Rule of the internet: don't install things that you didn't ask for.
More details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_aerial_photography#Pica...
One of the lectures on YouTube from the Oriental Institute had beautiful pictures of early (Old Kingdom?) Egyptian military and trading sites on the Nile in southern Egypt or possibly northern Sudan, and described the problems they had and why they used kites.
IIRC A kite powered boat called Jacobs Ladder held various sailing speed records at one point
0) https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81LstaapceL...
Takes a while to get the hang of troubleshooting the problems of flying, but the basics aren't complicated. Good cheap fun.
No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.
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.
A couple years ago I wandered past their store in Boulder and was floored that there was a real, physical incarnation of that magical catalog. I took my little kids there this winter and it was like passing a spark between generations.
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.
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
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 link is on HN?
I enjoy kites and have used this site before, but what makes it worth the front page of HN? It's nothing new, their site hasn't really changed in years, and it is somewhat off topic.
Was the poster just fired up about kites? Am I missing something?
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.
Kites are pretty cool and, as this site points out pretty dramatically, can go from super simple to technically very complex and interesting.
For example, NASA has been experimenting with designing simple parachutes [1] and it turned out that the parawings (or Rogallo wings) are pretty good traction kites, too. The NPW kites are still popular kites as they are cheap to make and long-wearing in use.
> 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/