Hacker News Reader

Comment by casion | Hacker News Reader

We absolutely do have those conferences! I've been to dozens.

Lots of idealists and evangelicals in the woodworking world as well, probably more so than any other world I've been in. Makes technology look fairly tame.

View on HN

You've been to dozens of conferences about hammers?

They have hand held precision cnc machines that use computer vision to register to the work piece and compensate for human error and execute the file.

I can't wait for people to start asking stable diffusion or dall-e for ideas. "unusual danish modern canopy bed 85mm"

I'm sure they won't run out of advances to talk about. And people keep reviving old techniques that got ignored too, or ones from other cultures.

A conference about hammers is closer to a conference on arrays. But a conference on carpentry is closer to a conference on novel algorithms and memory structures.

But we're talking about neither. We're talking about a conference on C.

Seems like this particular branch is talking about the suitability of using woodworking for the analogy.

And this is why I love HN so much haha

They're about to release Hammer 2, it's gonna be a subscription.

We have so many handles. Wood, metal, plastic. A variety of heads! Sand-filled (dead-blow), brass, plastic, hardened metal, soft metal.

A subscription to deal with the wear-and-tear is probably only needed for the larger shops.

Did you mean "an AI powered cloud based subscription in Rust?"

OK, maybe Rust isn't such a good idea here.

Never saw handtools confs but surely the mechanical woodwork confs have surprisingly large and numerous amount of new tools to show.

For hand tools I mostly saw japanese woodworker competitions.

Can you share more details? This is a world I know nothing about.

Sure, here's one of the larger ones: https://handworks.co/

There are many which are less modernly advertised (usually paper/newsgroup/email) that will draw 100+ people easily.

Including planned events with participants in the dozens, Id say you could count at least 100 a year. I'd consider that since that's the population of smaller tech conferences.

> Sure, here's one of the larger ones: https://handworks.co/

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but that event is about hammers just as much as embedded programming is about C.

> I've been to dozens.

Something like 'The 393rd International Conference on Hammers'? With people presenting about the latest developments in hammers and how they're using hammers in new ways? You've been to dozens of those?

Not sure I believe you.

The OP said saws and hammers, and there are conferences on hand tools which largely focus on saws, hammers and hand planes.

If we want to be literal then I don't know of anything on _just_ saws and hammers, but in the quite adjacent space (one or two hand carpentry tools also a focus) - yes.

Well yeah we do have general conferences on programming languages. But the point is we don't have a specific conference on C, like you wouldn't have a specific conference on a simple hammer.

But tech also has conferences on specific languages. Seems like a JS, C#, C++, Java, python, etc. conference could be analogous to hand tools for carpentry.

Exactly - and there isn’t one for C. That’s the whole point of the thread.

Comparing programming languages to a specific tool is not the right analogy. A programmer can specialize in C, no carpenter specializes in hammering.

John Henry specialized in hammering... He was a steel driving man!

But that's the insight people are bringing up in this thread - nobody specialises in C.

Lots of people learn and use C as an every day tool. I'm a Java and Ruby programmer - but I have to work with C as an ABI and an extension language. Python programmers have to work with C as an extension language. There are DB developers who use C.

I don't know anyone who describes themselves as a 'C programmer' like you would 'Ruby programmer'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com