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Comment by woodpanel | Hacker News Reader

> It's just hilarious the contortions of logic people will go to in order to put Musk down.

As much as I anticipate more cool stuff from Tesla, one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.

I actually laughed out loud when I saw the Headline of this submission "Tesla released a video of a car driving itself" being the number one entry on HN - sorry but this speaks volumes about the "neutrality" of HN regarding Tesla.

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Especially since this is trying to put a positive spin on Tesla having to announce that all their newly shipped cars will now come without those features that already existed in other cars for quite some time, and that anyone who purchases a car with them will not actually have those features until they're reimplemented and patched back in.

Could you provide couple links to videos of other cars driving like this and looking for parking without the owner :)

I too would like to see these videos.

It's not just self-driving cars. It's features like autonomous parking, lane-assitance, cruise control that automatically keeps the distance to the car in front of you and the like. Stuff like that has been repeatedly hailed by HN'ers as revolutionary when Tesla introduced it. Neglecting that other companies had those features for years.

Whenever Tesla is the topic it's almost guaranteed every negative comment on HN will be downvoted (I just see that right now with my comment above. It's constantly gaining and losing me karma).

Besides that, the self-driving Tesla isn't news. That is the joke here. It's a press release that gets frenzied on HN's #1 spot.

True. In a way this is kind of analogous to how Apple 'fanboys'/users behave when new features are introduced in iPhones but have already been present in Android for many years prior to that.

The oldest: copy & paste. The most recent: water resistant

I guess you've never downvoted anyone who disagrees with your opinion?

Can't speak for him, but I haven't. And I know others that haven't. Doing so only reflects an insecurity in your own opinion. I downvote for ad-hominems, or blatantly (easily verifiable) false claims.

Assuming that others downvote over differing opinions does paint you in the light of doing that yourself, though...

The downvote button isn't a disagree or dislike button. If I disagree (and care enough), I use the other button, reply, to try to understand their point of view and try to get them to understand mine.

The forum founders have stated that the downvote button is for disagree/dislike. If you think a comment is very bad, there's a 'flag' function if you click on the comment's timestamp (if you have the requisite karma).

My understanding was that downvoting was for comments which do not contribute to the conversation.

I'm both surprised and sad to hear that the downvote button's intended purpose is disagreement. This seems like it would discourage people from posting alternative points of view if their view is the minority.

As much as I tried looking for it on my own, I couldn't find one, so would you mind posting a source as to where the founders stated the purpose of voting?

I found this, but it's clearly Unofficial

http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq#downvoted

That said, the author currently has karma 111515 so he likely knows something about it.

The guidelines[0] do mention "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

From pg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

That... kind of makes me want to visit this site much less.

I often upvote both sides of a polite to-and-from between two parties with differing opinions, if the discussion is interesting, since that, I feel, adds to the quality of the whole page. I frown upon learning that it is encouraged to downvote if you disagree. Isn't it an equivalent of childish sticking fingers into your ears and hoping the other opinion goes away?

I usually try to argument with them, that's what a discussion is about, a exchange of argument and a test of there validity. Everything else, is just bubbling oneself into another ideology.

I've read comparisons of tesla's system vs others. They aren't even in the same ballpark. C&D has one with Infiniti, Mercedes, Telsa, and BMW.

They drove 50 miles on a fairly challenging road and recorded the number of times they had to grab the steering wheel. BMW and Mercedes were twice as often, infiniti about 3 times.

The #2 BMW "City streets also foil this equipment; occasionally the BMW lost the trail on clearly marked straight sections of pavement for no obvious reason at all."

The Tesla (with driving hardware 2 revisions ago, and software at least on revision ago) "the Tesla Model S locks onto the path ahead with a cruise missile’s determination and your hands resting on your lap.","The Tesla’s Autosteer performance can be distinguished from our other contenders by two words: no wobbling.", and "This system rises well above parlor-trick status to beg your use in daily driving.", "to Tesla’s credit, this is the only car capable of hands-free lane changes.", and " but by tallying only 29 interruptions in 50 miles, Tesla’s Autopilot app lives in a class of one."

So do other companies have lane following and related features... yes. Do they do as well as Tesla, not from what I've seen.

There's a video [1] by Mercedes from 3 years ago but they didn't demo autonomous parking like Tesla.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AihC5flC-38

Well those roundabouts do give them an unfair advantage. All joking aside, that video was of a research vehicle. The article above is for a car you can buy right now.

Well, you can buy the car with the hardware, but the self-driving part is still a ways out as far as public availability.

Wonder how long it will take for someone to jail break that hardware and hack up some v0.0.1alpha open source self-driving software for it. Not saying it would be wise, but it seems like the kind of thing people traditionally do for "locked up hardware, with software-enable coming in the future" (see gaming consoles, routers, etc).

Seems like something geohot can cook up, since he already has experience with both activities.

>> jail break that hardware and hack up some v0.0.1alpha open source self-driving software for it.

That "someone" would have to be a world leading AI research team, to "hack" something that would be a few decades ahead of the current state of the art. But alright.

Not really. The state of the art will get you a self driving car, just not a very safe one. Think more 1995 CMU Navlab and less anything that would ever be approved or marketed to the public. Self-driving car technology is 20 years old. Self-driving car technology I would be willing to trust my life to is... well -2 to -5 years old at best.

>> Not really. The state of the art will get you a self driving car, just not a very safe one.

Well, you can get a "not very safe" self-driving car by tying a brick to the gas pedal. It'll sure "drive" itself (in a mostly straight line).

Sure. But that's not the kind of thing a IoT hacker would consider a success. Someone might be content, however, with making a mod for Tesla that can e.g. follow "complex" paths of bright orange cones in a parking lot. Test it there, without being in the car themselves and put it on GitHub for bragging rights of having made a cool AI+Systems project. The problem is then someone might see that "cool hack", think it is more than it really is, and kill themselves turning it on while on the highway...

I think the interesting point here is that the hardware is available on all Teslas. The functionality shown in the video could be available on everyone's Tesla by installing an update. What they showed may be similar to what's been demonstrated by other companies in the past, but the potential for broad availability is novel.

It's about gathering training data. Any benefits for the users is secondary to that.

Some would argue that Gathering training data is beneficial to users in the long term, and the more aggressive auto-manufacturers go about it the better the cars will be to us users.

Eh, I don't think it's HN being fond of Tesla. I think it's just that Tesla (rather, Elon Musk) is very good at grabbing headlines and people are sometimes not as well informed about the state-of-the-art as they wish they were.

Same thing happens with other companies of course. Er, Apple, in particular. If you ask most people "what was the first smartphone?", they will probably say "the first iPhone"... even though there were a few earlier devices that used the same tech and would have been called "smartphones" today (by the same token as the original iPhone). They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did.

It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.

> They just never caught on in the same way as the iPhone did. It's marketing, innit. I don't think you can win against it.

The iPhone is synonymous with smartphone technology because its debut was a quantum leap ahead of the competition at the time (Blackberry, Palm, etc.). Google was working on a phone that used a physical keyboard until they saw the iPhone announcement and then quickly modified Android to ape iPhone/iOS.

I'm really sick of people trying to downplay Apple's innovations as nothing more than slick packaging and marketing. It's a stupid meme that refuses to die.

As far as I know, there were two new things that came along with the iphone: multitouch capacitive screen and 3g data plans that were actually worth using because apple threw their weight behind negotiating with the carriers. A few generations later, the iphone app store was a huge achievement too. All of those were huge, but there are also a lot of other innovations associated with the iphone that were actually around years before.

> one could say the same about akin-ness of people to find everything that Tesla does "super innovative" and "revolutionary" while the same features already existed in other cars for quite some time.

Exactly. I would go as far as saying it's simply infotainment.

Here is a test that I would use to determine the value of this. If it wasn't infotainment, it probably wouldn't need to be set to a soundtrack and would stand on it's own w/o music. The music creates an emotion and helps stave off the boredom.

I found this to be impressive because it seems to be working without LIDAR and performing very well. I may be wrong but most other contemporary cars that drive this well use expensive laser sensors

Controlled situation with easy pitches.

For example with the parking would the car know if the other vehicle has a driver and when that driver moves or is about to move?

Lidar sounds great, but 250 meters x 360 degrees without a tower on top of your car sounds cost prohibitive for now.

Cameras are cheap and I suspect the 12 cameras have overlap to help with depth perception and maybe even fault tolerances. I suspect as soon as LIDAR becomes a better solution for the price (if that happens) that Tesla will use them. Or maybe a hybrid of both so they can use the strengths of both as needed.

I hear you, but this move is >actually< super innovative and revolutionary, and has potential to catapult Tesla's self driving team way ahead of the pack.

There is no such thing as neutrality, unless you're a robot.

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