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It was too early and a bit of a dangerous design, but the StokeMonkey was built for torque and worked great at low speeds.

Some pedicab folks in Austin used to use them.

Hill climbing video YouTube https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux

Design info https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux



Came to say the same, I meet him once in his shop, what a great person he was. His wife also has a great amount of bicycle knowledge from what I heard.


And the shop itself closed in 2021 after being open for nearly 70 years. I purchased my Brompton there.


That is a shame, I figured Harris would be the last small shop left.

Unfortunately, I have seen a few family owned shops taken over by a "large" company, namely Trek. Others have just closed. I only know of one or 2 family owned shop left these days.


His wife was a professor at the Northeastern computer science department when I went there. A wonderful teacher.


Ah that’s the reason why reading several articles on the site it felt out of date. For example the website states “Disc brakes have become increasingly popular on mountain bikes and are gaining some popularity for other bicycles” whereas in my experience disc brakes are popular for all kinds of bicycles.


A lot of the information is indeed old, but then so are a lot of bikes. :)

Things are still being updated, primarily by John Allen. There's some writing about changes on the blog: https://sheldonbrown.com/blog/

(I have every expectation that he'd be quite pleased to entertain well-written updates from other parties, if anyone feels like being constructive. John is pretty easy to contact.)


That's actually more recently than I would have guessed. He had already departed by the time I discovered bike building in the early 2010s.

Time is strange.


> Sheldon Brown, a beloved iconoclast bicycle tech guru, died Sunday from a heart attack. He was 68 63.

Curious, what does "He was 68 63" mean. Is it a bicycle gear joke about his age at death?


Probably just a typo. He was 63.


Surprisingly young


I’m a little surprised to learn that Jobst Brandt outlived Sheldon Brown. He was 9 years older than him and Brown died at 63.


72 is still an awfully young age to die.


For a couple of known cyclists, 63 and 72 is a bit worrisome.



MS sucks. We need to end Epstein-Barr virus!


If you want a case study in Silicon Valley fascist tendencies, this douche Empact is perfect.

He's spent his life in a society where immigrants, without papers and with, have served his every need. And then you can check out his crappy linktree about his (sic) "wholistic" approach to investing.


Yikes - I know that emotions are understandably running hot right now, but you can't attack another HN user like this, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. (The same goes in the other direction, of course - indeed, in all directions.)

I'm sure you know that we ban accounts that break the rules like this. You've been a good HN member for a long time, so I don't want to do that.

The best way I know of to make the moderation point here is the "you may not owe" pattern (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) - in this case: you may not owe people who disagree with you on critical political issues better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.


These are increasingly harder to get, sadly. My credit union won't anymore. I have to keep a debit card locked


The video for that song uses excerpts from the movie version of Johnny Got His Gun. I don't know if the songwriting was inspired by it but the video certainly was. Because the video relied so much on the excerpts the band ended up buying the rights to the movie just to not pay royalties.

Hilariously, I won a writing prize about this connection as a teenager in 1989. Fun to see you had a similar experience


What an amazing life

Booker T and the MGs also recorded one of the best Christmas albums of all time

https://tidal.com/browse/album/216317?u


I agree and it's happening. I co-founded Outpost Publishers Cooperative as a member services co-op to provide enterprise-level subscription services to publishers on Ghost (which is a non-profit).

I'm biased but I think the model of member-service co-ops (like Ace Hardware) providing tailored software services to particular industries is fertile ground. Free of VC incentives, reasonably profitable, aligned incentives, and the state of software tooling makes this doable.

And since this model doesn't require capturing as much value as a VC funded venture, it's more sustainable.

But the hard thing is figuring out how to get to decent product without upfront investment, in lieu of investment models that don't require outsize returns.

I can think of ways to create early capital but I've yet to see an industry think through how to fund smart suppliers without falling into the trap of thinking they need to be VCs.


> how to get to decent product without upfront investment

Yeah, this is the hard part.

I work in the small “ERP-like” business market and I’ve come up with some good ideas (based on the reaction of the people I talk to). But the problem is that even a small team of about five genuinely solid developers can cost around US $300,000–500,000 per year — and that’s even factoring in that I’m in LATAM!.

That’s a lot.

To make something like this happen, you need to convince fairly big players — the ones who have the capital and the patience, but more importantly the vision. And that’s the part that’s rare. At least in theory, that’s what VCs are supposed to bring.


Bite the bullet, and find something smaller to use for funding the big thing.

(This is the stage I’m at currently.)


I'd say too we aren't the only ones. Plausible Analytics is a great, mission-driven, open-soutce non-profit providing cookie-free web analytics.

And they let us bulk buy for our member publishers.

There's so much potential in what you are suggesting!


That is fantastic to hear, kudos to you and best of luck! The funding is definitely an issue I'm chewing over in my mind as I think about these issues.


Nope. The percentage has flipped.

Hysteria over watching hard working immigrants getting grabbed by masked ICE thugs throwing tear gas at citizens?

Go * yourself and your fascist brain

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...


Which itself was a sequel to Brooks's first and underappreciated Western, The Wild Bunch (1969)


California's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs


Exactly. Regulations without suitable punishments and investigatory powers are essentially only barriers to new entrants, not deterrents of bad behavior.


California bans "fast lanes" and service plan bundles i.e Facebook and YouTube internet plans.

No one's allowing you to plug X x 100G into their eyeball network for free


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