1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4893
4894
4895
4896
4897
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 044e017 | When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. The | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fd702e1 | The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 462821d | This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5b0da95 | I was wondering when I was going to end up like this. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 91deaa8 | You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 50195d4 | No wind stirred the scene, and the pluming smoke billowed and roiled at its own whim. The plain near the bridge had been flattened by the passage of so many horses and men that it was nothing more than a flat field between the high banks of the river and the verge of a narrow band of trees that demarked fallow fields to the west. There was no shelter on this plain--it was exposed ground that Dietrich had hoped to cover swiftly before his Mo.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| eb50d6f | One of the soldiers slapped Gansukh on the legs with the shaft of his spear, and the Mongol warrior rolled away from the blow, getting his legs under him. Even though Gansukh didn't understand a word of what was being said, the message was clear. Clenching his teeth, Gansukh wobbled to his feet, and as he stood upright, one of the other soldiers whacked him across the back, causing him to stumble and nearly fall. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 462025a | Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aida swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 84f7896 | I hate e-mail," John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?" "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2af29fa | So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c96c2b2 | Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6213b63 | The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions, Tiny | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b0f778b | The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage--not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9da7c03 | THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy's T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ecfd0f3 | scratched out the first few terms of a series: "If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi--to reach toward it, but never to grasp it...much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them," -- | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 490d84e | Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4423be6 | That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?" "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f45e40b | As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3c2260d | Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank--a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 14614c9 | The people who know the most are not allowed to ask questions--or even to make suggestions. The least common denominator sets the standards. Just wait until you see Washington, Betsy--these goddamn car salesmen and small-town lawyers come into town every two years not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, and this enormously sophisticated and powerful and dangerous system is at their mercy. The Agency distorts information to fit the .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9303ab3 | Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction--the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e55581d | The example cited most often was a gradual change in eye color among Moirans. Eve Moira's eyes had been hazel: relatively light in color by the standards of black people, but not all that unusual. By the end of the Second Millennium, many Moirans had eyes so pale in color as to appear golden in strong light. On the walls of the Great Chain's fashion stores, blown up to ten times life size, Moiran fashion models still gazed at you through sh.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ccb3c31 | the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0162f13 | Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6860031 | if the entire world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets, then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large composite numbers. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e66010b | Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing--is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.--What's the difference? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6e4b3ba | What's a Klettersteig?" Dinah asked, trying to move on. "It is a mountain climb that is preengineered with cables, ladders, and so on." "To make it easier," Dinah guessed. "Oh, no. It is not easy. It is a way to take a climb that would be impossible, and make it merely extremely difficult." "Okay," Dinah said. "A good metaphor for what we are trying to do up here, then." "Yes, I suppose so!" Markus said, cheerfully enough." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 95a2b63 | I was going to kill that doctor when he shoved his finger up my ass but then I realized the possibilities of that substance. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8daf9d5 | All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0dc8274 | TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0648e83 | So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russians. | russians | Neal Stephenson | |
| f9f5a67 | I love the scent of a man under pressure. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c3d1e43 | What's the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c64d640 | As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2515d33 | Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. "So you're going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c248021 | He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I am not one of those who believes that God made the world and walked away from it, that He has no further choices to make, no ongoing presence in the world. I believe that He is everywhere, making choices all the time." "But only because there are certain things you have not explained yet with geometric proofs." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1064dcd | If it weren't for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime," El said. "It's the most fascinating thing I've ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 63fecd5 | The tragedy--and the entire point--of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b46a36b | It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ea7a1ed | One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world's adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0d281aa | Yes. It's really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed," Enoch said, "and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c37f674 | Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b46614f | Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle's head. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 681f260 | The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared. | Neal Stephenson |