Hacker News: avhon1

New comment by avhon1 in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

avhon1 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:59:18 +0000

Recumbent trikes have the potential for leg suck, but two-wheelers havee no especial safety risks.

New comment by avhon1 in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

avhon1 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:58:34 +0000

> recumbent bikes are expensive

New recumbents are expensive, but used ones are very cheap. Afyer seeing several within an hour's drive of me for $300, I got a Rans Rocket for $100. Appparently it had been available (but poorly advertised) for two years.

A little while after I became "the guy who rides a recumbent", I was given a Rans Vivo for free, because the owner hhad determined that the expected sale price wasn't worth the time and effort to sell.

New comment by avhon1 in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

avhon1 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:49:33 +0000

> My ebike's minimum speed for the motor is 15kph

That is a flaw in your ebike. Weird and dangerous.

New comment by avhon1 in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

avhon1 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:46:25 +0000

The cost wouldn't necessarily be in the bike, but in requirements for mandatory paid registration, licensing classes, insurance, inspection, and safety equipment.

New comment by avhon1 in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

avhon1 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:43:48 +0000

Wattage is basically meaningless. There is nk standard way to measure it. Almost all "250 watt" ebikes consume much more than 250 watts of electricity at full throttle, and can produce much more than 250 watts of mechanical output for seconds or minutes at a time.

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:30:42 +0000

To rotate the view in SolveSpace, you need any one of these:

* a keyboard's shift key and a right mouse button, or * a middle mouse button, or * a 3D mouse.

I've done some work in SolveSpace with a Wacom tablet, by binding the stylus's buttons to the middle and right mouse buttons. SolveSpace is a pretty simple program, so you don't need to dig deep through the UI to get to all the functions. Lost of the often-used functions have keyboard shortcuts, but I don't think there is anything that is only accessible through the keyboard.

Depending on what you aim to do, you might be interested in keeping up with Blender's currently-in-development tablet mode:

https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:21:09 +0000

SolveSpace does have some ability to control the color and fill of areas. It's nowhere near as powerful as Inkscape, but enough to make simple diagrams. The exported SVGs can also be edited in Inkscape.

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:57:15 +0000

for simple learning, I invite you to consider SolveSpace

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:55:38 +0000

SolveSpace is available in library form. It uses NURBS to represent surfaces, with triangles as a fallback.

https://solvespace.com/library.pl

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:51:59 +0000

Just because you type dimensions in doesn't mean it's parametric. If you're manually patching meshes, you're almost certainly not doing parametric CAD! (This does match with my memories of SketchUp, beck when it was owned by Google. I had to fix holes and overlapping geometry by editing the .STL files in Blender before any of the primitive slicer programs could process them.)

OnShape and Fusion360 are fully parametric CAD programs. Another free-tier closed-source one is Siemens Solid Edge (the "Hobbyist" edition). FLOSS parametric CAD programs that are reasonably usable are FreeCAD (complicated but powerful) and SolveSpace (an 80/20 sort of tool -- nowhere near as powerful, but vastly easier to use).

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:46:47 +0000

FWIW, the FLOSS CAD program SolveSpace can generate parametric sketches and export them as SVG files (file > export 2d view)

New comment by avhon1 in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

avhon1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:44:18 +0000

> chamfer all outside edges

FreeCAD can do this. So can all of the proprietary parametric CAD programs I've ever used, some of which (PTC OnShape, Siemens Solid Edge, Autodesk Fusion) have usable free tiers available.

New comment by avhon1 in "Bugs Apple loves"

avhon1 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 07:12:53 +0000

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)

New comment by avhon1 in "When someone says they hate your product"

avhon1 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:21:30 +0000

> Just stop using it

Unfortunately, not always an option without making major lifestyle decisions (for example, software required by a job)

New comment by avhon1 in "Damn Small Linux"

avhon1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:19:36 +0000

So you can use as little CPU and RAM as necessary to browse the page you want to read at any given moment.

New comment by avhon1 in "Turtletoy"

avhon1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:12:13 +0000

Writing an infinite "hello world!" loop on an Atari 800XL was my first programming experience... in the mid-2000s.

New comment by avhon1 in "How I block all online ads"

avhon1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:07:59 +0000

and if you find a video that hasn't had the ads tagged yet, the UI for it is pretty easy to figure out.

New comment by avhon1 in "Evidence from the One Laptop per Child program in rural Peru"

avhon1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:05:34 +0000

Chromebooks are ubiquitous in U.S. primary and secondary schools

New comment by avhon1 in "Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months"

avhon1 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:33:20 +0000

As someone who used the HTML gmail interface right up until google pulled the plug: the JS version is much slower to load. Every morning, I get to have about 10 seconds thinking about how it used to be faster.

New comment by avhon1 in "1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long"

avhon1 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:39:31 +0000

If each step was 1 frame, and the video played at 240 frames per second, the video would last about 17.5 years