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Comment by DangitBobby | Hacker News Reader

And this is why we can't have nice things. This opinion is wild to me. You do not trust a consumer app with life and death decisions, especially over something where the potential upside is getting to eat a mushroom you found and the potential downside is death. Making more criminals is not the answer.

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And yet clearly the existence of these apps has made the problem worse. People don't read disclaimers. And people do idiotic things. Now, for a mushroom identification app clearly the only functionality that actually matters is telling edible mushrooms from toxic ones.

How is it okay to make fundamentally broken software and then release/sell it as if it's functional? It shouldn't be, just like it isn't for architects, engineers(real ones) to design and build buildings that fall down and cars that explode.

We don't know if it made "the problem" worse. It certainly made it worse for the guy getting poisoned. But it's possible that for each person getting poisoned, there's a couple not getting poisoned because the app correctly ID'd a mushroom.

Or a hundred people who have their intellectual curiosity satisfied. I recently used Google Lens to ID (with like 75% confidence) a mushroom I had zero intention of eating either way.

Mushroom identifying books have all of the same issues. I guess one could make an argument that it's unconscionable to publish those, too.

The article calls it a "plant identification app", I guess it's not specifically for mushrooms.

A very important fact you need when identifying mushrooms is the consequences of misidentifying them. You don’t have “nice things” when you fail to raise this crucially important point.

Every responsible resource will be full of this kind of caution and neglecting it should be criminal. It isn’t covering your ass or putting an obligatory warning label on everything, a primary point of interest in mushroom identification is toxicity. If you don’t do it you kill people, not like maybe but certainly.

Eh, no, you're inventing a narrative. The guy knew the downside actually or he wouldn't have bothered to use the app to identify it. He knew the downsides, he rolled the dice, he lost. His wife knew the downsides, didn't roll the dice, and he thankfully lived maybe because of that.

You also don't know that the app doesn't warn users that it shouldn't be used in life and death situations, but I'll maintain that it shouldn't have to. To avoid "criminal negligence" accusations.

If I have a rock identification app does it need to say not to eat rocks to avoid liability for dental damages? If I sell bicycles do I have to tell you that rolling downhill fast can cause death or injury?

I think you’re misunderstanding the point here. Mushroom identification isn’t the same as bike selling or rock identification because the purpose of those isn’t to avoid danger. Almost the entire purpose is to reduce the “rolling the dice” factor in mushroom eating. In fact, that is precisely why traditional mushroom identification has such a wealth of deep knowledge, such as noticing ecological location, weather patterns, neighboring plants, etc. to reduce this as much as possible.

It is more comparable if you built an app to identify cancerous moles, except it produced false negatives significantly more often than an actual doctor, leading to people dying. This isn’t a “roll the dice” thing.

I don't think the intended purpose of the app is to tell you whether a mushroom or plant is edible or not, I think it's merely meant to identify plants, fungi, and other things for a hobbyist who's into botany and the like. I could definitely see where you're coming from if the app advertised itself as a "a great wilderness survival companion app" or something like that... But we're pretty much speculating, here. This is specific as the story gets

> he used the plant identification app

Which I think is a different category of app altogether from a fungus/plant edibility app.

It doesn’t matter what the app intends to do. You should not under any circumstances identify mushrooms without loudly and clearly spelling out specific dangers.

It would probably be wise to do so, especially after you've learned that it could save lives. But to decide after the fact that it's criminal negligence is not a healthy outcome. I'm all for trying to make sure people don't hurt themselves, but the app makers should not be legally responsible for the decision that was made here, period.

> You do not trust a consumer app with life and death decisions, ...

What about an app that tells you how to pump gas while smoking a cigarette? That seems like pretty obvious negligent design. In California at least that opens you up to a lawsuit. [0]

[0] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/personal-injury/product-liabili...

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