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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Well done! You have discovered part 1 of The Secret! Congratulations!!

Clues to Part 2 of The Secret can be found in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Stakes are high! At the end of the trail of clues, the Council of Immortal Wizards will ask you to join their ranks, at which time they will confer immortality upon you. There are only 10E100-1 steps to go!

Good luck!

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Haha, this was great. I arrived at an article about “John Frum” which did sound like a secret, and was quite the rabbit hole [1].

It got me worried about history. The whole story sounds like 90s zine fiction, which I think it is - there is no record I could find beyond the original story from 1995 on Harper’s Magazine [2], yet it is now in Wikipedia, stated as a fact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

[2] https://skeptichume.weebly.com/the-gospel-according-to-prum....

The wikipedia article includes references from a couple of decades earlier, at least; e.g.

> Nat. Geographic: May 1974. "Tanna (Island, New Hebrides, South Pacific Ocean) Awaits the Coming of John Frum (cargo cults of Melanesia since about 1940)".

(See https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TANNA-A... for a scan of the full article.)

> It got me worried about history. The whole story sounds like 90s zine fiction, which I think it is - there is no record I could find beyond the original story from 1995 on Harper’s Magazine [2], yet it is now in Wikipedia, stated as a fact.

Did you look at the references section in the article?

This is a great documentary about the situation: https://johnfrummovie.com/

Oh god, I just watched a video about John Frum, and now this subthread, it briefly felt like a delusion.

Off topic: is it new for HN to elide urls this way? I’ve never noticed it before but it really annoys me. I like that HN is just text, and preprocessing it this way adds no usability. It makes it harder to copy a URL, if anything, and it certainly isn’t prettier.

It's nice on mobile to avoid left-right scroll for long urls. Copying the url is easy enough with right-click for desktop or long press for mobile.

Whats wrong with wrapping?

Personal preference I suppose. There are a lot of urls where the text of the url (or large parts of it) conveys no meaning. In that case it breaks up the comment without adding value. Sometimes you see people use a footnote format here because even the short url is in the way.

Not nice to me. I like to be able to see what the link is before I click it.

On mobile, in Firefox, do a long press and it'll show you the full target URL. Hoover on any desktop browser.

That random wikipedia link is awesome. Didn’t know you could do that.

What's the name of the effect that when you click on something random you still end up on something related to you and you think "it's not that random". Because I got that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

The mental habit of seeing connections?

Dot here.

I call that one "creativity" !

Apophenia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat_Bog_Soldiers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Hmm. I'm having a hard time relating the '1990 All-Pacific-10 Conference football team' to anything in my life though.

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Fre...

Serendipity?

Pareidolia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

That article "Microbridge" should really be deleted because it's not notable, but it looks like it was proposed in 2011 and failed so it isn't eligible for WP:PROD and needs to go through the full WP:AFD process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_and_delusions_of_referen...

I once saw a solo improv performance that was started off by using that to get a prompt for a story

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