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arantiuson America.gov

This is just language being language. Humans are lazy, and over-abbreviate and over-shorten. "United States of America" is long. There are a few ways to shorten that, and they're all used.

arantiuson Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep

No one will ever see this (probably) but I remembered this comment, and just had this experience:

I've been learning the eBay developer APIs. Recently (i.e. within the past few hours) I looked up the "Browse API" specifically. My first or second try failed so I typed just [ebay brows] and didn't find it! But when I finished [ebay browse] that document (within ebay.com and titled "Browse API | eBay Develo...") did show up!

I can't reproduce now so I can only guess but it's possible this was a timing thing. I was typing several things, and changing/re-typing "as soon as" I did or did not see what I wanted to show up. But there was definitely a moment where I'd expect "that page I just had open an hour ago" to be at the top, but instead search suggestions (ugh, search in the address bar ...) were all that was showing.

arantiuson Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep

For things I access often, the Firefox address bar does function like a near-perfect search for me. Some things I type [ab cd] and the page with the words _starting_ ab and cd pops right up.

A while back I looked up a manual for an old Singer sewing machine, which turned out to be the model 15. So I typed [sin 15] in the address bar and -- yep, first result! A week ago I looked into the game Metroid Dread. Typed [met dre] and two relevant pages from my history came up, immediately.

I don't know what you mean by "100% unique match" but, this feature works for me, and in fact I regularly use it and find it very worthwhile.

arantiuson Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

> ... fast/audible switching between notes in a chord ...

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

Many of my favorite chiptunes use this technique.

arantiuson Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

I guess they've never heard of select-and-drag? Which isn't universal, but is common. And should be universal. I use it frequently. So many one-time-password forms break it in various ways, like wanting the value to go into six separate input boxes (why is this so common!?).

arantiuson LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs

This is a fantastic claim. I've been making web pages since the '90s and using web browsers just as long, and I can't think of a single instance of this. Perhaps it existed and I never knew about it? Can you provide some evidence for where and when this was the case?

arantiuson Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993

I've thought a little bit about this, and I agree that always on is a big part of the problem. I think if I were the time lord, I'd aim for crippling wireless computer networking. I think I want everything we have computing and internet wise, if it's not available wirelessly, and thus always.

arantiuson Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:

* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around. * Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.) * I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.

The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".

arantiuson Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)

Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.

IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.

arantiuson Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

For one piece of anecdata:

I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.

They're not all awful?

arantiuson Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.

arantiuson Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.

Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.

arantiuson The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).

arantiuson Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

Receiving mail correctly at the address on the label isn't a problem with the post office.

arantiuson A new, faster DeepSeek R1-0528 variant appears from German lab

This is an appropriate usage of the word "variant", and applies to anything that can have several varieties.

arantiuson Iconography of the PuTTY tools

Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but

https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+vs+spy&udm=2

An image search will show you plenty copies of the inspiration for this hat.

arantiuson What happened to the n in restaurateur?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=restaura...

Similar in Google trends, but

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

Much smaller difference, when limited to the USA.

arantiuson Rsync vulnerabilities

For a concrete example: https://www.gentoo.org/support/rsync-mirrors/

Gentoo's package manager most typically updates over rsync.

arantiuson Cuttle – a MTG like game using a standard 52 card deck

I discovered this back in 2015 (by the version history) and put together a "one sheet" (two sided) version of the rules. The side with the card effects is especially useful.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rRIiRebARNIadQaMZgimKYvW...

arantiuson ELKS: Linux for 16-bit Intel Processors

With so little context in your question I'll reply with

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

I remember using this in the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). A linux distro designed to be a router, and to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.

arantiuson WireGuard: Beyond the most basic configuration

Because this misunderstanding and limitation is so common, BitTorrent has workarounds in place.

See https://superuser.com/a/1548724

arantiuson Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks

> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

arantiuson Coq will be renamed into 'The Rocq Prover'

I'm honestly guessing here because I'm not an insider and I don't naturally understand what's going on with this made up word, but I think it's:

1. Name is "coq" which is pronounced like "cock". Tee hee hee I'm so funny I made you say a bad word. (Opinions can differ, but this word being bad isn't a terribly rare opinion IMO.)

2. Obviously, that means Q (at the end of a word!? *) is pronounced like a hard K.

3. Enough people don't like being "forced" to say that word, pick a new name, new name is "rocq". I was confused like you for a while until I figured out the above. If q->k, then this is pronounced "rock".

4. New name learner: Why in the world would you pronounce a Q (at the end of a word) as a K? (and/or) How am I supposed to pronounce that name? I've never seen a word like that before.

5. Oh, tee hee, because of an immature joke from the old name. (Have to explain the old name and make the innuendo, to make the new name make any sense. And the new name makes so little sense, it would be very natural to ask how it came about.)

* https://scrabblewordfinder.org/words-ending-in/q Which never happens -- have you heard of any of these words before? I haven't. (Besides I guess "tranq" which is really an abbreviation.)

arantiuson Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?

I left Google in 2022, but I remember seeing the beginning of this. The system that got built up to do all the things Google wanted to do -- previously "simple" things, orchestrated on raw hosting (Borg) -- got too big and complex. (Partially because it was too flexible, so too many projects did too many unique things, and running them grew difficult to match.) So they started adding abstraction layers, to make it "simpler". (Which as always means the common/easy case got easier, and the rare/difficult case got harder. The team I was on at the time couldn't use the new thing for (most) of what we did, because our needs were incompatible. But we did enough other compatible things that I started learning about it/using it.)

(Personally I'm sure it's doomed to failure. But partially because most all technology operates in cycles/like a pendulum. The abstraction layers will grow too onerous and limiting, and the solution will be to dive closer to the metal again.)

arantiuson What's the difference between a motor and an engine? (2013)

I used to think along these lines. But in actuality, not so much. By this definition they're the same thing. An electric motor converts electric energy into kinetic energy. A gasoline engine converts chemical energy to kinetic energy (and even more waste heat than the electric motor). (Neither of them produces power, this is of course impossible. Unless you're subtly using a very specific technical meaning of the word?) This input/output difference is a minor distinction.

Or in other words: the power that a gasoline engine uses wasn't produced in the engine, it was produced by geological and chemical means, and in a giant refinery somewhere else.

arantiuson A forged Apple employee badge

I guess I'll be that guy. "forgery" is an even better form of the word to discuss (the noun -- and of course a forgery is forged), specifically:

3 : an act of forging especially : the crime of falsely and fraudulently making or altering a document (such as a check)

Fraudulently making a document. That's this to a tee.

arantiuson Ask HN: What have you built with ESPHome, ESP8266 or similar hardware

A few years ago I made a temperature/humidity/barometric pressure sensor.

https://www.tindie.com/products/arantius/wi_ther-wireless-th... https://arantius.com/wi-ther/

As per the manual, it's ESPHome compatible if you prefer that, but I'm semi proud of the built in functionality.

arantiuson The Hearts of the Super Nintendo

> It is really asstonishing how dev hostile those game consoles were...

What's actually astonishing is the range of things that seem strange at first, but are actually very clear and logical, IF you also understand the historical context. The path that led reasonable people to make these decisions. Here, see the comments elsewhere about how licensing worked for physical cartridges (they were expensive -- open source cartridge games doesn't make much sense). Plus a dash of copy protection and especially, read into the video game crash of the 80s. This was part of the plan to avoid shovelware (which arguably made Nintendo the success it was).

> The games would surely have been prettier as a result.

What are you basing this on? 80s and 90s era console hardware was quite restricted, and the software we got did I think all that the hardware could do.

arantiuson Happy Birthday Lemmings

> Of course, I'm sure it predates being able to effectively use the canvas...

Predates it at all. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ca... says browser support didn't come until 2005 at the earliest.

arantiuson General purpose MCUs built in to LEDs emulate candle flicker

This reminds me a lot of Big Clive's "supercomputer". See any video https://www.google.com/search?q=big+clive+supercomputer reveals.

It's just a panel of self-blinking LEDs. But they're cheap and low quality, so they start off all-on, sort of in sync, then after a while they're blinking "randomly".

So I think you want an LED string built out of lights like these?