jayjay71

The smaller sensors aren't the same as the giant sensor that goes on top of the car, but ~10 of them can give you comparable coverage for self-driving purposes (assuming they work similar to other smaller LIDAR sensors such as what ibeo makes, hard to say before the product actually ships). And a few thousand dollars is easily affordable for luxury cars; think of it as a typical upgrade like consumers pay for navigation packages, stereos, leather interior, etc.

With regards to the missed shipments - I agree, that is a red flag. And when a company gives a timeline, and then that passes and they change their answer to "soon" it's concerning. Of course, it's CES right now - maybe someone will make an announcement in a few days. Last year Quanergy hyped up their sensor, but when they were pressed it turns out their demo sensor was actually not solid state.

Nebia is already funded by Y Combinator (S15).

The problem isn't the hardware here, the problem is the software. Robots just aren't smart enough to perceive the world around them yet. People are working on it, but it's still very much in the research phase at universities. You should check out HERB at Carnegie Mellon (1), which is working on things just like this. A fun anecdote - all the students spent forever trying to get the robot to open a microwave (and keep in mind this is a highly controlled environment and they knew exactly where it was). Eventually they gave up and modified the microwave.

Robotics is really, really hard.

(1) https://www.personalrobotics.ri.cmu.edu/

A link to the full study pdf (1) and a link to a more interactive version of the data (2)

(1) https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/...

(2) https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/manufacturing/arti...

"Please expand on what you find disagreeable here, else the post is just white noise and not really appropriate for HN."

That comment piqued my curiosity enough for me to read the article, something which probably isn't true for over 99% of the comments I read on HN. So I strongly disagree with you that it isn't appropriate for HN. There is nothing defamatory in what he says, and whether or not it is substantive can be decided with votes like all other comments.

There's a lot of competition in the autonomous driving space: Uber, Delphi, Cruise, Waymo, Ford, Volvo, Zoox, Varden Labs, Auro Robotics, Navya, Nuro.ai, Baidu, Tesla, Faraday Future, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Yutong, and there are others (including some in stealth mode that would rather not be mentioned).

Udacity also has a course just for making a self-driving car, and you get to use a real car.

https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nan...

Driving on highways is far easier than driving in cities because it's a more controlled environment. There aren't supposed to be pedestrians, bikers, traffic lights, and it's generally a more constrained problem. Logistically, you can just have truckers drive in cities, get out at certain waypoints, and then have truckers take over again at waypoints (mostly located just outside cities).

I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it's a much easier problem. You also don't have to be as concerned with public perception, as you aren't asking a consumer to get inside of it.

It's $650 billion from 2013 and growing (see link), so I extrapolated and rounded. Over 1% of people in the United States work as truck drivers.

http://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-industry-infographic...

While I'm not sure how well this fits into Uber's business model (I feel like freight and taxi services are very different industries), the idea of automating trucking is great. It's a far easier technical problem, the logistics are simpler, and it's a $700 billion industry just in the United States. After acquiring Otto this year it's good to see them pursuing this aggressively. Although I'm not a big fan of Uber as a whole, there is a huge amount of money to be made in automated trucking and Uber has a good chance of taking the lead there. I feel like this is where we'll see the real competition for automated driving in the coming years.

That's known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

https://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnes...

A great way to explain this to people would be to ask them if they've ever seen a panoramic photo glitch, and tell them that's what the car would be seeing most of the time (well, assuming anything is moving, like a car or a person or a piece of trash).

Eatsa has done a great job marketing itself as the automatic restaurant, so much so that many people believe robots prepare their food (their kitchen is just as labor intensive as any other restaurant). I actually spoke to their engineering director a while ago and I think they are going to have a hard time building any real robots (they are working on this and hired several engineers to do so). For starters, they had to outsource building their automatic cubbies - they couldn't build a moving door by themselves. But they are hoping to build an autonomous food preparation system more sophisticated and an order of magnitude cheaper than anything that exists today.

Something I see a lot is for someone with a lot of experience in pure software engineering to delve into hardware or robotics, and think he'll be able to just breeze through it (if it were so easy, there would be a lot more awesome consumer robots everywhere). What I found particularly amusing was the way he viewed it though. When I said robots are limited by the laws of physics, his counterpoint was that software was limited by the speed of light. He was dead serious, and to him that made the challenges comparable.

I look forward to seeing all the crazy food robots people concoct in the coming years. I suspect most people will realize it's a lot harder than they thought, and by the time the robot is useful it's too expensive to be profitable. Most people are unaware of the many companies in past decades that have tried and failed, including some that actually launched a product. This is definitely my favorite - an automatic hamburger restaurant from the 60's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE

Most of the Otto engineers are still in San Francisco, and many of them are working on self-driving cars (in addition to trucks).

In my experience, the drivers are usually very happy to talk about Uber - including how much they're making. They will often tell you what they're getting paid for the same ride, which you can compare to how much you're paying. I have never seen them get paid less than what I was paying, and am often surprised how much more they're making (it can be 3x depending on the promotions).

Yes, this data is limited. But all signs point towards Uber hemorrhaging money with no easy way of becoming profitable. And we know that competition can easily swoop in by looking at Austin, where Uber and Lyft left. It's a race to the bottom until self-driving cars are a reality.

I'd think Otto in particular would be enormously beneficial to Amazon. Amazon loves robots, and anything that reduces shipping costs (and times) would be incredibly valuable to them.

Sure, but their sales are subsidized by VC dollars. I don't have all the data, but everything I've heard in every city says Uber pays drivers more than they charge riders, hence the enormous 10 digit losses annually. And once they raise rates, people will use their services drastically less. The question is can they make driverless cars work before they run out of money? And I really, really doubt it. That's many years away, and I don't think Saudi Arabia is going to give them a few more billion dollars.

I realize Uber is a big company and it obviously deserves some press, but I'm surprised just how many articles about Uber have made it to the front page of hacker news the past few days. And (almost) all of them have been very negative. I wonder if public perception will change and people will use their competitors more? Probably not enough to be noticeable. I wonder how Uber considers managing its brand, as they rarely seem to shy away from bad publicity.

With regards to this specific article, how common is this practice at other startups? From anecdotal experience, it seems common for startups to under inform employees with regards to their equity and how it works. I rarely meet a startup employee who understands what their equity is worth.

Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of the engineers will be unhappy about constantly traveling (or worse, moving) to Arizona.

Their self-driving engineers are now split among three locations: San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Arizona. I think that alone is going to cause significant engineering friction. It's a lot harder to do remote work for testing live robots (especially if they can kill people).

I do not know Uber's plan, but assuming they're too smart to do something dumb is pretty silly. Everybody makes mistakes, especially companies that may have become arrogant after years of getting their way with little effort.

And besides that, Tesla does have a permit, so that argument quickly becomes very messy and I don't see how it could rule in favor of Uber. If every driver needs the permit (as opposed to every corporation) , that applies to Uber as well. They'd effectively be making the legislation more onerous against themselves.

It all seemed like really bad publicity though. Everything I saw described Uber as reckless and having subpar technology.

"Within 4 months, a small talented group can build a decent self-driving system from scratch."

What makes you think that? It's a lot more work than that. For starters, self-driving cars still aren't a commercial reality despite decades of research and many many millions of dollars in funding. I've never heard of a team build anything other than a super limited prototype in that time frame - nothing anyone would reasonably call a self-driving car.

"From our price studies, we're on par with other fast turn shops"

Your studies are cherry-picked to make you look good then, as that just isn't true.

"funding isn't a vanity metric when your company needs financing"

Needing to raise money and bragging about it as a sign of success are very different things.

Turn off the pitch, dude. I've already told you several times I'm not your customer. I'm bowing out of this conversation now.

I want more materials (ie stainless steel, brass), greater capabilities (ie 5 axis mill, welding), and it would be nice to have guaranteed compliance for regulated industries (ie food, medicine).

Other than that, you are more expensive than hiring a machinist the old-fashioned way for one-off parts. Apparently I just don't understand your business, because I'm clearly not your customer.

Also please don't name drop your investors - nobody cares. Funding is a vanity metric. Focus on how you can be profitable when your business is no longer subsidized by external funding - that's what will make you successful. Growth is great but it doesn't help if you can't ever sell at a profit.

Anyway, while I may not understand your business, I wish you luck. If you can truly revolutionize manufacturing the way you say that would be great.

A very prominent investor told me that hardware founders need some sort of celebrity attached to their name to raise money. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are rare. Investors know hardware is hard and the lead times are longer, so they see that as added risk which makes them less likely to invest.

Many investors, as a rule, won't even consider hardware and there are very few that specialize in hardware. It's a bit of a catch-22 with investors that say they want you to be different, because most of them really want you to be like everybody else. The majority are trying to ride the next wave, only a very small number are actually trying to find it independent of "signalling."

Every investor is different, every company is different, but if you're doing something unconventional you're probably going to have a very hard time. And now that Pebble has essentially failed, that's going to make investors a lot more wary about investing in consumer electronics.

What was/is your startup?

While I think you have some good points, and I'm not a huge fan of Plethora (like I said, their service was unusable for me), I think what we have here is people coming from different perspectives.

You understand real hardcore manufacturing and have a lot of experience in that realm. Plethora seems to be targeting people that don't know anything about manufacturing but want an easy way to build parts in small quantities. I don't know how they plan to scale to full manufacturing, and I don't know their numbers (the real question is retention, how many customers are coming back with larger order numbers), they may have found a niche by targeting customers that just don't know any better. I assume this market is small and I am skeptical of its value at all, since I know it's easier to just hire someone internally or just outsource it to a competent shop, but something Silicon Valley can do like nobody else is hype itself up. What that means is a lot of things, but it includes pumping up valuations for an eventual acquisition.

Is Plethora creating real value? I'm extremely skeptical. Are they attempting to create a company that can be sold for a profit? That seems pretty likely to me, and that's what the overwhelming majority of investors care about.

I think part of the problem is Nick sounds like he's pitching investors in this thread, when he's talking to people that are experienced in manufacturing. You're not his target audience. Then again, I doubt he's planning on showing this to investors, so I'm not really sure what his goal is here (unless he's just defensive, which is a really bad sign for him being able to see the forest for the trees).

'dictatorship of the majority' sounds like democracy to me.

My understanding is if they have the permit they are required to report all accidents, and they'd just rather not do that.

The team is split between Pittsburgh and San Francisco, as Uber acquired SF based Otto.

Oddly enough, the answer might be yes. Tesla is under investigation by the NHTSA for their fatal autopilot crash some months ago, in addition to a homicide investigation by the Florida Highway Patrol.

I really doubt anything criminal will be brought against Tesla, but it at least sets a precedent for an investigation. Considering Uber's complete refusal to follow regulation, it seems you could argue they're being negligent and if someone dies that might be interpreted as manslaughter (I am not a lawyer). At the very least, I'm sure it will be a PR nightmare and a huge court case that would put a chink in their armor.

http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-gets-extension-in-nhtsa...