Agree with you that we should be gentler on people when they are just introducing ideas to the world. I disagree that this is not HN's culture. Example, read the dropbox launch thread, among many others. Usually when I come to HN I expect the top comment to be some pseudo-intellectual takedown of someone else's hard work.

The dropbox thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I don't agree with you that people are being jerks there in the way that they are here.

But there was the "avoid gratuitous negativity" that got added to the guidelines in the years after the dropbox thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916

>We bought tablets, loaded our app onto them, and that was our hardware device. Yeah, we wanted to make our own device eventually, but we weren't at the point of sending a team to China to do it yet, and that's what it would have taken.

Well, then you worked for a software company that transitioned into hardware development.

That's my only personal gripe with this whole spiel, it feels as if it's a way to game the whole SV thing by calling yourself something you aren't.

A company that converts old tablets into more specialized devices using software to accomplish the goal is a service, not a hardware company.

DoorDash isn't a restaurant, even if they dabble in food. It'd be ridiculous for them to say that -- they don't produce food; they arrange for delivery of food.

The oversell is the issue for me. It’s essentially an video conferencing Android app, but instead of putting it on the Play store, they are making you lease the hardware. In the features, I don’t see any exceptional features that make it stand out over any other “meet” app.

I wasn’t going to say anything but I got triggered by your last paragraph.

I don’t come to HN to read glowing reviews of barely launched startups. There’s plenty of that out there if you’re looking for it and it all sounds the same anyway. Success porn crap.

I come to HN to see if other people like me think something is a piece of shit or if it’s actually decent, and why.

If everything that comes through here got two thumbs up HN would cease to be a reliable indicator of things worth my time or money.

You’re creating a false dichotomy between “two thumbs up” and “piece of shit”. There is an in between. There’s a LOT of in between. The commenter here is asking for constructive criticism, not a pandering two thumbs up. We can do better than “piece of shit”.

The key criticisms throughout the comments seem to fall into these quite legitimate categories:

1. Privacy concerns of an always on device in the home.

2. Removing the benefits of remote working such as flexibility.

3. Increased company/management control over employee actions and movement.

4. Overcharging for an existing device plus an app and calling it "new hardware".

Not sure why any of these are not valid criticisms. In fact it seems you are the one taking an extreme position simply because you don't like the criticisms.

Very subjective, but HNs comment culture went down in the last 1 or 2 years or so. (Reddit-style discussions, jokes etc. seem to be more common now)

It's true, tech support is hard. Samsung, for example, does a terrible job supporting that tablet -- I bought 3 and only one survived a year. One of the others was held in their US repair facility for months while the warranty ran out and then they claimed the problem was no longer covered.

I'm no longer buying tablets or appliances from Samsung. Their TVs and monitors appear to be OK.

The Samsung G9 Odyssey monitor rollout is not going well at all. I want to give Samsung £1200 but they haven’t convinced me their process is controlled enough yet.

One of my friends designs chips for both Apple and Samsung. He said Samsung promised to provide proper specs after the Note battery issue, but they never did. Just went back to winging it after a while.