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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

It is weird that the general opinion of Comma on HN appears to be positive while the general opinion of Tesla's Autopilot on here is generally more negative. It seems to me that all the complaints about Tesla including marketing, safety, and technological feasibility apply as much or more for Comma.

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I agree that Comma deserves much of the same scrutiny, but it’s not that weird that HN gives them more credit than Tesla. Comma is the hacker, open-source, upstart player in self driving space.

Expectation management and effort to implement in your car as well. Buying a 7k "full self driving option" that's seamlessly integrated from the factory vs having to hack into your wiring to install a glorified phone.

Hotz is a true hacker, Musk is a pseudo-nerd businessman.

Tesla overstates their capabilities and is more interested in keeping their stock price high than in doing what is best for consumers.

> pseudo-nerd businessman

I find this attitude towards Musk so, so odd. Where are you getting your info?

He was coding PC games as a teen, wrote the code for zip2, was the cto at x.com, and taught himself rocket science from textbooks (as confirmed by other rocket scientists). If that’s a “pseudo nerd”, who qualifies as a “real nerd”?

> "He was coding PC games as a teen, wrote the code for zip2, was the cto at x.com, and taught himself rocket science from textbooks (as confirmed by other rocket scientists). If that’s a “pseudo nerd”, who qualifies as a “real nerd”?"

If you don't code for 30 years, people might not call you a coder anymore.

Hotz on the other-hand still regular live-streams himself programming and hacking.

If anyone has to have the coding chops of Hotz to be called a nerd then we probably have only 50 nerds in the world. Y’all can definitely log off of HACKER NEWS since the news is definitely not for you!

It's not called Nerd News.

Last time I've heard of his streams he started on a grandiose project and bailed out when stuck after a few hours.

Those may be his origins but these days he seems closer to a glorified carnival barker (albeit a very successful one).

I hate Musk as much as the regular guy but the constant undermining of the people you hate is the reason people who do this are never successful.

Consider for a moment That Musk is a Nerd, a ruthless businessman and a cock all at the same time. He made (or at least partly shaped) companies that definitely do fantastical things. If you keep underestimating him only you loose not him.

I certainly don’t hate him and don’t really see how I’m undermining him.

Just providing my opinion on why his reputation is different than someone like George Hotz.

I'm always stumped by geohotz legend, he jailbroke the iphone on his own, then took some vuln from another team and used it on a sony device. Am i missing something else ? He seems super brilliant and fast but I think there's a lot of imaginary genius .. and in that way I don't think hotz differs much from Musk (overselling his dreams because most humans do that)

I think comma is mostly a joke, but at least it is only targeted at tech-minded who will probably put in the work to get it set up and understand that it is not foolproof. Compare that with someone just clicking a box on an order form and thinking they now have "Full Self-Driving"

You'd be right, except IIRC Comma hasn't gotten anyone killed because of (at best) misunderstood advertising (or seeing a barrier as a road, etc.).

I don't think that is for any other reason than math. Autopilot has driven multiple orders of magnitude more miles than Comma.

They do also have the highest consumer reports rating of all the autopilot-esque systems.

Yeah. We're approaching two million Teslas on the road now, and virtually everyone one of these has autopilot. I mean, yeah, with a sample size like that someone's going to find every edge case in manners ranging from hilarious to catastrophic. Just yesterday there was a guy on reddit claiming to have discovered one fork in Yosemite where, apparently, five Teslas have all wrecked their bumpers on the same rock. I believe it.

At the same time, it really is hitting all those edge cases. And the worst news in months is a cranky rock of doom?

I use this thing ever day. It's pretty amazing. I haven't driven Comma/OpenPilot yet, and wish them the best too. But the Tesla hate is approaching derangement at this point.

The experience of learning about Comma, buying a dev kit, downloading a separate software package, flashing it to the device, wiring it up to your car, etc. (vs. just having it there on your Tesla, and everyone's heard of Tesla) is the source of massive selection bias.

If you're competent enough to get Comma running, you're probably technical enough (and invested enough!) to read the instructions and understand the operational limits of the system.

Tesla has over promised and under delivered so far. Comma has done the opposite. The Tesla beta software seems to be rapidly improving, so I've got my fingers crossed that Tesla pulls through in the end and manages to deliver something that lives up to the hype they have created themselves, but they have really dug their own hole at this point in time.

Making promises is easy, delivering a sustainable profitable company is hard.

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