> 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.

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?

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.