Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

skoda-storyboard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 618 posts

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#551

Post by npunt »

allenu wrote: post #448
Coeur wrote: post #357

This seems to be part of a type of brand marketing where a brand claims it has invented something, but the only thing that ever exists of significant economic value is the attention raised by the promo video / article. Not the thing/service. Examples: - Samsung safety truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNGfse9ZK8 - Citroën motion sickness glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco63dlq_WE - Amazon Prime Air http…

I love these types of videos because they create this fiction of how design happens, where people sit around a table with drawings and or come up with beautiful mock-ups (the motion sickness glasses is a good example). Often, a lot of design decisions are super obvious and don't require a lot of sweat and collaboration to come up with, but in videos they're made to appear very difficult as it presents better. And oth…

Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well.

However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if not, but this issue is my particular hill to die on, it's 100% the single biggest gap in understanding that I see between those that regularly engage in original creative work vs those who do not.

People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!" But that's all hindsight, like saying "I could have bought bitcoin in 2010!" It's not even wrong, it's answering an entirely different question of capability, not probability.

The question is would you have come up with that, were you tasked with the problem and put in the same context? I'd estimate for most great-but-simple inventions, it's not many people who could plausibly say that, because so much of what we bring to bear on problems comes from our own histories and unique perspectives & influences, not to mention talents and predilections.

This distinction between could vs would is core to understanding creative output, especially the ideas that are the simplest to use or understand. The delta between understanding vs coming up with there is often vast; simple things are often the hardest things of all to conceive.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#552

Post by superbowl »

michh wrote: post #234

Coincidentally, I bought a 12v car horn yesterday with the intent of wiring it into my ebike's power supply with a little button on my handlebars. Not because of other cyclists or pedestrians wearing (anc) headphones but because modern cars are so heavily sound-proofed they don't hear a bicycle bell anymore. A recent incident with an inattentive taxi driver in a brand new EV nearly flattening me prompted me to want t…

Aside: folks living near bike paths where this happens are going to suffer. I don't know what the solution is, but increasing volume to defeat increasing sound-proofing seems like a recipe for noise pollution.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#554

Post by rorychatt »

Coeur wrote: post #357

This seems to be part of a type of brand marketing where a brand claims it has invented something, but the only thing that ever exists of significant economic value is the attention raised by the promo video / article. Not the thing/service. Examples: - Samsung safety truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNGfse9ZK8 - Citroën motion sickness glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco63dlq_WE - Amazon Prime Air http…

Why is significant economic value the metric for success?

Skoda publishes the research and design openly (no patent, no product for sale), to solve a real problem (increase in bike-related accidents from noise cancelling headphones), to ensure that the safety outcome can be spread as quickly and easily as possible.

We should be celebrating companies that open source material findings related to safety, not lambasting them for not exploiting it for maximum value.

it feels disingenuous to lump this in with most of the other items you listed.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#555

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

btown wrote: post #498
MoonWalk wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why this would become an "arms race." There's no particular competitive value in filtering out this ONE sound.

I think there's a broader indication of an arms race between noise cancellation systems and things that want to be heard, like advertising. And this just-happening-to-exist bandpass that the DuoBell is depending on could easily become collateral damage in that fight.

I was going to make a joke about advertisers working in some kind of ultrasonic modulation to their audio so it breaks ANC (I'm aware this wouldn't really work) but then thought, whats more likely, advertisers doing that, or advertisers partnering with 80% of ANC chip makers to just let them by-pass with specific tone markers...

Then we'll be hacking our headphones with specific 3d printed clip-ons that involve a particular brand of coffee filters that happen to attenuate the "clear freq" enough for the headphones to miss it.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#556

Post by deathanatos »

shiroiuma wrote: post #548
gibspaulding wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bike already has two crappy 80psi pressure vessels, why not three?

If this is a modern bike, 80psi is way too high. 50psi is sufficient and will give you a more comfortable ride as well as higher efficiency on real-world surfaces. 80+psi is for old-style road bikes with narrow 23mm tires. Modern bikes (even road bikes for racing) don't use these any more; 28mm is the minimum these days.

… I have a modern bike (a Specialized). The tires' rated range is 75psi to 100psi. I usually pump it to around 80–85psi. The tires are 33mm.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#557

Post by deathanatos »

jandrese wrote: post #321
srejk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was commuting 60k/day on my bike in shitty suburban conditions, I used one of these instead - you get limited use per trip, but you can always fill it up with a CO2 cylinder/bike pump: https://www.hpvelotechnik.com/en/recumbent-trikes-bikes/acce... It is loud .

> When I was commuting 60k/day on my bike in shitty suburban conditions Here I thought my 4.5 mile (7.25 km) bike commute was a bit long...

I used to bike ~20 mi / day … back when there were offices. Just as fast as public transit.

Aside from idiots with cars, it's relaxing. Only some of my route was on the road, though.

Like the other poster says … The winters were rough though. I just didn't bike, though my coworker kept trying to get me to.

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#558

Post by ordersofmag »

shiroiuma wrote: post #548
gibspaulding wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bike already has two crappy 80psi pressure vessels, why not three?

If this is a modern bike, 80psi is way too high. 50psi is sufficient and will give you a more comfortable ride as well as higher efficiency on real-world surfaces. 80+psi is for old-style road bikes with narrow 23mm tires. Modern bikes (even road bikes for racing) don't use these any more; 28mm is the minimum these days.

Not to be pendantic (but to be pendantic) 80psi is the correct pressure for 28mm tires ridden briskly on good roads. At least according to ye olde Silca tire pressure calculator. Back in the day when folks ran 23mm tires they would typically run above 100psi (though that may not have been optimal...).

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#559

Post by left-struck »

0x3f wrote: post #116

Do horns and bells really prevent accidents? In order for e.g. a horn to work you need enough time that the driver processes the situation and decides the horn will communicate something AND enough time for the pedestrian or whatever to process that and react to it. Generally it's a lot easier just to press the brake, and more importantly be travelling at a speed and in a manner where the brake is sufficient. Structu…

In cars a horn has saved me a few times where someone was backing up or turning into me not realising I was there. In those situations my car was stationary so there was nothing else I could do as quickly as pressing the horn

Re: Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

#560

Post by downthefoxhole »

npunt wrote: post #551
allenu wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these types of videos because they create this fiction of how design happens, where people sit around a table with drawings and or come up with beautiful mock-ups (the motion sickness glasses is a good example). Often, a lot of design decisions are super obvious and don't require a lot of sweat and collaboration to come up with, but in videos they're made to appear very difficult as it presents better. And oth…

Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well. However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if no…

> People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!"

That's the problem with user interface design as a career. It takes a lot of effort to create simple to understand and simple to use design, and then when users see them, they see it is simple and think it must have been easy to do. Most programmers tend to make programs for themselves and other technical people and has horrible design. The classic corollary example I like is when Apple came up with MP3 players and marketed as 'It can hold 1000 songs' instead of the current marketing at the time 'It has has 1GB of storage'. Technical folks would not be satisfied with 1000 songs becuase they would be doing back of the math calculations on how low of a bitrate you have to get, in order to fit 1k songs in a given space... while the other 95% of the population doesn't want to do any math, and if even if they did, they don't know.. or at least back then, didn't know what a GB was, or how many megabytes an MP3 consumed....

Post reply on HN