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:
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?
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadFor 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...
It's a poignant story about the devolution of social media into shallowness. With both orbital and quantum mechanics thrown in.
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?