Hacker News: msds

New comment by msds in "A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron"

msds — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:37:25 +0000

Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.

New comment by msds in "Building the most accurate DIY CNC lathe in the world [video]"

msds — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 01:19:01 +0000

No, good thermal management with a chiller, active thermal compensation, and glass scales make um precision on that scale reasonable. 10-100x better? Sure, you’re getting into machines where the room to keep them happy is significantly more expensive that the machine…

New comment by msds in "Let Kids Be Loud"

msds — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 01:27:19 +0000

Ok but my neighborhood children have started using electric leaf blowers as jet propulsion on skateboards. I have insisted they use hearing protection, but the rest of us are shit out of luck…

New comment by msds in "Parametric Modeling with Grasshopper"

msds — Sat, 10 May 2025 04:38:30 +0000

It’s fun seeing an uptick of rhino/grasshopper content here lately - two articles in a week?! The McNeel extended universe is a fun place to play around in, and I’ve met lots of great people since I started working on Rhino.

New comment by msds in "Stainless steel strengthened: Twisting creates submicron 'anti-crash wall'"

msds — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 01:19:47 +0000

You've got the heat cycles for annealing, hardening, and tempering confused. The slow cooling is for annealing, hardening requires a fast cool from rather hot and is a very different process from tempering, which is a short soak at a comparatively low but tightly controlled temperature.

New comment by msds in "A AI etymology deconstructor – can guess fake words"

msds — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 07:24:06 +0000

It doesn't really detect stringing together latinate nonsense, so all of my coinages got perfectly coherent definitions. On the flip side, I guess if you're erudite and willing to butcher other languages for sport, nothing has ever stopped you from making up perfectly quasiaryiumaryesque words.

New comment by msds in "Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home"

msds — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 23:14:25 +0000

Very important habitat restoration for electric eels, actually.

New comment by msds in "Ask HN: Is anyone making money selling traditional downloadable software?"

msds — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 02:54:28 +0000

I'm not running the show, but I am working at a place that does this. One time fee for a perpetual license for the current major version, free support, and historically ~6 years of updates per version.

Users tend to be quite happy about it, and we're profitable enough to pay comfortable salaries and have...a lot...of runway.

Of course, this model is possible because there was never any outside investment.

New comment by msds in "Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers"

msds — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:57:03 +0000

Turns out you can take out a driver side mirror by putting most of your weight on it and bouncing a few times. But that's reserved for drivers that have made contact with me...

New comment by msds in "Air Canada to remove free carry-on from basic economy"

msds — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 02:12:31 +0000

If we're "unbundling"/giving into "free market" nonsense in a highly regulated area, I just want to be able to pay reasonably proportional fee for musical instruments and get a guarantee that they'll be carry-ons, and not destroyed in the cargo hold. My only other alternatives are buying first class tickets or flirting with the gate agent (...works remarkably well...).

New comment by msds in "Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days"

msds — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 03:17:25 +0000

This is a real worry? Don't you just not go to meetings but otherwise solemnly swear that you're working on the plane?

New comment by msds in "Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil"

msds — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:30:39 +0000

Machine shops actually used whale oil until quite late. Much better than equivalent petroleum products until the '50s or later.

New comment by msds in "Linear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT) Basics"

msds — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 15:38:33 +0000

I was using it to build a dilatometer - an instrument for measuring thermal expansion curves of materials. Theoretically simple, in that you take a sample of something and measure how long it is while sweeping the temperature around. In practice, you need very stable ~um measurements and lots of care to make sure all other length changes around the sample cancel.

In the real-world, they're often used for precision gauging for in-process metrology.

New comment by msds in "Linear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT) Basics"

msds — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:51:51 +0000

LVDTs are fun! I bought one for a project a few years ago (since abandoned), and have been slowly designing my own readout electronics for them. Three revisions later, and the performance is very good - to the point that I've bought more increasingly precise measurement gear to benchmark how it's performing. Currently, I'm testing it against some good glass scale linear encoders, and a capacitive gauge with a single-digit nm noise floor.

So many don't buy an LVDT, I guess.

New comment by msds in "Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults"

msds — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:15:01 +0000

As a consequence of the aging members, a lot of churches (particularly the less virulent mainstream protestant flavor) around here are merging congregations and getting demolished, to be replaced with more apartment buildings. Sometimes the parishioners will fight the good fight and get concessions made for affordable housing or other social goods.

New comment by msds in "Norway discovers Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals"

msds — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:47:13 +0000

That was a line directly from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

New comment by msds in "Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)"

msds — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 21:21:56 +0000

That's exactly a disposable camera flash circuit.

New comment by msds in "BlenderBIM – add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender"

msds — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 18:37:02 +0000

Don't worry, if you don't know what BIM is, you don't need BIM and you should be thankful about your previous life choices. Weirdly, no one in BIM really seems to agree on what BIM actually is either.

New comment by msds in "Cicadas' unique urination unlocks new understanding of fluid dynamics"

msds — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 18:12:37 +0000

"Droplet superpropulsion in an energetically constrained insect"(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36376-5 ) is a great paper from the same authors - I came across it last year when I was deep in a project involving droplet manipulation on superhydrophobic surfaces. Nature is wild!

New comment by msds in "CNC lasers for cutting and engraving"

msds — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 05:24:57 +0000

I second this; this is super bad advice. CO2 systems are comparatively safe from an eye damage perspective - unless you take a direct hit, (...don't, seriously, that's what interlocks are for...), 10.6um is strongly absorbed by your eye and you'll get superficial thermal damage, maybe cataracts or a corneal burn, but it won't get focused on to your retina so serious vision loss is unlikely. Polycarbonate safety glasses have a crazy high optical density at 10.6 and are suitable protective eyewear.

The situation for visible diode lasers is much worse. Sure, the power tends to be lower, but they're still powerful enough that looking at a diffuse reflection will result in dangerous power densities on your retina. Unfortunately, the brain is really good at hiding this sort of damage, so it's possible to not notice until it's too late.

1.064um fiber lasers are the worst of both worlds. Very high powers, invisible so you have no idea how much stray light is getting out or if you're staring at a reflection, and expensive + hard to verify safety glasses.

I like doing things with high power lasers (next up for the collection is probably a 355nm ns system?), but am glad that I had to take a lot of laser safety training before I bough my first big laser source.