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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the Yandex self driving experiments seem much more credible than what Waymo is doing.

Waymo is testing its cars in a situation without any snow, rain, mostly without street parking, without pedestrians, in a city so hostile to pedestrians no one’s walking around.

99% of the work isn’t in getting the self driving to work in perfectly controlled sunshine conditions as Waymo has it working right now, 99% of the work is in getting all those edge cases working.

It’s gonna be decades before waymo cars can handle small mixed use streets with children playing on them, pedestrians, cyclists, and street vendors in a european city.

What they’re doing is amazing given the tech they have — but it’s not enough to reach actual level 5. It’s the same issue why most self-driving solutions only work on highways.

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I agree that Waymo will have lots of challenges reaching world-scale (cost, training, etc.), but what they've achieved is undeniable. It seems like it would work extremely well for anyone living in that area.

  It’s gonna be decades before...

Citation needed.

We can very accurately identify children, pedestrians, cyclists, and street vendors with machine vision. And with the LIDAR that Waymo is using, very accurately tell where they are and more importantly where they're going. Stopping for those things is pretty low on the "problems that need more work for Level 5" agenda.

Identifying people is easy, the much harder part is finding the right path to take as result. In a dense european street you’ll have pedestrians, cyclists, and so on all around you.

Imagine driving slowly through a large gathering of people, slowly having them move around your car, etc. Such situations will necessarily become major issues.

Especially if you imagine a snowy dense downtown street, with pedestrians crossing everywhere and snow all around you making the LIDAR useless.

That's not something you'll find a citation for. As someone who has worked in the industry it's not as simple as "see child; stop". What's also happening behind you? Beside of you? Do you swerve? How quickly do you stop?

You're very right that OD works great, that doesn't mean you can train a neural network to make the right decision though.

You barely even need NN for this - it's basically pathfinding.

Find the path to where you want to go, avoid the parts with negative weights.

Great idea, maybe you should call Waymo.

It's not a great idea because it's already done.

Again, the hard part is not "here is a human, avoid it". That part is done (in Waymo's case).

I'm afraid asking for a citation for a forward looking speculative statement doesn't come across very well.

But making wild speculation without any evidence comes across better?

Yes, it's just an opinion stated politely and unagressively. Those are valuable qualities that I appreciate.

Except OC was stating it more like fact than opinion, which is exactly why I took issue with it.

I've got no objection to you taking issue with it, you're entitled to your opinion too of course. We're here to talk. It just would have been nice if you had done so politely and unaggressively.

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