[HN Gopher] Making niche solutions is the point
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Making niche solutions is the point
Author : evakhoury
Score : 79 points
Date : 2026-01-26 21:56 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ntietz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ntietz.com)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I should get a 3D printer
| ge96 wrote:
| Even with my old/cheap Ender 3 Pro, I printed something
| overnight took 13.5 hrs, there it was
| ge96 wrote:
| A side/tangent note, I wonder if it says something about
| myself/character, I choose the faster print than the surface
| finish, so I'll have this rough surface finish due to the
| supports. But it goes from 20hrs+ to 13.5hrs so it's like
| I'll take the faster option. What I printed was a shell with
| internal screw mounts, it was a big piece about 5.5x4x2.5"
| with 20% infill, regular temp/speed and the structure support
| for overhang.
| gurjeet wrote:
| You might already have one, and just don't know it :-) If you
| don't, it's much cheaper to get one that the author considers a
| 3D printer.
|
| From TFA:
|
| > 1. I like to think that all printers are 3D, unless it's a
| printer in Flatland.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It's actually a 4D printer unless it exists for just an
| instant, or an 11D printer if string theory is correct, or an
| 8==D printer if that happens to be the value in the variable
| D.
| Bayart wrote:
| I've been telling myself that for as long as 3D-printing has
| been consumer tech (about 20 years ?) and now it's shifted to
| "I'll borrow one my friends' printers if needs be".
|
| In truth every time an issue fit for 3D printing has come up in
| my life, I solved it easily with wood and cardboard. I'm
| starting to recognize I might be a craftsman at heart.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Borrowing from a friend/library/work/low-cost maker space is
| the way to go unless you plan on printing with the thing for
| numerous hours per day on average. Having said that, once you
| start 3d printing, it becomes a tool you reach to more and
| more
| CyLith wrote:
| I have had a similar experience; my preferred material to
| work with is wood. However, as I got more into tinkering with
| electronics and vintage computing, I'm finding more instances
| where wood does not achieve sufficient strength-to-weight
| ratio, especially for small parts where wood grain and
| anisotropy becomes a significant factor to consider.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I thought the same thing while reading this. But I worry that
| I'd get one and it'd just sit on a shelf somewhere collecting
| dust.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| A whole variety of items and devices are good for this
| purpose, but 3D printing are an especially costly way to keep
| dust off your table.
| pbronez wrote:
| Skip the too-cheap entry level and get something reliable.
| They're great to have handy, but easy to fall into maintenance
| and calibration hell. Modern 3D printers have enough sensors
| and smarts to self-calibrate reliably. That's essential to make
| it a tool and not a tinker toy.
| CountHackulus wrote:
| Check your local library, a lot of them have one and can help
| you get started. It's usually pennies to print too. I printed
| an adapter for my coffee grinder at my local library a few
| weeks ago and it took 2 days and cost me $4. Fantastic stuff.
| ramboldio wrote:
| I think that is a fantastic insight that 'Making niche solutions
| is the point' with 3D printing.
|
| Unfortunately, it is still very hard to _design_ niche solutions.
| The usability of CAD tools did not really improve at all in the
| last 20 years..
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| CAD is complicated, yes. But the biggest pain point is that
| engineering requires a lot of adjacent knowledge about
| material, tolerance, mechanical design, tooling, and so on.
| Making things requires patience.
|
| CAD is the easy part.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That really depends on what you're making. I've made a lot of
| things that are basically, I want an object with this shape,
| model that shape, print that shape, success. For things where
| tolerances and material properties matter, a little trial and
| error takes care of a lot of it.
|
| There's an engineering saying that anybody can design a
| bridge that won't fall down, but it takes an engineer to
| design a bridge that just _barely_ won 't fall down. Why do
| you want a bridge that just barely won't fall down? Because
| it's a lot cheaper to build. That's not much of a concern
| when you're printing little doodads at home. I waste some
| material by designing overly-strong structures, or getting it
| wrong and iterating. That's fine, the stuff is cheap.
| barumrho wrote:
| AI coding tools are providing non-programmers giving similar
| ability. Not production quality, but still useful to them
| everyday and they can tweak as they go.
| uoaei wrote:
| Once upon a time, the Unix philosophy was lauded in these
| venerated halls. "Do one thing and do it well."
|
| Now the hype has seemed to shift to "do absolutely anything just
| barely well enough to get people to pay for it".
| pixl97 wrote:
| Turns out attempting to pay the bills on unix philosophy didn't
| go very far.
| esseph wrote:
| Man, that's a weird saying. Very weird.
|
| "Unix Philosophy", which many of us wouldn't be here if it
| didn't exist, wasn't designed with any sort of money in mind.
|
| That's like complaining that the company that picks up your
| residential trash is a shit company for not reducing your
| travel time to work.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Wat? Android, Linux, BSD (incl iOS and Mac) absolutely
| dominate the market in terms of mind share and deployment. I
| can't think of another philosophy that is so directly,
| causally responsible for billions of dollars of realized
| value.
|
| It sounds like you're parroting the corporate line of the
| early 80s. "Making money directly selling software artifacts
| is the only way to win." Which, as we know in retrospect, was
| a completely failed strategy, steamrolled by companies
| which... wait for it... adopted more flexible technology
| based on the Unix philosophy.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I'm going to lump together proprietary and for-profit software
| a little because I rarely see exceptions:
|
| Proprietary / for-profit software is made that way, yes.
| There's no other way you can do it, given the incentive
| landscape. You take the huge base of FOSS code and spend as
| little effort as possible to build a thin little layer of moss
| on top. You respect the customers as little as possible to keep
| them around. You fix bugs as little as possible. You use other
| proprietary services that spy on your customers, like Sentry
| and Firebase, because privacy costs money.
|
| Free / libre software has to compete on its merits. If a
| project isn't useful it doesn't grow. But not growing is okay.
| Some projects accrete over years, like a pile of stones forming
| a cairn. They don't need to squeeze money out of people to live
| because they aren't alive. They don't have to "eat".
|
| I'm mixed on the Unix philosophy. It makes a lot of sense when
| you're building CLI tools that a hacker is going to plug
| together, because then your program is really a function in a
| programming environment that spans one or more entire
| computers. Tools like ripgrep, jq, curl, they're all great, I
| love them. A good function does one thing and does it well.
|
| But just as often, I'm okay with huge software that does a lot.
| Web browser engines are evolving into universal GUI / IO
| frameworks and I'm trying to make peace with that. Systemd does
| a ton of stuff, but hell, so does the Linux kernel. I don't see
| an inherent problem with having an init system that acts like a
| monolith kernel for userspace. Microkernels are nifty but in
| the end we all ship our org charts. Maybe there's no need for
| microkernels if the real divide is between kernel programming
| and userspace programming. For the same reason, I haven't found
| any personal use for wasm, because wasm makes the most sense
| when you're connecting two pieces of code written by different
| teams at different times, like a GIMP plugin. I don't need wasm
| to plug my own code into my own code.
|
| And for GUIs it's just been a fucking nightmare. 57 years since
| the Mother Of All Demos and it's still 10x easier to write `fn
| main()` and build a CLI program that runs on _every_ OS, rather
| than a GUI program that maybe runs on one OS, like it runs on
| Ubuntu 24.04 but not Ubuntu 22.04. What a fucking mess. GUIs
| don't compose, so every GUI project I've tried feels like I'm
| inventing the universe from scratch. It's fun but it's a stupid
| fucking waste of time.
|
| Honestly browser engine frameworks like Electron and Tauri
| _are_ the Unix philosophy compromise. Making a GUI framework
| requires tens of thousands of lines of high-effort code made by
| experts. If a browser's one thing is "Be a GUI framework" then
| it allows your GUI app to just serve HTML and now it's a CLI
| app that runs anywhere without fucking with GTK 3 vs GTK 4
| bullshit.
|
| Sorry for the long rant. This stuff is all percolating in my
| head. I started with Visual Basic 6 and I still haven't seen
| GUIs improve since then. Phones have been a fucking step
| backwards, too. Everyone uses a phone but just like a mouse-
| and-keyboard player dominating gamepad players in a shooter
| game, I get a lot more done at a real desktop with a real
| pointing device.
| arjie wrote:
| My wife and I bought a Bambu P1S and I think the machine has had
| a duty cycle of 30% (excluding when we weren't in town). It's
| great fun. The majority of the models are ones we get from the
| Internet, it's true.
|
| But my wife used some base open source components to design a
| block that goes into the bits of a playpen that we used to have
| and transform it into something that docks with the wall instead
| of only with itself[0].
|
| And I have designed with Claude a few small things like card
| holders for the board game power grid[1].
|
| I wish there were better AI tools for interacting with modeling
| software. As it stands I use OpenSCAD with Claude and that seems
| as good as it can be. There are Solidworks AI startups but
| they're like for professionals.
|
| The Bambu P1S I have is quite low friction to set up. And I have
| an AMS2 Pro on top of it that feeds different kinds of filament
| (material and color) into the printer. I have just the one but
| now I wish I had more AMS hooked up.
|
| 0:
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-15/Modeling_Wit...
|
| 1:
| https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
| jmathai wrote:
| 3d printers are great.
|
| I attempted to productize a super niche idea I had for myself
| that I have ended up using multiple times. It's a simpler method
| of running wires without having to cut/patch drywall and drill
| through studs.
|
| It started with trying to create a router-like device equipped
| with a motor (which was version 1 [1]).
|
| But then iterated it to be a plate which can be attached to
| existing routers. That resulted in a drastically improved user
| experience which went from doing it all inside and making a mess
| to doing it in your garage with more precision. I've used the
| final design on 4+ projects at home and it has saved me so much
| time [2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i5p330nqo0cfrfx3gxf05/Wiresha...
|
| [2] https://trywireshark.com (includes diagrams and videos of
| what I 3d printed)
| zeeveener wrote:
| FYI: Your "Notify me when available" is landing on a 404 Not
| Found for me after I submit my email address
| jackfranklyn wrote:
| Same pattern in software. The best tools for specific professions
| usually come from someone who worked in that profession first,
| got frustrated with generic solutions, then built exactly what
| they needed.
|
| General-purpose tools try to serve everyone and end up with
| features that kinda work for most cases. Someone deep in a niche
| builds for the edge cases they actually encounter, and it turns
| out those edge cases are universal within that niche - they just
| weren't visible to outsiders.
| lovlar wrote:
| Making a good mechanical design is difficult, it usually involves
| making several iterations which in the physical world takes a lot
| more effort than iterating on software.
|
| One thing that always bothered me is that most people with 3d
| printers seem to design things on their own from scratch and
| rarely take on others designs, improve them and share them. There
| is little collaboration going on for 3d prints in comparison to
| software. Except from maybe ~10 widely successful projects that
| now have healthy communities improving them.
|
| Why is GitHub and similar sites not used more among makers?
| latchkey wrote:
| In your first sentence, you answered your question.
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