Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

bluejekyll

“It was very exciting,” Barrett says. “Then it crashed into the wall, which wasn’t ideal.”

View on HN

Basically a summary of my entire professional life.

Hahaha mine too :'D

It feels like HN became Reddit overnight. We had a good run.

"we have the technology, we can rebuild him"

Leave me broken and just give me the six million.

I picture the second part said in Ron Howard's "The Narrator's" voice.

I imagined "the front fell off."

For anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Lots of people in the robotics field might be making such an observation. Hopefully, this won't also apply to many production self driving vehicles.

The first fully self-driving car to market will be from the company that cuts the most corners and compresses schedules the most. I'm sure it will be fine.

cuts the most corners and compresses schedules the most

Only works for well-trodden paths where everyone is doing basically the same thing. Does this apply to self driving cars?

I find engineers are generally passionate, interesting people to be around, especially if they're masters in unintentional, deadpan humour.

So if this fell on someone, would it electrocute them?

I'm guessing not. More like an electric fence: volts are high but current is low.

Depends on a lot of things. But a big one is the amperage used. There's a parallel frequently used. Voltage is the reach, and amperage is how hard you can hit. This is why a lot of Tesla's demonstrations weren't fatal to people (and being high frequency). This device, probably not using high amperage anywhere that would really matter. But they are pulling high amps from the batteries, which is then converted to high voltage. So there is a distinct possibility that it could kill someone. But not likely in this small of a form factor.

Voltage doesn't kill, current does. One can easily take 10s of thousands of volt across the the heart if the amperage is low, but a car battery putting out 12 volts and several amps can. Personally, I've taken leads from a 240V, 3KW solar panel array from hand to hand and not felt a thing. Have so same 2 leads touch the same hand, you're going to feel it. For me, felt like a snake bite, minus the venom. Left a few small red mark on my hand that cleared up in a few days.

Mind this is all in reference to DC current. AC is another beast.

Edit: it takes around, or less, than 1.5 mA across the heart to kill

At 40kV and 600 watts, it's 15mA, so yes, it could definitely stop their heart...

So peak power is around 600 watts, power supply efficiency is 82%, and voltage is 40.3 KV. So amperage is 0.82*600 watts/40.3 KV=~ 12 milliamps. It's not necessarily fatal[0], but it's not going to be a good day either. In general, hundreds of watts of high voltage DC is not something to take lightly. At the very least, you might accidentally fry any microelectronics on your person! Possibly even near your person(due to the arcing you cause)! High voltage DC has a tendency to make microelectronics nonfunctional. [0]https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/02/what_electrici...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com