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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons this toilet is so expensive no doubt, is that the new SF public toilets are self cleaning and will have attendants on duty to try to prevent this. The one on golden gate park and Haight closes after each visitor to spray the inside down like a dishwasher, and has an attendant on duty to make sure no one is inside while it does that (and to generally discourage people from shady stuff). It's not perfect but they have been clean every time I used it.

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They have to pay an attendant hourly just to be sure no one is in there while the self clean runs? Why can't it operate based on a weight sensor?

Because no startup has made an AI for that purpose yet?

All you need is a PIR sensor

It's cheaper to pay someone $20 an hour 24 hours a day for 20 years than it is to pay out the $4mil lawsuit for when that sensor fails.

I'm not an American, but can/would people sue for getting washed in a self-cleaning toilet? Surely some signs and disclosures would be sufficient?

They’d be injecting hard drugs, especially fentanyl, constantly in this toilet, so signs and disclosures won’t mean much. SF is a rather “special” place, you can’t easily compare to other international cities.

Spoken like someone who has not spent more than a week in SF, probably entirely in hotels or restaurants.

I’ve lived in SF for more than a decade and if I opened the door to a public toilet I’d be surprised if someone wasn’t shooting up inside.

You don't spend much time outside of your house, then.

Are people really shooting up on the streets in Noe Valley? I kept hearing it’s the one nice part of the city.

People in America will sue because the "crunchberries" in breakfast cereals aren't real berries.

That doesn't mean they'll win, but even a bogus lawsuit is expensive and time-consuming.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_tosses_suit_cl...

They'd sue for you suggesting they shouldn't!

Easily defeated with a masking tape.

Because somebody will step on the sink or somehow else avoid the sensor and then sue for a round sum.

I think I'd take my chances with the sidewalk than risk a startups new self cleaning censor. Literally a shit storm

It's not some startups self cleaning sensor, this is old technology that is in several other cities without attendants, and is basically idiot proof. The attendant hopefully makes it american-idiot proof too.

I think the problem isn't making it idiot proof, but making it malicious user who really wants to do heroin in there proof

All the toilets in Paris self-clean between users. You don't need the sensor to work not to get sprayed, just to exit the toilet when a voice says "EXIT THE TOILET NOW, THE SELF CLEANING PROCESS IS ABOUT TO BEGIN.

I used one of these and the self clean cycle started without warning while I was washing my hands. I couldn’t have been in there more than 4-5 minutes. Luckily the door didn’t lock so I was able to escape before getting “cleaned”.

Heck, I cover up the self-flushing mechanism on toilets every time then remove it after. Not a pleasant surprise when it miscalculates.

Even self flushing toilets are often broken. A certain building I worked at I had to jump off quickly and out of the way so it didn't spray up with a trigger happy mega flush.

Kinda hard to do when you’re nodding out on the floor.

When unmonitored public toilets have had issues with people camping out while partaking illicit substances and other X-rated activities.

Valid point, public bathrooms in France do this without an attendant

These were the type of public toilets in France, it was actually very interesting to see and a bit confusing as I couldn't figure out why I couldn't go in right after another person...

Wonder if it cost Paris 1.7 mil as well?

Rented for about €1200 per month per toilet. 6MM/year for 420 of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette#In_Paris

6 million million?

6 million. Slipped my mind that MM is industry specific.

M is ambiguous between the Roman (M = 1,000), the SI prefix (M = 1,000,000), and metres (screen readers).

$1MM (capitalized) or $1mn (more recent) reduces the ambiguity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MM#Units_of_measurement

M is not ambiguous at all it stands for mega which is 1e6 (which happens to be a million).

Meters is lowercase m. And nobody uses Roman numerals as a suffix. MM is just unnecessary.

Well you're gonna be really disappointed to find out lots of people do use "mm" particularly in finance, and that Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed.

Just because you don't use them, or aren't aware they are used, does not make it unnecessary.

By unnecessary I meant the second M in MM is redundant (since M = Mega = 1e6 is enough). And yes I am disappointed, probably just as much as people's use of imperial units :)

Edit:...

>Roman numerals have been used far longer than the SI system has existed

Indeed it has. But has its use as a suffix existed for just as long? BTW I am also disappointed that the people still use Roman numerals :) (also completely unnecessary, the Indo-Arabic number system is "better").

> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions.

> The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M. [0]

k and MM are unambiguous. You don't want to stop & think, and you definitely don't want to be off by a factor of 1000. So it makes sense to avoid typing 'M' if you have any risk of being misinterpreted.

It's mostly about the reduction of risk, it's VERY rare to see M used in this way.

[0] https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...

> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M

This is unfortunate. $60,000 is $60K (capital K not k) using SI suffixes. Please reject M=1000 today.

> Please reject M=1000 today.

This is infeasible, and what does it mean to reject something in a written document?

I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish here: you're arguing against an established convention in a sector of the market which you don't have experience with.

The upside if you're successful is that I don't need to type an additional 'M'.

The downside is that it requires enforcing a blanket standard on an industry, rather than letting it converge over time to an unambiguous standard.

Help the convergence along by objecting to the use of M=1000 wherever you see it. We already have an unambiguous standard (it is the SI system of units and suffixes if you are unsure). People should be using it.

As a European, I have never seen suffix M = 1000. It’s always a million. Is this one of those things America does different?

It's inconsistent worldwide

https://old.reddit.com/r/FinancialCareers/comments/usdr2d/le...

If M is roman, wouldnt MM equal 2000? As in this year, MMXXII.

Thanks for the explanation though. Next we'll get into how a european billion is 1000 times more than a US billion.

Absolutely, but you're reducing the risk of communicating with people who may be using the roman suffix without writing in Roman numerals. In that situation, you'd see 2M rather than MM.

The British billion went out in 1974/5 (Wilson/Healy). One billion is 1,000,000,000 and you shouldn't expect ambiguity there.

In practical terms, it doesn't matter. It'd be extremely unusual to be at the scale of the old billion (1,000,000,000,000)

----

This is similar to a justification of using `i` as the variable for an iterator, or `x` and `xs` for head & tail. There are logical reasons, but it's mostly convention.

MM = "mille mille" = "thousand thousand". You will be seeing this in many places.

I'd rather not. The second M is redundant. M stands for mega (SI suffix) which is equal to 1e6.

M stands for 1000 in money. Finance isn't a natural science.

Don’t the ones in Paris cost money?

they should be free. You can find paying toilets in some train stations, but in those, there are people taking care of them

They’re free i used one today. Some of the bathrooms in the malls are paid though. But not the outdoor self cleaning ones.

why not have a full time janitor who cleans after each visit? much cheaper than a self cleaning toilet. even if you pay $100k to the janitor in annual salary, it will take 10+yrs to reach 1.7M and who knows what kind of issues these self cleaning toilets will have in that 10yrs.

I was thinking the same thing. We now hire people to watch extremely expensive machines do incredibly menial tasks.

Yes, I clean my own toilets at home.

Because a human who can afford to live in San Francisco almost certainly costs more than this machine over 10 years (the 1.7 million is for the whole project, not just the self cleaning portion), and drugged out crazies can make a mess that would be a very hard and unpleasant job to give a human.

A large number of City employees live outside the City. According to this article, only 40% of the City employees live in SF. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/remote-work-17510522....

So why is residence a requirement for the janitor??

Sure, substitute live in San Francisco with live in commuting distance of San Francisco. It's not like Daly city or Oakland are cheap either.

Even when we focus on the fiscal aspect of it, I don't think a machine is a bad idea compared to a plan of "find some willing to clean up after addicts and the mentally ill at all hours" - how much would you need to be paid to take that job and show up to outcompete the toilet-dishwasher-machine every day? California has tons of other jobs and generous social programs.

And that's ignoring the angle that we're allocating a human life to this extremely unpleasant and automatable task.

They're already hiring an attendant to ensure it doesn't run when someone is in it.

How does it work? I mean in France I saw many self-cleaning toilets (you can find some in Paris) and they don't need an attendant to function; they just wait for people to leave before the cleaning start and if you get sprayed it's just on you.

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