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Comment by yoav_hollander | Hacker News Reader

To Matthew Wilkes: It is true that in military situations the tradeoffs of safety vs. utility are quite different.

However, I think this is one of those (many) cases where it is an "operator error" which a better design could have prevented.

In other words, I think it was a plain bug. Somewhere in the fire() function there should have been some check for:

     distance(current_gps_coordinates, target_coordinates) < min_safety_distance

but there was not.

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Thing is, you actually don't want to put that line of code in there, because sometimes you DO need to fire on yourself. If you build a tool that fails that case because some idiot hard coded a rule with no override because they didn't understand every single case where their too might need to be used no amount of training can fix the problem. Sometimes you have to assume the user is smart enough to use your tool. I think this is the right idea, but you absolutely want to let the user shoot themselves in the foot if they want to, but you should make sure they know they are going to shoot themselves in the foot.

Absolutely. What I meant was that there should have been some "are you sure" confirmation in this case.

It seems reasonable that this device may not only be used to drop bombs, could be replenishing munitions or dropping food on target. Point being, a simple "are you too close" does the complexity a disservice.

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