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Kite Plans

kiteplans.org

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Re: Kite Plans

#11

Post by jfoutz »

Toadsoup wrote: post #5

Edit: I can accept that kite plans can be on topic for HN. I also don't mean to stifle anyone's curiosity about kites or kite building. I suppose I expected something more akin to "Kite Plans, Experiments, Observations, and Results that SoAndSo ran" or "Specific Kite Plan and Notes" to be linked on HN. If you're new to kites, good news, it's a lot more fun than it should be. --- Original Post: I am confused, why this…

It's neat!

> Am I missing something?

Yeah. you've been around here for a while, so i suspect you know the answer. But hey, maybe this will help. The first part is the boring answer

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1]

So anyhow, given you'd actively used the kite site it the past, you should be able to see how it satisfied your own intellectual curiosity in the past. Clearly, it's not relevant to you today, but perhaps you can see how it's relevant to others. Also, your experience can help drive some conversation with new kite makers.

the second part is some gentle advice - please don't take this as a criticism, just an observation. Try to take joy in other people being one of the 10,000 [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Kite Plans

#12

Post by xutopia »

Toadsoup wrote: post #5

Edit: I can accept that kite plans can be on topic for HN. I also don't mean to stifle anyone's curiosity about kites or kite building. I suppose I expected something more akin to "Kite Plans, Experiments, Observations, and Results that SoAndSo ran" or "Specific Kite Plan and Notes" to be linked on HN. If you're new to kites, good news, it's a lot more fun than it should be. --- Original Post: I am confused, why this…

I had never heard of the site. It's something of interest to me.

Re: Kite Plans

#14

Post by thefifthsetpin »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #4
monk_e_boy wrote: post #2

Henry Hulk, wow, haven't heard that name in years. Nice designs. No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.

Don’t forget the middle. There are many excellent spots for flying kites away from the coast. One of my favorite kite shops is out of Boulder, Colorado: Into The Wind[0] I’ve only bought from them once or twice, but I used to spend hours paging through their paper catalog as a kid. I also visited their shop in Boulder as a teen — that was really fun. [0] https://intothewind.com

My brother got his daughter a kite from there. The wind didn't cooperate on the first day we went to fly it, but her dad and I still tried getting it into the air by running with the string to see if we could get it high enough that it'd catch what wind there was higher up. We failed, but my niece saw us running with the kite, so she wanted to run with the kite. She had a great time running around the park with the kite bouncing on the ground behind her.

The kite survived that & flew fine on later occasions. Now that she's seen it fly, though, she has lost interest in kites that won't fly.

Re: Kite Plans

#15

Post by minikites »

Before drones were widely available, I attached an inexpensive camera to a kite to take some aerial photographs. I'm a little surprised that wasn't more common, given how popular drones are now.

Re: Kite Plans

#16

Post by omegaham »

Toadsoup wrote: post #5

Edit: I can accept that kite plans can be on topic for HN. I also don't mean to stifle anyone's curiosity about kites or kite building. I suppose I expected something more akin to "Kite Plans, Experiments, Observations, and Results that SoAndSo ran" or "Specific Kite Plan and Notes" to be linked on HN. If you're new to kites, good news, it's a lot more fun than it should be. --- Original Post: I am confused, why this…

Stuff that is old-hat to members of a subculture tends to be really interesting to people who didn't even know that the subculture existed.

The last time I flew a kite was in elementary school. I guess I knew in the abstract that people actually put thought and engineering into kites, but I never actually thought about it. Posts like this remind me of the enormous breadth of human hobbies, and they're really interesting.

As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1], and today, I'm one of the lucky 10,000.

[1]https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Kite Plans

#17

Post by conroydave »

i always feel slightly bad for websites like this that HN brings hugs to death, even though ad supported, its normal users are unable to access their content

Re: Kite Plans

#18

Post by mxfh »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #2

Henry Hulk, wow, haven't heard that name in years. Nice designs. No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.

Maybe in market value with all the gear that comes with it, but unlikely by numbers. Regular kite festivals still draw massive numbers anywhere in europe and casual or kid kites are still at thing. Regular kites where really huge in the late 80s and 90s for some weird reason, with any bigger town in Germany having at least one dedicated kite shop.

Berlin last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgXxSKhpbc

Fanø: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHM_DCpt0tM

All this without even mentioning places like Pakistan or India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zSQruHvsvA

Re: Kite Plans

#19

Post by kijin »

minikites wrote: post #15

Before drones were widely available, I attached an inexpensive camera to a kite to take some aerial photographs. I'm a little surprised that wasn't more common, given how popular drones are now.

Perhaps the limiting factor was the lack of inexpensive cameras, not the lack of drones. There was only a short window of time between when remotely controllable lightweight cameras became cheap enough for people to not worry about crashing them into rocks, on the one hand, and when drones became widely available, on the other.

Re: Kite Plans

#20

Post by losvedir »

fouc wrote: post #10

When I think of kites, I always think of my dream of a kiteboat for long term cruising around the world.. purely kite powered, with maybe a small stabilizer sail if necessary.

That's interesting. What would be the advantages of that over an ordinary sailboat?
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