
Seriously, we don’t need smartphone-controlled candles - sethbannon
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/why-why-why-headdesk/
======
pashabitz
Listen, I've read enough of these in the last couple of years. Enough! Don't
fucking buy the stupid candle if you don't like it. What, blogging about
things nobody needs is more valuable to the world than creating questionable
products with new technology?

People can make whatever they want and if nobody buys it - they'll stop.

Sure, I wish everybody worked on finding a cure for cancer every day but
that's not how stuff works. Get over it.

You know what this is? Lazy journalism. Find another topic.

~~~
ChristianBundy
Listen, I've read enough of these in the last couple of years. Enough! Don't
fucking comment on the stupid article if you don't like it. What, commenting
about things nobody needs to read is more valuable to the world than creating
questionable articles about new technology?

People can write whatever they want and if nobody comments on it - they'll
stop.

Sure, I wish everybody worked on finding a cure for cancer every day but
that's not how stuff works. Get over it.

You know what this is? Lazy commenting. Find another topic.

~~~
Infernal
Listen, I've read enough of these in the last couple of years. Enough! Don't
fucking comment on the stupid comment if you don't like it. What, commenting
about comments nobody needs to read is more valuable to the world than
creating questionable comments about new technology?

People can comment whatever they want and if nobody comments on it - they'll
stop.

Sure, I wish everybody worked on finding a cure for cancer every day but
that's not how stuff works. Get over it.

You know what this is? Lazy meta-commenting. Find another topic.

------
goshx
"While it’s probably neat to be able to light a candle from your phone, it’s a
fantastic example of something the world could do perfectly well without."

The world was doing perfectly well without a lot of things we have today.
Sometimes the ideas seen as stupid are what open doors to previously
unimagined possibilities and innovation.

~~~
emodendroket
Name one situation where you would really benefit from a remote-controlled
candle.

And besides that, it's not as though some new technology has been invented
here. This is combining well-understood parts together.

~~~
Spivak
> Name one situation where you would really benefit from a remote-controlled
> candle.

Dramatic effect for my DnD campaign.

~~~
koolba
> Dramatic effect for my DnD campaign.

Preprogrammed maybe, but pulling out your phone to alter the lights after
rolling a d20 would offset any added vibe.

The analog solution of having the candles already lit and then, " _Poof!_ ",
blowing them out as soon as you see that they failed the roll is far superior.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Preprogrammed maybe, but pulling out your phone to alter the lights after
> rolling a d20 would offset any added vibe.

"Pulling out your phone", sure, but if its out already because you also use it
for other game related functions...

~~~
r_smart
And it's sitting on the table behind your screen...

------
fps
"Only things that are directly useful to me should be made. Nothing else is
permitted!"

------
digitalsushi
I have spent countless hours trying to use the LIFX API to create a reasonable
candle flicker. Probably 40 hours of tinkering, getting inside its head,
figure out that it really can't.

I wish I knew about this.

Seriously, I need a smartphone controlled candle.

~~~
vlunkr
Depends on how you define "need" I suppose.

------
twinkletwinkle
The only thing worse than someone creating a smartphone-controlled candle is
someone else writing an article about it.

~~~
maxerickson
How bout a meta comment about someone commenting about someone writing about
it?

~~~
twinkletwinkle
It's wasted potential all the way down.

------
zedadex
"Seriously, we don’t need smartphone-controlled X" will always give way to
"but if it doesn't exist, we'll have the market to ourselves," and so you'll
continue to see "smartphone-controlled X"s being created and successfully
funded, as niches still have profit margins.

There's really no point to the protestations anymore. "Smart X" is the new
novelty modifier, and we've seen these come and go before. Just acknowledge it
as a trend, purchase the ones you always had an interest in and believe a good
product exists for, and forget about trying to dissuade the average consumer
from doing what they're going to do anyways.

------
sethbannon
One of the saddest things to me is seeing some of the most brilliant and
creative minds work on trivial or frivolous things. How much positive impact
could those people be having if they were just pointed in another direction?
Yes, it's sometimes hard to know what frivolous looking things may turn out to
be important, but some things (e.g. smartphone-controlled candles) are clear
as day.

~~~
recursive
Also sometimes formulated as "how can you people be having fun when cancer
still isn't cured yet?"

~~~
imagist
So you're claiming that people are working on smartphone-controlled candles
for fun? Because LuDela seems like it's a startup trying to make money, not a
group of people trying to have fun.

~~~
fps
Here's a community of people who make things that you probably find useless
for fun: [https://makezine.com/](https://makezine.com/)

Here's a company that makes money off this community, which is probably made
up of people who think making random crap you can control with your smartphone
is fun: [https://www.adafruit.com/](https://www.adafruit.com/)

Things you don't understand can be fun, including make interesting gadgets
that you don't find useful.

~~~
icebraining
The purpose of those companies is to get and help people to make stuff. That's
not useless. _Making_ is the point, not so much the final product. And still
90% of what I've seen on Makezine was more useful than LudeLa.

------
deathhand
We do though if we are to believe automation leads to more niche pursuits due
to the availability of labor. This is the market behaving exactly like it
should. Whether the goal is noble is a different thought exercise about where
we place value in society.

------
pachydermic
Isn't this what the whole point of the free market is?

Are there really more bad ideas for crappy products now than there were in the
past? I mean, "snake oil salesman" used to be a real thing, right? It's not
like it's anything new going on here.

~~~
icebraining
And this article is part of the free marketplace of ideas.

 _" snake oil salesman" used to be a real thing, right? It's not like it's
anything new going on here._

So we should avoid criticizing snake oil salespeople because they've been
around for a while?

------
skelsey
Oh cool, a remote igniter.

~~~
1812Overture
Yeah this thing sounds like a pyromaniac's dream.

------
hasbroslasher
It's stuff like this where you wonder why we don't just take a fraction of the
national budget to pay these (obviously bored, obviously skilled, obviously
challenge-hungry) nerds to go solve some of humanity's problems instead of
making them waste their lives designing more plastic shit.

If your defense of this is "hur hur free market" then I can't level with you.
The world needs less acidic oceans and a smaller Pacific garbage patch, not a
remote-controlled candle.

------
yoloswagins
While a smart phone candle doesn't solve the major issues facing humanity, it
does help with prevent home fires.

In the US, there are about 1.240 million house fires a year[1], of which,
2,325 are caused by candles[2].

The candle will go out if it's knocked over, or if it's smothered[3].

While this is very expensive for a candle, it has the very real potential to
prevent house fires. With time, the cost will fall, and we'll see less and
less candle induced home fires.

[1]
[https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/](https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/)
[2] [http://www.nfpa.org/public-education/by-topic/top-causes-
of-...](http://www.nfpa.org/public-education/by-topic/top-causes-of-
fire/candles) [3] [http://www.cnet.com/products/ludela-smart-
candle/preview/](http://www.cnet.com/products/ludela-smart-candle/preview/)

~~~
icebraining
_" More than half (58%) of home candle fires occurred when some form of
combustible material was left or came too close to the candle."_

I don't see how Ludela can solve this, so that leaves <1000.

In fact, this kind of large candles probably don't set much on fire, it's the
little ones that people put on Christmas trees and such that are really
dangerous.

~~~
thomasruns
Wait, who is dumb enough to put a real candle on a Christmas tree?!

~~~
icebraining
Oh, it's traditional in many European countries, and so it has been imported
into the US. I still have a kind of clip-on holder inherited from my
grandparents, like this:
[http://cdn.notonthehighstreet.com/system/product_images/imag...](http://cdn.notonthehighstreet.com/system/product_images/images/001/365/179/original_christmas-
tree-candle-holders.jpg)

I only use LEDs, of course.

------
mtgx
No? How about a "smart" wine bottle?

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/28/11317518/kuvee-bottle-
keep...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/28/11317518/kuvee-bottle-keep-wine-
fresh-smart-wi-fi)

~~~
oneloop
Oh man, even funnier than the idea itself is over the top claim that they're
going to "reinvent wine". Thanks for sharing.

------
nbadg
I have pretty mixed feelings about this. What I think the article gets right
is that the false sense of profundity surrounding stuff like this is really
and truly ridiculous. The Yo app, I think, is/was an even better example: yes,
there is definitely value in having 1-bit communication, as Marc Andreessen
put it. But much like this candle, the actual fractional value achieved over
existing options (text messaging, or a normal candle) is just so minimal that
it absolutely does not justify the $2.5mm raise (for Yo).

At the same time, the tech stack involved in producing these things,
especially anything social, is so incredibly complicated that, from an "effort
invested" standpoint, that hefty price tag almost seems justifiable. At the
core, every digital "social" system -- that is to say, any digital system that
communicates between autonomous physical-world entities instead of discrete
topological points on a computer network -- every social system has a common
core set of problems that have to be solved, but that are so incredibly
onerous that even the "silliest" of applications end up with some serious
capital.

I've thought (and worked) a lot on how to solve that, this enormous disconnect
between consumer value added and investor prospecting, but I think in the web
world, there's simply too much momentum behind existing best practices to make
any real dent. So, with a touch of irony, I think it's actually IoT, which is
arguably _even more difficult_ than your standard "social" app, that has the
best chance at fixing it.

My point is, there's definitely a place in the world for gimmicks like this.
They're fun. They're cool. That's fine! The problem we have, and one that I
hope to see solved (or solve myself) is that it's so absurdly difficult to do
this stuff that these ridiculous little things get so much time and effort
poured into them. Making something like this should only be marginally more
difficult than writing a "flickering" integer object in Python. We've added
way too much bulk to that, and I think we in tech, as an industry, would do
well to add a little introspective pause into this crazy trend of "connect all
the things!"

------
zaidf
"Seriously, you don't need to be internet friends with your roommate. Just
talk to them face to face!" \-- parents of college kids during early days of
facebook.

~~~
emodendroket
Somehow I don't think remote-controlled candles are going to be a smash hit
with young people.

------
moultano
When you have kids and perhaps an hour per day alone with your spouse, saving
a few minutes on setting the mood has real utility. Imagine the person saving
a few minutes finding matches just spent the previous hour doing dishes,
cleaning up Lego, taking out the trash, sorting mail, and spent the hour
before that wrangling kids into bed while they try with all their might to
avoid brushing their teeth for the nth day in a row.

Don't begrudge them their remote control candle.

~~~
chickenfries
> Imagine the person saving a few minutes finding matches

Seriously? This person owns candles. Chances are they keep a lighter or match
next to them. I'm all for user empathy, but this just seems to be making up a
use case that seems really unlikely.

~~~
moultano
My wife and I aspirationally own half a dozen scented candles. We never
actually use them.

------
traviswingo
If these people are planning on dedicating 50+ hours a week to this, then yes
it's a waste of time. I doubt they will, though. Once these things are built,
the product moves itself, especially off of a Kickstarter campaign went viral.
No need to spend any more time on it once it's done - its just a resume
builder and laughable revenue generator at that point.

------
paradite
Forget about whether the product is actually useful. The fact that it reached
here on top of Hacker News is a success for marketing effort, be it positive
or negative.

------
mladen5
Ok i definitely want one! This is one of the best smartphone controlled
products ever. I am sure this was actually a clever marketing trick.

------
simbas
I wish you need to be on the local access point to light it, because it would
be a nice way to remotely set fire.

------
emodendroket
This seems worse than useless, as it also seems to me like starting a fire
remotely has obvious risks.

------
charlesdenault
I doubt this was the piece the founders were hoping for.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Enh. All the people declaring that they'd never pay money for something so
frivolous (snrk) wouldn't have bought one anyway, and it'll probably bring it
to the attention of some people who might.

------
amingilani
I was hoping this was saite.

------
vanhowen
This has to be fake

