Discussion
charv: All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.
jasongill: This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
Aliyekta: Claude Mythos
markus_zhang: How about this one?https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
bitshiftfaced: For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
sebg: Lots of good comments over the years -> https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...
moffers: My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
baq: It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)
rationalist: Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
actionfromafar: Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!
Arainach: Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
shivaniShimpi_: ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week
NickDouglas: Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.
quentindanjou: I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
boxed: I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :PIf you want good sci-fi a good list can be:- Ender's Game- The Martian + Project Hail Mary- A Fire Upon the Deep- Dune
rationalist: The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
baq: - Hyperion
larrykluger: A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
jihadjihad: Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
rationalist: Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
comicjk: A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
sebg: For those curious -> https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
0xmattf: One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.
robrain: Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.
CGMthrowaway: >INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWERBoy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
grimgrin: okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just in generaldidn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
PaulHoule: You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
phkahler: >> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
rouvax: For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?
CGMthrowaway: People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
xeonmc: I know dune is highly acclaimed for its concept, but personally I couldn’t quite get into it.Its writing was too dry for my taste.
jjice: An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
Toutouxc: For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.
RajT88: Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.
xeonmc: Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it’s https://www.eternal-flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...
rationalist: More Magic:https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
nickt: I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!
Darkphibre: His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
bargainbin: You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*
croisillon: No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.
