Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comments here are fairly negative. Pointing to downsides, insufficient upsides and such. Gimme fully self driving or go home. Here's my perspective:

I think that self driving cars are coming and that. Even cars that drive on built-for-human roads are just a bridging technology. Eventually roads will be built for robocars. I think it's a big important technology. All transport revolutions are.

To get on that road we need to start getting this tech into consumer land, a beachhead. I don't know if this specific product is it, but it could be. It's got a nice gradual path from cruise control plus to auto-drive for 80% of the ride.

There might be other beachheads. Long haul trucking is often mentioned. This seems like a very similar problem. They both need to deal with highway driving only. Maybe robocar friendly road networks will be extended into built up areas.

I'm happy to see a company take what's working now and put it in a consumer product. We'll see if people like it. If they do, it seems like a good a place to start developing this stuff outside of research labs.

edit: clarity

Exactly! People fail to factor how yc companies evolve - how fast, and how far. I made this mistake twice in my life. These days I just stfu.

3 years back, I met with the poundpay team. They knew zero about handling fraud, and they said so. They said they'll figure it out over time. The cofounder said he was "reading a bunch of machine learning papers over the weekend" on combating fraud. I found that amateurish & scary.

2 years back, I met with the interviewstreet founder. The founder did not have any technical chops to speak of, and was actually quite misinformed about scalability challenges, algorithms & programming languages. I couldn't see how this guy could take on topcoder.

Today, 3 years hence, Balanced has processed over a half billion in payments, & Hackerrank has signed up a half million developers & both are well on their way towards a billion dollar market cap. Both are great companies to work for - in terms of actual tech & the potential for ipo riches.

What Cruise is right now is a useless datapoint. Think about what it'll be 2 years from now. Use your imagination. There are tons of low hanging features they could iterate on & completely dominate the space. Enough said.

The underlying message I'm getting is that HN applicants tend to find the "actual" problem they can tackle to make their fortunes while initially trying to solve a different problem.

Well, that's exactly what all the "lean startup" types say :) , the theory goes:

- 1) release an MVP - 2) get actual feedback - 3) pivot - 4) repeat 1, 2 and 3 until you find the actual pain point to solve, or run out of cash - 5) profit :)

I was thinking of the "schlepping" thing, which is pg's observation that the actual pain point is often your own.

> To get on that road we need to start getting this tech into consumer land, a beachhead.

But it's been there for years! All of the high-end car manufacturers offer this technology, in their current cars, well-integrated, well-tested, and for less money than what this company charges!

Remember, they're not offering self-driving, they're only offering lane assist and adaptive cruise control.

But the vehicle manufacturers are also working on self-driving, it's not just Google! BMW and Volvo have both committed to having self-driving cars on the roads by 2017.

I'm not sure what the price point is, but I'd pay non-negligible dollars to add this kind of tech to my '99 Accord. I don't even want the full $10k package with "self-driving," just lane assist, warnings, adaptive cruise control, etc. I think many of us would be onboard if someone can work the value proposition so that buying such a kit/package is a better idea than buying a new-ish car.

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