I am always pleasantly amused that many HN folks share with me a love for weaving, knitting and knotting; not to mention ropes.
Dang had once posted a long list of HN discussions on these topics.
I think there is something about them that squirts a little bit of dopamine in our pattern seeking, puzzle solving brains.
For me, one of draws was how does the symmetry of the woven pattern get weft into the cloth. Multi-shaft looms does it differently from, say, a Kashmiri rug.
When I had joined HN decades ago I had no idea that there would be this shared interest. Frankly, there were no reason for this to be the case.
Always good to learn more about the timeline of techniques lost in the mists of time. Some of the finest works of art were 'coded' in fibers, much more durable that most other media!
I think it's not just puzzle solving - for me it's the idea of creating something from raw materials where that something is itself a standard building block. it appeals to the same part of me that programming does.
I have heard it said that the word "technology" shares its roots with the word "textiles". Maybe it's not so surprising that there would be a shared interest as well!
Jaquard loom was one of the first machines that could operate based on a set of symbols / patterns encoded on a punched card. Computers ran on punched cards until the 1970s. Voting machines used punched cards until pretty recently (infamous "hanging chad" from 2000 US election).
Fun facts, TK Solver or TK!Solver original developer is Milos Konopaseka a textile engineer from from Czechoslovakia.
TK Solver is a software cousin of the infamous VisiCalc, developed by the same company Software Arts.
VisiCalc has been discontinued but TK Solver is still being sold today by Universal Technical Systems (UTS) [1].
Milos also developed the Question Answering System (QAS) running on a PDP-10. It operates on equations relating input yarn, cloth area, fiber strengths, etc. For a desired cloth strength, you could solve for fiber strength, or given fiber strength, you could solve for the cloth strength. The same operations you can still perform in TK Solver.
[1] Comprehensive Mathematical Software Tool for Engineers:
Basso Rial RE, García Atiénzar G, et al. Evidence of a warp-weighted loom in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo (south-east Spain). Antiquity. Published online 2026:1-18. doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10312
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadDang had once posted a long list of HN discussions on these topics.
I think there is something about them that squirts a little bit of dopamine in our pattern seeking, puzzle solving brains.
For me, one of draws was how does the symmetry of the woven pattern get weft into the cloth. Multi-shaft looms does it differently from, say, a Kashmiri rug.
When I had joined HN decades ago I had no idea that there would be this shared interest. Frankly, there were no reason for this to be the case.
Then one day this happened
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44462404
TK Solver is a software cousin of the infamous VisiCalc, developed by the same company Software Arts.
VisiCalc has been discontinued but TK Solver is still being sold today by Universal Technical Systems (UTS) [1].
Milos also developed the Question Answering System (QAS) running on a PDP-10. It operates on equations relating input yarn, cloth area, fiber strengths, etc. For a desired cloth strength, you could solve for fiber strength, or given fiber strength, you could solve for the cloth strength. The same operations you can still perform in TK Solver.
[1] Comprehensive Mathematical Software Tool for Engineers:
https://www.uts.com/Products/TKSolver
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/ev...
Basso Rial RE, García Atiénzar G, et al. Evidence of a warp-weighted loom in the Bronze Age settlement of Cabezo Redondo (south-east Spain). Antiquity. Published online 2026:1-18. doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10312