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

Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

kqed.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

871–880 of 919 posts

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#871

Post by brokenmachine »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #786
coldtea wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of t…

The question is whether the problem is one of insufficient engineering optimization or whether it requires a step-function in technology that does not exist now. It appears to me that self-driving cars are of the former type, while flying cars are the latter. Current-resolution lidar, cameras, and radar seem to provide sufficient sensor input. The costs are too high by a long shot, but that may just be a question of…

> If you could get a power source that provided an order of magnitude or two greater power density than the best of those technologies, flying cars would be viable.

So essentially thousands of flying nuclear reactors piloted by average joes around the city.

That sounds really safe!

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#872

Post by dang »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #421
mtgx wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the "facts" you keep reading about (from the same companies trying to sell you on the technology) are extremely misleading. Tesla for instance does that statistic against "average driving" but the "Average driving" happens in cities. And most Teslas enable Autopilot on highways, where Tesla recommends enabling it, too. Accidents happen much less on highways, so of course this "statistic" looks better. Put Autopil…

It pains me to see you banned. You've been with HN a long time. I compared your recent comments to 6 months ago. They seem a bit better now. Why not just email and apologize? We all have bad days. Why let a string of bad days tank your 8-year history? Regardless of what you decide, I wanted to leave an encouraging comment. At least one person is thinking of you and cheering you on. Good luck.

If you go back to stirring up drama on HN with offtopic meta comments, we will ban you again, much sooner than the years-long, hundreds-of-emails, dozen-accounts process it involved last time. That was more agony than any other user has single-handedly managed to cause on this site, and we won't go through it again. No more of this please—nothing of the kind—nada—period.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#873

Post by hvidgaard »

radium3d wrote: post #760
hvidgaard wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should start with not using a misleading name, Autopilot.

Autopilot is not a misleading name actually. You, the press and others just have ingrained a false definition of the word. "An autopilot is a system used to control the trajectory of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without constant manual control by a human operator being required. Autopilots do not replace human operators, but instead they assist them in controlling the vehicle. "

If everyone defines Autopilot as an automatic system, shouldn't the definition in the dictionaries be updated? That was a rhetorical question, because it happens all the time.

Besides, Tesla claim that it can drive you unassisted on the highway, so they are very much coining that definition as well.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#874

Post by Piskvorrr »

dkonofalski wrote: post #854
Piskvorrr wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car did "see" an obstacle for over 6 seconds and did not brake for it, now someone is dead. You are haggling over semantics to make it look like this did not happen and/or this is not a bug. Atrocious. (Or, more charitably, "oops, somebody forgot that object persistence is a thing" does not excuse the result)

What? That's not at all what I'm doing and you're being extremely disingenuous to suggest that. I'm simply correcting misinformation. The car wasn't programmed to drive through anything. It was programmed to throw away information. Either way, it's an atrocious mistake and I've even said, elsewhere in these comments, that the people responsible for that code should be held liable for criminal negligence. There's no n…

I have misunderstood you then, and I apologize.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#875

Post by ReptileMan »

greedo wrote: post #812
ReptileMan wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not suicidal, but probably worthy of a honorable mention in the annual Darwin Awards roundup since it was a very bad judgement on his part. As an engineer - he should have known better than to continue to use the feature the moment it became unreliable for reasons unknown. Those kind of failure modes are extremely devious killers.

So all the engineers who experience a BSOD, they discontinue using Windows immediately after?

This is exactly what the navy did when the bsod parked that destroyer in a harbour 20 years ago.

When you have mission critical pieces of software (aka stuff that kills you) starting to behave in unexpected ways with unknown failure modes you stop using it asap until fixed.

I will gladly continue using my bsoding pc for gaming, but I won't use it in data center or to control a shuttle launch.

If a person uses gas oven that leaks from time to time and only a bit - how will you classify him.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#876

Post by pferde »

perl4ever wrote: post #861
pferde wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted because your reply is basically an unnecessarily long "nuh-uh!" - a dismissal without any counterargument. Wrapping that in a string of fancy words does not change the fact that you are not providing any argument at all.

I agree with the sentence quoted, and wanted to amplify it by noting that when something unexpected happens, even if it happens rather slowly, it can be impossible to deal with it. Because when you see that your assumptions were at least partially wrong, you likely start to question all, or most, of your assumptions about everything. Which can paralyze you for an extended amount of time or lead to just thrashing arou…

Yup, looks like I misunderstood your use of "this" at the beginning - I thought you were referring to the post you were replying to. My bad.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#877

Post by skgoa »

brandonmenc wrote: post #569
KurtMueller wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the car go park itself while I walk into the restaurant. Let the car go fill itself up with gas at night while I am soundly asleep.

> Let the car go fill itself up with gas at night while I am soundly asleep. I'm bearish on both self-driving and the universal adoption of electric cars, but everyone will be plugging their car in at home long before they can make one that drives itself to the gas station.

> everyone will be plugging their car in at home

I realize that a lot of people here are privileged enough to own a single family home, but the majority of humanity lives in apartments and parks on the street. Trickle-charging at home is not a universal solution. The only practical solution seems to be some form of rapid charging of the car's energy storage. Either by pumping huge amounts of amps into a huge battery pack, or adding some kind of chemical fuel that gets reacted in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#878

Post by Piskvorrr »

perl4ever wrote: post #860
Piskvorrr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means that both pilots 1.set the parameters (not a single button push), 2.follow closely that the plane does what they would have, 3.ready to take over at any moment, as the AP cannot even reliably detect it's not on the happy path; this does take off some of the cognitive load off the pilots, but it's very far from the narrative "push button and have a coffee" that's being peddled here. In fact, it's more of "…

"In fact, it's more of "hold this heading and glideslope" than anything else - a smarter cruise control, if you will." Sounds like Autopilot on Teslas is the same thing as an autopilot on an airplane, so why is everyone angry at them again? Somehow they're responsible for the majority of the public having misconceptions about both ?

Somebody is promoting and selling "full self-driving", with fine print specifying "in some indeterminate future". Perhaps that could be...nah, not related at all.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#879

Post by lb1lf »

greedo wrote: post #834
lb1lf wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, automated systems will also do unpredictable things - the point I was (poorly, as it were) trying to make was that the mix of autopilots and humans are likely to create new problems; without being able to dig it out now, I remember a study which found that humans had problems interacting with autonomous vehicles as the latter never fudged their way through traffic like a human would - say, approaching a traffic…

I think that unless a single form of AI is dictated for all vehicles, we can't safely make the assumption that autonomous vehicles will obey the same rules. Hell, we can't even get computer to obey the same rules now, either programmatically or at a physic level.

-That is a very valid point.

And, of course, they should all obey the same rules (well, traffic regulations being one, but also how they handle the unexpected - it would be a tough sell for a manufacturer who rather damaged the vehicle than other objects in the vicinity in the event of pending collision if other manufacturers didn't follow suit...

Autonomous Mad Max-style vehicles probably isn't a good thing. :/

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#880

Post by maeln »

easytiger wrote: post #320
maeln wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. But what I wish for is better public transport in countryside. Automated train that can run also late at night and more bus would have relieved most of my woes when I was living in the countryside.

You could even make it so that you drive it yourself and keep it outside your home to use when you need. What an innovation that would be

Yeah, very clever. There is many reason why one would like to avoid having to take a care all the time:

1. I cannot drive if I went to a friend a drunk alcohol or consume weed

2. Why would I drive if somebody/something could do it for me, and i get to do whatever i want during this time

3. Gazoline, insurance, maintenance, repair, ... a car can be very costly especially if use intensively

4. Cars are polluting a lot, maybe I don't want to contribute to the issue of global warming

Post reply on HN