Smoke alarms, fingerprint readers - why the HN community gets it wrong
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This might be bad for your ego, but it can also be tremendously useful.
Why post anything to hackernews? Do you want a bunch of ego-validating fawning?
"WOW!!! That's the greatest idea ever!" "Brilliant!" "I could never come up with something so ingenious!" "This is going to sell like hot-cakes and you are going to be rich!"
These are all great comments to hear, but utterly useless. If you only receive opinions like these you might spend your precious blood, sweat, and money making something that nobody wants. Slightly more useful comments can let you zero in on why your idea is good, so that no matter what else doesn't make the final cut, the good stuff will.
"Good idea. I particularly like how it..."
The negative comments that make it sound like your idea is trash? Well, sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. You'll probably find yourself wanting to grab the authors of these comments by their short-hairs so you can shout into their face why they're wrong. If you can't think of anything past the physical violence, they just might have a point.
Some things that pop up here spark less than useful conversations as a side-effect of how HN people approach things. Take Apple's new fingerprint scanners. They are being sold as highly secure when all they really are is highly convenient. This hits that "easy to break" nerve builders have and is then reinforced by the contrarian urge to bash the big guy. It might be annoying to read if you're an Apple fan, but it's a natural result of the kind of thinking that goes on in HN. It might even be useful if you're considering using biometrics of some sort yourself!
In short, HN gets it right more often than not. People should keep bashing brilliant and stupid ideas alike because that's how everybody learns. If your ego gets hurt, take a break.
Reddit is a much better place if you want your ego stroked.
I suppose I wanted to distinguish between an overwhelmingly negative, weakness-focussed attitude, and a more generous, restrained approach. Taking the time to restrain yourself and evaluate your initial reaction isn't always easy, especially in the fast-paced snap-response mindset that I think internet reading tends to put you in.
Of course all user reviews need to be appropriately grain-of-salted, but the negs are far more informative to me than the pros.
Conservative ("Null") view: the primary objective of a smoke alarm is to (a) detect and (b) signal the presence of smoke. Nothing, hand waving or not, should compromise this.
Progressive ("Alternate") view: a smoke alarm must also maximise (c) the probability of the signal being heard. This objective is compromised if people, finding their smoke alarms a nuisance, turn them off.
In summary, Null says (a) and (b). Alternate says also (c). Null says adding (c) dilutes (b) and so is harmful. These views not mutually exclusive - not everyone need have the same smoke alarm. The more disciplined may be safer with a traditional smoke alarm. Those of us who just spent a minute searching the ceiling may be better served by the Nest Protect.
"Why not think about it this way: companies like Nest, Apple and Soylent are offering us, no strings attached, brand new propositions for paths to a better future."
Being sceptical of a fire safety product being brought to market is a good response. While I, too, found the tone of the Nest Protect and TouchID conversations combative, I was thoroughly informed by both. Constructive does not have to mean positive.
Disclosure: I am in the Alternate/"Progressive" camp
I like HN's usual healthy debates, but at this point things just seemed absurd.
But, once you combine both, you reach a really interesting third way: Don't do binary detection, do trinary detection if possible. "No smoke", "Some smoke" and "Ok this is completely fubar"-levels of smoke. "Some smoke" can be waved, Fubar-Levels of smoke cannot be waved and the user is informed of this.
> In every case, we’re given a choice: do we react reflexively, hunting for anything and everything that we can think of to shoot down a new and challenging idea, or do we fight our first reflex, and give the idea a chance?
Yeah, we should be giving a chance to use our brain and reason instead of being fooled but a nice product presentation and a beautiful "NEW!" sticker on it. As for Soylent, this product is an insult to reason and any kind of nutrition studies done before, so let's not put it as the same level as Nest. It's a different story altogether.
The "give everyday idea a chance" is a lot like "respect everyone's opinion" crap we have to deal with so much nowadays. On the contrary, I'd rather have a fruitful discussion based on reason, data and reasonable assumptions with someone instead of accepting everything just because it's fresh and new and cool.
I think it's very healthy to challenge new ideas and to point out their flaws. That's why I enjoy the discussions on HN, most of the time, because you have a bunch of educated people here who usually are very reasonable when it comes to debating and produce interesting arguments to think about. This should be actually good feedback for people who produce new ideas, rather than a crowd saying "bravo" everytime something "original" comes out.
Blanket statements, out of context. Perfect writing again.
I can make blanket statements the same way too. We all want to be loved. We all want to be healthy. We all want to be rich. We all like things to be easy. So, fundamentally, we agree on the same things, right ?
WRONG!
> Nobody, if you get down to it, thinks anything should be harder to use, that life should be less pleasant.
There is pleasure in doing HARD things. There is pleasure in learning from scratch and mastering something difficult. There is pleasure in exploration and understanding instead of digesting something pre-made for you.
Not for everyone, maybe, but in the hacker crowd you will find lots of people who are precisely like that.
I wasn't, for the record, advocate that life should be easy in the sense that you seem to be thinking I mean it. Maybe we should distinguish between hard as in unnecessarily complicated and poorly designed, and hard as in challenging. I'm teaching myself how computers work at the moment, I really enjoy it. That's challenging, and I like challenging things. Current smoke alarm design, on the other hand, is not challenging in an enjoyable way. They're poorly designed and annoying, and that's a type of hard that I think anyone really likes.
That's a type of hard most people don't care about because anyway it's not something they have to worry about every single day of their lives. That's a "LOW INVOLVEMENT" kind of problem. Unless you spend all your living time working on smoke alarms you will rarely have to deal with the inconveniences of their design. There are tons of things like that in life that nobody is bothered enough to fix because it's not really worth the time or the additional investment to fix it. Get over it. I'm pretty sure that even if Nest is a great solution (which it seems to be), it will not appeal to many people unless they price their product at the same range as the usual smoke detectors. If you have to pay twice more or so, it's not disruptive, it's just a premium product only premium-focused people will want to buy. The rest of us will keep living with their crappy smoke detectors and still have a good life nonetheless.
I guess you see my point now ?
I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all that smoke alarms are irrelevant or not relevant enough or whatever it is you seem to be trying to say here. I don't spend my life working on them but I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down. Every single one. I wanted to slap the stupid fucks, but then I realised that hey, most people really are kinda lazy and stupid and you will get nowhere getting angry over that fact, you have to accept that and adapt as best you can.
At the time I imagined something very similar to Nest - an alarm over your oven which turns it off if it detects sudden heat. An alarm which sends me, the property manager, a text if it goes off. An alarm that can distinguish too between "a little smoke" and "a shitload of smoke and heat." I imagined that, and I talked to the local fire service, and they laughed and shrugged and said it'd be great but who's gunna do that.
And now guess what, here's a company that's actually made and prepping to sell something even better than what I thought about. It's a beautiful looking object, for starters. It talks to you in intelligent language - "there's carbon monoxide in the living room". It distinguishes between potentially dangerous and critically dangerous situations. It can send push notifications to your phone when something goes wrong or when batteries are about to go out. It can be silenced with an elegant hand gesture. And it gets better: it lights up a room when it sees you walking through it at night. It can turn off your furnace if CO levels rise, if its connected to Nest's Thermostat. And it will help your Thermostat get smarter about power usage by detecting your activity.
And this is just a version one product. Keep in mind - the name is "Protect", not "Smoke Detector." What's to stop them making v2 smarter, and maybe it can sense when people in a house become panicked and call emergency services? Maybe it detects unusual activity when burglars enter? Whatever - use your imagination - the possibilities are huge. And don't forget, this is only the second product that Nest has produced. And already with two they've made them better together. This is the Internet of Things man. It's happening, and it's going to be massive.
If you're not seeing the breakthrough yet, then I just don't know what to say to you. What, are you angry because they made such a good product? Because they're selling it for a fraction of what it's worth? Because they're smarter than any of the unimaginative companies making crappy smoke alarms we had to put up with up until today? Are you angry because it's "not enough"? Because the whole world's not going to run out and buy this one product tomorrow, and so therefore for some weird reasons we shouldn't bothered being excited about it, because obviously it's gunna go nowhere?
Get over yourself man. The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life. And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious. If the false binary choice you seem to offer is between a chorus of blind praise and your brand of negative bullshit, thanks but no thanks, I'd rather take the former.
> I've installed them for student tenants, thinking I was doing a great thing and maybe preventing them from killing themselves with an unattended cooking fire, and you know what, two months later when I went around every single one, every single flat I manage, had knocked their alarms down
This sentence proved that you are not a regular person who uses only a single or two smoke detectors for their home. So you are not relevant. Almost nobody is like you. I have two smoke detectors and they only triggered once in 7 years living in the same place, and I had no issue whatsoever to stop them. This is probably in line with most people who have LOW INVOLVEMENT with these kind of things. You know, when you only use something like once a year or less?
> The world is about to explode with companies like Nest - and new products and opportunities will emerge to improve every single facet of our life.
If you think everyone is going to buy the best of the best in every category of prodcuts and spend all of their cash on things they don't really care about, you are in for a big surprise.
> What, are you angry because they made such a good product?
I'm not angry, I was merely explaining my point of view and I have no idea why you take my view as one of an angry person or something. I found their video nice, they did a good job, I'm just saying it won't change the fact that most people will not care and will not even know about it and keep going on with their business as usual.
> And people like you are going to look like the worst kind of assholes when the transformation becomes obvious.
Actually you are going to look like the worst kind of asshole for calling me names while I have never attacked you personally. That's ad hominem at best and frankly this is not surprising for someone who makes blanket statements about everything.
Cheers.
"But why not focus on the underlying idea – if we could make eating and nutrition easier, how? If we could make phones more customisable and modular, how? Where could this lead? The possibilities, once you start thinking along these lines, are endless."
To me, that brudgers discussion does directly and tangentially hint at making things better and benefits of existing solutions. And moreover, some people are good at fine combing ideas and not propose some new. Criticising people because they are being "negative" amounts to living in a bubble.
Btw ironic, considering OP's comments on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464120
What you say here is true. But it also lacks context - Hacker News is not intended to be a pure democracy. Combative discussion fostered by an incendiary comment shouldn't be acceptable just because it features factually accurate content upvoted en masse by the community.
If that were the case, Hacker News would not have guidelines or moderators. You could allow Hacker News to operate like a pure free-market economy, excusing this as long as it's democratically supported - but that is detrimental to the community's purpose in the long term. Online communities require involved government because the participants (demonstrably) cannot govern themselves when in a group. At worst, discussion devolves to chaos; at best, it becomes inefficient and bothersome. Like anything else, there are pros and cons to combative discussion, and the negatives outweigh the positives.
Examples like the Touch ID discussion and the Nest alarm discussion are particularly informative in this regard, because combative, rehashed meta-discussion took up an entire page in each instance.
Instead my criticism was, boiled down, that I like a lot of what Microsoft is doing but I don't think they've addressed certain basic problems with their communication style and general corporate culture. I feel especially frustrated because I like so much of what Microsoft is doing and want them to succeed, I think the world will be a better place if they are genuinely competitive against Google, Apple and Amazon. I didn't hesitate to express that frustration but in my opinion frustration is far from narrow-minded dismissiveness.
I see my comments on that article as constructive. If I let my frustration override my sense of balance then I apologise.
it ought to be remembered that there is nothing
more difficult to take in hand, more perilous
to conduct, or more uncertain in its success,
than to take the lead in the introduction of a
new order of things. Because the innovator has
for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in
those who may do well under the new.
(Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI)This applies more to things like Soylent which i find is dangerous in the way its marketed now as opposed to the experiment it was in the beginning but its also true for Nest.
There are companies in this business producing smoke alarms for decades and they most certainly know more about its challenges than the NEST guys and given the fact that their thermostats are by no means flawless, one should atleast be cautious and not drink the whole can of marketing induced and VC funded cool-aid without thinking. This is not a touch enabled music player after all.
Being naive and fresh in a decade old market is usually great, but there are certain areas, for example those that can affect peoples health in negative ways, where experience is simply invaluable.
I agree with your assessment though, the Nest post this morning really was quite 'over the top' so to say, as far as negativity goes.
This is exactly what was going through my mind as I traversed what could be aptly described as a flamewar over the product announcement of the Next Protect alarm this morning and after being unable to find any under all of the people claiming to be experts are cooking without setting off their alarm and teaching people how to use existing alarms instead of talking about the device that the comments were supposed to be about.
I'm not saying these comments were off-topic, but they were very distracting to me.
Emotive thinking I think goes without saying is worse since it's not logical.
But emotive people can still be quite good at their specialities and if the topic is not pushed by emotions.
No idea on the solution, have a Vulcan filter on emotive threads?
Is HN about learning from other people or about other people or both?
[edit] And will say emotive people also have other great skill sets like motivating others. Just are not good when you what to find the right decision.
Doesn't matter the negativity it may receive, we all know you hit the nail on the head.