A $35 keyboard for children transformed me into a novelist - danso
https://onezero.medium.com/this-35-keyboard-for-children-transformed-me-into-a-novelist-436a55370ee5
======
benjohnson
The Japanese have modern devices like this - this one is about $250 and had a
E-ink display and a folding keyboard. You can put the keyboard in English mode
- a few keys are in odd places but bearable. It's increased my output by
several orders of magnitude.

[https://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/dm30/](https://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/dm30/)

~~~
inyorgroove
There is also the Freewrite, its a little expensive but is targeted to English
speakers: [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

~~~
Digory
Beautiful, but $400 is steep for a monotasker. I'd gladly let students use
these in a class, though, as an alternative to notepads.

Which probably says something about the rise of keyboards and the fall of
handwriting; I get that ASCII is more useful than paper, but $400 buys a lot
of luxurious pens and paper.

~~~
BolexNOLA
Produces a lot of lost pens and paper in waste bins though!

~~~
splintercell
Check out the fountain pen thread from last week.

~~~
carterschonwald
Link please ? :)

Granted I’m a huge user of fountain pens and note books already :)

~~~
splintercell
There you go:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497259)

------
JoblessWonder
I have a very special place in my heart for the AlphaSmart brand. When I was a
kid in the 90's I had atrocious handwriting. No one could figure out why or
how to fix it. In middle school, one of the counselors had been given an
earlier model of the AlphaSmart as a demo unit and let me use it. It also
turned me into a writer. Instead of my teachers glossing over my chicken
scratch, they were able to read my typed assignments and offer me real
feedback. My confidence as a student and an intellectual returned. All because
I had a little keyboard to type on. Pretty crazy.

[Technical side note: Back in the day, to transfer what you typed you used to
plug it into the PS/2 keyboard port on a computer and press "send." It would
then recreate each keystroke for the computer, regardless of what program you
had open so if you hit send before opening up a word processor it would be
chaos until it finished transferring.]

~~~
frequentnapper
Lucky your teachers actually cared about you.

~~~
dividedbyzero
And had the resources to act on that. I've had the impression a bunch of my
teachers did care when kids were struggling, but didn't have a lot of options
to help really.

~~~
JoblessWonder
I agree. I think that teachers are relatively
powerless/underpaid/underappreciated/overworked (during the school year) and
that makes it so hard for them to help kids that are struggling. Let alone
help the kids who are struggling without interrupting the rest of the class.
It reminds me of the season of The Wire where it shows just how many systemic
issues there are in the education system.

My teachers were frustrated and sent me to the counselor, who lucked into a
solution for me. Combined with the fact that I was lucky enough to have a
computer at home to use, parents who supported me, and teachers who wanted me
to succeed was what made it work. Most people aren't as fortunate.

------
dougmwne
I think this is a worthy read because it looks a computing product from a
user's perspective instead of a engineer or an MBA. Multi-function everything
devices with the addictive potential of nicotine may be engineering marvels
and business rockstars, but this person wanted to write without distraction
and needed to reach into the past to find a product that met their needs.

And it's a fun exercise to take this user's need and whiteboard out a new
product for them. How are those ergonomics; could we hinge the display or
project it somehow in a way that will let them type longer without discomfort?
How's that LCD's readability; would eink be better? Should the device be doing
incremental backups to the cloud? Should it offer dictation?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_Should the device be doing incremental backups to the cloud?_

I think one of the key features would be no network connection.

~~~
naikrovek
So a Linux machine (like an old laptop) booted into single-user mode seems
like a good approach here. Single shell, single application at a time, no GUI.

~~~
phone8675309
I have an old Linux laptop (an old iBook G4) that boots into a non graphical
environment and starts emacs in text mode on login with no network
connectivity by default.

It's my go-to for focus.

~~~
anythinggoesbay
This is so good. Can you please share how it can be done?

------
nate
It's wild what constraints can actually open up for your creativity. I love
making videos but ran out of the time I used to have to spend on it. And so
largely gave up trying. But I decided instead of complaining about it or
trying to find more time to pile on some constraints:

\- only film AND edit on my phone \- only create a movie as long as a single
song track. don't edit the song track besides muting clips of the song. \-
only spend < 60 minutes on editing the video \- publish daily

So now there's little workflow pauses waiting for files to transfer. It's now
impossible to spend too much time in a rat hole of an edit. Of course this
limits things I'd love to achieve with it, but on the other side, I get to
publish so many more ideas and feel insanely more creative with it.

Feeling stuck? Probably need a good dose of giving yourself what seems like
arbitrary and ridiculously limiting constraints.

~~~
munificent
I've been getting into making electronic music and figuring out a workflow
that balances these constraints is really challenging.

The most powerful, expressive, flexible, and affordable way to make music, by
far, is to do everything in a DAW inside a computer. Ableton + a few software
synth plug-ins is a _ridiculously_ powerful platform to make music in. You
could produce albums for the rest of your life and never run out of
inspiration. And the user interface for Ableton is just an absolute delight.

But it's _so_ powerful that it takes me forever to get anything done. It's
easy to spend three hours tweaking reverb settings and never finish anything.

The other approach is to do everything in dedicated hardware with real
synthesizers. It's expensive to buy gear and a hassle to wire everything up.
Decide that you want delay on your bass instead of the lead? That's five
minutes of futzing with cables versus a single drag-and-drop in Ableton. Want
two different reverb settings for the pad and the clap? Better shell out
another $300 to buy a second reverb pedal. Undo? You're lucky if your
sequencer supports it.

But because the set of options is so much narrower and the cost for rethinking
choices is higher, the hardware environment pushes you forward and makes you
want to finish things.

The tricky part is that, to a listener, the music made on hardware often just
isn't as good in many ways as that made in a DAW. Listeners today are used to
lots and lots of layers and very surgical production and mixing. That's easy
(but time-consuming) in a DAW, but very difficult (and expensive) in hardware.

Finding the right balance here is hard.

~~~
fb03
That is totally my experience with my hobbyist music making endeavour too!

I thought owning more plugins and getting better gear would mean I'd make lots
and lots of music.

When I started out 9 years ago, I had Renoise, zero paid plugins (only free
vsts like Synth1 and friends) and a cheap pair of earbuds. I didn't even
understood basic things like translation, gain staging and etc, and I'd always
wonder why my tracks wouldn't play correctly on other people's speakers
(channels would clash frequencies, elements would downright disappear and
etc).

Yet, my most creative, layered and musical (data amount, transitions and
overall creativity) time was at that period. And I typed it all in using the
computer keyboard. In a computer in the middle of the living room.

Now I have a huge desk with a pro usb audio dac, Yamaha Hs8 Monitors
(excellent, btw), all plugged in with proper balanced xlr cables, 2 midi
keyboards, an ATH-m50 pair of cans for when I can't be noisy in the Study
(small kids), lots of paid plugins like Sylenth1 and Serum, a plethora of
sample libraries scavenged and assembled painstakingly through the years...
only the good stuff, categorized, ready to double click and peruse.

....It's been two years since the last time I actually used all this stuff

You guys are right. I need to get back to the basics.

What use is to be able to put 80+ tracks in your software because now you have
a good pc that can handle that many if you can't even write the first part
down because there are soooo many options and you're lost tweaking knobs.

"tweakititis" is a thing in music making.

One of my tracks, btw, if any of you got curious at what kind of music I make:
[https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-
kid](https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid)

~~~
munificent
Yes, I'm 100% with you. I've finished two tracks using Reason and Ableton with
dozens of unfinished things laying around. And those two tracks took weeks.

Meanwhile, with my little Electribe 2 and a couple of guitar pedals, I
finished three tracks in like a tenth of the time and _enjoyed_ it a hell of a
lot more.

But, on the other hand, those two tracks I made on the computer are, I think,
much better songs for someone to listen to.

So a big part of this dilemma is how much do I optimize for _my_ enjoyment of
the _process_ versus the _listener 's_ enjoyment of the _product_? The two are
not purely orthogonal. It's hard to make something people like if you're
miserable doing it. But they aren't entirely aligned either, as can be
witnessed by all of the many many ambient modular jams that I'm sure were fun
for the artist to make but are just pointless boring noodling to the listener.

 _> One of my tracks, btw, if any of you got curious at what kind of music I
make: [https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-
kid](https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid) _

I like it! The filter sweep on the drums is <chef's kiss>. The overall
structure is really cool. So much electronic music just has nothing
interesting going on in the arrangement.

I first got into making music like, uh, 20 years ago using PlayerPro on a Mac.
I was way more productive back then. Trackers are fun. But also my music was a
lot shittier, so there's a trade-off. Have you talked yourself into getting a
Polyend Tracker yet?

Here's my stuff:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMJ0iRwAhIFYSpntOEtn2g?vie...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMJ0iRwAhIFYSpntOEtn2g?view_as=subscriber)

I like putting it on YouTube because that feels less formal and less like a
"release" to me. Though the downside is having to make some kind of video for
each thing.

------
glassdimly
I use the Alphasmart, also. FYI, there's MacOs software for transferring the
text that works great. It needed a PR and Xcode, so I bundled it into a dmg
and am distributing it here:
[https://glassdimly.com/blog/tech/macos/alphasync-macos-
catal...](https://glassdimly.com/blog/tech/macos/alphasync-macos-catalina-
download-and-install-appdmg)

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Thanks for the pointer. Do you use yours for prose or also for more technical
(or even research) text?

------
vikingcaffiene
My partner is a novelist and owns two of these. She's been drafting with them
for a little over a year and swears by them. She says the appeal is that you
can't go back and read more than a few lines so you just kind of go and then
edit later. I also think the appeal is the keys themselves. Similar in feel to
an old Thinkpad.

~~~
mhd
I wouldn't go as far, the typing feel isn't as good as old Thinkpads and the
keys are definitely more fragile. Can't replace them, either. A device of the
same form factor, even display, with an Arduino for tinkering and mechanical
keys would be a godsend.

~~~
retzkek
I use an Atreus [1] as my daily keyboard, and Phil has been experimenting with
various forms of "cyberdeck" based on that [2,3]. Something like that, with a
minimalist emacs config like [4] would be an awesome portable writing device.

1\. [https://atreus.technomancy.us/](https://atreus.technomancy.us/)

2\.
[https://atreus.technomancy.us/decklog](https://atreus.technomancy.us/decklog)

3\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/d2rwp1/atreus_de...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/d2rwp1/atreus_deck_mk4/)

4\. [https://github.com/rougier/elegant-
emacs](https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs)

------
arnado
It reminds me of the TRS-80 model 100. I seem to remember reading a story
linked here a while back regarding the 100 and how popular it was for
journalists to write stories on, and maybe be uploaded via modem to the editor
when completed? (I might be remembering this incorrectly)

~~~
fanf2
You are thinking of this
[http://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/](http://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/)

~~~
arnado
yes, thank you. I'll have to read over it again and refresh my memory.

------
zelos
My dad used a Tandy Dreamwriter for many years to write on while working as a
travel journalist, well into the 2000's.

Small, Z80 based, with a few lines of text on the screen and powered by AA
batteries. Other journalists used to laugh at the 'old guy with the Fisher
Price computer', but the instant-on and distraction free typing was a definite
advantage. Pretty nice not having to worry about a fragile, expensive laptop
while out in the jungle or whatever, too.

~~~
mprev
Oh cool. The Dreamwriter was based on the Amstrad NC100:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_NC100

A very cool little device, at the time. I borrowed one as a kid and it seemed
very exciting to be able to type things wherever I was.

I'm kinda nostalgic for that less connected era, where life moved at a
slightly slower pace. Like all nostalgia, I'm leaving out the bad parts.

~~~
hombre_fatal
You make the link unclickable when you format it as code.

------
geocrasher
I am not a novelist. The problem isn't the device, it's my brain. But when I
have a creative block, I take a page from the novelists that just works.

I close my eyes and start typing.

In fact, Iv'e closed my eyes just now as I write this. Touch typing obviously
helps! But it allows me to hyper-focus on my writing and not on anything else.
If I wanted to, I could turn off all notifications. or just turn my sound off
completely with "mute". No big deal. Granted, this isn't very portable, but I
could do this with my laptop. The only thing I lack is the huge battery life.

As I open my eyes now, I re-emerge into the Real World where there exists more
than my writing. I fix the typos, make an observation, and click "add
comment".

But not before I add one more thing: You don't need a device to write. You
need a process, and you need to get out of your own head.

------
fooblat
Although the author mentions using outdated and unsupported software to
transfer the text, it isn't actually required.

These also have a mode where it just "types" the text into the program of your
choice, via the usb cable. No drivers required and works with any OS that can
recognize a usb keyboard.

------
ballenf
I believe we'll see a return to more single use devices. They won't supplant
smartphones.

For one, I've thought a lot about having two separate computers: one for
writing code and a second for googling when I need help / slack / email / HN.

And then keeping the two devices in physically separate places.

I could accomplish this with software and accounts, but I know for myself it
would be less effective.

~~~
gonzo41
I have that, I have a work laptop, that i dock into a displaylink set of
screens to run my work dev environment. And then sitting on the desk next to
me is my personal laptop. Totally different uses and the seperation is really
important because i never worry about typing the wrong thing into the wrong
context because the full size keyboard is attached to the work computer.

It's worked really well for me for about 3 years now. And i hardly look at my
phone.

~~~
dividedbyzero
I do pretty much the same, but I have my phone sitting next to me with an
external bluetooth keyboard. I'd use an iPad, but there's no Whatsapp for
those currently.

------
willmacdonald
Seems similar to this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88)

The Cambridge Computer Z88 is an A4-size, lightweight, portable Z80-based
computer with a built-in combined word processing/spreadsheet/database
application called PipeDream (functionally equivalent to a 1987 BBC Micro ROM
called Acornsoft View Professional),[1] along with several other applications
and utilities, such as a Z80-version of the BBC BASIC programming language.

~~~
julesallen
I bought one of these new when they came out and it was life changing. The
BASIC was surprisingly good and I got almost as much out of the spreadsheet as
I did the word processor.

One area that was a disappointment is _really_ doesn't like x-ray machines (or
maybe the other bits in the scanning process — magnets?). I asked for hand
inspection at LHR, they refused, and putting it through the scanner corrupted
what was stored in memory. Only upside is doing something again is usually
quicker and better than the first time.

------
arexxbifs
Seems like any laptop booting a minimal Linux distro straight into a similarly
simplistic text editor should be able to provide the same experience. Could be
carried around on a USB stick, effectively turning any available computer into
an AlphaSmart.

~~~
LeoPanthera
I've always liked WordGrinder. It runs in the terminal/console!

[http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html)

~~~
arexxbifs
That's what I use! It's pretty minimal by modern standards but might still be
too full-featured for AlphaSmart simulation.

------
macspoofing
Makes sense. Single-purposes devices are kind of cool. It's why eBook readers
have a place in a world where tablets exist.

I don't know about AlphaSmart though - the screen is too cramped. I suspect
after the initial euphoria of finding another way to write wears off, the
author will get tired of the limitations and go back to writing on a tablet or
PC. Having said that, maybe there is a market for a writing-only device,
similar to a read-only eBook reader.

~~~
eropple
I've been using one for long-form writing for about a decade now. Haven't
gotten tired of it yet.

~~~
macspoofing
Cool. I'm not a writer so I don't know what works and what doesn't. If it
works for you and the author - great!

~~~
eropple
Sure.

The other device I often use is a Thinkpad A20m running Linux. The only web
browser on it is lynx (which I mostly use or Wikipedia).

------
larrywright
For people wanting something like this, there are still plenty of Apple’s
EMate devices available on EBay:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300)

------
timurlenk
These people have a somewhat modern alternative with mechanical keyboard and
eink screen. It has wifi and that's it. From watching the reviews I understood
that a major drawback is that no editing is possible on the device itself and
it is very expensive (600$)

[https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

I personally use occasionally an android based ebook reader with a bluetooth
keyboard (Onyx BOOX Poke 2 with logitech k380). Distraction free writing is a
thing.

~~~
mprev
This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the
problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a dedicated writing device but, for me
as someone who writes pretty much for the entire working day, inconvenience is
the biggest bar to writing other than lack of sleep. If I can't edit on the
device, or find the text in my usual GSuite/Office 365 spaces, then maybe I'd
be better off with a $40 dictaphone and Rev.com.

~~~
tonyarkles
> This feels like the sort of thing people buy to kid themselves that the
> problem with their writing lies outside their own brains.

I posted elsewhere in this thread about this, so to summarize: I've been at a
cabin using LTE tethering, and am consciously turning my Internet connection
off and on.

I fully realize that the problem is in my brain, but putting up just _that
tiny_ of a barrier is enough of an effective "hack" to change the way I work
in a positive way. Because there's no connection most of the time I'm working,
there's no HN, there's no email popping up, there's no Slack notifications,
and there's no "falling down a rabbit hole searching for a solution". I'm
spending way more time writing down/rubber ducking the problem I'm trying to
solve and coming up with the solution myself (which generally results in a
much better understanding of the problem)

------
minikites
Sometimes I wonder how often these "productivity tips" mask a deeper feeling
of indifference or rejection of the task entirely. People spend hours finding
the right tools for a task thinking it will make them want to do it instead of
examining the task itself and their feelings around it.

~~~
reidjs
To a certain extent I agree. If you were really passionate about something
like this you would make it happen regardless of your circumstances. Think
about kids who grow up in impoverished island nations who make it to the MLB
through sheer perseverance.

The difference is unless you're already wealthy or talented, you _need_ to
write effectively to compete in the modern 'white collar' workforce.

Writing something that people want to read is very hard. People don't read for
the sake of reading, they read to learn something or feel something. It can
take years of consistent practice to evoke anger, sadness, or laughter through
writing. Think about how many books, workshops, and college courses there are
on writing itself. It is sort of like programming, it is a skill that anyone
can learn given enough time and it has very little barrier to entry. This
makes it extremely competitive, so a lot of people need to exploit whatever
edge they can get.

------
vorpalhex
I still remember as a child playing on a 1980s word processor that my mom had.
It had maybe a 4 line display, with an ugly greenish backlighting and no
battery whatsoever. It did however have a hinge mechanism so that little text
only screen would fold over the keyboard.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
These dedicated word processor devices were quite popular and cheap. Built-in
printer and floppy drive, shaped somewhat like a typewriter.

We had two in my house, even though we also had general purpose computers. I
think they were still in use into the early 90s for school reports.

------
lewisflude
For the mechanical keyboard lovers out there, there is a Cherry MX compatible
AlphaSmart 3000 PCB:
[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=91504.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=91504.0)

------
baronblackmore
One of my writer friends accomplishes a similar workflow by just having a
writing account on his laptop, where everything is disabled except a text
editor.

------
c22
I was given a first generation Alphasmart in middle school and told to use it
for all my assignments since I had such terrible handwriting. At the time I
thought it was incredibly cool, but in retrospect I wonder if I fell prey to
some ill-thought _technology in the classroom_ program. Perhaps it would have
been better if they had just helped me fix my handwriting.

------
nanna
Alphasmart HN thread from 2017 here, with comments by co-founder Ketan Kothari
and Freewrite's founder too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836866)

------
golem14
Given the amount of work going into custom DIY mechanical keyboards, it's
surprising that there aren't DIY solutions out there. All you need is a $5 MCU
(think ESP32) and a cheap display. Would make a fun side project :)

~~~
golem14
One problem is that cheap LCD displays are not easy to source. E.g., the
largest old school lcds I find are 4x20 characters, which is a bit confining.

There seem to be tons of TFT options out there on the cheap, but they're
probably not great in terms of eye strain and power consumption.

If price is no object, then e-ink displays seem a great choice, e.g. $70 for a
7.5'' display: [https://www.banggood.com/Waveshare-7_5-Inch-E-ink-Screen-
Mod...](https://www.banggood.com/Waveshare-7_5-Inch-E-ink-Screen-Module-e-
Paper-Display-SPI-Interface-For-Raspberry-Pi-p-1365278.html)

~~~
fenwick67
Many of these larger epaper displays are meant for very low refresh speeds -
I'm talking 5 seconds plus. This one takes 6 seconds.

------
ProZsolt
Outline link: [https://outline.com/PzjuRt](https://outline.com/PzjuRt)

------
DanielleMolloy
The Psion series got some legendary status for its attention to detail. The
Psion 5 had backlight, was running on batteries (25-35h battery life) and it
has a slot for Compact Flash Cards. The keyboard is foldable. If you find an
adapter for the CF cards they can still be used today for writing similarly to
what is described here with the AlphaSmart.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5)

~~~
julesallen
Loved that thing! Batteries lasted forever and the LCD was perfect for the job
of being focused. My hands are almost too big to touch type on it so notes
often needed editing when transferred to a desktop. Typing on it is kind of
like writing with Graffiti on a Palm, it takes some practice and then all of a
sudden you're pretty good at it.

If you liked the Psion you might like its successor the Gemini from Planet
Computers ([https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-
pda-1](https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1)). Same awesome
keyboard.

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Oh, I really fancied the Gemini. A tiny Linux computer the size of a Psion 5
sounded pretty awesome to me as a former Psion lover. I'm not unhappy that I
did not buy it in the end though - battery life, and it comes with all the
smart phone distractions - the Psion 5 used to be my distraction free writer,
not a terminal access device.

If you need to frequently do admin tasks (e.g. config file and script editing)
it's still a pretty interesting choice.

------
gadders
Who's tried coding on one? Own up :-) You could bang out 500 lines of JS
without stopping and then upload it to your PC and see if it runs...

------
hugozap
To maximize focus I've used the "One system user per project" trick. It works
well because now everything in your desktop has to do with your project
(files/notes/calendar/bookmarks/etc)

I've been able to ship a few projects using this trick.

Not sure who was (Maybe Seth Godin?) who recommended using a different
computer, which may even work better.

------
hairofadog
Along these lines I've been thinking a nice device would be an e-ink reader
that _only_ loads Wikipedia. (You know, for kids!)

~~~
Jaruzel
Similar idea: [https://youtu.be/R63x2TXm0s8](https://youtu.be/R63x2TXm0s8)

It's a raspberry Pi, with an e-ink screen, and battery to provide an 'offline'
repository of information, including Wikipedia.

------
nl
[https://www.osnews.com/story/131180/the-alphasmart-dana-
in-2...](https://www.osnews.com/story/131180/the-alphasmart-dana-in-2019/) has
a few more technical details of the device for those interested.

It runs PalmOS!

~~~
zelos
> I found a free text editor specifically written for the dana’s wide screen
> (SiEd, dana version) on SourceForge in alpha, and left abandoned 4 years
> ago. That editor will sometimes crash the whole system...

Nice to know my crappy code is still causing problems all these years later.

------
paulcarroty
I use Amazon Basics keyboard ($13), super comfortable for coding. Bought it
just for fun after reading this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20866319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20866319)

------
falcor84
On a related note, I've been imagining this product idea, as an educational
toy that would help kids practice typing and spelling: A small physical
keyboard with a small (but larger than the AlphaSmart's) attached color
display, which does nothing but present a single picture of the thing that
you've typed, and show nothing if the current input is misspelled or otherwise
not found. I'm thinking that it would have an internal (no internet
connection) visual dictionary similar to the one that comes with the
Scribblenauts game and would be rugged enough for 3 year old kids to play
with.

Do you happen to know of any existing product like this, or the feasibility of
building one?

~~~
vidarh
I don't know if they have something specifically like what you want, but VTech
has a whole range of educational toys with keyboards and assorted phonics and
spelling tutorials.

If you do a search for "vtech abc" and variations you'll find a huge number of
different types of devices.

~~~
mprovost
Wow I didn't know they were still around. My first PC was a VTech XT clone!

------
rjack_
I wonder if creating a different OS account on the same day-to-day work laptop
with limited access to app, games and no internet would trigger the same
"Pavlovian response" the article talks about. Did anyone tried this approach?

------
mixmastamyk
Reminds me of the Radio Shack portable:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

There were also a few simple word processors by Brother I think.

------
ericol
This is a very vintage & romantic way of going at it.

If you don't have a way to acquire one of these devices, a similar solution
can be implemented with a Bluetooth keyboard (Like the Logitech K480,U$D 35 @
Amazon, and has a slot for tables or phones) and a tablet or your phone (Or
_a_ phone).

You'll need an app for that, and my current choice for writing in my tablet is
Joplin [1] that has apps for all the OSes and phones, and can be hooked with
different ways of cloud storing for your files (Like Dropbox or NextCloud)

[1] [https://joplinapp.org/](https://joplinapp.org/)

~~~
frank2
You missed the main point of the OP: the AlphaSmart lacks the distractions
(temptations to procrastinate) of a smartphone or tablet.

Do you never find yourself using your smartphone or tablet to procrastinate
after intending to use it for a productive purpose?

~~~
ericol
Yes. That's actually why my tablet (That I use mainly for reading) doesn't
have my main Gmail account linked to it, plus I always use it on airplane
model.

My take was that not that many people will have the choice to get their hand
on one of these devices (I, for one, can't).

------
i_am_proteus
I use a Hermes Rocket (typewriter) for similar reasons: similar form factor,
does not require electricity, saves your work to paper rather than electronic
storage. About $50 used.

The keyboard is mechanical, as is the rest of the device.

------
walrus01
That thing looks kind of like a TRS-80 model 100

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

------
nanna
Requisite HN comment but also a genuine one too: Is there any chance any of
these Freewrites, Alphasmarts or machines from Japan support, or could be
hacked to support, emacs keybindings?

~~~
numpad0
There’s a guy who reflashed Pomera DM200 to run XEmacs, though at that point
it’s just an ARM laptop with no mouse

------
afandian
I've recently bought a handful of these (the more basic Pro and 2000), with
the aim of replacing the insides with an ESP32, but otherwise do the same job.
There's a community of people, weirdly on Flickr, who provided enough
motivation to buy one.

[https://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart/](https://www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart/)

------
framebit
The Alphasmart! We did typing class with that back in the early 00's. The IR
beam to the printer felt like science fiction back in the day.

------
klodolph
We had these in school when I was young. I loved them. I could carry one
around the playground and write a story. When you got back to the classroom,
you transferred it to the computer by hooking it up as a keyboard. I’ve been
dreaming about getting one for a while. The passive matrix LCD works well in
sunlight and the batteries last a long time.

------
Wistar
In the very late 80s, a co-worker of mine, a corporate-productions
scriptwriter, gave up his Mac and started using a Neo2-like device -- it
looked very similar and used AA batteries. I remember him crowing about how it
was a game-changer for him, and that it made him a much more productive, and
better, writer.

I also recall thinking he was nuts.

------
5-
tangentially related, i've been playing a bit with a brother ep-44 (see, e.g.,
[https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/serial-
termi...](https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/serial-terminal-
with-benefits-brother-ep-44/)).

i've mostly been running it as a linux tty, but in spite of being designated a
'personal electronic printer', it has some memory and editing features so
could pass as a portable word processor.

unfortunately its keyboard is quite unsatisfactory, so i'm considering
acquiring a
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700)
also for use as a tty.

i would be interested in further suggestions along these lines.

------
brettermeier
Why use medium.com with this login-wall?

~~~
pier25
Probably because it's free and easy.

------
fortran77
This reminds me of the Tandy 100, which was widely used by news reporters even
into the early 80s.

------
grayclhn
That device looks fantastic for what the author wants. Another approach if you
need a little more flexibility in the software might be using a deliberately
limited old laptop. (I'd rather type in emacs, for example.) Battery life
would be a lot worse, obviously.

------
kinghtown
I own a neo2. They are nice for first drafts or noodling with words. There
really is something in the idea of dumbing down tech to get things done. I
have written quite a bit on it but three things have held me back from being a
power user:

1\. It uses a dated, proprietary cable to transfer your writing to a computer.
Worst part of this is that the AlphaSmart re-types your writing so if you’ve
written the 50000 word max then it will take some time to save it. The process
is just annoying enough to trigger procrastination.

2\. If the battery comes out then you’ve lost everything. This isn’t such a
dealbreaker since I want a dumber word processor to get out of my way but I
think it makes the keyboard a little too dumb.

3\. Honestly, it’s not sexy. It’s huge, too. And people with no interest in
writing just don’t get it at all. The looks people give me when I’ve used it
in the public are like “what insane Jesus cult stuff is this guy writing on
that??” Nothing crazy here, just hunting bugs on TempleOS.

I see a market for a machine like this but done better. The just write or
whatever branding they are using checks a lot of boxes but the price is
insane.

I think I’ll just rig up Atom to work a little bit more like Scrivener.

~~~
Taylor_OD
[https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

I remember something like this being announced a few years ago called The
Hemingway. This is what I found when I DDG'ed The Hemingway typing machine.

~~~
kinghtown
Yeah these are the guys I was referring to when I wrote Just Write. Their
prices are still insane. Plus are they ever going to release the traveller?
I’m pretty sure it’s been listed as presale for 2 years now. My neo2 was $40
CDN with shipping. Paying like 20x that for something which is just a tad bit
nicer is kind of wrong. You’ve either got to be a working novelist to justify
the cost or like someone whose been sitting on the same handful of story
premises for 20 years but never finished anything you know like I’m gonna
throw down $700 on this thing because I’m actually really very serious this
time about writing a book. No thanks. Laptop will do here.

------
tartoran
This is interesting but I wonder whether no fewer and fewer folks remembers
the pleasure of writing by hand with a nice fountain pen in a nice notebook.
Not being able to edit also forces one into a different writing mode.

~~~
goda90
I've never had good handwriting, and I find the process makes my hand tired
pretty quickly, so for me there is nothing to remember.

~~~
tartoran
I hear you but this is true of typing on a keyboard for some:RSI. Last time I
was doing a lot of hand writing was in college and my writing has gotten way
worse since because of lack of practice. But, I remember not having to think
much about writing, my hand had a brain of its own.

------
pier25
GRR Martin still writes in DOS with WordStar:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502)

------
ngcc_hk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100)

------
JoeAltmaier
A very similar productivity trick, to having a separate 'office space' when
working at home. Triggers the mind to enter work mode, and minimizes
distractions.

~~~
tartoran
Of course it does but for many the problem is affordability so I'll take it as
a nice to have luxury.

------
mosselman
How safe is your text on this? What if this thing breaks or has some glitch?
Is there some form of cloud backup? I'd be terrified of losing data to this
thing.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
If you read the article, you’ll learn the only method of getting data off the
device is via usb connection to a host computer.

~~~
mosselman
You caught me, I didn't read the whole thing.

------
gohwell
Are there any OS projects that would turn a computer into a word processor
like this? Seems like a nice way to bring an old laptop back to life.

~~~
gohwell
Answering my own question:
[https://raymii.org/s/blog/Vim_as_PID_1_Boot_to_Vim.html](https://raymii.org/s/blog/Vim_as_PID_1_Boot_to_Vim.html)

------
pkamb
ThinkPad X40 is the perfect machine for this. I’d love to see a dedicated
disro with only writing + simple local and/or network backup.

------
moonbug
for similar reasons, I swear by my Remarkable tablet.

------
beamatronic
The keyboard in question is a 1993 AlphaSmart device

~~~
adamiscool8
The author is using a 2007 model from eBay, but it is cool to see the
technology from my childhood classroom almost 30 years ago persist. I
definitely wrote a few elementary essays on these in my day.

------
ceedan
My first thought when looking at this thing was neck pain.

Personally, I would be in rough shape if I used this thing for more than 15
minutes.

~~~
kinghtown
I actually don’t look at the screen when I’m typing on mine. I’m like zoning
out when I use it.

I write my first drafts on my MacBook in a similar way where I turn the screen
off and type away.

~~~
ceedan
Wow that's pretty cool insight to a writer's process. I'm not sure that ever
would have occurred to me

~~~
kinghtown
If you’re thinking of trying it, I recommend having soft targets for scenes or
chapters. Some kind of direction. Also it takes a bit of time for the engine
to start running. At first it’s kind of weird and you’ll be prompting yourself
with like “what’s next what’s next” anxiety but if you tough it out for about
15 minutes then the dream logic kicks in. All these cool things float up from
the subconscious. Lots of typos,too.

------
hamilyon2
Serious question: does anyone writing professionally or as a hobby use voice
input as main input device? Why?

------
kalium-xyz
I wonder how you could modify one of these to be more suited for writing code.

~~~
tartoran
Upgrade to a laptop, boot up into a stripped down verison of your OS

~~~
kalium-xyz
Not what Im looking for, a laptop is both too overkill and to underkill on the
battery life

------
dzuc
similar devices [https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst/free-writing-
devices](https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst/free-writing-devices)

------
bookmarkable
Tired of links to paid content, pay walls, Admiral anti-ad blocks.

------
brudgers
Hardware is a useful abstraction.

------
elchin
Digital minimalism!

------
depaulagu
Posting paywalled-articles in HN should be highly discouraged...

~~~
lukifer
[https://outline.com/PzjuRt](https://outline.com/PzjuRt)

------
jedimastert
I think folks here might enjoy the idea of cyberdecks

reddit.com/r/cyberdecks

~~~
dividedbyzero
Am I doing something wrong, or is that subreddit essentially empty?

Also, aren't cyberdecks the complete opposite to these devices? They strike me
as a multi-purpose device like any laptop, but in a different form factor and
maybe a bit more optimized for hardware hacking?

~~~
jedimastert
I linked to the wrong sub, there shouldn't be an s on the end

I would say that cyberdecks can be whatever you want. I've seen some single-
purpose form factors like network testing or radio telemetry before


Where the White People Live - cobralibre
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/where-the-white-people-live/390153/?single_page=true

======
paulhauggis
"Still, it's the poor areas, rather than the areas where whites have self-
segregated, that get the most attention from policymakers, who have sought to
ameliorate concentrated poverty in segregated areas by moving families from
black, urban areas to white suburbs. Beginning in 1989"

It's not just whites that have 'self-segregated', it's anyone that wants to
live and raise their kids in an area that isn't full of illegal drugs,
criminals, gangs, and people that can't or won't take care of their own
property.

I refused to subject my family to these areas and I don't care if it looks
like I'm "self-segregating". I'm not going to allow someone's poor life
choices to dictate my life path.

I lived in a neighborhood where this happened (government subsidy allowed the
poor to move into a middle-class neighborhood at a fraction of the cost).

Skin color didn't matter. 9 times out of 10, the house ended up trashed with
garbage or kids toys all over the lawn. It was un-kept and none of the rules
of the neighborhood were almost ever followed.

We shouldn't be blaming anyone for actually having a nice home, following
rules, being successful, and generally being a good citizen.

~~~
Rawrshack
>kids toys all over the lawn

Good grief, what a dystopian nightmare you endured living with those savages!
Sounds like something straight out of Mad Max!


A janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2017) - andygcook
https://thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inventor/
======
arkades
This article ends right before the actual interesting part begins.

Janitor takes some food his company produces, adds spices, makes a shitty
pitch deck and profit? Cool, but... this could have easily happened in a dozen
different configurations and gone nowhere. This is more luck than anything
else.

The interesting story begins _after_ that. This guy didn't end his career
there - so, presumably, he was't a one-hit wonder. We have an illiterate
janitor who suddenly got swept into the orbit of the CEO, without any business
or operational acumen. He somehow -how??- managed to learn the ways of the new
tribe, learn business, learn to read and write, learn how to lead a business
unit, and do it well. This guy came out of nowhere, and had to zero-to-sixty
from manual laborer to - what? executive? What position did they put him in?
How did he ramp up? What kind of support did he get, if any? What kind of
education did they provide him with, if any?

There's a long, interesting story between "janitor" and "successful VP", and
they neglected to tell almost any of it!

~~~
w8rbt
The point is that the CEO was open minded (he took a phone call from a
janitor... and actually listened to him and then gave him a chance). He saw
past this mans lack of education and experience and focused on his dedication
and enthusiasm. There's value in everyone, everywhere (even the lowest
employees). We need leaders who can put ego aside and see that. IMO, that was
the point of the story. The subsequent success of this man is another story
entirely (and a good one I bet). I'm just glad that someone recognized his
talent.

Edit: Credit also goes to the secretary for putting the call through to the
CEO and not acting as a gate-keeper. She could have ended the call.
Thankfully, she was open minded too.

~~~
jackvalentine
My takeaway was that not only was a janitor directly employed by the company
(as cleaning services are basically 100% outsourced in my experience now) but
was paid well and felt part of the company such that he was motivated to stay
interested and contribute.

~~~
triangleman
Yes that is quite the anachronism these days.

~~~
ddingus
Too bad. Perhaps there is an opportunity cost argument for a better
alternative.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I imagine it's super hard to quantify the profit of "ideas from janitor", but
super easy to quantify the savings of "no longer paying for a janitor".

Plus, if every company has a gentleman's agreement to ignore the help then
there's no lost opportunity that the competition can jump on.

~~~
ddingus
Sure there is, they all just agree to ignore it.

------
starpilot
My takeaway: there are huge potential markets in people who are not like me.
The execs were probably completely unaware of this market, and it took an
outsider to hold their hand and bring it to them. I love flaming hot cheetos
and know tons of people who do, but there is no way I would have thought of
taking the hot pepper / other spices from a traditional Mexican food (elotes,
which I had in LA) and adapting them in this way. The fact that everyone I
interact with forms an upper class monoculture (white/asian, college educated,
20s-40s, mostly US-born) means that I have huge blindspots. I wonder what huge
businesses could be created catering toward senior citizens, for middle aged
people working retail, recent Asian immigrants, working single fathers, and so
on.

~~~
news_to_me
This is why diversity is so important! Not only in business, but in general —
everyone has huge blind spots, no matter what background they have. Life is
much larger and more diverse than people usually imagine. Interacting and
learning from people with different backgrounds than yours is a fundamentally
rewarding experience, although it can be hard at times.

~~~
slimsag
I 100% agree.

But it's important that diversity be considered in all forms, not just based
on race/sex.

If your "diverse" team is made up of different ethnicities and genders but
only consists of ivy league members who grew up in California... well, not
really diverse then, is it?

~~~
opportune
Class diversity is pretty hard to achieve because you usually need some
baseline class to actually be able to succeed in a role, i.e. you can't show
up to a meeting with customers or shareholders chewing dip and wearing camo
jorts. And social mobility from lower classes into corporate-ready roles is
rather low in this country, so while there certainly are people who grew up
poor and would be useful for companies to figure out what lower class
consumers might need, there aren't many of them; furthermore, for the people
who did grow up that way and into being a person able to function in the
corporate sphere, it's probably in part due to their rejection of their poor
background.

Maybe we just need more focus groups.

~~~
BurningFrog
Here's the real divider: Viewpoint diversity.

Are you ready to have some conservatives/Republicans on your team?

~~~
bzudo
Viewpoint diversity? Republican/conservative seems to be the default state in
most corporations.

~~~
BurningFrog
You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley :)

~~~
ken
Yes, it's possible bzudo is one of the 99.9% of people who does not work in
SV.

~~~
BurningFrog
If we're only 0.1% who work, I understand why I've been feeling tired...

------
rootedbox
Frito Lay was a great place to work at because they did promote up, and they
also hired the best. I would often be in meetings where one logistics manager
went to MIT and the other logistics manager would be someone who started at a
plant boxing chips.

~~~
polartx
My dad literally went from putting the chips in the boxes when he was 23 years
old, to overseeing the construction of a brand new manufacturing plant (and
running it), to managing scores of plants at HQ in his 40's.

Frito-Lay however, is not immune from boneheaded decisions. After 20someodd
years of employment, and a trophy case full of awards, he and some of his
[white male] colleagues were laid off in favor of creating a more 'diverse'
management roster.

Lacking the experience of those whose positions they took, performance tanked
with the new management team, and the person who set it all in motion was
fired.

At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race,
or gender.

~~~
tylerhou
> At the end of the day, revenue-per-share is pretty indifferent to age, race,
> or gender.

Except, as the article shows, diversity _often does_ increase revenue share.
Flamin' hot cheetos were invented by a Mexican immigrant who realized that
Frito-Lay didn't have any products which appealed to Latino people.

EDIT: Changed Latinx to Latino.

~~~
throwawaycanuck
>Latinx

There is no faster way to discredit your argument than using absurd language
like latinx. I've yet to meet a latino person who referred to themselves as
anything else.

~~~
g_sch
I'm interested (and somewhat taken aback) by the intensity of the reactions to
this term. Maybe it's a generational/political thing? For my part, I know
significantly more people who refer to themselves as "Latinx" than "Latino".

~~~
pram
I don’t like being called Chicano, Latin, or Hispanic. It’s seemingly only a
US thing afaict. My family is from Mexico and “Mexican” suffices.

It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different
people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic. That’s how I feel
about it anyway. Not saying people shouldn’t identify with it, if that’s how
they feel. :V

~~~
the_pwner224
> It seems like they’re just terms to lump a bunch of legitimately different
> people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic.

I'm an Indian living in the US. If I see another brown skinned person who does
not look Indian, what should I call them? There are many Mexicans into the US,
but there are also people from other countries in South America etc. I have no
idea what Hispanic actually means, but I've heard it (and Latino) commonly
used to refer to that group of people in general, and those the words that I
use too.

If you were in Africa and saw a white skinned person, would you call them
American or White? Calling them White would "lump a bunch of legitimately
different people and cultures into a single, convenient demographic," but that
lumping is necessary since you can't know someone's culture just by looking at
them - or even after you have known them for a while.

~~~
umanwizard
To be technically accurate, you should say they are Native American, or of
mixed Native American and European ancestry (btw, the Spanish word for this is
“mestizo” which means mixed).

I’m aware that nobody actually says this in real life, but this is what people
in the US usually mean when they think of “typical Latino-looking person”.

In reality though, “Latino” is not a very precise way to describe someone with
that phenotype, because just like Canada and the US and other countries with a
major history of colonialism, there are people of all racial ancestries in
Latin America. This is largely ignored in the Western US, I suspect because
most of the “Latino” people there are from Mexico and Central America, where
most of the population looks like what you describe.

But Latin America started out with all the same major groups that the US did:
Native Americans, European settlers, African slaves, Asian immigrants, etc.,
and so you would expect to find all the same ancestries there as you would in
the US, just in different proportions.

And indeed, in places like Uruguay and Argentina, the majority of people would
be considered “white” according to US racial classification norms. In the
Caribbean, many would be considered “black”. In Brazil there are a lot of
people of Japanese descent.

But even in Mexico there are people who look like this: [https://specials-
images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bb...](https://specials-
images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5b147c3d4bbe6f74868b747c/416x416.jpg?background=000000&cropX1=1318&cropX2=3259&cropY1=77&cropY2=2020)

That guy is Mexican and Latino and Hispanic by any possible definition of
those terms, and also “white” (I.e., of primarily Western European ancestry).

The point is: “Latino” and “Hispanic” are not directly connected to phenotypes
or biological ancestry in the way you are assuming.

In general I don’t understand why it is so important to describe people by
their ancestry, as opposed to their actual culture. If you see a white person
in India you can be 99.99% sure they are not culturally Indian, but you can’t
really conclude anything similar in the US.

------
camjohnson26
This is a fantastic story. There are a few ethical problems including Montañez
plagiarizing parts of his presentation and having friends and family buy out
the products in the test market, but overall he refused to accept imposed
limits and accomplished something phenomenal.

One interesting thing is that Frito-Lay had no products targeting Latinos, and
no one on the highly paid marketing team did anything about it. The janitor
saw the problem immediately, but for some reason the entrenched interests were
unable to see it. The CEO by contrast was humble enough to take Montañez’s
call, let him give a presentation, and overlook that presentation’s weaknesses
to see the good idea at the core.

Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives, jealous
that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate to see
others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder social
mobility is so difficult.

~~~
wutbrodo
(Note that I reductively throw around cultural class labels like "lower-middle
class" in this comment for purposes of clarity: I don't mean to suggest that a
person's social class is fixed, or well-defined, but it's just a brief way to
get at the concept of different subcultures and their mannerisms, as well as
the rough income bands that people tend to associate with them)

> Also interesting is the backlash he faced from those same executives,
> jealous that someone less qualified was being successful. As humans we hate
> to see others doing better than us and try to push them down. No wonder
> social mobility is so difficult.

This dynamic is far more dominant than most people realize. I grew up around
lots of rich people, coming from a historically-wealthy family with little
money[1] (yay scholarships!), so my default mannerisms signal upper-class
pretty strongly. I've always been pretty disgusted with the notion of treating
people differently based on their background, so I decided it wasn't a system
I would personally participate in, and semi-consciously changed my diction and
habits to be more déclassé over the course of my teen and college years (to my
parents' minor annoyance).

Once I entered the professional and adult dating world, I noticed the degree
to which even otherwise-decent people could't resist pre-judging you based on
the class that your mannerisms signaled. Depressingly enough, I got by far the
most friction from my lower-middle class friends for the mannerisms that I had
retained from my childhood[2]. Note that I'm not talking about things like
fussing over which salad fork to use (habits that I'm happy to have jettisoned
when young), but often-minor differences in diction, habits, and manners (eg,
when and how often I choose to thank you to service employees, how comfortable
I am expressing how a piece of art or music makes me feel, etc).

After a certain amount of pushing against the tide, I eventually stopped
trying to casualize my mannerisms, and over a fairly short period of time
ended up reverting to communicating pretty much the way I used to when younger
(adjusted for age, obviously). It's been simultaneously amusing and depressing
to note the difference in how I've been treated, most notably with respect to
female attention and my professional life. I won't even try to delve into the
female attention side, but my best guess for the way the baseline of every
professional conversation has shifted is that I went from "scrappy & unusually
talented" to "bred for success". Again, I find this pretty repulsive, but it's
been pretty hard to argue with results. The differences are often hard to
articulate, but it's almost like I start every professional conversation from
an implicit position of power that I didn't have before.

I'm not really sure what to do about this: my initial thought that trying to
change society to treat individuals like humans instead of branded cattle
needed first movers, and I was happy to be one of them. But discovering the
degree to which class distinctions are subtly maintained by _even those who
suffer the most from them_ was enormously dispiriting.

People are weird.

[1] by which I mean, I grew up in a historically-well-off family that had
little money growing up due to some severe mental health issues in my
immediate family

[2] oddly enough, it's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of
class segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up; I've never had
trouble bringing random lower-middle class friends to hang out with friends
who grew up with upper-class mannerisms. It's a rather dejecting thought that
class segregation in a social context has so many (implicit) enthusiastic
supporters among those being hurt by it the most

~~~
whatshisface
> _it 's been my experience that the most zealous enforcement of class
> segregation in social contexts is from the bottom-up_

You perceive subtle rejection a lot more strongly than you perceive someone
else being subtly rejected. The effect you perceive could be explained by
pointing out that all of the negative interactions involving you were "bottom-
up," while the ones involving the "random lower-middle class friends," were
top-down.

~~~
wutbrodo
That's a very insightful point, but I'm not comparing the way my friends
interact with me to the way I interact with them, but rather the way friends
in a lower social class interacted with me vs the way those in a (sort of)
higher social class interacted with me. I feel like not having much money
meant that there were ways in which I was out of place among my childhood
milieu too. And yet somehow, I don't recall ever being made to feel out of my
place by anyone.

This is obviously partially attributable to the fact that everything about my
parents' and my mannerisms fit in well, despite not actually having money. But
I feel like the actual (significant) financial gap between me and my social
circles provided plenty of opportunity for social friction, and I literally
don't remember a single instance of it coming from that group.

More importantly, it would be predictable for people to enforce the advantages
that a rigid class system affords them, but it's unexpected to me for those
getting the short end of the stick to be enforcing the system more zealously
(albeit in a limited context) than those benefiting from it.

(It really bugs me that my comments keep referring to class as if it's a real,
important thing about someone's character, but I guess that's sort of the
point of my comment: the perhaps-naive disillusionment that I felt upon
realizing how insistent most are on enforcing it)

~~~
whatshisface
Class comes from behavior, which is I guess what you are saying - but it's
real, as real as body language or your native language. This would also imply
that if you talked enough about how art made you feel around your people, you
would be exempt from getting rejected by your extended family. I'm not sure if
there is a class in America higher than rich (Zuckerberg class?) but if there
was, you would have to hang out around them to really test your theory.

~~~
wutbrodo
> This would also imply that if you talked enough about how art made you feel
> around your people, you would be exempt from getting rejected by your
> extended family.

First off, this is a pretty bizarre interpretation of what I said: no one
cares if you _don't_ talk about how art makes you feel. It's the rule that you
_can't_ talk about it that gets enforced, in certain circles. I should also
note that this isn't some esoteric desire: I've been on drugs with these
friends enough times to hear them talking about how art makes them feel, but
the difference is that, when sober, they not only feel too inhibited to do so
but they feel like they have to mock others who do as "pretentious".

Secondly, I dont know what you mean by getting rejected by my extended family.
That's certainly not something that's ever happened, either with my family or
other people of the same class. The positive treatment I noticed from class
signaling (unitentional or otherwise) was entirely from women or in a
professional context.

------
bendbro
Very impressed with the janitor's vision and the CEOs good leadership. A poor
leader would have quashed the process when the janitor could not justify his
idea. Being a good leader, the CEO came up with a solution to determine the
viability of the janitor's idea.

The difference between seniors and juniors is experience, and that experience
can partially be defined by your "moveset". A janitor would not know it is
possible to run a limited trial, but the CEO would. I have found that managers
are often amenable to ideas from their workers. But, if a worker does not have
a full moveset, it will be difficult for the worker to pitch an idea in a way
that is actionable, and he will be turned down.

~~~
spaceflunky
Great comment. It takes a hell of a CEO to squash any ego they have and stop
to listen to the janitor about what direction their business should take.

------
greghatch
> “It hit me that I had no idea what he was talking about, or what I was
> doing,” Montañez recalled. “I was shaking, and I damn near wanted to pass
> out…[but] I opened my arms and I said, ‘This much market share!’ I didn’t
> even know how ridiculous that looked.”

>The room went silent as the CEO stood up and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen,
do you realize we have an opportunity to go after this much market share?” he
said, stretching out his arms.

Huge smiles from me here.

This really amplifies the willingness of this CEO to listen and promote good
ideas. I don't have a ton more context but I can relate to this janitor in
many ways and this reaction from the CEO would be incredible.

I'm so glad it happened this way and that it came from the janitor's
perspective.

~~~
elicash
That quote is missing some context that I think makes the story even more
impressive.

So, this was before the Hot Cheeto idea. Montañez was looking for ways of
advancing inside of the company and had asked a salesperson if he could trail
him as he did his routes. This was on Montañez's day off work, so it was
unpaid. The advantage to the salesperson was an extra set of hands for
unloading.

He saw the shelf or whatever the terminology is and how much FritoLay product
they were selling in the individual stores. That's what he had in mind when he
used his arms to say how much market share. The question scared him
(apparently he and his wife hadn't gotten to the "market share" chapter in the
book they got from the library) until he remembered that day following the
salesperson and so the punchline is that he thought he nailed the answer.

------
irrational
“I do have a Ph.D.,” he responded. “I’ve been poor, hungry and determined.”

Love that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I hate it. I think it belittles Ph.D's and denigrates the people who don't
have them suggesting that you need to deflect the question because you
[sarcasm] couldn't possibly have a skill set that's of high worth unless you
actually had done a Ph.D [/sarcasm].

Bleurgh.

FWIW my highest level of qualification is a bachelor's degree and I work in a
position that doesn't require any formal training at all.

~~~
martyvis
His Ph.D response was a retort to people questioning his qualifications to
conduct lectures. Almost every real Ph.D certainly deserved them, recognising
their knowledge or research in their field. However many of those with Ph.Ds
were not the best lecturers and teachers they could be when I was an
undergraduate at university. They actually hadn't been taught to teach
effectively and present their knowledge in way that others could absorb.
(Thank God for good text books and helpful tutors in my case). It sounds like
Richard Montañez' experience in the "school of hard knocks" may well have set
him above many regular Ph.Ds in capability to lecture and teach.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Well, exactly. You don't have to have a Ph.D to be an expert, to be a good
lecturer, etc..

But having a Ph.D is nonetheless a demonstration of a particular high-level of
learning, research, and technical ability.

------
WalterBright
I love this story. It's not about how Montañez "got lucky" \- it's about how
he, in several key spots, set himself up so luck would find him.

It's a great American success story.

~~~
axiom92
Also from the article:

> Six months later, with Montañez’s help, Frito-Lay began testing Flamin’ Hot
> Cheetos in small Latino markets in East Los Angeles.

> If it performed well, the company would move forward with the product; if it
> didn’t, they’d scratch it — and Montañez would likely return to janitorial
> duties.

> So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to
> the test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.

> “I’d tell the owner, ‘Man, these are great,’” he recalled. “Next week, I’d
> come back and there’d be a whole rack.”

:-)

~~~
fma
If I remember correctly, Sid Meiers would call up computer stores and ask if
they had his games in stock because he wanted to buy it. He'd call several
times and eventually the stores would reach out to him to buy it.

~~~
blarg1
I wonder if he had to come up with different voice disguises.

------
crankylinuxuser
The days when someone can start as a janitor or in the mailroom and climb to
the top is done.

Companies used to hire everyone in the company. Janitors were part of the
company. So was mailroom staff. So were secretaries. Everybody was part of the
whole.

Now, companies contract out everything but their core thing. Janitors come
from a low-paid 3rd party service. Mailrooms are no longer a thing (there's no
such thing as emailrooms, unless you count exchange admins). All those things
that allowed somebody to start at the bottom rung in a company and climb up
have been systematically destroyed and/or removed.

~~~
trefn
It may just look different now.

At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is
filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in
tech.

Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales
engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the
departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs
or who have grown into leadership roles. Some have left to start their own
companies.

It's actually been one of our most effective hiring channels!

~~~
ts4z
At your company, the modern equivalent is the janitor, who cleans your office
-- but doesn't work directly for Mixpanel.

------
danso
Great story. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of D'Angelo
Barksdale's cynical speculation about the inventor of Chicken McNuggets being
a "just some sad ass down in the basement of McDonalds, thinking up some shit
to make some money for the real players":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A)

------
bmmayer1
This is one of the best business stories I've ever read. It embodies the core
principle of the American dream: that you can really make it if you are
dedicated, work hard, and strike out on the right idea. It also highlights the
importance of good leadership, to recognize good ideas no matter where they
come from, and bottom-up management techniques that emphasize collective
ownership of a company's products and success.

------
ripvanwinkle
Inspirational.

I'd love to hear names of companies today where folks feel their work place
culture might allow something like this to happen.

~~~
jonathlee
I work at Nucor and know of several people who have done exactly this in the
20 years I've worked here. They started working in a entry level production
position and worked their way up to department manager, division manager/VP,
senior VP and even CEO in one case.

~~~
simonrobb
I've almost finished reading "Good to Great" (an excellent read, for whoever
hasn't read it already) which analyzes Nucor's company culture. Nice to hear
the reality matches the analysis.

------
darkpuma
I just wish they'd make them hotter. Takis are kicking their ass in the spicy
snack aisle.

~~~
bluedino
I have never found any flavor of takis to actually be “hot”

~~~
darkpuma
Not "capsicum hot" per se, but very flavorful. More salty and acidic I guess.
But it's a very bold and complex flavor, a top tier snack imho.

~~~
domsnar
I recently moved to Europe and can not find any vendor that supplies Takis.
For me they are basically crack and I can't get my fix. Maybe it's for the
better, as I can go through two large bags in one sitting..

------
JimBrimble35
The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_ his
idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with
Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors.

I wonder how likely this scenario would be in today's world. I have found
personally that many companies are unwilling to take risks on employees who
aren't formally qualified, even if they demonstrate the skills to operate at
far beyond their current pay grade.

Second real hero of the story is his wife. How important is it to have people
around you who will enable you do things you aren't qualified to do because
they believe in you unconditionally? All of the importants.

~~~
jakelazaroff
_> The real hero of this story is the CEO who decided to take this guy _and_
his idea. He could have easily taken the idea and ran with it on his own, with
Montañez spending the rest of his life mopping floors._

A practical question, and a moral one:

Would it be have worked out had the CEO tried to steal Montañez's idea, given
Montañez came up with the spices himself?

Does someone merely not doing something unethical, at no cost to themselves,
make them a hero?

~~~
danso
"real hero" is definitely overstating it – I'd hope we as a society haven't
reached the point where doing the decent thing is seen as going above and
beyond. Hopefully the CEO saw it not only as just the right thing to do, but
also the smart (and legal) thing to do – Montañez's story could in the long-
run inspire more innovative ideas and culture at the company.

~~~
JimBrimble35
Sorry, but we have _definitely_ reached that point. Granted I'm extremely
cynical, but stories like this are outliers and not the norm. And not simply
because of the scale of the success.

Read my other comment on why I consider the CEO the hero of this story.

------
dom96
This is a great story. I'm surprised to not see Ketchup Cheetos[1] mentioned
in the linked timeline[2], those are by far my favourites so I wonder what the
story behind them is.

1 - [https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european-
prod...](https://americanfizz.co.uk/image/cache/catalog/european-
products/cheetos/cheetos-ketchup-85g-800x800.png)

2 - [https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured-
timeline/history...](https://www.timelinemaker.com/blog/featured-
timeline/history-of-cheetos-timeline/)

~~~
FreeKill
I've always found it interesting that ketchup flavoring on frito lay products
were not a bigger thing. In canada, ketchup flavored chips etc. are a very
popular flavor and have been around for decades. Just never seems to really
have caught on elsewhere until somewhate recently.

~~~
dom96
Oooh, another reason to visit Canada. My love for Ketchup Cheetos comes from
Poland, where ketchup flavoured crisps are fairly popular as well.

------
z3t4
> “How much market share do you think you can get?” "I opened my arms and I
> said, ‘This much market share!’"

Brilliant answer for a stupid question that was probably meant to put him
down.

> Frito-Lay began testing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in small Latino markets in East
> Los Angeles. If it performed well, the company would move forward with the
> product; if it didn’t, they’d scratch it

So Montañez assembled a small team of family members and friends, went to the
test markets, and bought every bag of Hot Cheetos he could find.

Also brilliant, as such a "test" would certainly fail due to no marketing,
likely intentional by the exec's and politics.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
This was the same CEO who took a call from a janitor. It wasn't a put down.
This was an interview, and the question was open ended on purpose to see how
he responded.

~~~
jackvalentine
The CEO wasn't the one asking the question.

------
debatem1
That's an incredible story and props to the guy, but let's not tapdance around
the fact that this is incredible specifically because social mobility on this
scale is extremely rare. It took both exceptional determination and
unbelievable luck to make this happen. How many others have the doggedness and
skill, but not the luck? How many of them are still mopping today?

~~~
Macross8299
>because social mobility on this scale is extremely rare

Rare only works as a qualifier when comparing it to some other probability of
social mobility, either in an ideal or real system. The US has higher social
mobility than most actual countries in the world and is pretty much middle of
the pack in social mobility when it comes to developed (OECD) nations [0]

If I recall correctly, there was another case of a janitor working her way up
to becoming a C-level executive at Microsoft and HP. Capitalism with a social
safety net is what affords this social mobility because it doesn't matter what
your credentials are if you can find a market for a novel product like
Montañez did. You can argue about how much of a social safety net is required
to prevent the poor from staying poor forever, but it's still capitalism that
provides the impetus that lifts people up to where they don't need the social
safety net anymore.

Compare this to a society where you're hooped if you're born into the wrong
caste or without party connections and US social mobility doesn't seem that
rare anymore.

[0]: [https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and-
opportu...](https://www.oecd.org/inclusive-growth/inequality-and-
opportunity/The-Issues-Note-Social-Mobility-and-Equal-Opportunities-
May-4-2017.pdf) figure 2

~~~
debatem1
I'm left unsure what your point is.

Saying that you have to look at social mobility as a relative thing is
certainly false, because we have an optimal yardstick: perfect fairness. If
measured against that goal we don't do very well.

Then you go into what the relative numbers are, and it turns out we don't do
very well there either, being behind China, Hungary, South Africa and perhaps
a dozen others on your preferred yardstick.

You then note that there are at least one or two more cases of this happening
(which I believe), and that it requires capitalism with a social safety net to
do so. In current application the first part is right, but isn't broadly
correct, and the second part just isn't true.

Regarding the first part: for such a huge change in life circumstances to
happen you have to have both the extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
Capitalism is very good at generating those huge disparities, and is by far
the most common system with that characteristic today, but monarchies like
Saudi Arabia also experience it (extreme individual changes in SES in Saudi
Arabia are most downward, however). The presence of a social safety net
doesn't seem to play much of a role in these extreme cases, and certainly
didn't in this case. Examples of self-made millionaires going back to early
colonial history abound, and certainly there was no strong safety net in
place. Given the relative infrequency of such events, I would be skeptical of
any attempt to compare between two historical periods or societies based on
relative count between those societies or periods as well.

After all that the only thing I can think you were trying to say is that the
US is doing a-ok, which just isn't supported by the points you made.

------
rb808
> “it’s not about who you know — it’s about who knows you.”

I've never heard that before, its an awesome quote.

------
shripadk
I loved this article but I loved their Newsletter conversion page the most! I
never thought I would feel warm and fuzzy after giving away my email address
to subscribe to a newsletter of all things! Live to learn something new
everyday!

------
miguelmota
What a great and inspiring story.

> “Nobody had given any thought to the Latino market,” recalls Montañez. “But
> everywhere I looked, I saw it ready to explode.”

It's incredible what a new set of eyes with different perspectives can bring
to the table.

------
mxfh
What about those 300k employees in the 80s? That just sounds way off-scale and
hints to sloppy editing elsewhere. The only number close to this is what they
call their direct distibution system customers.

This article NYT from 1986 mentions 26.500 employees:
[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-
go-i...](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/02/business/frito-lay-s-go-it-alone-
ploicy.html)

------
gdix
What a nice feel-good story which is totally not a marketing/PR concoction,
albeit a brilliant one. The story is literally the Cheeto version of Good Will
Hunting.

Do you all honestly believe none of the hundreds of food scientists working at
Frito-Lay thought of making a spicy version their snacks?

------
l0c0b0x
When he broke the news to his family, his grandfather imparted a piece of
advice that would always stick with him: “Make sure that floor shines,” the
man told his grandson. “And let them know that a Montañez mopped it.”

As a Latino with humble beginnings, this brought tears to my eyes.

------
HillaryBriss
This is my favorite part of this story: _“It seemed there was a group of
[executives] who wanted it to fail,” he later told the podcast, The Passionate
Few. “They thought I got lucky. They were paid big bucks to come up with these
ideas… they didn’t want some janitor to do it.”_

------
synchronos
Here's an insightful interview with the man himself -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnYF7srPK0)

------
thtthings
Best thing i ever read on HN

------
jayeshsalvi
Inspirational story, but let's not forget about the nutritional value of the
Cheetos (or lack thereof)

------
gumby
man I love this story. And I wonder how many huge multinationals are smart
enough to let something like this happen?

And this is why VCs often say they prefer teams with just domain expertise to
teams with just the technical expertise, if the team doesn't already have
both.

------
zaroth
“How much market share do you think we can get?”

Arms spread wide, “This much!”

That is just too perfect. Who’s cutting onions in here?

------
mentos
Read the whole article but did not see any mention of if he was compensated at
all for his idea?

~~~
rconti
It didn't say anything about him being compensated directly for the idea.
Presumably as he moved up the ranks he got compensated via profit-sharing. In
the same way the highly paid guys who were SUPPOSED to be inventing new things
like this (but didn't) were also compensated. And the same way they would have
been compensated if they developed some hot new product (eg, at their same
rate relative to the profit sharing of the whole org).

------
RickJWagner
What an awesome story.

....he was going to be the “best janitor Frito-Lay had ever seen”

That's the enabler, right there.

------
rocketraman
Wonderful story. Both the janitor and the CEO epitomize Ayn Rand's "ideal
man":

> "The moral issue is: how do you approach the field of work given your
> intellectual endowment and the existing possibilities? Are you going through
> the motions of holding a job, without focus or ambition, waiting for
> weekends, vacations, and retirement? Or are you doing the most and the best
> that you can with your life? Have you committed yourself to a purpose, i.e.,
> to a productive career? Have you picked a field that makes demands on you,
> and are you striving to meet them, to do good work, and to build on it -- to
> expand your knowledge, develop your ability, improve your efficiency?

> If the answers to these last questions are yes, then you are totally
> virtuous in regard to productiveness, whether you are a surgeon or a
> steelworker, a house painter or a painter of landscapes, a janitor or a
> company president."

(HT: [http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-
bill...](http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-janitors-multi-billion-
dollar-idea.html))

------
kitten_smuggler
Wow, its been a while since I've read something that inspirational!

------
phillco
This is very well written. They get in, they tell the story, they get out.

------
test6554
My asshole would like to have some stern words with that guy

------
edisonjoao
love this

------
spacedog11
Very interesting.

~~~
JimBrimble35
indeed


Shame on you Microsoft, for buying a Promoted Tweet for "Firefox".  - rbanffy
http://twitpic.com/4c6nth

======
rch
Actually, that's kinda awesome. Talk about effective use of marketing.

------
samgro
Why is that shameful? Buying AdWords for competitor searches on Google is
standard practice, why should Twitter be any different?

~~~
rbanffy
Competing aggressively against a non-profit? Classy!

~~~
samgro
How does Firefox's tax status have anything to do with Microsoft's business
objectives? I hate IE as much as the next guy, but I don't see how Microsoft
marketing their business is morally questionable just because their competitor
gets tax breaks and doesn't pay dividends to shareholders.

~~~
rbanffy
What would you think of a paid-but-cheap clinic with shady methods and far-
from-best care practices (let's say they kill or mutilate 2% of their
patients) that targets search-advertisements towards people in need of free
healthcare?

Oh, and according to Tom Warren, of Winrumors, "The company was quick to trash
the marketing stunt after complaints started rolling-in on the social
networking site." so, they probably realize it didn't get down well with the
public.

~~~
samgro
I agree that IE is a bad product, and that this marketing campaign may even
have been counter-effective. I still don't see how a bad product or a bad
marketing campaign are "evil". That being said, my life as a web developer
would be better if IE disappeared off the face of the earth, but I don't
forecast that happening any time soon :(

------
rch
How much would a "Try Fedora/Ubuntu/etc. Live CD for Free" promoted tweet cost
when the next version of Windows ships?

~~~
rbanffy
I don't know. Kickstarter to the rescue?


Open Source Climate Data - grandalf

Evidently the source data is still available from NOAA.  Would anyone on HN be interested in creating a fully open source set of tools for generating a climate data set?
The project should simply be a script that expects to find the raw NOAA measurement data in a directory and that outputs a single csv file.
The NOAA data availability is mentioned here:  http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No
Anyone interested in collaborating?  I'm pretty handy with awk.  Over time this could turn into a great resource for climate change research.
======
furuiman
Check the Alliance for Global Open Risk Analysis (AGORA)

www.risk-agora.org

and post there. Maybe there will be people interested to help.


New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes [video] - sinak
http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/05/politics/u-s-new-leaker/index.html

======
deedubaya
Their choice of wording already sets this person up to not be a Whistle
Blower.

Mole => Wrong Doer => Terrorist

------
sarciszewski
A few of my more paranoid* friends already suggested this a while back, this
just proves it. :D

* Possibly s/paranoid/informed/