OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
This reads so well I was supposed to go out for a workout but I couldn't stop until I finished it.
Incredibly engaging yet simple writing that flows well.
It so was. It's amazing how easily we can all tell what's written by a real person these days. It's gotta be like the early days of CGI.... ten years from now it'll be so hard to tell :(
Why make him #5 in WoW of all games? Arena has never been that prestigious and most players primarily engaged in PvE rather than PvP, which didn’t have such rankings.
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
Don't listen to the quitters here kids, go chase your dream, it's worth it. Employment is just helping someone else reach theirs for a pat on the back.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
This is more of a question of personal philosophy/mindset, not logic. When you set yourself (or someone else) up for failure you've already failed and at that point there's nothing one can do. If you don't believe you can do something you won't do it. It's a loser's mindset. At the bare minimum you have to believe in yourself to be able to do things, no one else is going to do them for you.
Right, and if someone doesn't have the loser's mindset then reading "it's hard to beat the odds, don't try" wont deter them. So there's no loss there. It might deter someone with the loser's mindset though, and given that they weren't going to make it anyway if you knock them off track early then that's a benefit.
quitters dont generally make careers or stable jobs for themselves. you can rage against the man all you want, as long as you dont delude yourself into thinking you’ll ever be invited to the table or do anything but contribute to the status quo anyway. unless you went to a handful of schools and attended a handful of fraternities. cynical? yes, but that doesnt mean it isnt true. the proof is the overwhelming number of founders fail, even in hype markets.
When I was around that age, my Aaron was this kid who matched a similar description, very bright but utterly averse to any kind of work whatsoever, never finished his education, did okay in school but underperformed a lot.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
What’s funny is that there was a bankrupt auto company that was memed back into existence. Hertz, by all logic, was absolutely doomed. Retail traders brought it back from near-certain liquidation and could have made a ton of money. Not sure how many actually sold.
This was GM and as I roughly remember it there was no chance of this happening, because they just formed a new company and issued new stock after bankruptcy. Maybe hard for a young person at that time to understand, and the SEC probably shouldn't have allowed trading by the point he got into it, but it was all over the news and google was in its hayday, the information was easily available.
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that have some aspect of Aaron - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
But that is also basically what most intellectual jobs are, workers telling their boss what to do while pretending they are receiving and executing commands.
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
Am not a native English speaker, and I don't read stories much. Mostly the reason why I am at HN is to seek for tech news and learn something. But your story made a record to stuck me at a single page for 15+ mins. I need to tell you that i do have minor problem with my eyes, thus can't keep up with a almost-static screen for 5+ mins. But this one made me rub my eyes every 30 seconds but keep reading on.
I can't tell what I felt in the ending paragraph, but I can be sure of this is the strongest outcome I felt, from an web page.
I really enjoyed this piece. I thought the idea was creative and believable. It really sucked me in and kept the momentum going. I have a feeling it's going to stick with me for a while.
I am absolutely not a writer so take this with a big grain of salt.
Something about narrator felt like they weren't a real character and the whole story was just Aaron's third person. Maybe because the narrator didn't seem to have any intentional effect on Aaron's trajectory? Not sure if that was meant as a way to deepen that aspect of the story, but at times it felt a little awkward.
I clicked on the HN link and, when I saw "short story", almost closed the tab ... but I started to read anyway. I found it compelling and disturbing from start to finish. Much as my opinions about writing count for nothing, I truly hope that you poat any future works here. A great read.
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market in the early 2010s. It wasn't phrased like a prediction market focusing on when a person would die, but more like a bounty. If the bounty/pot got big enough, eventually it would be worth it for someone to do it.
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
I think all the big targets for this kind of thing have the legal or government muscle to get in your way? Millions of people usually don't agree on someone dying unless they're powerful.
Every prediction market is an assassination market. They claim to trade on "information" but it's more like "influence", and easiest way to influence an event is usually by sabotage.
thats already on a table when you place a prediction that is related to an Individual doing something. you dont even need to spell it out. not sure how we are going to regulate those
Kind of reminds me a bit of the story from Better Call Saul. Someone who has the ability and opportunity to earn an honest living, but is addicted to endorphin rush of taking risks, cheating the system, fame, etc.
I don't really know anybody like that, but there are certainly aspects of that personality that I can understand. I've never had much desire to get into bitcoin, meme stocks, prediction markets, and other forms of gambling - though at times I have felt a bit of FOMO.
Another aspect I liked about the story is that when he goes from being a failure to being a success (at least in his own mind and to his followers) - despite having the same qualities that he has had for the whole story - he goes from being a character that you pity to one that you resent.
Well written. Certainly bridges the gap between fiction and a plausible and believable first person narrative.
Are you familiar with the US magazine The Sun? https://www.thesunmagazine.org/
I have read several short story submissions at The Sun; typically first person submissions which blur the lines between true first person stories, and fiction.
Reads a bit like an elevated resentment fantasy. A mostly ethical narrator narrating his friend’s morally deserved doom that keeps the narrator’s own hands mostly clean. And with the narrator holding a medal at the end.
That’s cathartic for some. For me, the narrator rather resembles one of the local tech millionaires, envious of the billionaires. The story doesn’t seem to know the narrator’s dishonesty.
I think the narrator is the murderer and is lying about the man in the gray tracksuit. The repeated criticism of Aaron's moral character is a sort of rationalization for having killed him, with the underlying motive actually being a combination of greed and envy. Remember that the funds used to kick-start the trading platform came from a hackathon win that Aaron "stole".
Some people have always had qualities like Aaron's, and giving them tools like AI causes them to reveal themselves by virtue of becoming that much louder. Those problems are often unfixable regardless, as they are at the level of personality. What is fixable in comparison (but likely not in practice) is not inventing new ways of allowing them to hang themselves and others. But we will invent them anyway, because a promising idea cannot be left alone for long, and consequences will be suffered as a result.
As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way.
He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.
I use to read a lot, big novels and short stories, and I know when I see something that is good. Yours is.
One thing that I give you as feedback, maybe for another version, or for future stories, would be to develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron. I know it was there some reasons, but for me it was a bit harder to follow. But even this is a small thing.
Tell us if you have something else written to share.
> develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron.
Thanks for your feedback (I got similar feedback from my friend and my partner who both write). I agree that this felt like a bit of a hole in the story as I was writing it, that I never managed to satisfactorily patch up.
> Tell us if you have something else written to share.
This is my first piece of long-form fiction, have submitted a couple of new pieces to competitions since, and aim to post those and more soon!
I also didn't see the notice it was a short story. So I was a bit puzzled when reading how Aaron built his own exchange as a novice programmer. To me building an exchange is
high up on the scale of programming difficulty. Its one of those things you have to do extremely well or else no one will trust your platform.
Nice. Story and your writing style tell more about you as about Aaron.
IMHO, with the second paragraph, Aaron starts to fade into background. While you increasingly describe your character in-depth, but also more and more often seem to advert an urge to apologize for ... something. I wonder what that is!?
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I might have known an "aaron" or two like that.I've also known an actual "Aaron" who was famous for being extremely ethical and I initially clicked thinking it'd be a reminisce about that one.
The story is written really well. Lots of other people have said great stuff about it, so I get some room to criticize a bit too!
I just wonder about how you constructed the ending. It seemed like a different ending was coming in, and then the sudden <spoiler> out of nowhere is almost a diablo ex machina. It's just someone who comes out of nowhere, does one thing, and vanishes again, right at the end of the story, just to finish it. It's like "and then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" ; except not quite as bad as that makes it sound. Intellectually (sherlock holmes reader style) you could see it coming, but somehow story-arc-wise not so much.
I was totally on board with the story right up to that point though, so definitely good craft.
Haha I have not heard of the Shaggy Dog trope! (Or it’s only very vaguely familiar)
I agree with you that the ending is a bit rushed, which I think can come off as forced. I’d like to blame the word count for the competition I submitted this into… :D
I’d been thinking about the idea for this story for a couple of weeks before I actually started writing it, from which I had quite a visceral idea for the ending. So I guess in some ways I could have tried to weave it in more, but I also did kind of want it to be a shocker / surprise!
I initially missed the line saying it was a short story and read through most of it as personal experience until the last couple of paragraphs. That made it even more exciting, but it is still very good as a fictional story.
It’s hard to tell how spontaneous this error is as I’ve only just launched this website, but will try to see if there’s a fix for it — thanks for the data!
Hey you don't have to reply to each comment with a generic reply. It's a fine piece sure but let's not inflate this thread x2 with just "thank you for your words".
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Shut up and Dance."
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
There's a difference between intelligent and smart, the latter including being able to use your intelligence for a practical, real-life purpose, like improving your own life.
I thought the story was non-fiction until I got to the point about how the bots attracted real users to Aaron's platform. That part was really stretching it.
And yet it reads better than quite a bit of non-fiction and invokes some interesting questions. Maybe its worth asking yourself what qualities in writing can make a “fake” story engage so many peoples interest? It’s also a bit odd to call it a fake when it’s never pitched as being true.
OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
You're a great writer. I haven't read a lot recently, but this was the type of story that I really could not stop reading.
I also didn't see that it said "This is a short story" at the top, so I read more than half thinking it was nonfiction. Heh.
This reads so well I was supposed to go out for a workout but I couldn't stop until I finished it. Incredibly engaging yet simple writing that flows well.
My god, for a minute there I thought this was real.. This resonates, I bet a number of us know or Are an “Aaron”. Thanks for this.
I'll admit, I was really hoping the end was going to be like, "And that's how Aaron Kalshi created a £XX billion company."
THIS!
This is incredibly well written had me hooked till the end (probably because I thought it was a real life incident. :)
Congratulations! As someone who's written (micro and short) fiction for many years, I _feel_ how hard it is to get someone to read it. Enjoy it!
Good story, write more. You have a good NO AI style.
Couldn't stop reading! It's been an embarrassingly long amount of time since I got hooked to something like this. Keep going!
Very well written! I haven't read such a long piece on the internet for quite a while but this hooked me immediately, and kept me hooked.
Breath of fresh air between all the AI """writing""".
It so was. It's amazing how easily we can all tell what's written by a real person these days. It's gotta be like the early days of CGI.... ten years from now it'll be so hard to tell :(
Thanks OP, great read
I really enjoyed this! Thank you for writing and sharing.
Good story. I was hooked.
You write wonderfully, direct, heartfelt, human, real, the opposite of LLM output, and that’s the highest honor I can bestow.
Why make him #5 in WoW of all games? Arena has never been that prestigious and most players primarily engaged in PvE rather than PvP, which didn’t have such rankings.
Aaron seems like the kind of guy who would sink a ton of time in to something so meaningless now, doesn't he?
He was #6.
Superb storytelling. Thank you. This was fantastic.
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
Don't listen to the quitters here kids, go chase your dream, it's worth it. Employment is just helping someone else reach theirs for a pat on the back.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
This is bad advice to give. It sets a lot of people up for failure with unreasonable expectations.
The correct advice to give is "don't do it. It's really hard and you'll probably fail".
Anyone who quits after receiving that advice was never going to make it anyway.
"Most people fail, so better don't even try."
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
I think you're ignoring the GP's last paragraph.
Maybe an intermediate position is to say, "Before you attempt to beat the odds, make sure you can survive the odds beating you." Because the odds are, they will.
This is more of a question of personal philosophy/mindset, not logic. When you set yourself (or someone else) up for failure you've already failed and at that point there's nothing one can do. If you don't believe you can do something you won't do it. It's a loser's mindset. At the bare minimum you have to believe in yourself to be able to do things, no one else is going to do them for you.
Right, and if someone doesn't have the loser's mindset then reading "it's hard to beat the odds, don't try" wont deter them. So there's no loss there. It might deter someone with the loser's mindset though, and given that they weren't going to make it anyway if you knock them off track early then that's a benefit.
yeah go buy lottery tickets kids instead of investing your time and money into something predictable
quitters dont generally make careers or stable jobs for themselves. you can rage against the man all you want, as long as you dont delude yourself into thinking you’ll ever be invited to the table or do anything but contribute to the status quo anyway. unless you went to a handful of schools and attended a handful of fraternities. cynical? yes, but that doesnt mean it isnt true. the proof is the overwhelming number of founders fail, even in hype markets.
everyone has their own status quos and goals.
When I was around that age, my Aaron was this kid who matched a similar description, very bright but utterly averse to any kind of work whatsoever, never finished his education, did okay in school but underperformed a lot.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
What’s funny is that there was a bankrupt auto company that was memed back into existence. Hertz, by all logic, was absolutely doomed. Retail traders brought it back from near-certain liquidation and could have made a ton of money. Not sure how many actually sold.
This was GM and as I roughly remember it there was no chance of this happening, because they just formed a new company and issued new stock after bankruptcy. Maybe hard for a young person at that time to understand, and the SEC probably shouldn't have allowed trading by the point he got into it, but it was all over the news and google was in its hayday, the information was easily available.
They saved themselves by reporting rented cars as stolen and having them towed back to the lot so they could double-dip.
That's a shame to hear about - Hertz is one of the shittiest companies I know. It would have been great for the world if they had been liqudated!
I wonder how he'd have fared in the 2021 meme stock era, no doubt talking about how we still need to HODL and his apr diamond hands strong.
> NPC can't comprehend working hard on creative projects to avoid being a wage slave
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
Thank you for your kind words!
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that have some aspect of Aaron - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
Thank you for reading it!
Best line in the story:
I had spent my whole life dreaming of making my own overnight success on the internet, but had taught someone with no ethics how to do it instead.
This is such a great line and one I know so many people related to as soon as they read it.
You're a great writer, thank you for this today.
But that is also basically what most intellectual jobs are, workers telling their boss what to do while pretending they are receiving and executing commands.
Ah, thank you!
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
Thank you, very kind of you to say!
Am not a native English speaker, and I don't read stories much. Mostly the reason why I am at HN is to seek for tech news and learn something. But your story made a record to stuck me at a single page for 15+ mins. I need to tell you that i do have minor problem with my eyes, thus can't keep up with a almost-static screen for 5+ mins. But this one made me rub my eyes every 30 seconds but keep reading on.
I can't tell what I felt in the ending paragraph, but I can be sure of this is the strongest outcome I felt, from an web page.
Congrats, again.
Not sure why, but I thought this was going to be a friend of Aaron Swartz writing in memory of him.
I thought so too and scrolled the page looking for a last name. Then realized the ending was not the same. RIP
Same
we've been primed by the articles from jstor recently posted on hn
I really enjoyed this piece. I thought the idea was creative and believable. It really sucked me in and kept the momentum going. I have a feeling it's going to stick with me for a while.
I am absolutely not a writer so take this with a big grain of salt. Something about narrator felt like they weren't a real character and the whole story was just Aaron's third person. Maybe because the narrator didn't seem to have any intentional effect on Aaron's trajectory? Not sure if that was meant as a way to deepen that aspect of the story, but at times it felt a little awkward.
I clicked on the HN link and, when I saw "short story", almost closed the tab ... but I started to read anyway. I found it compelling and disturbing from start to finish. Much as my opinions about writing count for nothing, I truly hope that you poat any future works here. A great read.
Thank you so much. I do indeed plan on posting more work here in future... HN has given me the impetus I needed for that (and more) now!
I clicked this because my name is Aaron and stayed around because it was such a captivating story all the way through to the end.
Murder is always systematically kind of a dramatic act. We are definitely going to get a prediction market murder in <5 years, I think.
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market in the early 2010s. It wasn't phrased like a prediction market focusing on when a person would die, but more like a bounty. If the bounty/pot got big enough, eventually it would be worth it for someone to do it.
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
I think all the big targets for this kind of thing have the legal or government muscle to get in your way? Millions of people usually don't agree on someone dying unless they're powerful.
Every prediction market is an assassination market. They claim to trade on "information" but it's more like "influence", and easiest way to influence an event is usually by sabotage.
a tale as old as time. e.g., fixing a fight or a game
thats already on a table when you place a prediction that is related to an Individual doing something. you dont even need to spell it out. not sure how we are going to regulate those
Kind of reminds me a bit of the story from Better Call Saul. Someone who has the ability and opportunity to earn an honest living, but is addicted to endorphin rush of taking risks, cheating the system, fame, etc.
I don't really know anybody like that, but there are certainly aspects of that personality that I can understand. I've never had much desire to get into bitcoin, meme stocks, prediction markets, and other forms of gambling - though at times I have felt a bit of FOMO.
Another aspect I liked about the story is that when he goes from being a failure to being a success (at least in his own mind and to his followers) - despite having the same qualities that he has had for the whole story - he goes from being a character that you pity to one that you resent.
To OP:
Well written. Certainly bridges the gap between fiction and a plausible and believable first person narrative.
Are you familiar with the US magazine The Sun? https://www.thesunmagazine.org/ I have read several short story submissions at The Sun; typically first person submissions which blur the lines between true first person stories, and fiction.
Try to submit your story to The Sun.
I enjoyed it. I have known a number of Aarons.
Thanks for sharing it, and good luck!
Reads a bit like an elevated resentment fantasy. A mostly ethical narrator narrating his friend’s morally deserved doom that keeps the narrator’s own hands mostly clean. And with the narrator holding a medal at the end.
That’s cathartic for some. For me, the narrator rather resembles one of the local tech millionaires, envious of the billionaires. The story doesn’t seem to know the narrator’s dishonesty.
Good point! I also got that impression and that made this story feel shady and finally even boring, resulting in an empty aftershade, mentally.
However, taste modulates wildly.
I think the narrator is the murderer and is lying about the man in the gray tracksuit. The repeated criticism of Aaron's moral character is a sort of rationalization for having killed him, with the underlying motive actually being a combination of greed and envy. Remember that the funds used to kick-start the trading platform came from a hackathon win that Aaron "stole".
Some people have always had qualities like Aaron's, and giving them tools like AI causes them to reveal themselves by virtue of becoming that much louder. Those problems are often unfixable regardless, as they are at the level of personality. What is fixable in comparison (but likely not in practice) is not inventing new ways of allowing them to hang themselves and others. But we will invent them anyway, because a promising idea cannot be left alone for long, and consequences will be suffered as a result.
As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way.
He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.
Very enjoyable. I was waiting for Aaron to have a heart attack, same outcome, less contrived maybe.
This is like a story from "Big Vern" in Viz, but instead of Vern being a violent London heavy, it's basically Ho from Slow Horses.
https://assets.londonist.com/uploads/2006/12/i875/4998_big_v...
I use to read a lot, big novels and short stories, and I know when I see something that is good. Yours is.
One thing that I give you as feedback, maybe for another version, or for future stories, would be to develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron. I know it was there some reasons, but for me it was a bit harder to follow. But even this is a small thing.
Tell us if you have something else written to share.
> develop a bit more on why keep the friendship with Aaron.
Thanks for your feedback (I got similar feedback from my friend and my partner who both write). I agree that this felt like a bit of a hole in the story as I was writing it, that I never managed to satisfactorily patch up.
> Tell us if you have something else written to share.
This is my first piece of long-form fiction, have submitted a couple of new pieces to competitions since, and aim to post those and more soon!
Great story! Loved reading it.
I also didn't see the notice it was a short story. So I was a bit puzzled when reading how Aaron built his own exchange as a novice programmer. To me building an exchange is high up on the scale of programming difficulty. Its one of those things you have to do extremely well or else no one will trust your platform.
> I also didn't see the notice it was a short story.
I'm starting to think perhaps I could have made the callout at the top a little clearer :)
Thank you for your words above also.
Nice. Story and your writing style tell more about you as about Aaron.
IMHO, with the second paragraph, Aaron starts to fade into background. While you increasingly describe your character in-depth, but also more and more often seem to advert an urge to apologize for ... something. I wonder what that is!?
Strangely, doesn't load for me with some Vercel/NextJS error. Disabling Javascript displays the whole post, though.
Notice another commenter saying similar, thanks for the data.
Something seems to 404:
Prediction markets are a very powerful concept (and reality). With great power comes great responsibility.
I had to stop reading to leave the office and head home. I finished reading it while having dinner! It would make an excellent Black Mirror episode.
I might have known an "aaron" or two like that.I've also known an actual "Aaron" who was famous for being extremely ethical and I initially clicked thinking it'd be a reminisce about that one.
The story is written really well. Lots of other people have said great stuff about it, so I get some room to criticize a bit too!
I just wonder about how you constructed the ending. It seemed like a different ending was coming in, and then the sudden <spoiler> out of nowhere is almost a diablo ex machina. It's just someone who comes out of nowhere, does one thing, and vanishes again, right at the end of the story, just to finish it. It's like "and then he woke up, and realized it was all a dream" ; except not quite as bad as that makes it sound. Intellectually (sherlock holmes reader style) you could see it coming, but somehow story-arc-wise not so much.
I was totally on board with the story right up to that point though, so definitely good craft.
(edit: was it deliberately a Shaggy Dog Story? If so the fact that there is a trope called "shoot the shaggy dog" is almost too on the nose, so I'm wondering if you had that in mind! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShaggyDogStory https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShootTheShaggyDo... )
Haha I have not heard of the Shaggy Dog trope! (Or it’s only very vaguely familiar)
I agree with you that the ending is a bit rushed, which I think can come off as forced. I’d like to blame the word count for the competition I submitted this into… :D
I’d been thinking about the idea for this story for a couple of weeks before I actually started writing it, from which I had quite a visceral idea for the ending. So I guess in some ways I could have tried to weave it in more, but I also did kind of want it to be a shocker / surprise!
> then the sudden <spoiler> out of nowhere is almost a diablo ex machina
Matt Levine says that prediction markets don't just predict future events. They also create strong incentives to make them happen (or not happen).
If you already knew that then the end was, I won't say predictable (hehe) - I was a bit surprised - but also not out of left field.
I initially missed the line saying it was a short story and read through most of it as personal experience until the last couple of paragraphs. That made it even more exciting, but it is still very good as a fictional story.
from your first post, a couple of days ago:
>What I'm saying is: that the sum total of blog posts I have actually published (for myself, not for work) is zero.
thanks for publishing this story. it kept me hooked throughout. i hope you continue to publish more.
Ah - thanks! I aim to keep it up!
I won $10,000 betting on whether you would publish this story on hacker news. Thanks!
I'm not sure if this is a consequence of reading about The Truman Show but, is every comment here made by a bot?
anyone else gets an error? error loading dynamically imported module: https://rorz.io/_next/static/chunks/link-CKkD60iF.js
It’s hard to tell how spontaneous this error is as I’ve only just launched this website, but will try to see if there’s a fix for it — thanks for the data!
What a great story. You have a very pleasant, flowing style. I didn't even notice it until I reached the end, it really captivated me
Hooked me with the first couple sentences, and I just had to keep going, as I just wanted to know what happens next.
Thanks, a good read!
Very good from start to finish, it reminds me of a darker version of the real story told in the 2009 documentary We Live In Public about Josh Harris.
I’ve not seen this before. Added to my watchlist!
Ooo you are in for a treat, it is old enough that it is easy to catch for free on streaming services, it will be a very trippy watch in 2026
I legitimately thought this was real for about half of it and it made it very engaging, well done.
I just sent this to my 16 year old. Thank you for writing and sharing this
That’s awesome to hear, thank you.
I almost missed my metro stop because I couldn't stop reading.
Where did Aaron get the millions of dollars' worth of tokens from? The grannies?!?
For all the Aarons out there, I think it would be very interesting to hear your POV.
Gripping! Wonderful surprise to read this today
Great writing. Felt like it could be a Black Mirror episode
Thank you for this piece! I'll be thinking about Aaron during lunch today.
Thank you for your kind words.
Hey you don't have to reply to each comment with a generic reply. It's a fine piece sure but let's not inflate this thread x2 with just "thank you for your words".
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Shut up and Dance."
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
I appreciate you referencing Charlie Brooker as he is undoubtedly a subconscious influence on my writing! Thanks for your comment.
I don't have my reading glasses on, so at first I read the title as "My Friend Arson".
Different kind of story I reckon.
Exceptionally well written! I was instantly hooked.
was it his mom?
This guy aaron doesnt sound very smart to me
INT 18 WIS 3 is no way to go through life, son.
(Ref: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/3799 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA )
There's a difference between intelligent and smart, the latter including being able to use your intelligence for a practical, real-life purpose, like improving your own life.
I think he is smart and intelligent but lacks wisdom.
Black Mirror adaptation when?
I thought the story was non-fiction until I got to the point about how the bots attracted real users to Aaron's platform. That part was really stretching it.
Very fun read. Thanks for posting it!
Appreciate the comment :)
Spooky and riveting!
Thank you very much.
Loved it!
Good story and the classic problem with nearly all betting markets having viaticals embedded
Great story; it's amazing how many of us sympathize with or have had an Aaron in our lives.
Great short story!!
Thank you!
you're not black mirror lil bro
Before you read and waste your time:
== It's a fake story ==
> waste your time
Do you not read any fiction at all? Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Otherwise known as fiction.
And yet it reads better than quite a bit of non-fiction and invokes some interesting questions. Maybe its worth asking yourself what qualities in writing can make a “fake” story engage so many peoples interest? It’s also a bit odd to call it a fake when it’s never pitched as being true.
Man this piece should win an Emmy or something, it's so original and well written. I also couldn't spot much AI in there. Props to the author.
>rhythmically ejected spurts of bright red blood
Yeah man, like in music, synesthesia, I get you.
Unsurprisingly the author also makes music: https://rorz.io/music
One of his songs is called "Do androids dream of real sheep?"
What a fresh take on that classic quote! Made me spurt my kombucha, lol.
How can someone be SO talented. Thanks for sharing.
Such kind words…! I’m so honoured and humbled. Thank you.
P.S. - I didn’t use LLMs to write it, no! :)
> I thought Aaron’s credits would run out and that would be the end of it: he would finally get a job.
Upon reading these words I experienced psychic damage from the blast of concentrated ambitionlessness.