Show HN: Browser-based knitting (pattern) software

Wow, this is exactly how I feel! I'm a software engineer and I also started knitting last year. I'm really enjoying it for all the reasons you listed.

A while ago I started to build something similar, but I didn't get much farther than choosing a name for the project (https://github.com/mk12/loopy). I want to design a language that can specify patterns precisely and unambiguously, and then visualize them in a physically accurate way. For basic 2D patterns I was thinking I could render each stitch based on it and its neighbors (3x3 grid of K/P). But that wouldn't be that useful. What would really be neat is to use a physics engine to simulate the yarn in 3D. For example the simulations would show stockinette curling and ribbing stretching without that being hardcoded anywhere. But I think it's too hard and I have no idea where to start with that.

It's not a matter of communicating the knitting information, it's what other information[0,1] may be communicated at the same time.

Supposing we suspect this pattern to be a coded message[2], let's take our given (data) and strip out the stop words:

24 32 38 42 50 64

if these were straight ASCII values, we'd decode to '\x18 &*2@', which maybe means something under a whitening transform, but we have a big clue that we ought to look elsewhere: in real, uniguous, knitting patterns, the number of stitches has to continually increase[3,4].

That suggests we should look at the differences[5,6] between the values:

8 6 4 8 4

and of course we'd want to take the entire "knitting pattern" into account when guessing[7,8] how to interpret this, but just for didactic purposes let's say in one potential decode we threshold at n=5, assigning 0 to high and 1 to low, and interpret the result in ITA-2[9](why?): we get 00101, decoding to 'S'.

That may seem like a lot of work to get one character, but we're no longer in an age when "01 if by land, 10 if by sea"[A] will go unnoticed, and the technology is dual-use: the same tricks used by a spy to push messages through below the noise floor can also be used by a space probe, to communicate during one's Voyage.

Lagniappe: even if you're not sending coded messages to someone halfway around the world with knitting (or fibre arts[B] in general, or...), they're an excellent way, during meetings that could've been emails, to get something productive done.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel

[1] compare essence and accident in philosophy; how far back can we push the notion that essence communicates zero bits and accidents communicate some positive (rational) number of bits? Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succinct_data_structure

[2] eg, if you are sending text which looks like english gobbeldygook with idiosyncratic capitalisation conventions, and all sentences are 13 words long, it would look as suspiciously framed as if a message consisted entirely of 5 word sentences.

[3] Exercises: why do animal calls (whalesong, birdsong, etc.) often ramp in frequency? (1 pt) what was the chinese notion of the language of the birds, and how does it relate to other spoken languages? (essay, 5 pts)

[4] that's to first order; we could get fancier with second and higher order analyses to see if our putative knitting pattern has any hope of creating a closed physical object, etc.

[5] God made Nat, all else is the work of People?

[6] from here we can go into calculus, but that's a different topic...

[7] early digital computers were built for ballistics, cryptanalysis, and explosive simulation. Despite all the bossware, we should be proud that we've managed to find other uses for them in the eight decades since.

[8] it really helps when guessing to have a known plaintext; Körner has some interesting stories about how the teutonic tendency to Ordnung muß sein helped the allies during WWII. Eg. most military comms won't decrypt to "new phone who dis?".

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code Exercise: which coded messages decode to the same glyphs in ITA2 and MTK-2? (example: 1 pt, full set: 2 pts, do either of these relate to keyboard layout? 0 pts)

[A] do crochet and knitting also differ by number of needles?

[B] compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

Nice idea. I love how you manage to show the shapes of the design. But how do you know the size of the finished object? I assume you ask knitters to do the calculations themselves. That can be difficult (for me it was until I put words on it).

Being a long time knitter and also a designer (not a professional designer, but just someone that likes to design her own patterns and doesn't like to follow other patterns), I did several knitting tools using LibreOffice Calc (may be you can call that "old school"), you can download them here: https://www.aiguilles-magiques.com/-Outilsde-creation-?lang=... Sorry but they are mainly in French. Well, the sweater calculator is in English too.

For these tools, I just ask the knitter to enter the gauge and, yes, all the necessary measurements. The sheets make all the maths. Obviously there are way perfectible, and they don't show the shape of the finished as you did for your tool (notice the picture on y tools were made with Inkscape).

All this tools are under licence CC by-sa.

A character in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle encrypts messages in (IIRC) embroidery.