Live data from Hacker News

Welcome Chris Lattner

tesla.com

111–120 of 291 posts

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#111
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. NNs can behave non-deterministic (i.e. they produce different output for same input because AFAIK some operations on GPUs are undeterministic) and it makes sense to invest into software systems that clearly take a closer look on software correctness. One idea to get correcter code is clean code layout (I heard good things about the LLVM code base), simple to read code and compilers that exploit theoretica…

It ultimately depends on how much of the car's action is driven by DNNs, a miss-classification in the CNN can easily lead to a car crashing on a highway and causing a pileup. DNNs are so complex, you can't really write unit tests like you typically do for deterministic code. That's why some of the big banks flat out refuse to implement any form of deep learning for risk analytics. They're much more reliant on simpler…

Yeah and it will happen. I am all for self-driving cars simply as they increase the life-quality for our civilization (more independency, cheaper ways of transportation, less fatalities), but there will be accidents and then you have to analyze them (which is good).

In the end you want to know what did go wrong (the public will demand it and they are right) and it might be misclassification.

But that is not enough. You want to know why did it classify situation X wrong? So the answer is because the inference network (which was created via the training network) computed its weights because the input was Y. Now you might throw your hands in the air and say "oh it's complicated, the network is undeterministic, blame NVidia", but you can also go farther and build your networks deterministic (which is possible and AFAIK not a performance penalty). Compiler research helps in at least guaranteeing that certain parts of code are deterministic which makes it easier to debug and maybe avoid complex NN misclassification scenarios, but the way to do it doesn't have to do much with NN's itself but more with language design and (real-time, in particular deterministic) OS research.

So the statement oh, that's so complex, we do not no why we misclassified is no excusion, we can do better.

For starters we have to publish NN papers with implementations that describe how to make a particular NN out of given trainigs data (provide that too). We already publish the code and network structure (see caffe, etc.), but often with pre-trained models that have been build on a cluster with many forms of training-data going through network structure, etc.

Now at the moment you read a paper, head to the published code (often the case, again a desirable property of the ML community) and try to reproduce some examples by training on the data.

However it is hard to say in the end, if your network is really as good as the published, as a simple

  $ diff my-net-binary-blob.dat tesla-net-binary-blob.dat
might fail, if the stack (training etc.) to build the network is undeterministic. However if you have a good (i.e. deterministic) stack you might be able to reproduce NNs bit-for-bit, which makes it simpler to answer the question "why did we missclassify".

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, that was unexpected. Great poach by Tesla. Tangential, but I really hate the term "poach" when referring to recruiting employees. We shouldn't think of hiring people as "poaching", because employees are not property. You can't "poach" an employee because there's no ownership, and employees should be free to make their own decisions regarding their employment opportunities.

I hope you similarly dislike the term 'head-hunt' on the grounds that no-one's head is severed. 'Poach' is a useful metaphor that suggests that one company actively tried to lure an employee from another. It is a metaphor, it doesn't imply that the employee is a chattel. I think one can get a bit too precious about these things.

> I hope you similarly dislike the term 'head-hunt' on the grounds that no-one's head is severed.

this comparison really seems to miss the mark.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#113
post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I've used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy/unaware coding can do to it. Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrib…

Can you explain why you call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler?

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you're reading too much into things? Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time. You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". (I have no inside k…

... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on. Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. An…

> kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industryt

You know, it takes years if not decades to invent a product like the iPhone. You can't just say "Oh, Apple used to make iPhones, what has Tim Cook invented?". Like, give it some time, man.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#115
post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

software correctness eh?

so build the autopilot and other systems in haskell?

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#116
post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

Swift, XCode, and Apple software in general don't scream reliability to me. No doubt Lattner is a smart guy, but I'd be more comfortable with a smart guy from NASA or somewhere similar with experience developing survival-critical software systems.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#117
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/funny-...

So there are 2 meanings, and I read it "funny peculiar". But why is it "funny peculiar"? I think it is right to say Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs (as in "most popular tech/computer-stuff person for the public"), so working for Tesla has some kind of "coolness" factor and they have good marketing and might beat Google's self-driving endeavors simply via time-to-market (similar to IPhone). But why is that funny (haha…

I think you are over-thinking and misreading this. One person says something to the effect of "I think Musk is the new Jobs" another replies "I think Apple will die without a cultlike leader". The thing at the beginning of the reply is just a mostly content-free throwaway phrase not intended for the Talmudic analysis you're giving it.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#118
post #116
post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

Swift, XCode, and Apple software in general don't scream reliability to me. No doubt Lattner is a smart guy, but I'd be more comfortable with a smart guy from NASA or somewhere similar with experience developing survival-critical software systems.

I know the first thing I thought about was does this mean Tesla's going to start writing its software in Swift. If so they are fucked :P. (BTW I write non-critical consumer software in Swift as my day job)

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interested to see your sources on this. I was under the impression Android started first but Apple beat them to the announcement

I had read they had a "Dream" android phone prototype they were working on that was blackberry like [1]. There was also rumored to be a second one that was more iPhone like slated for down the line, but when the Apple demo happened Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone and the second one became the first. Interesting that Google recognized the importance and adapted quickly while Ballmer laughed it…

If you walk through the new London Google office by kings cross, you can see the original android phone right by their restaurant. It looked just like a blackberry / Nokia E62..
Post reply on HN