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Comment by demeyer1 | Hacker News Reader

Good list! Couple thoughts - if you are using some of these items with kids (the replacement part example) it's worth considering the types and materials of the filament you are using. Some are safer than others, depending on the application. If you are using for food storage, there are ways to take otherwise unsafe materials and make them safer for storing edible/consumable materials.

If there is something out there you need, I'd recommend searching Thingiverse, Prusa, and Thangs.com as they all have large libraries of free 3D printable objects.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO at Thangs.com and also a bit of a 3D printing nerd ;-)

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Thangs is super useful, as you can search by geometry. Sort of like a reverse image search. Works really well and is just amazing to me.

I've never actually understood the use case for that personally. What do you reverse model search?

It‘a most often used as an auto-complete - of sorts.

For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.

But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.

That does make sense.

I've used Thangs before but hadn't really understood the use case for the reverse search. Thanks for the explanation!

I appreciate you naming your company Thangs and not co-opting an existing word cough meta cough windows.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

I love this comment! Thank you for saying that!

Just wanted to chime in: Starting to become a huge fan of Thangs.com, thanks for being involved!

Appreciate the kind words - if you ever have any feedback, please just send me an email (d@physna.com) and I'll be happy to either jump on a call or take the feedback async by email. We are genuinely trying to build a different type of platform, and we highly prioritize listening to our users. We can't build everything everyone wants immediately, but it's a rare product change we make that isn't aligned to user feedback.

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