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Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

ryanwaggoner.com

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Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#2

Post by replicatorblog »

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.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#5

Post by ryanwaggoner »

replicatorblog wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#7

Post by noonespecial »

replicatorblog wrote: post #2

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.

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

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#8

Post by NickPollard »

replicatorblog wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.

#9

Post by replicatorblog »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #5
replicatorblog wrote: post #2

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.

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,…

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 ;-)

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