Hacker News Reader

Comment by angel_j | Hacker News Reader

What a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time.

Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge).

So much business BS in this post, too. Like claims of a new UX! As if the process of unlocking is the "experience" factor of importance! And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! And the part about "we created a culture of innovation"!!! What inflated garbage!

View on HN

I think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money.

Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!

But why? Keys work pretty well. But then, people buy IOT toothbrushes. So perhaps there would've be a market of idiots waiting in line.

There's a few obvious use cases I can think of:

1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too.

2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in.

I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.

I have a keyless, non-IoT deadbolt (number pad with access code). It's hugely more convenient and more pleasant to use than traditional keys. One of those things that you don't really realize until you have one. I never worry about having house keys. I can pop in and out of the house on short jaunts with much less friction. I can give people access to my home without coordinating handing over keys. I don't have to go through the clumsy and annoying process of getting keys out, sticking them in the lock, turning them, turning them back, taking them out, and putting them back in my pocket just to walk through a door. It seems trivial but it really does noticeably improve quality of life.

The traditional lock makers have that market sewed up.

(who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)

> And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock!

It actually made me LOL. Sounds like someone read https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc... and tried to apply gained knowledge to a door lock.

Yep. Who or which user 'falls in love' with a lock (with reference to the lead line of the article) anyway? Sounds like there is some serious reality distortion going on.

Please don't post indignant rants like this to Hacker News. It reliably leads to garbage threads, as the embarrassing sequence of 'fuck you', 'fuck you and your farts', and 'no fuck YOU' amply demonstrates below. It's cringeworthy.

The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comments wouldn't have followed.

Your post was upvoted, predictably to the top, but that doesn't mean it was good. It's because of the fact that rage activates the Jerry Springer Show impulse in most of us. This is a weakness of the upvoting system and something that amplifies the worst in online communities. As a result, we need all HN users, including you, to exercise a bit of self restraint and not go straight to the bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean you have to change your views, just post thoughtfully and with an orientation to good conversation rather than venting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I disagree. Civility in conversation has been a tactic used against women for centuries. "You can't talk that way! It's un-lady-like!" It is the morality of society who want to control those they oppress, by silencing them.

And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.

I'm familiar with that argument against civility, and even sympathetic to it, but I don't see how it applies here. We're not asking anyone to be "ladylike", nor trying to prevent anyone from voicing their experience of the world—quite the opposite.

It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting.

If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it.

HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting.

You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.

In this culture of "everyone's a winner" sometimes people can't accept failure. Entering acquisition talks is a dangerous move because you totally lose your focus, it sounds like these guys just got sloppy in their decision making and paid the ultimate price. The people blaming the acquiring company on the comments at the bottom of the article, as if they committed some kind of grave injustice by not bailing out the company, make me sick.

Having used Face ID on the iPhone X for 2 months now I would be more surprised if we didn’t open doors with our faces in a few years.

Respectfully, fuck this attitude.

Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal.

Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons.

It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.

Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware

Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.

I want to point out that they weren't necessarily building a great lock.

The "great product" bit seems to be the usual consumer startup rhetoric by the CEO, which many people fell for.

I can confidently say that it is marketing rhetoric because a similar example already exists in the world: car locks.

I still drive a car where you have to manually insert the key and turn it to open the door.

I've also driven cars where the locks are remote controlled.

I've also seen cars where you press your thumb to the lock to unlock it.

There's nothing "great" about any of the above after the first two or three uses.

I’m all for reinventing the wheel to make it better. It rarely works out, but when it does it’s well worth it. But if you can’t even describe what makes your wheel better, what are the odds it’s actually better?

To your three points:

0. We could all delightfully try to innovate all day without millions of wasted funding and a guy spewing garbage like every day that for a boss, filling our heads with propaganda. Also, does a lock need to be delightful? Did you not read they wanted you do be addicted to using their lock????

1. What's the difference? How about money, ego, and industry. we all get to have passions, but do they all deserve millions in funding?

2. Uh, what community is that? One of those "global" communities? I'm a hacker and maker, but I certainly don't feel like i'm a member of any such community. I'm not here to pat on the back the privileged failure of people I don't know, just cuz they are by some loose definition "makers" or hackers. Like, hackers do things with ingenuity and curiosity, not $50M. And I am mocking that project from the top-down, starting with the manic CEO who wrote that crap; so, it only trickles down to the hard working people who were conned into giving passion and time to the endeavor, but at least they got paid for being hoodwinked into believing they were "changing the world"... with a lock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com