Top all-time · #60
Charles Stross
Personal blog · antipope.orgwritinggamesculture
Charles Stross's personal blog at antipope.org covers writing, games and culture. Since 2007, 481 different Hacker News readers have linked it 1,089 times, most often “Accelerando”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 8 of 40 sampled comments recommend it, 3 are critical?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Charles Stross's blog for posts on surveillance, politics, technology and the future, and on writing near-future fiction. Several commenters cite it as support.
- Recommended for · 8 comments
- Called 'excellent', 'brilliant' and 'great', said 'nothing can beat' one talk and that a 2016 post was 'a good read'.
- Criticised for · 3 comments
- Says some pieces are 'overly-sensationalist', a Brexit famine forecast did not happen and a 25% figure seems high.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html37 people · 43 mentions · first linked 2010-03-29
- Accelerando18 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2020-08-20
- The High Frontier, Redux (On Space Colonization)17 people · 27 mentions · first linked 2007-08-25
- Accelerando (2005)15 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2018-09-19
- Common misconceptions about publishing (2010)15 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2010-05-15
- Invaders from Mars13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2010-12-10
- Dude, you broke the future13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-01-02
- /charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2010-11-17
- Dude, you broke the future (2018)9 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2022-12-02
- Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-09-01
What Hacker News says?
> Why do American companies sell this kind of stuff to China and non-democracies in the middle east? They must rationalize it in someway, but I think it's wrong. Pursuit of the almighty Free Market without regard for scruples or morality. Basically, public corporations base success only on money. If you as an executive refuse to bow down before Mammon[1,2] then you are replaced by someone who will. Seealso Charles S…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html
on ““Two days ago the police came to me and wanted me to stop working on this””Submitted Oh, 2022 as a story · 709 points
HN discussionI think Charles Stross said it best[1], what we have now is effectively the ancien regime pre-revolutionary state; that MUST retain absolute control, lest the natural order be shattered irretrievably. In effect, the guardians of the status quo are in full panic mode and are not necessarily reacting rationally. This is why this incident should be investigated by ( on the UK side ) a parliamentary commission, and ( on…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2013/07/a-bad-dream.html
on “Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation”Submitted Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI as a story · 534 points
HN discussion25% sounds a little high to me. The figure I normally hear is that paper is about 10-15% of the cost of a book (I'm not directly in the publishing industry, but I've been a technical reviewer on several books and have a fair number of friends who are author/editors - mostly in the non-fiction market which is a little different from the fiction world). See http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-cost.…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html
on “Outlawed by Amazon DRM”Submitted Rejection Letter as a story · 522 points
HN discussionaha, and i see i'm not the only one who thinks so: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/05/rejectio... though a bit of it is in your camp as well: > It's a worm — a boringly old-hat idea first introduced into fiction by SF author John Brunner in his 1977 novel "The Shockwave Rider".
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2017/05/rejection-letter.html
on “Cyberattacks in 12 Nations Said to Use Leaked N.S.A. Hacking Tool”Submitted The pivot as a story · 492 points
HN discussionYeah, well, I agree that people should stop using DRM, but it's not like it seems to be happening. And from a business point of view, it can be really hard to make that case. Anyway, the world looks really bleak for open platforms right now. The main example is Android. If you have like one toe dipped into a role related to infosec at the moment, you can't serioulsy recommend that people you work with or care for ev…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-the-money-apple-vs-the-.html
on “Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years”Submitted "Nothing like this will be built again" as a story · 452 points
HN discussion- yk · 2013-09-30
I am quite happy with Ghostery+NoScript. If you have a general solution, then you would just end up with an arms race. See [0] for details. [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made...
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made-out-of-meat.html
on “Google Web Designer” Submitted Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire as a story · 436 points
HN discussionCharlie Stross on the topic: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/rule-34-... 'For starters, it turns out that 3-11% of Yahoo! webcam traffic involves "undesirable nudity"' "I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government's equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world's largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriou…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2014/02/rule-34-meet-kafka.html
on “GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide”Submitted Why Microsoft Word must die as a story · 413 points
HN discussion> GCHQ could be sat on one of the largest private collections of indecent images of people underage Most likely yes. It has been pointed out that under the UK's tough anti-child-porn laws, there is no way that this is legal. Edit: more details on that from Mr. CStross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/rule-34-...
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2014/02/rule-34-meet-kafka.html
on “GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide”Submitted Nothing like this will be built again (2002) as a story · 411 points
HN discussionThis is a good illustration of what Charlie Stross says: But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as o…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
on “Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars”Submitted Updating classic workplace sabotage techniques as a story · 378 points
HN discussionYep, apparently he did: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-...
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-there-wont-be-a-third-.html
on “NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender”Submitted Burn the Programmer as a story · 377 points
HN discussionNice to see some other people pointing out the positive effects here. As a (room-scale only) VR developer, I've been writing about the upsides of VR and VR gaming for some time - example, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/05/three-un... . There's a lot of skepticism around this area, particularly the claim that games will actually make people fitter - but you only have to play a few rounds of Holopoin…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2016/05/three-unexpectedly-good-things.html
on “VR”Submitted Thoughtcrime as a story · 344 points
HN discussionhttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/not-a-ma... This blog has a brilliant insight that I still remember more than a decade later: we live in a fantasy setting, not a Sci-fi one. Our modern computers are so unfathomable complex that they are demons, ancient magic that can be tamed and barely manipulated, but not engineered. Modern computing isn't Star Trek TNG, where Captain Picard and Geordi LaForge…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2014/10/not-a-manifesto.html
on “We were wrong about GPUs”Submitted Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? as a story · 336 points
HN discussionAnd, the book is -- legitimately -- available for free, in a variety of formats -- details on the author's blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html
on “I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas”Submitted A nation of slaves as a story · 307 points
HN discussionReminds me of an aside in Accelerando: > His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream – coincidentally uncompressing it – and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
on “Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits”Submitted Yet another novel I will no longer write as a story · 304 points
HN discussionIf piracy had zero or positive impact, a genuinely greedy publisher wouldn’t care or would actively encourage it. When I do finally finish this thing and try to get it published, I will go though a normal publisher, because I like listening to the advice of people who’ve been though things before: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-d... Also, no: most authors need day jobs because sales are a…
Comment linking /charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-dont-self-publish.html
on “Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site”Submitted Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system. as a story · 302 points
HN discussion
