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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Are you kidding me?

Look around your home. Right now. How many things have software in them?

How many things don‘t you see in your home? Everything in your home that doesn‘t include software has been manufactured and packaged.

My employer makes components for industrial automation. Have you ever thought about it? Nobody does, unless he has direct contact.

Building automation? Special machinery (huge presses or packaging machines). Whatever.

And re: your Android board: come back when your bricolage conforms to all kinds of requirements. Extended temperature range. Vibration. Electromagnetic compatibility (it‘s easy to accidentally broadcast in the naval emergency band). Etc. etc.

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> Look around your home. Right now. How many things have software in them?

Not much as much as you think, apart from the routers, computers and phone, the only other thing I can think of is the dishwasher because it's half-recent. And I suspect the new ones just include a cheap Android board.

> And re: your Android board: come back when your bricolage conforms to all kinds of requirements. Extended temperature range. Vibration. Electromagnetic compatibility (it‘s easy to accidentally broadcast in the naval emergency band). Etc. etc.

I've worked on a company which manufactured their own card, that is much harder to do by yourself than buying a board which has been produced at millions of units where they solved all those issues directly. You can't compete with that easily. We had at least 5 iterations to solve the magnetic and heat issues, all of that comes for free in a mass-produced board.

I suspect you’re thinking at the wrong level. Your washing machine definitely does have software even if it’s not “recent”. When you press the buttons or turn the dials and it does stuff, even if it doesn’t have pretty graphics on the display, that’s software.

If you have a microwave, that has software, if you have a car that has a ton of software. Your car keys and your credit cards probably have software.

Battery charger. Camera. Camera lenses. TV. Blu-Ray player. HiFi/audio system. Radio. Dimmable lamps (probably). Electric toothbrush. Shaver. Possibly electric kettle. Blender. KitchenAid. Telephone (the wired one). Possibly door opener. Rice cooker. Garage door opener. Coffee machine. Toaster.

No, it doesn‘t come for free, because it simply fails all those requirements.

A developer board simply doesn‘t care about most of that, and if it does, to a much lower degree.

But we‘re done here, you‘re clearly not discussing in good faith. Stay in your web bubble if you want to.

You post a lot of great submissions to HN, but if you continue to be uncivil in comments we're going to ban you. This is the second time I've had to warn you in as many days. Not cool!

> But we‘re done here, you‘re clearly not discussing in good faith. Stay in your web bubble if you want to.

Thanks for your well detailed argumentation, that was convincing.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with another bad comment and thereby make this place even worse.

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

sorry about that

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