Compelling Science Fiction Issue 4 | Hacker News Reader

Compelling Science Fiction Issue 4

compellingsciencefiction.com

171 pointsroymurdock23 comments

Compelling Science Fiction has been consistently excellent since it started. I think I made a Patreon account just to support it. Highly recommended.

Thank you so much, that's gratifying to hear! At this point we're evaluating 300-400 submitted stories every month when our submission window is open, so creating a single issue takes a decent number of person-hours. I'm happy that you're enjoying the result.

Wow, so many stories?

All your issues have been excellent so far. Thanks!

I just did the same, after reading two very compelling stories. It was tempting to first read one more (and one more after that...), but it's already clear to me that this is scifi worth supporting.

Same! Top notch content, a real treat. A higher frequency of issues would be great, but then again I'm just greedy!

"The Little Gods" (http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/thelittlegods.ht...) is really wonderful.

I just read them in order, last one so far was The Little Gods. And .. I don't know, it didn't click for me.

But I'm really confused about the last line. If it's a quote, I don't know it. I don't speak that language. Google Translate makes this even _more_ confusing.

Given the prominent position (final line of the story) I assume this is important and I feel like everyone is laughing but I don't get the punchline.

Yeah, that was confusing.

Spoiler in ROT13: "inr!, chgb qrhf svb: jbr vf zr!, V guvax V nz orpbzvat n tbq (Irfcnfvna, fnvq jura sngnyyl vyy)". Zl onfvp vagrecergngvba vf gung gur zbgure sryg pybfre gb ure qnhtugre fvapr nsgre univat gur fhetrel fur sryg gung fur gbb jnf n "gval tbq".

It's not just you -- there was an issue there. Spanish got conflated with Latin, it should be "puto deus fio", "I fear I am becoming a god"

That's Latin. The emperor Vespasian's reported last words: "damn! I fear I am turning into a god!"

That is a rather lovely story, enjoyed it very much. Will most definitely be reading the entirety of CompellingSF.

Great stories - it sucked me in and I read it cover to cover.

extremely looking forward to read a few stories. The principles of this project are just great: solid and plausible, hard science fiction. Well done guys!

Any good stories to recommend?

Thanks! I'd start at the beginning of the issue with "They Breed Like Flies". It's the longest of the stories but it feels quick and sets a good mood for the rest of the stories.

remember to vote the post before start reading the stories. If you vote it 2 hours later it will not be as useful

I disagree: better an informative signal than a quick proxy of one. If HN's ranking algorithm does make informed upvotes less useful, then it's the algorithm that needs changing.

How can an algorithm determine an upvote's informedness?

I didn't mean that -- I meant we're better off if people choose to upvote or not after they've read the content, instead of before.

But that leads to the problem GP addressed: upvotes received too late won't help the submission rise (because "gravity" pulls a story down over time).

Of course you're right that voting post-read is better than pre-read, but my response was addressing your suggestion to change the algorithm. Without gravity (a bias for newness), it's not a news site, and gravity has been tweaked a lot to make it work well. So instead, I ask how can the algorithm take into account whether a user has read the content?

It's only partially rhetorical. For example, there could be a delay before voting is allowed; a check that the link was clicked; cooperation with a website to check that users scrolled all the way (like EULAs); or a checkbox "I read it" that makes the vote count more. These all have problems; but a site that managed it would be great.

Yes, if I had improvements I was confident about, I'd list them. (Maybe don't think of this as mainly a news site? Older stories are popular.) The first idea to come to mind was to slow down the aging and make the front page into a sample of the stories with upvote support over this newly longer interval -- but I have no experience managing a site like this.

But "quick, upvote before it's gone" seems clearly the wrong policy to encourage in people.

Non-news: historically, hackernews was startup news, which then expanded to "gratifying intellectual curiosity." I'd like to split the "new" and the "interesting", rather like how newspapers have a magazine-like section on weekends. Some of the most popular articles are quite old as you note. eg Feynmann stuff. Your idea would work well for this.

But I doubt anything so drastic will be trialled... though dang seems a lot more willing to experiment than pg was, so maybe it's possible, if we can think of an effective yet low-cost way to test it?

BTW there is a hidden lower-gravity version, https://news.ycombinator.com/best (but of course most votes aren't made using it, so it doesn't test the idea).

I agree blind upvoting is a bad idea, though I read the plea as "if you are already a fan of our work, please upvote early". In practice, the super-short story commented ("the little gods") is probably the best way to go - a quick way to evaluate the offering (which incidentally is what I did before upvoting).

Making the front page change on reloading or for different readers (making it a random sample) would indeed be really disruptive, but it could have a kind of second-order benefit, that new experiments would become easier to introduce, because we'd stop expecting it to look the same for everyone. Not that I'm seriously advocating this for HN -- maybe for a new site?

Geez, I forgot about /best. I tend to visit here to shirk work, and I'm not even shirking most effectively.

That's a great suggestion, pointing out the short story. I enjoyed it too.

Whether they clicked the link before voting.

Are they in a voting ring.

How have they voted previously.

Is everyone voting late... hence its a long time to evaluate so weigh heaver.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com