If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real?
I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.
> being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest
I think you misunderstand.
It's about growing up, going to a restaurant with your grandparents, it becomes a kind of comfort and home. It's not just branding, it's the entire experience, of which the logo serves as a central symbol. What you see from the highway, what you see when you arrive.
And then the company is taking away something you love. When you go back, it's not the same. They were completely changing the interiors too. It wasn't where you went with grandma and grandpa anymore. They did a total 180° on it's atmosphere and personality.
From that perspective, can you find more empathy for people's emotional connections to a place and its symbols?
That makes as much sense as saying someone has a parasocial relationship with a park, or a house, or a beach.
What a strange thing to say. You think there's something "parasocial" about memories of a place with your family? I think you may need to examine whether you're using that term correctly.
And, well, nothing was "ever yours to begin with". That doesn't stop people from acting collectively to try to preserve the things they like. Nor should it.
Your worldview seems strangely sterile and passive, like you don't seem to understand the very basic idea of emotional connection with shared places, or of trying to influence things you don't "own".
> I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s
Why do you feel that was “nonsense”? Norm Macdonald had a joke about Coke and Pepsi—Basically he said it’s a misconception for restaurants to assume that if Coke is your favorite beverage, that Pepsi is your second favorite beverage and an acceptable alternative. In fact, if Coke is your favorite beverage Pepsi is probably your least favorite beverage. You end up opting for something else…that’s not a cola at all.
People rejected New Coke because Coca Cola turned their favorite beverage into their least favorite. Of course someone would complain about that.
Yrs, it’s real. People collect coke stuff as a … hobby? Lifestyle? Disney too. While they seem as bizarre to me as adults who collect toy anime figurines or those who go to opening night of superhero/comicbook based movies, they do exist. I suspect such people are not that rare amongst Cracker Barrel’s demographic.
Things used to have personality, but there's been this slow march toward making everything as bland and boring as possible. Restaurants are becoming grey utilitarian boxes, logos that used to have interesting designs are boiled down to a max of 3 colors.
It's corporate min-maxxing for attention economy and the hope you don't offend anyone's taste. If you're bland, then it's hard for anyone to sincerely dislike you. Bland logos are more instantly recognizable than complex ones, so we must ensure that we save a few milliseconds of cognition before the consumer makes a choice.
We're surrounded by company logos all the time. At least make them interesting.
I definitely saw some. It came from people who were in that culture war space where they interpret every trend as being part of a big left-wing plot to impose their values on everybody else.
I think that the author's complaint is that cons cells are too low level a construct to be exposed so prominently to the user. I think he would prefer that it was abstracted over with some higher level interface the way a lot of other language do it. He mentions Clojure as a Lisp that gets it right in his opinion and that's exactly what Clojure does. Cons cells are still available as a construct, but the default method for interacting with lists is a set of higher level functions that also work on arrays and other sequences and don't require that you think as much about the implementation of the lists.
Xah's complaint appears to be that cons cells are too low level a construct to expose to the user. He seems fine with lists in general but just dislikes how they are implemented in Lisp. If I were to implement a list in a non-Lisp language (like C or whatever,) it would likely internally include a struct called "Node" that filled the same purpose as cons cells do in Lisp. However, users of this hypothetical 'list' usually wouldn't directly interact with these "Nodes"; they would mostly be an implementation detail, as appears to be the case for most list implementations other than Lisp's. I think that Xah is wishing that was the case for Lisp as well.
> Xah's complaint appears to be that cons cells are too low level a construct to expose to the user
On his web page, he writes:
> Lisp's cons forces programer (sic) to think of list in a low-level nested of 2-item construction, with explicit functions like “cddr”, “cadaar” etc, and even a special notation “(A . B)”.
Except, most of the time, it doesn't. For example, I think (a b c) is a list of three elements. If I want c, I call (third '(a b c)), not (caddr '(a b c)). I know it's stored as (a . (b . (c . NIL))) and that third is just an alias for caddr, but I'm not forced to think that way.
So why not just think in terms of lists, which can be nested, rather than cons-cells, which are only rarely used for anything other than to construct lists? The cons function itself would still be needed, as adding a value to a list without modifying the original list is extremely useful. Or you could think in terms of the more abstract data structures (parse trees, Lisp functions, etc.) you construct from lists.
When learning and using a language, it's important to think in that language.
So why not just think in terms of lists, which can be nested, rather than cons-cells, which are only rarely used for anything other than to construct lists?
Because, as he continues:
Worse, any proper list can have improper list as elements. So, you can have a list of cons, or cons of lists, cons of cons, list of lists, or any mix. The overall effect of the cons is that it prevents lisp to have a uniform high level treatment of lists, with the result that development of functions that work on tree are inconsistent and few.
In other words, the fact that the implementation details for lists are so exposed means that you have to be careful when interacting with 'lists' that turn out not to be actual lists. There is no type information, either at compile or runtime, that ensures that what you're dealing with is actually a list and not something else. So you can't _actually_ think in terms of lists; you have to think in terms of cons cells which are probably lists but might not actually be so.
> So why not just think in terms of lists, which can be nested, rather than cons-cells, which are only rarely used for anything other than to construct lists?
Cons cells are used to construct other higher-level data structures, like trees, not just lists.
But this whole discussion seems to just be a version of the usually static vs. dynamic typing discussion, where the “you have to think in terms of cons not lists” side is the static typing side saying that without handcuffs making it statically impossible to do the wrong thing you can't ever stop thinking about the things that could be done even if you aren't doing them and the “you can think in terms of lists without a problem” is the dynamic typing side saying “no, we actually don’t need to think about other possibilities unless we actively choose to use them”.
I’m confused as to what that would look like though. If you implement a linked list in C/C++, it ends up looking like cons. What is Xah imagining it would be otherwise?
You'll have an equivalent of a cons cell in any linked list implementation, but you won't necessarily interact with it as a user. Look at the standard library implementation of a linked list in C# for example (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collecti...). You see methods for looping over a list, for accessing elements, for insertions and removals, but not much for directly accessing a list's nodes and manually constructing a list out of those nodes. That part is abstracted away.
Right. Presumably a car idling for ten minutes produces less pollution than a car being driven for ten minutes, but a car that is driven for ten minutes and idled for an additional ten produces more pollution than either of them. Any pollution produced by cars idling in bad traffic is superadded to the pollution produced in transit so improving the flow of traffic should reduce pollution even if the total number of cars remains steady.
If the trip costed 10 minutes moving, yes the comparison would be between a car moving for 10 minutes and one that idles for some time and then moves for 10 minutes. But congestion makes the cars move slower, and at congestion speeds the amount of pollution increases very quickly with reduced speeds.
Correlation may not imply causation, but where there is causation there usually is correlation. So, if there is a rise in homelessness there is likely some factor contributing to that and if a factor is correlated there is a good chance that it's causal. Homelessness may caused by multiple factors but if it's increasing and those factors are mostly remaining static then looking for the one that is also increasing seems like a good bet.
a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them
Maybe if you're working with bronze or copper, but iron forging requires much higher temperatures than a campfire can provide. That's why the iron age took place after the bronze age, forges capable of making iron workable were not yet invented. It wasn't a trivial invention.
Charcoal - which you get from campfires is hot enough. It takes a lot more of it though and a lot of other effort. when bronze is available it is generally good enough and a lot easier, but historians tell me iron was used throughout the bronze age in small amounts. iron really needs steel to be signicantly better than iron and that took a while-
(I am a layman here so take this with a grain of salt) I believe you are correct, however no campfire will have enough airflow to get that hot unless you have a bellows or some other way of injecting air into it, and you'd have to have it structured in a way that it can efficiently burn the fuel. I'm not much of a blacksmith but had a friend who was into it and whose dad also was, and we did a pretty fair amount of "experimenting" as kids :-D I know from experience that elevation makes a big difference too, though I've never measured.
Would be fascinating for someone with knowledge of this to weigh in!
Charcoal is great for forging, though as you say getting airflow is tricky. Still this is manageable - clay and rocks are abundant on earth so there are options.
> I also think the gruellingly slow death of legacy media and rise of bluesky and X (and mastodon) is a net positive for society, if only for the reason that ~tweets can be immediately and transparently rebutted, whereas brainwashing ‘news’ programs can’t.
The problem with this logic is that for the most part, new media isn't replacing legacy media; it's simply placing new layer of filtering in front of it. The vast majority of people sharing information on these platforms aren't journalists doing their own research. Instead, they're getting their information from journalists and just applying their own filtering and spin. "Rebuting" usually just involves linking to different news sources. You were always better just reading the legacy media in the first place.
Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.
That's not true. PG has been ranting about wokeness for quite a long time already. I don't think you quite understand the nuance of a lot of these definitions. PG isn't a conservative MAGA guy nor a bigot. He just does not like how the woke crowd goes about trying to affect social change and how unsavory types use the woke crowd to achieve their political goals.
I've read his earlier writings on the topic and they are substantially less conspiratorial and influenced by neoreactionary thought. He even previously used the term "prig" in this 2004 article:
This is top to bottom a more thoughtful, nuanced take on essentially the same topic. The main difference is that saying stuff like "class of bureaucrats pursu[ing] a woke agenda" and "woke mind-virus" is fashionable among SV elites today, and it was not in 2004.
I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.
This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
HN also has vouching, so a small minority of flaggers shouldn't be able to censor a topic that a large number of HNers want to read about.
I think this got flagged initially because PG doesn't have anything to say about 'wokeness' that we have not heard many times before. He doesn't like it (big surprise) for exactly the reasons that you'd expect someone like him not to like it.
Salespeople are typically compensated based on commissions. At least the well compensated ones are. Automation can make things easier and streamline the sales process, but because the sales rep is paid a percentage of the GP of a sale, automation doesn't really their take.
I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.