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Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

Ryan, I really like a lot of your posts, but some of them feel a little light for HN. This one could be summarized as "I got an Arduino, Physical products are really cool". Kind of bummed its #1 right now. Nothing personal against you, just that personality rather than content seems to be rocketing things up the page.

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That's fair, and this is the thing I worry about the most with my blog. Part of the problem is that a bunch of my readers aren't technical, so I sometimes wonder how deep I should go on technical posts. As far as HN goes, I submit a lot of the stuff I write, but only because a fairly large percentage seems to find some traction here, so I guess people enjoy it. That's not necessarily proof that it's quality content, but as I've written about in the past, it's really hard for me to gauge whether I'm ultimately creating value through my writing. Popularity isn't really as useful a metric as one might think :)

Anyway, thanks for the comment, and let me know what kinds of posts of mine you've enjoyed, and what I can do to make all my posts more valuable to you.

EDIT: I should add that my recent post on finding a good IDE found little traction, despite being more in-depth and technical. Perhaps it was just a fluke though...

EDIT 2: I've updated the blog post with a more in-depth review of the Arduino and the Sparkfun kit.

I thought this was a good post:

http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/08/why-free-online-education-wo...

Presents an interesting case against a lot of technical Utopian ideas about tech/ed, highlighted the resistance to change in a lot of entrenched interest groups e.g. parent pressure isn't stressed nearly enough by most. It is a well thought out articulation of an interesting POV.

I really wasn't trying to be content police, just concerned that a post that essentially says "I Bought Something" was the most interesting technical news of the day ;-)

Not your fault people vote it up. It's certainly far more on topic than a lot of things that get submitted, so you can't be faulted for submitting it.

As someone who grew up on Dick Smith's Fun Way Into Electronics kits [1], I love the Arduino. I can see three Arduinos on my desk as I type. I'm not so smart with electronics, but it is a lot of fun, and it's a golden age for this kind of thing.

[1] Dick Smith is a successful Aussie entrepreneur who created a chain of hobby electronics stores and sold the chain when it had (I think) 200 employees and he couldn't remember all their names, so it wasn't so much fun anymore.

When Redhead matches was bought by overseas interests, he created Dickhead matches in protest and sold them in Aussie supermarkets.

He jumped a double-decker bus over 15 motorbikes when I was a kid, parodying Evel Knievel. He was my hero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Smith_(entrepreneur)

He recently created the Wilberforce award - "$1 million to go to a young person under 30 who can impress me by becoming famous through his or her ability to show leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy."

http://dicksmithpopulation.com/wilberforce-award/

"It has become obvious to me that my generation has over exploited our wonderful world – and it’s younger people who will pay the price."

Edit: He's also a founder and patron of the Australian Skeptics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Skeptics

Edit 2: Picture of the bus jumping the motorcycles

http://www.dropbears.com/m/models/specials/busjump.htm

You might enjoy this nostalgic look back at the Fun Way kits: http://tronixstuff.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/australian-elect... :)

Ryan is most gracious in his response, let me be a bit less gracious.

I think his post is on topic and the tech level is actually nicely positioned to get programmers a bit more interested in 'what goes on under the hood'. The vast majority of the people here have never seen, let alone used a soldering iron. Hardware is a big step for software people, the joke goes programmers can't change lightbulbs because it is a hardware problem.

So any post that tries to lower the barrier gets my upvote.

It certainly beats the 'how do you stop sea captains from killing their passengers' that's currently #1 or your own 'analysis of 250 winning designs from threadless.com'.

Keep them coming Ryan, both the technical ones and the 'not so technical' ones.

The best way to offer criticism is to show you can do better.

Just like you're bummed out that this post got a lot of upvotes I'm bummed out that an off-topic comment like this should get more upvotes than anything that directly references the content of the article, you could have sent him an email instead.

I didn't say it was off topic, I said it was "thin". Ryan (and 40+ others) agreed, hence the edits that make it much more robust.

I agree hardware is important, but yesterday on the front page there was a story about Arduino driven video game controllers. There are regular posts about cool stuff people make with the platform. The word is out. My point was that simply saying Arduino is addicting at this point is kind of like saying "Rails is empowering" its not really "news" anymore. To his credit, Ryan added some interesting content in his edits that make it a much more useful intro for anyone who hasn't yet heard about Arduino.

Re: my Threadless post, it was an original data driven analysis of the customer behavior of a prominent user-generated content startup. You may not care, but it least it was new information presented in a visually compelling way. Heck, Cromulent's comment on this post was more data filled than Ryan's PRE-EDIT post.

Yesterday, you felt the need to publicly encourage people to keep "Offering" things, Today, I'm publicly encouraging the submission of more content rich posts.

Well, the innate coolness of physical hacking may be old news too you at the Replicator blog. :-) But vast numbers of software hackers have a secret love of hacking around with real hardware and micro-controllers, and we don't do it as much as we'd like.

Ryan's post captures this emotion perfectly. I didn't vote for it, but I'm not surprised to see it at the top of Hacker News. There's some value in capturing widely-shared emotions succinctly.

I think his point wasn't that physical products are cool, its that for us web types, they seem preternaturally cool. After a while, one just takes it for granted that bits can be shuffled around a screen. To see a bit flip and actually do something is something altogether different.

To wit: I created (and bombed) an entire startup around a very tiny telephone PBX device and the thing I'm still most jazzed about is this little robot I built for marketing it that you could call up on the phone and drive with the keypad.

Video of robot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZkd8YMgzw

If you still have an interest in telephony you might want to look at http://www.rowetel.com/blog/ and his work on the Mesh Potato http://www.villagetelco.org/about/mesh-potato/.

It's an open source hardware project to create an easily deployed developing world "village telephony" system.

Some really good content.

Well, this is the same guy who wrote "The Secret To Getting on the HN Front Page".

I remember reading that and wondering how many people follow it. Today, after watching yet another of my more technical submissions sink without trace, I start to wonder whether I should game the system in the ways he suggests. After all, it would demonstrate and make use of the knowledge I've gained from being here here a while, and perhaps it would give my submissions a fighting chance among yet another submission telling us China has a new supercomputer.

I think we desperately need something like subreddits so that people can self organize into groups where they create and consume information to their liking.

I'm working on something. PG hasn't yet responded to a question, so I'm reluctant to do too much work or say too much about it before then.

Awesome! If youre working in python by any chance I could write some code for it too.

I'll return to these comments and come back to you if anything comes of it.

ADDED IN EDIT: I've now associatively filed your email address as well.

I've had a few random thoughts in and around this area, so if you ever want to talk about this, get in touch...

I even had a fully working prototype that I ended up losing somewhere...

Your email address has also been associatively filed. Thanks.

There's a reason your contest (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394751) did so well (I'd like to see some more analysis, too, nudge nudge...)

I'm not entirely certain what to think of this, either.

The "contest" is on my to-do list, from which things are slowly getting excised. The "Spikey Spheres" article was one, the 1800 dimensional optimisation is the next.

Not a fan, huh? :) I can appreciate that, but I'm curious to know what kinds of things you'd prefer to see. It doesn't look like you've submitted much to HN, so it's hard to get a sense of what kinds of content you'd like to see here.

I haven't been writing for that long, and I'm sure I suck in many ways, so rather than just complain, tell me what I can do to improve.

It could also just be a slow news day - I certainly feel like there it's been pretty light on meaty articles today. Maybe I should try to track that and see if there's some tendency towards different kind of articles on a Friday due to it being the end of the week.

It's technical/mathematical rather than news, but there's this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682

Yes, lets have more of that kind of thing!

I actually read and voted up that submission, but you have to understand that the set of people who care about / understand a post like that is small. As a result, with a generalized community like HN, you're always going to fight to get attention for stuff like that, especially as HN grows. This is an excellent argument for something like subreddits, because otherwise the community just gets more and more shallow. Bugs me to think I've contributed to that :(

  > I actually read and voted up that submission,

Thank you

  > you have to understand that the set of people who
  > care about / understand a post like that is small.

I've always known this, but I find it surprising that so many HNers seem to fall into that category. I've always thought of people here as interested in pretty much anything technical, as I am, but it seems like they're not.

Which I guess is just a thing to know.

  > This is an excellent argument for something like
  > subreddits, because otherwise the community just
  > gets more and more shallow.

Or something. I see sub-reddits as being like folders, whereas I'd rather have something like tags. I'd like the chance to stumble across something out of my comfort zone but still engaging and interesting.

I've got ideas and working on something in what's laughingly called my copious free time.

Similarly, I don’t mean to knock you or the article, but the submission title is overly vague and reminds me of Reddit-style “what is he talking about?” click-baiting. (Especially for HNers, such as I, are not sure what the Arduino is.)

Also, most people put these together with a 8085 or a PIC in high school.

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