Hacker News: abrowne

New comment by abrowne in "Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death"

abrowne — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:27:41 +0000

Look at the spelling: it would have rhymed with 'honey'. It's a pretty common phenomenon: we (Americans anyway) don't talk about 'cocks' and 'asses' anymore, we have roosters and donkeys.

The OED has a pronunciation history:

The usual current pronunciation with long ō ( /əʊ/ ) seems to have become established during the course of the 19th cent., and may in part be a spelling pronunciation reflecting the rarity of the word in general use in standard English at this date, when it may have been most familiar to many from use in the Bible (and especially in the Psalms) as the name of a foreign animal. However, this pronunciation is likely to have been reinforced by the desire to avoid association with 'cunt' and related words (compare 'cunny'), especially in a religious context.

New comment by abrowne in "Theranos.world"

abrowne — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 01:12:16 +0000

I've accepted X and call the posts "crements"

New comment by abrowne in "IANA's email about why example.com changed"

abrowne — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:48:00 +0000

Then they succeeded?

> the domain isn't intended to be a general purpose endpoint for things like availability testing so we do not encourage that kind of usage

New comment by abrowne in "The mystery animal on an ancient god's head"

abrowne — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:28:45 +0000

I am not seeing that on Firefox (beta/157) on Linux or Mac.

New comment by abrowne in "The mystery animal on an ancient god's head"

abrowne — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:54:10 +0000

I had to disable the body background-color with the web inspector to see any of the animal heads!

New comment by abrowne in "Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food"

abrowne — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:02:12 +0000

The Basques were whalers. They started from the coast, using watch towers. Once the Bay of Biscay was depleted they moved further and further into the Atlantic.

Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.

All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).

New comment by abrowne in "Google Messages has a weird bug that's sending old texts to random people"

abrowne — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:40:10 +0000

Do you want to use RCS?

New comment by abrowne in "The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood"

abrowne — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:30:35 +0000

Wildfire smoke will be the big question there. It's started to be bad for a week or two a year in Minneapolis, and is only worse the closer you are to the boreal forest.

New comment by abrowne in "Devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027"

abrowne — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:58:06 +0000

Next gen of the Razr Ultra at least, according to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363702

New comment by abrowne in "Western Sahara"

abrowne — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:47:54 +0000

And related to what happened in Ceuta recently. "The Moroccans orchestrated a similar cross-border influx in 2021 in retaliation for Spain’s allowing Western Sahara President Brahim Ghali, whose nation Morocco claims for itself, into the country for medical treatment." https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ceuta-spain-morocco-...

New comment by abrowne in "AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol"

abrowne — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:15:51 +0000

Agreed. If they really want to get ahold of me they'll leave a voicemail.

But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.

New comment by abrowne in "The AI Aesthetic"

abrowne — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:39:47 +0000

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-a...

New comment by abrowne in "Firefox 153.0 Beta"

abrowne — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:09:15 +0000

I prefer the Firefox PDF viewer personally, and now that it can do all this I uninstalled the default Ubuntu PDF reader recently. It made me think and I uninstalled the image viewer app too. For both I'd rather use Firefox.

New comment by abrowne in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

abrowne — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:34:27 +0000

Was your bookshelf stained from sliding them out? Ours was all red on the bottom edge.

New comment by abrowne in "The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing"

abrowne — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 02:30:49 +0000

All good deadpan deserves a downvote?

New comment by abrowne in "Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further"

abrowne — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:11:49 +0000

I think that's true, but energy efficiency is only one potential benefit of epaper displays, and not one that is a goal with this product.

New comment by abrowne in "Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further"

abrowne — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:54:35 +0000

> Touchscreens on your wrist suck so bad.

I don't mind myself, and especially in winter with mittens on I can – and often do – use my nose :-D

New comment by abrowne in "Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further"

abrowne — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:00:44 +0000

Bangle.js 2 (https://banglejs.com/) also has a transflective LCD. It's very fun product with a great community.

Bangle.js 3 is being discussed: https://github.com/orgs/espruino/discussions/7341

New comment by abrowne in "Boot Naked Linux"

abrowne — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:50:32 +0000

Or they meant 2010s?

New comment by abrowne in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

abrowne — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:59:03 +0000

Bankman won't be Fried