Generalizing, generations of Europeans have been trained to hunt for these mistakes, in both their own writing and thinking and elsewhere, as they telegraph ignorance and open markets to competition.

It is standard in multilingual regions to consider multiple languages during product naming; to do otherwise is often considered humiliating.

You can bet your nut that "Mistral" was sounded out in more languages than "Cat, I farted" ever was.

Here are a couple of particularly famous fsckups:

- the Rolls Royce Silver Mist didn't sell well in Germany for some reason (coughs)

- the Chevy Nova didn't sell well in Spanish countries, again, seemingly for no reason (cackles)

On the contrary, it makes such a move irresistible! Game theory at work: if your opponent is building hemispheric hegemony then you are existentially incentivized to do the same. Play the board game Risk sometime.

"science for all intents and purposes" is the most accidentally flattering anyone has said, and is hilarious in context. Wasn't expecting women's studies to get glazed on HN but I'm here for it :)

Need that on a tee

Ed Zitron is going to be all over this

Really he already was, back in August 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

Both of the "cute" responses to this post suggest a lack of culinary imagination. You are correct to ask this: no preservation method is taste-neutral, and moreover, this process requires a varietal that is likely quite different in flavour and texture to supermarket grapes, or even wine grapes.

I wonder if there are earthy notes picked up by the process? Similar to pu-er tea for example? Do the grapes become sweeter, or even partially fermented?

Fascinating. I love this stuff

yes, everyone knows that a human head cannot hold both information about CO2 and information about cars

Arvix coming right up

In terms of dollar magnitude, AI is in a class of its own. The investments make crypto look like softball. Attention around here follows the dollars, for good and ill.

The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word

The VP by most accounts is best in class. It’s just too damn expensive. There’s also still an open question if people really want to strap goggles to their face.

Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.

Yes, you see them on the subway all the time

I bought mine for air travel, when I can strap it to my head for 12 hours and be in a completely different place. I can lie back in my lay-flat seat, so there’s no weight pulling my head down, and it’s an absolutely fantastic experience.

I fly sufficiently that this is well worth it. The fact that it doubles as a mobile computer in the hotel room is just icing on the cake.

So subway ? Maybe not, but don’t pretend they don’t have their own niche…

Funny thing is that what counts as "politics" gets moved around a lot.

Evolution was political once and, if things go as they are going, it will be again. Approximately as retro as debating whether diversity is a good thing in tech.

You can call it "science ideology" if that makes you feel better about it.

This weather won't last forever and when it breaks, it's back to the outgroups with you.

This is the sort of a smug self-satisfied hot take that makes many non-SWEs recoil from this community.

Outside of tech, there are plenty of thoughtful communities of practice, tended by community leaders no less wise and dedicated than dang.

What HN has is YC. Its the financial estuary -- you come here to make contacts, not friends, and you come here to rub shoulders with people doing the work. And maybe, just maybe, have your own work recognized.

You can get those for much cheaper in e.g. a field like medicine, because promotion tends to happen on the basis of long-term deliverables delivered, rather than vibes about potential hyper scale returns a few years down the road. Simply, professionals are constructed as less desperate/opportunistic in other disciplines.

Other fields, like for example those that abut the artworld, are massively and aerobically served by a wide range of venues. Opportunity and curiosity are evenly distributed among them.

But that's not how our game works. Reputational opportunity is the gravity here, and we are all to some degree opportunists here, of varying degrees of success.

It's centralization. Our secret sauce is centralization.

This is both good and bad.

You’d think so, but then what’s the HN for those various fields?

Their communities of practice tend to enshitify after just a handful of years, turn into professional flame wars on the same old topics, or otherwise ossify into something that just repeats the talking points of the day.

I've been in a number of these communities: you leave for 5 years and come back and it's the same discussions repeated forever, or news posted that's weeks or months out of date. They don't generate, they regurgitate, and slowly.