YHK - yet another hacker news clone

There Are over 1M New York City Street Signs. Here's How They Are Made.

24 points bookofjoe 3 days ago 12 comments

timr 40 minutes ago | parent

> Even Mayor Zohran Mamdani showed up at the shop to help with the Knicks signs.

Well thank goodness that detail was included. I don't think the sign shop that manages 1 million signs could have done the job without him.

But in all seriousness...is it too much to ask the NY Times to have a human interest article about the freaking sign shop without it incorporating partisan politics?

I realize that politicians are going to take photo ops, but you don't have to cover it.

smcg 38 minutes ago | parent

how is that partisan politics? showing up as a mascot for a random human interest story is the primary function of a mayor.

timr 37 minutes ago | parent

> how is that partisan politics?

Nope. Premise is backwards. Why does the mayor belong in a story about the intricacies of printing road signs? Is the mayor a road sign enthusiast? Did he create the road-sign printing system? No? No relation at all, other than seeing an opportunity to inject himself into a story?

Yeah, maybe don't include it, then.

> showing up as a mascot for a random human interest story is the primary function of a mayor.

That's certainly what politicians try to do. You, as a journalist, are not required to take the bait. Sometimes it's just cool to have a nice little story about the people at the sign factory.

cj 32 minutes ago | parent

Here's an article + video from a while ago on the same topic, without mention of a mayor:

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/nyc-dot-sign-shop

I wonder if anything has changed with how they make signs since 10 years ago. I can't access the NYT article.

add-sub-mul-div 35 minutes ago | parent

This is very standard and innocuous. This instance only stands to you because it makes you uncomfortable. Own up to the specific reason for that instead of acting like the existence of "politics" in a general sense is somehow evil.

timr 33 minutes ago | parent

It is indeed, sadly, "standard". That doesn't make it good.

> This instance only stands to you because it makes you uncomfortable.

It doesn't make me "uncomfortable". I think it's stupid.

> Own up to the specific reason for that instead of acting like the existence of "politics" in a general sense is somehow evil.

Politics are not evil. Including them in everything, when they don't need to be included, is just bad journalism. And by the way...I would say this if the mayor in question was on any side of the ideoligical spectrum. Would you?

TehCorwiz 31 minutes ago | parent

He's the mayor regardless of your feelings on the matter, and the Nicks are the sportsball team for the city he's mayor of. This isn't partisan thing just because he exists and is doing what mayors do. If he tried to gatekeep something for only his party, or ideology then it'd be partisan. But he didn't because it's a NY thing, not a partisan thing. See the difference?

timr 27 minutes ago | parent

> He's the mayor regardless of your feelings on the matter

...which didn't come into my comment in the slightest? It's stupid no matter who the mayor is.

Your response is indicative of exactly the problem [1]: you're leaping to a partisan conclusion, because I dared to criticize something related to politics. I remember when New Yorkers made fun of crap like this.

[1] to be specific: the reflexive political toxicity that is melting everything into a morass of partisan goo.

TehCorwiz 26 minutes ago | parent

Are you an LLM, did you context get compacted?

You're the one who accused it of being partisan.

timr 22 minutes ago | parent

This is not hard. Including the content in the article is partisan, no matter who the politician happens to be.

It would be the same if the paper did a drop-in about Trump.