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Comment by segmondy | Hacker News Reader

One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it. It almost seems the same type of judgement needs to be made for auto-pilot. If your auto-pilot acts up at all. Just turn it off and don't use it till it's resolved. All you need is one incident to be dead, so if you get a chance to observe any abnormalities, consider it a blessing.

Something that will also be great will be a sort of "crash dump/bug report" button for these cars. If at any time your car does something unsafe, you can hit that button. The car will save the last 60 seconds so the manufacturer can analyze it to debug and figure out what went wrong.

I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.

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> Something that will also be great will be a sort of "crash dump/bug report" button for these cars.

Good point, and it isn't just vehicles with auto-pilot perhaps all vehicles.

The 2017 and 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Minivan kept on randomly shutting off[0] and loosing all electrical power at freeway speeds. You had to put the vehicle back into park, on the freeway, to restart it. There are several stories of near death experiences trying to get to the shoulder. It was intermittent.

This is relevant because nobody could figure out why, even the manufacturer. They had to install custom self-powered diagnostic equipment in consumer's vehicles to even try and get enough data on it. Turns out that suddenly cutting power to the onboard computers doesn't make them very useful for diagnostic analysis, some dealers even acted like the problem didn't exist because the computer had no record.

They did ultimately get it fixed (replaced an engine management unit or similar) but it does go to show that modern vehicles are getting so complicated that even manufacturers are struggling to stay ahead of it. Tesla's autopilot and similar just takes that up another notch.

[0] https://www.autoblog.com/2017/11/21/chrysler-pacifica-owners...

Various sources put the current SLOC count in modern vehicles in the hundred-million range: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39559/does-the-...

A lot of that is for the infotainment systems, but regardless, we're probably going to be seeing automakers struggle more and more with all of the problems that have plagued the software industry for its entire history.

On the one hand, I want to say that situations like this Tesla crash and your minivan example get so much attention because that's rare, so the manufacturers are mostly getting it right and we'll all be fine. On the other, knowing what I know of the software industry plus my past experience as a shadetree, the prospect of that much code running in 65-mile-an-hour murder machines gives me the shivers.

I think this is a key point. SLOC is going way up.

It's sort of natural - it's "why not". We can afford to have more SLOC than ever before. Why bother to try to reduce it, that's not a priority, our priorities are features and fixes. It becomes too much to really understand and manage, and then it's all automated checks and automated tests.

It's very hard to get the average/common developer to spend time thinking about how we can remove stuff, clean stuff up. And managers don't want to pay them to do that. In some places it eventually becomes a big problem, and then it's time for a big rewrite. Most software is throw-away. Website front-ends, mobile device drivers, etc ... mostly thrown-away roughly every year. It's the relatively rare and stodgy classic open-source stuff that's re-used (with minor updates) for decades. OK, I'm getting off-topic ...

Exactly my thoughts. You have explained in words what I have been thinking for a very long time.

As many of the comments (but none of the top-level answers) in that Stack Exchange thread note, most of the code in critical control systems like ECUs isn't written, it's generated from verifiable models. While this doesn't lend complete confidence by any means, I think it can be expected that the defects/SLOC will be much lower and of a very different variety in this type of code than code that's written.

>> most of the code in critical control systems like ECUs isn't written, it's generated from verifiable models.

I'm not sure what "verifiable models" means here. There are a bunch of people using Simulink to "auto-generate" code for some ECUs. I've used it with great results, and I've seen others do that as well. And yet some people still create horrible things with it just like regular code. But not once did I see anything that sounded like formal verification. That doesn't mean it never happens but the way The Mathworks markets their tools, you'd think some kind of magic is done automatically.

On a related note, I always laugh when Mathworks promotes the ability to compare "simulation" results to that of the "generated code". They call it "software in the loop" testing. This is actually getting their customers to verify that the tools they provide work as advertised.

For that kind of development I'd actually prefer to just shut the simulator off always generate code. Simulation should only ever be for plant models, not control systems you want to actually implement in software.

Isn‘t it possible to formally check Simulink autogenerated code using Polyspace? Or are you thinking of something else?

Oh god. You can check any C-code with Polyspace, I've done that. Most of the warnings Polyspace generates (at the time I did it) are not more significant than style - like checking for MISRA compliance doesn't guarantee a lack of bugs.

To me formal verification has always meant proving correctness in a mathematical sense against some sort of formal specification.

None of that really matters though because AFAIK you can't prove a neural net has been trained "correctly" and doesn't contain errors.

"None of that really matters though because AFAIK you can't prove a neural net has been trained "correctly" and doesn't contain errors."

Progress is being made in this area. Here is an "old" paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01135

Halting problem is even more general.

> I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.

This is more a hijack than a direct critique but I think the general issue is the assumption that we need a private vehicle for that.

Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now.

Edit:// with years I mean years. Before that pressure made longer rides usually more uncomfortable than they are now with modern trains. Probably only because my area has plenty of mountain tho.

In the US you will have lots of time to sleep due to waiting for an oncoming train to clear.

In most parts of the country we don't have dedicated passenger tracks. Amtrak (our passenger line) just rents track time on the freight lines. The problem is that freight lines are often single track lines so if there is oncoming freight you just wait until the freight clears. Sometimes this his hours.

Until we have dedicated passenger lines, long distance train travel is a non-starter here. It was too slow for my 75 year old uncle on a site seeing tour. His exact words were "fun, but never again"

My last Amtrak ride was my very last for this reason. My train was delayed four and a half hours!

I've ridden a lot of Amtrak and it's never been on a single track line. Are you sure that's an actual problem? Long delays, sure, but is that the reason? Seems to usually be train equipment failure.

Having ridden a lot of Amtrak almost makes it less likely that you'd have experienced the single track problem, since quality rail experiences in the US are pretty concentrated such that someone who has good train experiences probably lives/works in an area where that is the rule. On the East coast, pretty good service arguably extends as far south as Richmond, but past that sitting on the tracks is very common. And with that you get the classic downward spiral of crappy transit. Ride a train in SC or GA, and you'll see that anyone with the money for a plane ticket has abandoned rail there.

I mostly rode the train from SC to Boston and back (Southern Crescent) ... it's dual track all of the way. Also DC to Chicago, southern route, dual track all of the way.

I love Amtrak and am willing to put up with the delays, but DC to Chicago stop all the time, especially in the mountains, to wait for higher priority trains to pass. Sometimes it's only for a few minutes at a time, but sometimes it adds up to hours.

Nah, I love it.

Agreed entirely, in some parts of the world you can even drive your car onto a train, have a nice meal, watch a movie and sleep in a luxurious cabin. Wake up the next morning and pick-up your car.

I think demand for trains has diminished which is why they're not as nice as they could be; However I found plenty of nice trains on offer in Europe and Asia.

In Asia and Europe it's only developing since ever in my pov

Not in the United States. Rail coverage is terrible. If you can get to your destination, good luck doing that without switching trains.

To be fair. I used trains on any continent other than America. My comment is a passive critique to any system who aren't able to build such a transport system yet.

The US was able (and had) a passenger train network. It didn’t stay updated because cargo is a much more profitable business with professional customers. There is not one aspect of passenger travel that is a bonus over cargo for rail companies. As others have pointed out, you get to optimize the rails for either cargo or passengers.

You're almost certainly from an area with a population density much higher than the US.

We need IoTrains

>Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now.

For a very limited subset of points A and B, though...

Depends where you live. I had no issues in Europe or Asia so far.

Even in Europe to get from A to B you need to switch trains super often. Like in France you almost always need to go to Paris first before going somewhere else because the network is so centralized around Paris.

But even then you can get to paris pretty fast. I have had similar problems where I had to go to Karlsruhe from Flensburg to get a train to paris, as that was the fastest route.

To be fair that's not really a reasonable train trip for people that want to actually get there as opposed to riding a train. Probably above 9 hours compared to a sub-2h flight. Train routes that are more meaningful tend to be better serviced.

I regularly take a train that takes 6.5 hours. The flight would be 45 minutes.

Getting to, into and away from the airport easily ads another 2 hours tho. Also this route has 3 flights a week compared to a train every 2 hours.

With the train I just get in and enjoy nice service, free power and WiFi and usually get some work done.

Not to mention the difference in my ecological footprint.

My point is that it's not like you are wasting time in a uncomfortable environment usually. So I dont mind taking the train, actually usually even prefer it, so do millions of people all over the world.

I'm a big train fan and do impractical train rides quite often. I dont think millions of people share our appreciation of trains. Most people use whatever is faster, or cheaper. Trains over 3 hours tend to be neither. Paris to Flensburg is both slow and expensive. By most people's standards, the 6h additional duration of the trip offsets the airport annoyance by far.

> Not to mention the difference in my ecological footprint.

Only as clean as the electricity is produced. In many countries electricity production relies on coal, petrol or gas, which are far from being clean energies.

LA to NYC is the distance of London to Poti, Georgia.

Or Shenyang to Kunming which takes 18 hours on a train. But what's your point? Trains aren't meant to replace crosscontinetal flights. It would be better to compare regional routes like LA - SF which is super inconvenient.

> If at any time your car does something unsafe, you can hit that button.

Tesla actually has that, it's not widely documented but you can do a voice command of "Report bug" followed by a brief audio description and it's uploaded to Tesla.

No idea how it gets triaged but I wish more products had a similar feature.

Really they should have some kind of flag when they get a high number of autopilot disconnects ( or steering overrides) happening in the same place. I had to disconnect every day because it ignored temporary lane stripe markings, and it never improves, despite Tesla’s claim of fleet learning.

Seems an obvious way to improve: look at where your drivers are overriding your system.

That's disappointing - I'd assumed that every single disengagement would have been logged and uploaded for analysis and use as a regression test. That's what I'd be doing.

I have reported using that and also emailed their feedback list but of course they don't follow up that anything was ever updated to fix it. For e.g. It's still unsafe on car pool lanes with bikers and lane-splitting which is legal in CA.

Whoa whoa whoa, "auto-pilot" is NOT self-driving. Tesla goes to great pains to make auto-pilot sound like self-driving while still stringently claiming that it requires constant supervision, like an airplane auto-pilot.

Yes, but my friends that own Tesla's actually believe that self-driving cars are almost here.

When I say that it's at least ten years away and likely much longer because it will take big breakthroughs (strong AI, lot's of knowledge about the world, etc.) they look at me like I'm crazy.

I really hope it happens in my lifetime, but I remember talking about Greenblatt's chess program (see [1]) when I was at MIT in the 60's. The AI folks really thought that a chess program would be world champion within 10 years. They finally did it, but it took more like 30 years, and one of the reasons they were successful was that Moore's law eventually allowed a super computer (Deep Blue, at the time the 259th most powerful computer in the world) to evaluate 200 Million board positions per second[2]. Deep Blue's opponent, world champion Garry Kasparov) was most definitely not evaluating 200 Million board positions per second.

I see driving as a much more complex task than playing chess, so maybe 30 years before we will put our children in cars to be driven across town. I will be happily surprised if it arrives sooner.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1465715

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)

Deep Blue was actually a team of chess and CS experts assisted with a super computer to beat Kasparov. They were tuning parameters between games.

More like a supercomputer with a coaching team then?

Tesla's current autopilots are pretty far off, but I think Waymo and possibly others are much closer.

We'll see about that when the time comes to test self-driving cars during an actual winter with snow, ice, black ice, slush, cars being parked 6" to a foot further into the street, et cetera. Driving around this winter in the upper midwest made me realize just how idealistic (and silly) people that think self-driving cars are 5 years away are.

Nah, still 30 years away. My guess is aligned with the OP.

Waymo is already running fully autonomous cars in Arizona without backup drivers.

It may take 30 years to handle blizzards and every edge case but you can just park the car to avoid those problems temporarily while still serving 99% of the market so they don't need to be solved now.

They scam people into buying Tesla thinking their version is close to self-driving right here https://www.tesla.com/autopilot . Reality is that since Oct'16 is that it's nothing more than a glorified adaptive cruise control found on many common cars.

Update: Since Oct'16 self-driving software is an add-on option and Musk has been tweeting[1] since Jan'17 that it's just months away and that its autopilot is somehow safer than adaptive cruise control. This Oct'16 video even starts with the claim that the driver is only there for legal reasons.

There is a lawsuit since Apr'17 regarding above - Google dean sheikh et al v. tesla, inc

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/823632597284691969 " Yes, safety should improve significantly due to autonomy features, even if regs disallow no driver present 23 Jan 2017"

3 months maybe, 6 months definitely 23 Jan 2017

Before clicking that link, I assumed they were very careful about drawing the distinction between 'self-driving' and 'auto-pilot'.

They are not careful at all. The first text on that page says "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars"

You have to be moderately savvy to realize that you'd also need this to be coupled with "self-driving software", which the Tesla does not have.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. All you have said is true. Maybe, people don't like the word 'scam', but essentially they are trying to sell more cars by bamboozling people with technology that is years off.

It is this reckless marketing. 'Bio defense system', are we meant to believe the Tesla's air conditioning will keep out vx gas?

By doing this they are in my opinion sabotaging the invoations they are actually making.

'I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.'

My only experience of automated driving is the feature where you can set a maximum speed. This is useful in the UK since average speed cameras are commonplace on the motorway network nowadays and it is easy for your concentration to lapse and drift over the current limit. The cameras are automated and there isn't much leeway.

However, the speed limits often change in range of 50, 60, 70 mph depending on local conditions and roadworks, so you can never just 'set and forget' you need to be alert all of the time since speed limits can change frequently.

It's going to be a long time before I trust a car to do this on its own without my supervision and, as regards going to sleep and letting the car do 'everything' on its own, I don't envisage being able to do this comfortably in my lifetime.

I rented a car that had active cruise control and lane assist. I drove most of the way from Oakland to San Jose with out touching any of the controls, except maybe the accelerator once or twice. But? I got to my destination exhausted and in a little pain because I had sat tensed up ready to take the controls again at a moment's notice. Partly that's because these features are not intended to be a complete self-driving solution. But partly it's exactly what you said - I wouldn't trust it absolutely anyway and would want to stay alert. It's easy for me to stay alert when I'm driving and not just supervising.

If you just need to follow speed limits, Tesla can do it perfectly fine. It knows speed limits for most roads. It would fail if the speed limit is due to construction or speed trap :-)

Great point. What's the over-under on a road-worker death when autopilot plows through a confusingly-marked construction zone at 70MPH?

> I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.

If it's any consolation that's not how autopilot on an airplane works. Pilots are expected to remain alert and ready to intervene in case of trouble.

> The car will save the last 60 seconds so the manufacturer can analyze it to debug and figure out what went wrong.

Ideally, this would be sent to the NTSB as well to determine if they need to issue a recall and possibly also shared with the public if the car's owner is okay with that.

Issuing a bug report to the manufacturer is fine if the manufacturer is being responsive, but fixes take time and large companies don't always put a high priority on fixing bugs. Sharing bug information more widely increases their accountability and I think potential buyers have a right to know about safety-critical flaws before they buy a car.

How can one sleep in autonomous car?

For babies car is autonomous already. They have to be strapped pretty tight in a bit reclined position.

Do you mean to sleep sitting just like passengers in a car kinda can? I guess people are able to sleep that way. I for one have to be totally exhausted to fall a sleep sitting.

One certainly can't hope to sleep laying on a side under a blanket. Self driving can't ensure that car will never experience sudden deceleration. For the same reason you will not see seats facing back of the car. Because you could be killed by your or other passenger's laptop or burned by your hot coffee.

>> One of the things you learn in flying is not to force it. If conditions are not safe. Just forget about it.

I wonder if we would have had safe planes if that was the mentality when they were first invented.

That's existed for well over a century : trains.

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