I was thinking along the lines that these days “Harry” is (mostly¹) a stand-alone name and no longer used as a nickname for Henry (and this was something I only realised in the past couple of years).
Anyhow, I really enjoyed the article and learning about the origins of surnames, e.g., I didn’t know that “Peters” should be understood to be in the genitive case and I’d never have associated the surname Dixon with being “Richard’s son” – even though I’m familiar with Dick as a nickname for Richard.
¹ Other commentators have pointed out that Prince Harry was actually christened as Henry.
If you read the article instead of just the headline, you will find that almost all the names discussed are names people do still have. Jack, Dick, Bob, Nick, Bill, Robin, etc. are nicknames specifically called out in the article.
The article does finish with Hob, Daw, Wat, and Gib. But most of the names highlighted are ones that are still in use. (I personally also have found that a lot of people don't realize Harry is a nickname for Henry, like anyone who wasn't alive for JFK doesn't know "Jack" is "John")
> a lot of people don't realize Harry is a nickname
Does no one know Shakespeare any more?
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
I had actually read Henry IV, Part 1 in school many decades ago but in that play the young prince Henry was (mostly) called Hal – not to be confused with his opponent, Henry Percy, better known as Harry Hotspur.
Off-topic: I wonder if this the first recorded use of the phrase “the game’s afoot”?
It's actually even more relevant here than it appears, in that the rest of the comment is true: half the article really is about nicknames that people do still use, so there was no reason for the author to object. But that point is lost thanks to the snark.
In many cases, these licencing schemes are put in place by incumbent trade groups, to prevent comeptition.
For example, an association of funeral home owners will lobby their state representative for a law forbidding the sale of coffins by anyone other than a licensed funeral director. Ostensibly this somehow protects the public from unscrupulous coffin-sellers. In actuality, its main effect is to protect the profits of the funeral home oligopoly.
(Lest you think this is a fanciful example, see St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille.)
The AMA education requirements are of essentially the same sort, put in place by a compliant legislature to protect the profits of an incumbent cartel, at great cost to the public.
Advances in artificial intelligence will do nothing, absolutely nothing, to catalyze reform of what is essentially a problem of politics and greed.
> In many cases, these licencing schemes are put in place by incumbent trade groups, to prevent comeptition.
The worst is NAR and Realtors®. There's absolutely no professional instruction involved, just a morality test taken every few years that until the late-1940s early-1950s required that realtors maintain the racial character of neighborhoods (under penalty of disciplinary action.)
They managed to get themselves written into most state and local laws. Only the explosion of aspirational middlemen occasioned by the internet has recently managed to push back on that. Hopefully the recent antitrust case against them is catastrophic, but they spend $100M a year lobbying. Lobbying government is basically all the NAR actually does and all the real value that members are getting.
I would add too that these laws often serve the same interests of white supremacy that they have since the Civil War.
After the end of Reconstruction the Southern states instituted laws now called the “Black Codes”, forbidding blacks from being blacksmiths, or grocers, from owning property, or doing any sort of work other than, effectively, being sharecroppers - essentially slaves of the same white landowners as before.
Consider who is hurt most by laws requiring expensive and onerous licensing for independent hair-braiders. Are a lot of white hair-braiders suffering from this, do you suppose?
Same with minimum wage. Whites were tired of blacks underbidding them, so they just outlawed their jobs by making unskilled labor valued below X illegal.
"Minimum wage legislation emerged at the end of the nineteenth century from the desire to end sweatshops which had developed in the wake of industrialization.[17] Sweatshops employed large numbers of women and young workers, paying them what were considered non-living wages that did not allow workers to afford the necessaries of life." ...
"The earliest minimum wage laws in the United States were state laws focused on women and children.[25] These laws were struck down by the Supreme Court between 1923 and 1937.[25] The first federal minimum wage law, which exempted large parts of the workforce, was enacted in 1938 and set rates that became obsolete during World War II.[25]'
We know your scenario isn't true because there are plenty of white-owned businesses which knowing hire undocumented workers in order to pay them sub-market wages with poor working conditions.
Go back further. Minimums were applied to the railroad in 1909, pulling them up to the prevailing white wage when the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen became enraged blacks were working for cheaper.
I don't see anything about a minimum wage. I do see 'the arbitrators did rule that the railroad would be required to pay African American and white firemen the same wage' but nothing about how that minimum was set by law.
Minimums for a union job are not the same as minimum wage, which is the legal minimum set by law.
Union minimums predate the Civil War. For example, the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker's Society had a minimum price per shoe made, back in the 1830s, leading to Commonwealth v. Hunt.
Well back in the early 20th century I'm afraid that was mostly what was available to discriminated minorities. It's not just theory, it goes back to railroadmen being pissed blacks were undercutting them. They could not just outright outlaw blacks so they just got the minimums set to the prevailing white wage.
Suffrage in the early 20th century applied more to whites than blacks. And having low wage labor be black market without protections can in some cases benefit the upper classes.
Leaving Norvig out of it, it seems to me that there is some shame in taking a reasonably straightforward problem like this one, thrashing around with it for months or years without producing an effective solution, and then being unable to see that your methodology wasn't working.
If the account is accurate, this Jeffries guy wasn't getting the ball through the hoop, whether or not LeBron was around.
You're the second commenter, so far, to mention exclamation marks. What do they mean to you that would bother you so much to point it out, or anyone for that matter? I haven't even noticed them until I read the comments here on hn.
Not gp, but I feel similarly. For me, I can't help read it with emphasis. As in, the voice in my head gets all fancy in an annoying way. If you imagine someone in person reading it out-loud with exaggerated emphasis, that's what it feels like. Same thing with comic books for me, the sprinkled bolded words in dialog are really grating.
To me it's fairly similar to someone making excessive use of CAPS LOCK. It can be used as a stylistic choice at times, but use it TOO MUCH and it just becomes DISTRACTING.
I DON'T SEE A PROBLEM WITH THIS EITHER! BUT I EMPATHIZE! I GET COMMENTS FROM PEOPLE SAYING THAT I'M SOMEHOW YELLING AT THEM ALL THE TIME BUT I'M ACTUALLY SITTING IN SILENCE, TYPING QUIETLY ON A MEMBRANE KEYBOARD! LOL???
Oh this is nothing. One of my colleagues does that and adds random colour changes, underlines and font face changes. It's like working with a serial killer.
Ahh. I honestly miss that amount of self-expression, garish as it was. Or rather, I intensely dislike the mono-culture where every vertical video with one-word subtitles looks the same.
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