Category: Rants

Well, that was “fun”. Last week, we wrote a newsletter post about the state of Hackaday’s comments. We get good ones and bad ones, and almost all the time, we leave you all up to your own devices. But every once in a while, it’s good to remind people to be nice to our fellow […]
You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like […]
The modern web has become difficult to navigate without ad blocking software. Ford now has a patent that would bring the ads we hate to your vehicle’s infotainment system. [via PCMag] Ford has already replied to criticism with the usual corporate spiel of patents not necessarily being the direction the company will go with future […]
A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo projects, or a feeling that something “isn’t good enough for Hackaday”. But I really want to push back […]
You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” While that’s catchy, it is really an aphorism that encourages us to consider the viewpoints of others. […]
Some of the entries we got into the Tiny Games Contest have been really mind-blowing. Just as you think you’ve seen it all, for instance, alnwlsn comes along and mills the DIP-package ATtiny84 and embeds a complete Simon game in the space normally wasted by all that plastic overmolding. It’s the tiniest, and most gonzo, […]
Programming languages are generally defined as a more human-friendly way to program computers than using raw machine code. Within the realm of these languages there is a wide range of how close the programmer is allowed to get to the bare metal, which ultimately can affect the performance and efficiency of the application. One metric […]
The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state of the art in hardware hacking for all. At its worst — well, let’s just say that at least it’s not the YouTube comments […]
If you’re like us, you’ve studied the mathematician [Euler], but all you really remember is that you pronounce his name like “oiler” and not much else. [Welch Labs], on the other hand, not only remembers what he learned about logarithms and imaginary numbers but also has a beautiful video with helpful 3D graphics to explain […]
Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova] has been on a multi-year kick to make technology more personal by making it herself, and has just now started writing about it. Her main point rings especially true in this day and age, where a lot of the tech devices we could use to help us are instead used to […]