Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone
I have been really thankful for hackernews. This place has been full of great knowledge and people.
I really appreciate the efforts of the people who are running this platform.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
I really appreciate the efforts of the people who are running this platform.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
257 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadI'm peripherally aware it has something to do with (North American first nation) Indians and early settlers plus it tends to involve feasting on turkey and pumpkin dishes.
As far as the US holiday is concerned, it's secular, by which I mean it is celebrated by pretty much everybody regardless of religious persuasion (or lack thereof).
That said, not all American Jews do view Thanksgiving as acceptable. Among ultra-Orthodox Jews, the belief is widespread that celebrating Thanksgiving violates Jewish religious law against observing non-Jewish festivals. Likewise, some conservative Muslims (Salafis in particular) view Thanksgiving as haram for parallel reasons. You might say these Jewish and Muslim objectors are paying more attention to the festival’s Christian origins than most Americans do.
Thanksgiving isn’t the only example of a minor American Christian tradition being secularised - the same is true of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Unlike Thanksgiving, which is rarely observed outside of North America, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have spread to most of the rest of the English-speaking world, even if not always on the same date. Many cultures have indigenous traditions of festivals to celebrate motherhood and/or fatherhood, going back centuries or more; but in Anglophone countries, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are generally American in origin, and only date to the 20th century, not due to one of those older traditions.
We dont have it here in Australia (except apparently on a small island off to the side of the mainland). We don't really have any sort of festival or celebration that is comparable.
Of course it is not entirely equivalent, in that Thanksgiving is a more religiously inclusive holiday than Christmas is. While there are people with a religious objection to both, there are many more with a religious objection to the later but not the former.
I think this recent adoption of Black Friday in Australia is dumb, for two reasons:
(1) It makes zero sense given we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving
(2) Given the term’s historical association in Australian culture with mass death (1939 Black Friday bushfires that killed over 70 people, 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that killed over 170 people), using it for sales could be seen as disrespectful and culturally insensitive
It is Christian only in the sense that the people who celebrated it were Christian. The events that led to the festival were purely political in nature, and not necessarily wholesome either.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/thanksgivi...
2. https://www.salon.com/2016/11/23/thanksgiving-a-day-of-mourn...
US currency in itself isn't inherently religious, but the decision to put that phrase on the currency was religious, and so is the decision to keep it there today. Now, it is not just religious, it is also very political, but the two are very often intertwined: it is a form of politicised religion, or religious politics.
> So I'm not sure the proclamation makes Thanksgiving religious. The origins might, though
I think to most Americans in the 19th century and earlier, the idea that Thanksgiving was a religious festival would have seemed obvious–it was about giving thanks to the deity, assuming a Judaeo-Christian conception of deity. Now, no denying that it became quite secularised through the course of the 20th century, and to many 21st Americans it is an entirely secular occasion, and if "thanksgiving" is anything more than an empty word, it is thanks directed at one's friends/family/colleagues/acquaintances/community/etc, maybe even at the cosmos, but not at God in whom one quite possibly doesn't believe.
As I said in my original comment, other religious festivals, such as Christmas, have also become highly secularised. But, even though many celebrate Christmas in an entirely secular way, people still remember its association with Christianity, which makes many non-Christians feel uncomfortable celebrating it even in a secular form. Thanksgiving was never so explicitly Christian, so Jews and Muslims and others feel more comfortable in celebrating it.
EDIT: Flagged? Have I broken a rule? Or just raised an uncomfortable subject?
This year I'm thankful I don't have to deal with that kind of behaviour outside the internet.
The only thing that comes to mind about my knowledge of Thanks Giving is from the Addams Family Values film... I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be taking that revision of a historical event too seriously.
Much further away from the equator, you can't really do agriculture to harvest stuff. Closer to the equator you can often do multiple harvests a year.
Mentioning this not just to be pedantic (though I enjoy that), but also because the connection between our physical surroundings and culture are endlessly fascinating.
See eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmjIBD2Fd4
One of the most distressing things to me about the last 2 years is the bright line that has been drawn under the innumeracy of the general population of the world.
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-statement-on-ivermectin-use...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(EAS tones, I always used, the SAME FSK chirps followed by the attention tone. Wake the dead, that will. If you never want to miss a page again - and never want anyone in earshot to doubt it's important, besides - give it a try! Bonus side effect: you'll immediately be in the correct frame of mind if the real balloon ever goes up.)
(If you do check, maybe turn it down to be nice to your nerves :D)
Wow, SAME is very interesting. (I live in Australia and have never been exposed to a comparable system. I think the closest we have is an SMS-based thing.)
With TV at that time offering in many places, my childhood home included, only about a dozen analog VHF and UHF channels many if not all of which participated in the system, you were all but guaranteed to see and hear a system test sooner or later - I might have been five or six the first time I did, and it frightened me so badly that I ran and found my mother.
As mentioned in the README to that project, there's a smallish and somewhat creepypasta-adjacent Youtube subgenre of fictional EAS messages, and I've wondered sometimes if experiences similar to mine are where that found its genesis. If video content hasn't all moved to VR by a couple decades from now, I wonder if we'll still see the like being made.
EDIT: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." –Carl Sagan
I am continually humbled by not just the consistent quality of content but also the comments. It’s a testament to the moderators that this site has maintained this level of quality for so long.
I am thankful and happy to use thanksgiving as an excuse to express that notion.
I’m actually just as thankful for all the words I don’t have to learn here. This is often the first place I go to when I want to look for a distilled, “real” take on something by people capable of communicating with a lot of jargon but generally choose to speak simply and succinctly.
Please spell out your abbreviations for those of us who are not familiar :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...
edit: "it's me!"
Happy Thanksgiving!
That said, very few programmers today recognize or admit the atrocious quality of modern software. I think That's why people like Jonathan Blow or Casey Muratori are disliked by developers who see themselves as champions of "modern" software development.
Sorry for misunderstanding.
I love HN. Happy thanksgiving!
I have seen them squash interesting debates.
I had one guy email me, and tell me at home to stop commenting so much. (Never forgot that one, and there are no TOS. I will probally pay for those last two sentences? Then again if HN is what it claims, maybe not?)
What makes this place special is there are a wide range of people here interested in many subjects. What I love most is cutting through the bull. I doubt there's a person here who doesn't know about The Scientific Method, or The Placebo Effect.
We don't automatically give credit to the wealthy boys unless they did something really spectacular in their lives, and we want to know exactly how much help the wealthy family had in the success. We don't let them pontificate ad nausium because they made money. We scrutinize and investigate everyone, and every idea. From the best in class PhDs to lost disenfranchised souls. Everyone has a chance to make their point.
Hacker News is by far the best site for technical discussion.
(I do spend too much time here. It's my fault though. I don't have much of a life, and I am lonely. I am looking for new sites besides Reddit. Reddit would be so much better if everyone wasen't trying out for a SNL contract.)
Indubitably true.
Frankly, even if I’m forever shadowbanned, I can’t think of a better place on the net. It reminds me of the old net, the best parts. The current fashion and culture change a bit over the years but not too much. It’s hard to not mess up a good thing but they do well to do that here, even if there’s a strong pro-CCP bias evident at times in some of the moderation.
Tech meet ups, gym classes, insert interest here groups and anything else you can think of.
Online connections just don't fully satisfy the human need for connecting.
In other words, exactly what the internet was and (for people like me) hoped it would continue to be. I don't think it's entirely the moderation (though that certainly helps) but somehow the conceptual integrity has been maintained and has a powerful shaping force.
I never completely agree with the content and opinions, but we all seem really well aligned with the rules of the game.
Yeah I got karma to burn, but this is the hill i want to die on. Too many a good place went to ruin due to eternal septemberites coming from one place geographically and inadvertedly creating a monoculture. I get that ycombinator is US based, but hacker culture is so much more than just US.
I hesitated to leave my comment here because I'm part Native and aware that it's complicated. The kind of comment you left is not the best way to broach such subjects.
I would like to see more articles about Natives generally without focusing overly much on the victim narrative. I think I'm alive in part because of my Native heritage, for which I am also deeply grateful.
My other comment that I'm talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29338387
It wasn't until after school that I learned what was really going on, and now when I see celebration for this day I really do just think of genocide. Probably not the best way to approach this but I was surprised at how strongly users are flagging any comment that mentions it. It makes me feel like people want to keep up their cognitive dissonance, and it feels like that mechanism is what allows our nation to continue harming first nations people to this day.
"Genocide is the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part." - Wikipeda
In my comment I mentioned that I am concerned about how widespread willful ignorance of these matters allows our nation to continue harming first nations peoples today. So certainly I am not spreading some extermination rhetoric.
And I agree with you that my comment was not the best approach for getting people to understand. But I was responding to someone who already understood, and commiserating with them. Unfortunately my comment was flagged and killed, so others could not see how I feel.
That knee jerk desire to bury discussion of the truth is what concerns me. That same reaction allowed police to mass arrest protesters fighting Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline.
It seems clear to me the culture in the USA is one that wants to ignore what really happened. I think it is good that you post positive articles about Native culture and history, but I know too there must be a time to look at the facts head on, without blinders, and acknowledge what happened. I say this not to look back, but to look at those today who hold our founders in reverence every holiday season as bastions of freedom, even when their crimes are well known. The people must hear stories of George Washington and think "Town Destroyer"[1], not "cherry tree".
My aim is not to convince, but to show the strength of our cognitive dissonance by telling the truth. And this thread today has done a lot to illustrate how strong that dissonance is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_Destroyer
Clearly you touched on a very sensitive subject. I was also surprised that my link was flagged by this much people, as it was a very informative blog post about the fact that some First Nation tribes might have a different point of view about what Thanksgiving actually means to them.
I did email dang and asked if he can take a look at down votes in this thread. But either way, keep up the good work and don't get disappointed by the sheer amount of injustices!
To my knowledge it is the only celebration of the beginning of a genocide today.
This has been an extremely brutal couple of years for everybody, and by most estimations the brutality is going to continue. People want something to be happy about, and the idea of sharing things they're thankful for is that. You don't need to take that from them.
Nobody is celebrating genocide. People want to get together with their families and be happy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: also, please don't call names - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29338611 is not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Yes.
> Is my concern for consumerism over Black Friday not relevant?
To a post about being thankful on Thanksgiving? It is absolutely not relevant. Let people be happy.
I work at a TCU and we gathered canned items as a staff to distribute to the less fortunate. That's the actual spirit of Thanksgiving.
> Then you have the wrong association given the current tribal views on the holiday.
Which tribal views? I was responding to a comment that linked to a purportedly indigenous American view that mentioned the link to genocide.
> actively hurts the perception of the tribes.
Tell that to the people who wrote the article linked in the comment I was responding to.
> we gathered canned items as a staff to distribute to the less fortunate. That's the actual spirit of Thanksgiving.
How do you define "actual?" My understanding of indigenous life in the Americas before colonization is that people would have been cared for based on need year round, not once a year.
Decent people have reclaimed the day 4/20 and number 420 for better purposes than celebrating Hitler's birthday, the same way "queers" have reclaimed that term as our own and use it in the acronym LGBTQ+.
So let's please not let the white supremacists who celebrate American's genocide against the original natives maintain their exclusive claim on Thanksgiving, which literally means giving thanks, which is a good thing for everyone to do in general.
He died in 1910.
As A Native American, Here's What I Want My Fellow Americans To Know About Thanksgiving
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/native-american-thanksgiving_...
>“I can choose how I feel about this day, but it is a choice. I can either let the holiday claim me, or choose to reclaim it.”
>If I could ask one thing from my non-indigenous fellow Americans when it comes to Thanksgiving, I would ask that you refrain from teaching the romanticized version of the holiday. Read to your children about what it means to be thankful, what it means to heal and be a family. Learn as a family about the tribal nation that is local to where you live. Take time during dinner to recognize whose traditional lands you give thanks on. Take this holiday into your own hands and understand that not every Native will have good feelings about this day, and be accepting of that. We can all choose how we feel about this holiday, but it is always our own choice.
Cool robots in your bio :)
The cool robots mean nothing if we cannot find our humanity and understand our past behavior so we may stop repeating it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-p...
That being said, in the future I recommend seeking out the best pies that you can, my personal favorites are blueberry and apple.
Welcome to America and happy Thanksgiving!
Then now I've been living abroad for almost 10 years without returning home to the USA and if I did not see this post I would not even have remembered.
It's strange how we can so quickly adjust to holidays from different countries in just a few years -- while forgetting the ones back home so easily. And it's not because we were ingrained with them as kids, because while I grew up in Jamaica, I've totally forgotten the holidays there now.
I guess the main one is Christmas - it's hard to forget because of all the shopping - and that's kinda celebrated here in Asia too.
Anyway... Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!
It is funny, because only few years ago I was more cynical about it and reduced all holidays to the 'feast' part.
Likewise to you.
To me i can appreciate that far more than worrying about the origin story, but the version thats told is inspirational too
For those of you who have to work to keep this giant machine running, just be aware: legally you are allowed to have one drink at your desk at all times during the holiday weekend. I don't make the rules.
what i would pay for that experience while walking home after a night out.
You are all beautiful, bickering, nerds. And I love you all.
Happy Thanksgiving!
For those in groups, be thankful for those you break bread with and the paths that led them to your table.
Can't promise to respond instantly, but will respond before I go to bed tonight.