Someone shared our project on Hacker News. Which is cool! They shared my individual blog though, and not the project page, so most traffic went to my tiny home server (which kept serving the static site for over 10k views!). My server crashed then somehow (could be also when our WiFi box goes down, my server can’t reconnect, and I have to manually reboot it), and I was out of town, so I probably lost a bit of traffic to the site because I wanted to self-host the hardware… anyway. This then also ended up on Hackaday
Here you can see what my blog normally looks like, and when the Hacker News article went live…
Our project on Hacker News/Hackaday:
We had a lot of questions:
Some haters:
Some valid concerns:
Some people “understood the assignment”:
A nice comparison to the RepRap project
, saying how they debugged in the open to achieve a more affordable result than would’ve happened with VC funding:
A nice discussion on the lack of consumer success with flow batteries:
I think both commenters are speaking some truth, but I also think the second commenter overestimates the technological development level of flow batteries. Many companies are simultaneously reinventing the wheel right now (if they haven’t gone bankrupt already). I do think companies target B2B sectors first because it’s “easier” than B2C.
And most importantly, some strong interest!
My response
Although we work in the open, our project wasn’t “ready” for the public eye (is it ever ready though?). I hadn’t written a roadmap, FAQ, anything like that, since this project is entirely in my spare time while I work a full-time professional research job on a different topic. This Hacker News development, while unplanned, was a nice kick in the butt to get things going. It was also a great indicator of interest in our project. We also had a few new financial contributors to our Open Collective!
Here is a more official project post that contains everything we compiled in response to the Hacker News post:
Also viewable here: https://fbrc.dev/posts/roadmap-faq-forum/
Thanks everyone for your interest.
Citation
@online{pollard_smith2024,
author = {Pollard Smith, Kirk},
title = {Response to Our Open-Source Flow Battery Project on {Hacker}
{News,} {Hackaday:} Haters, Fans, Time to Get to Work!},
date = {2024-10-14},
url = {https://dualpower.supply/posts/hacker-news/},
langid = {en}
}