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

Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

teslamotors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 410 posts

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#361

Post by stcredzero »

sukuriant wrote: post #194
GenerocUsername wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear monger. What if what if what if... I'm not saying it couldn't happen, I'm just saying that possible new issues are no reason to persist the old issues

No. It's a car, and has the power to kill people on software malfunction, making it a critical system. Critical systems are tend to go through a much greater and more robust form of testing.

The destructive potential of a car exceeds that of a lot of handguns one can buy.

There have long been techniques for writing software as formal proofs of correctness. As far as I can tell, they haven't been popular with mainstream programmers because they are simply too different.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#362

Post by stcredzero »

bmelton wrote: post #323
ssmoot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except at a service center there's presumably the opportunity to replace the firmware chip or board if they brick it during the update whereas a bad OTA update leaves you little option. OTOH I'd risk a bad OTA update 1% of the time if it meant avoiding the service center the other 99% of the time. And I'm sure a bad update is just a call and a tow away from a fix at a Tesla service center. Unless you're on a road-tri…

I feel like you've uncovered a horror movie plot from the future. Teen girls take off on a road trip in their Tesla Model Z, when an unfortunately timed OTA update leaves them stranded in a land of backwoods hillbillies... with secrets they'd rather stay secret.

Cue dueling banjos?

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#363

Post by to3m »

repsilat wrote: post #338
Crito wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who actually lobbies for it? I can't imagine that gas station attendants themselves have much sway, and I don't see why station owners would want to keep it that way. Is it just regular old people in Portland who honestly believe it is best, even without any lobbying or propaganda?

People aren't smart. They like full-service, and they know it'd disappear if it wasn't the law. What they don't realise is that the reason it'd disappear is that they don't like it enough to pay extra for it. The stations themselves might not be against full-service, either (at least away from state borders.) It's an extra cost, true, but it's paid by all of their competitors, too, so it just drives prices up. Demand…

There are a couple of petrol stations near me that have recently started offering optional attendant service at peak periods, for no extra charge. This has been some time coming, I must say; last time I saw attendant service, it was probably the mid 1980s, and that petrol station was famous for being the only place in town that offered it. But anyway - even if it's got rid of, it may yet come back.

(I have no idea what's caused this. My personal theory is that it improves throughput at busy periods; many UK petrol stations have closed over the past 10-15 years due to the wafer-thin profit margins so those that are left can often get quite busy. But that's just a guess.)

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#364

Post by stcredzero »

mncolinlee wrote: post #236
bfe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acting in favor of individual businesses is usually orthogonal or antithetical to acting in favor of the free market. Big businesses and the politicians who love them often rely heavily on erasing the perception of that difference.

It depends whether you're describing "the free market" religion or "the free market" reality. In practice, most politicians mean an economy tilted in favor of multinational corporations when they use these dog whistle terms. It is an offense to everything Adam Smith stood for, but it's what they really mean by "free market." The real Adam Smith believed modern-style multinational corporations were a recipe for corrup…

dog whistle terms

That's a great phrase. I look on in trepidation at the almost mechanical way folks in their teens and 20's react to memes. I find parallels in the way programmers parrot half-truths and untruths. And of course, there's the joke that passes for political discourse on TV.

Really, we 1st world people aren't that much more sophisticated than 19th century Russian peasants chanting "Constantine and constitution" thinking "constitution" was Constantine's wife.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#365

Post by stcredzero »

hrayr wrote: post #150
rst wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, an OTA update mechanism is obviously more subject to third-party spoofing than an update delivered by physical ethernet from the dealership. (BTW, do Teslas apply OTA updates while the car is underway, or store them up for application when parked? If the former, then applying even a correct update to a car in motion could have all sorts of nasty consequences if it resulted in a sudden change to, say, r…

"do Teslas apply OTA updates while the car is underway" Even your cellphone doesn't update when it's 'under way', what makes you wonder a moving automobile will? If you hazard a guess as to how OTA's are applied to automobiles, I would guess it'll be in Parked, plugged in, and prompted to update by pressing an "Accept & Update" button.

There are realtime kernels that can update the apps, the OS, and install a new kernel without dropping a beat. VisualWorks Smalltalk had a system for loading code into a shadow of the running class hierarchy, then atomically committing the code changes. If you defined some functions for the transformation of existing objects, you could start a transaction in one version, then finish it in another.

We keep forgetting that lots of "advanced" features were actually invented decades ago.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#366

Post by stcredzero »

mcv wrote: post #247
Systemic33 wrote: post #230

So much for the american "free market"... What a joke. As a european, i can't even comprehend how ludicruous it sounds that a business can't sell it's goods directly. It's so outrageously wrong, that I can't find words that fit adequately.

I agree, it sounds ludicrous. But there are plenty of ludicrous instances in the EU where free trade gets banned by some stupid law legalizing a monopoly. As much as I'd like it to be, the EU is hardly perfect in this.

What makes it ludicrous is how much noise US politicians on the right make about "free market" and how they vilify "socialism" then turn around and pass legislation that implements massive market-distortions. It's basically massive demagoguery and corruption.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#367

Post by to3m »

mathattack wrote: post #231
grellas wrote: post #211

Paternalistic meddling with free consumer choices is always fraught with peril. Sometimes it is necessary to protect important principles in society. You can't discriminate based on race - that limits choice but who would support the contrary? You can't defraud people in selling products - ditto. You can't buy land to build a smokestack plant in a quiet residential neighborhood - ditto. Many other examples might be c…

New Jersey has a lot of these strange laws. They also force you to have full service at the gas station. The lobbies force the issue.

I believe you can fill your own car if it takes diesel fuel.

(This is probably not that interesting to most people, not even those who live in New Jersey, but it might be some evidence for - or, perhaps, against... - the idea that this is a strange law.)

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#368

Post by stcredzero »

acd wrote: post #340

I think that oil is poison for humanity, it leads to resource conflicts and providing money for evil governments. Thus we need to get off oil to have long term peace on earth. Elon Musk is a hero

It's not oil or other resource conflicts that are poison per-se. It's a system of conflict resolution that eventually and too often turns to armed conflict as "diplomacy by other means."

It's also a "human nature" that is prone to having one group of us kill another as a means of conflict resolution. Unfortunately, that is apparently a part of the natural behavior repertoire of Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes.

I assure you that governments will continue to do evil things and will find the money to do so, but over time governments will become less evil.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#369

Post by stcredzero »

kyrra wrote: post #66
digikata wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Planet Money episode[1] gives a interesting of the history of autodealers, with some additional info regarding the latest twists that had come up due the fiscal crisis too. [1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...

That's a fairly one-sided view on the situation. Just some random points: * Saturn tried the "no-haggle" new car buying experience. People generally liked this, though Saturn doesn't exist anymore. * "closing a dealer is hard". Dealers have to pay for the land they own. The cars on their lot tend to be bought with money from the bank (a bank really owns the cars). The dealers just have to pay insurance/interest on th…

Saturn tried the "no-haggle" new car buying experience. People generally liked this, though Saturn doesn't exist anymore.

That's mostly due to internal politics at GM when they were going bankrupt. Even though Saturn was one of the divisions making a profit, they got the axe.

Once again, internal company politics being a terrible proxy for rational decision making.

Re: Elon Musk: To the People of New Jersey

#370

Post by stcredzero »

larrys wrote: post #199
ghaff wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, the things he mentions are not very expensive service items--to say nothing of the fact that there's no particularly compelling reason to have them done at the dealer if you don't want to. (And talking about "tune-ups" is pretty close to an anachronism at this point.) Tesla, on the other hand, does have all its new electric car components which are all very impressive technically but about which re…

I buy luxury brands and have for a long time. The dealer experience is pretty darn good. I took delivery on a new Porsche. The transmission had a problem. So they flew a new one in from Germany by Fedex at a cost of perhaps $8,000 (after all it's pretty heavy) in air freight I was told. Loaner cars? Last time they gave me a brand new Cayman (I own a 911) with 300 miles on it. Other times Cayene Hybrids with 3k miles.…

(routine service maintenance was $450 to keep up the warranty Mercedes does something similar)

Mercedes in Houston charged you something like $175 or $250 just for bringing your car in.

Post reply on HN