Science Fiction Short: Hijack | Hacker News Reader

Science Fiction Short: Hijack

spectrum.ieee.org

51 pointssohkamyung15 comments

By Karl Schroeder, who wrote Ventus[1] and Permanence[2]. (One of my favorite sci-fi authors!)

I always thought this reviewer quote on the front of Ventus was pretty funny:

> “Dramatically effective and a milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems.” – Vernor Vinge

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventus_(novel)

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanence_(novel)

Go, 3340, I believe in you!

I read his Lockstep and really liked his "workaround" for speed of light. Fascinating, compatible with physics and not completely unrealistic.

I feel like lightspeed limitations would severely restrict the scalability of planetary-sized computers. How is one computer a light-second across much better than two computers a light-second away from each other?

The circumference of Earth is much smaller than a light second.

And the short story that was posted takes place on Mercury which has an even smaller circumference than Earth

The circumference of Earth is about 1/7 light seconds, not that much smaller than a light second.

The Network is the Computer (TM)

Dudes staring at you with serious expressions. A bit of shiny techno stuff in the background. Scifi book cover yeah!

But where's the spaceship with a bunch of shiny blobs and spires sticking out of it?

For reals, we thought about putting one in, although the blobs and spires would have been the payload in the center of a solar sail, but we couldn't squeeze it in! [I'm an IEEE Spectrum editor :) ]

Needs some editing; one whole paragraph is repeated, and not deliberately.

More typos: all the numeric exponents got flattened (e.g. "6 x 1024" should be "6 x 10^24").

Ugh, should be fixed. Another transfer problem that always has to be catched manually. I've been putting articles online since the mid-1990s, and in 30 fecking years of watching ever more elaborate text processing, DTP, web and content systems evolve from hand-assembled HTML 2 through homebrew content-management systems to CSS/HTML 5 and the fancy commercial CMSs of today, and desktop processor speeds go from 66 MHz to 3 GHz, we still can't reliably guarantee things like italics or superscripts will automatically go all the way through from word processor to browser.

I honestly thought that problem would be solved way before e.g. automated interview transcription...

Congrats on being an early reader, b/c I spotted this on a fresh read Monday morning and zapped it! [I'm a IEEE Spectrum editor] This is a problem that's got me the odd time before—when you've read an article so many times, and something somehow gets duped in the transfer to the online content management system, it's easy not to notice because you think you just lost focus for a second and your eye jumped back to re-reading the same paragraph, not that it's actually the same para twice. You get as many eyes as possible on articles to prevent this from happening, but every now and then something slips through, especially when you have a very atypical layout and structure compared to our regular articles, because focusing on those things is stealing cycles. So that one's on me!

...also, great scrabble word.

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