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Comment by bcohn91 | Hacker News Reader

Why is the first comment on HN minimizing this truly impressive project? Of course it's not perfect, he's ONE person.

Because this article reinforces our bizarre cultural notion that one person deserves all the credit for some innovation.

Nevermind the ridiculous amount of engineering that was required to build all the tools he's using and the order of magnitude more engineering required to make this a safe, mass producible product.

But nah, let's just praise the founder, allow him to get rich while we all do the dirty work.

1. Make a working prototype

2. Impress investors

3. Hire others to finish the job

4. Profit

Tesla customers invest in Musk. Musk invests in Hotz. Hots invests in developers. Developers in researchers. We're all delegating until we find someone who can finish the job. We're investing in people to hire the right people.

You're assuming that Hotz then does nothing, and also Musk. You really think Musk is sitting around with all this free time not doing anything? You don't think it would all fall apart without the key people still in key roles?

It doesn't work this way. You just move up the value chain.

This comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it.

Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bit ridiculous, but this is pretty damn amazing.

If this is the "hacker ethos" then I want nothing to do with it:

> “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

> “ ‘If’ statements kill.”

> “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology. I just want to know how it all works.”

Hotz is pretty eccentric, but he's also pretty incredible. While technology wouldn't progress very far if everyone was like Hotz, I also don't think it would get very far without people like Hotz.

Exactly. You can appreciate aspects of a person and the work they do without deifying them in their entirety. Linus Torvalds and weev (being an extreme example) fall into this category.

Agreed. I can appreciate people who can go heads down and get things done. Where it falls apart for me is when those people get deified--or deify themselves, like that last quote demonstrates. And when they demonstrate an unwillingness to collaborate.

Then may you get what you want.

I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.

Have you ever spoken to a journalist? It's their job to sell clicks with charged headlines and over-blown quotes. If they followed you for a day I promise they'd generate some equally stupid quotes.

Yes, that kind of journalism exists, but does it have a place here?

Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.

To expand on that: '“I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple"', which seems like an attitude of someone without a solid understanding of ML. But who knows, maybe he's figured out something the rest of the field hasn't...

He implemented methods from the literature using a sensor specifically designed for this application. Grad students do this for class projects.

You're just easily impressed, that's all :)

It's not "one guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt" though, it's something hundreds of people have been doing for years now. He's more of a media hacker than he is a car hacker.

He didn't write the article, it's not his fault it comes off as cocky. He is tackling an impressive project on his own, and spitting in the face of corporations. He should be giving talks at DEFCON about this, teaching people how he did it.

Your comment screams a superiority complex, but I bet that you are actually a nice person in real-life. Hotz is doing good work, and everyone in the technical field is relying on work done decades before they were born.

He sure didn't write the article, but looking at him and what he's saying on the video gives me the same impression of cockiness. But I bet he's actually a nice person in real life. ;)

It's an impressive personal project, no doubt about that. It's however also important to recognize the difficulty of having a system that works in mass production and handles all kinds of situation. Like someone said earlier it's easy to have the car drive in clear day with very visible markers. The hard part is when it rains, when it's foggy, when things are less optimal, etc.

Once he get to that point he'll find that part to be a lot harder than what he's accomplished so far.

He should give talks at defcon teaching people how he did it?

You mean like this one, from Defcon in 2013?

http://hackaday.com/2013/07/26/defcon-presenters-preview-hac...

Or The Defcon 19 How To CanBus Hack Workshop, that taught classes about this in 2011?

http://www.canbushack.com/blog/index.php?title=learn-to-canb...

Unfortunately for him, defcon prefers original content, not someone claiming credit for what has been demonstrated repeatedly in previous years.

A good point. I did some HTML for my elementary school when I was a kid, and the local newspaper put me up as a 'whiz kid' on their front page. Not that anything I did was shockingly complicated in the slightest, even for the web of that era. Journalists hype stuff, that's nothing new.

Reminds of the quote from "The Social Network"

>> "If they had engineered a self-driving car, they would've engineered a self driving car".

You are just being absurdly accusative in your comment. That guy has done a self-driving car with nothing but tools available in the market.

Putting a prototype self-driving car on actual roads without understanding the difficulty of that project seems like a legitimate, substantive criticism, and I don't care how many people are involved in the project.

Now, that's a very valid criticism. I don't care about his personality, but testing the car on live roads is asinine. And, this journalist jumps in and excitedly plays up how he was afraid for his life, etc.

Yeah, instead of going after the sensationalism, how about you discourage him from endangering the lives of others who weren't given the opportunity to make such a stupid decision?

Yes, It's one person. WE GET IT.

This article is a hero worship piece about a guy rather than a story about the technology. It's like how you can't find an article about Theranos that isn't actually just a photo-shoot/celebrity worship article about its founder.

Early investors love genius superheros because lesser investors are willing to pay a premium to invest with companies with a superhero and a story.

The guy clearly is technically brilliant. But I was referring to the results. Not how the results were achieved.

In the video, he claims to want to achieve level 3 driving. Let's see how he can do the following under non-perfect conditions:

- switching lanes

- stopping at lights

- turning cornerns

- turning left corners in traffic

Then we can move on to the more difficult situations.

I feel as though there are improvements that can be done in the environment of driving;

Have all stop lights have a beacon that will tell cars their state, "the light is green on north south, red on east west"

Have exit signs have beacons as well.

Have you thought this out? What happens when someone hacks their own beacons for lulz? So then the beacons have to have public key cryptography. Now all of the firmware will need to be audited and kept updated. Will there be over the air updates? What if someone cracks or steals the key? It seems to me that a target as juicy as "getting control of the North American road network" would be worth a major national power throwing a significant fraction of its resources at it, so that inflates the computing power such devices will need.

What if someone would install their own traffic light right now?

That's immediately visible to people with eyeballs. The first sign that something is going wrong isn't going to be a car colliding with another car. It's going to be, "Hey, why are those kids installing a light with a step ladder?"

Have you seen a traffic light? They're pretty substantial. How long would it take for you to make one in a hackerspace?

Contrast this with hacking OTA updates for traffic beacons. You might not even have to change any atoms around to do your dirty deed. You might not even have to be there physically.

Why would it need all that if the only thing it's doing is simply announcing its state?

So, 'simply' invest in billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements that will serve less then one percent of vehicles on the road?

It's a custom on HN. Look what happened when DropBox was announced on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

One person can build something that starts a revolution. See Woz/Apple.

The real issue here is that self-driving cars are probably the wrong place for that to happen in AI. At best, a solo project creates a crappy prototype where there was no product before (again, see Woz/Apple). The expectation for driverless cars is too high – they need to be 100% good, because your life is on the line, not 80% good.

What's the AI project that would blow people away, even if it was a shadow of a working prototype? I think that's the real question.

I don't follow why AI vehicles need to be 100% good. Plain old human-driven vehicles sure aren't and we accept their utility as being worth the trade.

In one word: liability.

In two words: actuarial tables

Imagine the day an AI vehicle causes an accident that otherwise would not have happened.

Even if AI cars are statistically better than humans on average, it's an issue of control. It's true that most accidents are avoidable and caused by human error, but most people are (perhaps overly) confident in their own ability to drive safely (this is also why people text and drive).

We, as the flawed beings we are, can't accept both giving up control and not getting guaranteed safety as a result.

>What's the AI project that would blow people away, even if it was a shadow of a working prototype?

Robot that can build a better robot?

It's neat that one person did that. But debugging on-highway? Bad idea.

Finding a safe place to test an autonomous vehicle on a budget is hard, but not impossible. Our initial testing in 2004 was in a large unused Sun parking lot in Fremont.[1] (Sun got carried away with expansion plans, and started building a big facility there. They paved the parking lots and poured the building foundations, then stopped construction.) Later off-road testing was at the Woodside Horse Park. We also looked into testing at the Hollister off-road vehicle park, and discovered we could book a sizable area on a weekday for our exclusive use. We never used that, though. We'd also looked into using the old FMC tank test track in San Jose, but never found a good contact there.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/8CZsJZ6SPbA2

Who cares about how many people built it? What matters is the end product, which is something that existed in the 80s.

Because "minimizing" is an emotional notion, and it's irrelevant. But providing a response to over-enthusiastic reception is informative if only because it presents the other side of the issue.

In other words, I don't care if this guy is painted as a genius or script kiddie. He's not relevant in my life, and I will forget about him a week later. However, the lessons about machine learning and engineering that I can find in thsi article is the reasons I subscribe to HN (yes, I don't really know shit about these topics, and don't have enough time to fill gaps with real sources), and this comment is the most informative, just because he tries to cover what the article didn't.

"Built a self driving car" set the bar way too high for what this guy did

I think it's fair given his mission to "crush Mobileye".

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