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Comment by skunkworker | Hacker News Reader

The fictional article https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/ is one the best written computer science/cryptography SCP like articles I've ever read.

What I loved is that:

$ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | openssl dgst -sha256 (stdin)= 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17

actually works, but is a little sneaky. See https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-tr...

Edit2: https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter How the examples were generated.

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What is interesting is what the top comment in the previous thread points out, both the collection and the iceberg are part of the same domain. The text for it is the only one that's italic and stands out a bit but not too much. It's like the whole thing is made just to sell that one.

And I gotta say congrats to them, I completely fell for it.

There are other italicized entries. For example, OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays and Falsehoods programmers believe about time.

It may still be a clever ad, but doesn't seem necessarily related to their font choices.

Lots of great stuff - not sure if it's on there, but I like the story about a user complaining they couldn't send an email farther than 150 miles.

Turned out to be related to some sort of timeout (and 150 miles being around the time it would take for the timeout to fail).

I liked it because the user reporting it was debugging in an interesting way a non-technical person might, but it initially weirded out the technical person when they first tested it and saw the 150mi thing appeared to be true (before deducing why).

The story of Mel is also on there and a great (true one). Speed up loops was another fun DailyWTF one and I also liked the one about the cool cam (that saved some flight video game that was way behind schedule).

The old programmer lore stories are great.

It's in there, the 500 mile email.

Ah 500mi - I misremembered, thanks

There was another story on the same site [1] that involves thermodynamics and signal processing. I don't think I've seen such technical sci-fi before. Anybody else have more examples to share?

[1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...

Not quite to the same level of technical complexity, but this short story about the horrors of mind upload is formatted like a future-Wikipedia article [0]. qntm, its author, is a great source of... outsider art science fiction? His written work feels similar to the movie Primer, which was created by engineers without much formal training in filmmaking; namely, it's impressive and imaginative and well-polished, but obviously without the mien and certain stylistic elements of those who learned the "rules" of the medium by rote rather than derivation and imitation.

[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

This story is one of the most horrifying things ever. I’d rather die than get mind-uploaded into a VC-backed immortality machine.

(Of course it helps that I believe that there’s an afterlife - but even if I didn’t, I’m likely to make the same choice)

Greg Egan is an extreme example of math in hard sci-fi. https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html

72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of his stories became the movie Arrival.

Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find it though.

This should be the page, but it requires a Flash plugin (so doesn't work for me): https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

Here it is as a pdf: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf

Wow! Thank you for finding that.

Thanks for linking this, I love this kind of "computer science fiction" stuff

It’s the stuff the Laundry series by Charles Stross used to be, but then it really focused on the espionage and then just general paranormal parody riffing.

For the uninformed, what’s sneaky about it?

From the comments in the linked thread:

> They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the real hashes have extra characters in between those start and end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22 zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An achievable-in-reality difficulty level

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