Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Fond Farewell

farmersalmanac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 225 posts

Re: A Fond Farewell

#191

Post by rufus_foreman »

threetonesun wrote: post #129
profunctor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.

Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd…

>> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines.

I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.

The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#192

Post by Spooky23 »

kulahan wrote: post #160
Spooky23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their audience is old people who buy the book at the cashier line at Walmart. Both their customer base and sales outlet is dying off. These things are really magazines that run once a year. The notion of a magazine is a weird concept that doesn’t compute for anyone younger than 35.

You think Walmart is dying off? Definitely not.

The retail experience is. Farmer's Almanac sat above the candy in the checkout aisle.

That's all transitioning to delivery and self-checkout. 20 years ago, you'd like 30 lanes open with eyeballs on the book. Now, in my area there's like 3-5 lanes most times.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#193

Post by wiskinator »

Dang. This is one of those annoying cases of finding out something that I would clearly love exists only as it leaves.

I would have subscribed if I knew that the Farmer's Almanac still existed :(

Re: A Fond Farewell

#194

Post by senderista »

pksebben wrote: post #172
cogman10 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities. A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more…

I think to tease out the core of the problem with large businesses, capital, and society (esp. as regards the dissolution of small businesses), you need to autopsy the concepts of value and liquidity. Money is meant to be a store of value, 'value' in this case being literally anyone considers valuable. However, it's an abstraction that doesn't quite fit over the thing it attempts to abstract - it really only captures…

Possible counterpoint: consumers will price in these intangibles when making purchasing decisions.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#195

Post by kelnos »

Imnimo wrote: post #144

According to the "best days" link in the article, November 7th is the best day to cut your hair because the moon phase and zodiac will lead to slower hair growth if you cut it today. I am amazed this publication made it this far.

Unfortunately, I think you underestimate how rampant superstition is in the US.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#196

Post by hbn »

fingerlocks wrote: post #97
Lu2025 wrote: post #95

Good riddance. These guys had like 40% forecast accuracy, worse than random. When they say the winter will warmer it will be colder and vice versa.

If you’re treating a forecast as a single Bernoulli trial, wouldn’t that make them 60% accurate for the opposite of their prediction? Which is a silly assumption; a forecast isn’t a single yes-no event. it’s not obvious to me that 50% is the worst case success rate. Would be more interesting to compare their forecast to something like a long term NOAA forecast, but I don’t believe such a thing exists because calculat…

GP did say it was just in reference to whether the winter will be warmer or colder than the last one, which is 50/50

In which case if they're 40% accurate, you can get 60% accuracy from them by assuming it'll be the opposite of what they say

If they could get their accuracy down to 0% you'd have perfect predictions!

Re: A Fond Farewell

#197

Post by anonymars »

breakpointalpha wrote: post #167
localhost wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do social hubs need to be places of financial transactions? I was in Delft recently and I really loved their library/community center. Full of music practice rooms, people playing board games on the ground floor, a coffee bar and it was full of people at 8pm. It is open from 9am - 11pm M-F. You walk or cycle there (free indoor bicycle parking). There is a movie theater across the "street" (no cars).

They didn't need to be transactional spaces, they need to be spaces that attract people regularly. The local chicken farmer who works 16 hours a day to keep his farm running isn't going out of his way three times a week to visit the community center for board game night. He's definitely in the local Tractor Supply store three times a week though... It's about creating community where people naturally gather, not crea…

Consider this little anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kurt-vonnegut-envelope-quo...

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I'm getting — I'm going to buy an envelope.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know…

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#198

Post by kulahan »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #189
kulahan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that just obviously isn't true. If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? If nothing else, natural market forces would simply prop up the farmers who aren't wasting time and money following a completely inaccurate book. In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistic…

> If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? The same people who buy books about healing crystals, who donate to televangelists, who go to reiki "healers" and chiropractors, who believe in tarot firmly, etc.

Those people aren't in something resembling a zero-sum game, so they don't really make sense. Chiropractors sell back cracks, and the people buying that get exactly what they want.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#199

Post by warmwaffles »

kelnos wrote: post #195
Imnimo wrote: post #144

According to the "best days" link in the article, November 7th is the best day to cut your hair because the moon phase and zodiac will lead to slower hair growth if you cut it today. I am amazed this publication made it this far.

Unfortunately, I think you underestimate how rampant superstition is in the US.

It's world wide, not just the US.

Re: A Fond Farewell

#200

Post by waylandsmithers »

markphip wrote: post #81

There is still the Old Farmer’s Almanac https://www.almanac.com/old-farmers-almanac-233-years-and-st...

Did we all have a Mandela moment that what we all thought was "The Farmer's Almanac" with the yellow cover actually has OLD in the title? And there is randomly this other farmer's almanac?
Post reply on HN