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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

NJ got snubbed in this submission. We still have tons of independent diners (around 450 according to this article: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1241959475/new-jersey-diners-... )

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Yeah, it's weird, NJ is pretty well-known for having iconic Diners. People from many different states will know about NJ diners.

https://www.tastingtable.com/1203923/best-diners-in-new-jers...

And people not even from the states (like me) know about NJ diners because one saw the birth of Unicode :)

> … NJ diners because one saw the birth of Unicode

While it’s possible that Unicode was also conceived at a diner, you’re likely thinking of UTF-8. Unicode was from a decade earlier.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Yup! That's what I was thinking about. In fact I did read this right before posting (though I had found it at https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history) but only to validate that it had been in a NJ diner, so I missed my confusion of UTF-8 with Unicode.

I would not make a good fact-checker :(

It's virtually guaranteed that much of the birth of Unix itself took place at NJ diners.

I'm shocked that Tops earned #1 -- they did a remodel a few years ago and started taking reservations (and turning people away during busy periods if they didn't have one), and it's much less of a diner and much more of a restaurant nowadays.

Also, the Bendix Diner is closed, likely permanently, because of fire code violations.

And a number of restaurants that might as well be diners, but they're just a tad fancier.

I'm thinking of the Chatterbox in Ocean City, NJ, for instance. Grace Kelly used to be a waitress.

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