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George Hotz Is Giving Away Self-Driving Software
- akerl_ 10y agoThis seems like the kind of end-run around the system that tech folks tend to think is a clever life hack, only to find out that legal/regulatory bodies aren't fooled. Like trying to convince the judge that you weren't speeding because if you set your frame of reference inside the car, it was the road that was speeding, backwards! I only hope that the folks hand-rolling this onto their cars don't injure too many people in their attempt to "disrupt" cars.
- trome 10y agoYeah, I doubt that this code dump will stimulate a community to form in a legally safe way similar to the Linux kernel or GnuPGP, the choices of BSD and CC-ShareAlike-NonCommercial are likely to encourage manufacturers to pull a Sony and take the code, build their own training data and contribute nothing back.
- pjmlp 10y agoIt is also a reason that as engineer (real degree, not self named), I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations. Thankfully at least EULAs are void in most European countries and companies can be accounted for.
- di4na 10y agoSadly, despite 50 years of work on it (and there are still lot ot work on it), we have no idea on what to regulate. Which is the culprit here.
- tluyben2 10y agoHow would that work practically? I am sometimes for regulation but I cannot fathom what it would look like.
- siddboots 10y agoANAE, but one form it could take is via a government or independent expert body with a mandate to inspect and certify code in some meaningful way before it reaches the consumer.
- icebraining 10y agoAll code? I'm pretty sure you just ground the industry to an halt, if even Flappy Bird must be inspected and certified. If it's just code used in critical situation, then you're not really talking about the same thing as pjmlp.
- pjc50 10y agoSelf-driving car code is a critical situation, surely? Isn't that what we were talking about?
- bcook 10y agoThe code is likely useful in many other ways than just self-driving cars.
- cowsandmilk 10y agoAncestor in this thread said: > I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations. Maybe there is a line that is "critical", but not "life critical", but ancestor's statement was pretty damn broad.
- cnvogel 10y agoPeople seem to be under the impression that regulation inevitably means "someone has to review/audit every single change that was made to any aspect of a product". But in practice there can be all kinds of provisions, from the weak to the strong. A weak provision may be that at least a minimum of development and testing has to take place, with requirements on record-keeping and naming of responsible persons: For a simple device, or a simple software, this might take the form of a checklist or a questionnaire which you have to take before uploading code to the App-Store. Yes, this seems very straightforward to fake, but at least then you have deliberately cheated a system designed to catch errors, and not "just written shitty code" (or built a flimsy mechanical device... when applying this scheme to non-software world). Which, I think, would already help a lot to make people accountable for their products/inventions/... {for, example: with CE certifications, you, as a producer only state that you have built your products according to some harmonized standards, but the conformance itself is not tested by a third party} With increasing security/privacy requirements, the mandated measures can could then be ramped up. Maybe scaled by permissions of an application (accesses otherwise protected data?), the ability to process sensitive date or maybe number of users? The extremes measure would be a full line-by-line review on every change, when software is life-sustaining or a fault may have catastrophic (death of people, like running a pacemaker or steering a huge plane).
- patcheudor 10y agoThis may very well be the future text-book example of how to not handle life critical systems and software, unfortunately it may well take people being killed. At this point we have no idea how this software handles pedestrians, cyclists, and even motorcyclists. We have no idea how it handles unanticipated situations like black ice or even construction zones. It has not been tested or certified by anyone. Clearly anybody who thinks they can download this, compile it and run it in their car likes playing with fire.
- slavik81 10y ago> I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations. That would be the death of free software. I'm also a P.Eng., but if we're going to require professional licensing, it should only be for safety-critical uses. Shared tools and knowledge have made software systems better and more affordable for countless people. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
- stale2002 10y agoThis isn't some "clever trick". It is genuinely not illegal to release a bunch of code open source on github. The Government asked him to not sell his product, so he complied with the government's request.
- chillydawg 10y agoIt is an ethically shitty move, though. The software is not properly tested. People will run it thinking it's legit and probably some will get hurt or die. The law doesn't matter.
- diggan 10y agoIt's ethically shitty to release open source software now? People who pull down some source from Github that has 4 commits, thinking it's legit and rely on it to drive your car are probably not too many. Those that do, are generally hard to protect from themselves in any area of life.
- nzjrs 10y ago7 years ago I completed a PhD developing the first control software for quadrotor drones. I mention this only to give a sense of time. Now every idiot with an arduino and a github account can crash one into my family at the park. Do you think the adoption of shitty self driving technology by unequipped amateurs will follow a different path?
- tbrake 10y agoThe cost of both entry and failure for hacking on quadcopter vs car is orders of magnitude apart? Unless you know something about the upcoming price of cars that you'd like to share ;).
- nzjrs 10y agoReally? In 5 years how many cars will be equipped with the basal level of sensors that make these sorts of hacks possible? My guess is more people will have compatible cars in their house than qudrotors.... Cost and chance of failure is poorly (or not at all) evaluated by the kinds of dangerous beginners likely to crash their car-pilot into a bridge.
- cptskippy 10y agoIt didn't really strike me as an end-run but more like his interest was in solving the self driving car problem and when faced with solving the regulatory problem he said "no thanks" and walked away.
- yalogin 10y agoSerious question. He seems to lack tact, saying Ford never did anything remotely useful in computer science. Why would his investors let him piss off their potential acquirers that way?
- dzhiurgis 10y agoNeither Marc Andreessen nor PG seem to be particularly tactful.
- agumonkey 10y agoSorry for them, but in that department they're way below GH.
- drcross 10y agoHe basks in controversy. It greatly detracts from what he is hoping to achieve- automate humans traveling in large metal contraptions at 70mph. This is not an area for inflated egos.
- jbigelow76 10y ago"Move fast, break things"; eventual body count not withstanding, this is literally silicon valley's ethos for the last 15ish years expressed via temper tantrum.
- agumonkey 10y agoI hope he goes into space, I even have a name for his next company: astron'hotz.
- CmdrSprinkles 10y agoWhile possibly too political to discuss on HN, Hotz is a Brand. His claim to fame was rooting an iPhone and later showing the world why we can't have nice things (showing that OtherOS was a security hole and making Sony disable it) This was a continuation of that. He was hacking the future and all that crap to raise money. Once he and his backers realized there were actually regulatory boards for this (Oh no! Politics!) they had to pull out immediately. So they "fought the system" and open sourced it (not really) to show that he is A Man of The People. And most people will never care to look at the source and will (hopefully) think he invented Teslas or whatever the hell. And in a year or two, he and many of the same backers will innovate and revolutionize a new field have a new product that they can hopefully get bought out on before that field's regulatory board cares. And the buyer will know it is snake oil but will now have a reputation and a Brand to increase the value of the actual product they had been working on for years.
- dovdovdov 10y agoI remember when we did lane image recognition in Matlab on uni, I felt like a master hacker. This was like 10 years ago. Sure this is more advanced tech, but seriously, we should be far far further in the development of these. I still have my tinfoil-hat hope that all these technologies are ready made and resting in a drawer, and companies are just milking the fossil fuel era as long as they can, and teasing us with this crappy progression meanwhile.
- ohwello 10y agoHow would self-driving detract from fossil fuels? It should increase total demand for fuel.
- cxseven 10y agoSelf-driving tech would make vehicle sharing much easier, which would in turn allow people to use vehicles properly sized for their current need. In other words, people wouldn't need a big honkin' SUV or truck most of the time, and could ride around in something smaller with just the fuel range they need for that trip. Also, traffic might get better. If everything became automated it might even be possible to eliminate traffic lights.
- trome 10y agoThere would likely be vehicle sharing benefits, but self driving cars are apt to make traffic worse. Your average 8 lane freeway will still only be able to carry 11k cars an hour assuming everyone has minimal stopping distance & is driving at 40mph for ideal throughput. Traffic lights are also unlikely to disappear, as self driving cars do not magically get perfect traction or stopping abilities, and they will have to share the road with the other humans that exist on our streets, whether they be pedestrians, bikers, joggers, skateboarders, etc. In contrast, a light rail alignment can move 20k people an hour. It also won't reduce traffic, but it'll slow traffic growth by reducing latent transport demand and allow cities to remain economically viable as traffic increases.
- 10y ago
- AmVess 10y agoHe says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know when something smells like bs, looks like bs, and sounds like bs...it's bs.
- wyager 10y ago> yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project. I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.
- Oletros 10y ago> To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project To be fair, looking at the code, it has all to do with the quality of the project
- cleeus 10y agoDo you happen to know where the code is? Can you post a link?
- LukeB_UK 10y agohttps://github.com/commaai/openpilot https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
- cleeus 10y agodoesn't look to bad except: - I can't find automated tests - The vision module is a binary blob (of course this was also stated in the previous HN discussion) The rest is basically just a bunch of glue and bootloader code.
- Oletros 10y agoNinjaed by LukeB Here there is a discussion about the github repo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13073331
- xt00 10y agoIt would be interesting to have somebody who was knowledgable in the area of self driving cars to analyze his code. I mean it seems like he might benefit from a combination of learning a few things and some level of humility. I mean, Kalman filters, and even the algorithms used to lower the noise in images and radars were not invented overnight but when it comes to a car that may easily kill somebody it seems like it's worth it to be a bit cautious about learning about potential pitfalls to different algorithms and technologies. I mean build all the self driving car algorithms and cars that drive on test tracks, but if one of his cars ran over my kid, or anybody else's kid, then the price of progress is too high.
- sschueller 10y agoAm I missing something? I only see the dataset available but no source code.
- jsjohnst 10y agoAs typical for this type of article, it's poorly linked. Here's the code: https://github.com/commaai/openpilot https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
- andrewzk 10y agoWow, this codebase is alarmingly bad. No tests. Comments like "TODO: actually make this work" all over the place. I can see why geohot is terrified of regulators.
- justinjlynn 10y agoApropos, https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/5 https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/5 bneiluj > There is no test suite. Unit tests or E2E tests. Geohotz > Pull request please! mgraczyk > We have unit tests which have not yet been open sourced, because we haven't yet set up automatic testing on Github. [...] Wat. In what world is it acceptable to elide the test suite for your product because you don't have automatic testing setup on your repository host? Are your tests in a completely separate repo... (checks the repo history) no, you've just dumped a snapshot of your development in a git repo and pushed it to github. I really don't want to sound snide... this project has the capability to be so cool. It's just... well, if someone hands you what they say is a magic box that you can trust your life to and that box is manky and leaks strange fluids all over the shop (and it really isn't supposed to do that)... what would you think? Is that box magic? Will that box save your life? It certainly doesn't give the engineer in me great confidence in the quality of their system if this is quality of the piece they're proud enough to show everyone.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jsjohnst 10y ago
- arihant 10y agoI might be missing something, but most of the critical code seems to be binary. It only supports two car models. So unless you own those two and are willing to let no-warranty indie code which you cannot see drive you around, this is a solid no-no.
- mjpuser 10y agoI noticed that too. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/visiond/visiond https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v...
- winteriscoming 10y agoLooking at that github repo, its a handful of python scripts with around 30 odd commits? Am I missing something or is this really what is the core implementation of a complex thing such as a self driving car software? Edit: Someone else in this thread commented that the repo linked in the article isn't the right one and apparently this is where the code resides https://github.com/commaai/openpilot https://github.com/commaai/openpilot
- nitrogen 10y agoPrevious discussions came to the same conclusion, with the added realization that Python has no hope of maintaining the consistent latency required by a hard-real-time task such as driving a car.
- agumonkey 10y agoI don't know how much bandwidth and complexity is involved in processing the single cam setup, maybe with a recent core i7, the variability of python is swallowed by the cpu performance. That said, Hotz claimed to have read state of the art papers, but it doesn't seem he meant hard real time physics/mechanics computations; probably neural net, computer vision and deep learning. Hacker way ?
- tremon 10y agoI don't know how much bandwidth and complexity is involved It's not about bandwidth or complexity, it's about latency. And no, even a recent core i7 can be stalled for long enough to cause underruns in a simple audio stream.
- TickleSteve 10y agoreal-time is about maximum-bounded response time.... not performance. an i7 in this case will be significantly worse than a Cortex-M0. Entirely due to the features in the i7 that make it high performance, such as instruction reordering, branch prediction, etc. All those types of features make the performance less deterministic.
- 10y ago
- jakozaur 10y agoWouldn't it better if he pivoted to self-parking? At $700 a kit that allows car to drive by itself to garrage, open it, park would be so attractive. Driving through parking lot seems to be way easier than fully autonomous car.
- agumonkey 10y agoYou mean finding an empty spot and parking ? interesting small scope project.
- jakozaur 10y agoYes. Or even let me walk out of the car at front door and let it drive to garage spot. Pros: + parking is one of the least favorite part of driving. It also eats a lot of time. + low-speed makes it much easier, you can stop at any time. Also stopping and asking human for help would be acceptable. + 360 sensors are superior to human vision in parking situation. + parking accidents are usually minor. Self-driving car getting minor bump, scratch is much easier to swallow them someone getting killed, injured. + you can implement valet parking for free. E.g. Self-driving valet that gets 30% discount would be so much welcomed in San Francisco.
- agumonkey 10y agoParking can be fun sometimes, but many time it's indeed stressful, you have to care not to touch other cars. And in streets avoid blocking traffic too long.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yamaneko 10y agoAlso, if you're late to work and can't find a free parking spot, you can let the car circulating until it finds one, while you can head to work. But this would add other problems to cope.
- madaxe_again 10y agoThis seems like a political statement. Flagged.
- paulsutter 10y agoThere are countless auto manufacturers around the world. I was surprised to see the length of the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture... I'm sure some percentage of these are willing to move faster than the major brands we know in the US. This strategy by Cruise could help then reach these smaller companies, some of whom surely have more flexible regulatory environments. Especially for local companies.
- wichert 10y agoFYI that list also contains manufacturers that went out of business a long time ago. The first one I looked at immediately said "The company [Minerva] became defunct in 1956". For some countries this is explicitly mentioned with a "defunct" headers, but not everywhere.
- andrewclunn 10y agoTorn. Concerned about safety, but wanting this to be open source and not vendor locked in...
- sickbeard 10y agoit only works on 2 cars.. that have a tech package. Might as well buy it from the vendor
- Nomentatus 10y agoVendors who will use his tech, now, 'cause it's free and better than what they could craft. His point is to offer his services to vendors. What's available now amounts to a demo.
- occamrazor 10y agoIn which countries is it legal to install a DIY actuator system like this one?
- eternalban 10y agoA somewhat critical point of view from a month ago on George Hotz, comma.ai, and engineering ethics for this category of software: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Cor8E9U1Z4J:http://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2016/11/01/thoughts-on-george-hotz-and-the-death-of-the-comma-one/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Cor8E9...
- tempw 10y agoHe is not releasing visiond binary, the main part of the project though. Can't say with certainty buy I don't doubt it was a little of a publicity stunt
- jamescostian 10y ago> not releasing visiond binary Nit: he did release the binary[0] he just didn't release its source, and there's a README that mentions this: > Contact us if you'd like features added or support for your platform. But I totally agree that it is pretty fishy to provide the source, especially in an "open-source" project... [0] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/visiond/visiond https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/v... [1] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/visiond/ https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/master/selfdrive/v...
- tempw 10y agoyeah, the source, my bad. The blob is available