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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

I hate to bring this up, but this is perhaps one of the clearest examples of PR copy as mentioned by Paul Graham's Submarine post: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Basically, this is a big advert for Yondr (the company making the phone baggies) - the clickbait title, the picture of the baggies, the quote from the fan saying he's ok with the whole thing, the list of artists signed up with Yondr, and the whole spiel about why a "phone-less" concert is such a great thing.

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Plus, almost no information about how it works or why people would not just open the bags on the inside.

They can't. It's locked. You have to bring it back up front to unlock the bag.

But Paul Graham admits there that even his company did this. I don't think he says it's bad.. but good to bring awareness about it.

I think the product is cool

More importantly: Isn't Hacker News about programing and technology?

This article is about technology. More specifically, society's reaction to modern technology. It also raises questions of how society is going to react to wearable computing once that becomes more prevalent.

That's a huge stretch. Sometimes in job interviews you get asked about recent tech news to assess if you stay up to date. I wouldn't speak about this article personally.

Ycombinator is about startups, Yondr is apparently a startup.

It's an interesting startup with an interesting idea but the article couldn't be more clickbait advertisement.

And startups. HN is very much about startups.

Fair enough, if HN is about startups I won't complain about articles covering startups selling reed baskets then.

Yes, it's called a 'puff piece'.

Given this is an entrepreneurial-leaning community, maybe we should be congratulating Yondr for securing the coverage rather than criticizing them and the NYT. Marketing is a necessary part of any successful endeavor.

Washington post not NYT

Hacker News in a nutshell: "We should be congratulating the ones who are manipulating the means by which we mean to be informed, as they were doing it for capitalist gain."

Please don't make dissing generalizations about the community as a rhetorical device. We've noticed that it's reliably a marker of bad comments. People usually make such generalizations to put down those on the other side of an argument and give themselves a higher status by implication. That may be good for making others look bad, but it's not good for the thoughtful discussion we hope for here.

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