Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Joke's on them, I was only acting dumb!

Seriously, you putting a bullet point with no explanation, and got an equally terse rebuttal. You didn't "win" that.

Let me help you. I offered "Lights" as a design requirement unique to vehicles with respect to phones. Without any explanation it leaves the door open to a surface level counter point "Phones also have lights" that requires a functioning brain and the most basic level of reasoning. Lights on modern vehicles (high beams, low beams, DRLs, blinkers, brake lights) are certainly not simple components, especially those on vehicles sold in the EU where the regulatory body has taken up new technology much faster than in the US. This wasn't a dumb point, cell phone lighting requirements are child's play compared with the requirements of a vehicle lighting. It is 100% valid, but was also placed as bait as explained above. Make sense?

Lights are highly regulated but they're very straightforward regulations to follow. If you're not even going to bother to write out a sentence then it's not worth responding to it seriously, because it's hardly a reasonable objection in the first place; any random engineer could handle it solo.

I keep coming back to this in my head, thinking about how superficial this counterpoint is. Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements. In reality, table stakes are LED DRLs, high beams and lowbeams. Matrix LEDs or laser lights that can mask out other vehicles using onboard IR sensors are becoming more common. Additionally there are styling requirements, such as computationally driven welcome and farewell patterns for lock/unlock, and trends to follow like light bars, super thin OLED strips etc.

A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.

> Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements.

Yes they are. You don't get to point to random fancy things and call them "requirements".

> A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.

You're taking "phones have lights" too seriously. It was a deliberately vague and useless rebuttal to a deliberately vague and useless point. The real answer is what I already said. Replicating the functionality of a bulb/socket/housing is not hard to such an extent that the only reason to bring up lights is for jokes. So the joke got a joke back.

Audi, BMW, GM, Ford dedicate entire teams to lighting, so no, a random engineer could not handle it solo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com