Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t remember why the lightning bolt was yellow. With hindsight that seems the strangest thing about it; cyan would have been a more obvious choice for electricity. Possibly it was just to contrast more with the blue screens of the computers.

I had to stop and consider this, because it seemed to me that yellow was "obviously" the correct color. And indeed a few image searches confirmed this: a yellow lightning bolt is by far the most universal symbol for electricity, along with the standard black-on-yellow danger icon. I'm not sure how far back in history that representation goes, or what its origins are, but I think it's been used ubiquitously in comics and cartoons for a long time.

View on HN

Simon Tathum is British and I have never knowingly seen a lightning bolt coloured cyan hereabouts. Our "Danger of death" signs are black on yellow (1)

To be fair an image search for lightning does look decidedly cyan on royal, with purple, red and more options.

(1) https://www.hse.gov.uk/electricity/nearelectric.htm#signs

It's like the symbol for rain being a "raindrop" that's shaped like a teardrop: Bulbous bottom, with a top that tapers to a point, which is manifestly not the shape rain takes in the air.

https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/shape-of-a-raindrop

Iconography is a language, and terms in a language aren't usually exact representations of what they stand for.

No, but it is the shape of a drop that is about to drip. Which is a lot easier for people to see in detail than a falling raindrop.

Perfectly documented warning stickers for everything is such a British thing. Together with fused plugs and on/off switches for every socket. As a foreigner who lived in London for a few years I believe the UK leads the world in self-deprecation. No country complains about itself more while being so absurdly well-organized.

I think, in part, because we don't have the same level of experience with how things are elsewhere.

The "Elderly People" road signs win for me: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2GYPJR6/an-elderly-people-roadside...

The first time I saw one of these I stopped to take a picture. It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the road.

I'd saw we need them in the US, but no one walks here - and by the way people ignore the warning signs for children, I assume it'd have no effect anyways.

They can and they will and when you run them over because you where going at the speed limit minding your own WhatsApp nobody will come to your rescue blaming the victim for jaywalking.

You might consider them redundant because elderly people can also cross the road where there aren't any signs, but then few warning signs aren't.

> It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the road

I don't understand this mindset. Do people not walk where you live, or do you not have elderly care homes? I've been to _multiple_ countries and nearly all of them with some uniform signage standard warn motorists about elderly and children crossing.

I think the point is that elderly people are fairly sentient so you don't have to worry about them doing dumb things like darting out in front of a semi truck like you do with kids so there's no reason to warn drivers about a high density of them since they behave like normal pedestrians if perhaps a bit slower.

I think it's more to warn a motorist to be mindful of slow moving people. And older people do occasionally fall over too.

Naples FL needs signs like these. Only it’s to warn motorists of elderly people attempting to pilot Lamborghinis and other ridiculously powerful sports cars. It’s surreal to see valet have to help an 80 year old out of a aventador and the step up the curb to the door of a restaurant.

"while being so absurdly well-organized."

I note a z in organized ...

I do get where you are coming from: My mum used to joke about a fictional sign that said "Please do not throw stones at this sign". Some of our signage is absolutely laughable.

We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway, so why bother.

Across the entirety of the UK, our road signage is pretty rock solid. There may be a few degenerate cases but all sharp corners have chevron warning signs and they do save lives.

> We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway, so why bother.

I'm not sure it's as absurd as it sounds. Do you look at the signage you pass every day? I suspect I don't.

When they put in a new stop sign near where I live (in the US), things were less safe for a long time because people consistently drove through it without slowing. Since this was not a consistent problem with any other stop sign nearby, I believe it was not willful disobedience but people so used to there being no stop sign there that they literally didn't see it.

(Even with literal neon pennants on it, people kept driving through it anyway, but you'd at least sometimes see people skid to a stop partway through the intersection, presumably as their brains caught up. And eventually it penetrated locals' consciousnesses, and now they stop.)

Fair point.

"Do you look at the signage you pass every day?" - I do and so does my sodding car and it still annoys me when it gets the speed limits wrong!

I accept I'm not everyone and noting and warning about change is a good idea. We do have a lot of signs and I'm pretty sure I've seen signs warning about upcoming signage (not really 8)

I'm happy to report that I've driven in several US states (mostly FL, including around and in Miami and Orlando) and found it pretty straight forward. "Right on red" is pure genius and "four way pass in turn" is not, especially when multiple lanes are involved!

I'm fairly certain I can find a sign that says, not verbatim, "no shooting at signs" riddled with bullet holes. There was one near the experimental USDA forest, but I bet I could crowd source another one.

Most signs do not have bullet holes in them. Like, 98/100 signs are holes-frei

Well it's certainly true that "no shooting" signs typically have bullet holes in them.

> non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway

Not entirely accurate? Non-locals may visit the area often enough that they're familiar with the area but will not necessarily be familiar with local changes.

(eg parents visiting from another part of the country every few months)

> We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already ...

Not really. New changes like adding stop signs or converting a one way stop to all way must be conveyed to locals who's muscle memory will send them sailing through.

Happened to me recently, city added an all way stop to a 4-way free for all intersection and converted two intersections from one way to all way stop. I sailed right through the new all way stop the first day - no cop but I caught it as I went through. Missed the big yellow NEW STOP AHEAD too. Almost ran it again the next few times. Now at least 6 moths later I still see that sign and have to think "oh yeah, thats there."

> I note a z in organized ...

I think high school English in my country is officially British English, but practically we all learn from reading American media.

Organization and complaining about disorganization stem from the same source, an intolerance to disorder.

> No country complains about itself more while being so absurdly well-organized.

I’ve noticed Australians seem to have a similar issue: they decry the Nanny State at home, but all the ones I’ve met abroad complain about the current location being insufficiently nannified. Often both complaints in the same conversation.

Finally: Italians. I thought a trip from Milan to Rome was going to be like a trip through Somalia the way the Italians I know describe their country. In fact, everything seemed to work exceptionally smoothly, although whenever I bring this up I’m told that I simply didn’t venture south enough.

That’s not my experience of Australians at all! The Australians I’ve met (through working for an Australian company) all seem to love their nanny state, and genuinely don’t understand how anyone could see anything undesirable in it.

Somehow the same country that venerates Ned Kelly

You only have to watch one episode of Aussie Dash Cams to see how we Australians feel about authority.

Freedom for me, but cheering when someone else gets caught by the police when they are breaking the law. It’s an odd dichotomy. I don’t hate it but we do seem to lack self awareness with a slightly English style.

Because you're meeting the ones so content they don't leave.

All the things people are saying here about Australians are the same complaints Americans in the west have about Californians.

It might be useful here to give a current example or two of Aussie nanny statism, just for context

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-30/malcolm-turnbull-fine...

LOL, that struck home. While I'm living in Germany now, I lived in Napoli from 2004 to 2009 and I have to agree with our Italian friends: Italy south of Rome is a markedly different country and experience.

*Tatham

My finger slipped across most of the keyboard, or I fucked up.

You decide!

Very close to the ISO standard sign. Black lightning on yellow background. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:grs:7010:W012

Dunno why you'd use anything else.

In particular, WinAmp at the time used a yellow lightning bolt in its icon, which was on damn near every Windows machine in the 90s.

WinAmp's yellow lightning icon is still sitting happily in my Windows icon tray right this very moment. Pageant is in there too with its cute little spy-hat :-)

Also vintage of the era is ZOC[1] which was a dialer and terminal emulator whose "O" used a yellow lightning bolt.

[1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/ZOC

(The Wikipedia page for the application does not have the same splash screen that the above link does and the above is certainly the version I remember.)

this also caught my attention. the author also questions why the screens are blue

I think he has just forgotten that in the late 90s, these color choices were entirely obvious and followed the Windows design precedent, which is why he probably didn't think much about it at the time

Indeed. For example, Windows 95's My Computer icon might have had a teal background to match the default desktop background, but the screen of the peer computer in the Network Neighborhood icon was blue.

I'd accuse windows of knowingly setting expectations by choosing a blue screen as the default, but they were using it before the BSOD was even a thing

DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…

Do you remember Microsoft Word’s “Jerry Pournelle mode”? He convinced them to ship a feature that forced Word to render white text on a blue background, just like his favourite word processor, so that he would switch. I think the last version with this feature was Word 2003.

I used to use that occasionally!

It was Pournelle that inspired it? Really?

This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the yellow lightning bolt stayed yellow in the PuTTY icon (among other uses) because the symbol was likely just borrowed from safety warnings. Yellow has been preferred for a long time since it's considered a high-vis color and would typically stand out on industrial machinery housing where you might want to clearly warn someone of shock hazard with a pictograph so the warning transcends language. The lightning bolt stayed yellow as a result of "that's how we've always done it, I guess" thinking

It's funny, I was just thinking about this recently. I noticed that a lot of electric cars or PHEVs use cyan accents to signal that they are EVs, yet I also think yellow is the more obvious color for electricity.

Actually I think yellow is only appropriate if it's a lightning bolt. Otherwise it wouldn't make me think of electricity. Cyan hints is more "cyber" like Tron or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_electricity

> The Neo-Latin adjective electricus, originally meaning 'of amber'

Seems like electricity and amber have been tied together for a long time.

This rules out the idea it comes from safety signs. I also dont buy the safety sign origin as the graphics are always in black and the background is yellow.

In “Avatar: the Last Airbender”, there’s one-ish characters who can bend lightning, and to the credit of the animators, it is indeed depicted as cyan colored

Reply on news.ycombinator.com