Hacker News Reader

Comment by nancyminusone | Hacker News Reader

I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record.

View on HN

The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering.

land use and design issue more than anything.

ramps have been around for a long time, and are well known to take up a ton of space. especially if every propery gets its own ramp rather than all the properties on a block sharing the same ramp system and having a common porch

The two are not unrelated, and perhaps the inventiveness and energy of the latter could be applied to affecting the outcomes of the former.

It's very much related because the technology provides an excuse to ignore the infrastructure problems even when it isn't good enough.

I just don't know what it means to prefer to be involved with the design and installation of ramps. There's a lot of ramps around, and the knowledge of how to build them is widely distributed. Is there some phenomenon I'm not aware of, where lots of people want to have ramps if only they could find a way to design and install them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com