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Show HN: HackerThings - Products for hackers

hackerthings.com

364 pointscoderdude134 comments

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Pretty cool. It reminds me of what ThinkGeek used to be before it turned into Spencer's for faux-nerds.

One suggestion, mechanical keyboards.

Das Model S http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional-silent/

Topre Realforce Tenkeyless http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=topre_keyboards,r...

Happy Hacking http://www.elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards...

Thanks and great suggestion -- I'll add one on the next update (tomorrow).

If you're looking for product suggestions, Snap Circuits for the budding hacker child are great.

http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-SC-750-Snap-Circuits-Extreme/dp...

Thanks for the suggestion, that would go great in a kids section.

Please kind sir, I yearn for a resurgence of interest in the Denshi Block system .. please add it to your catalog:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gakken_EX-System

Denshi blocks are a fabulous way to learn electronics and they belong in your catalog.

How neat, and retro! I'll see if I can find some good retailers selling them. They look pretty cool.

Also, Unicomp Customizer 104/105: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html

What is a "Linux2" keyboard layout?

http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/pckeyboards_2163_276533

Geez. You'd think that the letter N, being at the very center of both GNU and Linux, would warrant a space on a Linux user's keyboard.

The greatest keyboard ever made. If you havent used one, you honestly have no idea what you're missing.

Very cool.

There was a thread a few months back with a few similar ideas along this vein. See: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1988328

My one suggestion would be to add an "additional resources" section under the more hackable products with links to relevant GitHub repos or blog posts.

I know for instance a few people have messed around with creating their own USB missile drivers for Linux. Here is one example: http://www.lukecole.name/research_and_projects/personal/usb_...

Thanks for the suggestions. I like the idea of additional resources. I was also thinking of trying find things on sites like Instructables that use the products I find. Including links to little projects like the one shown in the USB missile link would certainly add a lot of value for the visitors.

Suggestionss: check all option (for those with fat wallets) and weird tools like lock pick kits.

That's a really neat collection and I'm going to have to put your site on the blacklist to make sure we have food here.

Thanks for the suggestions. The weird tools idea is a good angle.

DealExtreme.com and similar might be worth picking some of that stuff up from. Mostly crap but hard to beat for odd screwdrivers and the like.

Oh, and add a "Don't show me things from stores that won't ship to my region lest I become consumed with envy and curse the very name of newegg.com" checkbox, perhaps :-).

Along the lines of weird tools, I've found a kit like http://www.amazon.com/Piece-Apple-Macintosh-Computers-iPhone... tremendously useful for taking stuff apart to replace hard drives and things.

Have to be careful with some things like lock picks. Various state laws can make having such things troublesome. Sure, most of the laws have something requiring the intent to commit a crime, but if someone gets the wrong idea, it's rather hard to prove that you had no such intent.

You, sir, are a genius and a scholar. This site is going to hit my paycheck every week for months.

Thanks :)

Haha same, I cannot wait to assemble the mini rocket engine.

I really recommend it. I bought that one myself a few months ago. It's very cool! The guy who runs the site is awesome and he'll help you out if you have any questions. He can't ship the N2O canisters outside of his country though (or maybe it was just to the US) so you'll have to find a place around you that sells them. Not too hard to find though.

I love how the use of "hacker-news orange" (#f60) instantly makes things look hacker-ish now! (Might just be for me)

Not just you -- that was totally the idea. Nothing says 'hacker' like that particular shade of orange. It also helps because I made this site for the HN community (for the most part, figured only you guys would understand it). What better way to identify with my fellow HNers?

Another suggestion, similar to the Hand Moldable Plastic: http://sugru.com/

Thanks! I'll check it out

Sugru is the business. I love the stuff. Last night (with one small sachet) I added a focus confirmation chip to a manual SLR lens, replaced two missing feet of my netbook, filled in an annoying embossed Belkin logo on my iPhone case and added a big colourful zip pull to my camera bag.

This stuff is made for hackers!

Thanks for that link, just had something break, and this is exactly what I needed.

The Kinesis keyboard seems germane to this site:

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/

(Talk about "cure for disposable income"... they're actually great to type on once you get used to it; they're just not worth $300).

By the way, this is a delightful and simple site; I signed up for the newsletter, and I want to give you my money somehow. For what it's worth, I wouldn't bat an eyelash at affiliate links. I agree with joshu that curation is a huge value-add. In mere minutes, just based on the design of the site and the content on it right now, you have gained my trust! Treat it well and benefit from it.

Thanks for the words of encouragement! I have to admit, I am having second thoughts about making money from this.

Nifty. Like the minimalist design. I reckon what it really needs is some kind of subtle recommendation filter based either on like/dislike (interesting/boring?) buttons or just on what items you bother to click through to. Maybe a little (X) button to say take-it-away-and-don't-show-me-it-ever-again.

PS: Go ahead and put affiliate links on it, its got to pay for itself somehow. IMHO affiliate links are less obnoxious than ads taking up room. Just make sure you don't let the affiliate income bias your selections too much, or the usefulness of the site will be degraded.

Thanks for the suggestions! RE: the PS, my friend and I were just discussing this. That was my biggest issue, that my judgement would be clouded or that people might believe that my judgement was being clouded.

Dude, awesome!

- I would suggest feeding in some of the dev kits from Digikey. The Parallax devices are pretty spiffy, as is the XMOS XCore.

- What about a magstripe reader?

- Include a Lisp book... On Lisp or perhaps Practical Common Lisp? ;)

Great ideas! Thanks for contributing -- I hadn't thought of that. And yes. I think the site is going to need a Lisp book. Possibly Haskell as well. I want to keep the normals off there as long as possible. ;)

I am sure the Learn You A Haskell Guy would love to see his book receive more distribution. He's really nice, you should ask him.

And the bookhas the distinction of being on of the ONLY approachable and natural explanations of monadic programming.

Awesome, I'll definitely check the book out.

The new "Land of Lisp" book scares the hell out of normals, not just because it's about Lisp - http://landoflisp.com/ ;). Also, it's a great book.

Real World Haskell is a pretty solid Haskell book too.

I've seen a couple of sites like this that have done well generating traffic from niche forum banner ads (http://toppppp.com is the one that sprints to mind immediately).

My worry with these types of passive income sites is the upkeep for pricing information. The OP's source looks like he's manually printed the price, and the same with my example except their prices are quite out of date by now. Does anyone have any ideas how best to scrape the price from the 3rd party site?

Yep, I have to manually keep track of the pricing. It's going to be a pain as the site grows. Growing pain I suppose. I don't showcase very many retailers. It wouldn't be difficult to write a simple Python script to fetch the product pages for the retailers I carry the most items from and automatically update the price. I can take care of the rest by hand.

Word of warning: DO NOT buy the rechargeable USB batteries. They are very cheap and leaked acid (I owned two). Also, they do not hold a charge for more than a day in my experience. You'd be better off with regular rechargeable batteries.

Nice site, by the way. Has some very cool stuff.

Thank you, and I didn't know the batteries sucked. I'll remove them in my next update. Don't want to show off crappy products.

How about including a mechanism for reviews like this on the site? (I know most of the linked to sites have review areas as well but having it all in one place in your curated venue might add some value).

That's a great idea, I'll definitely look into it.

I was just gonna suggest this. Reviews would also be a great idea because they would be "for hackers, by hackers" in a way.

This is one of the most well-designed and interesting projects I've seen posted here. Considering you built it in a weekend, that's truly amazing.

What's your plan going forward?

Thank you very much.

I don't really have a plan at all, to be honest. I don't plan on putting affiliate links or ads on it ever. I just wanted to put up a simple showcase of products for like-minded people. It's sort of my hacker answer to ThisIsWhyImBroke.com.

Bullshit - curation is a valuable act and you should get something for doing a good job of it.

Also, you should build a machine learning thing to up/down rank stuff based on clicks. I might be able to help with that.

Also, I want tags. More like this! Especially for stuff that I don't know much about (eg UAVs)

There are a few people telling me I should be trying to hook up some kind of money making deal with this. It's something I should seriously consider.

Doing some machine learning for the ranking would be a load of fun. If you have any ideas or want to help out with that I'd be glad to accept!

Of course you want tags. ;) I definitely agree though. There needs to be labeling or at the very least some sort of categorization.

Thanks for the feedback!

My point is that I think you are free to make money. If you can do it without compromising your sense of quality you will go very far.

Well, not necessarily tags, but I want to dive deeper in some things. You should allow that.

I like the idea of having a web page that's the opposite of sites that make me email some jackass to get a price. These are all buyable things, RIGHT NOW.

You should have a giant page of SBCs. And UAVs. And 3d printing things. And useful software. Free or otherwise! I think the iphone game Trainyard might appeal to hackers, for example...

I'm gonna order the panograph tomorrow, I think...

Good idea. I think you've got a good idea of what I'm trying to add to the site (especially with the SBCs and UAVs). Adding individual pages based on interest would be a major improvement. Apps is another great idea.

I'm considering the idea of cutting deals with retailers (or even manufacturers) if the site reaches critical mass. I mean, I'm not averse to making money. I just hadn't planned on it.

Drop me an email and I will remember to write up my ideas.

Awesome -- what's your email address?

You should be able to figure it out from my profile + google :)

Somehow I knew this was a test. LOL

I'll find it.

You might want to add some items from the United Nuclear website:

http://www.unitednuclear.com/

Lots of fascinating products and number three on the google search results for "buy uranium"! :-)

Thanks, I'll definitely check it out.

Huh, the temperature-sensitive glass [1] featured on the home page seems backwards. The coolest parts are red, and the hottest parts, blue. (This violates color theory and standard heat maps.)

[1]: http://www.inventables.com/technologies/temperature-sensitiv...

Under "existing uses" on that page they show examples of how it really looks (which should be correct I think). Inventables photoshops a lot of their images. They might have just touched that one up as well.

From the FAQ:

  > The base color can also be color matched to virtually
  > any color imaginable.

Also

  > • Tiles that appear black at room temperature and move through the color
  > spectrum when temperature (warm water, radiant heat, etc.) is applied.

Now I want a shower curtain thats translucent when in ambient temperature, then turns (red/green/white/black/whatever) while the shower is on (hot water).

At $33/each, they're also astoundingly expensive to buy from this site; by my calculations, one wall of the shower featured in this photo cost a minimum of $4,620 in tiling alone:

http://cdn.inventables.com/technology_application_images/565...

Very cool stuff, but at quite a heavy price ;)

Yes, inventables.com has some really cool stuff, but they are sometimes too expensive. For example, the "Super absorbent polymer spheres" [1] are also available from ThinkGeek for a lot less [2] (And you'll probably get them elsewhere even cheaper)

[1] http://www.inventables.com/technologies/super-absorbent-poly...

[2] https://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/science/cd32?srp=2

I just have to keep away from this site...I am just going to pretend this is a dream and it doesn't really exist.

Otherwise I will spend so much money and so much time playing with the awesome things there that I will end up broke and unemployed in under a year.

Kind words ;)

Glad you found the stuff there so interesting!

HackerThings recently posted a widget I created (the ATX Power Supply to Bench Supply). In a few days I'll post a writeup of traffic (or sales, if any, none so far) mainly for the benefit of coderdude.

Thank you, coderdude, for sharing my product!

No problem. Thanks for showing me something cool to put on the site. ;)

Great site! Congrats on launching!

And from the comments, I suppose some of the next few features you may want to add would be: 1. a way for users to recommend products 2. a way for users to LIKE and DISCUSS products

Thank you! Feels good.

1. Absolutely. I've been getting great suggestions through multiple channels (in this thread, through Twitter, my personal email, etc.). It would be great if visitors could suggest something right on the site.

2. That would be ideal. I might end up creating a comment system similar to the one on HN. Something barebones that just works. I would very much like to add some interactivity to the site.

Why bother? Just hook up Disqus--it's free and just a couple of lines in your html.

I may do that instead. It would be nice to take advantage of the various auth systems without requiring me to implement Twitter and Facebook (et al) myself. That's the only reason I might choose a canned system over something homegrown though.

Since people are posting suggestions, how about Bloxes? http://bloxes.com/ They ship flat, you just fold them up and build structures out of them.

Hey that's pretty neat. They'd make a fun addition to the site!

I think I'll click the subscribe button for the first time in my life.

This is pretty neat, but it'd be more useful if it had some basic category filtering. That way I could filter out all the electrical engineery stuff from the other stuff, for example.

That's in the works. Well, not yet but I do plan on it. The site is pretty bare bones as far as features are concerned.

Nice, thanks!

Cool! One suggestion - make it more like Uncrate: http://uncrate.com/

So, add:

- Tags

- Categories

- Filtering (most popular, saved, etc)

- Saving

- Blog style (so people can direct link, or just provide direct link)

- Similar items (via categories or tags)

Definitely some good advice. Although I probably won't make it like a blog, I do agree that each item should be linkable. That's something I wish I'd done before submitting it. Hindsight! But those are all features I think I should incorporate as soon as possible.

I would love to see more EMF shielding products, including clothes. Some of the stuff here looks great: http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html

I'd like to wear this on a date for sure: http://www.lessemf.com/images/a260.jpg (being optimistic, then run one of the Faraday canopies over the bed)

Hmm... those RF shielding boxers do look pretty comfortable... ;)

EMF has been shown to reduce sperm count and testosterone, if those boxers can help - great.

Oh god, love it. The ultimate cure for disposable income.

One suggestion, which may be unpopular: As many cool "let's build stuff" ideas as I get when browsing sites like this, a tag or filter for stuff that is complete, ready-to-use products would be helpful, as I already have too many PCBs scattered around and most times should only be buying complete products that can actually improve my life directly.

Not a bad idea! Thanks for the suggestion.

You know what I like about this website? It doesn't use the word "curated" to describe what it does.

{I realise this is an off-topic personal bugbear)

Excellent job! Clean, simple, effective... perfect.

Will you update this daily? And will the number of items you showcase be the same?

Thanks!

I will update it daily -- at least I'll try. It depends on whether or not I can find things that are a good enough fit each day. I want to update it with 3 new items per day. The number of items I showcase will grow. I haven't decided on how I want to handle this yet. I'm thinking the items will need to be split into categories and the front page will just be newest or most popular items.

What would be the best way for others to suggest products to add? Tweet them @hackerthings?

For now that will work. Or you can email stuff@[the HackerThings domain]. I plan on adding a suggestions form though very soon.

consider keeping a site blog, along the lines of http://www.kk.org/cooltools/, to showcase particularly neat stuff as you add it.

I certainly will do so. A blog would be a smart thing to add right now.

Dammit, I want everything in there ! Congratulations btw.

Thanks!

Everything here is great.

relevant: http://isitchristmas.com/

Tell us more about the "backend"... are you drop shipping this stuff or do you have inventory?

I'm not selling any of this stuff myself. It's just a big page of links to other sellers. It would be neat though to have inventory of my own!

Oh I see, sorry - I didn't actually click through otherwise I'd have seen that :P

You should definitely check out the excellent Adafruit Industries for similar geeky goodies (http://www.adafruit.com/)

Awesome, another great source I didn't know about. Thanks!

Nicely done. I'm looking forward to seeing more web-stores that just link to other websites for the checkout process. Does this have a name? Product curating?

Question: do you make money from affiliations and if not, do you plan to?

I do not use any affiliate programs nor do I ever intend to. It's just for fun.

The site looks great, full of stuff I'm now trying not to buy...

How to plan to make money from the site? I guessed that the links would be tracked to affiliate schemes but they just look like straight links to the retailers' sites

No plan for making money on it. Just doing it for the fun of it!

As long as you don't compromise the content of the site (i.e. only promoting products that earn you the greatest award) it could be worth considering at some time, even if it just makes you some beer money.

Keep up the good work!

USB-Rechargable AA Batteries is amazing idea! http://www.inventables.com/technologies/usb-rechargeable-bat...

Definitely happy to see the Emotiv headset on the site! I am currently using one to run a study on brain wave activity on athletes.

Definitely going to keep an eye on your site.

Did you use a CMS or did you build this from the ground up?

The backend uses web.py http://webpy.org/

It's a truly kick-ass framework. I suggest it to anyone doing Python backend work.

How often will this be updated?

Once a day, 3 items per update (provided I can find good enough stuff each day).

There really is nothing that can top Caffeinated Soap.

This is the greatest site I have ever seen

Wow, that's quite a compliment. Thank you. :)

Very neat. I have a pair of those rechargeable USB batteries. They're perfect for a wireless mouse.

You should see if you could also become a distributor for milkymist.org (open hardware VJ system).

Dammit man, get me a panda board!

Neat! I didn't even know about the Pandaboard until just now. I'll add it in an update.

This is excellent. Thanks!

Glad you like it!

I really like the Bamboo keyboard and mouse. Avoid touching plastic.

Does anyone have any experience with these? The reviews seem rather slim.

Really very nice, and I appreciate the time and effort you put into this. Have to say, though, that the Facebook association leaves a bad taste.

Really? This complaining about facebook is getting ridiculous. This site merely has a facebook tag among other services to help advertise it.

Really?

Really.

This complaining about facebook is getting ridiculous.

No, it's not. What's ridiculous is the way Facebook treats privacy. If you're OK with that, and are happy to see it promoted by propagating Facebook bugs, that's your choice.

People who find it offensive, though, need to speak up and let site owners know that they do not approve of Facebook's behavior.

I assume that any site with a FB "like" button is OK with Facebook's "privacy" policy.

Whatever your thoughts I can't understand encouraging acquiescence through silence. That's also ridiculous,

James has done a great job with Hacker Things, but if he wants to put a Facebook tracking item on the site for whatever promotional gain then he should be doing so with true deliberation, knowing that it will put off some number of users.

Would whoever down-voted me tell me where I'm wrong?

I didn't down vote you (don't have enough karma,but even if I did I still wouldn't), but I can explain my opinion better.

First the disclaimer: Personally I find the complaining over Facebook's privacy concerns exaggerated and sensationalized (I don't think it's that big of a deal).

That being said, I think it's absolutely fine to not agree with Facebook's privacy policies or have your own personal concerns. I also think it's completely reasonable not to use the site and even to tell others that you have some concerns over their policies.

What I think is excessive though, is complaining about it on an unrelated post about something that has nothing to do with Facebook and saying a simple tag 'leaves a bad taste'. Especially considering a Facebook tag on a different site has nothing to do with their policies.

Thanks for the comment.

I would not have brought up FB if I did not think it was germane to the post. This is a "Hey, HN people, what do you think of my site?" post. The site includes a FB bug in the form of the "like" button that makes it easier for FB to track people across sites. That diminishes the site for me. I'm less concerned with the Twitter button precisely because of the difference in company privacy policies and past behavior.

When people build sites and decide to tranclude content from other domains they need to make a deliberate decision about what that means. If you willingly associate your site with some other site then the expectation is that you're good with what they do and how they do it.

Briliant! I definitely buy the Emotive headset

Man I wish that I'd thought of this. Great idea, and great site!

How many sales you got till now? Just asking ... :)

nice collection

Thank you...this is awesome!

Glad you like it!

ie. if SparkFun, ThinkGeek and Maker SHED had a baby...

I like that analogy. However, I'd say it's more like if SparkFun and ThinkGeek were a couple, but then it turned out Inventables was the real dad and ThinkGeek only got visitation on the weekends.

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