Sometimes someone has to tell the party when they've come up with a potentially deadly idea no matter how much of a killjoy that may be.

Case in point - my friends wanted to imbibe a certain white powder with alcohol and I had to let them know that it is magnitudes more toxic to take them together. Did they have a less fun time? Probably. But I won't have their premature deaths on my conscience.

So, now we're comparing a hat dropping one or two stories to overdosing on a combination of drugs and alcohol?

It'd be nice if we could all just chill the hell out and let someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project just be someone's fun, stupid, kinda pointless project.

Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but do feel free to tell me if I'm off base for thinking comparing this project to overdosing is a hell of a stretch.

I was responding with an anecdote to the comment that sometimes it's important to communicate concerns, even if it means being a killjoy. Didn't mean for it to sound like I was trying to equate the AI hat-dropper to potentially overdosing, just a recent occurrence that I was reminded of when I saw the parent comment.

Imagine walking (or in this case, standing around) on a sidewalk just going about your business. Then, imagine something drops on your head, literally out of the blue. In a city littered with scaffolding designed to prevent pedestrians being injured by stuff dropping from buildings. Further, imagine you are easily scared and/or have a weak heart. So, I think it's not a huge stretch to say that, with enough unlucky coincidences, this also might kill someone.

I think it'd almost certainly eventually kill someone with a pacemaker and a weak heart.

(Or maybe cause someone to take a sudden step away from the sidewalk)

(I wonder if the title is a bit clickbait and the hat dropper in fact tries out this new tech only on friends who are prepared already, not random strangers?)

if it kills someone you can always just say "it's just a prank bro"

It is opt-in. You have to “order” a hat.

Aha, now, on a 2nd look, I see this:

> Here a busy New Yorker can book a 5 minute time slot, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day

Ok. And after all, such nice hats are a bit expensive I guess (since they also function as helicopters).

Skimmed the article the first time.

I don't think he was making that comparison. I think this he was more referring to the mentality of "you must be fun at parties" whenever someone speaks up with some concerns about an idea.

Thanks for getting where I was coming from, haha.

Another fucking twat. No one likes this.

Most parties serve alcoholic drinks. Alcohol is a common reason for sudden and early deaths. Do you go around saying that in every party you attend?

I think it’s more akin to telling someone at the party that it’d be stupid to chug that whole bottle of liquor on a dare.

Drinking alcohol is almost certainly more dangerous than dropping hats.

This is not even close.

Heck, pick any one negative impact of drinking alcohol at parties (impaired driving, or long term health effects, or impaired judgment, etc) and that individual impact would probably be orders of magnitude worse than the total negative impact of dropping hats.

If someone spikes the punch with alcohol that's bad. If everyone is consenting: drop away. If they don't consent please leave them alone.

It is a hat. Chugging a bottle of liquor has way more harm potential.

Only if you’re focused on the individual instead of risk to unrelated 3rd parties.

Yes, think of how dangerous it is to have a hat land nearby…

You mean how dangerous is tossing something vision blocking where people drive…

Yes, how dangerous is it? Please enlighten me.

> Yes, how dangerous is it?

Lethality dangerous

No, define how dangerous it is please. I’d like to know the odds of dying from a hat falling from the sky.

If we’re going to call something dangerous, we should probably have actual logic and data to support that claim, right?

> actual logic and data to support that claim, right?

As you seem to be massively misinformed:

> Distracted driving is dangerous, claiming 3,308 lives in 2022

> What Is Distracted Driving?

> anything that takes your attention away from the task of safe driving.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving

Now obviously having a hat land on a windshield and actually block visibility would be worse, but catching something falling out of the edge of your vision especially something odd like a falling hat would easily qualify.

It’s also distracting pedestrians and so likely to result in other injuries.

> As you seem to be massively misinformed:

I am not "massively misinformed". I'm asking a person making a ridiculous claim (a hat falling from the sky will kill you) to support their claim.

I'm seeing no mention of hats in your linked information. Please share hat related injuries, as that's what we're discussing.

The claim is distracting drivers can result in deaths, it has little specific to hats. Rather it’s about the dropping.

“Several properties of visual stimuli have been shown to capture attention, one of which is the onset of motion.“

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-018-1548-1

> I am not "massively misinformed"

Your ignorant response proves otherwise.

So, you're an expert in hat related deaths? I fail to see how rattling off irrelevant statistics makes you "informed". Still not a single reference to hat related deaths, the topic of our debate!

> I fail to see

Clearly you don’t want to see, but you lost the argument anyway.

Some basic advice, if you don’t want to come off as a fool try actually responding to an agreement as presented. You may still lose, but at least it doesn’t look like you’re hiding.

I’m not hiding from anything! You presented an argument (a hat falling from the sky will kill you) and then have been spouting irrelevant nonsense!

I suspect that, if the notion of a hat falling 20 feet out of a window terrifies you this much, you’ve probably not engaged much with real people or the world around you, such that I wouldn’t really have expected anything different. Glad I was not wrong!

> a hat falling from the sky will kill you

Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.

Summing up for a simple mind. Research shows falling hats distract people. Article showing intersection means drivers would get distracted. Research showed distracting drivers risks killing someone else.

So with multiple events each risking killing someone taking place risk gasp increases.

PS: It’s also illegal, but that’s a secondary concern.

> Yet, again demonstrating you didn’t understand even the title of the article. As you clearly failed to read there in an ‘s’ at the end of “hats” at the top of the article. In this context that s means repeated hat drops.

_Some_ hats? gasp. The horror!

Go outside.

At least you acknowledged your loss in the end.

It's been mentioned here earlier but considering you don't seem to really go outside you're the poster child for the stereotypical person anyone wouldn't ask for advice about the actual danger of falling hats in this context.

You're so lost in the forced fake universe and viciously defending it digging even a deeper hole for yourself I wonder if you even remember how to walk.

Let's say 0.001% of distracted driving accidents are caused by falling hats. That's way less than one death a year. Now, DUI deaths don't just dwarf that but make it seem nonexistent which it basically is. If you stretch this to the extreme you could consider heavy snowfall to falling hats, but hundreds of hats falling around you all the time to the point they reduce your vision greatly. But even at that point alcohol is more dangerous. And at this point you linking some paper will just make you seem more deranged considering the kind of leaps you're making to try to stretch some academic reference to this theoretical question.

Please go outside.

Is dropping a hat really comparable to chugging a whole bottle of liquor?

Do you go around qualifying every point with a hyperbolic example to show that it doesn’t generalize at every party that you attend?

Yes, you don’t?

Deadly? More like the music's too loud.

Shut up twat, everyone hates this crap.

Please don't cross into personal attack and please don't do drive-by internet tropes.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.