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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

This is the SV “fake it ‘till you make it” culture. Right now Tesla is delivering “full self driving” cars that require a human driver at all times. Experts have said that it’s not possible using cameras alone, without LiDAR.

Oversell and underdeliver. Fraud works great until it doesn’t.

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I mean, we can go the other way by looking at SpaceX. I spent years reading detailed reports from experts that everything SpaceX was doing was impossible.

-A rocket made of steel

-Landing a rocket anywhere

-Landing a bigger rocket anywhere

-Landing a rocket on solid ground

-Landing a big rocket on the ground

and a lot of smaller things in between.

I read many plausible looking reports on the non-feasability of these things often came with the backing of professors at respected universities and they were all wrong.

Sometimes it goes the other way.

I don't disagree. It's a good thing that people are confident that they can achieve things that others deem impossible, especially experts. That's real progress. The part that starts to cross the line is when someone starts making legally significant promises ahead of schedule.

Tell stakeholders you're working on it. Tell them you're ahead of everyone else. Tell them that the experts are wrong. Tell them it's coming very soon. Update them on the details of your progress. Don't tell them it's done when it's not.

It should be noted that the DC-X rocket also landed propulsively in the 90's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

For the risk of being a broken record, nobody claimed that reusable rockets were technically impossible. The argument was that they were rather financially unfeasible due to a limited number of LEO launches, so nobody tried (I lost the ESA study on this from the early 2000s unfortunately...).

I'd really love that myth of SpaceX doing the impossible with landing rockets to die. Also because they don't have to, they were the first to do so. That alone is really impressive. Whether or not it is profitable is impossible to tell until SpaceX is publishing audited financials.

Also I have to point out that although SpaceX has very competitive prices for market contracts there seems to be a different services and pricing scheme for government contracts.

This is not unique in the industry to some extent but since SpaceX has no published audits competitors claim they overcharge the government.

There were definitely no rocket experts claiming rockets can't be made out of steel. That's not a new thing.

I commented this in a different story, but I hate that the media (and now apparently HN) is conflating outright fraud with "fake it until you make it" culture. They are totally different, and the line between them is actually bright and clear, not some "gray, fuzzy" distinction some people propose.

That clear line is simply "are you telling a material lie about the present?" In Theranos' case, there were numerous instances when Holmes lied about the current capabilities of her company and its tech that she knew to be false. That is very different from making overly optimistic assessments about future capabilities.

Would love to hear any stories about a company that "faked it" when talking about their present day capabilities but we're able to "make it" before the fraud was discovered.

I agree that there is a difference. But, I do think that the line is not so clear in more than a few instances, and that the business culture in SV has normalized this.

The use of exaggeration, vague, misleading and/or conflicting statements, labels, or depictions can really blur that line.

Determining whether a statement is a lie is not always a straightforward and undisputed process.

Isn't the self-driving just a feature on top of the car? They're faking one feature that a customer might opt into -- and none that I know have.

Tesla has delivered a performant EV that is nice to drive in and is comparable to other luxury vehicles. It's not exactly faking for quite some time.

The fake it part is calling something full self driving when it does anything but that.

They stopped calling it fully self driving a little while ago in part due to a lot of pretty bad press and some good journalistic research.

> "Full Self-Driving Capability $10,000"

... is listed today as an option when configuring any vehicle on tesla.com

You're right. I think there's several regulators on it, but no one has forced them to rephrase the statement.

They're charging for "full self-driving" separately from the car, so I think it's fair to put it in the same bucket.

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