Hacker News Reader

Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

It sounds crazy, but as someone who reads a lot of fiction (and very little fan fiction, because most of it's crap), I sincerely think this is one of the best things I've read in years. I'd personally rank it up with Asimov or Heinlein at their best.

If you're the kind of person, upon discovering a 'wizarding world' would:

- Look into establishing arbitrage between the wizards' fixed ratio of Gold/Silver currency and the muggles' variable ratio

-Try to discover the underlying laws and mechanics of magic

-Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP

Read this Book!

View on HN

As someone who also reads a lot of fiction, I think this fic is in great need of a good editor... but that after the normal publication process it would be as good as anything Asimov or Heinlein wrote.

Have you read Asimov recently?

In the cold light of adulthood it is unfortunately not as good as my inner child remembers. Nowhere near as bad as Rowling, who is an awful writer, but still pretty bad. To be fair to Rowling her first book actually introduced some good ideas, the rest were pretty much universally crap.

Some of Asimov's themes and ideas are also feeling very dated now too, he seemed to be heavily influenced by the US/Russia situation and early electronics and those inspirations have not stood the test of time.

A visionary in his time and for a generation afterwards, but I'm starting to doubt he'll be much read in 10 or 20 years time.

"Nowhere near as bad as Rowling, who is an awful writer, but still pretty bad. To be fair to Rowling her first book actually introduced some good ideas, the rest were pretty much universally crap."

What? Excuse me, are you serious? Rowling is a very good writer. In terms of style and plotting, the latter of which isn't always perfect, but definitely not as awful as you make out. And why on earth are you measuring her in terms of "ideas" such as historical context, she wrote a series of children and teen's books, which happen to possess a cross-over appeal to adults due to their quality. Harry Potter isn't hard science fiction, and I do find your seeming inability to find simple pleasure in reading such a (in my view) charming series quite disheartening.

@ araneae and mattmanser

I really thought Hacker News was a more intellectual place, than to condone empty blanket statements like "their writing is crap".

Please, if you are going to state something, especially in a thread regarding rationality, please back it up.

If you're going to posture as an amateur writing critic, thinking about the social context of Asimov's writing, you probably shouldn't also condemn a writer loved by readers, writers, and critics as "pretty much universally crap". It's counter-cultural and pretentious yet very shallow, and so you lose a lot of credibility as a critic.

Is it really controversial to say that Asimov had a bad prose style and is primarily an idea or conceptual writer?

I mean, look at http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=asimov%20%22prose... . These people aren't making it up; Asimov will never be praised for his striking style, magnificent metaphors, or lucid descriptions, like, say, Gene Wolfe is.

Pretty sure he was defending Rowling, not Asmiov.

His writing is pretty bad in the original Foundation trilogy, but it was his early work. He got a lot better later on. Have you read Stephen King's first novel, Carrie? The writing is awful.

And yes, there are a lot of direct cold war references in something like Fantastic Voyage II that make it seem outdated, but I think that his really futuristic stuff doesn't have that flaw.

Sadly, because it is fan fiction, it will never be published.

But because it's fan fiction, I wouldn't object if, after the story finishes, someone produced their own edit of it.

Oh wow, there you are.

I just wanted to say that I absolutely love this series of Harry Potter stories. Awesome. Brilliant. Genius. This is as someone who does read a lot as well. It's really, really, really excellent. It's the only mostly static website on the web which I go and manually check every couple of days, excited at the thought that maybe there's a new chapter up. It's like having a child's Christmas every few days. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I hope I'm not raining on your Christmas, but if you register at FanFiction.net, you can subscribe to get an email whenever a new chapter is posted. That way you find out about new chapters quickly, and you don't have to check manually. That's what I do, anyway. There's also an unofficial RSS feed:

http://demented.no-ip.org/~feep/rss_proxy.cgi?5782108

I actually built a feed-builder: http://ffnetupdates.inklesspen.com/

Sign up (no email or password, just a UUID), track as many authors or stories as you like in one Atom feed. It will let you know when wordcount changes even if there's no new chapter, or when your favorite author has a new story.

Oh, I know about the RSS feed, I just prefer it this way. :-)

Highly irrational, but I understand and approve!

What's rational depends entirely on what you want. For someone who enjoys the excitement of periodically checking FanFiction.net to see if HP:MoR has been updated, it's a deliciously rational thing to do.

"Thanks," he said in the small, awkward voice of someone who'd never quite figured out how to take a compliment like that gracefully.

It strikes me as slightly ironic that this book is so popular here. After all, it's in praise of rationality, whereas HN is a community of entrepreneurs; A profession where the odds against you are so great that you almost couldn't get out of bed in the morning without delusions of grandeur, or at least a healthy dose of narcissism.

Right, and the main character of this story never faces heavy odds, nor tries to do anything ambitious, and nobody in his universe ever accused him of having delusions of grandeur... I gotta ask here, have you read up to Chapter 5?

Nope, didn't read it. I didn't realize the book touched on this, though it wasn't meant as a criticism of the book (or HN) anyway.

Ahem. You don't happen have that .tex template hanging around that was used to produce the .pdf? Because it's absolutely beautiful and I would like to co-opt the template for my NaNoWriMo novel :D.

That would be Bogdan Butnaru's work. Email me and I'll forward your email to him.

I'll be honest: I read a lot of fiction too. And this is awful. (Note: giving it up at chapter 3.)

Everything so far has followed this pattern:

* 1) Set-up. * 2) Harry demonstrates his special, unique smarts.

Of course, step two is the far more important of the two.

Combine that with a ridiculously over-the-top amount of name-dropping (more citations than a doctorate!). (I admit, I did have a soft spot for the Flubber reference; it was instantly ruined by the AD&D one that followed -- and if "+6 thingamabobie" wasn't explicit enough for you, the entire next paragraph was about AD&D.)

This is not storytelling: "And she told him of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the Dark Lord, Voldemort." Bleargh. And following it up with an academic citation WRT the bystander effect: WTF?

Anyway, everyone has opinions; that's just mine. Story should come first, and wish-fulfillment fantasies second. (Not that they can't add to a story!)

Just to clarify, you're judging this story after only 3 chapters? Because if you want to get an accurate impression of the story, you should push past chapter 5 at least. The tone of the story evolves considerably, and you might find you like it after all. (Though to quote the author, "If you still don't like it after Chapter 10, give up.")

Yes: I set it aside very early on.

I'm quite certain the story will change & evolve. However, I'm rather sceptical that the writing quality will.

Part of why I gave it up so early is purely on me: I am a sucker for a page-turner -- once a plot picks up a certain amount of steam, I have a near-compulsion to finish. This is the case even if, upon reflection, I don't like the writing, characters, events, etc...

Nothing less fun than coming out of a reading binge at 3am on a work night reading a book you didn't like!

edit: Random sampling in future chapters reveals great heapings of soliloquy and dialectic. I don't feel too bad about setting it down.

> Nothing less fun than coming out of a reading binge at 3am on a work night reading a book you didn't like!

Oh this has happened to me far far too many times...

If it helps, MoR's plot is fairly episodic and doesn't start to pick up steam until about chapter 16

I'd add an "I loved it" but honestly, I liked a lot of the things you disliked, so YMWPV.

I agree though, the writing is sub-par. It somehow sounds far too american to quite fit into the Harry Potter canon, in my opinion.

Since the author wasn't interested in trying to fit into canon, that doesn't seem to be a fair basis for dismissing his/her writing.

However, there are plenty of others (standard IMO disclaimer applies). ;)

(As a very quick & somewhat quantitative example, look at how many words the author spent on the contrasting views & strained relationship of Ma Potter & Pa Potter WRT magic in the first chapter, vs. the approximately zero words spent on that same topic in the second chapter when magic is demonstrated directly for them.)

If you like his writing, see also "Three Worlds Collide":

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

I love HP and the Methods of Rationality, and absolutely hated "Three Worlds Collide" because

a)It was very contrived, and

b)Rape will never be legal, sorry, unless it's an anti-feminist society similar to some Arab countries, which that society wasn't. I know it's just one little thing, but that completely killed the suspension of disbelief for me.

It's contrived because the goal of the story was to get people to think about metaethics. It's still pretty good for entertainment value though.

b) was a reference to http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/

There was some discussion of this when the chapter was posted. The rape idea was really weird, but it made more sense after reading some of the discussion:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q... http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q... http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q...

I've read the comments, and the point still stands. There's a reason that I had never heard of a "weirdtopian" novel before. If something is outside of the scope of what humans are capable of, it's very jarring to one's suspension of disbelief. Just because it fits with his desire to make it weirdtopian doesn't mean I like it any better.

But isn't the basic idea that, through genetic engineering et al, we can become a species other than our own? I can't fault a science fiction story for showing the possible sociological consequences of scientific progress, no matter how much I don't "like" the direction science or society is taking—that's the whole point of science fiction, after all.

People like to have protagonists with "human" values to root for in stories—in fact, it can be said that consuming narrative is basically how humans indulge in pretending to believe their own far values (by identifying with characters that act on those far values as if they were near, and then "liking" the works of writers that cause those identifiable characters to "win" the story—or, alternatively, that cause characters without those values to "lose", as in tragedies.) That's the reason that any setting, no matter how fantastic (D&D, 40k, HHGTTG) still has (something that acts and thinks like) modern-day humans. However, if you really think in Hard sci-fi terms, you begin to realize that there's no good, probable explanation for "the future" being such a setting without further, conscious intervention on our part to retain our current values (see Eliezer's "Theory of Fun" sequence.)

I'm not sure it's possible to argue someone into enjoying a work of fiction.

I explained why it didn't work for me. Any work of fiction- the successful ones, anyway- will always be about people. If they're too different of a people (genetically engineered out of their humanness), then people simply won't enjoy it.

There's a reason that there are virtually no popular science fiction novels where the protagonist is an alien that has a completely different value/mating systems to us. I got like a page into a story about an alternate history of Earth where birds resembling jacanas (a species where the females are behaviorally like the males of other species and v.v.) were the intelligent species on the planet. Then I realized that no-one could ever relate to or care about my characters. They were just too alien. That isn't to say there can't be great fiction where the conflict between alien races is over that difference, like 3 worlds, (Ender's Game comes to mind), but the point is always to reaffirm what it means to be human. You just can't do that if the humans in your book are alien.

I'm not suggesting that you should enjoy it. It's not escapism; it's not intended to pass mindlessly into your amygdala. It's meant to be a serious, critical analysis of the consequences of doing such a thing—a satire, in other words. you're meant to come away with it with an opinion on whether or not doing this—becoming alien in this way, having these irreconcilably different values—is a good thing or not.

...which was, oddly enough, the plot of the story itself! The protagonists decided that the values of the Baby Eaters were a bad thing; and, likewise, the Super Happy people decided that the values of the protagonists were a bad thing. One day, our future, alien selves might decide that our current values are a bad thing, and, likewise, if we see their (potential) values as bad enough, we might consider not allowing such a positive feedback loop toward new values to take place at all.

Except (spoiler alert) the central conflict of the story is that the humans don't even remotely want to go through that kind of change, even though it's scientifically possible. Which means that you have biologically stock humans who are allowed to rape each other, not futuristic bioengineered posthumans who just happen to not mind being raped.

It wasn't even an especially important or relevant part of the plot. It's not an unusual, or especially heinous sin for SF to be tone deaf about how actual human beings function, but supposing that any kind of peaceful society would allow rape is pretty absurd.

If you think legalized rape is outside of what humans are capable of, you're not up on current events.

If you mean that an individual human couldn't view sex as something outside themselves, then maybe.

Huge, huge, HUGE upvote. Three Worlds Collide is amazing.

And if you like that, check out "Life Artificial":

http://lifeartificial.com

That was great! A previous discussion about "Three Worlds Collide:" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1387771

If you're not careful when you read it, you miss the True Ending: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yb/true_ending_sacrificial_fire_78/

    Use a time machine to prove/disprove P == NP

Hold up. P==NP is only proved if you have a time machine.[1] It's still unknown in story if you can do it with a conventional, causal, turing machine.

Also note that Harry is either ahead of the times (he doesn't mention the Moravec paper in-story) or very, very au courant, being perhaps the only eleven year old in the world to be reading preprints of theoretical computer science papers while also attending wizarding school.

1: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.artic...

Actually, it happens to be true that all eleven-year-olds attending wizarding school read preprints of theoretical computer science papers.

<snicker>. Though your statement does feel a bit like dereferencing a NULL-pointer, as in GetAllElevenYearOldsAtWizardingSchool()->doesReadTheoreticalCompSciPapers() should blow up... (Well, at least in the world of bare-metal C, any sane language will of course return an empty collection, and not a NULL pointer to the first function....)

Then you did a very unrealistic job representing each and every other young wizard in your writing.

You're missing Eliezer's little joke. In classical logic, usually any predicate is True of a non-existent entity.

There are no 11 year olds who attend wizarding school, hence it is True that all such creatures read CS preprints. (Like it is True that unicorns have one horn.)

I was also joking in that in Eliezer's fictional work he writes prolifically about 11 year olds who attend wizarding school and there is precisely one who reads them.

Perhaps a </joke> would have been necessary.

It's not bad as far as fiction goes. It's straight awesome compared to just about all other fanfic. It's main problem is that it's front loaded with all of the authors non-fiction blog posts on transhumanism. The story is stalled repeatedly by the Rand-like "John Galt" speeches by the Potter character especially.

Which is rather ironic, given Harry's dismissal of Atlas Shrugged in one of the early chapters.

HPMOR has hit HN front page on at least 3 occasions (including this one). That in itself tells you how good this thing really is. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668766

"I'd personally rank it up with Asimov or Heinlein at their best."

There's also a healthy dose of Pratchett, acknowledging the fundamental silliness of magic.

But perhaps it is J. K. Rowling who should get credit for doing the acknowledging. If you write "students are given time machines so they can attend more classes" and no one in-universe points this out as odd, that's Harry Potter. If a fanfiction has someone notice how odd this is, that may bear a greater stylistic resemblance to Terry Pratchett, but the core silliness was still J. K. Rowling's idea to start with...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com