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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

If you don't know what an FPGA is, you are probably not going to be able to do much with one. It's kind of like expecting the Ubuntu homepage to explain what Linux is, or the Django website to explain what Python is.

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I agree with you. It's a complex topic that takes a long time to learn and use effectively. It costs plenty of money. We don't need a site on development kits aimed at practitioners to explain the basics of what they are. We have other sites for that.

> It costs plenty of money.

Not for the entry level. The Icestorm [1] tools are free software, in every sense of the word, and can take you all the way from Verilog source (or VHDL using GHDL's analyser [2]) to a bitstream. An associated board, such as an iCEstick or iCE40-HX8K, costs $40 downwards. (Cheap enough that a friendly sales rep. gave me one for free on request.)

[1] http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/

[2] https://github.com/tgingold/ghdlsynth-beta

The iCEstick is probably quite useful for general-purpose hardware interfacing tasks, etc but I doubt you'll be doing much in the way of FPGA compute on one of those.

The project is about AWS's using high-end FPGA's. It's going to assume they have money and already learned the stuff since they pay as they go. Whereas, for a page on introducing FPGA's, what you referenced would be good stuff to have on it. Especially in addition to Spartan boards or list of cheap kits.

Again, this isn't an introduction.

Just wanted to make it clear to the casual reader, who was considering learning about FPGAs, that "plenty of money" doesn't have to be the case. It would be a pity if we lost a newbie :-)

$150 should get you a half decent board with all kinds of interesting IO options and a free toolchain.

And if that's too much, there are boards like this: https://www.amazon.com/RioRand-EP2C5T144-Altera-Cyclone-Deve...

Together with a $10 USB dongle, you can get going for $35.

It's still big enough to store small CPUs etc. A lot of fun!

Now now, don't be talking about how things are fun and might appeal to newbies or children. Gatekeeping is Serious Business and is not a fit subject for play or enjoyment.

Yes, but that's not very helpful to people who are just becoming aware of such technology. There is some room between explaining things in elementary terms like a tutorial and being cryptic to the point of hostility (see: lots of Unix man pages).

The #1 question I find myself asking on tech-related landing pages is 'why might I be interested in learning about this?' because people so often write documentation aimed purely at their own level of knowledge, to the point that they sometimes forget that it might be of interest to anyone else, or even to mention What It's Good For.

It's not a whole lot of extra effort to say 'FPGAs get us closer to the performance of dedicated hardware while maintaining much of the flexibility of software. If you have ever enjoyed building electronic circuits then you may love programming FPGAs.'

It's kind of like expecting the Ubuntu homepage to explain what Linux is

And why would it be such a bad thing for it to say something like 'Linux is a wonderful operating system for your that anyone can use or modify for their own purposes, and it's free!' In fact, it does say something along those lines:

Ubuntu is an open source software platform that runs from the cloud, to the smartphone, to all your things.

Is there something bad about being informative and accessible?

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