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rantallion

290 karma · joined March 26, 2022

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rantallion··on Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death
Are you referring to the Allotments Act 1950? If so, that doesn't necessarily extend to private gardens. Plenty of places will have byelaws or covenants that prevent the keeping of animals in garden.
rantallion··on Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death
From Latin via Anglo-French and Old French, but the Spanish also derives from the Latin. https://www.etymonline.com/word/coney
rantallion··on Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

rantallion··on Magnolias are so old that they're pollinated by beetles, not bees (2025)
Seeds are not gametes. While your dog may help spread the seeds, they are not assisting in the sexual reproduction itself.
rantallion··on Library of Juggling
Don't forget about fire. Even the most boring of moves amaze crowds when half your equipment is burning.
rantallion··on Library of Juggling
They're not wrong. Assuming alternating hands are doing the throwing (rather than both hands throwing a ball simultaneously), 4-ball patterns mean each ball is in the air for 4 beats, while 3-ball patterns only take 3 beats each.

And once one realises that many juggling patterns can be understood by the number of beats each ball takes to return to a hand, one can then think in siteswap (https://juggle.fandom.com/wiki/Siteswap).

rantallion··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
Isn't interoperability of messaging one of the goals of the Digital Markets Act?
rantallion··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
Given the environmental impact of disposable vapes (the littering was awful), some places have already implemented bans. The UK's ban came into force June 2025.
rantallion··on GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder
> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.

This is what we've been told since time eternal but it seems more likely that those pirating are those that wouldn't be inclined to pay at all.

rantallion··on Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs
> direct costs of the exchange up front

Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.

rantallion··on Buteyko Method
> you will miss quite a lot of valuable things

Arguably, the lack of medical evidence tells us that this is in fact not a valuable thing.

rantallion··on Quebec to ban public prayer in sweeping new secularism law
> Let's say I have a religion that, as part of practicing it, restricts my diet. > If I try to make you - a non-practitioner - eat that diet, then your reply makes sense. It's a personal matter; I don't get to force it on you or anyone else.

In the UK, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find restaurants whose meat is not halal. One could argue that a religious diet is in fact being forced upon those who do not practise Islam.

rantallion··on Louvre to hike ticket prices for most non-EU tourists by 45%
> green card holders and H1B workers, who can still visit the national parks at the lower price

But only until ICE detain them, right?

rantallion··on Can you take an ox to Oxford?
Sheep on the Town Moor would be a new one. The Freeman of the city have herbage rights for cattle, which are a frequent sight.

> "herbage right" means the full right and benefit of herbage vested in the resident freemen and widows to graze cows on the Town Moor;

Source: [Newcastle-upon-Tyne Town Moor Act 1988](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/1988/31/pdfs/ukla_198800...)

rantallion··on Pixel 10 Phones
> Paying with your phone is a massive improvement to convenience.

And it only gets easier when you pay with a watch - you don't even have to pull your phone out of your pocket!

My cards only come out when I'm making a large purchase that I want extra protection on (think the UK's Section 75) and these are usually purchases I know about in advance - otherwise my wallet stays at home most days.

rantallion··on GPT-5 for Developers
If you're doing nothing in that 30-45 minutes other than stare at a loading screen, you're doing it wrong.

I'm not sold on the efficacy of AI and I share your reservations about having to scrutinise their output, but I see great value in being able to offload a long-running task to someone/something else and only have to check back later. In the meantime, I can be doing something else - like sitting in those planning meetings we all enjoy!

rantallion··on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
Do you have a source to support that claim?
rantallion··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Might be worth considering a different name before you get too big. There's already pact.io, which will be the first result any time anyone searches for pact testing.
rantallion··on My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures
The best part is that you can do both. Give the agent a prompt, go for a walk, come back to see how well it did.
rantallion··on Let me pay for Firefox
You could probably calculate it based on how much ad revenue one can gain by having your own default search engine be the default in Firefox.

At least, that's probably how Google determined value added when deciding if it's worth the return when they funded (read: paid for development at) the Mozilla Corporation.

rantallion··on Fictional K-pop bands zoom to top of US music charts
If by "all these bands", you mean BTS and Blackpink, they do not exist only in fiction. They are flesh and blood entertainers.
rantallion··on ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral
Indeed. GP needs to read "First They Came".
rantallion··on Next month, saved passwords will no longer be in Microsoft’s Authenticator app
On one side of the pond, we have the EU's Digital Markets Act to protect consumers. It has teeth and it's already being used to ensure consumers have choice.
rantallion··on Earths largest camera:3B pixel images
France is the odd one out, right? California and Britain having in common that they're each only a part of a country.
rantallion··on How would a passing gravitational wave look or feel?
> Things dont fall to the ground because the earth pulls on them. Earth is pulling in the space around it, and those things come with it.

Gravity wells aren't pulling surrounding space toward their centre. They're only pulling other masses that occupy the surrounding space.

rantallion··on Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system
> What’s a “moon” versus a “planet”? Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not?

Planets orbit stars. Moons orbit planets. That's a clear and easy distinction. Planet vs dwarf planet isn't so clear to most.

rantallion··on Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff
But surely it'll help in this case, where an article is being published in English and being shared on an English language forum.
rantallion··on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
I'm with you. Looking at the way people respond online to things now since LLMs and GenAI went mainstream is baffling. So many comments along the lines of "this is AI" when there are more ordinary explanations.
rantallion··on Where is London's most central sheep?
If you mean Jesmond Dene, there's a petting zoo with a few small beasts and birds. I know they have a couple of breeds of goat but I don't recall seeing any sheep on my last visit (within the last month).
rantallion··on Software engineer pay heatmap for Europe
They didn't even manage to get the UK right. Apparently whoever made this map doesn't know that the UK is the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and that Éire is only the bottom bit.

I wonder how that skews the figures. Are folk in NI paid more in line with GB or with Éire? I'm sure currency comes into play too, what with Éire using the euro.

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