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> *They're loaded with useless/barely-functional interior electronics that are poor copies of Tesla

Having owned both an EV Ford and a Tesla I can say with absolute certainty that the ford runs circles around the Tesla. Outside of having steam games on the screen, Tesla’s infotainment does literally nothing better, and the interface itself feels like an early 2000s Linux gui. Oh, and Ford actually supports carplay and android auto.


Outside of... having Steam games? What?

Tesla's briefly had Steam

Insane take. If you actually own a Tesla and have this opinion I’m gonna eat a dick. Ford’s software can’t even do navigating via chargers right. It’s universally panned.

So, I haven't driven a Ford EV for any significant amount of time so can't comment on the "navigating via chargers" part, but I'd take Ford's non-EV infotainment system over Tesla's system. Ford's is obnoxiously laggy, basically just above the bar of that I'd consider a shippable product, but Tesla's touchscreen for things that should be buttons is awful, and the lack of Android Auto/Carplay is crippling.

And tangential to the infotainment system, Tesla dropping sat radio receivers is pretty annoying if you're frequently outside of cell service.


Nah everything you need is available on the steering wheel contextually. You would know that if you had one. You would also know why Tesla owners don’t care for android auto or carplay much (though I recognize that it’s definitely a selling point because people have this stance from their experience with other cars, which suck)

Ah yes, no true Tesla owner.

> Tesla owners don’t care for android auto or carplay much

I suspect you're actually hitting a point, but it's not "people who buy Teslas realize that carplay doesn't matter", but rather "people who care about carplay don't buy Teslas".


New person to the conversation: I just want to say that even if the CEO's politics weren't awful I would never want a Tesla. I don't want a touchscreen to adjust the direction of the AC. Audio, climate and basic media functions should all have tactile control.

Tesla is to blame for my parents thinking EV = complicated iPad on wheels. An electric drivetrain doesn't have to come with a touchscreen UI for everything.


Volume up/down (scroll), previous/next track (left/right), mute/play (press) are all on the steering wheel's left button.

Not being able to adjust climate with a tactile control is mildly annoying, but the "temperature X degrees" voice control works fine.


You can change the temp and media etc on the steering wheel. Air is generally automatically adjusted

Yeah it's terrible, but it's way cheaper than engineering a bunch of buttons and switches, which is why Tesla did it. Somewhere along the line car makers decided non-mechanical door handles were a great idea too. Polestar is the only one that had some sense in that area.

> There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or Google, and I’m not sure I want there to be.

There shouldn’t be a legal right to an account, but there absolutely should be a legal right to sit down with someone from the company to plead your case, understand why the account was locked, and at least be given the opportunity to gather your things if they decide not give you a second chance.

If you get evicted from an apartment they don’t just change the locks and keep all your stuff…


Volkswagen was handed over to be run by a British military officer immediately following the war.

Tesla’s board decided after the war was lost to not only let the nazi sympathizer continue running the company, but to give him an egregiously disproportionate compensation package. The guy who single handedly pushed the biggest failure in the history of the company (cybertruck) is apparently the only one who can save the company.

I expect at some point they’ll be acquired for pennies on the dollar by a Chinese company or if Trump gets his way he’ll insist on a government takeover.


He’ll probably let Jared Kushner have a go.

> People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%

Causality in war includes people that were only injured. This was far, far more than a 50% casualty rate. More like a 9552% casualty rate.


> Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons.

The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets in order to kill 42 targets.

On what planet is that “very few actual civilians”? I think you knew full well before posting that’s a ridiculous claim which is why you did it anonymously.


> in order to kill 42 targets.

This is not correct. Each one that had this pager was connected to Hezbollah, i.e. a soldier of Hezbollah. This attack was meant to "disable" a very big portion of Hezbollah, which it did (4000 of them).

This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.


> This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty. 127 civilians Lebanese civilians killed since the ceasefire by the party you claim is avoiding civilian casualties, btw. very careful bunch

"The reports" are that 12 were killed total, not that 12 civilians were killed. Only 2 of the killed were civilians as far as I can tell. Several of those who people on Twitter tried to claim were civilians, including a doctor, were admitted by Hezbollah to be Hezbollah members and given Hezbollah funerals.

I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.

You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.


Incorrect. The reports are 42 total killed, 12 civilians including 2 children.

"Operation Grim Beeper" (seriously) on Wikipedia cites these numbers from Lebanese government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...


The figure of merit in a military strike is casualties, not KIA; it's the "wounded" part you actually care about (in fact, in some tactical situations, wounding is preferable to killing, as it ties up adversary logistical resources).

Since the pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah (which fought an actual civil war with the Lebanese security forces specifically in order to establish its own telecom network), I would be extraordinarily wary of any source that has claimed more injuries to noncombatants than to combatants.

You can still tell a story where the pager attack was unacceptable owing to civilian casualties: there could be so many civilian casualties that any number of combatant casualties wouldn't justify it. But if you're claiming that there were more casualties to noncombatants over small explosions from devices carried principally in the pockets of combatants, it is rational to draw the conclusion that your reasoning (and sourcing) is motivated.


> it is rational to draw the conclusion that your reasoning (and sourcing) is motivated.

Have you provided any sources at all for you numerous claims throughout this thread? Would it also me rational to draw a the conclusion that someone who has provided no sources at all is also engaging in “motivated reasoning”? At least be consistent.


(We're conversing in multiple different parts of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227021)

Hezbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon. This is an important detail buddy.

No, it isn't. Hezbollah is an occupying military force in Lebanon, responsive only to a minority of its population, that happens to have a political party attached. It is the IRGC's faction of the Lebanese Parliament, except to the extent that it operates its own parallel government when that body is inconvenient to it.

Fair enough, 12 total only includes the original pager attack, not the subsequent radio one. However, you seem to have made the same mistake. 42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.


I didn't say 42 targets.

Per the report: 42 dead, 12 of which were civilians. It follows that 30 were considered Hezbollah.


Several of those initially claimed to be civilians were later acknowledged by Hezbollah, so that number is still a bit fuzzy.

I'm not claiming absolute knowledge of numbers, just going off the public reports which are all we can go on.

Source? Can't find anything stating this

The report is 4,000 civilians injured (which means they just didn't die -- people lost fingers, limbs, eyes, etc.)

Presumably if you have thousands of Hezbola people walking around within their homes, businesses, hopistals, shops, etc. it makes sense you'd have many civilian injuries when these went off. There wasn't a geo fence around them and if someone was in an NICU or preschool the explosions were indiscriminate.

So while there was some element of precision in placement of who had these pagers, there was zero awareness (by design) to where they actually were when they all exploded.


I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets.

42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters).

Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.


You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.

The distinction is /civilians/.

You make an assumption that of the 4000 people wounded /all/ were civilians, which is odd, considering that explosive was in a device given out to Hezbollah members.


The problem is, 2750 + 750 injured is less than 4000, and it doesn't make sense that none of the injured were targets but >30/42 of those killed were.

We're talking about a tiny amount of explosives in each pager. Sure, it could lightly wound a bystander under perfect circumstances, but it's not going to create a big confluence of major injuries. <6 grams of PETN--we're talking about a risk of injury at roughly arm's reach.


To be clear, that claim of 4,000 comes from a member of Hezbollah:

> According to the Lebanese government, the attack killed 42 people,[11] including 12 civilians,[12] and injured 4,000 civilians (according to Mustafa Bairam, Minister of Labour and a member of Hezbollah).

The wikipedia page's other reference claiming that the majority of those injured were civilians is also vague. For instance, it writes, "On 26 September, Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon's Foreign Minister, confirmed that most of those carrying pagers were not fighters, but civilians like administrators"

The reference for that sentence is this, which reads: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2024/09/israel-hezbol...

> It was an attack mostly on Hezbollah, but a lot of civilians got hurt in the process, because not everybody is sitting there fighting on the front. These are people who have pagers or have telephones. They are regular people. Some of them are also fighters, but not most of them. A lot of them are administrators working here and there. . . .

This is a very different claim that what the article reads. "Administrators" and "not fighters" is a very different thing than "civilian". A woman working in my building also works in the Army's HR department during the day. She's literally a member of the military, but it's also not wrong to say she is "not a fighter" and an "administrator".

In short, the idea that we have credible evidence that the 4,000 people who were injured (and more, importantly, those that were actually maimed rather than receiving light injuries) were mostly civilians doesn't seem to pan out.


but we have the benefit of seeing live videos from actual shops where these hezbollah members were, and you can see the explosion was small enough to not hurt anyone in the vicinity

even if very close, one of the videos shows a supermarket line, and no one around is hurt


>I didn't say 42 targets.

You quite literally did.



What? It's possible I had a previous typo, but please show me where I said that.

>42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

So they only managed to hit 30 targets with 12 misfires… that makes it even worse.

> In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source)

That’s 1500 in addition to the 4,000 civilians. The fact they managed to wound 2.5x+ as many civilians as targets isn’t exactly making them look better…


> The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets

Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?


I vouched for your post because your question is legitimate and asked in an appropriate manner; there is no good reason to flag it.

The answer to your question is yes: the "4,000 civilians wounded" figure is attributed to Mustafa Bairam, a high-ranking Hezbollah member. I have not seem any corroborating sources. As far as I can tell every mention of that number, including Wikipedia, traces back to him. Obviously this is a highly biased source that should not be trusted blindly.


source?

For the IDF, a 28.6% civilian death rate is actually quite good. Their own classified data reveals an 83% civilian casualty rate in Gaza—nearly three times worse.

The Lebanon pager attack: 12 civilians (including 2 children) killed out of 42 total deaths (28.6% civilian casualty rate).

Gaza genocide: Leaked IDF intelligence documents show 8,900 militants killed out of 53,000 total deaths as of May 2025 (83% civilian casualty rate).


You understate your point: the 83% rate is much, much more than 3x worse. To kill 100 intended targets, a 28.6% civilian death rate means you'll need to kill `N / (100 + N) = 0.286` (N = 40.06) civilians. With an 83% civilian death rate, to kill 100 intended targets, you need to kill `N / (100 + N) = 0.83` (N = 488) civilians. It is about 12x worse to have an 83% civilian death rate compared to a 28.6% rate.

I'll note that for two rates (a, b) the general formula for this kind of comparison would be:

    a (1-b) / (b (1-a))

Thank you for that correction.

there is no classified idf data of 83% civilian casualty rate. there is data that idf can identify by name 17% of casualties as hamas/etc member. if there are 10 people with machine guns and rpg and you blow them up with a bomb, they don't become civilians just because you don't know their names

Seems some say even the named may be fabricated:

>> Sources within the Israeli intelligence community cited in the report raised concerns about how deaths were categorized, with one source claiming people were sometimes "promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death" in the database. <<


The IDF did not dispute this, so unclear why you are.

According to Hezbollah sources 1500 of their terrorists were taken out of commission due to this attack. Making the death ratio 42/1500 or 3% while if only taking the civilian ratio that's even lower.

Even the 12 civilian count is probably higher than reality because it is doubtful that 12 civilians had access to a military clandestine communication device

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollahs-tunnels...

Regarding the leaked IDF document this was leaked to a minor blog yet cannot be seen anywhere.

But let's entertain it as real, these are 8000 named Hamas terrorists known for certain by one intelligence unit in the IDF to be dead. This only means the minimum amount of Hamas terrorists, this doesn't take into account the other armed groups in Gaza that had a prewar strength of 10,000s of terrorists or the Hamas members who are only known by uncertain intelligence to have been killed.

Taking that number and reducing it from the Hamas published death count (an organization that kidnapped babies for political goals, but is incapable of lying, and was caught faking death counts before) to get the civilian death count is very unscientific to be extremely mild


[flagged]


Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by:

    Argentina
    Australia
    Austria
    Bahrain
    Canada
    Colombia
    Czech Republic
    Ecuador
    Estonia
    European Union
    France
    Germany
    Gulf Cooperation Council
    Guatemala
    Honduras
    Israel
    Kosovo
    Lithuania
    Netherlands
    New Zealand
    Paraguay
    Serbia
    Slovakia
    United Arab Emirates
    United Kingdom
    United States
but calling them terrorists is biased?

They're military and political personnel. Terrorist designation is a made up political thing as Trump has made obvious. Hezbollah has done nothing that Israel hasn't also done.

Military personal wear uniforms, are clearly identifiable in their operations & movements and have standards of behavior in line with jus ad bellum & jus in bello.

The numbers you state are from the Lebanese government and Hizbollah. So I don't think we can assume they are accurate. I don't have any better numbers, though.

You specific argument though misuses even those numbers. 42 is the number of people actually killed. I couldn't figure out how many were targeted (how many pagers did explode), but I'd assume the number could be much higher than the number of deaths. Without that number we cannot determine how well targeted this was. I also don't think it is plausible that for every target you injure 100 bystanders. So I would assume the number of targets was at least an order of magnitude higher.

There's also another number from Hizbollah, that 1500 of their people were injured. But no idea it those would be included in the 4000 wounded number.


Not sure how I feel about it being a throwaway device for $100. I get they say you can send it back to be recycled, but this feels like you’re just proactively creating e-waste.

Not even an attempt to make a replaceable or chargeable battery?

Also they point out oura rings need to be charged every few days, but that’s because they’re constantly chewing through battery monitoring your health stats. I’m willing to bet if they were in a constant state of deep sleep and only woken up to record short audio clips they’d also last for months at a time.

I know folks around here love pebble, but this feels like a miss to me.


> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.

That's a pretty long life, TBF. I appreciate your concerns, though, and do wonder if there was a better middle ground (maybe a micro sterling engine leveraging the heat gradient from my finger to ambient, ha!).

People are buying Fitbit charge6 products today and those probably have an 18 shelf life and cost more.. so maybe it's not totally left field - although the charge6 isn't advertised to fail so soon lol.


That lifespan is based on the user recording for 12 to 15 hours over those two years. It's a $100 device that can record 12 hours of audio and then you throw it away. You could expend the battery on your first day by holding down the button.

Honestly I can see a niche use but this device strikes me as quite weird and I'm not sure why it isn't a button on their new watch.


Their Oura comparison really didn't sit well with me because of that. The device clearly uses a fraction of the power that the Oura is using. If it had a rechargeable battery you would not have to charge it that frequently.

Agreed. Brave to launch disposable tech with the current environmental awareness. e-waste in 12-15hours, when people are pushing for more and more for repairable devices just feels very out of touch.

this is a device that would potentially last years though, not months — if you're in the niche of needing something like this you're paying less than $10 a month (maybe as low as $5)... doesn't net out too terribly in exchange for not charging

We did it guys, we made physical devices usable only if you treat them as a SaaS otherwise you're sol when battery runs out

that's a pretty lame take, all I did was break down the cost to the lifespan of the device

it's useful to think of a lot of things this way, I also justify clothing purchases on a rough estimate of cost per wear


Right, and an Oura would be usable for a decade because it has a rechargeable battery.

sure but the Oura does a bunch of unrelated stuff specific to health and also has to be charged twice a week? they're not even comparable products

I don’t understand what you don’t understand. The oura comparison is one they made and used “charging every day” as a reason to not use a rechargeable battery. If they took the oura hardware model and applied it to their voice recorder ring, you would be charging monthly if not longer.

TL;dr - There’s no reason to not have a rechargeable battery other than to create e-waste and “a revenue stream”.


That's total nonsense, you have to make it larger to include a charging mechanism (which would need to be proprietary to fit) and it's more difficult to manufacture in a water-tight way. They're spending significantly less on developing and building this than Oura has. Keep in mind Oura has raised over a billion dollars in funding.

The e-waste here is negligible. If you've ever tossed a laptop or phone you've effectively produced more e-waste than a lifetime of these little things. A single disposable AA battery is more waste by weight.


I know exactly how I feel: I'll never buy a disposable electronic device.

The ring weighs approximately 1/1000th what a MacBook pro does. If it really lasts for years it's a tiny, tiny amount of e-waste.

Every company should be responsible for the lifecycle of their product, big or small. You can't just point fingers at others.

How much of it is even recyclable?


Not mandating and not recommending are two different things. Europe basically universally recommends hep-b because it would be insane not to.

So not China unless you’re being pedantic and pretending when people say they are avoiding China they doin don’t mean the mainland governed by the communist party.

> "Europe is taxing Americans to subsidize a continent held back by Europe’s own suffocating regulations," Carr said.

And America is taxing Americans via tariffs to subsidize a corrupt executive branch lining its own pockets. At least Europe is looking out for a whole continent. Not just a handful of grifters.


Europe does tax its people a lot more. So the argument doesn't make sense.

Taxes which are used wisely for the people’s benefit is not a wasteful thing. That was the point original commentator made.

Your reasoning is that taxation is always bad and the more you pay the worst, a very American view which I can understand given how badly US government spends money in this regard.


I made no such reasoning. The parent comment wrote about taxes like its something bad.

It didn't just say tax, it suggested what the taxes were for, and how they were levied.

If we're all going to be persnickety about things, let's use the whole context.


Still doesn't make sense. How are tariffs "subsidising" corruption? What does that even mean?

It's just a dog whistle. People hate tax, so calling things that are not tax "tax" triggers anger in people without deep critical thinking skills. Or people with skills but not enough energy or time to use them on this particular issue.

Actually the difference isn't that big when you consider that "taxes" (I'm using this to describe all (semi-)mandatory state money extraction from revenues, whether they're called tax, insurance, cotisation, etc) in European countries cover the majority of healthcare and retirement costs that Americans pay out of pocket. But still have to pay. So if the US had the same "tax" model as European countries do, the rate wouldn't be that off (VAT is usually higher than American sales taxes, income tax often has higher brackets, but Americans spend a lot more on healthcare and retirement).

> The moment you have any issue at all with it, the car will be considered totaled.

Huh? The taycan has an 8-year/100k mile battery warranty. How many 100k+ mile carreras do you see for sale on eBay?


Quite a few actually, regular 911s often end up being daily drivers and given Porsche build them to last there's plenty of high milers out there.

There are currently 17 total carreras for sale with over 100k miles, none of them are less than 8 years old. The average taycan buyer isn’t going to own the car long enough to exceed the warranty.

Carrera is not Taycan. Why would you equate both? Different cars with different targets.

> Different cars with different targets.

The head of the product disagrees with you. No offense but I think he has a slightly better idea of their target buyer than you.

>AW: How much was Tesla on Porsche’s mind when the Taycan was produced? It seems like you’re going right after Model S with this car.

>SW: The first target for ourselves was to make sure that the Taycan becomes a Porsche. We needed to make it as close to the 911, our icon, as possible. Obviously, we had a look at the competition, we had a look at BMW, Mercedes, Tesla.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/people/a2157176/talking-taycan...


They mean this as a status symbol, not as the competing vehicle? Taycan is a four door car. A daily driver. Not a two-door sports car. It would compete with Panamera, not 911. Equating the two is wrong in the context of mileage driven. See other comments for that.

It's like the S60, VW W12, old V12 Continentals, etc. If it's expensive to maintain no one wants to buy it off you so you get hit with massive depreciation costs. You can get a 20y/o 'no issues' 500+hp V12 Continental for 10k where I'm at. They've had a brutal cost/year and cost/mile.

Huh? S60? Can you clarify?

I've driven a 2003 Volvo S60 (plain 5 cylinder, no turbo), which matches your 20 years - and most diy repairs were quite straightforward. I suppose you're talking about some Mercedes or other brand I'm less familiar with?


Oops, meant the S85 of the E60 BMW M5. Where I'm from we call it S60 since it's the S engine. Forgot it's not a real thing...

The warranty isn't going to cover underside damages caused by going over a shallow bump

No, your insurance is going to cover damages caused by hitting road debris whether you’re driving an EV or an ICE vehicle.

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