Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

How can you exceed your max value? This has always bothered me, its pretty much admitting "We kinda pull numbers out of our butts." When I see this in other media, like movies or games, it seems to be a direct response to hype or personal politics. Maybe CR is overly green and wants to promote EV's? Reminds me of when Obama got a Nobel Peace prize for things he will do in the future.

Also, the Simpsons did it first:

Tralawney: Listen, we've been meaning to have a talk with you about your reviews. Everything's a rave! Nine thumbs up, what the hell is that?

Homer: I've given out my share of bad reviews

Beaumont: Oh, the only bad review you gave was to a slice of pizza you found under the couch.

Homer: It lost some points because it had a Hot Wheel on it.

View on HN

I think people are making too big of a deal about scoring greater than the "maximum."

It's pretty clear that they came up with some arbitrary scoring system where each aspect of the car gets some number of points. There's nothing wrong with that, any rating is going to be arbitrary to some degree. They then arranged the scales such that whatever they saw as a good car would come close to 100, because 100 seems like a nice number.

Then they test a car with a combination of attributes they never expected, and it exceeds 100. 100 isn't the actual maximum, it's just what they thought would be the top score from their system. Turns out that if you throw a car at their system that is extremely efficient and powerful and seats lots of people, the numbers go higher.

Similar issue with the "Coefficient of Performance" in heating and cooling[1], which is the ratio of "energy extracted" to "energy consumed". Since you're just moving energy around, this value can easily be greater than 100% -- no violation of the laws of thermodynamics! 100% is just as arbitrary a value on this scale. .

However, there's still always a relevant maximum that you should measure relative to, and refrigerators have a theoretical maximum. The maximum ("Carnot") efficiency is the ratio of the higher (absolute) temperature to the temperature difference. For room temperature to freezing, that would be ~300/27 = 11.1 = 1100%.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

Hmmm... Other measurable things like temperature, voltage, loudness, etc. don't get to 100 and suddenly stop, even if that's the biggest number on the meter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com