Hacker News Reader

Comment by drsim | Hacker News Reader

"If all you have is a hammer..."

You're talking to software engineers here. Equating 'humanity' to us on Hacker News forgets about all of the mechanical engineers who would do a great job of racking those pins.

View on HN

Both observations have equal validity for middle-/upper-class denizens whom can spend money on increasing entropy much faster. Go to anywhere remote and/or poor, and the better-to-do outsiders will be gobsmacked by inventiveness that, to the local, will seem mundane and vital. For example, one of my great-grandfathers made a continously self-cleaning oil-filter for farm equipment... the sort of thing corporations clearly wouldn’t offer for monetized consumables reasons.

Was it two cans at different elevations, with a length of sisal rope suspended in an arc between them? Because lots of people "invented" that...

I’m sure I’m being daft, but how would that arrangement function as a self cleaning filter?

The sisal rope will wick based on the elevation change and deposit clean oil to the lower receptacle.

Ah, so the sisal rope is just a simple filter, and not a "continuously self-cleaning" filter? I presume it's eventually fouled and must be disgarded? So this must not have been to which the ancestor was originally referring.

king_nothing did not say his great-grandfather "invented" anything. He said his great-grandfather made it.

My apologies. I suppose I must have read the word "inventiveness" and just sort of mentally smeared it over the next few sentences.

Just put a chip in it #internetofshit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com