The idea behind the site was to be more oriented towards forums than news stories. Basically, we wanted to provide a way for somebody to ask design questions to a community of smart hardware hackers. Of course, cool hardware stories are hard to come by so they make great submissions as well.

Looks like it's built on the same codebase as news.yc...

I asked Paul if we could use his code but it was too much work to integrate it into Octopart so we wrote it from scratch in python.

It would be a good idea to give to the users the option to save links so they could read them later again or something.

It looks like there is some more info about their news site here: http://news.octopart.com/faq

Interesting that they don't require registration to submit links, presumably relying on javascript + obscurity to avoid spam.

Cool. So the hardware nuts go there and talk about building stuff, then they look for the parts on the site before buying it from the site.