson 7y ago
        Not to mention at that time Linux was gaining a lot of share in the service space replacing legacy UNIX, Novell and even Windows NT. Just because "hordes" weren't using it on the desktop doesn't mean there weren't hordes who were aware of it and used it at least sometimes, if not daily. In 1999 I worked for a company in Canada that replaced servers that supported their products and internal servers that ran SCO UNIX with Red Hat boxes. Saved them a lot and we managed to keep everything working as it had on the old servers. I didn't think of myself has part of a horde at the time but I sure was opinionated about Linux and could see myself being one of those "know-it-all-kids" that hassled Steve had I read his stuff at the time.
fmajid 7y ago
Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as opposed to how today’s best and brightest are focusing their energy into increasing ad click-through conversion rates by 3%.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.
    - dllthomas 7y ago
      Reading some of that in the modern era was... uncomfortable but probably valuable.
  - Kadin 7y ago
    I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.
cryptonector 7y ago
Stephenson is a great writer. He just can't write endings. Which is fine because then he just writes never-ending trilogies.
m463 7y ago
I loved Neal Stephenson at first, but then around the baroque cycle his books became less interesting (to me, personal opinion).
- iNate2000 7y ago
  "Baroque Cycle" was a real slog. Much better the second time through when I already had clues who everybody was.

KineticLensman 7y ago

I love as a book Cryptonomicon but ...Spoilers.... the specific near-future tech product that Stephenson suggested in it never happened – he didn’t in 1999 predict ubiquitous smartphones even though they were less than a decade away. In contrast, Reamde still seems ‘right’ but that’s because it doesn’t contain technology predictions. I downloaded the article to see if see if it also contained predictions, and if so, whether they were accurate. In classic Stephenson style, the article is a long (60 page) discursive essay, so my check might take a while….

alchemism 7y ago
As far as predictions go, out of all of them I’m still of the opinion that The Diamond Age has aged the best.
- noufalibrahim 7y ago
  Perhaps but snow crash was still the most entertaining. :)
komali2 7y ago
SUPER SPOILERS . . cryptonomicon wasn't quite supposed to be predictive, though it did "predict" crypto currency. It was and always has been science Fiction, evidence being - ask yourself, how did Enoch Root die in Switzerland and then appear later in a jail cell in the Philippines? The question was surprisingly answered in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in a way I really wasn't expecting but did make it clear that this was an entirely made up universe. Think of Stephenson's answer to the question, "why call what is obvious Linux, 'Finux?'" He wrote, "for the same reason it's metropolis and not new York." He wanted to be allowed to do whatever he wanted to without horde of Linux users filling up his (now non-existent) inbox. Same for his universe - like ours, but dissimilar enough to allow him to get away with pretty much anything.
- bediger4000 7y ago
  > horde of Linux users less than 2% of all desktops are linux. There is no horde of Linux users, much to my personal dismay. This is a myth.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Ok, so of 2 billion desktops (estimated 2015), that's 40 million Linux users. Of that number, the cross section between "Linux Users" and "readers of Neal Stephenson's works" are probably quite high. It doesn't take much to be faced with a "horde" as any person popular among a niche crowd can easily attest to.
    - smhenderson 7y ago
      Not to mention at that time Linux was gaining a lot of share in the service space replacing legacy UNIX, Novell and even Windows NT. Just because "hordes" weren't using it on the desktop doesn't mean there weren't hordes who were aware of it and used it at least sometimes, if not daily. In 1999 I worked for a company in Canada that replaced servers that supported their products and internal servers that ran SCO UNIX with Red Hat boxes. Saved them a lot and we managed to keep everything working as it had on the old servers. I didn't think of myself has part of a horde at the time but I sure was opinionated about Linux and could see myself being one of those "know-it-all-kids" that hassled Steve had I read his stuff at the time.

fmajid 7y ago

Cryptonomicon is OK, but far inferior to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. I think the latter is an incredibly inspiring vision of technology used for good, as opposed to how today’s best and brightest are focusing their energy into increasing ad click-through conversion rates by 3%.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
Diamond Age was amazing when I read it in 2008. I couldn’t believe it had been written in ‘95, given its vision of (what we call) 3d printers, Amazon Turks, software mediated 1:1 relationships, etc. I imagine reading it today, it would read as a likely near-future-history, but in 95 it must have seemed laden with far-fetched original invention, both technological and societal.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  the most salient insight from the diamond age is in my opinion the isolated and fragmented nature of the internet and the extreme segregation into cultural communities, when at the same time everyone was talking about how the internet is going to connect everyone and erode all borders.
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    Reading some of that in the modern era was... uncomfortable but probably valuable.
- Kadin 7y ago
  I read it in the 90s. I think what people forget is in the pre-dot-com-crash era, there was a lot of (unwarranted, it turned out) optimism. If you took the rate of technology advancement and adoption through the 80s and early 90s and extrapolated it forward, and also took into account the social changes it had already driven (and which hadn't really shown their strongly negative sides), it was possible to imagine these really wild possible futures that seemed to be only a few decades off. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and the wheels fell off that particular cart shortly after 9/11, along with a lot of optimistic visions of the future.

cryptonector 7y ago

Stephenson is a great writer. He just can't write endings. Which is fine because then he just writes never-ending trilogies.

m463 7y ago

I loved Neal Stephenson at first, but then around the baroque cycle his books became less interesting (to me, personal opinion).

iNate2000 7y ago
"Baroque Cycle" was a real slog. Much better the second time through when I already had clues who everybody was.