Lyft releases self-driving research dataset • Hacker News Board

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#101

Post by heymijo » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #97

heymijo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a commercial entity is sharing their data despite it being valuable to them What's their incentive to share?

Likely they see self-driving as a complement to their core business of vehicle-passenger matching rather than something they hope to profit from directly in a meaningful manner, in which case "commoditize your complement" applies. "A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets…

Excellent. Thank you

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#102

Post by heymijo » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #96

heymijo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a commercial entity is sharing their data despite it being valuable to them What's their incentive to share?

There's a few quick things that come to mind that may be possibilities: 1. If people use your dataset, they can do research into things relevant to you 2. Some people like working for companies that share data/code back with the community, helping hire & retain staff 3. Bits of publicity, either to potential engineers/researchers or others seeing lyft in a better light 4. Improvements in the domain, no matter where t…

Your ideas pair well with what Austhrow743 said above. Self driving as a complementary endeavor so Lyft's core isn't jeopardized by releasing the data.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#103

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

FBISurveillance wrote: post #88

cardigan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here, just waking up (I'm remote) - I can't edit my original comments so let me modify them here: I wasn't involved in our communications with Lyft, so I was talking about something I didn't know much about. My audience was just the anonymous commenteriat: turns out a lot of people whose opinion makes a material difference to Lyft/Scale read these comments too. Sorry for not realizing that; I probably wouldn't hav…

I seriously suggest you to add "Disclaimer" to every comment you leave on threads related to your company (see boulos' comments for example here on HN). Also, and I really mean this in a friendliest way possible, take a pause commenting here. You're not doing yourself a favor. I suggest you talk to your PR/marketing department before exposing more internal details, or run comments by them before posting.

[deleted]

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#104

Post by buboard » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

vinayms wrote: post #99

This will go against the grain here on HN. I don't know how anyone can imagine self driving even succeeding in real world, leave alone in the so called third world, unless all vehicles are self driven and operate in a controlled environment. There are some really important things pending, like accurate NLP and computer vision, but no, we need something shiny and useless. I think some smart computer scientists are get…

I 'm with you i think self-driving is an aspiration rather than a concrete goal. It literally means solving the quintessential problem of robotics which is a very very hard problem. We 'll probably have human level NLP before that.

Car driving is in decline http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/04/m...

A more concrete goal for transportation would be to reduce driving times even more by adopting remote work. That is reachable within the decade. In the meanwhile, car safety features should be ramped up, but autonomous driving so far doesn't seem very safe.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#105

Post by hitekker » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

cardigan wrote: post #85

cardigan wrote: post #13

(I work at scale) Hmm this blog post and the website doesn't mention that this dataset was mostly annotated by Scale (scale.ai), as part of a partnership with Lyft ... We're going to publish a blog post about this soon, but if anyone at Lyft is reading this, please figure out how to reasonably credit Scale since I doubt leaving out Scale completely from the announcement is in the spirit of the agreement. Scale should…

OP here, just waking up (I'm remote) - I can't edit my original comments so let me modify them here: I wasn't involved in our communications with Lyft, so I was talking about something I didn't know much about. My audience was just the anonymous commenteriat: turns out a lot of people whose opinion makes a material difference to Lyft/Scale read these comments too. Sorry for not realizing that; I probably wouldn't hav…

Your apology seems sincere but from the outside it looks like the CEO forced you to do so.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#106

Post by mitfahrener » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

cardigan wrote: post #85

cardigan wrote: post #13

(I work at scale) Hmm this blog post and the website doesn't mention that this dataset was mostly annotated by Scale (scale.ai), as part of a partnership with Lyft ... We're going to publish a blog post about this soon, but if anyone at Lyft is reading this, please figure out how to reasonably credit Scale since I doubt leaving out Scale completely from the announcement is in the spirit of the agreement. Scale should…

OP here, just waking up (I'm remote) - I can't edit my original comments so let me modify them here: I wasn't involved in our communications with Lyft, so I was talking about something I didn't know much about. My audience was just the anonymous commenteriat: turns out a lot of people whose opinion makes a material difference to Lyft/Scale read these comments too. Sorry for not realizing that; I probably wouldn't hav…

Word of advice. If someone is paying you for a service (Lyft in this case), you really should think twice, three times, four times, before you disparage them in public. Live and learn. Good luck.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#107

Post by jaimex2 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

obese_by_nature wrote: post #91

jaimex2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other way around. LIDAR doesn't work in fog, rain and snow.

It does work better in the dark than cameras?

Yep, it would as it emits 'light'. Then again so do headlights, just not 360 degrees.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#108

Post by jaimex2 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #76

jaimex2 wrote: post #18

It's looking more and more like everyone is just going to have to licence Tesla's FSD when its finished. They are the only ones with a broad real world data source and seem to have wisely taken the right path by not adopting LIDAR, focusing purely on passive vision.

Its not really that wise, its a large gamble. tesla decided to not include lidar because they couldn't find a manufacturer that would make one cheap enough for them/fell out over terms. Its not a statement of vision. Its exactly the same decision that Apple dropped Flash support for the iPhone, The processor and ram were too limited to support it, adobe refused to make compromises, and it was too late to change befor…

Anytime you do something new its a gamble and things will go wrong.

Tesla has never been shy of using expensive components for their products. Their entire strategy relies on bringing down battery costs.

Musk makes a very good argument for his choice to not use LIDAR - nothing alive on this planet uses it. Every creature navigates our world on vision, even dolphins and bats use sonar as a secondary system. The proof of concept is everywhere, Tesla is just adopting it.

And yeah, they're purely level 2 at the moment. I don't agree with their marketing as it does lead some to use it as something more before its ready.

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#109

Post by bigiain » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

yodon wrote: post #100

jahewson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The license specifies that "using the material for commercial purposes" is prohibited. The act of training a commercial model is obviously a commercial purpose. Whether or not the data is somehow incorporated into the resulting model is irrelevant. You're confusing this CC license with open source licenses that do not restrict use but require derived works to be created/distributed under certain condition…

CC is rarely a good license to choose other than to make yourself feel good. It does a terrible job of dealing with the actual matters of importance to a license outside of photo sharing (and even there it's not a good choice, as many photographers have found because it explicitly grants rights to others that the photographer may not be able to to grant to them, leaving the photographer open to lawsuits as has happen…

I'm curious about what you (or anyone else) would recommend as better license choices for datasets that might be used in machine learning model training?

(With, I suppose, hints about what restrictions you might be wanting to grant or prohibit by particular license options?)

Re: Lyft releases self-driving research dataset

#110

Post by alexmlamb » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

cardigan wrote: post #13

(I work at scale) Hmm this blog post and the website doesn't mention that this dataset was mostly annotated by Scale (scale.ai), as part of a partnership with Lyft ... We're going to publish a blog post about this soon, but if anyone at Lyft is reading this, please figure out how to reasonably credit Scale since I doubt leaving out Scale completely from the announcement is in the spirit of the agreement. Scale should…

(I work at Lyft)

I've had it with you Scale.AI people always trying to take credit for Lyft's work. We've been working weekends and nights for years, even the hourly workers have had to take unpaid overtime. All that time, I've never seen Scale.AI do extra work to help us before a big deadline.