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Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

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151–160 of 258 posts

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#151
Today, I am thankful for all of the technologists who made the greatest tool of all time: the computer. And here's to the greatest language of all time: VBA. Haha just kidding, it's obviously Rust. Or is it? Hehehehe.

Just getting my snarky comment practice in before the family dinner. Alright, I'm off to bake a sweet potato souffle!

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#152
Happy Thanksgiving! There is no Thanksgiving in my country, but I have been reflecting on my work life as we approach the end of the year and I'm really thankful for having gotten to spend 14 happy years working with a bunch of different, interesting tech stacks.

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely one of the only places on the internet where you can ask a question or insult something, and have either the creator or most renown SME pop out of nowhere to explain everything. Never seen anything quite like it in any other field of interest I have.

SME = subject matter expert? Please spell out your abbreviations for those of us who are not familiar :)

Everyone else seems having fun with it, but yes - subject matter expert.

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely one of the only places on the internet where you can ask a question or insult something, and have either the creator or most renown SME pop out of nowhere to explain everything. Never seen anything quite like it in any other field of interest I have.

SME = subject matter expert? Please spell out your abbreviations for those of us who are not familiar :)

This is why one should watch our for TLAs ;)

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#158
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is Christian in origin, albeit a minor local Christian tradition (developed in the US) rather than a major near-universal one. Like many Christian traditions, it has been secularised, just as Christmas has been. I think the big difference between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is the Christian origins of the later are much harder to forget. That’s why relatively few Jews (for example) are willing to celebrate Christm…

> It is Christian in origin, albeit a minor local Christian tradition (developed in the US) rather than a major near-universal one. 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/…

Thanksgiving, as a consistent national holiday formally observed every year, was established by Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation in 1863, which declared it a day for “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”. Clearly religious in nature, although no doubt Lincoln had political motivations as well - the two are not mutually exclusive. 1621 was in itself a one-off event; the fact that it was later cited as justification for a regular observance says more about those later times than about 1621, and how 1621 was presented at those later times (such as in 1863, but also various earlier times too-it was observed at the state/local level, and intermittently nationally too, before Lincoln made it a regular national observance) is more important than what really happened for the purpose of determining whether it should be classified as religious. Abraham Lincoln appears to have not believed in Christianity personally (his personal beliefs are obscure, but he may have been some kind of deist); but when he made that proclamation I think he was expecting most Americans to understand it in Christian terms and most Americans at the time in fact did.

Re: Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4/20 is also traditionally celebrated as Hitler's birthday by white supremacists, but that doesn't mean all the stoners and hippies who celebrate cannabis on that same day are also celebrating Hitler trying to exterminate the Jews. 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…

While Thanksgiving is indeed partially a celebration of the yearly harvest, to say "Thanksgiving is just about giving thanks" really misses the point of what people are rightly complaining about - which is that much of the folklore relating to the holiday amounts to a celebration of collective denial around the historically dismal and dishonorable ways English settlers behaved towards the natives. And the controversy…

> Mark Twain acknowledged it as early as the 1920s!

He died in 1910.

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