Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Fail-safe's, especially fail-safe hardware, should operate in a safe fashion whether the user does what you want to or not.

You shouldn't get to excuse safety incidents with "well we wrote it in the manual, it's not our fault, it's on the user". If your users are not actually following the safety precautions you expect, then you clearly did not engineer your product for the real world (which, frankly, is part of the definition of engineering).

With any mass-produced product, you have to assume that your users will not all follow the exact directions. This is the difference between your theoretical user, and your real-world usage.

As far as I know, it's not impossible to design a treadmill that would stop even if the "safety key" is still in. Maybe if it's facing significant resistance, but there is no downward weight on the device? Doesn't really seem like a valid situation for a treadmill, so it should stop. If you want to say "well it doesn't have sensors to detect that!", then maybe it should.

That is just the first thought off the top of my head; I am not a treadmill designer. I would expect people who are full-time treadmill designers to be able to come up with some better solutions.

> I also challenge you to find me a treadmill that wouldn't react in the exact same fashion

Your point may be valid here, but claiming "all treadmills are unsafe, so making unsafe treadmills is perfectly okay and we shouldn't expect any better from a $25B company" is a shitty attitude.

So what's your fix? All razorblades are unsafe, we still make razorblades. $25B companies haven't figured out a way to make a razorblade safe for a child to use.

So instead, we just don't let small children handle them, because that would be dangerous. Just like we make safety mechanisms for treadmills so children can't hurt themselves, but when adults refuse to use those safety mechanisms children can get hurt. And the list goes on:

Bathtubs. Wall outlets. Plastic bags. Guns. Large animals. Small magnets. Cleaning chemicals.

I assume you've got a fix for making all of those safe for children in a way that doesn't require an adult?

All razorblades are unsafe, we still make razorblades.

You've seriously never heard of the term 'safety razor'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_razor

Now, they're still not things that you would give to a child, but the point is, we don't just throw our hands up and say 'razors will never be safe, why bother?' but instead, we try to make them safer. Doing nothing because we can never achieve perfect safety is reckless and uncaring.

Safety razor still cut... my face knows that for a fact.

They nick surface skin. They don't sever arteries like a straight razor could. They don't accidentally slice your jugular.

A safety treadmill would--instead of sucking a child underneath and pinning them--give them a friction burn or pinch their arm.

It's a guard. Add a guard around the roller and you eliminate this scenario.

we made safety razors because they're safer for the user's face, not because they're safer for children to play with. Both safety razors (or the replacement blades) and straight razors must be kept from children.

This is, with all due respect, an absolutely stupid comparison.

You are taking something that is fundamentally not-safe as a function of what it is, and the job it needs to perform. With out current level of technology, there is no practical way to make a single razor blade "safe" by your definition. There are fundamental, global safety issues (sharp things are sharp, corrosive chemicals are corrosive) that are impossible to avoid, because the safety-issue is tied directly to the fundamental function.

There is absolutely no fundamental function of a treadmill that requires the ability to kill a small child.

Are you claiming that it is fundamentally impossible to make a treadmill that is safer?

For what it's worth, there are attempts to make even-dangerous-things less dangerous, by limiting the danger. Instead of full-sized razors, you get little razors already embedded in a plastic casing. You engineer cleaning products that are household-acceptable and less-poisonous.

Just because there is some object out that there is not safe, does not mean that other things shouldn't be made safer when possible. Safety-precautions and safe engineering is not an all-or-nothing thing that has to be 100% across the whole world.

> So what's your fix?

You attempting to make solving all of the worlds safety problems my problem is bullshit. I explicitly stated that treadmill engineering is NOT my job.

---

PS. Don't even try to compare gun safety to treadmill safety. As far as I know there isn't a National Treadmill Association trying to make Treadmills as accessible as possible and actively pushing back against any safety initiatives.

This is the most bullshit, side-lining, "attempt to distract from the actual issue" argument that I've ever seen on this site. And that's saying something.

>You are taking something that is fundamentally not-safe as a function of what it is

A plastic bag is fundamentally not-safe?

>You attempting to make solving all of the worlds safety problems my problem is bullshit. I explicitly stated that treadmill engineering is NOT my job.

And yet you have no issue claiming despite the fact NO treadmill manufacturer has been able to come up with a fix, that they should be able to. So "this is an easy problem but I have no idea what the solution is".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com