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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to belittle what the kid has done. It's an actually amazing accomplishment, for anyone of any age.

But it calls to question a problem. Is there a major issue with cross-disciplinary collaboration within the medical and academic spaces? I would think a mechanical or electrical engineer would consider this to be a fairly trivial application of the tech, yet the medical community seems to be hailing it as a ground-swell.

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OTOH, it is a groundswell in the engineering community to notice the medical application. Interdisciplinarians are the hugely valuable applied scientists who unlock the power of ideas.

It may be, but I'm more concerned with the poor treatment the kid got initially, getting ignored like that. Even if you didn't think he was serious, would it have killed you to refer him to what you thought would have been a more appropriate channel rather than ignoring him?

He didn't pass the right signaling… maybe they're better off by not working with those who dismissed them so easily?

I don't know. I think I understand the viewpoint. I get emailed by random people all the time. I usually reply to them, and try to be encouraging, unless I'm super harried and it just slips through the cracks. But, as far as I can tell, none of them have really turned into anything. Usually, they end up ignoring my email. There's been dozens over the years and it probably would have been a better use of my time to ignore them.

Could you send a form letter inviting them to verify that they are serious?

I sympathize with your sentiment, but the amount of mails academics get from people who says they want do work in their group is just overwhelming. Mostly it is Chinese and Indians who want to do a PhD or a postdoc in the group. Those who doesn't make it clear that they understand more than superficially what your position is and what the research group is doing will be rudely ignored.

That's like saying every software engineer in the Bay Area should respond helpfully to every email from recruiters, directing them to more appropriate candidates rather than ignoring them.

There is some supporting evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1964613

This is just a hype article. The invention is a cost saving redesign of an existing device. The wholesale wholesale price ($400) is lower than the retail price of existing devices ($200), which is nice -- more competition, but not particularly technically amazing.

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