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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I don't know who I'm shaking my head at more: the person who bought this nightmare of an alarm clock, or the person who sold it.

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Or the engineer that designed it.

I can guarantee no sane engineer would have designed that. That was almost certainly designed by some marketer who didn't know the first thing about alarm clocks. The engineering team was probably outsourced, saw the requirements, facepalmed, and implemented them exactly as described. The project manager made sure the project was on-time by removing any workarounds for creating the account. And the clock team had a great dinner out to celebrate another successful product.

That's what I was thinking. This guy is one of the most reputable software developers in the world, bearing the weight of the Windows Shell on his shoulders, with a career that spans decades... and he bought... an alarm clock with wifi? Was he drunk that day?

Let they whom has never purchased something on the internet while intoxicated throw the first stone.

I'd be fine with a clock with a wi-fi chip, provided that it have a hardware firewall that blocks everything but Network Time Protocol, and include a USB port for business such as updating firmware, updating zoneinfo, or changing IP addresses.

Also, it might have been a gift from a well-meaning friend or family member.

I'd be fine with a clock that has a wifi chip, provided I didn't need to install a fucking app on my phone to change the goddamned alarm.

> I'd be fine with a clock that has a wifi chip, provided I didn't need to install a fucking app on my phone to change the goddamned alarm.

It's worse than that. You have to create an account. I facepalmed reading that. I hate companies that create such garbage.

Agreed. My phone already has an alarm clock app that sounds an alarm through the phone speaker. If someone tries to sell me a separate alarm clock hardware device that requires a smartphone app to accomplish basic functionality that is already available on the phone itself, I am liable to become very hostile and recount unflattering anecdotes about the salesperson's mother.

It's a GDMF clock. We already have well-established user interface paradigms for clock-setting that require only two binary input buttons, in devices that cost less than $0.05 to manufacture.

The use case for a network-connected clock is to never have to set the time manually, or update it for daylight savings. That is a feature you add to a clock that is already completely functional without a network. You can add a wifi password with just two buttons and a 16-segment LCD, if you are patient enough.

"You can add a wifi password with just two buttons"

Reminds me that I bought a printer with wifi, which I didn't really want, but it didn't come with a cable, so then I found out you had to enter passwords by hitting an up or down button to scroll through all possible characters.

Eventually I found a USB cable that worked with it.

> I'd be fine with a clock with a wi-fi chip

Not me, if only because that's entirely unnecessary for a clock to do what I want a clock to do (including setting the time itself).

It's a head shaker. My guess would be that people sincerely and carefully design one particular consumer-facing item put so much effort into that design that they expect other consumer-facing items to also be worthwhile. I wonder if the people who actually design this crap would buy it?

Having borne witness to the multitude of compromises and suboptimal design decisions that are required to bring a product to market with a bare-bones team at two hardware manufacturers now, I assume that everything described on the box will be shoddy, glitchy, and not work at all as described.

It could have been a gift.

Could also be he bought the clock because he liked the look of it and never guessed the wifi part was required rather than optional.

I am neither as brilliant, nor my career at Microsoft nearly as long as Raymond's, but I am in no position to cast that first stone. My list of "should've known better" stretches temporally long, and quite wide in it's breadth of categories of bad purchases. Yes, some of them were alcohol-fueled. Sadly, most of them were not, thereby removing any excuse.

I'm a little older than Raymond (I think), and I am probably just now reaching the point where I consistently think to myself, "nooo, you know full well how this is going to end." when faced with a bad potential purchase.

"The person who bought said clock was unaware of its lurking mysteries."

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