Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

electrek.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 498 posts

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#271

Post by sedachv »

brianbreslin wrote: post #22

Something seems fishy to me. Cruise which GM bought for $1B a few months back was working on similar tech. Having only raised $3M he could have EASILY sold his tech/team to Chrysler or Ford or Hyundai, or any other car company for $100M and made his investors super happy and himself very rich. So why "quit" when the feds ask you to deal with regulations that involve passenger safety. Its not like he had to spend $20M…

Suspicious especially given Hotz's comments about Cruise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zy_07g2IrM#t=40m10s

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#272

Post by BurningFrog »

taco_emoji wrote: post #249
BurningFrog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > they can and will close down his business if they feel like it > That's the textbook definition of 'regulation'. Right, and it's one of the big problems I have with this form of regulation. I think it violates the idea of "Rule of Law", as opposed to "Rule of Man", which was one of the major factors behind the rise of modern free society.

Can you explain? You seem to be implying that you believe that the NHTSA is capriciously making demands of Comma but not to other similar companies in a similar stage of market-readiness.

They certainly could, which is part of my point. Whether they do or not depends on the honesty, bias, and personal ambitions of the people running the agency.

The empirical experience is that regulatory agencies over time gravitate towards favoring the big established players in the industry they're regulating.

The economist term is "Regulatory Capture".

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#273

Post by bdrool »

Analemma_ wrote: post #16

He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…

> He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter

He said the NHTSA made "no attempt at a dialog". What does he call that letter? Ridiculous.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#274

Post by chadgeidel »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #256
throwaway729 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If 10,000 people were killed on the way to making driverless cars safe, and this wild west approach ended up getting them into mass market use a few years earlier, it would save the lives of thousands of people overall. This is a perfect example of the biggest and IMO most compelling critique of utilitarianism -- namely, that it's too susceptible to bullshitting. People decide what they want to do, then completely…

Lots of things are susceptible to misuse. That doesn't invalidate them unless they are in fact misused. Moreover I don't see how you can conclude on a whim what's possible to estimate and what is not. Given these things take expertise in the relevant field and more than just casual analysis. Finally, it's not like there is a small margin of error. Can you even really comprehend 30,000 deaths every single year caused…

I would absolutely consider speeding up R&D to save that number of lives. I'm 100% behind self-driving cars. I think self-driving cars will eventually reduce the number of road deaths significantly.

I don't think the case has been made yet that today's tech will reduce the number of road deaths. I don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of the claim "this works great, trust me".

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#275

Post by zodPod »

mikeash wrote: post #167
abduhl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an ends justify the means argument. How many lives have been saved TO DATE with self driving cars? How many lives will be saved IN THE FUTURE with self driving cars? What is the acceptable casualty rate to get from where we are now to where you think we will be in the future. Is your family an acceptable casualty? If not, then why is mine?

"Is your family an acceptable casualty?" is a pointless question. It can be applied equally well to the opposite argument: what is the acceptable casualty rate for not advancing safety in this way? Is your family an acceptable casualty? Continuing on with the status quo is just as much of an action and a choice as pushing forward with automation. Both choices are going to get people killed. We can either evaluate the…

I don't necessarily disagree with you but one thing that I think a lot of people are seeing is you are relinquishing control of your car to a computer. When I think of computers I often think of things that I CAN MAKE WORK but that aren't inherently trustworthy. Sure they're great for things like math and stuff but when I try to run a new piece of software I expect crashes and they generally happen. NOT ALL SOFTWARE. But a good bit of first gen software.

So do I really want untested first gen software released without extreme safety standards and heavy testing? No. Do I think the net result of that happening would be a safer driving experience? No. Give me the iOS 9 or so of self driving car software or the unix. Not the Amazon Fire phone.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#276

Post by droopybuns »

The comments in this thread make me realize that there is a large amount of HN readers who have never had to deal with the government.

Yes, the penalty is scary looking, but it is par for the course. You don't get exposed to it if you are doing amateur/freelance/e-commerce.

As soon as you touch critical national infrastructure (Telcom, NTSB, Healthcare, finance) then you have to deal with the government, which never forgets to remind you of the threat of authorized violence and financial penalties.

If you want to play at the high stakes tables, you have to pay the blinds. If that's too scary, then stay at the smaller tables.

The unfairness commentary here is pretty naive.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#277

Post by kefka »

smallnamespace wrote: post #260
kefka wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that kind of talk, only those "well connected" can readily do that. Hmm. Regulatory capture? Yeah. That.

If by 'well-connected', you mean people who have the means and resources to properly test their products, then I agree.

"Product" ? I'm seeing a demo he wasn't selling.

And when a big govt stick comes a'knocking, unless you're also big and well connected, you will get shut down.

This was clear as a way to "do insane amount of documentation in a laughably short timeframe, or fuck your business with a fine-stick."

Yeah, GeoHotz is an ass, but this is inane. Great way to kill small businesses.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#278

Post by bdrool »

jdonaldson wrote: post #150
BurningFrog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the letter, it's a lot more than "answering a few questions". He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product, I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error, interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it.

Yeah, the extremely short timeline here combined with excessive fines puts this squarely in "F-You" territory.

As others have pointed out, the short timeline is mainly due to Hotz himself and his plan for putting the product on the market so quickly.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#279

Post by andreyk »

shraken wrote: post #138

I'm not involved in the machine vision field but I found his commitment to open and transparent academic publishing very admirable. He published a paper with their summer intern here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01230.pdf

I looked over that paper, and honestly it is nothing that impressive. Basically it just described applying off-the-shelf algorithms to a particular kind of data. It probably would be published and is interesting to look over, so I don't mean to deride the paper itself, but still it is just not that novel. Nothing about how their end-to-end self driving works or how it's better than the many competitors. So to me this was hugely underwhelming, really.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#280

Post by mlvljr »

slg wrote: post #201
Analemma_ wrote: post #16

He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…

I wrote the below less than 12 hours ago for another post still currently on the front page and it is just as appropriate here with the simple change of a company name. The arrogance of our industry seems to be growing. >One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it work…

Soylent? I remember that comment, good one :)
Post reply on HN