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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Indeed! And here's you've given a perfectly good theoretical answer for why cars do the verifiably incorrect thing. The problem here is your handwavy use of "as they can" to invoke some kind of hidden expertise that doesn't actually exist in the real world. The car has some vague idea of what the current fan outlet temperature is, based mostly likely on one or two thermocouples in the chain, or maybe just on the engine coolant temperature. And some egghead firmware engineer somewhere built a very solid, justifiable model of "rider comfort" and optimized the control response to that, thus giving the theoretically optimal experience for...

Nah, forget it. Theory is always wrong. I spend an hour in my car every day. Don't you[1] dare tell me how best to warm it up. Just don't.

[1] To head off the wounded screaming: no, I'm not talking about you personally here. Just the idea of "firmware knows best".

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Edit: grammar

Some cars are really good at this. Some are not. It depends on so many factors, including the egghead quality.

I'm one of those firmware eggheads, btw.

As another example, when I fuel my car from emtpy to full, as soon as I turn the key, the fuel gauge ramps rapidly up to Full. In my wife's car, it finds its way to Full after a minute or so. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure the difference is the filtering algorithm employed. One egghead knew about Kalman filters or similar, and the other didn't.

It's the same with all the other software features in the car. Some had good eggheads on the time, and some didn't. I think it's impossible to buy a car that does every single thing "right", by any single person's definition.

> the fuel gauge ramps rapidly up to Full

That's funny! Does it also fluctuate when you take sharp turns?

No, but that's just the point. It's smart enough to know that at key-on, it has very little information about the actual fuel level, so it allows the needle to move rapidly. As it continues to operate, it gradually (probably over a few seconds) filters the fuel level measurement more, so you don't get rapid fluctuations while driving.

Your anti-intellectualism is quite obnoxious. It doesn't help your case that you are actually wrong on top.

The poster above you has it correct. Climate control cars will not turn up the fans until the engine block heats up. Turning up the temperature does nothing to change this.

Please stop with the attitude and name calling.

I love that you're telling me how my car (cars, actually, this has been true of all of them) works, and I'm the obnoxious one. :) Clearly I'm not wrong. You are arguing on the basis of what can be done by software given perfect inputs. I'm telling you what is true on real systems. And the fact that you can't distinguish the two is precisely the problem I'm getting at.

That's not "anti-intellectualism", it's called "correct requirements analysis". And it's something I wish more software people knew how to do.

I am certainly not telling you about your car. Your car is very much irrelevant. The topic is very recent luxury cars with climate control. Even if your car would qualify for such a category, it's behaviour does not generalize to all such cars.

A great deal of people beyond yourself drive fancy cars with climate control, myself included. Your car is a single data point. My car is another. That my car, and other posters cars, behave as we say is enough to show that your generalization is wrong.

It is still all anecdote of course; to really determine truth you would need to do a study of as many cars as possible. Further, there is no theory in such a generalization.

This is where your anti-intellectualism comes in. You repeatedly make false statements about theoretical works: "theory is always wrong". It is almost as though you do not understand the definition of "theory." Additionally, your use of "egghead" when referring to engineers is classic anti-intellectualism. I mean, why not just throw out nerd, geek, or pointdexter too? Using anecdote to support your generalization is another extremely common undesirable behavior.

Please stop.

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