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You are very welcome sir. I must say I'm not English, I'm Spanish actually. Congratulations on your Street Coder book, sounds like great reading material for junior engineers, I'll give it a read, seems promising. Regards.

As a yank watching the video in the OP I felt the piss draining my body. Thought I'd figure out what it was about from the video alone.

We had an explicit "no stamping" rule, which could be overturned by agreement before a game.

Actually, we used to have a rhythmic string of rules which were very sayable, which I can't remember, along the lines of "no stamping no biting no _____ no _____ no ...", with a list of things, and a rhyme or two in there. I'm going to ask any old friends I run into and see if I can get the full thing back again.

I'm pretty sure the first two were no stamping and no biting though. If you'd anything like that, I'd love to hear it!

I was curious too:

> An "airplane" in conkers is when a player swings their conker in a wide, sweeping, horizontal motion, typically at about shoulder height.

The ones used for conkers are horse chestnuts (typically round in shape), not the same as the ones that are eaten which are spanish chestnuts and normally have flat sides.

These are horse chestnuts, they're inedible.

Conkers are horse chestnuts, rather than sweet chestnuts. Similar name, unrelated tree.

Horse chestnuts are different and not edible.

Wait, he.. he didn't?

It would, but depending on the dictionary there might not be much, if any, context about the game.

You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).

“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.

I was curious, and looked in my paperback Merriam Webster american english dictionary that I used through out school and received about the time I first read HHGTTG. Conker is not present.

The big honking dictionary on a pedestal at the high school library probably would have had it, and if that was not enlightening then the library in the closest city that we visited monthly would have good encyclopedias that probably would have described it. But I don't remember the conkers reference catching my imagination, and probably wrote it off as a silly made-up sci-fi word.

You'd need an encyclopedia to have any real chance of understanding what kind of game it is, a dictionary typically only gives very small amounts of context.

I guess it just wasn't worth the effort to check, compared to how easy googling is. Lots of things were like that back then.

It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.

It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.

It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]

Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote.

It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.

> why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"?

hmmm, these might be what they call "jokes"

Getting a massive haul of conkers was almost as important as the game itself. So, that might add some context.

This one in particular has mostly died - schools don't like it & children otherwise don't play outside as much.

Things from my youth, as well as conkers:

- marbles (can you get them anymore?)

- kick the can (where would kids get cans today?)

- British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous)

I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.

Wouldn't that newton's-second-law your own conker just as hard though? As the aggressor you get to choose the points of contact, which must be where the accuracy comes in. If you can strike your opponent downwards you're more likely to knock them off the string and lead to Stamps.

I wouldn't be surprised if many of the "techniques" softened it but made it more resistant to shattering.

An extremely hard but brittle conker would probably make for poor results.

It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.

I saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools:

   In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]

I'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!

<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.>

I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.

Drilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.

I'm between your ages and we played it. Not a lot, it definitely occupies a larger area of national psyche than it's played I think, but we did. Yes school banned it, but when did that ever stop us?

Also played at school in England.... probably ~22 years ago now I'd guess! Sad to hear that era is over!

What are the health and safety risks from this game? Do the chestnuts fragment violently when they break up?

Arguably with the steel conker endemic happening before us there are finally some valid health reasons...

> Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school.

Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.

In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompo

As well as the old myth that putting a conker in the corner of a room will ward off spiders building a web there. The veracity of which, attest to I cannot.

I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.

It was very common in Ireland too, hunting for conkers was always fun. However I don't think it is common at all now

In many places the cup-and-ball [1] game was/is popular. It's incredible to think now about games that doesn't require batteries and USB ports.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball

"A generation or two ago" roughly corresponds to the Tamagotchi era too.

I’m American and never heard of this sport in my life yet article painted a similar picture in my mind.

That's more or less it.

You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.

Then you take turns.

One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.

There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.

Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.

soo.. bayblade with nuts?

Indeed, it was still popular in the 80s and 90s. I assume still is, given the Guardian is a national newspaper.

Don’t draw on your hand with a pen or you’ll get ink poisoning

Lol, I don’t understand what THAT means! A swan might break your arm?!?

It's a game you play as a kid. This is the first I've heard of there being a professional league.

On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-gloucestershire-6...

If it is a serious game, I’m surprised they don’t examine the chestnuts first

Geez, we just had tetherball. No one tried to destroy each other’s nuts.

I think you’re reading way, way too much into this. Read the piece and it seems like just a goofy little oddball story, makes for a light and enjoyable read, I’m really not picking up any political angle in this piece.

The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.

This is silly. Conkers aren't a rich person's sport, and this article in the guardian isn't pushing any political subversive subtext.

Right on.

Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):

> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."

In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr75xyn1rd8o

It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.

Conkers is about the least upper class game i can think of. We played it on council estates.

In Britain, maybe. In the USA, I don’t think so.

I find it highly suspicious that the reigning champion gets to drill the holes in the conkers. You can intentionally make some of them weaker by drilling closer to the edge or something.

I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.

You hold the conker in one hand and the string in the other with some tension and then release so it pings and bashes the other players conker, hoping to smash it off the string.

Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.

If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.

I once had a niner. a fiver took it down.

More Brits will have played football than soccer too, I believe.

It’s just crazy that someone would cheat at something so low-stakes with such a high probability of being caught, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Playing conkers at 23 years of age is a bit wrong. It is a bit like building LEGO kits as an adult, particularly wrong if the goal is to just build the design on the box and put the completed model on a shelf, rather than build your own creative masterpiece.

Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.

Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.

Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).

Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.

As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.

Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.

But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.

But then how would you smash theirs? That sounds a bit like cheating by staying at home and not playing.

You take it in turns to hit, moving yours on their turn is cheating. Given that you have a lot more control over what kind of hit happens on your turn than on theirs, skipping your turn is never going to give you an advantage (unless your opponent is somehow anti-competent).

I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.

Missed the edit, but just to add 'keep-away' is 'piggy-in-the-middle' in the UK, and I don't know if perhaps you have it too but 'swingball' is a similar game to 'tetherball' but played with a tennis ball & (typically not tennis, but just cheap plastic thing for the purpose) racket.

I assume he wouldn't cheat everytime and instead would only do it to reduce the overall wear on the chestnut over many matches?

That would make sense to me, but it seems like maybe it isn’t how they did it?

> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.

I’m do not think you always want to hit them hard. If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.

the two conkers hitting each other harder likely will lead to an earlier result, but it will also favor the conker that can withstand few hard blows over one that can withstand many softer ones.

So, assuming you can somehow judge how well your and your opponent’s conker do in this regard, you may want to go either for brute impact or for many rounds.

> What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages?

I think that’s more important. Even idealized conkers are fairly asymmetrical, so possibly, the ‘bottom’ of one hitting the side of another is a winning or losing strategy. If so, it’s more a matter of timing than of being brutal, at least for hypothetical perfect players. Whether humans can do much here, I wouldn’t know.

The strings and the conkers are supplied by the organisers. Contestents can't use different types of string.

This all kind of takes the fun out of it don't you think?

Not every game needs to have the fun sucked out of it by endless optimization and instrumental play.

Just conk some chestnuts. Simple as.

It is banned in schools. As I said in another comment, that outlaws it for the vast majority of players at the place they used to play it.

Believe it or not adults playing conkers or people playing conkers outside of schools isn't a common pass time.

It is pretty much RNG, though you can massively nerf a conkers structural integrity by making the hole through the middle poorly, so there are some techniques. People also used to use thicker shoelaces like in vans, which I think made the centre more solid. I've never run an experiment to verify the difference that might make.

IIRC at some point schools decided to put a stop to it (it was a popular playground game in Autumn) because of the possibility of injury.

Or that might have just been a tabloid outrage-bait headline.

Yes, that's it.

The reason I think this game is so popular is horse chestnut trees are very popular in the UK. For about a month each year, where I grew up the ground would be littered with conkers, both on my route to school and on school grounds. It's natural when walking around to try to find particularly large / impressive looking ones.

Sad to experience this kind of Indianapolisphobia in the hallowed pages of HN

I don't think you can tell it is AI except that it is long. All long blocks of text now are AI because humans have already stopped being as verbose?

This seems like a pretty big shift that has happened pretty fast, that any blocks of long text are automatically assumed to be AI.

I'm pretty sure it's you assuming that the comment is assuming that.

I think the assumption is more that someone who's offended that the Guardian didn't explain a mainstay British playground game to their readers...

Is probably from the USA.

The Dutch are direct.

In Britain you’re not allowed to be.

Now imagine adding an explanation of american football rules on every article about it, of which there are probably hundreds written a day.

I have no clue about american football rules - I barely know the sport exists, the ball has a funny shape, and that it's popular in the states. Still it would be absolute nonsense to explain their basics every time someone talks about them and I won't expect anyone to do so. Explanations like that will just annoy the vast majority of readers, who will have a preexisting interest in the sport and thus will already be familiar with the rules.

That said, I had even less of a clue what the hell conkers is. Luckily I have basic technological literacy and was able to find the wikipedia article[1] in a fraction of the time it takes one to complain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers

It's the guardian. You're not the target audience. Not everything is about america.

I'd recommend finding more important things to be disturbed by.

I'd rather read and learn about conkers than another snake oil AI / crypto blogspam.

Hijacking page on place#1 to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP3AAjsiqY

"Show HN: Two purple Conkers.. and one yellow honker. In Python using PyBangSwackThump With Fleshy Bits"

#1 does feel a bit much but I don't mind getting a kick out of titles/situations which could be interpreted immaturely.

It's almost like people upvoted it or it's quiet. Commenting on it won't help; downvote it if you want, upvote things you do want to see.

I for one am here for the random things that pop up on occasion. I have zero interest in LLMs and crypto-bollocks (mainly because I'm not earning money off of it)

There's this quote from Andy Warhol that I think has great explanatory power:

> What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.

If you visit the UK without an awareness of all these little class indicators, you'll probably find yourself frequenting establishments that target the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, because discretion is highly valued by those at the top. There is truly excellent food to be had here - British cheeses win more international awards than French ones, for example - but if you don't know where to find the good stuff, you'll end up getting the slop the lower orders have to put up with.

Not sure where you've been eating, but even Birmingham—my unfashionable British hometown—has nine Michelin star restaurants within a short drive.

I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cutting edge fine dining and wonderful traditional food to home-grown variants of immigrant cuisine. It's a great place to eat.

My home town is legendary for Indian restaurants—to the extent that Birmingham-style Balti curries have made their way back to India. Before you claim that this is Indian food, not British, can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?

Home cooking is far more popular in the UK than the US: anecdotally, most British people cook most meals at home, while few of my American friends know how to boil an egg and rely almost entirely on take-out. British celebrity chefs and cooking shows are famous worldwide. It's odd to claim that British food sucks while binge-watching our prime-time baking show!

I love America and a lot of things are better over here, but food—unfortunately for me—is not one of them.

The UK excels at nicking bits of culture from other places, making them our own, but passing them off to the world as authentically foreign.

Can confirm, as a Brit, our food is utterly shocking.

OTOH the national dish is Chicken Tikka Masala.

Still, can't beat a good British fried breakfast.

I don't agree; find better places to eat. I for one loved the steak & kidney pie with a guiness I had after hiking a mountain. Don't take sad Wetherspoons food as an indicator of British food.

Such an overused stereotype

The UKs genetic pool is so small its really interesting how many "unattractive" people they have there because of it.

Football wasn't spread (just) through conquest.

The UK never conquered Argentina or Brazil yet if you'd look at football fans in both countries you'd think Argentina or Brazil not only invented football itself, but they also built an entire cult around it :-p

India for sure wasn't conquered that way. Yes, there was a lot of "divide et impera" going on, but just one simple example, the population of Bengal was about 40 million in 1800 while that of the UK was only around 10 million.

Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.

India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.

Read this: https://a.co/d/7r25CnA - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.