"I wish HN were less biased towards ... fast-moving startups ... I do wish there was more on embedded, enterprise, real time and game development."
I agree with you in general but specifically its not an either or relationship. I wish there were more coverage of fast moving start-uppy entrepreneur topics in the embedded and game fields.
So there's a small company called micro-nova in Detroit (Detroit?) that ships a nifty little xylinx dev board in a DIP-40 form factor and I love the idea. I have no connection with these guys personal or economic just bringing up as an example of fast moving entrepreneur small business startup-py type embedded story not covered on HN.
Pretty much everything adafruit, evil mad scientist, and dangerous prototypes does should get a story on HN by the above criteria.
Spiderweb software recently (like last week) released their most recent game Avadon 2 an awesome deep little RPG. Admittedly it is not a "new tech" story because their focus is on story and gameplay, which is excellent. As far as entrepreneurship goes, spiderweb is basically one dude. Again no personal or economic connection to me, just an example of something that should be on HN but isn't.
X-Plane, another one man entrepreneur did get some minimal coverage on HN when he got sued by some patent trolls for basically porting his simulator to Android. So HN is not entirely devoid of all entrepreneurial gaming news, just mostly.
Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?
> Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?
I don't know if this is an actionable problem, as it depends on the interests of the community, which are, in turn, governed by who they are and what they do. If other types of developers join HN in large numbers, the situation might change, and it will benefit even web-based SV startups, too.
But there's another problem. A few years ago I was working for the defense industry, and hadn't even heard of HN. We were doing distributed, fault tolerant systems with graceful degradation – things that have since become very interesting for "web" (in the wide sense) developers. Obviously, much of the work done there is classified, but even the parts that aren't don't get discussed much because that community hardly blogs at all.
So it's not just a function of what gets submitted or upvoted, but of what "content" (how I loathe that word) is out there, and developers in other industries just don't write of their experience as much (which is a shame because we could all benefit from that). Once in a while we're very lucky to have some technology leak from the often maligned (here on HN) "enterprise". Look how much we've learned from Erlang, that for years was the sole domain of telecom. Or Clojure, which is a result of Rich Hickey's experience in projects that are very far removed from web startups.
Click "new" on the orange menu bar across the top and scroll down looking for what I recently posted. You are right, some of these FPGA technologies should get more coverage because a lot of hackers could build cool startups around hardware as well as software. But don't complain about it. Find articles on cool stuff and submit them. Many will be ignored but eventually people will catch on that there is something worthwhile in hardware hacking. Just keep plugging away at it.
I agree with you in general but specifically its not an either or relationship. I wish there were more coverage of fast moving start-uppy entrepreneur topics in the embedded and game fields.
So there's a small company called micro-nova in Detroit (Detroit?) that ships a nifty little xylinx dev board in a DIP-40 form factor and I love the idea. I have no connection with these guys personal or economic just bringing up as an example of fast moving entrepreneur small business startup-py type embedded story not covered on HN.
Pretty much everything adafruit, evil mad scientist, and dangerous prototypes does should get a story on HN by the above criteria.
Spiderweb software recently (like last week) released their most recent game Avadon 2 an awesome deep little RPG. Admittedly it is not a "new tech" story because their focus is on story and gameplay, which is excellent. As far as entrepreneurship goes, spiderweb is basically one dude. Again no personal or economic connection to me, just an example of something that should be on HN but isn't.
X-Plane, another one man entrepreneur did get some minimal coverage on HN when he got sued by some patent trolls for basically porting his simulator to Android. So HN is not entirely devoid of all entrepreneurial gaming news, just mostly.
Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?