George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’ • Hacker News Board

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#201

Post by slg » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #16

He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…

I wrote the below less than 12 hours ago for another post still currently on the front page and it is just as appropriate here with the simple change of a company name. The arrogance of our industry seems to be growing.

>One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it works despite something like Uber's or Airbnb's total ignorance of the law. Sometimes it fails like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations. Seems like comma.ai is falling in the latter camp.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#202

Post by taco_emoji » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

jtmarmon wrote: post #97

patcheudor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not mission critical, rather life critical. I've worked on several life critical systems as a security researcher, helping to develop controls in tightly controlled environments to keep people safe. Work on software controlled switches in industrial machines mostly. As I've followed these developments and those of Google and Tesla I've been wondering at times if I live in some alternate universe. The level of diligen…

i understand where you're coming from, but there is a counter argument to what you're saying, which is that although there may be some dangers to things like the comma one and tesla autopilot, their release may save more lives than they edanger, having a net positive to humans. humans are pretty bad at driving

That's even MORE of a reason for the NHTSA to ask these questions. If the first-to-market autopilot system is too dangerous, that will destroy the public's trust in any future autopilot system, no matter how much of a net benefit it provides.

It's like how IUDs (birth control device) are disproportionately unpopular in the United States despite many benefits - all because of one particular brand that caused infections with horrible repercussions:

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/09/why-are-iuds-...

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#203

Post by djrogers » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #80

ceterum_censeo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards

Oh, well that sounds like you'd know about it, if you live in the US. Should make it easier to answer all of this still.

It's also the first thing that comes up when you google the term - I'd think an autopilot startup wouldn't have a problem with that one...

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#204

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #161

pdog wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe the nerve of some of these Silicon Valley randroids. If they're so great, why do they think a little bit of regulation is going to kill them?

Is this a joke? If not, you clearly didn't read the letter; it's more than "a little regulation", it's a huge set of requests on an unreasonably short timeline. With regard to the more general point of your post, even if it's nominally possible to eke out a profit under overburdening regulation, you're still allowed to take a principled stand against it.

It's an unreasonably short timeline if you're a bakery owner. Not when you're about to release a driver-assist hardware. He should have most of the required documents and information already prepared, or else he really has no business being anywhere near car hardware.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#205

Post by cloudjacker » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

Egohotz is back!

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#206

Post by idsout » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

brianbreslin wrote: post #22

Something seems fishy to me. Cruise which GM bought for $1B a few months back was working on similar tech. Having only raised $3M he could have EASILY sold his tech/team to Chrysler or Ford or Hyundai, or any other car company for $100M and made his investors super happy and himself very rich. So why "quit" when the feds ask you to deal with regulations that involve passenger safety. Its not like he had to spend $20M…

He posted the answer to this on Twitter: "Would much rather spend my life building amazing tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers. It isn't worth it."

Money isn't everything to some people. He has the true hacker ethos.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#207

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #190

jacquesm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incredibly reasonable list and something anybody active in the self driving car space should be more than happy to answer in the required detail.

What is your estimate of the required detail? Mine is 100,000 pages. Is your estimate, I don't know, only 100 pages or so? Look at their definition of the word "describe." This letter is designed to kill the company. That is a result I support, but, the people saying "This letter is designed to kill the company" are entirely correct.

Designing a self driving car on a hobby budget probably isn't doable ($3M doesn't cut it). 100K pages is probably on the high side, but let's say the order of magnitude is correct (25K, 50K, 100K, it's effectively all the same).

I think that he could have gotten away with showing a substantial effort towards answering the questions and getting some kind of experimental license to verify the technology is viable, I emphatically do not believe that the goal was to 'kill the company' given that all these questions have - for the automotive industry - reasonable answers and that if Hotz was serious about this that he should not have been totally blindsided by this request.

If he was then he should probably have researched the space a bit better before embarking on the project, it's one thing to be a 'hot hacker' but it's quite another to go into this business without the required knowledge about what being in that business will entail.

Trying to imagine SpaceX/Elon Musk backing out of the rocket business because 'the paperwork is just too damn complicated and lawyers are no fun', ditto for Tesla, Google or any other party that is trying to re-vamp some branch of industry.

If the tech is for real the reporting requirements are a reasonable extra cost to be born by the company, the amount of money available for this tech would dwarf the cost of the reporting.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#208

Post by DannyBee » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:02 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #142

BurningFrog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the letter, it's a lot more than "answering a few questions". He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product, I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error, interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it.

Yeah it seems a lot of the community here thinks that if he just threw together a few bullet points in an email response the NHTSA would sit back, say "Okay, great have fun!" and not, you know, make a big deal out of it. I, uh, disagree.

If he gave them the docs he certainly has on this stuff, and said "i am glad to sit down and walk you through any other answers or questions you may have", they'd be fine with it as an initial response.

I think you have pretty much already assigned a negative agenda to NHTSA, when they've just requested some info.

While they may have followups if they don't like the answers they get, of all the agencies you find, NHTSA is not one that tends to have a serious pre-bias towards anyone.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#209

Post by assface » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:02 PM UTC

shraken wrote: post #138

I'm not involved in the machine vision field but I found his commitment to open and transparent academic publishing very admirable. He published a paper with their summer intern here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01230.pdf

This is not peer-reviewed. This is a tech report. Anybody can post these.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#210

Post by xiphias » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 6:02 PM UTC

gavman wrote: post #130

hartator wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel $21,000 fine per day sounds pretty like "we want to shut you down". He never presented comma.ai as an autopilot but as a very smart line assist and adaptive cruise control.

By "we want to shut you down" I meant the NHTSA isn't presenting him with so many regulations and requirements that meeting them is impossible, effectively ending the product. They are definitely using the fine to force him to comply with their request to meet the very minimum bar of answering their questions about his product. This, as mentioned, makes total sense to me in terms of what government should do to prote…

Actually even the $21k fine should be nothing if he got $3M in venture capital. What's questionable is whether somebody can build safely an almost-self-driving car without a good team and with many years of experience in the field.