Top all-time · #10444
Geri Walton
Personal blog · geriwalton.comhistoryculture
Geri Walton's personal blog at geriwalton.com covers history and culture. Since 2017, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Geri Walton writes historical essays, such as a history of U.S. senators who died in duels, and pieces on past child-rearing, historical science errors and consumer regulation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
No surviving Code Duello that I'm aware of (there are several, though the authenticity of most of them is disputed) says that duels have to be to the death. There is a French one [0] which says that in a duel with swords, the seconds decide among themselves whether the duel will be to first blood or to the death, and do not inform the principals of their decision. [0] https://www.geriwalton.com/french-dueling-codes-…
Comment linking /french-dueling-codes-for-swords-pistols-and-sabers/
on “A Somewhat Comprehensive History of U.S. Senators Who Have Died in Duels”Submitted The Umbrella as a Weapon (2014) as a story · 44 points
HN discussionThere is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older childr…
Comment linking /breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet-nurses-in-the-eighteenth-century/
on “What happens when babies are left to cry it out?”Submitted How to Make the Most of a Victorian Christmas Tree as a story · 2 points
HN discussionÉmilie du Châtelet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émilie_du_Châtelet ), mentioned at the beginning of the article, was a fascinating woman, living at a time when “natural philosophy” was morphing into different sciences. For a time she was also very active in the social scene. Like so many brilliant women of history (see Marry Wollstonecraft for another example), her biography ends in death during childbirth. Volta…
Comment linking /voltaire-emilie-du-chatelet/
on “A Collection of Human Errors: Assessing the Distant Past”Submitted Antoine-Augustin Parmentier Made Potatoes Popular in France in the 1700s as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou wrote: "By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good" Demonstrably not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alum : > In the Victorian era, alum was used along with other substances like plaster of Paris to adulterate certain food products, particularly bread. It was used to make lower-grade flour appear whiter, allowing the producers to spend less on whiter…
Comment linking /food-and-drink-adulteration-in-1700-and/
on “Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker”
