
Compelling Science Fiction Issue 4 - roymurdock
http://compellingsciencefiction.com/issue4.html
======
nxrabl
Compelling Science Fiction has been consistently excellent since it started. I
think I made a Patreon account just to support it. Highly recommended.

~~~
mojoe
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.

~~~
pmontra
Wow, so many stories?

All your issues have been excellent so far. Thanks!

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

~~~
darklajid
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.

~~~
unwind
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".

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

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pastullo
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?

~~~
mojoe
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.

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

~~~
abecedarius
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.

~~~
hyperpallium
How can an algorithm determine an upvote's informedness?

~~~
abecedarius
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.

~~~
hyperpallium
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.

~~~
abecedarius
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.

~~~
hyperpallium
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](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).

~~~
abecedarius
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.

