Sure that's a valid choice. And if we as a society chooses safety then lower the speed limit. But it's not reasonable to expect everyone to drive 40% of the speed limit under what are normal conditions (the parked cars are almost always there).
A human driver travelling at the same speed would have hit that child at exactly 17 mph, before their brain even registered that child was there. If that driver would also have been driving a large SUV that child would have been pushed on the ground and ran over, so probably a fatality. And also functionally nobody would have given a shit apart from some lame finger pointing at (probably) the kid’s parents.
And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either:
Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults. And honestly even for adults stepping out a bit from behind an obstacle in the path of a car is an easy mistake to make. Don’t forget that for children an SUV is well above head height so it isn’t even possible for them to totally avoid stepping out a bit before looking. (And I don’t think stepping out vs. running out changes the outcome a lot)
This is why low speed limits around schools exist.
So I would say the Waymo did pretty well here, it travelled at a speed where it was still able to avoid not only a fatality but also major injury.
> A human driver travelling at the same speed would have hit that child at exactly 17 mph, before their brain even registered that child was there.
Not sure where this is coming from, and it's directly contradicted by the article:
> Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.” The company did not release a specific analysis of this crash.
No, Waymo’s quote supports the grandparent comment - it was about a “fully attentive human driver” - unless you are arguing that human drivers are consistently “fully attentive”?
Fair enough, so then how fast would a semi-attentive driver stop?
The comment I originally replied to makes the claim a human's brain wouldn't have even responded fast enough to register the child was there. That's going WAY further than how Waymo is claiming a human would have responded.
I don't see how that's a more reasonable assumption that a human driver actually being "fully attentive", and I'm not sure Waymo's definition of that term is the same as what you're using.
> And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either: Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults.
I get what you are trying to say and I definitely agree in spirit, but I tell my kid (now 9) "it doesn't matter if it isn't your fault, you'll still get hurt or be dead." I spent a lot of time teaching him how to cross the street safely before I let him do it on his own, not to trust cars to do the right thing, not to trust them to see you, not to trust some idiot to not park right next to cross walk in a huge van that cars have no chance of seeing over.
If only we had a Dutch culture of pedistrian and road safety here.
At least it is not as bad as on Windows 11. There the resize area is inside or outside the visible frame depending on which side and which corner of the window.
Oh for the time when chairs were still for sitting and PDFs were still for printing.
Restaurant websites mentioned — the majority of restaurant web sites I’ve encountered were much more annoying and difficult to read than a PDF, even on a small phone screen. Or should I say, especially on a small phone screen. Some would make a 32 inch monitor feel cramped.
That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story. Light bulbs will last longer if driven less hard, due to the lower temperature. But that lower temperature also means much lower efficiency because the blackbody spectrum shifts even further into the infrared. So some compromise had to be picked between having a reasonable amount of light and a reasonable life span.
But yeah agree, this subscription thing is spreading like a cancer.
I'm not an expert on the case law, but supposedly United States v. General Electric Co. et al., 82 F.Supp. 753 (D.N.J. 1949) indicates that whatever design trade-offs might have existed, corporate policy makers were really just trying to screw consumers [1] (which is why they probably had to agree on short lifespans as a cartel rather than just market "this line of bulbs for these preferences" vs. "this other line for other people" -- either as a group or separate vendors). I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop where they figure out how to make LED bulbs crappy enough to need replacement.
Leds are already awful. I already lost 4 of 10 led light bulbs I boughtast year. I hope they will be replaced. It's because every led bulb has a small transformer inside and it fails quite quickly
I think its a heat dissipation issue. I have some overhead LED lights that replaced some halogen bulbs and they have huge metal heat sinks on the back and have all lasted 10+ years. Unfortunately they are no longer sold but I did buy a few spare just in case.
It depends a lot on the bulbs. When we moved into our current house 11 years ago, we replaced everything with LEDs. Many of those original bulbs are still going strong, including all of the 20 or so integrated pot lights we put in to replace the old-school halogen ones. Others died within a year, and replacements have been similarly hit and miss.
To some extent you get what you pay for; most of the random-Chinese-brand LEDs I've picked up off of Amazon have failed pretty quickly. Most of the Philips and similarly expensive ones have lasted. Also the incandescent-looking ones that stuff all the electronics into the base of the bulb tend to fail quickly, as do anything installed in an enclosed overhead light fixture, due to heat buildup.
> as do anything installed in an enclosed overhead light fixture, due to heat buildup
This is my problem. My house has a lot of enclosed overhead light fixtures, and LEDs just do not last long in them. And renovating all of them to be more LED friendly would be quite expensive.
I got one of these free energy audit things which included swapping out up to 30 or so bulbs with LEDs. Whatever contractor did it seems to have gotten the cheapest bulbs they could, and the majority of them have failed by 4 or 5 years later. So far so good on the name brand ones I replaced them with.
Yes, but the compromise didn't have to be an industrywide conspiracy with penalties for manufacturing light bulbs that were too long-lasting and inefficient. But it was. Consumers could have freely chosen short-lived high-efficiency bulbs or long-lived low-efficiency ones.
In fact, they could have chosen the latter just by wiring two lightbulb sockets in series, or in later years putting one on a dimmer.
"That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story."
Whilst that's certainly true the Phoebus cartel's most negative aspect was that it was a secret organisation, its second was that it was actually a cartel. These disadvantaged both light bulb consumers and any company that wasn't a member of the cartel—a new startup company that wasn't aware of or a member of the cartel would be forced out of business by the cartel's secret unfair competition.
Without the cartel manufacturers could have competed by offering a range of bulbs based on longevity versus life depending on consumers' needs. For example, offering a full brightness/1000h type for normal use and a 70% brightness/2000h one for say in applications where bulbs were awkward to replace (such product differences could even be promoted in advertising).
Nowadays, planned obsolescence is at the heart and core of much manufacturing and manufacturers are more secretive than ever about the techniques they've adopted to achieve their idea of the ideal service lives of their products—lives that optimize profits. This is now a very sophisticated business and takes into account many factors including ensuring their competition's products do not gain a reputation for having a longer service life or better repairability than their own (still a likely corrupting factor that originally drove the formation of the Phoebus cartel).
Right, the philosophy's not changed since Phoebus but the sophistication of its implementation has increased almost beyond recognition. There's not space to detail this adequately here except to say I've some excellent examples from the manufacture of whitegoods and how production has changed over recent decades to manufacturers' advantage often to the detriment of consumers.
In short, planned obsolescence and the secrecy that surrounds it has negative and very significant consequences for both consumers and the environment. When purchasing, consumers are thus unable to make informed decisions about whether to trade off the reduced initial costs of products with a short service live against those that have increased longevity and or improved repairability. Similarly, shortlived products only add to environmental pollution, witness the enormous e-waste problem that currently exists.
As manufacturers won't willingly give up panned obsolescence or secrecy that surrounds it, one solution would be to tax products with artificially shortened service lives. In the absence of manufacturing information governments could statistically determine product tax rates based on observable service lives.
Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.
Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.
PHP was blamed for a good reason: for a long time it did not by default support prepared SQL statements. You could install the mysqli extension to gain such support but that was almost never available on shared web hosts.
That was the bigger problem, IMO, in that even once PDO existed and the MySQL extension was "fixed" to have prepared statements, so much of the documentation still did it wrong.
And yet similar classes of bugs still pops up today, even with what I would've assumed to be safe defaults? I'm guessing its non-standard databases or DB clients or something?
This case is more just a pure lack of sanitisation, but it's fascinating to see in 2025 still :)
It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.
(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)
And the 1 and 8 aren't next to each other anymore, either. (See typewriters from the "18"00s.)
> those smart quotes
Fixing straight quotes is a hard problem[0]. My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], includes my library, KeenQuotes[2], for replacing them at build time. It's not perfect, but can typeset my ~400 page novel without any errors.
> Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character?
When typesetting Markdown, KeenWrite first converts the document to XHTML (i.e., XML), then invokes ConTeXt to convert XML into TeX macros. One of those macros handles the ellipses by converting it to \dots{}:
What's so weird about it? It's the appropriate way to do it when writing in those languages.
And really easy to do on an Android phone, I've found: Switch the input to French or German, and the on-screen keyboard offers the appropriate quote marks for that language in the same place as usual.
for em dashes and ellipsis at least it's trivial to convert before displaying them... which I do in my own markdown-to-publication toolchain (but not here on HN).
Yeah one wart about Windows is that you always have to lookup these weird registry hacks after getting a fresh install. Disabling this automatic reboot was one of them. Otherwise that would make your computer completely useless for things like
- gaming
- watching movies
- presentations
- anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours
- anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…
Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.
And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.
- Parked cars on the street. - Drive somewhat fast. - Avoid killing people.
Pick two.