Hacker News Reader

I think this practice is hand-in-glove with the general commercial model that a review site like this inherently pushes back against, though?

In any case, I've daydreamed about doing something along these lines, plus an aggressive list of policies that companies/products/brands are delisted for violating (i.e., delisting brands when teardowns find anything they went out of their way to engineer for predictable failure).

View on HN

Engineering things for predictable failure is often necessary when the alternative is a worse, dangerous failure further down the line. The classical example of this is the fuse - it's a device designed to fail first in order to prevent other, more destructive failures. I know that's not the kind of engineered failure point you're thinking of, but it's important to understand that things like this may actually have good reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com