Hackaday Hacked!

October 19, 2024 by Elliot Williams 200 Comments

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 hackers who get featured here, because after all they are the people doing the work that gives us something to read and write about. The whole point of the comment section is for you all to help them, or other Hackaday readers who want to follow in their footsteps.

Someone decided to let loose a comment-reporting attack. It works like this: you hit the “report comment” button on a given comment multiple times from multiple different IP addresses, and our system sends the comments back to moderation until a human editor can re-approve them. Given the context of an article about moderation, most everyone whose comment disappeared thought that we were behind it. When more than 300 comments were suddenly sitting in the moderation queue, our weekend editors figured something was up and started un-flagging comments as fast as they could. Order was eventually restored, but it was ugly for a while.

We’ve had these attacks before, but probably only a handful of times over the last ten years, and there’s basically nothing we can do to prevent them that won’t also prevent you all from flagging honestly abusive or spammy comments. (For which, thanks! It helps keep Hackaday’s comments clean.) Why doesn’t it happen all the time? Most of you all are just good people. Thanks for that, too!

But despite the interruption, we got a good discussion started about how to make a comment section thrive. A valid critique of our current system that was particularly evident during the hack is that the reported comment mechanism is entirely opaque. A “your comment is being moderated” placeholder would be a lot nicer than simply having the comment disappear. We’ll have to look into that.

You were basically divided down the middle about whether an upvote/downvote system like on Reddit or Slashdot would serve us well. Those tend to push more constructive comments up to the top, but they also create a popularity contest that can become its own mini-game, and that’s not necessarily always a good thing. Everyone seemed pretty convinced that our continuing to allow anonymous comments is the right choice, and we think it is simply because it removes a registration burden when someone new wants to write something insightful.

What else? If you could re-design the Hackaday comment section from scratch, what would you do? Or better yet, do you have any examples of similar (tech) communities that are particularly well run? How do they do it?

We spend our time either writing and searching for cool hacks, or moderating, and you can guess which we’d rather. At the end of the day, our comments are made up of Hackaday readers. So thanks to all of you who have, over the last week, thought twice and kept it nice.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

October 12, 2024 by Elliot Williams 399 Comments

[Editor’s Note: After we posted this, we got hit by a comment-report attack, and about 1,000 (!) comments across the whole site got sent back into the moderation queue on Saturday. We’ve since re-instated them all, but that took a lot of work.

About halfway down the comments in this article, the majority of comments are “hey, why did you delete this?” We didn’t, and they should be all good now. We debated removing the “try deleting this!” comments, but since we didn’t delete them in the first place, we thought we should just leave them. It makes a royal mess of any discussion, and created a lot more heat than light, which is unfortunate.]

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 “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)

What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.

And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.

It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!

Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!

We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.

Where Is The End Of DIY?

October 5, 2024 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around you right now, you’d probably be able to recreate about 0% of it again from first principles.

Smelting lead and building a cellphone are two sides of coin, in my mind. The process of getting lead out of galena is simple enough to comprehend, but it’s messy and dangerous in practice. Cellphones, on the other hand, are so monumentally complex that I’d wager that no single person could even describe all of the parts in sufficient detail to reproduce them. That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech – the only way to build a cellphone is to split the complicated task into many subsystems.

Smelting lead is a bad DIY project because it’s simple in principle, but prohibitive in practice. Building a cellphone from the ground up is incomprehensible in principle, but ironically entirely doable in practice if you’re willing to buy into some abstractions.

Indeed, last week we saw a nearly completely open-source build of a simple smartphone, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. The cell modem, for instance, is a black box. It’s an abstract device that you can feed data to and read data from, and it handles the radio parts of the phone that would take forever to design from scratch. But you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where the limits of DIY are in your project, where you’re willing to accept the abstraction and move on, can be critical to getting it done.

Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want the cell modem to be like smelting lead – something that’s possible to understand in principle but just not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are some folks out there who hack on cell modem firmware and others who could do the radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I’d have to admit that the essential complexity of the module simply makes it worth treating as a black box. It’s very probably the practical limit of DIY.

What’s The Deal With AI Art?

September 28, 2024 by Elliot Williams 103 Comments

A couple weeks ago, we had a kerfuffle here on Hackaday: A writer put out a piece with AI-generated headline art. It was, honestly, pretty good, but it was also subject to all of the usual horrors that get generated along the way. If you have played around with any of the image generators you know the AI-art uncanny style, where it looks good enough at first glance, but then you notice limbs in the wrong place if you look hard enough. We replaced it shortly after an editor noticed.

The story is that the writer couldn’t find any nice visuals to go with the blog post, with was about encoding data in QR codes and printing them out for storage. This is a problem we have frequently here, actually. When people write up a code hack, for instance, there’s usually just no good image to go along with it. Our writers have to get creative. In this case, he tossed it off to Stable Diffusion.

Some commenters were afraid that this meant that we were outsourcing work from our fantastic, and very human, art director Joe Kim, whose trademark style you’ve seen on many of our longer-form original articles. Of course we’re not! He’s a genius, and when we tell him we need some art about topics ranging from refining cobalt to Wimshurst machines to generate static electricity, he comes through. I think that all of us probably have wanted to make a poster out of one or more of his headline art pieces. Joe is a treasure.

But for our daily blog posts, which cover your works, we usually just use a picture of the project. We can’t ask Joe to make ten pieces of art per day, and we never have. At least as far as Hackaday is concerned, AI-generated art is just as good as finding some cleared-for-use clip art out there, right?

Except it’s not. There is a lot of uncertainty about the data that the algorithms are trained on, whether the copyright of the original artists was respected or needed to be, ethically or legally. Some people even worry that the whole thing is going to bring about the end of Art. (They worried about this at the introduction of the camera as well.) But then there’s also the extra limbs, and AI-generated art’s cliche styles, which we fear will get old and boring after we’re all saturated with them.

So we’re not using AI-generated art as a policy for now, but that’s not to say that we don’t see both the benefits and the risks. We’re not Luddites, after all, but we are also in favor of artists getting paid for their work, and of respect for the commons when people copyleft license their images. We’re very interested to see how this all plays out in the future, but for now, we’re sitting on the sidelines. Sorry if that means more headlines with colorful code!

Against Elitism

September 21, 2024 by Elliot Williams 104 Comments

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 against that notion, because I believe it’s just plain wrong.

One of the most important jobs of a Hackaday writer is to find the best parts of a project and bring that to the fore, and I’d like to show you what I mean by example. Take this post from two weeks ago that was nominally about rescuing a broken beloved keyboard by replacing its brain with a modern microcontroller. On its surface, this should be easy – figure out the matrix pinout and wire it up. Flash in a keyboard firmware and you’re done.

Of course we all love a good hardware-rescue story, and other owners of busted Sculpt keyboards will be happy to see it. But there’s something here for the rest of us too! To figure out the keyboard matrix, it would take a lot of probing at a flat-flex cable, so [TechBeret] made a sweet breakout board that pulled all the signals off of the flat-flex and terminated them in nicely labelled wires. Let this be your reminder that making a test rig / jig can make these kind of complicated problems simpler.

Once the pinout was figured out, and a working prototype made, it was time to order a neat PCB and box it up. The other great trick was the use of 3D-printed mockups of the PCBs to make sure that they fit inside the case, the holes were all in the right places, and that the flat-flex lay flat. With how easily PCB design software will spit out a 3D model these days, you absolutely should take the ten minutes to verify the physical layout of each revision before sending out your Gerbers.

So was this a 1337 hack? Maybe not. But was it worth reading for these two sweet tidbits, regardless of whether you’re doing a keyboard hack? Absolutely! And that’s exactly the kind of opportunity that elitists shut themselves off from, and it’s the negative aspect of elitism what we try to fight against here at Hackaday.

Fun And Failure

September 7, 2024 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

My sister is a beekeeper, or maybe a meta-beekeper. She ends up making more money by breeding and selling new queen bees to other beekeepers than she does by selling honey, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t also process the sweet stuff from time to time. She got a free steam-heated oscillating hot knife, used for cutting the waxy caps off of the tops of the cells before spinning the combs down to extract honey, and she thought it might be easier to use than her trusty hand-held electric hot knife.

The oscillating knife, which was built something like a century ago, hadn’t been used in decades. All of the grease had turned to glue, and the large v-belt wheel that made it go was hard to turn by hand, and the motor was missing anyway. So she gave it to my father and me as a project. How could we resist?

We found the original manual on the Internet, which said that it would run from any 1/2 hp motor, or could be optionally driven by a takeoff wheel from a tractor – unfortunately not an option in my sister’s honey house. But we did find a 3/4 hp bench grinder at Harbor Freight that conveniently fit inside the case, and bought the smallest v-belt pulley wheel that would fit the grinder’s arbor. We thought we were geniuses, but when we hooked it all up, it just stalled.

We spent more than a few hours taking the mechanism apart. It was basically an eccentric shaft with a bearing on the end, and the bearing ran back and forth in the groove of a sliding mechanism that the knife blade attached to. As mentioned above, everything was gunked, so we took it all apart. The bearing was seized, so we freed that up by getting the sand out of the balls. The bearing couldn’t move freely in the slide either, but we filed that down until it just moved freely without noticeable play. We added grease from this century, and reassembled it. It turned fine by hand.

But with the belt and motor attached, the mechanism still had just enough friction to stall out the motor. Of course we wrapped some rope around the shaft and pull-started it, and it made a hell of a racket, nearly vibrated itself off the table, and we could see that the marvelous zinc-coated frame that held it all together was racking under the tension. It would require a wholly new housing to be viable, and we hadn’t even figured out a source of steam to heat the knife.

In short, it was more trouble than it was worth. So we packed up the bench grinder in the original container, and returned it no-worse-for-wear to the Freight. But frankly, we had a fantastic time playing around with a noble machine from a long-gone past. We got it “working” even if that state was unworkable, and we were only out the cost of the small v-belt pulley. Who says all of your projects have to be a success to be fun?