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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Conveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area? This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.

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This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.

Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

This is version 0.1 - it will get much better. Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.

Lofty ideas, supported only by hope. People can dream up solutions as much as they want, doesn't mean it's going to work.

99% of startups fail, this one will be no exception to the stats.

Sure, they might succeed, but there's no guarantee they'll make it past this super basic PoC.

Lofty ideas, supported only by hope.

They're a startup. That's what startups do. If you think they're wasting their time you're really on the wrong website right now.

Most startups fail. Declaring any one a waste of effort is statistically justified. Alternative reason to read HN: a sadistic desire to watch people fail, and say that I told you so.

This is maybe unnecessarily harsh (but you do you).

I too am mostly here in a more spectating mode when it comes to all the VC startup brained ideas, but its not primarily people that fail, its an entire system of thought, and the money that gets poured into it; its staunch belief in technological determinism combined with highly sophisticated investment schemes and plenty of capital.

I am not going to the race to see the cars maybe crash, its enough to see the cars go round and round in circles.

I am not motivated by the schadenfreude, myself. I was just speaking to motivations that one may have for hanging around a site with a significant startup readership.

Most startups fail. Declaring any one a waste of effort is statistically justified.

IMO very few startups fail entirely. Plenty don't get to the point where they make a profit, and fewer still make a return for their investors, but there are lots of other things startups do that can be considered successes.

For most startups failing is an event that comes at the end of a long journey filled with successes. It would be wrong to only consider the last step.

I'm responding to:

> Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.

Literally nothing about the linked site suggests that this is the case. The commenter I'm responding to is functioning on unbridled (and in my opinion, irrational) optimism for a company that has one demo video putting out a camp fire.

It takes more than hope to run a company. You have to have a viable idea and execution plan, too.

Ideas that will make their startup better that are realistic, highly likely they are considering:

- 50 drones not one - make sure they don’t run into each other - drones of different sizes and speeds - watch out for power lines - watch out for birds - don’t run into planes - don’t ruin the scenery for hikers by always being aloft - make sure they are charged - use as first line of defense before the humans come - make sure they can’t be hacked

Anything?! This implies they have thought of everything which is a dangerous assumption. I think it's important to ask questions, even (especially?) ones that seem obvious.

Expecting something to work 100% of the time is far too high of a bar to set for fire prevention. If it helps it saves lives.

That's not necessarily true. It may help and save no lives. It may not help.

It may cause fires...

It will be in great publicity videos, with FEMA kicking in funds for purchase grants. Local firefighters will have fun playing with new toys funded by further deficit spending.

Or the drone's battery/electronics light on fire.... There is no good reason why the drones themselves can't be the source of the fire.

Exactly my worry. To get to reasonable flight times you need very energy dense batteries which are a potential source of ignition, and good luck putting that out.

I don't think this would even be able to put out a single tree catching fire. Generally the fire is too vertical and the extinguisher would land on the ground and not be activated by the heat, so it won't go off until flaming branches fall down, at which point the fire is too large.

You’re referring to a canopy or crown fire. It depends on conditions, of course, but it usually takes time for enough heat to build up that a fire crowns. There’s generally a period where it will burn through the lower and mid stories and it spreads.

In the area they show in their video it doesn't look like it'd take much for the trees at the edge of the clearing to go up in flames, and pretty fast too.

> This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.

Can you identify a technology that didn't have that quality initially? Even a simple thing like a pencil - what a waste of money cutting a precision tube inside a stick and somehow installing a carbon rod, which wears out so fast you can't even finish a book without having to build a whole new one. Oh, and it randomly breaks while you're using it and requires special metal sharpening tools.

If it was obviously cheap and reliable from a quick glance, it would have already been invented at a time before it was so obvious!

My intuition says that in those cases, even partially extinguishing the fire would buy a bit of time, and in the meantime you’ve now got live aerial footage of the fire’s location and progress to better inform the people who are responding to it.

… in other words, putting out the fire with the UAS is a “best case”, and may happen more often than you’d think, but really it’s mostly marketing. That doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t provide real value.

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