High School Club Builds Self-Driving Vehicle | Hacker News Reader

High School Club Builds Self-Driving Vehicle

theinstitute.ieee.org

46 pointssohkamyung26 comments

This paragraph is interesting:

For the most part, I’m self-taught. I took a series of C programming language classes a few years ago from Stanford’s GiftedandTalented.com program. I learned the Python programming language on my own. In eighth grade, I took advanced-placement calculus and statistics courses, which enabled me to take multivariate calculus in ninth grade. We are fortunate at my school because we have a professor from Foothill College who teaches this course. This class turned out to be useful for understanding machine-learning algorithms.

I’ve finished Udacity’s online machine-learning engineer nanodegree. I also interned at Nvidia, in Santa Clara.

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The opportunities available for self-education now are just fantastic.

Kudos to all those involved.

Wait. So, a high school student interned at Nvidia?

Don't know if it's still the case but when I was at Microsoft in the late 90s this was common, and they were given real work.

Is there something more to the kids being software prodigies? When I was young, there weren't that many. If there were, they didn't make the news. Today, it seems like they are more frequent and that many are in software. Has there maybe been a societal change that allows more to blossom?

Broader access to technology? There weren't many online courses or cheap computers 10 years ago

After I typed it, I thought about the price aspect. Prodigies that made the news, back when I was younger, often came from wealthier families. Today, prices are quite low for a bunch of things.

That does count as broader access, methinks. So, I suspect you're right. There are many, many sources of inexpensive education. I don't know if that would, statistically speaking, increase the actual numbers/percentages - but if it doesn't, it would almost certainly enable them to go further.

Ever wonder what it'd be like to have had access to this stuff when you were younger? Personal computers didn't arrive until I was an adult.

Anyhow, kudos on the kids. That is impressive and certainly better than I can do.

I can't really wonder what it'd be like to have access to this stuff - I'm 17 myself, and am from a moderately wealthy family in the Bay Area so have had exposure to technology basically my whole life. I definitely think the culture of the area and growing up with a computer in my room contributed to my passion for tech.

Now they can write and publish apps to get noticed. Apple and co can run the story to encourage more developers to build for their platform etc etc.

PeopleSoft came by my high school to solicit two folks in our computer class for internships. One was me, the other a friend of mine. I suspect our teacher played a part in setting it up; my friend and I had basically completed the coursework way early and were goofing off writing video games. This would've been in the late 90s.

I was a huge dumbass and turned them down.

My last firm had an unpaid high school intern. He was the son of one of our accountants. Despite the nepotism, he actually produced code that we used.

This 10th grader is doing more than almost any person I know at University...

Yes. I read In eighth grade, I took advanced-placement calculus and statistics courses, which enabled me to take multivariate calculus in ninth grade. and thought, "A lot of Silicon Valley tiger parents will be sending their kids to math camp next summer!"

I mean this in no way to belittle the students accomplishments... certainly they have done something that is extraordinary for highschool and something even trained engineers might find difficult.

But one takeaway from this article is how amazing it is that open source, the availability of hardware/electronics for reasonable prices, and open online courses where people can learn at their own pace have all come this far.

It is incredible to me for instance what is out there for object recognition algorithms and models now. And sensor hardware that used to cost thousands can now be had for a few hundred dollars.

Again, kudos to these students. They deserve praise for what they accomplished. But I am a little jealous I did not have access to what they have when I was a kid :)

These types of headlines always remind me of The Pareto principle, in that 20% of the effort will achieved 80% of the result.

Getting the last mile (no pun intended) is what’s extremely difficult and time consuming, and what separates the novice from the master.

Good luck to these kids and their bright future. I hope they bring us the last 100% necessary for self-driving technology.

This is really cool; I'm glad to see this kind of technology reaching younger students. In grad school, we actually built something similar for undergrads to use as part of a robotics course. The idea was to give teams an identical platform, and then race them at the end of the semester to see who did the best job at programming it.

If anyone is interested, we open sourced all of the design files, with instructions on how to build a car of your own for around $900 (at the time, this was several years ago): https://vaderlab.wordpress.com/roscar-robot-stock-car-autono...

Here is a video of the results from the semester. One group was able to max out the speed on the car, which at scale is equivalent to 128 MPH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRjv3D7lGo

What a fantastic resource!

Worth noting FRIST Robtics competition is also a great place to get students involved in STEM and involved in team building, since running a FIRST team requires fundraising, design logos, order t-shirts, promote team event, so there are things for students who are not interested in the engineering part to do too, while learning more about STEM. Also parents are usually involved too... so more bonding time and more school-parent engagement.

I co-founded FIRST Robotics team in my high school (all started because I wanted to run a club for college app lol). Then the following year after we won the All-Start award, our school created an “engineering program”, and our teams (yes, teams), battle with other nearby teams :) in NYC during off season.

In Michigan, the lack of regulation around autonomous testing can be great. At first, you just needed a $30 manufacturer plate to do autonomous testing anywhere in Michigan, but I'm pretty sure they recently got rid of that requirement.

Level 2 autonomy is not exceedingly difficult to achieve either. If your car has LKAS/ACC or similar features you can port something like openpilot[0] over to your car.

[0] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

comma employee here - we have bounties for a handful of cars!

https://comma.ai/bounties.html

I love this story. I hope the snobs at r/machinelearning get a good read of it. I've seen HS kids there ask questions and get talked down to instead of encouragement. Those people want to keep ML their exclusive little club and apply intimidating terminology to simple concepts to keep people out. Congrats to these kids. Middle fingers in the air to the snobs.

It makes sense economically. The less people with the skill the more valuable it is.

That's not a healthy scientific attitude.

The field is poisoned by money, I haven't seen a single paper ever use a statistical test of significance, hell most don't even have multiple trials! Most papers can't be reproduced and when you ask the authors they'll literally say to change the random seed . This includes, often especially so, the big labs. All so people can have a piece of the big tech company money pie.

This is so true. The difference between an ml expert and a novice is often less than a few percent on accuracy.

the difference is that the novice is nearly always combining models and code written and trained by the expert.

I know this is off topic but I've been recently digging into geometric algebra. Boy is linear algebra a shit algebra compared with GA. It's particularly well suited for computer vision and what not. So check it out whatever if you are trying to get into it. Things actually make sense!

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