Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics • Hacker News Board

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#141

Post by SkiFire13 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:19 AM UTC

hinoki wrote: post #87

esskay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIP to every single camera in existence if that happens. Lidar is awful with damaging camera lenses.

I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers? It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...

> The biggest concern is not photographic cameras but rather the video cameras mounted on autonomous cars to gather crucial information the cars need to drive themselves.

So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#142

Post by rfv6723 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

donkey_brains wrote: post #135

rfv6723 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflic…

Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory?

The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility prevented the Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise triggered.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#143

Post by galangalalgol » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:21 AM UTC

zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

Since lidar has distance information and cameras do not, it was always a ridiculous idea by a certain company to use cameras only. Lidar using cars are going to replace at least the ones that don't make use of this obvious answer to obstacle detection challenges.

The reasoning is cynical but sound. If the system uses only the sensing modes people have, it will make the mistakes people do. If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win. It doesn't matter if your system has fewer accidents if some of the failure modes are different than human ones, because the jury will think "how could it not figure that out?"

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#144

Post by mikeyouse » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

shinycode wrote: post #130

hinoki wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look this up, because I had never heard of it. How could a lens be damaged by infrared lasers? It turns out it’s the sensors that are easily damaged by high powered lidar lasers. https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/keeping-lidars-from-zapping-ca...

There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone cameras. It’s not even clear if Apple takes those under warranty. We’ve seen car review YouTubers that got their iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera) while reviewing

One such review where Marques shows how it happened to his phone

https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=cANJDT5BLfdd9ZUT

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#145

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:26 AM UTC

pu_pe wrote: post #24

oblio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, I guess, even more advanced surveillance.

LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually

People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about.

They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#146

Post by cucumber3732842 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:27 AM UTC

rfv6723 wrote: post #89

oblio wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, I guess, even more advanced surveillance.

Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflic…

This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#147

Post by generuso » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:29 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #22

orliesaurus wrote: post #9

Interesting to see the cost curve drop ... this always changes the market. I have been watching the sensor space for a while. Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. ALSO regulatory and mapping integration will matter. I tried to work with public datasets and it's messy. The hardware is only one part! BUT it's exciting to see multiple vendors in the space. Competition might push vendors to r…

> Cheap LIDAR units could open up weird DIY uses and not just cars. Interestingly, there are already some comparatively cheap LIDAR units on the market. In the automotive market, ideally you need a 200m+ range (or whatever the stopping distance of your vehicle is) and you need to operate in bright direct sunlight (good luck making an eye-safe laser that doesn't get washed out by the sun) and you need more than one sc…

Neato from San Diego has developed a $30 (indoor, parallax based) LIDAR about 20 years ago, for their vacuum cleaners [1].

Later, improved units based on the same principle became ubiquitous in Chinese robot vacuums [2]. Such LIDARs, and similarly looking more conventional time-of-flight units are sold for anywhere between $20-$200, depending on the details of the design.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22A+Low-Cost+Laser+Dis... [2] https://github.com/kaiaai/awesome-2d-lidars/blob/main/README...

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#148

Post by servo_sausage » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #74

servo_sausage wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful but not at all required. Camera + radar is sufficient for driving, and camera+ USS is fine for parking. Radar is just cheaper than the number of cameras and compute, it's also not really a strict requirement. Look at how the current cars fuck up, it's mostly navigation, context understanding, and tight manoeuvres. Lidar gives you very little in these areas

All of the actually WORKING self driving systems use LIDAR. This is not a coincidence.

I work with programs approaching L3+ from L2, with the requirement that the system works for 99% of roads (not tesla before people start fixating on that).

We find that the cases where lidar really helps are in gathering training data, parking, and if focused enough some long distance precision.

None of these have been instrumental in a final product; personally I suspect that many of the cars including lidar use it for data collection and edge cases more than as part of the driving perception model.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#149

Post by Zanfa » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:32 AM UTC

Mordisquitos wrote: post #124

Zanfa wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.

> the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.

My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much.

Re: Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics

#150

Post by squigz » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 11:33 AM UTC

rfv6723 wrote: post #134

squigz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a random internet comment proves anything about society at large. People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others. Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.

History shows that whenever surveillance gaps appear, chaos follows. The explosion of crime during early urbanization was the specific catalyst for the creation of modern police forces because traditional social bonds had failed to provide oversight in growing cities. Japan maintains its safety through a deep-rooted culture of mutual neighborhood monitoring that leaves little room for anonymity. Even China successful…

Police forces nor "neighborhood monitoring" are equivalent to mass surveillance though.

Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?