My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...

For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.

In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.

THANK YOU. For example, I'm currently a user of an android app (installed thru Play Store) which I found through front page; cool. The headline: "I developed <insert FOSS app which meets regular value prop> and didn't use <insert commonly used framework>". Tragically, I care less about framework than I do about functionality, and ever since installing, i've been left wondering how many of the hundreds of upvoters tried running what I describe as the single buggiest app on my phone. I've rage uninstalled multiple times in hopes of fixing issues which are sometimes only fixed by clean installing. My point: Guiding philosophies are important, and evaluating them at scale is critical* work.

*see what i did there

Yes, but usually it doesn't come down to something that works vs. doesn't work.

And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.

Repurposing an old device is good. If the closed platform bothers you, don’t buy and iPhone - but regardless of what you do there are millions of old iPhones that could be saved from the landfill by projects like this