Hacker News

You include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push.

Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.

I have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff.

At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be cool?” and there was no one powerful or smart enough to stop their hubris.

Every hot summer night, I turn off my bedside lamp, and scream internally when I notice I forgot to put a dark piece of cloth to obscure the blinding white light on the fan. In these nights, I dream of sending an email to Rowenta’s customer team, and asking them to present me the head of the person responsible for this.

I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately and how technologists have made the world ugly by forgetting to keep in touch with Quality and Beauty, and this is painful reminder of it.

Case in point: minidisc :)

Recording was the killer feature for me. I recorded thousands of hours of band rehearsals with their stereo omni mics and the media quality.

I disagree here. That would be a marketing problem and I would have market it as for audio on the walk. With the focus on listening and the record option as a bonus.

... and later, the fancier and more expensive walkmans started to actually have a recording function among the differentiators :)

im thinking about making a hackernews but only for articles written before 2021 (or so).

Good catch!

> Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.

I still have a first gen (!) iPad that still lasts for weeks on a single charge when locked. It is useless now, because there is no software support, but not because of the battery.

They boot reasonably quickly, just turn it off.

While on they are constantly listening for a “find my” signal so it’s easy to locate. For the overwhelming majority of people it’s a good tradeoff.

> my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged.

Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).

Was yours 3G? The first-gen was offered with 3G (mobile) as an option. I imagine that killed battery life much faster and might not have been tested as well as the wifi-only option.

Is it even possible for tablets to hold a charge so long and provide near instant wake?

Why didn't you try powering it off when done?

Turn on Battery Save mode, it’ll last a month.

I've got the same problem with a Samsung tablet I got. I use it maybe once every two weeks, so naturally I turn it off for the duration... but it somehow manages to empty its battery while completely off?! And it takes like a million years to boot, half of it only after you unlock it for some damn reason, it's such tedium.

Same here! I was so annoyed that it didn't come with an auto-powerdown function. Did they really expect people to remember to turn them off "when they plan not to use it for a few days" (I mean who plans not to use something)

People generally classify the opportunity cost as zero, and if you want to say no to the reasonably good ideas, others will put pressure on you to just do it.

This writeup looks at a successful product with a small number of features that was thereby distinguished from a field of unsuccessful products with a large number of features. Accounting for many products, considering both successes and failures (i.e. using a wide selection of data), it argues that the distinguishing factor of less features was related to the device’s popularity.

In the canonical example of survivor bias, the only bombers being examined (for their characteristics) in the original flawed analysis were the ones that made it back; the planes that were shot down (and their characteristics) were not being considered — an error.

Sure, but how many failed consumer products can you name that solved a problem a large number of consumers actually had way better than anything that came before?

I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.

Maybe, but you can't count how many times I see it happen in reverse too. Without saying it directly, a person reveals that they believe there is nothing left to invent or that whatever is currently best established can never ever be replicated or (gasp) beaten.

One of the most important [to me] books, was The Simplicity Shift[0], by Scott Jenson.

It was written pre-iPhone, when phones had seriously limited screen real estate.

He talks about how important it is to “weight” features, and order them by importance.

I am wrestling with this exact type of issue, right now, with a screen of my app.

[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf (a PDF of the entire book. It’s a short read)

You're blown away at how old he is, or how young he is?

My gmail account is over 20 years old!

That isn't snark — it's reality.

Probably hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people still suffer from this truth each and every day.

ERP and corporate procurement in a nutshell.

> So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.

no, it’s never not been a superpower.

sorry, couldn’t resist some wordplay. it has always been one of the most important skills, but it doesn’t advance your career easily. enshittification happens because people don’t say no.

> If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that.

And high traffic on a terrific landing page only tells you is that your product might be good enough.

OTOH, if you have a product that is dog-ugly, but still have people willing to pay for it, you have lightning in a bottle.

I've never been enticed by a landing page (yes, datapoint of one). It's either recommendation from source I trust (which has included reddit) and some demo/review available somewhere. Never the landing page as they usually took too much scrolling to get to the point.[0].

Better host a quick video demo/video add instead of drowning the user in copywriting.

[0]: Compare https://nova.app/ and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html. Everything bellow the six highlights in the former case should be its own page.