[darreninthenet]

Probably a tiny handful of times? And would it have been useful? Yes of course it's useful to get a warning when you're not at home or upstairs in bed. I didn't say it was a life changing critical feature, I said "handy".

We had a freezer door pop open overnight once... it was because one of the drawers wasn't quite shut properly, all was good for hours after closing it and then suddenly it popped open when we were in bed and we came down to the food at the front of the drawers defrosted.

When you use something day in day out for 40+ years you occasionally have an accidental bad interaction. Sometimes you press the wrong button on the TV remote, sometimes one of the drawers in the freezer is further forward by half an inch on one side and you didn't notice, it happens.

Most people, especially on HN, don't need to be reminded to think critically about how real world interactions actually might occur before posting poorly thought out responses for the sake of evangelically pushing a point, but here we are

[arter4]

I'm not saying it is not useful, nor am I making a point about "survival" (also because people have survived long before fridges were even a thing).

I'm saying it can be useful, but only very rarely.

[thfuran]

Features that are useful but only rarely are great. Designing only for the happy path is terrible.

[arter4]

only if the downsides are less significant.

If dealing with an ugly path means streaming data all the time to the Internet and potentially decreasing the reliability of the whole thing, just because once every 5 or 10 years stuff defrosts...