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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

The road to hell is paved with products that pursued simplicity but ultimately couldn't afford it.

* Just Doesn't Work

* Your simplicity becomes my complexity (fussy compatibility, batching creates latency, etc)

* "One-button" interfaces where you have to learn a morse-code dialect and timing to access the necessary features

* Bonus points: the software is laggy and the one button is mechanically unreliable, compounding the difficulty of getting the timing correct

* Useless error messages that make simple problems complex

* Similar: Necessary complexity (e.g. radio reception, authentication, updates) hidden behind a featureless spinning wheel for maximum time wasting when you can't tell what the holdup is

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> "One-button" interfaces where you have to learn a morse-code dialect and timing to access the necessary features

Flashlight enthusiasts, I'm looking at you. Doubly so when there isn't a way to know the current state without already knowing the current state.

I feel attacked! :)

I mean, it's a hard problem - for many reasons you only have one button, with no way to display information. And you have to cram possibly many functions into that one button.

It's a really interesting exercise in UI, and there are benefits to different approaches. I actually like comparing the different ways manufacturers have chosen to solve this.

I really want more Bluetooth support in flashlights. Not only would you always know where they were, and their state of charge, but if you leave your bag in a corner somewhere at a location, it could ping you if it gets moved or opened but isn't within a few feet.

BLE mesh means you could link them in groups for lighting large areas that don't have power yet.

You'd never have a mode you didn't like, just turn of the dang flash mode or map it to a long press. The dim mode could be as dim as you wanted it, down to sub milliamp for when you're working in a dark theater and need to read your notes.

You could set it to turn on when unplugged for an emergency light, glow all the time faintly to find it....

I wonder if there's a market for boutique handmade one off lights... Making a few a year might be fun but I sure wouldn't want to start my own production scale anything.

Although these would really be at their best if they were mass produced and cheap enough to have several.

That's an interesting idea. I'm not very versed in the flashlight world, so I don't know if it exists, but I at least haven't heard of a "pocket" flashlight that has bluetooth support.

Olight does make these "bulbs" that have Bluetooth support, you can configure color settings there through an app.

As far a market, there probably is if you're good. There are a bunch of people who collect all manner of flashlights, and boutique one-off things are usually a great thing.

Adding bluetooth to a flashlight probably adds at least 2 dollars to the BOM, cpu upgrade and bluetooth module (for reference one of the cheapest might be an espressif chip in the $1.5 range, but they don’t do low energy very well when bluetooth is involved). So it’ll cost roughly $18 more than the next flashlight. So maybe? I’ve worked on BLE mesh, and it’s enough of a pain at the moment that I wouldn’t be willing to implement this on something as cheap as a flashlight, but then again I was just poking around and found flashlights easily selling for over $100. so there may be a market for this.

Unless it got popular enough that you were making bazillions. It really shouldn't need to cost much more than a normal flashlight plus the $2 Bluetooth SOC. An existing manufacturer would probably charge a premium but a new company could be like "2 buck more and you get Bluetooth".

Actually seems like something Pine64 would do really well.

(I could also be talking out my ass here though, I know nothing about business, and Bluetooth anything might attract technophobia and make some people actually less interested).

>I mean, it's a hard problem - for many reasons you only have one button, with no way to display information.

Yes, there is a way to display information: put a screen on the device. My bicycle headlight has this: https://www.niterider.com/products/6780-lumina-oled-1200-boo...

Of course, this costs more. The OLED screen version of this headlight costs significantly more than the plain one-button version.

> Your simplicity becomes my complexity (fussy compatibility, batching creates latency, etc)

Forth is simple. (It is not that hard to write a simple Forth system that implements the language in a workable fashion.)

Python is simple. (It is a good choice for a first programming language, and plenty of people use it to rough out ideas because it allows them to ignore some kinds of resource management details and comes with a large standard library.)

Equivocating on 'simple' is a neat trick if you can pull it off.

Python is easy, not simple. Lisp is simple.

> Lisp is simple.

Look at the Common Lisp FORMAT function and say that again.

[R5RS][1] is simple.

To get any work done with it, though, you need to write your own Python.

[1]: https://conservatory.scheme.org/schemers/Documents/Standards...

That is admittedly a bit of an abomination (very powerful though) but the language itself is very simple. It just allows the creation of DSLs which is what format really is.

Not sure you're using simple in the same way other people use that word :)

I believe GP is using it in the literal etymologically correct way in the vein of Rich Hickey: https://youtu.be/LKtk3HCgTa8?feature=shared

Pedantically, Common Lisp being a Lisp-2 vs a Lisp-1 arguably makes it a duplex vs a simplex…

I don't think your examples feel like the simple options to me. For example:

Batching should solve a specific problem, it's not really complicated to implement but without a need adds unnecessary complexity to the system. Simplicity in this case would be no batching and just handling the inputs as they come.

One-button interfaces while minimalist are not simple, you've already covered why they're complicated. They can be simple though, if used correctly, but you're intentionally over-complicating to make a point. Even no button interfaces with gestures can be simple an generally intuitive.

But you're correct that my simplicity may be your nightmare. I use DWM because I don't need or want the complexity of a full desktop environment. Most of what I do use the same vim keybindings, and runs in the terminal. The settings for all of those are in a git repository and I install a new machine or VM with a single line that I've memorized at this point.

To you that may seem like a brittle hell, to me it's the simplest most stable system I can design.

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