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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I live in Las Vegas. Deaths occur in homes here every summer due to AC system failures (usually among the elderly and children that cannot easily leave and go to a cooler place). Many more do not die because they realize it is getting too hot and do whatever they have to do to get to a cooler place. A device like this that changes your perception of whether it is hot or cold would likely do more harm than good here and in other extreme climates. I can see huge product liability lawsuits in their future.

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I don't mean any disrepect, but this comments seems a lot like the comments on the recent "Show HN: Dropbox" page from 2007, you are trying to think of a way this would fail, rather than potential uses.

Solving the issue of access to air conditioning or heating for the poor is a completely seperate issue than providing a solution to help lower our use of A/C or heating.

Not every idea is a good idea. Not all criticism is offhand dismissal. In fact, critical evaluation is necessary to separate good ideas from bad ones.

HN may have gone a bit crazy on Dropbox when it came out, but the proper response is to think carefully on your critiques, not view all critique as "being negative" and dismiss it.

Also, seriously, how is "this device could injure someone when they aren't aware of dangerous body temperatures" not a point that should be addressed?

MIT Wristband Could Make AC Obsolete

It may be an issue with the Wired author, but the headline warrants qualification. People dying would be one such qualification. It really has little to do with the startup itself (if any). So the Dropbox allusion is just off base. People that have experience in extreme environments have reason to be wary of anything such as this. To use another analogy, its akin to taking pain medication to run with an injury. It would be irresponsible to say that such medication "would make doctors obsolete". In other words, by treating a syptom (pain) and not the problem (injury), you may actually be increasing risk (further, more severe injury). The concept of a personal cooling system itself is not science fiction or without merit. Its actually rooted in golden era of the space program. But there are resons the Apollo solutions did not look like this.

So tempted to go meta on how your comment seems like a lot of comments ever since the recent re-discussion of the "Show HN: Dropbox"... where were the nay-nay-sayers before 2 weeks ago?

Feedback such as the OP is beneficial to product development as a reminder to cover every aspect of potential improvement and protection from liability.

Feel free to go meta, don't hold back. Real feedback related to improvement and liability protection would stem from improving on the leads into the device to prevent electrocution or something similar.

OP's comment could be said of fans not doing enough to prevent deaths during extreme heat waves as well since the fan helps you feel cooler, but it may not be enough to overcome ambient temperature.

A fan doesn't help you _feel_ cooler, it actually helps cool your body by increasing air circulation and thus improving the rate of heat exchange. This device, OTOH, is explicitly intended to trick your body, potentially compromising its internal defenses against overheating.

OP's comment wasn't about being negative or knocking someone else's hard work; [s]he's simply pointing out what appears to be a very real safety concern in the system that needs to be addressed. Your suggestion that preventing electrocution on a device presumably powered by batteries is more safety-critical than this seemingly very real health risk that affects large parts of the world is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

Fans can actually make you cooler by increasing evaporation of your sweat.

Engineers trade in failure modes. That's 99% of engineering; so to tell a site full of engineers that they shouldn't look at how an idea could fail ( especially catastrophic failure modes that could cost people's lives ) is going to get you mocked mercilessly and rightly so.

And notably; Dropbox has had some serious security issues; and it should not ( even today ) be used to handle information that is sensitive, confidential, safety-critical; or part of operating a nuclear facility. And that is true, despite the fact that it's tremendously useful and popular.

One could argue that the criticism Dropbox received from HN contributed to their success.

I could also see this being a liability. They will probably need to take steps to mitigate the issue by adding more technology to the wrist band that help monitor health in general (health relating to heat exhaustion). This will raise the price of the product, but possibly enable them to do something like send the user (or 911) alerts when your body temperature rises to dangerous levels.

In addition to that if they put a disclaimer on the box they can get away with a lot more. Something similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_packaging_warning_messa....

This is an obstacle, and how they could go about it in a way that may add to the quality of life, or one where they assume no responsibility for your health if you use this in extreme climates.

Also, I'd be interested to see if by "tricking" the body the wearer sweats less and then wouldn't get dehydrated as fast, possibly extending and improving quality of life in extreme climates... I'm far from a doctor, but you are right it needs to be looked into and addressed.

sweat cools you down when it evaporates. I could only see that making it more dangerous to wear

I think it would be easy for the device to detect the ambient temperature, and/or your body temperature, and warn you if you are getting too hot.

What if you've fallen asleep?

Valid point. I'm not a doctor, but I'm guessing the immediate symptoms of hyperthermia - i.e. profuse sweating, blushing - could be masked by such a device when it is tricking your brain that the skin surface temperature is lower in relation to the the actual. Core and skin surface temperatures have intricate relationships in regards to heat dispersion through blood circulation.

i clicked on the link expecting that they actually cool the blood flow like this (only using more compact wrist device instead of whole glove as we aren't talking extra quick cooling of sweating athletes)

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-rese...

"The newest version of the device is a rigid plastic mitt, attached by a hose to what looks like a portable cooler. When Grahn sticks his hand in the airtight glove, the device creates a slight vacuum. The veins in the palm expand, drawing blood into the AVAs, where it is rapidly cooled by water circulating through the glove's plastic lining."

I was also expecting it to be about the Stanford cooling glove.

Most of the criticism above is because it's _not_ about the Stanford cooling glove or any technology that actually controls core body temperature. All this does is change one's perception of hot or cold. Even if it did a perfect job of that, which it won't, it won't keep you from dying of hypo- or hyperthermia. It won't replace air conditioning because it won't do anything about the humidity in the air, which is a major discomfort factor in the summer in most non-desert climates. It's an interesting bit of psychology but it could do without overblown claims, and I personally view energy-saving as falling in that category.

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