News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

keithjl

Re:Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @10:31AM (#46961074)
I caught on near the tail end of the fixie craze, and my first build was a classic ten speed conversion with diagonal dropouts.

Imagine my heartbreak when I didn't tighten the lockring enough and stripped the threads the first time I tried to skid stop :')

Re:Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info on Friday February 06, 2026 @12:32PM (#46915696)
This website is such a treasure. When I was first getting into bicycles in 2013, it was a mix of Sheldon Brown and the local volunteer-run co-op that taught me everything I need to know. He is himself a generous spirit, advocating for DIY tooling, repair, and reuse.

I would highly recommend anyone into bicycles to try building their own wheel using his article.

Re:Concrete Shipbuilding – Argentina on Saturday November 22, 2025 @02:12PM (#46017383)
Still alive and well in Civil Engineering departments across North America. Their equivalent to Formula Student racing teams in Mechanical Engineering.

https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences...

Re:Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language on Sunday April 16, 2023 @01:27PM (#35592179)
The Korean graphic designer Ahn Sang Soo played around with linearizing the alphabet: https://www.we-find-wildness.com/2011/05/ahn-sang-soo/img_00...

What's nice is that it's immediately legible if you already know how to read, but you also realize how inherently slower it is. One of the nicest parts of Korean (and other east asian languages) is that each block is always a single syllable.

I'd make a case for any node-based scripting language in 3D modeling software. Blender or Grasshopper for Rhino comes to mind. Benefit of Grasshopper is that there are convenient Python or C# nodes for you to write scripts that can't be expressed through nodes (IE loops); downside is that it is paid software (although not subscription based!!).

For architecture/design students, Grasshopper is usual their first introduction to programming and algorithmic thinking, and many students become fantastic programmers by extension.