History of the Paper Clip (2016) | Hacker News Reader

History of the Paper Clip (2016)

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80 pointswizardforhire31 comments

No mention of those clips which require a tool to take them on and off. They are basically like a binder clip without the arms. IIRC they are a Japanese design, I've never seen them for sale in the US but I'd love to know what they are called.

Paper clam clip

Trust the Japanese to introduce a seafood reference.

That's the one. Thanks!

Recently I have been fascinated by the awesomeness of wire bending machines. Has anyone done any really funky stuff purely with wire bending? I am thinking furniture scale creations, green walls, giant sculpture, etc. Haven't quite got the timespace to build one but should be straightforward assuming small guage wire. There are some open source ones published: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=open+source+wire+bending

Took a class a few years ago which was on developing optimization pipelines for engineering design. Was fun, fairly mixed bag of students from all over the institute, both undergrad and grad. Anyways, one student from aero/astro did a project on wire-bending for assembly of truss-like structures… in space! I believe his project was on trying to improve the bending sequence to arrive at an arbitrary desired structure. Not sure if he ended up publishing his work.

Cool. Space would be a great place for it - less opposing forces, plenty of 'space', so simpler processes become more scalable. On folding, there's some interesting similar work from origami academics and noodle nerds looking at things like how you can pre-score or pre-plan to auto-achieve a selected geometry by constricting limited lines of tension across partly rigid planes, or achieve arbitrary geometries on flatpack noodles when rehydration occurs. In general, the flatpack/IKEA notion gets really hard really quickly once you take tooling, protected workspace and dextrous free labor out of the equation.

I've seen a surprising number of these (a dozen? maybe more?), given the years they were introduced... the "Ideal Paper Clip" in particular keeps popping up somewhere every few years.

It’s wild how many patents were granted for basically the same thing. Add a little wiggle on the end? New patent!

Also works for drug design! Add a methyl group here or there, and presto, a new drug that probably has the same target and yet is new intellectual property!

Aka "nice bendable piece of wire with more uses than McGyver himself could come up with".

This is what the internet is for! This!

A view into the hobbies, the lives of your fellow humans, not for profit, not with dancing stuff on the page, not with endless ads, this!

Yes. It harkens back, indeed, to what we could call the "Age of Clippy". He might have been annoying. He might have been near-useless, but gosh bang it, he was ours - like the internet of the time - and we want him back.-

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Its like Beetlejuice.

Say paperclips 3 times and someone will link to Universal paperclips.....Or clippy will appear and murder you.

Love it, play this once in a while. 6 hours of fun.

Now I understand how it can use paperclips to make technology; technically any bent metal can be considered a paperclip.

a.k.a. “Future of the Paper Clip”

After 30.0 septendecillion, feels like there are still not enough paper clips!

Goodness gracious. I am (sort of) back.-

There went my week :)

Thanks. I guess ...

PS. A Yomi calculator, if anyone needs it: - https://www.extratricky.com/yomi

Thank you very much, now I want to play Universal Paperclips so bad.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Yeah, IMHO that’s one of the funniest and best computer games ever. For those who haven’t played it, I can warmly recommend it.

I assign it as homework in my microeconomics class.

it's like 6h when you know what you are doing :-)

Cool! How do the students react? :)

Generally the whole senior class gets addicted to it; other faculty wonder about what's up with this paperclip game... maybe about a third of students take it not just through "monopoly" (the assignment) but to the very end.

So much of what we talk about in micro is in there; price and profit maximization; market power and monopoly; game theory; production possibilities increasing through technology; etc.

There must be some point before the game ends where it must surely transition to macroeconomics homework.

Deep cut

First clip's free: An historical drama new to Netflix exploring a parallel historical reality in which all socialist revolutions are pre-empted with funding and covert support by agents of a shady dynasty of paperclip industrialists.

Well I'm sold!

>Vaaler Paper Clip >Patented 1900 (Germany), 1901 (US)

>Vaaler, who was Norwegian, is commonly but incorrectly given credit for invention of the paper clip. His designs were neither first nor important. There is a large Gem paper clip statue in Norway. Norway might consider giving it to the U.S.

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