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Show HN: Elevators

john.fun

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Re: Show HN: Elevators

#301

Post by donalhunt »

olex wrote: post #17

The biggest problem I always have with elevators is not the algorithm, it's the people seemingly being unable to grasp the concept of pressing either the up or the down request button, depending on where they want to go. Almost always I find someone will press both, because "then the elevator comes faster". Completely ignoring the fact that they end up going the wrong way first half the time, and adding an unnecessar…

I live in Ireland. 10+ years ago I used to the travel to the US quite a bit (5-10 trips a year). The majority of the time I would fly via a major EU hub like AMS or CDG even if there was a direct flight from Ireland.

The reason? Other factors that were important to me!

Examples:

- cost optimisation. I could fly business within company budget rules.

- flight time. I highly valued longer flight times between Europe and the US west coast so I got a proper night's sleep when flying east-bound. Doing connections on the east coast often meant quite short transatlantic flights that arrived very early in the morning. Much harder to manage the jetlag.

- Product offering. Some of the routes from AMS and CDG had much newer planes and cabins.

- Airline alliance loyalty. Given the travel pattern it meant sense to pick an alliance that delivered some value. Irish airlines didn't have much to offer and were much more expensive for a worse end to end product.

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#302

Post by CGamesPlay »

perpetuallunch wrote: post #280
woeh wrote: post #266

I am currently staying in an AirBnB of a 60 floor tower, and the three elevator shafts definitely cannot handle this (I don't think the building was designed with renting to tourists in mind). The elevators are frequently completely saturated during weekends, meaning that the elevator stops at each floor, but noone can get in because the elevator is already full. This means the backlog of people wanting to use the el…

Or, the building / owners corp / code / city could simply ban short stay accommodation where it was never attended. I would not want to be in that building if an evacuation alarm sounded.

> I would not want to be in that building if an evacuation alarm sounded.

You shouldn't be taking the elevator if you heard an evacuation alarm, but to be sure, you don't want to be an any 60-story building when you hear that alarm.

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#303

Post by dguest »

sorz wrote: post #277

I just come back from a furry con hosted in hotel in China, and learn how every furry con like this completely break hotel's elevators: - rooms are all booked - young furries usually share one room with 4 or even up to 6 friends - more guest room-lobby-ballroom traffic - far more inter-guest-floor traffic than their usual tourists - one full-suit furry take 1.5-2 human's space Their elevators are not designed for thi…

I would really love to see a regular a blog that details all the ways the world will need to adapt to furries. There are endless engineering challenges here!

Also, any spiritual successors to Sim Tower needs to include furry-con as a disaster scenario.

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#304

Post by swiftcoder »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #241
pimlottc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is case where you need to make sure your test data reflects real-world usage or you end up optimizing for the wrong thing. Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage and then run it through a simulator like this to determine the optimal strategy for that particular building. And you'd want to re-run it every once in a while as the building tenants/usage changes. I wonde…

I wonder if we'll see LLM elevator scheduling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNuFcIRlwdc

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#305

Post by dguest »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #203

All I want to know is why the heck I can't un-press a button I pressed by accident. This should be very simple. Press once to turn the button on, press again to turn it off. Or I guess you could do long-press to turn off or something if you're worried about confusing people, but I really don't think that should be necessary. We know how toggles work. The button lights up when it's on.

They had this in Korea when I was there a decade ago!

It works fine, but people's reaction on hearing this is always interesting, ranging from:

- enthusiasm: that's awesome everyone should do that

- skepticism: that seems like a terrible idea, people will un-press your floor and chaos will follow

- denial: you didn't see that

- cultural / racist: that would never work in it must just be because Koreans are

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#306

Post by gregorvand »

Amazing article and demos thank you. I’ve also been fascinated by what algorithms are driving elevators.

As someone often using destination dispatch, I am inclined to think after the elevator arrives, you get to the destination more quickly than RSR or LOOK because it’s optimised everyone to the same floor (less stopping)

So it may be a case of more waiting in the lobby but less in a claustrophobic box, which I’ll happily take

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#307

Post by Tomis02 »

npodbielski wrote: post #300

How people do such nice animation? Is there is some nice program you can use? I looked and I could not find anything that seemed really easy to use. Llms can sometimes generate something usefull and sometimes something attrocious. I remember few months back article where someone create animation of how 3.5" 1.4MB disk is build, somebody asked about this in the comment and author said it was done mostly by hand. While…

Pretty sure this is vibecoded so don't feel too bad.

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#308

Post by NikxDa »

My biggest issue with elevators is that some places and hotels I‘ve been to use disconnected systems:

They have three elevators, but pressing one button only calls that specific elevator. So everyone presses all three buttons, meaning the three elevators basically turn into one.

I don‘t understand how this was ever signed off, but I‘ve seen it multiple times now...

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#309

Post by dsego »

olex wrote: post #17

The biggest problem I always have with elevators is not the algorithm, it's the people seemingly being unable to grasp the concept of pressing either the up or the down request button, depending on where they want to go. Almost always I find someone will press both, because "then the elevator comes faster". Completely ignoring the fact that they end up going the wrong way first half the time, and adding an unnecessar…

Yes, same here, in croatia people believe that you need to press the opposite direction to "summon" the elevator, if the elevator is on lower floor they will press the "up" arrow to bring it up to their floor. And then of course when the doors open they will ask "going up or down?", which is ridiculous. When I point out that the ground floor only has the "up" button they just ignore it (hard to unlearn ingrained beliefs).

Re: Show HN: Elevators

#310

Post by ButlerianJihad »

trivo wrote: post #25
olex wrote: post #17

The biggest problem I always have with elevators is not the algorithm, it's the people seemingly being unable to grasp the concept of pressing either the up or the down request button, depending on where they want to go. Almost always I find someone will press both, because "then the elevator comes faster". Completely ignoring the fact that they end up going the wrong way first half the time, and adding an unnecessar…

And then when the elevator door opens, they ask the people inside: "Are you going up or down?" There's an arrow showing that, for Christ's sake.

The direction is also indicated by the chime sound, which only blind people and YouTube viewers seem to know.

As for button pressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#As_a_metaphor

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