Hacker News: wheels

New comment by wheels in "Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding"

wheels — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:45:14 +0000

Indeed. I've lived in Germany for 25 years, and I had to Google where it is. If 10% of the local town came to visit every year, that'd still only produce 8 visitors per day. The numbers just don't make sense.

New comment by wheels in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

wheels — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:08:33 +0000

As noted in an earlier comment of mine, I have one (actually made for burning weeds) connected to my gas grill tank, and a fancy Japanese one inside. They're honestly pretty rinky-dink. What they are good at is transferring heat just to the crust. But they only do a small patch at a time, and you have to hover for far longer than you'd think. Like, you do a little patch, leave the torch there for 30 seconds, move on. They just don't pump enough energy into the crust fast enough for them to be a general solution. I use them for touching things up, or crisping up a bit.

New comment by wheels in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

wheels — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:55:46 +0000

There's so much written about how to cook a steak well, and I've tried a lot of exotic techniques (I have gas and charcoal grills, tried cooking straight on a chimney starter, have gas torches inside and outside). Most of what really matters is that it's dry, the pan is heavy and hot, you use enough oil to get good heat transfer.

If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.

New comment by wheels in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

wheels — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:48:26 +0000

Agreed. I'm an avid cook. Sous vide circulators are cheap now, and so are meat thermometers. Doing a steak well is one of the easiest cooking tasks, to the extent that I won't bother paying top dollar in a restaurant because it's so easy to do restaurant quality at home. I could teach someone to cook a restaurant quality steak in a couple hours and a few practice runs.

New comment by wheels in "In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words"

wheels — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:47:10 +0000

As I said, it was about the generic widgets. Your memory on the time though was better than mine. I looked up the commit and it was April 9th, 2003.

New comment by wheels in "In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words"

wheels — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:24:32 +0000

I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.

New comment by wheels in "Three of our worst VC stories"

wheels — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:35:58 +0000

I had the same thing happen (though seed round). I don't think it's uncommon. Also never took another meeting with the guy.

New comment by wheels in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

wheels — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:21:36 +0000

A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.

But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.

New comment by wheels in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

wheels — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:41:03 +0000

Stone fruits (plumbs, apricots, the two most common fruits in rakija) have higher methanol levels:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2e9c/544909602112c2816a956b...

New comment by wheels in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

wheels — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:22:37 +0000

Interestingly, after looking at this more closely, what I said is true of rakija, which is what I'm most familiar with (part of my family is Serbian), but appears to not be significantly true for grain distillates. Your sources mostly don't address these topics though; the latter one is mainly about copper and lead levels.

New comment by wheels in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

wheels — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:36:13 +0000

You have no idea what you're talking about. Please Google it.

New comment by wheels in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

wheels — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:22:43 +0000

Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).

Too many kid photos, the Apple Vision Framework, #2 spot in the German App Store

wheels — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:06:58 +0000

Article URL: https://shutterslim.com/blog/2026/01/18/vision-framework-image-similarity/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669627

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: ShutterSnap – uses AI to find and clean up Photos.app similar photos

wheels — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:00:15 +0000

I've wanted for ages to clear out my Photos.app library of, let's face it, mostly gigabytes of banal kid photos. I also wanted to try out the Apple Vision framework for analyzing photos. Almost everything else that I found out there just compared metadata or histograms, and both was useless at finding the best photo in a series, or even identifying a series.

This uses the Vision framework to look at stuff like facial expressions, focus, picture quality. It also has keyboard shortcuts that make it really fast to review, so I managed to delete about 150 GB of photos by mostly pressing "return" over and over again for a couple hours. (It has an autopilot mode, but even though I'd say it gets things right from my perspective about 90% of the time, I didn't trust it completely on my kid photos. Might be great though on particular albums that weren't especially important.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542524

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wheels in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

wheels — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 17:48:05 +0000

This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.

New comment by wheels in "Ken Parker, famed luthier, has died"

wheels — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:00:19 +0000

My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.

My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.

The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.

New comment by wheels in "Ken Parker, famed luthier, has died"

wheels — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:26:05 +0000

Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.

I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.

New comment by wheels in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

wheels — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 01:36:09 +0000

They're actually actively subsidized in Germany to make them artificially cheap.

New comment by wheels in "Psilocybin decreases depression and anxiety in cancer patients (2016)"

wheels — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:43:45 +0000

Adderall is just speed, which also has a long history of recreational usage. It was a widely used recreational drug decades before it began being used for ADHD.

New comment by wheels in "First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV"

wheels — Thu, 08 May 2025 19:20:11 +0000

There are a few different orders within the catholic church with some of their own intellectual, practical and traditional differences. Most popes don't come from any of the orders. The last two popes did. That's historically odd. Francis had been the first one from his order ever, even though it's the largest one.