Nobody cares • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody cares

#681

Post by pclmulqdq » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #653

tqi wrote: post #425

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for de…

Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a speci…

Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.

Re: Nobody cares

#682

Post by ieee2 » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #653

tqi wrote: post #425

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for de…

Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a speci…

Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.

Re: Nobody cares

#683

Post by bjornsing » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:11 PM UTC

> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.

This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.

Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.

At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.

Re: Nobody cares

#684

Post by patrickwalton » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

When people ask me what cope is, I'll be pointing them to the comments here.

All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.

Re: Nobody cares

#685

Post by homebrewer » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

unknownsky wrote: post #116

liontwist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs. That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowl…

> kids do most of the cleaning

We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.

Re: Nobody cares

#686

Post by gizmo » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #650

gizmo wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hosti…

Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason. "Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes. Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole i…

The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty.

What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.

Re: Nobody cares

#687

Post by quietbritishjim » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

tass wrote: post #644

quietbritishjim wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.

Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch. It’s easier than ever to carry one.

Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible state of affairs which, in itself, is a gross anti-pedestrian move.

(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)

Re: Nobody cares

#688

Post by neop1x » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

maayank wrote: post #646

easygenes wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.

Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer

Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk

Re: Nobody cares

#689

Post by rbetts » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #529

a_e_k wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over…

In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas. It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range. Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars…

I'm glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.

Re: Nobody cares

#690

Post by pammf » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.