Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System • Hacker News Board

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#451

Post by lx3459683 » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

bobsil1 wrote: post #423

lx3459683 wrote: post #258

> "the interior is a disaster, there's no instrument cluster which takes your eyes off the road" This is the most WTF aspect of the model 3 to me and seems to confirm that there isn't going to be some last-minute mitigation. I know it was done because autopilot was expected to be mature by the time model 3 rolls out, but I don't see how it can even be street-legal when you need to look away from the road to determine…

I’ve driven a P3D and it was fine. Currently driving a Toyota which also has speed in center. So do Minis.

I'll take your word for it. From the pictures I've seen the vertical distance between the screen and the windshield looked big enough to block most of your view of the road when looking at the screen. Unlike a Toyota where the display is vertically positioned the same as any other dashboard.

There's an entire generation of traffic safety cameras that detect people looking down away from the road and it looks to me like they'd be tripped by a model 3 driver just reading their speed...

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#452

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #446

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every application I can think of off the top of my head, but mostly in the ones that apply to Tesla, you truly don't, except when the law or a contract says otherwise. I'm sure there are exceptions for things that don't apply to Tesla (or for that matter SpaceX). Here's what's inside of every autonomous vehicle ever made: a message-passing subsystem, sensors, fusers, navigation, dynamic control, actuator device dr…

Do you have a book where you just explain various things in this style? I’d buy it.

Interesting. I guess it's time for me to pick up another hobby!

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#453

Post by swyx » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 3:22 AM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #450

ryandrake wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the same thing about the burnout and turnover. Do companies really think they are saving money by paying peanuts, grinding people down to burnout, and then constantly having to rehire/retrain new people as the old ones leave? Meanwhile the code is a mess because nobody has been there longer than a year and there is no architecture or design continuity. Just frantic patches over other frantic patches by burnt…

Does paying peanuts here mean—not very top of market? Or?

i assume it means an above median annual salary but a very poor hourly rate. usually these discussions omit a calculation of to what extent the engineers took the job knowing this already and still decided to do so of their own free will, and how much is... not so voluntary.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#454

Post by altitudinous » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 3:25 AM UTC

Every IT system in the world is the worst in the world according to some tech who performs firefighting on it. These tweets apply to nearly every system. Singling out Tesla is pretty unfair!!!

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#455

Post by carlivar » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 3:48 AM UTC

rrcaptain wrote: post #389

misiti3780 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Elon is a big Windows fan and pushed hard to run the whole shop on Microsoft tech wow - this is surprising to me and wasnt mentioned in the biography - any ideas why ?

Because it runs counter to the "epic nerd" persona Musk was trying to build with his authorized biography. Windows isn't cool right now.

When was it cool?

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#456

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #11

I used to work at SpaceX on the team that did a piece of software called "WarpDrive". It was a massive monolithic ASP.NET application, with large swaths done with ASP.NET WebForms and a slow frontier of ASP.NET MVC gradually growing when I was working there. This application was responsible for practically everything that ran the factory: inventory, supply chain management, cost analysis, etc. Elon is a big Windows f…

When Musk became CEO of PayPal, he tried to switch the servers from Unix to Windows. Of course the founders revolted and fired him for such an dumb and wasteful idea.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#457

Post by bobsil1 » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

lx3459683 wrote: post #451

bobsil1 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve driven a P3D and it was fine. Currently driving a Toyota which also has speed in center. So do Minis.

I'll take your word for it. From the pictures I've seen the vertical distance between the screen and the windshield looked big enough to block most of your view of the road when looking at the screen. Unlike a Toyota where the display is vertically positioned the same as any other dashboard. There's an entire generation of traffic safety cameras that detect people looking down away from the road and it looks to me li…

I see what you're saying, but the P3D's speed was top left on the screen, felt like a non-issue. Maybe driving it longer I'd feel differently, was a test drive.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#458

Post by crubier » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 4:19 AM UTC

agitator wrote: post #409

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who used to write navigation and control software for autonomous vehicles who occasionally gets downvoted for telling people that you really don't need a fancy RTOS for this stuff, you really don't need a fancy RTOS for this stuff. Linux is a very common platform for highly responsive robotic systems. I promise that their pid control isn't an Electron app.

As someone who worked on RTOS systems and now works on autonomy. These things frighten me everyday. What frightens me even more, is the people who work on autonomy without a real grasp on determinism. It's unfortunate that the people who have the most high tech backgrounds (phds in computer vision AI, etc) applicable to autonomy, have never implemented safety critical autonomous systems outside of a research project…

Having worked several years on critical embedded systems in aerospace, I would tend to agree with you.

But on the other hand, has any Tesla car ever had an accident because of this? At some point, "heavily tested and validated end to end in real-life conditions for years" and "formally proven on a simplified model using reasonable assumptions made by human engineers" become relatively close in terms of how much trust you can put in a system.

But somehow we tend to prefer to later. I am not sure if this paradigm is still relevant these days.

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#459

Post by jerkstate » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #452

mikeash wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a book where you just explain various things in this style? I’d buy it.

Interesting. I guess it's time for me to pick up another hobby!

check out comma.ai for a mostly open-source implementation

Re: Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

#460

Post by forapurpose » Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 4:41 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #300

forapurpose wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to match the right tool (AI driving) to the right job (well-defined, well-controlled situations). I seem to recall that similar ideas go back to the early 1990s, at least, for highways: Drive your car to the entrance ramp, plug in your destination, and the autonomous system takes it from there. But for many of these things, such as the Bay Bridge or a highway, it seems like there is a simpler solution: Put…

Ive been picturing the rail problem for some time as well. Not just for cars, but also for cargo... just have a constant gondola-like conveyer that detaches a platform from the line to slow it enough to allow for cargo to get on, then re-zip-it backinto the line and speed it along, de-rail it once it hits its exit/location... ideally though, in cities, there would be no surface streets and all cars would have their o…

> What would SF look like if a superstructure was built above all streets and all pedestrian and bike traffic was moved up there?

The street level would be dark and storefronts would become difficult to access. If the stores moved up to the 2nd floor (a massive transformation of real estate, probably greatly reducing available living space), what would go on the first level? Not many people would want to live in the dark.