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Comment by daghamm | Hacker News Reader

I really liked the plans Samsung employees had to give old phones a new life. I have a box of mostly working phones from different companies and I often wish there was an easy way to use them for different automation tasks around the house.

Anyway, I'm not surprised it didn't work. Engineers see possibilities while lawyers only think about how something goes very wrong and the company ends up in court.

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In other words, lawyers also see possibilities, albeit maybe not the same possibilities as the engineers.

(That's assuming that this was shut down by Samsung legal. I didn't see that in the article, though I skimmed a bit so maybe I missed it.)

I've heard if the company really wants stuff to get done efficiently then they need to put a lawyer on the product team - i.e. change the incentive from "prevent engineering creating risks, even at the cost of them failing" to "help engineering manage risk whilst succeeding".

I mean, its positioning them to enable rather than block.

We also see devops and netsec often play the lawyer role, where they feel their job is to block others from deploying anything that's not a golden cathedral.

> while lawyers only think about how something goes very wrong and the company ends up in court.

To be fair to the lawyers -- that's primarily what companies hire them to do.

Maybe a lot of executives and lawyers start from this perspective, but if so it's a bad position. Lawyers are supposed to be educated risk mitigators, working to maximize value not just minimize risk. I see so much CYA that they adopt a "better safe than sorry" attitude that doesn't accurately blend likelihood and impact, to the detriment of the company. They also rely on thin case law and current events which is basically just anecdotal evidence; they rarely look at data or have the skills to interpret it. You're better off hiring an actuary to run your GRC team.

> Lawyers are supposed to be educated risk mitigators, working to maximize value not just minimize risk.

Not so sure I agree with this. Lawyers are supposed to provide an analysis of the legal risks of things the company wants to do. It's the job of management to take that information and weigh it against the other business factors to determine if the risk is worth taking or not.

If a company is too risk-averse, legally speaking, that's a fault of management, not the lawyers.

That said, good lawyers won't just give a binary "recommend/don't recommend" answer. They'll also provide various options for other ways of doing something that have different risk profiles.

It was a fantastic idea! We had the prototype software and it worked great.

Take your old phone, put Docker on it, and do anything!

Phones, even very old phones, are incredibly capable devices: cameras, antennas, accelerometers, large touchscreen. They just need a new purpose.

Well, the other thing I'd want from a repurposed old phone is to remove the battery. Having it glued to the screen would be a problem.

If its rooted you can put a charging controller on it.

The battery is not dangerous or even particularly perishable if its always kept between 30% and 60% charge.

I had an idea and even basic prototype a million years ago where I was going to get a bunch of used cheap Android phones for free or very cheap, and make a transcoding cluster out of it and make a ton of money. I figured that no one wants old phones, and Android phones are relatively powerful and utilize a relatively small amount of power, so I'd be able to undercut competitors, and I thought it would be a good idea to get more life out of these computers and reduce e-waste.

I got ahold of most of my friends and family's "old phones living in a drawer", and I did more or less get the prototype working with a message queue, but I never really figured out a good way to utilize the built in h264 encoding chips, so it was always extremely slow software encoding, slow enough to where I don't think anyone would have actually paid me for it, and I lost interest in it.

I don't think it was a dumb idea, and it's not something I've completely given up on doing eventually, but I don't think it was as clever as 23 year old me thought it was either. If anyone here disagrees feel free to take it and run with it.

I imagine that a single modern desktop GPU could encode more video than a room full of old androids.

Well my idea was that Android phones typically have some kind of hardware decoder chip, so it might be fast enough.

I'm not saying it was the best idea ever, and I haven't pursued it in like 8 years.

CPU, not GPUs. GPU dedicated encoding hardware is terrible in comparison to a single 32-core CPU by any metric for this usecase.

Same for those phones - that one CPU can replace a box of phones.

One frivolous lawsuit destroys the revenue from multiple happy customers. Unfortunately.

> One frivolous lawsuit destroys the revenue from multiple happy customers.

And there's little or no downside for freelancing plaintiffs' lawyers to file questionable lawsuits in the hope of extracting a nuisance-value settlement. So the mentality tends to be, what the hell, let's give it a shot. (A.k.a. "moral hazard.")

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