I was hoping to read about an actual boat trip to Java but I knew that on HN I’m more likely to find programming stuff.
For people who are unaware of the place, I suggest googling photos of “Java nature”
To be fair it would have been Kim Polese and Patrick Naughton and James and Arthur Van Hoff who made the final decision on the name from the suggestions thrown out in that meeting. And furthermore Yahoo search was dominant then, maybe with AltaVista, and the idea of polluting the search space hadn't occurred to anyone.
Mind blown :o
Anyway it made sense at the time, it’s just unfortunate. The only redeeming part is that in Indonesian it’s actually spelled Jawa so it doesn’t affect locals too much