That sort of “I googled for 30 seconds, and found a cheaper option, why does this project exist” type response is anti-curiosity and anti-learning.

It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).

I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.

> A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).

You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence.

I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'll see a mix of fraud and overconfident people pitching undercooked ideas that they under deliver, and you're criticizing those who might as well have experienced that first-hand for a few times.

There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.

It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.

It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.

> There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.

Unfortunately that recommendation is also pushed by snakeoil salesmen.

Well, I guess since I disagree with you, I must be an inhabitant of this non-real world. Dang, I wish I’d thought to deem myself the arbiter of reality.

But from here, floating in the imaginary clouds, the error of the cynics was pretty easy to spot. It was that there are different types of wheelchairs and the cynics were just googling up the bargain-basement mass produced ones. I guess in the real world everything (including medical devices) is one-size-fits-all?

> just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions

The word you're looking for is "arrogance." HN comment sections are no better than reddit, if not worse, with people arrogantly making all sorts of statements that are demonstrably false with a simple google search.

HN demographic is worse in the sense that you have more people who think if they earn more than they peers their opinion weights more.

>It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

If you have some actual knowledge about a thing and can explain why it's pointless and already existed then that's a great thing to post. That's very different from just assuming that something you have no knowledge about is pointless, though. We certainly see lots of pointless reinventing in tech, but if something appears to be a pointless reinvention of something you could find in 30 seconds with no prior knowledge, it nearly always isn't a pointless reinvention of that and you just don't know enough to understand what's different.

> Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

There are a couple of reasons for that. The most obvious is that they did not do their research prior to embarking on the project. The less obvious is they did extensive research before embarking upon the project. Plenty of tech popped up in the 70's and 80's that flopped or only found a niche market, that later turned out to be quite popular. Sometimes the tech wasn't ready, other times it was just too expensive when it was introduced, yet other times he market simply wasn't ready for it.

It is possible, but one thoughtful takedown by somebody who actually knows the field is worth more than an infinite number of uninformed googled results.

> someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

I think it’s worse than than. Amongst the people doing the work, someone usually knows that there is a product out there that already does the job, but the higher ups think they know better.

That works the other way too.

Somethings the higher ups don't know anything in detail, and just believed the new hire guy who said "I can't believe you're still using jQuery! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Angular!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Angular - they screwed up the 2.0 to 3.0 migration so badly how can we trust them any more? We need to throw this all out and re write it in React!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using React, Facebook are awful! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Flutter!".

And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Flutter - Google are bound to graveyard it any day now! We need to throw this all out and re write it in React - its new features are _amazing_!".

And today they're 2 years into the latest rock star new guy's 6 month rewrite of the entire front end using Rust and wasm. He's _almost_ got it working on his laptop, it'll be ready for testing with the staging backend platform any day now.

Meanwhile the company's B2B sales team are doing several million dollars of MRR from clients using the "legacy" jQuery front end from 2012. And the backend Java guys are all WFH and haven't had a single bug fix of feature request ticket in 3 years. They cosplay "scheduled maintenance" every 3 months by sending out notification emails to all customers and then just writing reports to management claiming successful updates with zero downtime and no measurable increase in latency or error rates. Half of them have second jobs or side gigs that pay more than their salary there.

his wife is in a wheelchair, i think he did know wheelchairs exist before making a wheelchair company

Indeed. If I google for 30 seconds, and see a stark contradiction with what somebody offers, I try not to conclude that that the guy in question is a fool. This is always possible, but rarely true.

Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.

> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.

Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.

Especially if one of the people is an engineer/maker and the other has the lived experience of being a wheelchair user. It’s wild to think they might have embarked on this venture without first googling for thirty seconds to see what else might be on the market.

One of the more valid use cases for AI is scanning forums an auto-labeling/hiding low quality comments.

Low quality comments or comments you don't agree with?

It’s like being outraged and asking “Trek and Cannondale exist, why do we need fifty other bike makers?” When some new manufacturers pop up.

I don’t get the negativity.

My cynical assumption is that most startups start out with a grand vision that they overpromise and underdeliver on. Especially if it's a content creator, where I assume that they started with a need to monetize their brand and then came up with a product idea.

This guy claims to be different in that he has enough money already and he's just trying to make the world a better place, but pretty much every startup makes claims about how they're different and therefore they're going to succeed. They can't all be right. I'd prefer to hear unbiased opinions about viability from intelligent people on HN/reddit/twitter rather than biased opinions from the guy who's trying to market his company.

I'm not saying that this wheelchair is going to flop, I'm just defaulting to skepticism of new ideas in general.

> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

It's the epitome of current state of the internet. We're on a social platform with coins to be gathered, which doesn't induce a deep, well though discussion, rather short snarky comments that gets clicked.

Asking a question is "anti-curiosity"?

The piece raises at least a half-dozen possible answers, not all of which are compatible. The author pushes the "low cost" angle quite heavily at the start, so there being much cheaper options is reason enough, IMO, to ask the question what the point of the project is.

They say the chair won't make money, but it's a for profit company. They say they want it to be employee owned and to make their employees lots of money.

The author basically says 'it's a good second chair' (not a quote) that lacks in some features their own chair has. The piece also talks about cutting out expensive considerations like assessment by a physio and assessment of pressure points - that doesn't sound great, although if it's just a second chair, maybe those matter much less.

It seems more like the YouTubers decided to make a $2M wheelchair - real estate, machinery, employees, etc. Then see if they could spin it out to a short lead-time, online customer-specified production.

Good luck to them. Hopefully it will turn into a great example of a cooperative that's producing well-engineered affordable wheelchairs.

>Asking a question is "anti-curiosity"?

It's not asking questions though there's a lot of saying 'how is this cheaper? I found this crappy thing on amazon [that's clearly a completely different design] . why are they making this?!'.

I've yet to see a cheaper option that's the same type of chair. The ones I keep seeing posted are collapsible ones that are used in hospitals which are much heavier and way worse than the product in the article, they're not fitted to the user and much more likely to cause issues. When comparing to a similar product these chairs actually are much cheaper than what's out there.

He's certainly not an idiot, and it's clear he wants to sell $1000 wheelchairs in order to earn money.

He does not get paid for it though. At least he says so.

Probably because of the title. A 1$k wheelchair doesn't sound like anything special. While their selling point is that it's a $1k wheelchair that is actually worth that money.

I sort of think of left-handed people.

I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.

There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.

so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.

Most left handed people I know (me included), use the mouse with the right hand. Might be a bubble though, but I never thought to get a left handed mouse, or left handed scissors or most left handed things. There's a few things that really don't work (I play my drumkit with hands reversed), but most things are fine.

I tried using a mouse in my left hand in left handed mode back in the day. Eventually, I got tired of changing the settings on shared computers at home/school, and I realized it wasn't any more or less hard to use the mouse with my right hand. Today, I use a right handed vertical mouse. Interestingly, I play guitar right handed, despite being inspired to play by Kurt Cobain. My girlfriend got me left handed scissors as a joke, but man, they actually feel better.

My sister used to use a neutral mouse, with her left hand, on the left side of the keyboard but in "normal" or "right handed mode". Now she has a laptop with a big touch pad in the middle.

I am lefty and occasionally use the mouse left-sided when I have right arm injuries. What I don't do is swap the buttons. That way, nothing has to change, I can switch to the preferred side at any time, and coworkers aren't stymied when they need to drive the computer.

I do what your sister used to do. (Left hand mouse use, buttons left at default).

Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.

Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.

A lot of left-handed people are actually cross-dominant or selectively ambidextrous.

Keyboard shortcuts aren't as convenient with the mouse on the left. The most useful ones are all biased to the left of the keyboard. Left Ctrl is also easier to hit reliably.

I would have been left handed when an early childhood injury caused me to switch to right. A few years ago I thought about that and tried re-learning some skills and tasks with the left hand.

It's specific to each task but I can normally get the left handed version as good or better than the right. I am willing to bet most people could do this, you just have to spend a bit of time awkwardly re-learning.

In school for fun when it was boring I many times would do writing exercises with the right hand (like write a line of A's, a line of B's, etc) and after a couple of weeks I got the right hand up to maybe 80% speed and accuracy of the left, but I realized I needed to do constant training to keep it as good as the left (admittedly the left had daily training of many hours due to having to take notes, etc). But it does sound plausible!

Same here.

I use dual mice for variety sake.

The Logitech G300s has been solid as a lefty. They used to be cheap enough that replacing them every couple of years (depending on usage) was feasible, but I'm not sure if the market has driven up prices since then.

I switched to an Apple Trackpad and it basically cured my wrist issues that I was experiencing.

I felt comfortable with "neutral" mouses that aren't shaped right or left that I could use either with right or left hand

Sounds like a nice application for 3D printing tbh. Take the electronics from a regular mouse and fit into a left-handed housing with a range of shapes/sizes etc available! Call it "second hand"

At least one guy on reddit did this and is still sending out the files for people who ask: https://old.reddit.com/r/MouseReview/comments/enxzgg/lefty_g...

It seems like a massive pain though. Rebuilding a non-symmetrical mouse the other way would take electronics tinkering as well as 3d printing, and probably a ton of work to get all the connections and tolerances right.

I am left handed, and I use trackpads with my left hand, but I gave up on lefty mice years ago and use an ergonomic one right-handed.

I'd assume the electronics are very modular and probably just clip into place in a single unit. You do need a battery compartment or something though, and the buttons need to fit well. Wheel can come from donor mouse.

Unfortunately they are not. Mouse motherboards are generally shaped like the mouse, i.e. right-handed, and the side buttons are on ribbon cables too short to move to the other side. Impossible to reorient without serious work.

Sounds like someone could buy a bunch of different mice and x-ray them to look for the easiest candidates. Looking for symmetrical-ish electronics, most of all.

Elecom makes a nice left handed trackball. Employers don't often provide ThinkPads, so I usually use a standard mouse on the left side without swapping the buttons.

I think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".

I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.

I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.

Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products.

It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.

[0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator

Looking the configurator (very cool btw) the bespoke part is a few bends in the front fork, rest of it is modular parts that are fastened together. Looks like you can stuff hundreds of these in a container to bring piece cost down. I do think the big selling point is speed since they talk about months of lead time from other vendors. Regardless, looks like much cheaper than competition - I admire what they're trying to do.

Stocking when you have 25k different variations is a whole different nightmare and massive cost that probably rivals the cost of just making them to order with the right equipment here in the US. Maybe there are common enough configs that people take you could prestock a subset and make to order the rest but it's still a huge amount of work and cost to manage and stock that vs the option they took of making the frames to order.

>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.

We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.

TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.

>The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike

Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke.

It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this.

>IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product

Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.

> Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.

I think that's what people are missing.

His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations.

I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.

Looks like very little bespoke parts - the front pork pieces, that's some worker feeding pipe stock to an expensive machine after punching a few numbers for $10 an hour. The wheels are commodity, can't imagine the BOM for something like this is >$200. Competitors are other western companies charging even more exorbitant prices, they managed to charge less which is great. But that doesn't mean the cost is not still overall absurd for what you get. Maybe reasonable American manufacturing prices, sure, it's a good value product. I'm not familiar with the machine, but I've priced out bending aluminum pipes for various architecture details and fitness equipment and per piece price is peanuts in Asia compared to fabricating in NA.

I don’t know anything about wheelchairs, but there’s a similar very high-margin market for eyeglasses. Freakonomics did a podcast about it:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-your-eyeglasses-cost...

Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.

How can you even judge how basic it is just from the photos?

A $10k bike designed for racing has the same kind of components as a $100 bike from Walmart, but every single one of them is far, far better - better materials, higher tolerances, a geometry finely tuned to the rider. None of that is really obvious until you look closely. A rally car looks kind of like a road car, until you realise that it only shares a few body panels - every other component is built to a far higher spec.

Maybe this would be a $200 product if he was mass producing them to the same dimensions. But he's not, they're custom made on order to the dimensions of the user.

I've owned a few low cost Chinese bikes, and while they're OK, there's always parts on them that fail because they're clearly made to be as cheap as possible. If I depended on a wheelchair for moving about every day, I'd be damn sure it was well built and reliable. That's the market he's operating in.

In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.

It's the lack of curiosity in not taking the small extra mental step of thinking "what niche does this clearly physically different product address?" that's the most galling/disappointing. Or having done the search and found very cheap alternatives thinking, "clearly the person setting up a business creating and with a partner that using these products daily missed that this already exists" immediately instead of looking at why JerryRigEverything might not be an idiot wasting his money.

It's not odd because as you pointed out this is a tech oriented site and not a wheel chair oriented site.

There are forms of technology other than software, and wheelchairs are one of them. YCombinator has invested in dozens of medical device startups... including devices in the mobility category: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trexo-robotics

You expect too much of people.

Please stop. These cynical drive-by comments add nothing to the discussion.

I get it but the acting surprised feels condescending and annoying itself. Maybe I should have articulated that better. There are always ignorant people. Always. Take that opportunity to answer their questions and move on. Not this "I know right. gawd. youd think theyd know better..." come on man, that's just rude. Like of course, there are gonna be questions and confused people. Don't be condescending and act all surprised.

The hope is that it is a site full of thoughtful people who’ve done at least a couple difficult projects. For that sort of person, the first instinct should not be to try and invalidate a project based on a couple seconds of googling. We should know that sometimes the problem takes more than a couple seconds of research to get to the real problem statement.

It's not but the concept that there may be more than one sub-type of a product (here: manual wheelchairs and their subtypes: "medical" [0], transport, etc) because there are many different scenarios for using any product is a universally applicable idea. You don't have to know much to see the cheaper types, see that they're physically different and figure out that there's a reason for there to be different types.

It's an endemic problem in many fields but you see it a lot with programmers. It's the same class of cognitive bias that births ideas like "the law should be like a program, that would be much simpler" that were (still are?) big in tech circles. Lazy pattern matching and thinking that understanding one complex thing (programming) makes one automatically better at unrelated fields (complex manufacturing).

[0] The type most people are most familiar with, large wheels, collapsible, handles for assistance from others. Generally not used by people who are able to move under their own power.

[1] similar to "medical" but without the large back wheels so they're only mobile with another persons help or by scooting around using your feet.

I think the dismissals come because wheelchair users are already painfully aware of the options.

Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).

But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.

If you look at the dismissals in this HN discussion you’ll find none of them are coming from wheelchair users or even people familiar with wheelchairs.

Nevermind that the article is clearly written by a wheelchair-user, for a publication about wheelchairs / related assistive implements, and clearly explains the pros/cons of the pricing and direct-to-consumer sales model, and includes their positive impressions on having used the chair in question as a daily-driver.

Individual preference is offensive to a certain kind of worldview.

"I don't get it, you can buy a laptop from Walmart for $75, what's the problem"