Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | mildchalupa's comments login

Life's dangerous.


Roughly 30k cycles is typical. You can certainly design a spring to have infinite life. But it requires reducing average deflection, aka more spring with less deflection per turn.


The article claims a 10k cycle limit for common-grade torsion springs (but again, I'm skeptical). You can design a spring to have infinite life. Still, you must constrain yourself to specific materials (steel and titanium being the most common) because most materials don't have an infinite life on an S-N curve.


People think garage door springs are like diffusing a bomb. It's not that bad if you are competent and have the correct equipment.


People who nickel and dime everything usually do not have the correct equipment and most of them are hardly competent as well.


This is a wild proposition. Were taxis running directly after 9/11?

This is sort of a problem if a society depends on them as a piece of critical infrastructure. If a city owns a bus route and needs to evacuate a population, they can just do it by edict.

No one is considering this edge case and how it should be handled at Uber. A company or community that has pride in what they offer would probably provide rides for free during such an anomaly. This is a drawback on the scalability of technology as we currently implement it.


Large CNC machines that are not exportable under ITAR use GPS and other sensors to detect movement.


Are those not afraid of GPS spoofing either? Spoof GPS near a big CNC machine shop that a big competitor relies on, disable their machines...


I didn't know that, that's wild. Does the government actually track their location in real time?


I believe the machines generally disable themselves and need a factory technician to re-enable them should they fault out.


I've heard it justified as a safety measure - those machines are carefully balanced on installation, and if the sensors detect it being moved, the machine locks itself out to avoid damaging itself, workpieces and/or operators.


Sustainable forrest management requires frequent controlled burns to manage underbrush. Around Michigan this can be a yearly occurrence.


I have a new one. PM had determined that their work load is diminished if a project is killed. So they deliberately recommend that projects be terminated and or do things that would cause the likelihood of termination to increase.


Sounds like that could good PM taking into account their team's capacity and prioritizing.


Unless mildchalupa was talking about the PM's personal workload!


Even then, understanding your own limits is a good thing.


I thought it was determined to be a glove finger knitting apparatus.


Roman dodecahedra predate knitting by almost a thousand years. The earliest known knitting was from the 11th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting#History_and_culture), while the earliest dodecahedra are from the 2nd century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron#History)


Meanwhile, elsewhere on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting

>Earlier pieces having a knitted or crocheted appearance have been shown to be made with other techniques, such as Nålebinding, a technique of making fabric by creating multiple loops with a single needle and thread, much like sewing.[4] Some artefacts have a structure so similar to knitting, for example, 3rd-5th century CE Romano-Egyptian toe-socks, that it is thought the "Coptic stitch" of nalbinding is the forerunner to knitting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nålebinding

The lack of signs of wear is a bigger problem for this hypothesis IMHO


To doubt that knitting existed in Roman Times is preposterous. Thats like saying they could not weave baskets. Instead your incredible hypothesis lends credence to recent studies by internet sleuths that indicate history as we are taught may have an extra 1000 years added simply because dates have been mistranslated or misconstrued to read a 1 (one) where there is indeed an I or J symbol, denoting years since the Christ; IOW that that 1999 is actually J999.


Knitting is from the Neolithic. The Chinese were already knitting silk about 3000 years ago.


Hmm, I'm not convinced.

The only geometry the knitting demonstrations justify is "pins around hole". I don't see an argument for the dodecahedron shape or the cast metal. A vastly cheaper wooden jig with nails would service just as well and offer much better ergonomic possibilities, like a handle. The knitting with the finger growing inside the dodec looks unhelpful and implausible.


> The knitting with the finger growing inside the dodec looks unhelpful and implausible

There are also examples without the big holes in, which would make knitting pretty much impossible.


> There are also examples without the big holes in, which would make knitting pretty much impossible.

Gloves for children?



Romans had mass production facilities for some things. Possibly gloves. So a durable permanent jig is not an unreasonable suggestion.


I think the objection is not about unnecessary durability, but unnecessary complexity; you don’t need so many faces to make a glove.


Unnecessary complexity & expense, and if it were part of a mass production process you'd expect to find them clustered in production centers or something. These are found scattered randomly and individually in graves and border forts.


If the thing was for making gloves, the faces would be for different finger sizes.


The holes in them are of different sizes.


The glove is inverted, the fingers are inserted into the holes separately and sewn into the glove using the pins.

When you’re done, you take it off and unfold it.


Related, video showing its use in knitting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76AvV601yJ0


Even if that's the case, some mystery remains, discussed at this point: https://youtu.be/76AvV601yJ0?si=JQi4K8w9ZvphZ1wV&t=460

Presumably you'd find similar jigs for finishing the glove nearby.


You also wouldn't need such a complex object for that. These things were extremely difficult to cast in the years that they were made. It would be far easier to carve a similar device out of wood as a glove-making jig.


I love this idea! Looks like it works brilliantly too


I love seeing all of the nerdy (and wrong) explanations of it, when in reality somebody’s grandma took a look at it and said “oh that’s for sewing gloves”.

No mention in the article for this purpose, but sometimes it takes a bit for grandma info to reach the researchers.


That's a heartwarming story. Unfortunately it's bullshit.


I don't think knitting existed during the time of Roman Britain.


It was suggested and some old bird even showed it was possible to do it, but it was not a complete explanation, especially given some variations in designs that made glove making hard. Another plausible option is it served as a calendar of sorts. Equally mundane explaining the broad distribution.


thought so too


1000 pieces is a soft tool Millions are expected out of hard tooling.


Probably a bimodal distribution here in terms of homeschool education.

Though the entire set is probably more useful and practical.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: