luka-birsa

The components cost too much.

Perhaps if this was some open source play where everybody did everything for free. We tried different pricing, different positioning and we could not breakthrough into large volumes with a platform play. Everybody in the end tries to haggle you on the price / cut you out and unless you have Google-deep pockets you can't afford to lose money for a couple years to launch this wide.

I'd say that it's pretty much impossible to do a platform play in hardware if you're a startup. Even when talking about IOT, which is arguably the simplest hardware I don't remember of a platform play that went really well. Most of them are meh or random successes like the ESP WiFI (again not started by a small startup, but still could be argued that is a proper hacker platform).

If you want to play with some of our solutions, hit me up at luka dot birsa [at] visionect dot com and I'll see what I can do.

Chicken and the egg?

You need high volumes to drop the price and you can't get high volumes with high price. The E Ink technology has a lot of downsides compared to OLED and LCD, such as update speed, limited colors,...

We (http://www.visionect.com) have been building E Ink solutions for past decade and we just stoped convincing people that they should use E Ink where they could use LCD or OLED. E Ink is useful only as a niche solution for specific, mostly not consumer (exception being Kindle and Remarkable) products. We've sold a platform for any application and after a while we saw that it only makes sense to focus on specific niches (digital signage, transportation, bus stops) or go for finished product (see our https://getjoan.com).

In the end it is what it is - everybody says they'd use an E Ink display everyday, but almost nobody is prepared to spend the cash when they can use iPads, phones or huge LCD/OLED instead.

E Ink will have it's day in digital signage as they solve the colors as these screens will replace all paper advertising eventually, but untill the you'll see this screens on ebook readers / note takers, on conference rooms and on digital bus stops.

Such a good project. Reminds me of some of the projects people hacked using our solutions - for example this Digital Picture frame that is displaying the latest tweet from Donald Trump: https://www.visionect.com/blog/sign-of-the-times/.

Android will never work in a cordless scenario. We have device with 3 months autonomy and the next gen device currently nearing production drastically increases that as well. We've evaluated everything embedded, especially Android (love the ecosystem), but there is literary no tech that would give you full operation and full wifi connectivity, months of autonomy off a standard phone battery and Android. We had to develop a lot of proprietary stuff...

Yup. We did get a lot of that with our meeting room solution. We'll be expanding the feature set over the near future, to entice home users to go for something like this even with a price tag of 250.

Large format E-ink displays are currently used primarily in digital signage scenarios (outdoor advertising, passenger information systems,...) - examples are Soofa (http://www.soofa.co/) and Mercury Innovation (https://www.mercuryinnovation.com.au/digital-bus-stop).

The largest size currently available is 42" and it is used in outdoor and indoor scenarios. Indoor use is for education purposes as a digital whiteboard - see Quilla (https://www.engadget.com/2017-01-03-quirklogic-s-quilla-is-a...).

None of these are especially applicable for home use due to the price tag (just to be clear, the display itself is very expensive). What you could do is use Sonys larger format eInk tablet, use Remarkable EInk tablet or hack your own solution from an older Kobo reader.

We're offering solutions somewhere in the middle - traditionally we were focused on SME, where our devices are being used as universal digital signage (http://www.visionect.com) or tailored for room booking (http://getjoan.com), so a bit pricy for home use. But we just launched a 6" device called Joan Home (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-home/) that syncs to your calendar and are looking to expand it with new functionality in the future. We're thing of integrations with home automation, pomodoro timer, IFTTT, etc...

Comments on the Joan Home are welcome - as we're actively thinking of developing this into a more feature rich product in next two months.

We've seen a resurgence of eInk device related threads on HN and that got us thinking if we can respond to some of the requests of the people in the comments by providing a devices for that purpose.

We've just launched Joan Home - a WFH device that you can mount on your door to reduce the interruptions you get during your day working from your home office. Schedule your deep work sessions and share your calendar with your family.

Best thing is that this is an eInk device, so easy mounting (no wires) + easy on the eyes as well. No 24/7 LCD screens blasting down the hallway.

What? :)

I hope the OP writes a book with zero changes to his writing style.

OP, please write that book / collection of stories. Loved reading this, it makes me appreciate the culture and quality of work we have in our company.

What about:

- Asking them why did you pick X? (here you might get an answer why you didn't pick Y) - Telling them that you tried Y and it worked for you.

So it's understanding their process and sharing your experience. I think in the end you should have the engineer decide on his own.

In the end they might go with X anyways, so you'll need to react to that.

I've had an engineer going for X for 14 days, but every time we had a discussion I've asked additional questions about X for me (and them) to understand why going for X is a better approach. In the end he figured it out that Y is a better approach. While it took a while, the engineering person in the end figured it out and took the solution for his.

I've also had cases where this didn't work out, but in those cases I've put my foot down saying you need to use Y to the person. It's also the case that person is not with us anymore.

Starting with "X is a Dick" will be less effective than "I'm having problems delivering, can you please help me - looks like my manager is running me to the ground". Thats all I'm saying.

You're probably more likely to salvage the relationship if you position it as process issues and give the Lead some room to walk back.

Even tho it is usually personal.

Look, I'm not here to sugarcoat it. It's clear that it is in my interest to get the dysfunctions reported.

But you really are projecting or something in the second part of the reply. The OP took time and opened a thread on HN with the purpose of fixing what is clearly a strained relationsihip. I'm giving feedback what you should do if you really want to fix it.

I'm not expecting anyone to do anything and for what it's worth - if you don't care about the job/position then just walk away.

Reallity is messy and it is not possible to have these perfect relationships across the company - everybody fucks up (just like you create bugs in the software). We're talking how you can move forward and try to fix it for everybody in the organisation - if you give a damn about the organisation.

It benefits both. Me, as a founder, will get an insight into what is happening and I can implement policies / work to change the culture / fire people in order to make it right. There is a clear incentive for me, since a functioning company is more likely to succeed.

But there might be also an incentive for the OP. If you care about what you've built / want to continue working in the same company / want to get the recognition you deserve you can go to the founder/CEO and let them know what you think. It's not a hard thing to do (eg: just book a 30 minute slot with them) and let them know how you feel.

I've seen all of the above motivations and I think that these are more important than financial ones. Seen friends, engineers in other companies, torn apart due to the fact that they just couldn't stay in the company where they really wanted to be due to some bad actor. Those are the cases where management / founders don't see the actor the same way as an employee does.

I'm a startup co-founder (~100 ppl working in the team now). Had this kind of stuff happen before.

Two options:

1. Your observations are correct and you are not getting the recognition you deserve and there is an a-hole managing you.

2. Your observations are incorrect and you think you're entitled to more that you really are, making you the a-hole.

Regardless what is the reality you need to talk to the founders. We are sometimes oblivious to what is happening in the team and cannot see everything. I keep all my employees that raise the voice in extremely high regard - they want to improve something.

I will however do some exploration after such report and figure out what I feel is the truth and how I want to react on this. I've had people report stuff that was good on surface, but further exploration pointed me that I do not want to side with them. I've explained my view to the reportee and implemented actions (if applicable).

When you talk don't do it in an a-hole way (eg. Team Lead is a dick), but let them know you're having problems (you feel your work is not appreciated, you're trying your best, you're burning out and you don't know what to do, even thinking of quitting). Explain what is happening, but try not to name names. Any good founder/CEO will figure out quickly what's the problem.

The founders action will tell you what they think - do they agree with 1. or 2. If nothing happens that would solve your problems, change careers. It's sad that you worked your ass off, but that probably means that they went with option 2. it means that this environment is not right for you. Good news is that if you're really a high performer, you should have no problems finding a new gig and kicking ass there.

Makes me wanna install Ableton and just play with it. What a well done commercial.

We've managed to build the app in 21 days start-finish and it was on of the best development/deploy experiences ever. Let me know if you have any questions for me.

I'm guessing people will soon start figuring out that privacy is important and that perhaps posting personal shit online is not smart. Today it's some kid who had some friends say something barred from entry in the US, tomorrow it's going to be you for some weird meme image you've posted online flagged by some algorithm.

Say it won't be so, but I can't see how that wont happen especially with the always shifting moral compass and laws around what's acceptable and not.

Went to check the landing page, looks nice.

Does not answer why I would choose this over all the other 1000000 of CRM offerings (just in our office we tried Zoho, Close.io, Salesforce, Pipedrive,....).

Plus, not fully sold on the "Built to last - Wobaka is like your favorite craft beer or artisan coffee. Made with love and hand-picked ingredients. No mega-corp here." pitch.

Great effort tho.

+1

Plus, this is chump change, but it reminded us that we really should migrate behind their NATs for outgoing traffic. I do think that they are doing this to motivate customers to reduce the IP usage as the IPv4 space is finite.

Ideal for a company that has near infinite markup on the goods (eg. SaaS business with very good unit economics). As somebody that processes a lot of payments for physical goods (electronic devices) the preference is not as clear cut. You ship out the goods in the COGS value of couple K of USD just to get the chargeback.

We've ended up adding additional heuristics to mark the fishy payments and manual checking before shipping out.

Something like Stripe Chargeback protection actually makes sense and I'll ask my team to look into the ratio of chargebacks to see if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree just because of this.

You can try: https://marta.yanex.org/ - this one keeps the original NC spirit strong. i've used it a while but reverted back to Finder + command line folder manipulation.

Can somebody TLDR; why 5G is so much more dangerous (security wise) vs 4G?

Plus I do like the two-facedness - nobody should spy unless it's us.

Shouldn't you just stop going?

I still install antivirus software, but given the feedback from you guys - I'm not sure it's still worth it.

What can I say, I moonlighted as a computer technician during W95-Win7 years and old habits die hard.

Shocker, I know!

You are trying to tell me that its an unlucky coincidence that the businesses are shutting down right around Brexit deadline, and Brexit nothing has to do with it?

Sure.

I'm literarly hanging on the edge of the seat in this self inflicted catastrophe that is Brexit.

I view it as an experiment in what happens when common sense fails to win in an election.

I'm a EU citizen and Brexit will have negative impact, but I really want them to see this through, preferably in a no deal fashion.

I want to see what happens. Was it realy project Fear, or - what I belive - this will spell total shit for UK for comming years and decades.

Reading the comments bellow its really funny to hear all this bull about caps being there to protect the providers and their lack of capacity.

I have 300 mbit link for 50 USD and no caps. I have full lte and 2TB downlink cap for 25 USD.

But we do have strong competition and it seems it was never about capacity. Its about who offers more. Its obvious that they can afford this since nobody is loosing money, and all of this on a very small and marginal market where isps purchsing power is small.

You are being bullshited to, dear Americans.

We had to migrate ~100 instances from Azure to GCP. It took us one month. At the end of the month we changed the dns entries and flipped the switch.

Its true tho that we never wanted to work with managed services, so there was literarly no need to redo any of the tooling.

I'd like to jump on this bandwagon. IMO a decline of a company can come in various forms and here we're seeing an empire built on mobile market growth starting to feel the reality of 1% yearly growth in a mature market.

Apple is slowly declining (a percent per year) their market share (they are no longer number two - oppo/oneplus has that position now), next year they won't be number three (Huawei). What happens when they go below 10%? Will developer still deliver applications for OSX? Is there a possibility for the same scenario as it was in the Mac vs PC?

Reality is that modern Android mobile phones are good enough for most. Unless you're really into the status symbol part of the Apple, they really don't have something special. Plus there is no need to upgrade a phone anymore. I bought my Galaxy S8+ a year after lunch (much cheaper) and would replace it only because of consumerism - to get a new phone. Arguably there is nothing that really warrants an upgrade today.

Headphones, while a great move, won't help them in a long run - not enough margins and good competition. The silver lining with Apple is the that they have a growing services business. Too bad Netflix is kicking their ass in video content wars. Siri is also mostly mediocre. Homekit - who knows, what happens if your market share is falling.

Reality is that Android won 3 years back. We'll see if Apple can turn around thanks to their endless coffers of cash. It's not over yet, but they need to do something and not just upgrade what they have.

There was no accidental mistake by the media. It was a PR spin by IBM, hyping up the tech to sell the IBM brand.