4 ms·

What a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time. Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-le

What a garbage post from a garbage project that wasted lots of time. Locks keeps honest people honest, they don't stop a determined burglar. A digital, key-less system with new gears to move the same deadbolt, is providing zero innovation, b/c it's still just a little deadbolt securing all ~inch of door-perimeter to the frame (unless I missed something and they also re-invented the door hinge). So much business BS in this post, too. Like claims of a new UX! As if the process of unlocking is the "experience" factor of importance! And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! And the part about "we created a culture of innovation"!!! What inflated garbage!

slackingoff2017 9y ago
I think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money. Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!
- unicornporn 9y ago
  But why? Keys work pretty well. But then, people buy IOT toothbrushes. So perhaps there would've be a market of idiots waiting in line.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    There's a few obvious use cases I can think of: 1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too. 2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in. I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.
  - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
    I have a keyless, non-IoT deadbolt (number pad with access code). It's hugely more convenient and more pleasant to use than traditional keys. One of those things that you don't really realize until you have one. I never worry about having house keys. I can pop in and out of the house on short jaunts with much less friction. I can give people access to my home without coordinating handing over keys. I don't have to go through the clumsy and annoying process of getting keys out, sticking them in the lock, turning them, turning them back, taking them out, and putting them back in my pocket just to walk through a door. It seems trivial but it really does noticeably improve quality of life.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The traditional lock makers have that market sewed up. (who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)
unicornporn 9y ago
> And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! It actually made me LOL. Sounds like someone read https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788 https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc... and tried to apply gained knowledge to a door lock.
nicodjimenez 9y ago
In this culture of "everyone's a winner" sometimes people can't accept failure. Entering acquisition talks is a dangerous move because you totally lose your focus, it sounds like these guys just got sloppy in their decision making and paid the ultimate price. The people blaming the acquiring company on the comments at the bottom of the article, as if they committed some kind of grave injustice by not bailing out the company, make me sick.
mb_72 9y ago
Yep. Who or which user 'falls in love' with a lock (with reference to the lead line of the article) anyway? Sounds like there is some serious reality distortion going on.
austenallred 9y ago
Respectfully, fuck this attitude. Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal. Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons. It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.
- _aarti 9y ago
  Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.
- exergy 9y ago
  Irreverently, fuck this attitude instead. Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much. People who're convinced that their idiotic pilgrimage towards delivering a "magical" "experience", while completely divested from common sense and lacking any semblance of an answer to "but why?", will nevertheless change the world and "delight" users. Fuck all of it. Here's what this genius has to say: "...the software team challenged themselves to complete the full user experience so that our customers would fall in love with the way they engaged the product and actually experience joy as they used it." Huh? Whatever. Let's put a chip in it. I've never EVER had an interaction with a motherfucking lock where the lock was even the subject of my consideration, let alone worthy of delighting me. Usually when I'm unlocking shit, I'm focussed on what lies beyond the lock. There really IS such a thing as solving the wrong problem. I'd say all the engineers who joined this foolhardy project deserved what came their way, but unfortunately most of them were probably young engineers desperate for experience or a chance to work at a "startup". This fucking internet of shit trend cannot fucking die soon enough.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Having used Face ID on the iPhone X for 2 months now I would be more surprised if we didn’t open doors with our faces in a few years.
dang 9y ago
Please don't post indignant rants like this to Hacker News. It reliably leads to garbage threads, as the embarrassing sequence of 'fuck you', 'fuck you and your farts', and 'no fuck YOU' amply demonstrates below. It's cringeworthy. The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comments wouldn't have followed. Your post was upvoted, predictably to the top, but that doesn't mean it was good. It's because of the fact that rage activates the Jerry Springer Show impulse in most of us. This is a weakness of the upvoting system and something that amplifies the worst in online communities. As a result, we need all HN users, including you, to exercise a bit of self restraint and not go straight to the bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean you have to change your views, just post thoughtfully and with an orientation to good conversation rather than venting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- angel_j 9y ago
  I disagree. Civility in conversation has been a tactic used against women for centuries. "You can't talk that way! It's un-lady-like!" It is the morality of society who want to control those they oppress, by silencing them. And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.
  - dang 9y ago
    I'm familiar with that argument against civility, and even sympathetic to it, but I don't see how it applies here. We're not asking anyone to be "ladylike", nor trying to prevent anyone from voicing their experience of the world—quite the opposite. It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting. If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it. HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting. You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

I think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money. Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!

unicornporn 9y ago
But why? Keys work pretty well. But then, people buy IOT toothbrushes. So perhaps there would've be a market of idiots waiting in line.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  There's a few obvious use cases I can think of: 1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too. 2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in. I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.
- not_kurt_godel 9y ago
  I have a keyless, non-IoT deadbolt (number pad with access code). It's hugely more convenient and more pleasant to use than traditional keys. One of those things that you don't really realize until you have one. I never worry about having house keys. I can pop in and out of the house on short jaunts with much less friction. I can give people access to my home without coordinating handing over keys. I don't have to go through the clumsy and annoying process of getting keys out, sticking them in the lock, turning them, turning them back, taking them out, and putting them back in my pocket just to walk through a door. It seems trivial but it really does noticeably improve quality of life.
maxerickson 9y ago
The traditional lock makers have that market sewed up. (who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)

unicornporn 9y ago

> And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock! It actually made me LOL. Sounds like someone read https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/1591847788 https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc... and tried to apply gained knowledge to a door lock.

nicodjimenez 9y ago

In this culture of "everyone's a winner" sometimes people can't accept failure. Entering acquisition talks is a dangerous move because you totally lose your focus, it sounds like these guys just got sloppy in their decision making and paid the ultimate price. The people blaming the acquiring company on the comments at the bottom of the article, as if they committed some kind of grave injustice by not bailing out the company, make me sick.

mb_72 9y ago

Yep. Who or which user 'falls in love' with a lock (with reference to the lead line of the article) anyway? Sounds like there is some serious reality distortion going on.

austenallred 9y ago

Respectfully, fuck this attitude. Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal. Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons. It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.

_aarti 9y ago
Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.
exergy 9y ago
Irreverently, fuck this attitude instead. Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much. People who're convinced that their idiotic pilgrimage towards delivering a "magical" "experience", while completely divested from common sense and lacking any semblance of an answer to "but why?", will nevertheless change the world and "delight" users. Fuck all of it. Here's what this genius has to say: "...the software team challenged themselves to complete the full user experience so that our customers would fall in love with the way they engaged the product and actually experience joy as they used it." Huh? Whatever. Let's put a chip in it. I've never EVER had an interaction with a motherfucking lock where the lock was even the subject of my consideration, let alone worthy of delighting me. Usually when I'm unlocking shit, I'm focussed on what lies beyond the lock. There really IS such a thing as solving the wrong problem. I'd say all the engineers who joined this foolhardy project deserved what came their way, but unfortunately most of them were probably young engineers desperate for experience or a chance to work at a "startup". This fucking internet of shit trend cannot fucking die soon enough.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Having used Face ID on the iPhone X for 2 months now I would be more surprised if we didn’t open doors with our faces in a few years.

dang 9y ago

Please don't post indignant rants like this to Hacker News. It reliably leads to garbage threads, as the embarrassing sequence of 'fuck you', 'fuck you and your farts', and 'no fuck YOU' amply demonstrates below. It's cringeworthy. The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comments wouldn't have followed. Your post was upvoted, predictably to the top, but that doesn't mean it was good. It's because of the fact that rage activates the Jerry Springer Show impulse in most of us. This is a weakness of the upvoting system and something that amplifies the worst in online communities. As a result, we need all HN users, including you, to exercise a bit of self restraint and not go straight to the bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean you have to change your views, just post thoughtfully and with an orientation to good conversation rather than venting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

angel_j 9y ago
I disagree. Civility in conversation has been a tactic used against women for centuries. "You can't talk that way! It's un-lady-like!" It is the morality of society who want to control those they oppress, by silencing them. And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.
- dang 9y ago
  I'm familiar with that argument against civility, and even sympathetic to it, but I don't see how it applies here. We're not asking anyone to be "ladylike", nor trying to prevent anyone from voicing their experience of the world—quite the opposite. It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting. If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it. HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting. You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.