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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people are misreading this. Right now one of the rules to pass a crash test is that there is a steering wheel. This didn't used to be controversial, but now it is. The rules were written in the 70s and just assumed there would always be a drivers seat.

The only thing here is that the government rewrote the rules to no longer assume those things. It's not saying those things aren't necessary, just not required. If the car can meet all the safety standards without it, then that's fine.

It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.

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> It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.

As aside, that’d be great.

As soon as I typed that I knew someone would reply with this. :). I agree it would be nice and I sometimes miss physical switches, but imagine how clunky a Raspberry Pi would be with a physical switch.

And besides, I almost never used the switch on the computer anyway. I was always told to put it into a power strip and use that, because it was a lot cheaper to replace the power strip than the broken power switch on the PC!

I recently disconnected the capacitive power button on my desktop thanks to my stupid cat repeatedly turning off my computer.

Instead, I've turned on the feature in the BIOS to boot up when power is applied. Now, to turn on my desktop, I just flip the power switch on the back. Feels satisfyingly retro.

As an aside, that sounds like a smart cat, not a stupid one. Perhaps your cat enjoys seeing you react to its shenanigans? :)

That would be my guess. Must be fun watching cameronh90 getting punished for not emitting enough attention particles

Single use instant off capacitive power buttons is the stupidest design for a power switch I've ever seen. It's on the Xbox One (I think?) as well. A cat walking past or someone messing around with unrelated AV equipment accidentally brushing up against it are NOT valid use modes for a device that is running live with a lot of state that evaporates when you turn it off and takes more than 1s to restart. Dumb.

If you're on Windows: one habit I've developed is to always keep an unsaved notepad.exe open. When my cat hits the power button (not if), Windows will always stall and ask if I want to save the notepad first; at that point, you can press cancel to cancel the whole shutdown process. :)

Think about having a switch on a laptop. And if the switch doesn't just kill power (which it shouldn't to safely shut down), then it shouldn't be a switch it might be better as a button.

"Turns off when I tell it to and does not disobey me" is part of "safe".

I've never seen a machine disobey the long-press, though it's probably happened before to someone.

Anyway, I'd rather avoid accidents.

We have some Lenovo ThinkPad X1 laptops that disobey the long-press. They get stuck in a state where they are turned on but appear off and nothing works. The only way to get them out of that state is the reset hole. Supposedly it's a motherboard fault, but they've replaced the motherboards repeatedly and it still happens.

My HP ZBook once crashed also somehow and I had to remove the battery. I was not the only guy in the office with this problem.

You want a switch that also kills power without software or firmware.

I had a Dell that once got stuck and the usual long press of the power button was not switching it off (probably it was sw/fw controlled). I had to take it apart and disconnect the battery, otherwise I would have lost my working day waiting for it to die.

Just like a sibling comment says I also haven't ever seen a case where a long press didn't turn a laptop off but i agree maybe a pin push button for hard restart might make sense in such cases.

I would prefer it to Windows saying, "Hey, I see you want to turn off this, ahem mobile, computer of yours. I'd like to comply, but you see, I have all these updates I'm 'bout to install for you so... yeah... Oh and don't even think of putting it in your bag because it's a Dell and they void your warranty if'n you do that. Mmmkay?

P.S. Yer 'bout to miss your flight."

But doesn't the long press actually do that? Kills the power, if you really intend to do that. The warranty thing is an entire Pandora box of discussion in itself

That's clearly a manufacturer defect (on Dell or MS's part).

Since my cat learned to press the red button to get my attention, it would be fabulous.

Always-ON computer?

It’s not 100% clear in the article, but it reads like this change is scoped to crash safety. The scope of those regs is the physical protection of the passengers in a crash, not all aspects of safety related to self-driving cars. So, not a big deal.

Actually, removing the steering wheel is probably a crash safety gain. Manufacturers had to invent a way to retract the steering wheel in crashes since it caused so many torso injuries. Steering wheel injuries were also the spur to invent and deploy the first airbags.

Another analogy is that in some countries, all cars had to pass an emissions test to be road safe. I knew someone who imported a Tesla into their country back in 2015 or so and the licensing office would not give them a license plate because they could not get a smoke test done on it.

I assume such countries changed the laws to remove that requirement once EVs were no longer a novelty.

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