Someone who painstakingly recreates, by hand, an object based on 500 year old woodcuts while learning several new manufacturing techniques in the process matches one of the definitions of hacker.
"6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example."
The production of this dress was an appropriate application of ingenuity that resulted in a carefully crafted work of art, which is literally hacking:
"Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."
It is interesting (to me at least) because it is something I have not seen before, done skillfully, and is not Yet Another Article About Rust or Containers (YAAARC).
I know nothing about dress making, but I find any kind of serious research into the past combined with recreating techniques to be very interesting, especially when our knowledge of the original process is incomplete. It's entertaining, but it's also a kind of doubly informative - it gives information about the past, and it gives information about the present.
HN isn't just about programming. It's about absorbing deep knowledge from a variety of sources, whether that's the field of pharmacology, industrial manufacturing, or what have you.
Someone has spent not only the time to recreate a period correct dress, but also do a well written write up of it for the rest of us.
I'm not particularly interested in sewing, and don't wear dresses (well only on weekends ;) ). But its great that other people are interested in that.
Surely the best thing about the internet is stumbling across some blog about some niche interest you had never even considered before, and being enlightened by it. I much rather this than some web 2.0 social media platform with no vowels in the name.
I suppose you could make the argument that HN is for developers, and so should only contain developer things, I don't think the field would advance very rapidly if no one even brought in anything from outside the field. Just wait, next month some web 3.0 doohicky will be announced, informed by this very article.
You do realize that there is a voting-based algorithm & that's how things make it to the front page of hacker news right? Do you find every article on the front page personally interesting? Do you ask on those other articles why others found it helpful?
This is more or less the equivalent of code archaeology in a different field--how did things get to be the way they are? Why is this or that technique used?
Totally fascinating and worth reading. Or skipping over if it isn't your cup of tea.
I don't think this comment should have been so heavily downvoted. You didn't say "this shouldn't interest people here," which would be obnoxious. Rather you displayed curiosity about why people were interested, which seems neutral at worst.
