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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

Adding more insecure devices to protect your home makes no sense. Whatever happened to the idea that fewer "moving parts" meant less likelihood of failure?

The selling point is that you can monitor all this stuff remotely on your phone, but really, what can you do about it? I don't see how this surpasses the (very expensive) services like Brink's and ADT who will contact law enforcement for you.

And yes, I've seen the ad where the guy is at the store trying to figure out what to buy and can look in his fridge from his phone. Whatever happened to making a grocery list before you leave?

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To play devil's advocate, what ever happened to making a mix tape from songs on the radio to play in your large battery powered Walkman on the go?

"Why can't we just do it the old way" isn't the best argument for halting attempts at innovation. Before we can have the IoT we see in movies, we have to have gradual iterative progress in the way we think of/use the tech.

"Making a mix tape from songs on the radio to play in your large battery powered Walkman on the go?" was never a design principle, and "why can't we just do it the old way" is not the argument being made above.

The last line of the post I commented on: Whatever happened to making a grocery list before you leave?

Which summarizes to: Why can't we just do it the old way

To which I responded. Again, summary: it's silly to complain about new things being different than the things that came before them, and the only way to make the new stuff great is to make a bunch of new stuff and see what sticks.

> Which summarizes to: Why can't we just do it the old way

To me, that summarises to Why can't we do it the simple way?

Again, why use a combustion engine that requires fuel when you can just use the horses we already have?

Horses are a combustion engine that requires fuel, and a fairly high maintenance one, low power-to-weight ratio combustion engine, at that.

On the plus side, they run on renewable rather than fossil fuels.

Point: missed.

To stretch the "whatever happened to good old days things mentality" a little bit further (in the pure devil's advocate spirit): whatever happened to preparing a meal for oneself the way you see a person is doing in this video [1].

I mean, IoT will have a great potential to provide meaningful services with a great deal of convenience only if the things become as inter-operable as plug-pins and sockets.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM

> Whatever happened to making a grocery list before you leave?

What happened is "not having to". Maybe you like walking to the bus stop and looking at the board to see when the next bus is coming. Maybe you've never gone to the store, seen something that you've forgotten if you have, and then wondered if you should get it because you just remembered a recipe that needs it. Maybe you've never wondered if your stove is off or if you set the thermostat off before you went on vacation.

It's not about being careful. It's about not having to be careful. Life's great, and now we're going to make it effortless. And like everything else, the last 20% is going to cost as much as the first 80%. And maybe it won't be worth it for people like you but when it's finally made in a safe way, it's going to be great for the rest of us.

> I don't see how this surpasses the (very expensive) services like Brink's and ADT who will contact law enforcement for you.

By not being very expensive? I mean, you don't necessarily expect a cheap solution with electronic gadgets to be of better quality than an expensive solution with large quantities of human labor; the point is that a lot more of us can afford the cheap solution.

While I think the camera in the fridge thing is of dubious value, "whatever happened to X" is not an especially strong argument against something...

Honestly I think the camera in the fridge is a great idea.

Who hasn't forgotten to check if they have something? Who hasn't been near the market by chance and decided to pickup something and didn't do a full list before hand?

It is something that can be useful, adds a pretty small amount of cost to an appliance like that, and doesn't get in the way of someone that doesn't want to use the feature.

It's a fantastic IoT opportunity, because if it breaks or doesn't work, the fridge still works fine without it.

And beside, we'll finally be able to establish if the light in the fridge is on or off when the door is closed!

> Whatever happened to making a grocery list before you leave?

It stayed on the table where you carefully put it in-order-not-to-forget-it, as usual ;-)

to be fair home security systems have been using the same assumptions many years before IoT became a thing. most of them rely on cellular (can be jammed), or phone line (can but cut) or power (can be shut off).

I don't know about most countries, but in my country higher end security systems include backup batteries, a 'continuous monitoring' connection where a monitoring centre can detect the line being cut (e.g. in my country, 'BT Redcare' [1]), and some also include a GSM backup connection. So even if you cut the power and phone lines, the alarm monitoring centre can notice it's happened.

Of course, you can buy cheaper alarm systems that don't have these features, but they're certainly not uncommon. Of course, no amount of technology can fix the fact that when the alarm triggers, the response companies often respond slowly (or not at all) making it unlikely any criminals will be caught in the act.

[1] http://www.redcare.bt.com/Products_services/Classic.html

In my country the line detection doesn't exist but alarms do have backup batteries. I have known cases in my area of houses that got broken into with the use of a GSM jammer. Especially if a household relies on broadband telephony, knocking out the land line is a matter of turning the power off.

I would actually love a freezer inventory system, but it would have to cope with "lump of leftover beef wrapped in foil" and "tupperware box of stew" items.

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