Dear HackADay

I have been with you from the very start. Even since much has changed you keept the spirit.
Thank you for that, thank you very much.

Regards
yet another happy reader.

if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

this site ain’t broke.

I like some of the ideas posed.

I wish there was a Hack A Day forum. I could use a place similar to a Ben Heck type site. I have a few simple projects that I need to find someone to help build and usually a forum like that is a good place to get information or get someone to build for me.

Great Job HAD, glad to see you putting some effort into improvements. Also nice to see you prove the trolls wrong about the content.

@MS619,
Please go back to wasting your potential? I’m not sure what you are saying here. They never put enough effort in, now that they are, you are complaining? wtf.

i say again better too much than too little. i will never ever complain about too many posts. i can spare the extra scroll wheel motion, i can burn that calorie. and i’m to lazy to hold down an extra button to capitalize my i’s

I like the site though I definitely prefer reading about more complicated technically detailed projects. Why not let the rss be tag filtered and give yourselves the option to have an unfilterable post? That way people could add tag=!teardown to their rss url and drop those posts.

People keep using the word “complex” to describe hacks that appeal to the more knowledgeable readers. I might be nitpicking semantics here, but I don’t think this to be the case. I think the “brilliantly simple” hacks are the ones that appeal to everyone, beginner to advanced. The perfect example was the attiny13 that emulated an RFID tag. It had just two components: an MCU and a single inductor. The inductor acted as an antenna, a power source (rectified by the I/O pin protection diodes), and the clock source. If I was asked for the perfect example of a hack, I’d point to this.

As long as stories like that continue to be posted, I’ll keep reading. I don’t care for the yet-another-Arduino-powered-noise-machine-with-blinky-lights posts as much, but I know that brilliant hacks are few and far between.

Just don’t let this site turn into lifehacker.

The changes sound like positive steps, taken for the right reasons, and I fully support them.

Accepting that different people have different skill-levels and different tastes in hackery, I agree there’s some mileage in the idea of making filtered RSS feeds if it’s feasible – that way the ones who run on rails and only like one sort of hack can read only one sort of hack without the rest of us having to listen to them bellyaching about everything else… that way we can all enjoy what you’re doing without the naysayers continually pissing in the coffee. :-)

Hey team- remember that people are way more likely to comment when annoyed than when pleased. I suspect that the “not a hack” crowd and those who post threats about not reading the blog if some imagined standard of technical difficulty isn’t met are a small but vocal minority of readers. (The threat of not reading something is pretty silly in itself, come to think of it.) I check HAD every day, and it keeps me totally juiced and inspired. I even canceled my subscription to Make magazine– with project porn this good, who needs print?
I welcome the addition of more social features, I just hope the haters don’t have the team too worried.

h-a-d project kits for popular projects would be really cool, I’m guessing they would sell fairly well. Over all I dig the new suggested features. A forum is a really good idea.

Just make an Arduino section already and get it out of the main page. It irks me the way BoingBoing goes on and on about “copyfight” blech.
As per the “trolls” on here: way to Godwin a difference of opinion. If we were all “yes men” then we would never open our gear or wake up the mods enough to overhauling not only the page, but also the content. The “trolls” were merely questioning why somethings were considered hacks if they exist in the collective conscious of every carbon-based life form. As per the racist comments I saw a 4:1 ratio of one person making a negative comment towards “a downtrodden” and then four others jump on him because he is middle class; as if because he has money he could anymore choose where he was born. Drop it. If you want to use that argument, then all of you armchair EEs with schooling in the field are not real hackers either applying your store bought education lol.
A little fire is good now and then, it gets things cooking as we see here now.
I really did enjoy the page earlier but as others have noted, it changed over time. While there are still some REALLY neat hacks now and then it kind of shifted to http://www.PICAXEDUINOaday.com lol.
Anyhoo best to all involved in getting HAD back where it belongs :)

I’d love to see a comment rating system similar to engadget so we can bury trolls. BTW I enjoy HAD I check it at least once a day.

Excellent stuff – love the site and very pleased the hear the ‘question’ section is coming. Shame not a forum (from the sounds of it) but still, great idea!

I am very non technical, but love reading about the stuff that people get up – and slowly inspiring me to get technical!

Caleb,

As a casual reader (and most definitely NOT a hacker) – If you keep posting, I’ll keep reading.

I’d love to see projects that included coding to be broken down into a languages category.

For you guys who think that projects should be derated or even banned from Hackaday because they contain an arduino, let me say this:

I agree! I am tired of seeing the same tools used over and over again! So, not only would I ban anything that uses an arduino, for the same reason, I’d ban any project that was built using a hammer, saw, tin ships, or a drill!

Oh, I especially hate those drills! Every lame newbie thinks he is some kind of 3l33t hacker because he uses a drill!

No more plastic! No more metal! I keep seeing solder used… over and over again. Geez! Puh-leez! Can we move on? And screws and nuts… give it up, already. Enough with the screws and nuts! And don’t let me catch you post another so-called “hack” that contains a transistor. Transistors are for art-tards.

Atoms are OK, though. You can still post hacks that involve atoms… but nothing else!

I’d better stop… I’m starting to froth.

Huge love to all at hack-a-day, whatever you do; editors, contributors, trolls – you’ve all been making me chuckle for years and I wish you all the best with the new plans, arduino implemented or otherwise ;-)

So to add more, please don’t implement a CMS though…I started taking a look around instructables.com the other day and its a f*cking mess…HAD has a nice simple layout, I visit every day and can quickly check what has been added and I can use the tags when I partially break some gadget and what some ideas of what I can do with it.

HAD, I’ve been with you from the beginning. Of late you’ve been “dumbing” the site down. Don’t do this, otherwise you’ll end up as just be another in a pool of many. I don’t want to come here and see every other post about iPhone or Arduino. Keep your core followers and you’ll live forever. Do that by staying true to your roots.

OK, now I need to go look at the Content Management/Analysis system I had at a previous job.

The system was nice, but not something I was familiar with at the time. Essentially, the system let you (a registered user) “lock-on” to other users that you tended to agree with. If these other users flagged an article highly, then it appeared in a customized site feed. If they low-balled it, the site feed only showed you the headline on the top page.

The site worked because it was incredibly similar to Hackaday, as it is displayed now. The home page was a dynamically generated stream of “articles”, and you could browse it. It also had custom pages generated for specific users (the “Ranked Highly by Peers” page was just one example). The system was a JOY to use, and delivered information relevant to my specialty, while delivering general information that the entire user-group needed to know.

A high-caliber Thank You for opening the ability to ask questions for newbies or someone like me, a born-again hack. I used to be quite proficient at several types of mods and hacks. But my hacking education took a way back seat to heavy-duty, formal, post-secondary 6-yr stint in college in a non-techie field. And then that was followed by a teaching job where my hacks were always last-minute necessities and only for providing low-level science equipment when the REAL equipment wasn’t available.

Now I feel totally out of my element in the hacking world and completely in awe of even some of the simpler things I see on Hack-a-Day! I definitely need a RE-primer into the world! I have so many parts and things I’d love to repurpose and use in novel ways… I can’t wait. (I’m friggin’ “giddy.” [Yes, I really said that… sad, huh?)