Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpm_sd | Hacker News Reader

This was a fun read. I don't really 'get' the product, though. Lots of smart lightbulbs already on the market, with wakeup timer features etc. This is one you can pick up and carry around? Is that actually better?

Those pogo pins aren't going to last very long.

View on HN

I think something that characterizes a lot of stereotypical hacker news comments is reductionism of a product to its feature list.

A classic one is on the Dropbox 2007 launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).

In retrospect, some product ideas are dumb. Others are good. But because we see this kind of comment so often (really not trying to pick on you!), I wanted to point out that it might be a good habit for lots of people to notice if they are trying to describe a product by its list of features, and maybe think if that is the best way to achieve their goals.

Again, not trying to pick on you in particular, I think that habit is incredibly common for tech people in particular. And there's a lot positive to be said about that style of interaction.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

There may never be a better example of "what's compelling to techies isn't necessarily what's compelling to the general public" than that one.

Yes, but CmdrTaco never claimed to be stating anything more than his personal opinion of the product. Slashdot wasn't HN, people weren't always making product-market fit predictions and discussing the financial of startups.

rise to my defense!

(Also always lost in the mythologizing of this quote is that the first version of the iPod was not good. Mechanical click wheel, mac only, it took them a revision to disprove my statement!)

It would be fair to say that misapprehension grinds my gears a bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cmdrtaco+by:icebraining&type=c... :)

Since I have your attention, thanks for all the good years of Slashdot! Hope you're doing well.

I think it also explains why you see a lot of Apple hate in the tech community. It becomes a specification comparison by cost and the majority of people just don’t care about those things.

As a hardware engineer and sometimes product designer, I am interested in discussing the list of features with other people of a similar background. This isn't a review of the user experience (since I've never touched one of these lights), it's a response to a hardware teardown.

I don't think the parallel with the classic Dropbox comment is fair. I have the tech skills necessary to make an IoT flashlight, too, but doing so would probably not occur to me. I don't think such a product would necessarily fail, but it seems a bit gimmicky in that it only superficially solves problems.

That's true in a lot of cases but comparing a gadget to a service is far from being intellectually honest.

Best case scenario it becomes a hit as the philips hue, but at the end of the day it's a gadget, it's shiny, it's new, it's trendy, but it's still a gadget. Sure it fulfils some kind of weird pseudo-need but it's not going to revolutionise anything.

So? Not everything needs to be a revolution. Casper already revolutionized the mattress industry. They're merely further monetizing that success by introducing a well-designed new product, since mattress sales cycles are so long.

It's really easy to use as a light. And the UI is completely unobtrusive. My girlfriend has some smart switches in her place that are provided by her alarm system company, and the amount of work she has to do to turn off one switch is a huge inconvenience. Not to mention how unreliable the cloud service is.

It's wonderful to see a company building smart equipment that doesn't require a smartphone to operate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com