Hacker News Reader

Comment by dominicr | Hacker News Reader

"For some reason, GE decided not to install a physical reset button" Well, there might be some good reasons not to have a reset button. Without knowing GE's reasons let's brainstorm:

- My first thought is that many light bulbs are not easily accessible. They could be high up, or in a casing that requires a tool to open. So being able to reset them remotely is a practical benefit.

- If you google "accidents whilst changing light bulb" it seems that it's not impossible to injure or even kill yourself whilst changing a light bulb. So minimising the amount of times you need to physically access a light bulb has safety benefits.

- It is possible that the bulb is turned off but the power to it is still on. In that scenario getting a consumer to reach into a powered on light socket to press a button on the bulb, near the electrical connections, is not considered safe.

That's my 5 minutes worth of reasons. Any more?

View on HN

The fact that there is a logical chain of engineering considerations that got us to this point I take as granted (yes, the article thinks it could have been done better but, as you point out, there are safety problems).

But our world is becoming more and more like a Doglas Adams novel - I seem to remember in one of the H2G2 books that they considered their civilisation so advanced that they did away with TV remotes, and the TV could detect that you wanted to change channel when you make a gesture. The upshot being that if you didn't want the channel to change or the volume to suddenly shoot up, you had to sit completely rigidly still for the duration of your programme.

I kind of do that to Spotify - I have to listen to tracks I don't necessarily like so that their suggestion mechanism would stop pushing me the same stuff I had already listened to.

PS: That being said, I would still listen to stuff I don't like to discover something, but that's beyond the point - wasn't automation supposed to make our lives better in some way? :)

So your goal is discovery of music?

We used to have a great solution for this: disk jockeys. Some stations still do employ them as actual curators of music, not just a pleasing voice over the Clear Channel Top 40 feed.

The problems of today are strange.

The loss of DJs to syndicated formats was tragic.

These folks are pros, with vast experience, and they can put together a show by theme, or to tell a story, or to set a mood, or to challenge you with some new things. Most of them now press the button on whatever they're told and read the title out.

But, every once in a while they sneak in a late night show now, maybe when mgmt isn't looking.

I wonder if this would be a good format for streaming, like the old days but global, with a live DJ and fans interacting live.

> I wonder if this would be a good format for streaming, like the old days but global, with a live DJ and fans interacting live.

I have a great site for you: check out https://wfmu.org

Nice, and also https://radioparadise.com

I've found Apple Music does this pretty well with some of it's scheduled programming like Beats 1, or the less frequently but quality stuff like Echo Chamber.

It is the most common format for clubs in virtual worlds, and I've found a lot of new music that way. One of my favorites is the saturday afternoon show in Utopia Skye, which is simulcast on Discord, allowing people who aren't in the virtual club to listen and to interact with the DJs.

Utopia Skye Discord: https://discord.gg/hScth5T

> I wonder if this would be a good format for streaming, like the old days but global, with a live DJ and fans interacting live.

This is exactly why I've been working on a live streaming site for DJs and music lovers [1] where DJs can play whatever we like LIVE while also interacting with our listeners via a well-working chat (not those pesky shoutboxes most of radio stations seem to use). This differs from Twitch and other platforms being only focused on music and having lots of features for the DJs to engage and grow their fanbase.

I'm obviously biased but live streaming DJ sets and radio shows to a live international audience is very exciting and getting to listen proper oldskool DJs play awesome sets live feels always special. Internet FTW! :)

[1]: Slipmat.io - https://slipmat.io/

I miss disk jockeys. The ones who were knowledgeable about music, played B sides, and had some personality were gems. I found a station (KSLG) in northern California that still does this.

I like Spotify and there's a place for it. But I wouldn't call it fun. Listening to a good DJ was fun and sometimes informative.

That doesn't sound as bad as Pandora for me - I used to like it until Pandora kept playing Björk songs over and over and over, no matter how much I downvoted them!

Almost, it was about radio knobs and touch control, not tv remotes:

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329

>A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

I like to watch Youtube videos about cars I can't afford, and Heart of Gold was exactly what I thought of when I saw that a recent BMW 7-series actually has gesture control.

Every light bulb has to be accessible enough to be changed. Most in-home bulbs are accessible by hand. The remainder are accessible by stepladder or by an extendable pole tool that is easily affordable by everyone who has ceilings that high.

The obvious placement for a reset button is somewhere that it cannot be accessed while the bulb is powered, such as near the screw-in Edison base, accessible only from the direction of the base. If the bulb is still screwed-in, you just can't align your paper clip with the pinhole, because the socket hardware is in the way. So the user has to remove the bulb, maybe also letting it cool off, before performing a pinhole reset.

And adding a reset button does not preclude a switch-controlled reset procedure, either. Press the reset button OR switch off for at least 15 seconds, on for two beats, off for one beat, on for three beats, off for one beat, on for five beats, off for one beat, then on again to receive the reset feedback flashes. Allow some percentage variance in the timing, so the slower the tempo, the easier it is to trigger the reset. "Off-one-two-off-one-two-three-off-one-two-three-four-five-off-reset." No one is going to do a sequence of primes by accident. And if you adjust timing on the fly, a machine-controlled bulb-resetter could reset a bulb in less than a second using a clock pulse generator, while a human could still do it in less than ten seconds by switching to a steady musical beat or by watching a timepiece.

Really, the only reason we want a button is because their timed power-cycle reset process is so ridiculous. Your reasons for not putting one in are valid, mainly under the assumption that a reset button would be mutually exclusive with a reset process. There's no reason why a bulb can't have both.

None of these make a physical and digital reset together impossible.

> My first thought is that many light bulbs are not easily accessible. They could be high up, or in a casing that requires a tool to open. So being able to reset them remotely is a practical benefit.

Light bulbs that get installed ARE accessible -- accessible enough to be installed and changed, at the very least, and that's all that's needed.

Remove the bulb, put it in a lamp, turn the lamp on, and push the button that should have been installed for a firmware update.

The "power on, wait, power off, wait," repeated 12 times or whatever should be a LAST RESORT only, imo.

It could also be that it just adds a few cents to the design.

This is likely the real reason there is no button.

Just hope you never have to do this process on a house full of these things. LOLOLOL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com