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Comment by wuj | Hacker News Reader

I think this sentiment only applies to certain products. A software like Slack can get away with being good enough. Self-driving softwares like Tesla's FSD? Not so much. There are certain engineering solutions that aren't viable without being perfect. People expect them to be perfect.

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Here's a physical engineering secret: all things are built to be "good enough", all things are a trade-off, all things have requirements they must fulfill. The products and cars you buy all are built with tolerances. Your hot dogs can only contain so many rat feces; they aren't perfect.

If that's the case, then Tesla has a certain number of children their FSD solution can run over every year, below which its cheaper to settle with the parents out of court instead of improving their FSD solution.

This is a classic ethical dilemma. Self-driving cars will kill some amount of people via malfunctions, accidents, etc. Some amount will be children. Should we ban the development of the technology? What if it only killed 1 child? What about 10? What about 100? How many dead children is the benefit of self-driving cars worth?

From a builder's perspective, yeah, everything is built with a tolerance. It's just that many users are not aware of those requirements, or lack thereof. Would you feel comfortable eating a hot dog knowing it contains any rat feces?

I already do, every time I eat a hotdog.

The apocryphal "a delayed game is eventually good" quote seems relevant here. SaaS users tend to be more forgiving of iterative improvements than gamers are, to pick just one example.

SaaS users are going for the utility, whereas gamers are going for the immersive experience. The fault tolerance are different for those two use cases.

Yeah but I do like that Nintendo for the most part lives that philosophy. Recent example I came across was Mario Odyssey. It is 7 years old, never had a patch because it was just considered done. Very cool to see.

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