Comment by catherd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catherd | Hacker News Reader

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I typically agree with your calls on being a jerk vs. not, but LeifCarrotson is being pretty factual here.

Hardware is incredibly expensive and time consuming to create from scratch in ways programmers usually don't appreciate. If the GP is asking those questions after thinking about the problem for years they do clearly need to be told they have no idea what the problem is.

In the hardware business we are constantly approached by people who have little more than a vague idea and a hobby-money budget. I've seen what happens when you encourage them, and it usually involves fucking up their retirement if you let them get too far.

Much more humane to see it for what it is and shoot the idea down as fast as possible, or at least help them understand they probably need VC level funding to get anywhere.

If someone has been simmering on an idea for years and can't even formulate a clear explanation of a problem he wants to solve (so that people can explain what's required past "it's really expensive, don't do it") it's clearly not sinking in and there's no product there, just a guy who wants to play with technology and waste manufacturer's time while doing it.

I certainly wouldn't argue against any of that. But it's easy to make such a case without putting someone else down. In fairness, though, the bits I was objecting to in LeifCarrotson's comment were pretty borderline.

There's a long long tail of weirdness and variation in any large population (such as an internet forum like HN), so it's best to give people the benefit of the doubt. It can easily seem like someone else is doing one thing when in reality they're doing another. I feel like half of the moderation we have to do in comments boils down to this.

Not disagreeing, just adding more info:

I think a lot of people on the manufacturing side react in a confrontational way because it's disrespectful to a manufacturer when someone wants to use the infrastructure they've sunk years into as a playground with no hope of actually making it to production.

If a manufacturer takes on 10 projects in a year and none of them do anything but endless prototyping they will quickly go out of business. Unlike in software where you make your money in the design phase.

If someone has been trying to make a hardware project happen for years and they still don't understand this dynamic then there's not just an understanding issue, there's a track history of being a drain on other people's resources, or at least a willingness to be one. Establishing a relationship with everyone needed to make hardware has a much higher drain on partner resources than would happen if a consumer called a help line or a programmer read some API documents. Just making a quotation can take a week or more for a non-trivial hardware project, and prototyping is generally not that profitable either, if at all.

An analogy: If someone came in here and said they wanted to hire CS grad students to work on Blockchain (but no clear idea of a specific problem) during the shutdown and was hoping they could pay them half of what they make on their already lower than market rate research stipend but still take advantage of the research topics they are involved in, I think expressing a certain amount of "hey, those are real people you are hoping to screw over" would be appropriate.

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