Hacker News: abcanthur

New comment by abcanthur in "The "Unbreakable" Beer Glasses of East Germany"

abcanthur — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:19:31 +0000

Does anybody have experience with these? I assume they behave like Corelle, with the million piece explosion when they do break? I just cracked my German PYREX beaker for coffee 10 days ago :(

New comment by abcanthur in "I built an AI company to save my open source project"

abcanthur — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:12:30 +0000

I've looked into optaplanner/timefold but never ended up using or experimenting with it. Can anyone compare the experience to OR tools?

New comment by abcanthur in "The Plan to Save Frank Lloyd Wright's Only Skyscraper Isn't Going as Planned"

abcanthur — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 05:39:37 +0000

To help explain his reputation, he was extraordinarily influential and prolific (400+ completed buildings). His first 20 yrs of work was published as the Wasmuth Portfolio in Europe in 1910; basically all the great European architects who started Modernism had a copy, and even more studied under him at Taliesin. His space planning was revolutionary in the West, his Usonian homes were technologically and sociologically innovative, his many writings are often incisive. To the mentions of his buildings deteriorating; they were unusual, made of new materials, and many residential (no budget for upkeep). He should be regarded as an architect, not an engineer; these fields are almost entirely separate now. And he had great engineering successes, his Imperial Hotel in Japan famously survived a major earthquake. In my opinion he's underrated (even being the most famous American architect) probably because he was so stylistic (a virtuoso) and he was a half generation older than the more significant wave of Modernists. Go to the Guggenheim, the Marin Civic Center, Oak Park Illinois, Hollyhock, Taliesin East and West, his buildings really hum.

New comment by abcanthur in "How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden (2016)"

abcanthur — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 05:21:27 +0000

I have a small raised bed dedicated to my first Three Sisters growing right now. Just planted beans a few days ago now that corn has had a head start. Rookie gardener, but hoping for at least some visual interest if not production. The beans are supposed to fix nitrogen which helps the other plants, but does anyone know if this requires a year to pass where the old bean plant decomposes into the soil? Or is merely bean plant presence enough to share nitrogen?

New comment by abcanthur in "Show HN: FIFA Interactive Bracket (World Cup)"

abcanthur — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 01:36:28 +0000

for the World Cup and most other leagues, the platonic ideal of speed/freshness, information density, and legibility, is https://plaintextsports.com . It has a great World Cup presentation which can display by group or by date https://plaintextsports.com/world-cup/2022/schedule . The page sizes are something like 3 magnitudes smaller than ESPN.com, especially great for when you're actually at the game and the network is bogged down in the arena.

New comment by abcanthur in "San Francisco’s famous sourdough was once gross"

abcanthur — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 19:37:30 +0000

Pockets of extra sour!? Fascinating, what is her secret?

New comment by abcanthur in "Building future cities out of timber could save 100B tons of CO2 emissions"

abcanthur — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 02:49:13 +0000

noise transmission (and the reduction thereof) is affected by all aspects of building design. A wood building will not always be noisy. More expensive buildings tend to have multiple mitigations in place for sound transmission. These can be multiple special purpose layers in floors and walls, from elastic layers that are only a few mm thick, to inches of poured concrete present only for the sound response. A technique in very nice stick-built (the 5-over-1s mentioned) buildings is to have walls built with different structural systems for either side of the wall. Two layers of drywall on a single structural wall acts like a membrane, transmitting sound to the other side. Attaching drywall to disconnected structures greatly inhibits that vibration, at the cost of a thicker wall (lost rentable sqft) and ~2x spent on structure.

New comment by abcanthur in "Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]"

abcanthur — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 17:54:25 +0000

For a very similar but different up and down story arc that both makes one appreciate the value of one's own mental faculties, and stirs compassion for those with diminished abilities, I highly recommend the movie "Awakenings." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awakenings De Niro and Robin Williams, based on an Oliver Sacks book, which I haven't read but it probably great.

New comment by abcanthur in "The Colorado Safety Stop is the law of the land"

abcanthur — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 16:49:40 +0000

There (should) be a very small rectanglular sign right below the stop sign that says "4 way" meaning there are stops on all 4 corners. I've always thought these were way too small to notice and I wouldn't be surprised if they were often missing.

New comment by abcanthur in "Plain Text Sports"

abcanthur — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 17:40:27 +0000

true, but usually only for players currently on the court and who knows what direction you'll have to rubberneck to read it. This is one instance where I like mixing the small mobile screen w my real world view, it's an augmented reality!

New comment by abcanthur in "Plain Text Sports"

abcanthur — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 15:46:01 +0000

Great site, I've been using it for months. It's a really different and richer experience at night when the games are in progress. There are added features for the big leagues, such as the NBA games feature a game flow graph of the scoring margin. It truly shines when you're at a sold out NBA game, you can barely get a tweet out due to the crowd size, but you can still refresh the box score of your own game in

New comment by abcanthur in "Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?"

abcanthur — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 16:21:04 +0000

Wow! Can you post some non-satellite pictures? Is willow the primary plant making all those shapes? Or have you done significant earth moving too?

New comment by abcanthur in "MovieLabs publishes common ontology for production"

abcanthur — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 21:57:16 +0000

The building (AEC- architecture, engineering, construction) industries have the IFC format. https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/

This is meant to be an interop for various BIM (building information modeling) applications. The first generation of technical progress in AEC had been largely about computer generated geometry, but the lagging needs now are on the information attached to the geometry. In the US autodesk's Revit is dominant (and reviled) but the IFC open source development, namely ifcOpenShell & BlenderBIM, is rapidly reaching feature parity. The first computerized cohort of architects knows only AutoCAD, the current cohort will be all Revit, and I predict right now there is a new split coming as much better tools get built. Hypar.io, testfit, speckle etc are some of those tools. Ifc is likely to be a part of that, it's a fresher, cleaner take than awful Revit and opens up the information to much wider platforms.

New comment by abcanthur in "For soccer players, the less brain they use, the better for penalty kicks"

abcanthur — Sun, 23 May 2021 20:52:11 +0000

I've always wanted to see an experiment to see if free kicks (or teed golf shots, or a teed football) performance went down if the athlete was not allowed to set or tee the ball themselves. Soccer players will always give the ball a gentle toss onto the ground and watch it settle; do world class athletes "see" the millimeter differences in the ball position and subconsciously take into account before striking??

New comment by abcanthur in "How fit can you get from just walking?"

abcanthur — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 16:03:59 +0000

Refers to a John Steinbeck quote, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

New comment by abcanthur in "Dry Bean Dataset: Images of 13,611 grains of 7 different registered dry beans"

abcanthur — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 15:20:41 +0000

I have a small collection of bean-shaped rocks that I have found over time in my purchases of dry beans. Lesson, rinse and sort your beans! By sort I mean remove a 2-3 shrivelling beans per pound and a rock every 10 lbs.

New comment by abcanthur in "Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard"

abcanthur — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 16:34:31 +0000

I have long yearned for the sliding keyboards of yore; better touch typing, adds some articulation and yes, size, to phones that are too small and smooth for many hands, all while preserving screen real estate from onscreen keyboards AND visual obstruction from our moving fingers. To this last point, I have given up on physical keyboards returning to phones, but why can't we have a physical scroll wheel on the side? Handles so many use screentime use cases (infinite scroll...), unobstrusive, precise, piggybacks on accessibility UIs, etc. Early ipods were all scroll wheel, and there is great versatility in the clicking and smooth-vs-stepped modes of modern mouse scroll wheels. If we haven't gotten a decent keyboard in any device for years, at least give us a wheel!! Touch screens are like wearing cheap cellophane gloves, this is why nobody looks cool while using their smartphone, because there is no possibility of virtuosity in the dead, time lagged UI.

New comment by abcanthur in "America’s bald eagle population continues to soar"

abcanthur — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 17:33:37 +0000

More anecdata, I know of a catfish processor a few miles inland from the Mississippi River (the bluffs of the Mississippi are one of their favorite habitats) in Wisconsin where they scatter fish carcasses in the fields during the winter. I have seen flocks of no less than one hundred bald eagles in the field and roosted in the nearby trees. This is interesting to me regarding the view of Bald Eagles as apex predators (America!) or scavengers (like seeing them at a landfill). They are certainly both. I've gotten within yards of them a few times while cycling in the same area; they will be feeding on roadkill and they fly off just as I quietly roll up to them. They are huge, beautiful, totally majestic, very believable to imagine them flying off with a small lamb or nightmare scenario, a toddler.

New comment by abcanthur in "Show HN: Plain Text Sports: live sports games, play-by-play, and boxscores, fast"

abcanthur — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 01:15:52 +0000

This is awesome! I hate scrolling, I hate autoplay videos. I love scores. This is might as well be my homepage, single kilobytes.

New comment by abcanthur in "OpenStreetMap charts a controversial new direction"

abcanthur — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 20:18:20 +0000

Is this virtual or real damage? As in, the trail route is imperfect and misleading about the actual trail, or the trail is revealed via the map and others come and physical use damages the trail. The second reminds me of land owners sneakily putting "no trespassing" on land that is legally publicly accessible (I think this happened in Sausalito about a year ago)