Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)

I bought one of these a couple decades ago. The story I got was they were mass produced in Shenzhen and sold (cheaply) to poorer sections of China, India and SouthEast Asia. As for the "educational" aspect... The one I got did come with an English vocabulary program, and a few other games in what looked like simplified Chinese (couldn't tell for sure, I don't read or speak any of the Chinese dialects.)

But it looked very similar... I'm guessing some of the old fab equipment was completely depreciated and picked up for a song and stuffed in the corner of someone's warehouse and was cranking out 6502 clones by the thousand.

I remember some of the limitations: zero networking (not even RS232), no mass storage (not even a cassette port), 8-bit sound (no voice samples for language lessons) and something like a 252x240 screen resolution.

I've often wondered how (in)expensive you could make something with a better built-in screen, the ability to play VP9/AV1 video and opus samples and Bluetooth to connect to mouse / keyboard and PC as a net and storage device.

tylerflick · 4h ago

> I've often wondered how (in)expensive you could make something with a better built-in screen, the ability to play VP9/AV1 video and opus samples and Bluetooth to connect to mouse / keyboard and PC as a net and storage device.

I’ve been doing this, and the answer if you have a 3d printer is $10 US(pi zero 2 w) + the cost of whatever display you want to use. This won’t do AV1 but it’s good enough for my use cases. I’m slightly cheating on the cost as I have plethora of LiPo batteries in reserve.

fiddlerwoaroof · 1h ago

I’ve been wanting to do something like this to make a modern iPod / audiobook reader.

tylerflick · 23m ago

For an iPod style device you could even go lower down the line and use Pico W along with the addition of some i2s/amp combo.

zokier · 3h ago

Hardware wise that sounds a lot like basic tablet, which sell around $100 price point. On the other hand, Raspberry Pi 400 costs $80.

bitwize · 5h ago

I remember some sort of OLPC/Raspberry Pi-like initiative in India to build a "teach the kids how to program" type computer based on a Famiclone. The idea was that "famicoms on a chip" were readily available in a way that would make it cheap enough even for the dirt-poorest of Indian families to afford, and the software could theoretically be ported to the more bootleggy famiclones already out there on the market.

rickcarlino · 1h ago

I think that was “PlayPower” http://playpower.pbworks.com/w/page/17230477/About%20the%20$...