[mikeyouse]

It's astounding to me how easily people shrug off 'corner case problems'. Some things need to work in every case, and many complex systems have to be designed to accommodate every 'corner'.

"How much cheaper would buses be if they didn't need to be wheel-chair accessible? Surely 99% of people don't have wheel-chairs."

"Our nuclear power plant is designed to withstand a 10M tsunami, nearly all of the earthquakes and tsunamis in the past hundred years have been smaller than that."

[aeorgnoieang]

> "How much cheaper would buses be if they didn't need to be wheel-chair accessible? Surely 99% of people don't have wheel-chairs."

If buses would be so much cheaper that special wheel-chair accessible vans could be provided instead then maybe that's a case that should be shrugged-off.

Are you really surprised or are you just expressing outrage that other people make different tradeoffs than you do?

Even in the nuclear power plant case you mention it's not obvious that it would be better to design every nuclear power plant to withstand disasters that have not occurred in the past one hundred years especially if the alternative is, e.g. a coal-fired power plant.

[mikeyouse]

I really am surprised how so many 'solutions' to 'obvious' problems are really just methods to ignore the difficult parts. It's pervasive, especially on Reddit/HN type forums and with charlatan politicians and their supporters.

If the solutions were easy, they would have been figured out by now. We live in a highly engineered world but people constantly ignore all nuance.

Another example I saw recently was this crazy outrage that Whole Foods was selling pre-peeled oranges in plastic containers. They were contacting corporate offices and trying to shame WF for their waste. Nobody stopped to think that maybe people have different levels of manual dexterity and that the elderly or disabled people might enjoy a fresh orange too.

Nearly all of the challenge in design lies in the corner case.

[ryandrake]

I'd highly recommend every software engineer to spend a little time in their career working on safety critical applications. Medical devices, avionics and automotive, anything related to emergency-911 services, etc. The attitude towards risk, tradeoffs, edge cases and defect prioritization is different than it is at your usual "build fast & break stuff" circus. It can be eye opening.

[DamonHD]

No, it should not be "shrugged off": it could be carefully considered and a better alternative provided, as you suggested.

"Shrugged off" implies that problems that don't apply to you personally are not important, and that attitude or even its apparent presence cause a huge chunk of the world's problems at root...

[alphaalpha101]

>If buses would be so much cheaper that special wheel-chair accessible vans could be provided instead then maybe that's a case that should be shrugged-off.

No, it shouldn't. This is the problem with just saying 'the market will fix it'. The market will fix it for rich white able-bodied men and basically nobody else.