Powerful, cheap and Cambodian: Computer dreams being born in the kingdom | Hacker News Reader

Powerful, cheap and Cambodian: Computer dreams being born in the kingdom

channelnewsasia.com

90 pointssohkamyung45 comments

My mom moved to Cambodia full time two years ago at the age of 60 to become a librarian at a rural orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where electricity is often scarce and access to the internet is a luxury. She's a remarkable woman, doing a remarkable thing, with some remarkable children.

Access to laptops, such as the one described in this article, could play a huge role in helping the youth of Cambodia find good work in the global economy. Children from her orphanage are fortunate enough to have an opportunity to learn english, complete high school, have meals every day, and have access to quality health care; however, many still end up struggling in their early adulthood, such that they find themselves often working as prostitutes to survive.

A single family member having access to a high paying job for that area can absolutely transform generations, so anything any of us can do to help make that a reality goes a long way. If you have an opportunity to hire a remote worker, think about hiring from Cambodia!

Where would you even look for such workers? Is there a good place? What kind of jobs Cambodians specialize in?

The infrastructure just isn't there yet really. Many SEA countries have a ton of students in the IT field though. Vietnam has a ton of young people learning to code in University.

The difficulty is finding someone with the appropriate communication skills. I think there are plenty of devs with decent technical skills, but they usually need firm guidance on projects and they do lack in creativity.

I live in vietnam and I agree with you mostly but I find that a lot of the talent leaves to work in Singapore or Malaysia.

There definitely our communication problems with tech workers here.

A friend of mine runs a software development company with local presence in Vietnam. The talent is there but there either needs to be guidance or patience to work things out. That being said, the quality is top notch.

I guess it's running Linux? I had never heard of this, maybe because I never go to any of those co-working spaces.

There is a lot of interest among young Cambodians in programming and new technology, though unfortunately the corporate tech world here is stuck using old, proprietary tools. The average salary for a web developer / programmer at a Cambodian company is somewhere in the range $400-$1000. A couple friends of mine with better English speaking ability have gone freelance and had success though.

Some of these dinosaur Cambodian tech companies will also advertise programmer job postings as 'male only'.

Do you mean $400-$1000 per month or per year? And what is the quality of programmers in Cambodia compared to the US, if you have some opinion on the matter.

USD per month, and id actually say that's high. Overall the quality is much lower, although of course there are some great coders. That's mostly due to poor education institutions. The best coders are largely self taught or have been trained in house.

So companies are doing active in house training (like talks, lessons) rather than just learn as you go?

This article details about the philosophy behind the laptop (which is commendable) but I wasn't able to find any details about the actual specifications other than that it will run windows with Macbook aesthetics.

Even Mr.Rithy's twitter page[1] doesn't seem to mention about it; at-least I wasn't able to find any.

1:https://twitter.com/rithythul

If I had to guess from the screenshots, that's Budgie desktop. Googling "koompi" led me to this Budgie fork repo: https://github.com/tellsela/koompi-desktop

It seems to be a bit of a disservice to be running such a flashy GTK 3+ desktop. I would have picked a stock Lubuntu with just a branded desktop wallpaper/theme. Haven't personally used Budgie Desktop so maybe it's fine. Anyone have experience with it?

Of course I'm not in sales or marketing so the appearance of the latest Mac (even if on insufficient hardware) may sell well and work well enough for casual users. Actual developers should quickly find ways to make it more usable.

From the description, I thought they were going with elementary OS [1]. Pantheon as a DE is reasonably lightweight [2] (for me, it uses ~400 MB of ram when idle), is absolutely gorgeous, as well as very user friendly.

[1] https://elementary.io/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5l39tz/linux_distros...

> The initial roll-out of 500 computers will cost US$369 each

I was expecting a around a third of that number. How affordable is $369? (I'd appreciate anyone who better knows economics or Cambodia chiming in.)

Wikipedia says per capita GDP using PPP (which I believe is the appropriate conversion for this purpose) is ~$4,300 per year, so the computer costs around a month of typical income (as distributed to everyone, not just to the workers).

At that level of income, people probably don't have much that's disposable; I would assume almost all goes to necessities. I could imagine a developer spending a month's income on a badly needed computer, but their market is people who haven't used one before. How many of them will invest in one?

Of course the person behind this project knows Cambodia far better than I do and must be well aware of the affordability issue. I wonder what their solution is. Maybe the target is a wealthier subset of the population and maybe there's a good reason; for example, maybe that level of wealth is required for reliable electricity.

> Wikipedia says per capita GDP using PPP (which I believe is the appropriate conversion for this purpose) is ~$4,300 per year

No, you shouldn't use PPP adjustments in this situation. The price for laptop is what it is. And the only money they have to buy it is the money they have (without any adjustment).

So the laptop is more like 3 months of salary. For a typical US programmer making $120,000 a year that's (kinda sorta) equivalent to buying a $30,000 car.

Computer used to cost months of salaries. In around 1995, in France, you could buy a 10.000 Fr computer whereas minimum wage was around 3.000 Fr per month. Still, my parents made the financial effort to buy one.

Yes, but your parents probably had a house, a car, good healthcare access, etc.

Edit: Almost forgot - and they didn't have to take care of their elders, financially.

> No, you shouldn't use PPP adjustments in this situation. The price for laptop is what it is. And the only money they have to buy it is the money they have (without any adjustment).

Yes, you're right. My error, though much too late to edit the GP.

> So the laptop is more like 3 months of salary. For a typical US programmer making $120,000 a year that's (kinda sorta) equivalent to buying a $30,000 car.

The parent does say "kinda sorta", but I want to emphasize: For the US developer that $30K isn't needed to for food, shelter, and health care. The impact isn't nearly the same.

The income distribution is very uneven. It might appeal to the more well off but not extra wealthy. It's probably to much for your average Cambodian, and the extra wealthy probably get real macs from Singapore.

I don't believe in this, after the series of OLPCs and similar...

Products like these will change the future of how learning and new skills will come out of Cambodia.

I just returned from Cambodia last week. I have been around the provinces with my Cambodian friend. What I came to know is many young people who are also smartphone users are not able to read or write Khmer, let alone English. The smartphone usage is mainly around using facebook, mostly to post pictures and watch videos. Though the internet infrastructure is good in Cambodia, it's underutilized.

What I wish to see is how localization and learning software powered by TTS/AI along with inexpensive hardware would inspire them to learn and acquire global outlook.

Wouldn't it be more practical to just teach them to read and write? The model for getting out of poverty is well established at this point and literacy is an essential component.

In fact I'd argue the stakes are pretty high because if we don't help these people become literate they'll end up little more than attention batteries plugged into Zuckerberg's Facebook Matrix.

Specs from the SmallWorld Facebook page:

“Our current test version is 4GB RAM, 1.1Ghz CPU mobile version, 128GB SSD.

The final specs we want for $369: - 8GB RAM - 256GB SSD (minimum 128GB) - Core i3 (final confirm in a couple week, but that is the goal)

Hope we can hit that target. Will update more later.”

https://www.facebook.com/smallworld.kh/

https://koompi.com/#/specs

I’ve always wanted to visit Cambodia. They suffered so much from our carpet bombing during the Vietnam war. The unexploded ordinance maims so many people each year.

It's made it China...not in Cambodia.

sound more like a money making scheme: https://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_620750.html

Wished that the article talked more about the specifications of the laptop. I'm curious whether it is ARM based or not. It looks quite similar to the Pinebook and equivalent.

Please see https://koompi.com/#/specs

Looks like a Chuwi machine - anyone got any more info?

It looks like a reference design from Intel that they were giving off for free to volume buyers 2 something years ago. There tons of companies other than Chuwi doing the same design, though Chuwi is on the better side on quality

Ah right - thanks for that. Are there any good articles explaining the industry, or the supply chain? I know about Clevo and Winstron and that's about it.

Despite its enormity, I believe there is nothing amounting to the "OEM electronics industry: annotated manual"

Just like the work culture in a big dotcom is something totally alien to the remaining industry, the way thing work in the Pearl River delta region is very different to the outside world.

Chuwi is basically running a scam. They switched out the hardware for cheaper parts once they got their good reviews (and it no longer runs Linux btw)

https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/22/chuwi-lapbook-14-1-l...

and yet tech sites keep promoting it...

More like Teclast F7

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Teclast-F7-Notebook-14-0-Win...

UPD. After looking at the ports on the left side I've found precise model. It's YEPO 737A, not Teclast or Chuwi.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/YEPO-737A-laptop-Apollo-13-3...

Can these bad boys be used for coding? Looking to source some laptops to run a coding school.

Depends: Visual Studio or anything Jetbrains is going to be a bit slow, but it should be possible.

Buy one and test it out.

I'm not convinced this project will do better than OLPC did, and that had a lot of credible backing and resources.

It's mainly targeted at college students, attractively priced, and looks like a Macbook Air. It might work.

With how low the average salaries are in Cambodia, it is financially out of reach for most of the population.

> OLPC did, and that had a lot of credible backing and resources

OLPC had massive resources but it had such an arrogant "leader/founder", Nick Negroponte that it was doomed to failure. I can't believe this guy still suggests that journalists should describe him as the father of the netbook and tablet computing now.

OLPC did for Netbooks what Raspberry Pi did for Single Board Computers, essentially creating a new & much larger market for devices that existed, but had been priced much higher before either of those entrants had entered the market.

I don't think this upstart will see much success though, as the price point is out of reach for most locals. Refurbishing laptops en masse for less than half the cost would likely get more powerful hardware into the hands of notably more people as compared to buying new hardware from an ODM.

Are you kidding me? First of all, the OLPC did not create the netbook market, capitalism did. Secondly this is a great project because he probably plans on trying to locally source the construction of the laptops.

OLPC's stated aim was to ensure that governments that couldn't provide children with adequate free education or even clean drinking water could provide them each with their own personal computers, with the belief this would result in demonstrable improvements in literacy and numeracy.

This appears to have the more modest and commercial objective of selling Linux netbooks that mimic the aesthetics and OS behaviour of higher end machines sold in the West to middle class college students in developing countries, with the belief they'll use it to complete coursework or improve their English language reading skills amongst other things. If it fails, it'll probably be because Samsung et al can do the same thing far more efficiently and setting up supply chains in Cambodia is really hard rather than because they were aiming for a questionable target.

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