94 karma · joined March 27, 2011
Turns out the dealer made a single-letter mistake in VIN when registering the car with DMV, and there is no check digit to reject invalid VINs.
Isn't that exactly how Gmail came to be?
You will.
There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.
There wasn't anything unpredictable about the behavior of Google SDC. From the official statement: https://www.engadget.com/2016/02/29/google-self-driving-car-...
"Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it.
Our test driver, who had been watching the bus in the mirror, also expected the bus to slow or stop. And we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put. Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day."
It costs the moved people a great deal, but the government doesn't care.
thesmallestcat claimed "that ex-Googlers cannot bad-mouth the company", and I claimed that no such clause exists in the standard contract of employment.
By the time you are an ex Googler, getting fired is unlikely to be an effective deterrent.
> Which is why the "personal views" of a current company employee of any organization posted publicly is close to useless.
Either you believe that the company is forcing me to write this (instead of just remaining silent), or your argument is not very logical.
What matters is how your scores compare to other interviewers scores on the given slate.
> Not sure how the HCs "adjust" me.
Maybe they don't. Maybe you are the most precise and best-calibrated interviewer on every slate, and never make a bad call. Good for you ;-)
You understand this based on what?
Out of curiosity, I just went through my employment agreement, and did not find any such clauses.
> Horror stories come out, but few and far between due to this risk.
Or due to the fact that they rarely happen (I am not disputing that they do sometimes happen).
> the volume of Google defense on HN feels like astroturf.
Like I said earlier, since you are dead set to never apply, you'll never find out what (if anything) you've missed.
I do. I've also done 200+ interviews.
> Googlers are known to come out to defend their employer on HN
Well, sure. It's not because Google tells us to defend it though, but rather to state the facts as we see them.
I guess you'll never know what (if anything) you've missed.
> I'd end up working with a bunch of sycophants who are willing to do that sort of thing
You are implying bad intentions where none are likely to exist.
Google is a very large company, and 0.001% of candidates are bound to have suboptimal interview experience by sheer bad luck (and it's likely that you see their horror stories more than you see "I interviewed at Google, had a good experience, got hired, and now work on cool stuff with incredible coworkers" kinds of stories).
It's not like going in front of HC is an inquisition or anything -- they are just your peers.
When writing feedback, you simply look back at 20 other interviews where you asked the same question, and write "candidate X's performance on this question was was in {top,bottom} {5,25,50}% of ... at this level".
You also have no idea how other interviewers will score, and if your score is 1.5 when everyone else's is a 3.9, it's likely that the HC will ignore you.
The HCs do see multiple feedback from you and your peers, so they build a model of your feedback for themselves: P is a soft interviewer, so we'll adjust his score down but Q is a very hard interviewer so we'll adjust her score up ;-)
“I think this is the first time autonomous driving has been approached so strongly from a deep learning perspective,” says Tandon. “This is in contrast to a traditional robotics approach,” continues Carol Reiley, cofounder and President. “A lot of companies are just using deep learning for this component or that component, while we view it more holistically,” says Reiley.
and
"This is why many companies working on vehicle autonomy are more comfortable with using traditional robotics approaches for decision making, and restrict deep learning to perception. They reason: If your system makes an incorrect decision, you’d want to be able to figure out exactly what happened, and then make sure that the mistake won’t be repeated."
“This is a big problem,” Tandon acknowledges.
Elon's claims notwithstanding, Tesla may actually be half a decade away from L4.
> It's pretty sad how far behind ...
Maybe they are just trying to not over-promise and under-deliver?
If you use site name as the passphrase and fixed password ("password" below) instead, you end up with:
yahoo.com: dXgvRMjjHQvRQFvSa
patreon.com: UdKiiXVxrCRjYe
therapy.com: KFXUMnMnSrJLIjaB
Google's reports will likely be transferred to waymo.com site soon enough, and new ones will appear in due time.
The video shows a fully autonomous vehicle in a range of (relatively) easy driving conditions.
1. There is not a single "sticky" situation in that video. Handling 90% of situations is (relatively) easy; it's the last 1% that is extremely hard.
2. It's not clear how many tries it took to record that video, but likely more than one.
3. At the end of the video, the car drives in the opposite lane of where it's supposed to. That smells of a highly-staged demo, not a general purpose solution.
In short, this video in no way proves that the sensor suite is anywhere close to being sufficient. Can that car repeat the same trip at night? In rain? Can it drive down Castro St. in Mountain View or University St. in Palo Alto at lunch time? Etc. etc.
The only way you are likely to see "another 100k on a good year" is if you sell all the RSUs you've got that year.
I've see a few people "add a couple of million" when their project of 7 years succeeded, but these were very senior people.
I think it's an illusion to think that rank and file SWEs will ever have an "add a few million" year.
> who do you think is buying all these houses?
I see very few rank and file Google SWEs being able to afford anything within 1 hour commute of Mountain View.
It's hard to argue that a car stopped at red light violates anyone's expectation of how a human would drive.
Urmson talks about it here: https://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=14m3s
Google cars have the Big Red Button, which shuts off self-driving system and brings the car to a stop.
What more controls do you need?
"but sometimes these wanted messages are mistakenly classified as spam. When this happens, you might have to wade through your spam folder to find that one important email (yuck!). We can help senders to do better, so today we’re launching the Gmail Postmaster Tools."
(The total miles driven in both manual and self-driving mode is closer to 2 million miles I believe.)
Before the incident, developers could use Windows, Linux or Mac laptop for remote access. After, only Linux and Mac remain as options.
In addition, a mandatory two-factor authentication was introduced.
Many barns in USA are red. Most barns in USSR were not painted at all. Most French barns don't appear to be red either: http://www.google.com/search?q=image+barn+france
It's true that there are a few disgruntled ex-Googlers that may give you this impression.
But I don't believe you'll find many current Google employes who will agree with that.
We feel that in the long run, this can only hurt us through negative morale, high turnover, and destructive office politics."