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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

Post is fiction. Spoilers follow.

When I started reading this, I didn't realize it was fiction. When I got to the point where the protagonist left the end-date off a query and saw a spike, I thought it was going to be explained by falsified data and lead into a (real) accusation of providing fraudulent metrics to advertisers. It wouldn't be the first such accusation. But it turned out to be a science-fiction story with unexplained time travel in it. Oh well.

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Spoilers precede too. Much more enjoyable to start reading not knowing it is fiction. Glad I RTFA first for once :)

I read 2-3 paragraphs into this and then thought, hmm, maybe I should check the comments first.

Thank you.

Does it help that "Crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a point of no return?

I've never heard that before, so it didn't tip me of.

I did think the PIG abbreviation was too good to be true and decided that I didn't want to read it if it wasnt anything to do with real life internals

For once I'm glad I didn't read the comments before reading the story. jimrandomh comment would have spoiled it.

Edited to add a spoiler warning. My apologies to anyone I spoiled the ending for.

Not effective. Your spoiler is telling us that it's fiction. The delight would have been in that surprise realization, not the nitty-gritty details of the story.

You're supposed to put the spoilers after the spoiler warning.

Sure but if you saw a "Spoiler Warning" on something, you would know that it's fiction.

You can always just say:

"Read the article FIRST and then come back to read the comments. . . . Spoiler alert. Post is fiction. Yadda yadda."

If it were real, why would it be posted on Facebook itself? That was my first clue, anyway.

Still a good short read IMO.

So that it would self-fulfill the prophecy and Julie would be safe instead of headline news for some terrible reason.

I've read similar story before (Fallout 3 "Number Station" short internet story), so the it became very obvious the first time "data from the future" was mentioned ;-)

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