Ask HN: What's the Hacker News of hardware? - EXueBRJ9d
======
androng
I was wondering the same question because I have an EE degree and am annoyed
there is no website that spews interesting content for my profession. Maybe
Planet Analog or EEVBlog forum? It's very hard to find great tutorials.

I would argue that this website covers both hardware/software in the natural
proportion of hardware:software developers. If I had to guess then that would
be 1:30.

Why is it 1:30? Because hardware developers have way more at stake than their
software counterparts. One injection mold costs $8000, one PCB assembly run
costs $12000, one PCB costs $900 and one week, one wafer costs $400,000 and
six months. So there are just a lot less hardware developers than there are
firmware/software ones.

Look at the distribution of posts on the HN two front pages 9 Software
optimization (compilers, language features) 9 Business/ IP 6 Other 5 Cutting
Edge software like AI 4 Information Security /Privacy 4 Show HN or similar (a
product or dev tool) 4 Historical Computers 3 Non-Technology news 3 Design 2
Other Technology news 1 Ask HN

Only 17/50 of those are actually pure software posts. (Software optimization,
Cutting Edge software like AI Design) The rest would likely be on a hardware
website too.

Software changes much faster than hardware. Software can be acted on by
individuals and posted on HN by individuals, not just companies/universities
with $1m research labs. But when new hardware comes out that is intellectually
interesting, like IBMs quantum computer, or an ESP8266, or Google's Tensor
Computer Units, you'll bet you can find it on HN.

~~~
cottonseed
> It's very hard to find great tutorials.

Reminds me of a comment I saw on reddit:

"Verilog/SystemVerilog are not languages many people write about online.
Reading Synopsis documentation and occasional seminars are the best of what
you can get."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/2m58ci/hardware_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/2m58ci/hardware_engineers_of_reedit_what_is_your_job_like/cm1579o/)

As someone trying to learn Verilog better, it's frustrating.

~~~
ci5er
JCooley @ Synopsys was great help on Usenet in the early 90s. I don't know
what's up about that now.

EDIT: But still ... the tooling is pretty stable. I don't know that I would
turn to an HN-like community to help me put a (frankly, pretty vanilla) module
on a CPU bus from the Broadcom family. I know how to do that. You can go down
the stack (at which point everything is proprietary) or you can go up the
stack (at which everything is software). No?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
John Cooley is still active.
[http://deepchip.com/about.html](http://deepchip.com/about.html)

From that link:

DeepChip.com is a 20 year old clearinghouse where semiconductor chip designers
contribute data-intensive papers and articles of first-hand evaluations and
production benchmarks of commercial EDA tools.

John Cooley at or (508) 429-4357 edits the content of both ESNUG and DeepChip.

~~~
ci5er
Sweet! It's good to hear. He was always so super-helpful both on Usenet and
directly when I was at Moto Semi way-back about 20-or-25-or-so years ago. Of
course, Moto is gone, and I've moved on, but it's good to hear a knowledgeable
war-horse is still still around to guide, mentor, inform and design.

Knowing that warms my heart. Thank you.

------
Animats
Check out "bbs.elecfans.com". 4 million posts in "Engineer Workplace".

Articles include the problems of being obsolete at age 30, and a comment that
Huawei is "cleaning up" the staff over 34. There's an online course on how to
become an embedded systems developer by writing your own RTOS, and what
questions Huawei asks in interviews. Somebody wants help with their square
wave generator, which is producing a poor waveform. Somebody else wants to
know how to drive a 12V brushless DC motor 300mA 2000 RPM. Nobody posted a
useful answer, which is disappointing.

All in Mandarin, of course, but that's what Google Translate is for.

------
ktta
I would say subscribe to a couple subreddits. The level of discussion is not
as to the point as I find HN tends to have (which is a good thing in my
opinion), but there are quite a few different ones with varying levels of
discussion and acceptance. So I wouldn't expect the HN version of hardware
there, but something different.

To start you off, I subscribe to the following:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/](https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ECE/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ECE/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DSP/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DSP/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ComputerEngineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ComputerEngineering/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/](https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/)

Note that there subreddits related to a specific product where discussion
focuses on that specific hardware. They tend to by hobbyist, but that's as
close as you can get.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/](https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/esp8266/](https://www.reddit.com/r/esp8266/)

~~~
chillingeffect
[https://www.reddit.com/r/stm32f4](https://www.reddit.com/r/stm32f4)

------
richardxia
Not exactly like HN, but [http://hackaday.com](http://hackaday.com) focuses on
small hardware projects and news.

~~~
MegaDeKay
The cross-section of articles on HaD are indeed quite good. However, the
comments to those articles are often best avoided.

~~~
milesvp
YMMV, I've been regularly impressed with the quality of posts on hackaday. I
find there are some very knowledgable posters who will often add great value
to a given article. That said I may happen to only be interested in the
articles that tend to attract higher quality comments, and miss much of the
trolling that happens elsewhere on the site.

------
morganvachon
[http://anandtech.com](http://anandtech.com) is where I get most of my retail
hardware news in the PC and portable space.

[https://hackaday.com/](https://hackaday.com/) is good for hardware hacking,
though it leans heavily towards Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms. Most
articles that aren't about one of those platforms tend to be about retro-
computing, 3D printing, repurposing hardware, and similar topics.

[https://phoronix.com](https://phoronix.com) is great for Linux-specific
hardware reviews, and is worth a subscription; Michael Larabel is one of the
hardest working people on the Linux news scene.

------
Animats
sci.electronics.design on Usenet is quite helpful. I've been able to get help
there with obscure problems in switching power supply design.

Because all the clueless people have dropped Usenet, it's mostly people who
know what they're doing. comp.lang.* groups remain useful.

r/electronics is rather lame. Current top articles:

* Join fellow redditors in delivering happiness to one another around the globe! (AD)

* Interesting7805 at the heart of a Super Famicom (SNES).

* Organization Tip: Old Cassette Cases w/ Labels to Keep Parts Sorted!

* Modded Gopro clone sees through Blu-Ray player

* NJ based Components Distributor with NO minimum order quantity (AD)

Not too helpful.

Electronics people usually get Electronic Design magazine. Mechanical
engineering people get Machine Design. (Those are free. New Equipment Digest
arrives whether you asked for it or not.)

------
watchdogtimer
I like [http://www.cnx-software.com](http://www.cnx-software.com) (which,
despite the name, is more about hardware than software) and
[http://www.linuxgizmos.com](http://www.linuxgizmos.com).

------
analog31
I've found that at the forums for Raspberry Pi and other hobbyist gadgets,
folks will go off on a tangent about hardware news, often enough to make it
interesting.

A strange difference is that for me, software news is much more actionable
than hardware. Somebody has to turn a new hardware development into something
like a breakout board, often with support software such as drivers, before I
can really do anything with it. The stuff that I can support myself, such as
peripheral IC's and analog components, doesn't evolve as quickly.

I suppose one could say that software also requires support software (such as
Python wrappers) before I can use it, but that seems to happen more quickly.

------
labdsf
HN is not limited to software. Hardware news are posted here sometimes and no
rules prohibit it.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, and it may just reflect the relative levels of interest in software
and hardware. I think it was attributed to Bill Gates, the early realization
that for every person interested in creating hardware, there are 100 people
interested in creating software.

------
SAI_Peregrinus
I feel like the IEEE should have a forum on their site. Currently the closest
thing outside of Spectrum and their various journals is probably their
Facebook page, which is just a Facebook page.

~~~
uiri
IEEE Collabratec is a weird social networking thing that they have. I think it
is trying a little bit too hard to be LinkedIn except LinkedIn is already
LinkedIn.

vTools Events is really great but it is obviously intended for organizing
face-to-face meetings, workshops, etc.

I do agree that IEEE should just host a phpBB forum (or similar) on their
site. Perhaps have a subforum for each Society and Affinity Group and also
subfora for various Regions/Sections.

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jasminz
Personally, I visit hackaday.com almost daily. It contains a bit of hardware
news along with a bunch of interesting projects (called hackaday.io). Main
focus of the website is modding of HW and SW though

------
nickpsecurity
Im curious to know what you find out on that. One resource you might enjoy is
Jack Ganssle's Embedded Muse. Go through back issues. He and his readers have
all kinds of neat tips from tools to firmware tricks. I remember one there and
today on Schneier blog was talking about noticing specific analog problems
through sound from the waves they leaked. They didnt have equipment onhand so
tuned an AM radio or something to it. Most isnt that exciting but those gems
slip in there.

------
dpc59
Maybe you should aim for something more precise, such as forums about
microchips, or keyboards, or soundsystems (there has to be great ressources
about those, I have friends who build their own to throw big raves), etc.. I
started getting into microbiology and chemistry as I started brewing beer (I'm
just here because my roommate is a webdev and I'm interested in
entrepreneurship, I can't remember how to code a loop in python and couldn't
tell you the difference between AC and DC), and there's nothing great
specifically about those sciences. However there are great forums (facebook
groups and subreddits in particular, with a good mod team they can be great
platforms) for brewing (both professional and home-scale), growing mushrooms,
theory behind drug synthesis/purification, and probably a lot more stuff I
barely know about.

------
Negative1
I would say [https://hackaday.com](https://hackaday.com). It doesn't match the
format exactly (i.e. story voting w/ aggregated scores for weighting to front
page) but it is in the spirit of HackerNews.

------
MrQuincle
Forum, but quality quite okay and if new hardware arrives it gets discussed.

[https://forum.mysensors.org/category/4/hardware](https://forum.mysensors.org/category/4/hardware)

------
asmithmd1
Certainly not popular as HN but it does have some community:

[https://www.element14.com/community/welcome](https://www.element14.com/community/welcome)

------
jekrb
[http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/)

~~~
nickpsecurity
That doesn't fit the main topic. However, I'm glad you shared it because it's
awesome. Even the subset of hardware people that are mainly tinkerers should
appreciate it.

------
ramshanker
Almost all major hardware news are submitted on this Hacker News as well.

------
deepnotderp
eetimes and semiengineering as well as r/hardware (although it's a lot less
technical) can be interesting

------
labdsf
[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) is similar to HN, but has tags, so
you can limit your scope to hardware:
[https://lobste.rs/t/hardware](https://lobste.rs/t/hardware)

~~~
nickpsecurity
It's true but we have barely any hardware news over there either. There's some
cool projects in embedded, emulators, etc you might see on occasion. You're
not going to learn hardware for the most part. There's also very few
commenters in general much less for hardware.

So, it's a nice, high-signal, tech-focused site that a subset of HN readers
will enjoy. It's not the site to get hardware advise or HDL from.

------
mej10
There isn't as much of a pop culture around hardware, hence less news.

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arca_vorago
HardForum

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pokemongoaway
Good question! We need one! HardOCP used to have some things... And the very
first high-end/professional HW benchmarking websites were inspiring.

I think if we could get a couple engineers from each HW manufacturer from
different departments to help put together articles, then I think one as
entertaining as HN could be built. People just don't hash out HW specs like
they used to - and we need a resurgence via an injection of top-skilled
onslaught articles written by the actual innovations of today. I'm happy to
help coerce them to participate in such an adventure - if some of you will
help me :)

------
yuhong
This reminds me of
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Ram/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ram/) and the idea of
a DRAM subreddit that deals with DRAM like DDR3 and DDR4, hopefully with DRAM
experts.

~~~
ktta
That subs front page has a ton of spam, which was submitted a year ago, so I
wouldn't suggest it.

EDIT: On further inspection I think that sub is about the truck 'RAM' and
other things.

~~~
yuhong
The point is to take over the subreddit. alienth is one of the mods.

