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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

That tester detected a serious bug in the whole concept, inadvertently risking his life during testing. He should've been promoted.

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Agreed, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

The statement is the "Driver no longer works for waymo" not that "they were fired for the incident.".

That feels somewhat deliberate choice of words to me.

that’s the standard phrase

clearly picked up by a competing firm for presumably a large salary increase

Headhunted by Casper Mattresses.

The guy who is hired to pay the electric company to power the data center didn't show up for work for 3 months. He helped discover a serious bug!

This is definitely the correct response - what is the role of testing if not to uncover flaws in both design and implementation?

To seek out flaws and report the ones they find, yes. That is their job.

Their job is not to flake on duty and then, by pure accident, reveal the system's inability to recover from a failure more.

It does make me wonder what screening for test drivers they use.

They call up a temp agency and say "we need X people who have a valid driver's license, a pulse and can piss clean"

Which is incredibly hilarious because surely it shouldn't be too hard to find a volunteer engineer to drive the thing they coded.

Surely?

Disagree. If you screen your test drivers, you no longer have adequate testing. Your test drivers need to be representative (as much as possible) of the general population.

No, Waymo's test drivers aren't supposed to be representative of future customers, they're supposed to babysit the cars until drivers are no longer needed at all. That's why their Firefly prototype didn't even have a steering wheel.

> a serious bug in the whole concept

Manual driving mode bell is not loud enough?

Wake up jolt needs to apply 240v to the backside of the driver.

So long as it's milliamps, it should be okay.

Preferably into the buttcheek and not the thorassic spine

The placement of the gas pedal does seem strange in retrospect if we think about people falling asleep in the car. I'd also be worried about people pitching forward in their sleep and banging their head against the steering wheel and activating something they shouldn't.

The normal mode of operation for an auto-taxi is nobody in the driver's seat.

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