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nothinkjustaiyesterday at 4:21 PM2 repliesview on HN

Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.


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homarpyesterday at 4:52 PM

it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise

see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/

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wk_endyesterday at 5:17 PM

I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW:

ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans.

But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible.

Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

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