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Comment by mkozlows | Hacker News Reader

Back when I worked at Best Buy in high school, I heard this basic story -- "A single unit of a particular product went bad, and therefore this product/brand is untrustworthy and bad, and I will never buy it again." -- from probably half the people who walked in.

Sony/Toshiba/Panasonic/Dell/HP/Compaq/Apple/Canon/NEC... seriously, every brand of anything, there was someone who was prepared to swear up and down that it was all junk, because one thing broke on them one time.

There's something interesting about that, to be sure, but I don't think it has much of anything to do with Nest.

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It's slightly different when a product is supposed to be significantly more reliable than consumer entertainment. And even in that space, where there are multiple similar options, it's not crazy to use the "I've had [good/bad] luck with brand X" as one of many shopping evaluation metrics.

A single unexplained false positive is rightly enough to ruin an end user's confidence in a smoke detector. And the rate I hear about Nest Protect failures is enough to shake my confidence in the product even without experiencing it first hand.

> single unexplained false positive is rightly enough to ruin an end user's confidence in a smoke detector.

Wait what? You want false positives. You definitely don't want false negatives.

> You want false positives

Absolutely, 100%, no. This is terribly wrong. I work for a company that manufactures smoke detectors, and false positives are almost as dangerous as false negatives. False positives encourage people to disregard the alarm as "just a false alarm", and ignore it, which can, and has, led to people die needlessly.

Also, if one of our products woke people up in the middle of the night because of a false alarm and they were unable to silence it, I would join them in calling it crap.

I agree, but in this case we're not talking about reasonable false positives (e.g. toast burning or candles being blown out). I wouldn't put up with a £10 smoke detector waking me up in the middle of the night for no discernible reason, much less one I paid £89 + shipping for.

This was more than just "a single unit went bad"... it was "a single unit went bad and there was no user-friendly way to stop it from disrupting my life". It sounded like if the damned thing had an "on/off" switch on the back that worked, he'd have been much less dissatisfied.

If a new TV breaks in normal use then o well. If a new knife breaks when chopping vegetables then most people are going to call the company crap.

Smoke detectors fall under the second category where the is basically no excuse if it fails.

There are asymmetric costs with smoke detector failure. A poor false positive and you are awoken in the middle of the night. A poor false negative and very well could be dead.

Because the detectors aren't perfect, you want it to make one of these errors much more often than the other.

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