I think we have the opposite problem too. People ascribe way too much intentional design to shit they don't understand even where no such intentional design exists.

Like 99% of the stuff you encounter on a daily basis is how it is because of some 3-way trade between aesthetically pleasing, the economic realities of producing that object and "how they've always been." It is not engineered for performance in the slightest other than some basic "yeah that should do" napkin analysis.

Or where the original constraints made sense at the time but they’ve been forgotten and all we’re left with is the end product.

I think of this whenever I see coat hooks with dual hooks, the top one extending further. I've always assumed that they were designed when people regularly wore hats.

In my house, we use the bottom hooks for "outdoor base" and the longer top hooks for "outdoor top layer". It means you're never putting dry base layers on top of a wet waterproof layer.

But your explanation makes _way_ more sense.

I think it also provides value for people to hang purses.

But as other comments mention they found utility in it through layering. It may have been for hats once, but it’s certainly kept around because people found new uses.

> it’s certainly kept around because people found new uses.

Yasure that's the reason? I mean, sure, it's possible... But my money is on the "how they've always been" / "the original constraints made sense at the time but they’ve been forgotten and all we’re left with is the end product" mentioned above.

Happened to me more than once in a new project to come across some old code I didn't like, and when trying to understand it finding out that the old team doesn't understand it either and just does things out of inertia. Now what's one supposed to do here, except starting to refactor to get a feeling what dragons there are?

First of all, aren't harnesses only safer if you go all the way with roll cages, helmets, etc., and more dangerous if you don't?

And more importantly, this misses the point of the original article, in which the author didn't understand how seat belts work at all.

Correct. Multi-point racing harnesses can only be used with a cage. The standard diagonal shoulder belt design allows your body to lean over sideways (towards the center of the car) if the roof of the vehicle caves in on your head and pushes you down. If you're in a harness without a rollcage and the roof caves in, the harness locks your spine upright and you end up with a head/neck/spine injury that's very likely to be fatal. This whole line of reasoning snowballs from there, because beyond that:

If you do install a well-designed cage just so you can safely use a harness, now you also need to wear a helmet. A cage without a helmet is begging for a bad head injury, because your head bounces around a little during an accident, and those bars are hefty, rigid, immobile objects mere inches away from your skull.

Even in a fairly low-speed incident that wouldn't cause other injuries, the bars would put a dent in your naked skull. You're also going to want a neck restraint system for that helmet (it's like a collar under the harness with little straps to the helmet, so that it can't move far), in part because of the added head weight (momentum) from the helmet and how rigidly your torso is locked in place, to prevent neck injuries.

Now that you have all those parts down: the combination of the harness locking down your torso, the neck restraint, and the limited window of visibility from the helmet means you've lost a good chunk of your peripheral vision and can't turn your head/neck to check things either. With your vision more or less locked in straight forward, you can't see all the things you really need to see to drive in normal street conditions safely. The limited vision works fine on a racetrack under racing conditions because everyone's trained the same way and operating in a sanitized environment, with no "intersections" or cross traffic, you have flag workers and/or radios to warn you of some things you can't see, etc.

The bottom line is that both street and race car safety systems are a whole complex of things that are engineered together in concert. They're well-tuned to the appropriate environment, and foolishly mixing ideas from the two generally makes you less safe, not more.

Random context video showing a race crash from the inside and outside perspective. Loss of brakes at the end of a high speed straight at COTA (he was still moving at 136 mph at the wall impact, after all the attempts to slow it down). The driver walked away fine, thanks to all the safety gear that the cockpit video shows off nicely near the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQitOyEyRd0 .

Adding to that, it helps to think about how the types of accident are dramatically different.

1. In a regular car, most accidents are at relatively low speed, and in those at high speed are generally front collisions (for at least one of the cars), so cars are designed in a way that the front and back are crumple zones to absorb the shock and limit energy transfer to the passengers. So after protecting passengers from flying out of (or within) the car with the belt, airbags are there to prevent whiplash from front/rear hits.

2. In a racing car, impacts are usually at high speed, and in basically any direction. Accelerations and decelerations will be significantly more brutal, and particularly for rally cars, vehicle rollover is really common. Hence the rigid cage + harness to reduce direct damage to the driver in those events. But even so, since the helmet's weight and the rigidity of the vehicle can make whiplash and basilar skull fractures, there are also helmet restraints (like HANS[0]) to reduce this risk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HANS_device

This is the reason I love HN, and I couldn’t have come up with a better example of exactly what the article talks about than this comment and it’s parent. :)

What amazes me most about that crash video is that there are no airbags deployed. You explained that racing safety systems don't belong in street cars. But I didn't expect the reverse as well.

I'm not familiar with this category of motorsport, but at least in F1, all safety systems need to allow the driver to leave the car in less than X seconds in case of accident (for example, if the driver needs to get out of the car in the case of a fire).

So maybe, and this is a guess, airbags are not activated in lateral impacts like this one as they could make this escape more difficult than the damage they are preventing.

Looks like the driver was intentionally skidding the car sideways to increase friction too. That's some very quick thinking I would not expect from a regular person on the street...