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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what's with all of the hate? Someone uses a new technology to create a device that could be a more efficient way of solving a current problem, and the best comments that anyone can write are complaints about how it's a bad idea or solving the wrong problem because they personally don't have this problem? What an awful way to encourage inventive people to follow their dreams and build new products for everyone. These attitudes kill entrepreneurship.

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Well there's this:

    > What about clinical studies?
    > Clinical studies will be published soon, showing the same
    > dramatic improvements in plaque-removal and overall oral
    >  hygiene that our inhouse testing and usage by 
    > our first customers have already been showing.

That's not quite how science works.

But it's nice to see engineering geeks getting into the medical quackery business.

Also:

> It lasts 1 year - you receive a refurbished one (professionally cleaned and all bristles brandnew) for 89.

So it's even more expensive to maintain than an electric toothbrush, which can also be shared among multiple users with different bristle heads.

I've been plagued with bad teeth all my life. No one ever taught me to know your teeth are clean, you just gotta figure it out. Who cares what toothbrush gets you there as long as it makes your life easier? It's not like it's a chemical.

I'm very excited about this. The 6 second thing would be a Godsend for my 5 year old, who I spend 90 seconds every night brushing his teeth for him, trying to stave off more tooth decay on his teeth (bad teeth run in my family). I feel guilty about only doing 90 seconds, and he hates that we even do that long. This would be huge for our evening routine, and maybe for his long term tooth health (baby tooth health can effect adult tooth health)

I'm disappointed at the $500/person price tag. ($300 plus dental impressions), but I'm still really thinking about this for him and for me.

I'm curious how long a kid could use one of these before needing to go get a new impression/print. Any dentists out there have a good estimate?

I imagine it would only last them like 6 months at best. I can't see putting a kid through dental impressions that often even if the price tag dropped.

For adults though this does sound exciting.

for my 4 year old son, I brush his bottom teeth and count to 100, then brush his top teeth and count down to zero. maybe it's because i started this routine when he was 2, but he sits through it A-OK.

no cavities yet, and i hope it helps him with numbers too.

One of the parents at my school took a bullet for the rest of the team and let her son not brush his teeth. They became black, holey and disgusting, and I imagine quite painful. Everyone in school knew that that's what happened if you didn't brush your teeth. Worked on me and my brothers, and I remember the kids in my class boasting about how long they brushed their teeth for.

> I'm disappointed at the $500/person price tag.

Totally. That price seems to be based on a weird kind of "medical products should/can be expensive"-thinking. Also consider they priced the product at an equal amount of dollars or euros. Makes me think it's priced more towards what people might be willing to pay (and betting quite high) than as a function of its cost.

You are correct. medical products should be expensive. If they're not they won't sell. The thought is something like this: "High price equals high quality". Family of mine found out when they engineered a machine to transform biohazard medical waste to standard 'grey' waste. Standard waste is 100 times less expensive to dispose care of, but they're having a really hard time selling the machine. (They own the patents and everything).

That's the exact reason why a bunch of Apple stuff is more expensive that it should be and/or not free. People tend to perceive free stuff as cheap/bad and expensive stuff as high quality/good.

Being in the FOSS world, I can only shake my head at that...

When people have difficulty to compare products they will use the price of the product and comparable products as a guide. If people start hassling you about prices of your goods/services, it means you have not done a good job differentiating your products. E.g. your message sucks (or perhaps your product suck).

> What an awful way to encourage inventive people to follow their dreams and build new products for everyone. These attitudes kill entrepreneurship.

How to provide useful feedback is a very serious problem. On the one hand, I agree that we are usually biased toward negative criticism, on the other hand overly positive feedback is exactly 0% useful.

If people on HN have this kind of reaction, it's very likely that other people out there will also have this kind of reaction so as an entrepreneur, you really want to know real people's reaction so you can improve your pitch.

So let's make sure that we provide constructive and encouraging feedback but let's also not refrain emotional reactions just because we want to encourage inventive people to follow their dreams and build new products for everyone. Otherwise, it's not feedback anymore.

They act like that on almost every article. It's like an Entrepreneur's version of the "Player Haters Ball" Dave Chappelle sketch.

this is perfect for small children who cannot brush their teeth that well.

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