[HN Gopher] DeskHog, an open-source developer toy
___________________________________________________________________
DeskHog, an open-source developer toy
Author : constantinum
Score : 250 points
Date : 2025-06-11 13:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (posthog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (posthog.com)
| bitwize wrote:
| Hog Speed. You're a hedgehog that runs fast. Sounds like a lame
| game concept with niche appeal at best.
|
| This thing looks seriously cute and next to useless. Like a mini
| Chumby. A perfect gadget for "the street to find its own uses
| for".
| rideontime wrote:
| I still can't believe this company is named "post hog."
| joshdavham wrote:
| Why is it called PostHog anyways?
| vasco wrote:
| If only there was a tool for finding answers to our
| questions:
|
| https://posthog.com/docs/posthog-
| direction#:~:text=PostHog%2...
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| But then there'd be no one for you to be condescending
| towards!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| What a blissful prospect.
| vasco wrote:
| You underestimate my ability to be annoying.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I don't think that's the full answer. Post Hog is internet
| parlance for "upload a picture of your penis". Someone had
| a sense of humor when they picked that name.
| thih9 wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar with the slang but even without it the
| name is weird.
|
| The "hog" alone would never make me think of a hedgehog
| instead of a regular hog.
|
| > a domesticated pig, especially a castrated male reared
| for slaughter
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hog
| wink wrote:
| Ah, "spotted hog", as my English teacher (6th grade or
| so?, ESL) had said: for some reason this is one term most
| pupils will remember, no matter how unimportant.
|
| Guess he was right, or maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I used chatGPT to ask this question at first and it spat
| out nonsense so I just decided to pose the question here
| haha. I guess I should've just RTFM'd as they say.
| vasco wrote:
| I copy pasted your comment onto Google and it was the
| first result.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| TIL highlights work perfectly in Firefox.
| julianeon wrote:
| Judging by the amount of free publicity it generates, I think
| it was the right choice.
| jnsie wrote:
| Post hog ergo propter hog
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| 27 lawyers in the room, anyone know...?
| harshitaneja wrote:
| After hoc, therefore something else hoc...
| sibeliuss wrote:
| This thing is rad.
|
| So many props on the Series D fundraise. Well deserved. (Best
| company ever.)
| knowitnone wrote:
| how many are you buying?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Can it play Doom?
|
| >...We're working on it.
|
| Seriously though, can a ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather[1] (dual-
| core Xtensa @ 240 MHz, 512KB built-in RAM, 2MB external PSRAM,
| 4MB Flash) play Doom? As usual with these microcontroller-type
| things, it looks like storage poses a harder limit than compute,
| but maybe just a bit of Doom could be crammed in?
|
| [1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/5691
| tecleandor wrote:
| Seems like you can do it using Retro-Go, that's using a port of
| PrBoom 2.5.0. (No sound, though)
|
| https://www.hackster.io/naveenbskumar/yes-arduino-nano-esp32...
| shakna wrote:
| Espressif do publish one [0] themselves, but that requires
| extra RAM - 4MB, not the two this seems to have.
|
| So its probably doable, but may require a few modifications.
|
| [0] https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom
| bradleykingz wrote:
| Working at Posthog must be fun
| hugs wrote:
| you saying that is probably the reason they did this.
| jatins wrote:
| Developers: "Ha I don't fall for silly marketing"
|
| Also, devs: "They are shipping a toy, must be a fun place to
| work"
|
| It may be a fun place to work fwiw, but this is just marketing
| not something a team of engineers decided to ship between jira
| tickets!
| fuziontech wrote:
| This was literally something someone did on the side between
| other stuff. We don't use Jira.
| jatins wrote:
| I stand corrected. Sorry for cynical take
| fuziontech wrote:
| It is :3 It's exactly how you think it would be like working
| here.
|
| And we are hiring. Come join us! https://posthog.com/careers
| fnord77 wrote:
| FYI, my Pihole is blocking this domain.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You can't fit posthog in your pihole?
|
| Try more ClotdMilk-Fat.
| enlightens wrote:
| They do web analytics so definitely end up on block lists for
| people who don't want to be tracked.
|
| (I've used PostHog on several projects and feel that they are
| better for privacy than, say, GA, but understand why people
| would block them)
| joshdavham wrote:
| This looks really cool, but I'm not really sure why they made it.
| PostHog is primarily web analytics software from what I
| understand. Why build hardware?
| vasco wrote:
| From the looks of it, for fun.
| daniloc wrote:
| Here's the truth: it was a weird idea from our Slack - build a
| tamagotchi! - that I took too seriously. In a couple of
| evenings, I had a prototype working. Then everyone was so
| excited we just ran with it.
|
| Our audience is developers: we make you happy, you'll love us
| and make us the first part of every project you do, on your own
| and at the workplace.
|
| Meanwhile, man, hardware is just so much fun. But most folks
| have no idea how much easier it is to build now. Basically, if
| you can use open source software, you already know how to hack
| on microcontroller.
|
| So this foray into developer toys is about helping you have fun
| with something that maybe you wouldn't have played with
| otherwise.
|
| But you can also display real-time PostHog data on it, out of
| the box. Which means you can expense it. A merch win-win.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Did you make an HN account just to reply to this? If so, I
| think that was really cool of you to do!
| daniloc wrote:
| It was a good question! Thanks for asking.
| Aeolun wrote:
| There's a walking little toy on my posthog dashboard already. I
| have no idea why they made it, but I sure do appreciate it.
| h1fra wrote:
| I was expecting them to display posthog metrics on it, but not
| even
| swyx wrote:
| i would buy it if the screen looked a bit better. based on this
| website it looks really small and not super useful for the "keep
| analytics up on screen" usecase
| fuziontech wrote:
| Sounds like something that might show up on a DeskHog Pro
| seveibar wrote:
| Hardware is becoming more accessible, so more software companies
| are going to release hardware products or build hardware products
| for internal purposes. The future of physical world innovation
| isn't going to come from legacy hardware corpos, but from
| software companies that run hardware experiments that become real
| hardware products. Hats off to Posthog for making it cool!
|
| The reason hardware has sucked in the past is poor tooling. But
| now open-source solutions are getting pretty good, and AI is
| covering many knowledge gaps.
| fidotron wrote:
| This is the truth - my recent work has dragged me into doing
| exactly this, building hardware "giveaways" to promote SaaS in
| niche industries, and enabling the backend devs to have an API
| they can understand to control it.
|
| It has made me wonder why such things haven't been more popular
| attached to Grafana. For example, take a LED strip and use that
| as a gauge or similar. Many devs seem to fetishize screens and
| enjoy extra displays in their environments, while normies (at
| least the feedback from the recent work) have been telling me
| they actively want to get away from any screens. OTOH using LED
| strips rapidly turns anywhere into a vape shop.
| oersted wrote:
| Could you elaborate on these hardware projects? They sound
| cool.
|
| If your workflow lets you crank out hardware quickly and
| cheaply enough for just a marketing stunt, you must be using
| methodologies we could learn from.
|
| I'm not convinced developers just like normal screens though,
| tactile/analogue widgets are always cool and welcome!
| fidotron wrote:
| It's not my place to go into details as to what it is at
| this time, and there are other people involved on here!
|
| The build is neither cheap nor fast, though the proof of
| concept was. If you are aiming at a dev/maker audience
| telling them to configure things with ESP Flasher will
| work. If it's for some random person then it won't, and the
| complexity explodes.
|
| I would caution anyone going into this because almost
| everyone you speak to will radically underestimate the
| difference between the proof of concept and a shippable
| product, even a giveaway one, with the consequence that
| most people respond as if it's a high school science
| project and not real work.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > radically underestimate the difference between the
| proof of concept and a shippable product
|
| LOL. I had my boss call me out on this once. I made an
| offhand comment about doing something "in a few days"
| while on a customer call (yeah, I should have known
| better), leaving him to patiently explain to the customer
| that I meant a basic PoC and that would actually take us
| quite a few weeks to productize after we got it working
| :-)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > you must be using methodologies we could learn from
|
| Not necessarily. You usually just need to know where
| to/what to buy.
|
| e.g., someone on Reddit posted about being able to automate
| taking a photograph every time someone walked by. Turns out
| that I had an unused Raspberry Pi and a cheap webcam AND a
| passive-IR sensor. Half an hour of research into Linux
| command line webcam control and an hour later I had a proof
| of concept. Just lucked out that I have a well-stocked junk
| box.
|
| But for most quick hardware things I'd turn to Arduino. I'm
| a professional embedded systems engineer. Arduino makes
| prototyping stuff that would have taken weeks or months
| just 10 years ago, doable in hours.
|
| If for some reason, Arduino wasn't around, then I could use
| the "dev boards" that all microcontroller manufacturers
| provide to let you learn about their systems. Generally,
| they're below a $20 price point and come with enough I/O to
| do something useful and tooling is free.
|
| I could probably go on, but there's enough stuff here to
| google if you're really interested :-)
| andylynch wrote:
| I'd love to set up stuff like this, but our IT security guys
| would really not like the risk with everything else on their
| plate!
| fidotron wrote:
| They're right too. "Let's install random drivers to get the
| USB serial to work" etc.
|
| Working on it was one of the motivations for
| https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella where I'm basically
| trying to control more from the access point since I
| believe these devices need strict separation from
| everything else. (That code also is essentially a golang
| superset of the C++ on the device).
| joshvm wrote:
| These do exist but they're remarkably expensive and the
| infrastructure is apparently terrible. Several companies sell
| "smart led displays" that people use to show their follower
| counts while streaming. There's no reason you couldn't make
| one and have it subscribe to ntfy or something like that. But
| adoption seems ropey because the use cases are always clocks
| and $200 for a screen is a big ask for most people.
|
| See the "tidybyt" https://www.theverge.com/23303371/tidbyt-
| review-desk-accesso...
|
| There are anecdotes about offices having a "build status" LED
| and you would get shamed if your commit broke the CI.
| eichin wrote:
| We had a "smart display" that was a wall-projector that
| someone was throwing out, a raspi zero and some python code
| that used SDL to display some numbers (in a huge font) from
| a requests fetch of a csv file. Once we moved out of
| incubator space and into a real office, we duplicated it so
| that it was visible in more places (at the time, terribly
| under-spec projectors were $150ish and melted/burned within
| a year of 24/7 operation; after a couple of iterations of
| that we'd grown enough to have an actual analytics team
| that got a big screen and a dashboard up in the kitchen -
| but noone really looked at it, the thing about the
| projector version was that it had One Big Number that Went
| Up and so it was easy to care about.)
|
| Since it was widely visible it occasionally got augmented
| with "N days to <critical deadline>", usually conference
| appearances.
|
| Also, originally it was unfunded (free raspis, trashpicked
| projectors) but when it first went away due to projector
| meltdown, the legendarily cheap CEO showed up with a
| replacement, because he really liked having The Number on
| display.
|
| (Didn't have build status, but it _did_ change from green
| to red on certain kinds of infrastructure failure, which
| wasn 't as useful as it sounds.)
| fidotron wrote:
| > the infrastructure is apparently terrible
|
| This is unsurprising. LED displays/arrays/strips involve
| using enough power that a software specialist is unlikely
| to manage it safely without getting decent at electronics.
| Conversely, the hardware people can throw just enough
| software together to make the happy path work, but not
| scale it up let alone reliably.
|
| There are some people genuinely superb at both domains, but
| at some point they sucked at one or the other. The trick is
| to be ready to absorb information from both sides, but many
| will simply go "hey, it works on the happy path" and move
| on. My personal cutoff is whenever it goes over 12v or
| 500mA I know I'll be getting a second opinion.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and
| portable music players. It's neat to have dedicated devices
| that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device
| that can do all the things. It's easier to transport, easier
| to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability
| perspective it's probably also generating less waste,
| although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science
| to confirm that notion.
|
| I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of
| LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that
| they're actually better at anything, but just that they're
| kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to
| consult them than to consult dedicated sources of
| information.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing
| well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all
| the things.
|
| ... less well.
| pjerem wrote:
| In the meantime we've lost pretty much any innovation in
| the physical space.
|
| I have a great illustration with a simple product I cannot
| find : a _modern_ ... alarm clock.
|
| I've been searching for the ultimate alarm clock in a while
| with the following list of must have :
|
| - FM/AM _and_ DAB+
|
| - Decent sound/speaker
|
| - Nice ringtones (with decent sound) and not just beep beep
| beep or a radio station ...
|
| - A brightness suitable for an alarm clock (that's
| something we aren't able to make anymore it seems or nobody
| cares anymore)
|
| - Physical buttons that you can use in the dark
|
| - Good build quality
|
| And that's all.
|
| It's not an unreasonable list of features. In fact, most
| alarm clocks on the market have most of those features,
| nothing in this list is exceptional. Yet, I totally fail to
| find one that have it all.
|
| It just feels like objects are all the same now and that
| nobody cares.
|
| Sure, you can use your smartphone as an alarm clock. But
| even if you wanted (I don't) it doesn't check all those
| requirements.
| ValentinPearce wrote:
| At this point I'd settle for one where the button on top
| just lights up the numbers without playing awful
| compressed babbling brook sounds at full volume.
| tetha wrote:
| Mh, this sparked an interesting thought.
|
| For my phone, I'm happy, because it replaced about 6 things
| without losing much quality. I could get myself a better
| camera (my parents in fact have one). I in fact have a more
| compact and repairable MP3 player that runs off SD cards
| and batteries and it still works wonderfully. With the
| death of the 3.5mm audio port that thing can actually drive
| the good headphones better than my phone, heh. But that's
| just more stuff to lug around.
|
| On the other hand, for my hobby music, I by now prefer
| single-purpose things. My audio interface has the job of
| digitalizing audio. These three pedals each have their own
| unique job and function, and I own them for that purpose.
| There is a bunch of very dedicated stuff around, a good
| tuner, a good metronome with googly eyes.
|
| I'm kinda observing the same at work: Sometimes, I just
| want to get rid of a problem. Just throw a magic zero-
| config box at it and have it be gone. And in other contexts
| you want or need to have control over many parameters, and
| then having small, little single purpose things is very,
| very useful.
|
| Some monitoring box very likely would want to err on the
| zero-config magic box I guess?
| Saigonautica wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly!
|
| I like to use the TM1640 and RGB LEDs. It's cheap, works
| well, requires a minimum of external components, and can
| convey a fair amount of information. It can also drive a 16x8
| LED matrix if I do want something screen-like.
|
| Usually I'll control it with a Wi-Fi MCU like the ESP8266 or
| Pi Pico W. Total component cost, including board, sits around
| 5$ each with a minimum quantity of 5.
| thepryz wrote:
| When someone mentions smart devices without screens, I'm
| always reminded of David Rose's work on what he called
| "Enchanted Objects". If you look on YouTube, you should be
| able to find some talks he did at TED and Google highlighting
| his work.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| the options for hobby electronics these days are incredible,
| you can get a microcontroller for under 20 bucks and attach it
| to almost any sensor, light, or display you can imagine -- add
| a little beginner python and it's connected to your smart home
| belmarca wrote:
| This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].
|
| Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to
| teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a
| hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The
| device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and
| publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it
| directly from codeBoot.
|
| BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!
|
| [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blinxinc (working on a
| landing page)
|
| [2]: https://codeboot.org (also working on a landing page)
| doubleorseven wrote:
| i still wish i had a small keyboard with like 9 configurable keys
| that can execute what ever i want like "start debug" or "open tty
| at a specific folder" or "git status a specific repository" and
| so on...
| EricBetts wrote:
| Have you heard of, or considered, a elgato stream deck?
| fader wrote:
| Adafruit makes a keyboard kit that you can assemble and write
| your own macros in Python:
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/5128
| fragmede wrote:
| Macropad keyboarda exist, just need to do the software
| configuration for your particular use case.
|
| I have one with a rotary knob that I hooked up to my debugger
| so that I can step forwards and into fluidly.
| ctxc wrote:
| Brilliant usage of the rotary knob!
| sandebert wrote:
| There are lots of keyboards like that. I use an eight-key
| version that I found on Amazon. Works just fine, no complaints.
| ctxc wrote:
| Hey, the website on your profile is broken.
|
| Btw I did exactly that! I cut (literally) a cheap keyboard at
| the numpad boundary. Installed AHK (Windows) which runs macros
| on button click.
|
| Postits to label each button.
|
| Now I have one of those fancy few-button keyboards that do my
| bidding.
|
| I've been meaning to post it. Would that be interesting?
| themikesanto wrote:
| Yes, please do!
| gala8y wrote:
| Look up "macropads" on the Internetz.
| yRetsyM wrote:
| Something like this
| https://www.mylocalbytes.com/products/localdeck?
| bfors wrote:
| This is probably the one I would get -
| https://protadesigns.com/ It looks great, and also I appreciate
| that it's a one man operation
| RollingRo11 wrote:
| Couple other people suggesting some great options, I'll throw a
| hat in the ring for building your own!
|
| This May Pad kit is great (https://keyhive.xyz/shop/may-pad)
|
| Also great options from keebio
| (https://keeb.io/collections/macropads)
|
| The tidbit is also really cool! (https://nullbits.co/tidbit/)
|
| Again, just options if you feel like this would be a cool
| project and you're cool with doing some soldering. Other people
| have suggested good pre-built solutions, and many macropads can
| do what you're looking for.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Well that's certainly one way to make me want to work at your
| company.
| madh wrote:
| epaper version would be cool
| teraflop wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, this seems like a fun thing to play with. But
| it feels very weird to see so much marketing and branding poured
| into something that's literally just a plastic enclosure and
| software for an off-the-shelf dev board made by somebody else.
|
| Like, the page says:
|
| > Want more hardware? We included an I2C expansion port, just for
| people like you.
|
| No you didn't! Adafruit did! You didn't even add a connector.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| I'm no expert, but it seems like the value add is the firmware
| they wrote to turn this into a more accessible platform.
| Hardware is always composed of other hardware, so "included" is
| not inherently the wrong word, though it maybe takes too much
| credit. In general, the intent feels wholesome to me. As a
| software guy, I had no idea that hardware could be so
| approachable, and I'm suddenly excited about the possibilities.
| teraflop wrote:
| > Hardware is always composed of other hardware
|
| In general I agree, but there is absolutely no composition at
| all happening here. (Unless you count buying a dev board
| that's designed to run on a battery, and plugging a battery
| into it.)
|
| I truly think it's great that they've made software that
| people find approachable. It's the branding of someone else's
| hardware product as their own that rubs me the wrong way.
| They aren't saying things that are technically false, but it
| still feels misleading.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I instantly pictured this being a rubber duck. And then I started
| thinking, how could a virtual rubber duck help you deduce things?
|
| Mostly you'd want it to listen and be supportive I guess.
|
| But maybe, just maybe, could AI somehow summarize a very short
| suggestion or response based on what you say.
|
| That is something I'd buy. Tactile, can be thrown around a bit,
| listens at the press of a button, responds with a random short
| suggestion or idea.
| joshvm wrote:
| That's a fun idea, just have it ask questions like the little
| IQ toys and have a yes/no button. Turns out this works
| reasonably well if you only allow binary responses. If you also
| had an "I'm not sure" or "I don't know how" button it might
| work even better.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6849eb45-6700-800d-ad3b-57458eb5c7...
|
| (Asking chatgpt how to put up shelves without it knowing what
| the task is and only allowing yes/no responses)
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Brainstory was trying to do something similar, but using AI to
| kind of prompt you using Socratic questioning. Seemed like a
| neat idea, but unfortunately it got shut down.
|
| https://github.com/brainstory
|
| Looks like it got turned into a VSCode extension by one of the
| people working on it though, so that's something. Might be
| interesting to try if you already use Copilot:
|
| https://github.com/cassidoo/brainstorm-buddy-extension
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| The beauty of the rubber duck is that that's all it is.
|
| That being said, I'd buy your "live" rubber duck as well. Even
| if it gives mild Furby vibes.
| newman314 wrote:
| While cool, instead of buying this, I wonder if anyone has tried
| to used their Flipper for this use case.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Chuckles in M5stack_
| kreetx wrote:
| Enjoyed the joke in the cookie banner! Have been mildly surprised
| how people controlling larger websites haven't been casually
| poking fun at this before.
| sakesun wrote:
| For internal session cookie, do we actually need the cookie
| banner at all ?
| kreetx wrote:
| They either use the cookie for something other than a
| session, or they just want to be better safe than sorry. (Or
| for the sake of humour)
| quinndupont wrote:
| The hardware is UGLY.
| jasperry wrote:
| I like the idea of this enough to search a bit for similar
| projects. The deal breaker on this for me is the 1.14-inch
| screen. Middle age has made it much less pleasant to look at
| things that small.
| mikestew wrote:
| Goodness, my watch has a bigger screen (my watch has a higher
| resolution, too). But I'm about to be eligible for a lot of
| senior discounts this year, so perhaps it isn't built for the
| likes of you and me.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| It's a amazing to me what can be made / sold for so cheap. A
| friend recently got one of these
|
| https://www.surenoo.com/products/23280116
|
| (note: the picture with the hand is way off scale. Thing is
| slightly larger than a MagSafe phone charging ring (since one way
| to power it is to put it over such a ring)
|
| $25
|
| Unfortunately I have no experience on how to mod it and after
| searching for 10-15 mins it seemed like more work than I wanted
| to deal with. Seems like you need to build your own firmware and
| re-flash it. I found someone had used it to build a nest like
| control for Home Assistant
|
| https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guition-1-8-360x360-es...
|
| If I'd found an easier way to just write some python or
| JavaScript I might have spent a few hours/days making some round
| games or demos.
| jonah wrote:
| Sounds like you can make your own software (firmware) for it
| with micropython:
|
| https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/esp32/tutorial/intro....
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Ive had a project a lot like this on my infinite todo list for a
| while now
| smallbread wrote:
| If you want something with ESP32-S3 and a bigger touch screen to
| hack on (the current software is very young), there's the UM
| squixl.
| https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop.html#!/SQUiXL/p/743870537. They
| also make a WOPR kit that can tie into home assistant.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| It looks way to small to be of any practical use. To small to
| display useful information, to small to play games on it?
|
| What's the use of this?
| kube-system wrote:
| > toy
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| Toy still needs fun activity you can do on it.
| kube-system wrote:
| The page says it plays games.
| citrus1330 wrote:
| but what is it for?
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