

In the Ruins - JonnieCache
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/MISC/RUINS/Ruins.html

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sbierwagen
Wow, that got flagged off the front page fast.

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jloughry
I didn't like it. But I think it's important, so I'll upvote it. A lot of
things on HN are like that.

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JonnieCache
It's not the best sci-fi short story I've ever read, and I don't necessarily
agree with all the views expressed, but I thought it would be interesting to
HN.

For those not familiar, Greg Egan writes some of the hardest science fiction
you'll ever read. Check out _Orphanogenesis,_ which stands alone but is also
the introduction to his mindblowing novel _Diaspora_ :

[http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...](http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html)

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RivieraKid
What is it about? TL;DR version?

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funament
If you're the kind of person who substitutes reading a review for watching a
movie:

It's a poignant story about the devolution of social media into shallowness.
With both orbital and quantum mechanics thrown in.

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RivieraKid
I am that kind of person in this case, thanks.

HN submissions like this – meaningless title followed by a wall of text – are
unfortunatelly pretty common here. The problem is that you can't easily
determine if the article's value is in the information it provides or in the
reading experience (i.e. something that makes you laugh or a well-written
story).

The point is, I visit HN primarily for information, not for reading
experience. That's why a 3 sentence summary of a 3 page long article may have
the same value for me as the whole article. So I'd say TL;DR summaries are
valuable for some people and there's nothing wrong about requesting it. Why
should I waste time reading a multi-page nytimes.com article if the _useful_
information can be compressed to one sentence?

