Hacker News: chasingthewind

New comment by chasingthewind in "Rare look inside the secret Lego Museum"

chasingthewind — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 16:37:37 +0000

This is basically a fluff piece about Lego with a side helping of climate and sustainability topics. It’s not a particularly good article in my opinion. I think the most fundamental question facing Lego is that clone brick makers are now able to deliver excellent sets at significantly lower cost. The article doesn’t mention that at all.

New comment by chasingthewind in "What the hell is wrong with Europe? [video]"

chasingthewind — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 23:38:38 +0000

This is a video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for anyone who might want help deciding on whether to succumb to the clickbait title.

New comment by chasingthewind in "New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair"

chasingthewind — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:02:13 +0000

My dental practice has only one significant improvement that I’ve noticed in the last 30 years, which is to use a sonic scaler to remove plaque instead of manual scraping with an implement. Somebody in the field would certainly be able to provide a better and more informative answer.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Space Elevator"

chasingthewind — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:21:18 +0000

I find it curious that the Lockheed Vega is chosen as “Amelia Earhart’s plane” since most people would probably associate her with the Lockheed Electra, the plane she was flying when she disappeared. It’s analogous to saying that Ernest Shackleton’s ship was the Nimrod…not wrong, just odd.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Subway Builder: A realistic subway simulation game"

chasingthewind — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:58:36 +0000

I am also bad at mini Metro but the thing that makes me crazy is that when the game ends it says something like “your city shut down.” That makes absolutely no sense and the endgame message should’ve been “you were fired!” Such a missed opportunity!

New comment by chasingthewind in "Curious Correspondence with Edward Gorey"

chasingthewind — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:09:53 +0000

I was never a very big fan of Edward Gorey but I always loved his contemporary Ogdred Weary. :)

New comment by chasingthewind in "Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died"

chasingthewind — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:37:00 +0000

My condolences on your loss. I used QModem in the early 90s downloading shareware and the like. I just looked through my floppy disk holder and found a 3 1/2 inch floppy from 1992 with QModem on it :) Your dad’s contribution to the BBS scene was huge and it was an important part of my own journey into computing.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Modchipping a Fridge"

chasingthewind — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 12:04:03 +0000

Meta discussion: The article is brilliant (my fridge hassles me too!) but makes two small word usage “errors” by using the phrase “dawn it’s Freon cap”

The first “error” (I’m mostly a descriptivist) is incredibly common: using “it’s” when “its” is “correct”. The second “error” is much less common: using “dawn” when “don” is “correct”.

Is this just a case of autocorrect being “helpful”? :D

New comment by chasingthewind in "Portcullis"

chasingthewind — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:01:50 +0000

I seem to recall that some drawbridges could be counter weighted and have supports that could be removed quickly that would then free the counterweight and close the bridge immediately.

New comment by chasingthewind in "I Couldn't Escape Poison Oak. So I Started Eating It"

chasingthewind — Sun, 19 May 2024 11:18:01 +0000

If you search YouTube for the channel Extreme Deer Habitat and the video How to Never Get Poison Ivy again the presenter asserts that hard scrubbing with a cloth will remove the urushiol oil after contact and that it will prevent a rash.

New comment by chasingthewind in "How to fix America's aviation system (2023)"

chasingthewind — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 23:48:33 +0000

I'm hesitant to comment because while I'm an aviation fan I really know very little. I subscribe to VAS Aviation and Blancolirio where a lot of these incidents are reported and analyzed and one thing that continually strikes me is that the architecture of airport runways seems like an incredible arsenal of footguns.

The way the runways intersect each other and parallel each other creating the need for complex and sometimes dangerous intersections seems like such an unfortunate and possibly unsolvable problem. Airports are forced by economic and logistical necessity into spaces that are really too small to solve these issues with better layout and that means the solutions "have" to be found in process or technology.

I've encountered constraints like this so often in software but mercifully I've never worked on anything with life or death consequences.

New comment by chasingthewind in "$850 Millennium Falcons and $680 Titanics: Grown-Ups Are Now a Gold Mine"

chasingthewind — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:04:33 +0000

One we like is the unfortunately named “FunWhole” on Amazon.

Though to be honest I think these are increasing in price on Amazon lately :(

But there are tons of other sellers and many of the sets seem to get good reviews

New comment by chasingthewind in "$850 Millennium Falcons and $680 Titanics: Grown-Ups Are Now a Gold Mine"

chasingthewind — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 21:26:13 +0000

Cheap imitation building blocks are stunningly high quality nowadays and many companies offer extremely interesting sets at a fraction of the cost of real LEGO blocks.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Backyard Birding (2023)"

chasingthewind — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:50:29 +0000

We are very casual birders but on our daily walk yesterday we watched a pileated woodpecker eat insects from a log for 5 minutes from about 25 feet away and it was wonderful :)

New comment by chasingthewind in "Simon Riggs has died"

chasingthewind — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:54:28 +0000

Some discussion and a really upsetting video on Reddit that I’m assuming is this incident

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1boxor4/cirrus_sr...

New comment by chasingthewind in "NASA will retire the ISS soon"

chasingthewind — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:20:56 +0000

By 2030… “Soon” seems like a bit stretch.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Don't dry your iPhone in a bag of rice, says Apple"

chasingthewind — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:23:08 +0000

When my daughter was a teenager she dropped her phone in the toilet and fished it out and put it in rice to dry. We didn’t see any rice in the trash, and so we continued to question her and it turned out she had simply returned the rice to the cabinet afterwards. :P We threw out the entire bag, of course.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Infinite Craft"

chasingthewind — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 17:17:54 +0000

My favorite combo so far was Alien + Buddha = Yoda :D

New comment by chasingthewind in "A man who collects lost pet posters"

chasingthewind — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 16:17:41 +0000

I’ve been seeing a lot of lost pet posters lately. One of the things that has struck me is that they seem pretty ineffective. Most of them have really small writing and when you’re driving past them in the suburbs all you really see is that there is some lost dog or cat and you probably pass the sign too quickly to get much information or write down the phone number. I was pretty sure that there had to be at least 10 different websites trying to help solve this problem and a quick web search confirmed my suspicion. I have a feeling the websites aren’t much help. The only thing that seems like it probably works is the chip database, but I’d be interested to see if anybody has done research on the most effective ways to find and reunite lost pets.

New comment by chasingthewind in "Steamboat Willie [video]"

chasingthewind — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:55:47 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut