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Lyft Self-Driving

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Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#101

Post by nradov »

Robotbeat wrote: post #89
Pyxl101 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be? Is there a difference in competence significant enough to warrant such a difference in pay?

Consider that senior pilots are flying the biggest, most expensive planes with the most passengers and the most revenue. Even slight improvements in competency or safety look pretty good when you're talking about a 747 which costs the airline $400 million.

Competency and safety are relatively minor factors. The real reason is that senior pilots control the unions and airlines have to stop operating if pilots strike.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#102

Post by dang »

notliketherest wrote: post #18

I will never join the "shared ownership" communist utopia. And neither will most Americans that live outside of the cities. I appreciate innovation but spare me the feel good crap.

Please don't post ideological rants to HN. They lead to nothing good and so are always off topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#103

Post by [deleted] »

Game_Ender wrote: post #7

Based on their job openings [0] it looks like Level 5 is going head to head with Google, Cruise, and Uber and building a full autonomy software solution. Looks like they are close to square one though since they are hiring leads for essentially everything: localization, perception, prediction, and controls. It's an interesting to see all the players trying to have an out if someone withholds either the transportation…

[deleted]

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#104

Post by visarga »

so33 wrote: post #92
smt88 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese, disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in dense, central urban environments. Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads.

The NYC subway accounts for 5 million trips each day, taking millions of cars off the road because they don’t need to exist in the first place. Traveling with kids? Something people do with public transit and walking every day. Promoting walking encourages healthy lifestyles; promoting driving (or just sitting in a car and not doing anything) encourages the opposite. Elderly or disabled people take public transit all…

We have had self driving vehicles for a long time - they're called busses, taxis and trains, and can take many people at once who don't need to drive or own the transport. We're just automating that last one human who needs to hold the wheel of the bus/taxi/train and extending the reach of the network.

I'm a little bit worried about self driving cars being used for auto-detaining people and delivering them to police/terrorists. When you get into a sdc, you lose your ability to get off anywhere you want, it might lock up the doors and deliver you to the mafia or police for all you know.

Remember "auto-detention" I invented it here and now. :-)

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#105

Post by losteric »

sandworm101 wrote: post #88
smt88 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese, disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in dense, central urban environments. Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads.

And anyone with more than a handbag to carry. Many workers travel with tools. Im going to training next month and have to bring about 80lbs of various stuff with me. Hauling that in and out of busses, not to mention finding places to secure it while i sleep/eat, wouldnt be much fun. But it all fits in my car nicely. And no, i cannot send it by courier.

What kind of tools? Is there a functional reason for lugging your tools back and forth, or is that just how it's done?

Could you leave those tools at work/training if they had secure storage? Alternatively, could the training facility offer a set of training tools while you keep your personal set at home for training?

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#106

Post by visarga »

jsjohnst wrote: post #79
greentrust wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of data collected by your average Goog/Cruise/Uber autonomous vehicle is on the order of gigabytes per minute. I highly doubt Tesla is phoning home data at that level of detail.

Correct, but how many cars does Goog/Cruise/Uber have on the road daily collecting this high data rate? 1k? Let’s be overly optimistic and say 10k. Remember, normal driver driven cars don’t apply here generally, just the research cars. Tesla on the other hand has hundreds of thousands of cars on the road and is rapidly on their way to 1M cars. Data won’t be as raw and abundant, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t potentia…

The kind of data Tesla collects is useful for general self driving, less so for solving hard cases. For that we need simulations and real life enactment, like Google does. We already have the basic data, we need the special case data now, or we could use the driving data from Tesla to discover new special cases.

Simply putting more SDCs on the road does not guarantee they will focus on the data they need.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#107

Post by prakster »

nradov wrote: post #101
Robotbeat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that senior pilots are flying the biggest, most expensive planes with the most passengers and the most revenue. Even slight improvements in competency or safety look pretty good when you're talking about a 747 which costs the airline $400 million.

Competency and safety are relatively minor factors. The real reason is that senior pilots control the unions and airlines have to stop operating if pilots strike.

Solution: Self driving planes.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#108

Post by heyalexej »

visarga wrote: post #104
so33 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYC subway accounts for 5 million trips each day, taking millions of cars off the road because they don’t need to exist in the first place. Traveling with kids? Something people do with public transit and walking every day. Promoting walking encourages healthy lifestyles; promoting driving (or just sitting in a car and not doing anything) encourages the opposite. Elderly or disabled people take public transit all…

We have had self driving vehicles for a long time - they're called busses, taxis and trains, and can take many people at once who don't need to drive or own the transport. We're just automating that last one human who needs to hold the wheel of the bus/taxi/train and extending the reach of the network. I'm a little bit worried about self driving cars being used for auto-detaining people and delivering them to police/…

The only way to travel in a SDC is with a set of diagonal pliers and screwdriver in you pocket.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#109

Post by fatbob »

hanbura wrote: post #91
smt88 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walking and mass transit suck for people who are: traveling with kids, obese, disabled, short on time, carrying groceries, elderly, and/or in a place with bad weather. That's not even mentioning people who can't afford to live in dense, central urban environments. Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads.

>Self-driving, solar cars solve all problems of mass transit and are far cheaper, since they use existing roads. They don't solve the arguably most important issue: road capacity. A bus that takes the same space on the road as 2-3 cars seats 30 people (and holds another 30 standing). Self-driving cars enable somewhat more efficient traffic patterns, but they will have a hard time overcoming the order-of-magnitude lea…

Buses are not always full. Their average capacity does not have an order of magnitude advantage.

Re: Lyft Self-Driving

#110

Post by Turing_Machine »

skywhopper wrote: post #10

To the extent this works anytime soon it will be so slow and inconsistent that it won’t be economically successful. Any driving service that works worse at night, in bad weather, or outside small well-mapped neighborhoods will not be comprehensive or reliable enough to be economically viable. Also the idea that self driving cars will end traffic is a dangerous lie to tell. Self driving cars will do nothing to reduce…

> outside small well-mapped neighborhoods will not be ... economically viable.

Hmm... but aren't the small well-mapped (and high-density) neighborhoods where almost all the money is?

You see way more conventional cabs roaming Manhattan and the Chicago Loop than you do on a county road outside Minot, North Dakota.

Also, there's no reason they couldn't keep some human drivers for trips outside the dense core regions. The apps know where you're going before the car is even dispatched, after all.

"This guy is going from the Art Institute to the Field Museum... send him a robocar." "This guy is going from O'Hare to a farmhouse on the outskirts of Kankakee... send him a human driver."

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