Hacker News: shirleyquirk

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Blacksmithing and Lisp"

shirleyquirk — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 19:05:06 +0000

It doesn’t make any sense that you’d need tongs to make tongs; just hold the workpiece. Maybe you cant draw out the reins quite so much on your first one. (Ok im a modern blacksmith that assumes the existence of rolled bar as a source material)

But a hammer! How do you make a hammer without a hammer?

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Number 16 (spider)"

shirleyquirk — Thu, 23 May 2024 06:44:02 +0000

I’m so glad to hear you say that, i was carrying it around while slogging through it and everyone else who saw exclaimed how good they’d heard it was. I do think the sequel is better, I can suspend my disbelief more and found parts of it honestly thrilling

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial"

shirleyquirk — Thu, 09 May 2024 20:39:16 +0000

Did your sense of taste change after your surgery? My sister is considering a similar procedure and is concerned that everything could start tasting like hot garbage.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "I wrote a string type"

shirleyquirk — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 11:21:04 +0000

The Nim compiler used ropes internally for years, until recently[0] because removing them reduced memory consumption and decreased compile times, so ymmv

[0]https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/pull/20433

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Nim 2.0"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 19:28:38 +0000

The ecosystem is smaller than some, but wrapping libraries is mostly automatable, and there is tooling to assist interop with python, c, and c++

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Nim 2.0"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 19:16:07 +0000

yes, Nim has move semantics, but takes care of you more than c++ does. for example, if you use an object that was previously moved, you dont get garbage, the compiler turns the first move into a copy (and tells you)

the relevant docs are here: https://nim-lang.org/docs/destructors.html

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)"

shirleyquirk — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 20:11:01 +0000

they should be able to. same physics applies, right? poles dont have to be as thick or as deep to resist the same torque, and if you could somehow make the pales curvy/corrugated, they could be thinner, too.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be"

shirleyquirk — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 08:38:24 +0000

It may not come as a complete surprise that the economics of metals are more complex.

Aluminium, was so expensive until the Hall/(that other guy) process was developed, that it was used for jewellery [1].

Even today it's expensive and difficult to reduce Al ore to metal, which is a supply side problem.

[1]https://www.bellandbird.com/products/aluminum-bangle

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Workers rely on medieval era tech to reconstruct the Notre Dame"

shirleyquirk — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 18:54:25 +0000

I came here to share that the importance of using contemporaneous materials, if not methods, was highlighted for me when I worked on Bath cathedral and saw how the victorian 'improvements' of using iron rather than wood to fix the stonework caused much damage a century later; iron expands when it rusts and causes cracking.

Then I see linked in that article that Notre Dame was a very early example of using iron staples! I can only think that they were used away from water, unlike Bath, where the repairs were on the window fixings.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Nontoxic powder uses sunlight to quickly disinfect contaminated drinking water"

shirleyquirk — Sat, 20 May 2023 12:01:55 +0000

Not any kind of chemist, but I'm seeing molybdenum disulfide plus (metal) coated on alumina support used as a catalyst, as well as magnetic Al/Fe composite nanoparticles used for same. Usually the metal is something more punk rock, like platinum, cobalt, or ruthenium, but copper is an obvious choice on the poisonous/cheap axis

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Nontoxic powder uses sunlight to quickly disinfect contaminated drinking water"

shirleyquirk — Sat, 20 May 2023 11:47:09 +0000

Metallic aluminium is insanely reactive and any Aluminium exposure will always be in the form of oxides or hydroxides. It's disingenuous to suggest that it is inert in this form, especially given that the point of the exercise is active, complex, catalysed photochemistry.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "I write code 100 hours/week, here's why I probably won't stop"

shirleyquirk — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 18:36:59 +0000

> If you have children or a significant other, think how much time you spend with them. Do you get burnt out from it?

New daughter. Love her immensely. So happy. Burnt out? YES.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Fun with fluorescence in olive oil (2012)"

shirleyquirk — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:35:40 +0000

Olive oil absolutely degrades in light. Even in dark bottles. Really high quality olive oil is sold in opaque ceramic containers.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Sony backs Raspberry Pi with fresh funding, access to A.I. chips"

shirleyquirk — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 09:31:17 +0000

You can get third party rp2040 modules or just the raw chip, easily. Not with the (proprietary licensed?) Wifi stuff, and definitely not official.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 23:16:33 +0000

Reading the manual it looks like it automatically pulls the electrode back away from the workpiece after the arc is struck.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:13:55 +0000

Correct. In a stick welder I care about: working all day, in the rain, up a ladder, at 130A. For ease/quality of the weld, I pay for quality welding rods, not more settings.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:26:32 +0000

No it's not, there's no spool. It's tungsten electrode, inert gas. Feed wire and electrode diameters are, like, 0.3mm

New comment by shirleyquirk in "The Beauty of Pulse Arc Welding"

shirleyquirk — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:24:54 +0000

Not fundamentally different, technically, just optimized for that low end. I think this model maxes out at 13A. And you're looking at your weld *through a microscope*.

New comment by shirleyquirk in "The four-horse race to decarbonise steel"

shirleyquirk — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 07:42:54 +0000

That process is called /decarburization/

New comment by shirleyquirk in "Ask HN: Tools to learn music theory?"

shirleyquirk — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 08:20:23 +0000

I grew up in a family of classical musicians, got a degree in music, and was briefly a professional classical musician myself. So my advice may be very out of touch with the experience of someone learning for the first time, but my experiences learning beyond European classical music theory left me feeling insulted.

The basics of music theory are presented as though they are the foundations upon which all subsequent music is derived. In fact, teaching scales and chords is like teaching that the electron orbits the nucleus - a 'simplification'. There _are_ real psychoacoustic truths, alongside equally fascinating historical forces, that underpin music theory.

Learn the language and idioms of music theory, by all means, but don't think of it as being in any way true. Its a syncretist cargo cult of hacks and rules of thumb handed down by centuries of men with dubious motives.

I recommend Adam Neely on YouTube, he illustrates music theory concepts clearly, engagingly, and with an appropriate skepticism for received wisdom.

Here's his discussion of some more political criticisms of music theory: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

I recommend Sethares' _Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale_ to anyone interested in the underpinnings of why some notes sound good together and others don't.

[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287019948_Tuning_ti...