> "Usage of Odin in a world-class product" is enough to count as notable
I'm not even sure that would count, really. A world-class product that gets a lot of coverage is notable, for sure, but that wouldn't be enough to make some implementation detail of that product notable unless the sources really leaned on it.
Makes sense. The Brainfuck article has a bunch of citations to published journals and books, so it's notable -- people are talking about it in ways that Wikipedia recognizes. That's what "notability" means -- "are unrelated trustworthy people talking about it?"
The references aren't good. I don't have any pre-existing opinion of Odin, since I had never heard of it before I saw this HN post, and those references don't convince me that it matters to anyone.
I'm fairly inclusionist, so I'd personally think it's worth keeping the article if they could point to Odin being used by any notable project, or by a bunch of small projects. But the only user it claims for the language is a company I'd never heard of that doesn't have a wikipedia article.
Is it "defrauding" if someone's just following the rules, though? And, at that, is it worth building your citizenship rules around something incredibly rare? (Estimates seem to think it's something like 15k babies a year.)
There's this quote from the 2010 interview with Waterson:
> If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons?
I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
Watterson and Larson (both who retired at or near the "top" of their game) could easily have gone on for a year or two more - or three, or five, or twenty.
But they both knew that the font was running low, if not completely dry; likely triggered by starting a joke and realizing they'd done it before years ago.
Both have "come back" here and there to dabble, as appropriate for someone who actually knows how to retire.
The Simpsons used to be my favorite show, but I feel like the quality dropped dramatically after season ~13 or so. Part of that is because I got older, I'll admit, but even rewatching the older seasons, I still find them funny while season 13 and onward I simply don't.
I would have so rather they ended the show twenty years ago and use whatever budget they spent making it on new cartoons.
Schultz, who is still fairly universally beloved (including by Watterson I think?) went on forever. So did Johnny Hart (BC). The trick is that they're not really trying to get a laugh out of you every day. They're a slightly surreal setting with warmth, and a few recurring gags.
Larson and Watterson were high intensity in a way classic cartoonists weren't. That's not bad, but most people are probably going to burn out or worse (e.g. ending up like Scott Adams).
Another example of retiring at the top was Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary. A 20 year run of daily comics with about 16-17 years of that being a reasonably consistent storyline.
Doing a daily anything is hard. Garry Trudeau sort of did a good compromise by pivoting to just a Sunday entry--that is still pretty solid. But my general observation is that it's really hard to keep things flowing day-in and day-out as a cartoonist/columnist/etc.
I didn't read the comics when they were new, but I started reading the daily rerun comics of Doonesbury, and I hadn't realized how funny they actually are.
I guess as a kid I always thought it was the comic that "old people" liked, and never gave it much of a shot, but I kind of inadvertently found it recently and it actually pretty good.
One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout.
Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice.
> And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline
We have had threads on HN before about C&H where people identify a slight but noticeable change in the strip in the last years. Watterson was naturally growing more ornery as he moved towards dad age, and that more dismal view of the world did grind against the strip’s basis in the wonder and magic of childhood.
Also, culture changes, and treatening a little kid with psychological or physical harm isn't as funny as it was back then. You had to grow up in that era to appreciate it. Despite loving and being loved by their parents, Calvin is frequently terrified of them.
I think this implies that Calvin is not as unruly as it appears, and he was raised with good values, so he still obeys his parents most of the time because he knows they want the best for him.
If we still had Calvin and Hobbes nowadays, it wouldn't be as well received if it didn't change with the times. I can't picture them going to family theraphy, for example, although I haven't read all the strips.
I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier.
Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
Joke is on him. The comic section of the paper (if it even has one anymore) is filled with fossilized strips that weren't even fresh in the 80s. The comic cartel in the US basically killed off the medium.
Do any households with young children present even get the newspaper anymore? I would wager if I asked my nephews and nieces they would all say they've never actually read a newspaper comic strip. I don't think any amount of freshness would have saved that
Agree 100% ... but it would be nice to have some softer edges around those things, where I don't have to be so prescriptive and robotic in the way I make such requests. For example if I set a 15 minute timer, I'd like to be able to follow up five minutes later with "actually that 15 minute timer should have been 16 minutes" and not second guess whether it will do the correct thing.
Indeed. The person who responded made the following points:
* BHG then made a thuggish and threatening post on your user page:
* BHG later characterised this like "oh but he was trolling me and I merely asked him one time on his talk page to stop (which is allowed)", which is bollocks because the "one time" is a long, angry screed written in a menacing tone.
And yet, no action was taken against her. I wonder why that was? And yet I was the one who was indefinitely banned. There was clear bias, and Wikipedia lost a good contributor. One I would say did far more than she ever did (she dealt with categories and dead links, and one article relating to Ireland).
Incidentally, if you want to know what the poster missed... it was that it was a one-way interaction ban. BHG was never, not even once, admonished for the way she treated me. In fact, her supporters actively encouraged her to attack me. When she attacked me, I was unable to defend myself or respond. Does that sound like procedural fairness to you?
Funnily enough, she did this to one too many people and was banned. I was banned by her supporters, not by ArbCom. It's what is known as a kangaroo court.
But hey, fairness and impartiality on Wikipedia was something that was lost a long time ago. Wikipedia is continuing to slide into obscurity. The ones who are active are most interested in drama, and not content. I feel sorry for those who are there for the content.
Is the person best known for exploiting security vulnerabilities to get into places you'd rather they didn't, and then getting lost and taking forever to get places the ideal namesake for your AI workspace project?
Out of all the homeric heroes, the main characters are just one tragic flaw after another. Odysseus is pathologically distrustful, Achilles is a diva that throws temper tantrums.
You gotta pick a dude like Sarpedon who just was a swell guy poking holes in greeks with his spear until he gets killed by Patroclus and everyone is sad.
I'm rereading the Iliad right now and was just reflecting on the fact the first time you see Odysseus at work he's selling two incompatible flavors of bullshit to officers and their men, in service of a third flavor of bullshit that was decided upon in advance at a war council.
I can think of worse. Inspired by somewhat surrealist names of a cat video, I'm pretty sure naming them "HP Inkjet 3482" would be a worse name for an AI model and lead to copyright issues from Hewlett-Packard.
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