4 ms·
As an aside: Hacker News is getting old, the 2008 discussion is closer to the book’s year (1994) than it is to now.
by microtonal 1y ago
As an aside: Hacker News is getting old, the 2008 discussion is closer to the book’s year (1994) than it is to now.
- cperciva 1y agoI just realized that my most famous comment on HN is the same age as I was when I won the Putnam.
- dang 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045535
- assimpleaspossi 1y agoA sobering thought is that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.--Tom Lehrer
- tptacek 1y agoSmooth, Colin. :)
- cm2187 1y agoAnd for the millennials: compare the distance between your birth and ww2 vs your birth and now!
- gunnihinn 1y agoThanks, I hate it.
- darkwater 1y agoI was exactly thinking this the other day while running and seeing an old, rusted lamp post in a rural street: "this was probably put there over 50 years ago, in the early seventies", and then thought at things from "over 50 years ago" when I was a child and well, WW2 was in its making. I don't know while I thought that but that's probably also a sign of our age: WW2 was the biggest thing "from the past" that our families lived or were touched more or less directly.
- cm2187 1y agoBut also ww2 is this black and white thing from our history books. As we get older we get to know more about how recent and relevant it is, we met people who lived it and told us about their actual experience. But it still feels like something that belongs to history rather than a recent event. That's kind of the "anything that happened before my birth I don't care" attitude of today's teenagers.
- simonh 1y agoI'm a Brit born in 66, and growing up I felt that WW2 was recent history. War films were a dominant genre in my early life, we visited the German defences on the French coast while camping as a teenager along with my Grandfather, who served there and visited some locations he remembered. Some buildings still had war damage. In many ways the world of the 70s felt closer to the war era than to nowadays. It was still the cold war, and that was just an extension of the post-war stalemate.
- avhception 1y agoAs a German born in 87, it didn't feel _that_ recent any more. But it was definitely close, both my granddads served in the war and were scarred for life by that, mentally and physically. Family history a mess of war-torn biographies. I found some rusted, old big munition in the forest as a kid. Old bunkers and flak towers can still be seen in the cities, and many of the local kids in my hometown and age cohort adventured into the old mining shaft used as an air raid shelter and saw the gas masks that were still there. And then there was the GDR (or DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in German) and all the reunification that happened when I was already alive (although I was a child at the time). Thinking about my childhood visit to Ost-Berlin still makes me shiver with thoughts about all the suffering. Many of the buildings still had bullet holes and it felt like you could touch history.
- microtonal 1y agoI am from 82 (Dutch) and I still remember vividly visiting the border/iron curtain in 89 (just before the wall came down). My mom would jokingly put her arm through the fence and say 'my arm is in communist East Germany' (technically DMZ I guess) and my parents would tell that they would shoot people trying to cross from the other side. We often go to Germany, but this summer we went to Rügen. To get there we have to travel directly east, those trips just make you realize how close we were to the border and thus to an authoritarian regime. Many of the buildings still had bullet holes and it felt like you could touch history. When you know where to look, you can still find the scars everywhere. Our church tower still has bullet holes from WWII.