7 ms·

Cars weigh thousands of pounds and routinely drive upwards of 60 miles per hour. The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to n

Cars weigh thousands of pounds and routinely drive upwards of 60 miles per hour. The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to navigate through life-and-death situations not only for the users but also for everyone around them. There are places for 'move fast and break things'. But cars move fast already, and they can really break things.

stingraycharles 8y ago
I think this is a naive perspective. I've heard many similar stories from friends that work in the German automotive industry, and I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments). Every organization has these types of things internally. As an engineer, I don't like it, but it's a fact of life.
- karpodiem 8y ago
  Banks can reverse transactions if they want to. Tesla's cavalier attitude towards manufacturing has yielded a 14% first pass through rate on the Model 3 line (which is abysmal and may bankrupt the company along with declining M3 demand) vs. the industry standard of ~80% FPT rate. Source - https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-reworking-thousands-of-cars-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-... We're at the point in the Tesla story similar to that of 2008 where Dr. Berry et el were watching the housing market collapse around them and the banks wouldn't re-price the swaps. Tesla is already bankrupt, most people don't know this yet. But they will.
  - jsight 8y ago
    While I agree that 14% is horrible, that was a point-in-time number that is being compared to an average. One would hope that factories regularly run well above 80%. I'd also bet that some occasionally drop well below it for a day or so. The details matter here and given the quality that I see in the field, I'm not convinced that this is such a horrible situation.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    I don't think the rework rate is a big deal for the customer. Ultimately manufacturing is about increasing the yield rate so that costs are lowered, because rework is expensive. But if you can make money with lots of manual rework on every product, it's no big deal. Something to improve next quarter. I have so many electronic devices, from cheap to expensive, that have some passive component manually bodged on somewhere. They work fine. It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. Waste is worse than a product that is imperfect immediately off the assembly line.
    - karpodiem 8y ago
      People are waiting 3 or 4 months for replacement parts for their vehicles or Tesla has had possession of the vehicle (and the person is using a loner) for a similar amount of time. That won't fly in the mass market.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      "But if you can make money with lots of manual rework on every product, it's no big deal. Something to improve next quarter." Is Tesla making money?
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      Rework dramatically slows production. Tesla cannot get the rest of their booked-sale cash for an undelivered car. But they must pay all the fixed production costs anyway. In cash, creditors at this point will be getting squirrelly. Therefore: slowness in production is the fast-track to a possibly fatal cash crunch.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      >>> It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. It's not about money. Correcting and refacturing a board takes time, in the order of months even for a simple one. It's too long.
  - gammatrigono 8y ago
    Why are so many things framed by HN users in terms of scenes from The Big Short?
  - v_petkov 8y ago
    Hope your short position is huge.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    In some cases banks can't reverse transactions.
  - QuantumGood 8y ago
    That link is not a source for declining Model 3 demand. Source? My info shows that • In July, over 60,000 test drive requests in the US alone • 5000 Model 3 new net orders in one week in mid-July • Total deposits greater than total refunds in the twelve months ending April 2018 • Reports of Cancellations Outpacing Orders proved to be False wording Meaningless negative indicators include Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino saying Model 3 social media activity had lessened and frequent critic Latrilife said Tesla’s Burbank Airport lot is under 24/7 surveillance Sources include: • Seekingalpha.com/article/4189303-tesla-short-thesis-model-3-demand-wrong • Seekingalpha.com/article/4179986-tesla-model-3-reservations-tip-iceberg
    - karpodiem 8y ago
      A key supplier may have gone cash on delivery (no more net 120 terms) because M3 production this week has been at a stand still - https://twitter.com/skabooshka/status/1032409945407250434 https://twitter.com/skabooshka/status/1032409945407250434 And - https://twitter.com/Paul91701736/status/1033136573615730688 https://twitter.com/Paul91701736/status/1033136573615730688 All the first hand Twitter intelligence is gathered by people who are short on TSLA. They see the ground level reality.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments). It's not like those matter. The bank itself guarantees the integrity of your account and can reverse charges. And of course would be insured for such losses. Being killed by a car, otoh, is more permanent.
mikeash 8y ago
Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety. If this guy worked on motor control or braking system firmware then that would be scary, but he didn’t.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
  > Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety. Only if it's deliberately isolated in the vehicle. It should be. Aaaand, it isn't: the firmware upgrades to all other car computing elements go through it.
  - freerobby 8y ago
    Runtime isolation is distinct from compile/build-time isolation. You're citing the latter, but it's the former that matters. Tesla gets this right, e.g. an interrupt in the MCU does not have any effect on braking, drive-by-wire, or ADAS systems while a car is in operation.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Just to back this up: I have rebooted both my MCU and my instrument panel while driving. Critical systems are not affected.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
      Fair enough, but if those bits pass through the infotainment center on the way in, controlling one allows you to control the other.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Ignoring the infotainment system for this argument (as they firewall it off from CANBUS and other life critical systems [1]), I argue that their IT infrastructure is safety related, as it governs Tesla's velocity in getting patches and security fixes out to vehicles in a timely manner. Can you imagine a zero day being found in Windows with Windows Update being down? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng
frozenport 8y ago
Hacks and safety aren't exclusive. You can have a hacked together system that is also safe.
dewey 8y ago
There's still the problem with exploding phones and batteries so even if it's just a phone it can go wrong in dangerous ways. (If it happens on a plane for example)
- f4rtcl0ps 8y ago
  or if the phone weighs thousands of kilograms and is traveling at highway speeds
snowwrestler 8y ago
The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which they invited a couple reporters to tour, etc.
- nomel 8y ago
  > The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case. A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car. A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail. But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Is a Tesla steer-by-wire? No. It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Brakes aren’t either. You might lose ABS or boost, but you’ll still have brakes.
- nathancahill 8y ago
  That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").
- mcguire 8y ago
  Didn't the iPhone use a dual processor set up like the other manufacturers at the time? One ui/app processor and a separate radio processor stack?
Nelson69 8y ago
Are there any interesting papers on formal verification of some of the most modern machine learning algorithms? Clearly when we "verify" Waymo or Tesla auto-pilot, we're going to want to use that stuff, right? Surely they won't just provide insurers with some data about the billions of miles they've driven without accidents and how humans can only drive like a million miles without an accident and try to get the insurers to give them policies... Just like when we hand out licenses, we always check to make sure the 16 year old took some formal driving classes from professional driving instructors... I wish things were better but we don't care about this stuff as a society until much later usually. When did the car first appear? When did the first seatbelt law appear?
- atomicthumbs 8y ago
  lol they'll never bother with that
weaksauce 8y ago
Read the Barr report on Toyota’s unintended acceleration incident. They didn’t have the right failsafes and watchdogs and only a single bit was responsible for a critical feature. Meaning memory corruption or a cosmic ray flipping the bit can cause disaster. They didn’t follow anywhere near best practices in their firmware development. It’s not just the young upstarts that mess this up by being “reckless”
aglavine 8y ago
Indeed, cars currently move fast and break things. Tesla is an improvement on current situation.

stingraycharles 8y ago

I think this is a naive perspective. I've heard many similar stories from friends that work in the German automotive industry, and I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments). Every organization has these types of things internally. As an engineer, I don't like it, but it's a fact of life.

karpodiem 8y ago
Banks can reverse transactions if they want to. Tesla's cavalier attitude towards manufacturing has yielded a 14% first pass through rate on the Model 3 line (which is abysmal and may bankrupt the company along with declining M3 demand) vs. the industry standard of ~80% FPT rate. Source - https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-reworking-thousands-of-cars-2018-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hit-model-3-target-by-... We're at the point in the Tesla story similar to that of 2008 where Dr. Berry et el were watching the housing market collapse around them and the banks wouldn't re-price the swaps. Tesla is already bankrupt, most people don't know this yet. But they will.
- jsight 8y ago
  While I agree that 14% is horrible, that was a point-in-time number that is being compared to an average. One would hope that factories regularly run well above 80%. I'd also bet that some occasionally drop well below it for a day or so. The details matter here and given the quality that I see in the field, I'm not convinced that this is such a horrible situation.
- jrockway 8y ago
  I don't think the rework rate is a big deal for the customer. Ultimately manufacturing is about increasing the yield rate so that costs are lowered, because rework is expensive. But if you can make money with lots of manual rework on every product, it's no big deal. Something to improve next quarter. I have so many electronic devices, from cheap to expensive, that have some passive component manually bodged on somewhere. They work fine. It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. Waste is worse than a product that is imperfect immediately off the assembly line.
  - karpodiem 8y ago
    People are waiting 3 or 4 months for replacement parts for their vehicles or Tesla has had possession of the vehicle (and the person is using a loner) for a similar amount of time. That won't fly in the mass market.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    "But if you can make money with lots of manual rework on every product, it's no big deal. Something to improve next quarter." Is Tesla making money?
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Rework dramatically slows production. Tesla cannot get the rest of their booked-sale cash for an undelivered car. But they must pay all the fixed production costs anyway. In cash, creditors at this point will be getting squirrelly. Therefore: slowness in production is the fast-track to a possibly fatal cash crunch.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    >>> It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. It's not about money. Correcting and refacturing a board takes time, in the order of months even for a simple one. It's too long.
- gammatrigono 8y ago
  Why are so many things framed by HN users in terms of scenes from The Big Short?
- v_petkov 8y ago
  Hope your short position is huge.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  In some cases banks can't reverse transactions.
- QuantumGood 8y ago
  That link is not a source for declining Model 3 demand. Source? My info shows that • In July, over 60,000 test drive requests in the US alone • 5000 Model 3 new net orders in one week in mid-July • Total deposits greater than total refunds in the twelve months ending April 2018 • Reports of Cancellations Outpacing Orders proved to be False wording Meaningless negative indicators include Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino saying Model 3 social media activity had lessened and frequent critic Latrilife said Tesla’s Burbank Airport lot is under 24/7 surveillance Sources include: • Seekingalpha.com/article/4189303-tesla-short-thesis-model-3-demand-wrong • Seekingalpha.com/article/4179986-tesla-model-3-reservations-tip-iceberg
  - karpodiem 8y ago
    A key supplier may have gone cash on delivery (no more net 120 terms) because M3 production this week has been at a stand still - https://twitter.com/skabooshka/status/1032409945407250434 https://twitter.com/skabooshka/status/1032409945407250434 And - https://twitter.com/Paul91701736/status/1033136573615730688 https://twitter.com/Paul91701736/status/1033136573615730688 All the first hand Twitter intelligence is gathered by people who are short on TSLA. They see the ground level reality.
coldtea 8y ago
>I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments). It's not like those matter. The bank itself guarantees the integrity of your account and can reverse charges. And of course would be insured for such losses. Being killed by a car, otoh, is more permanent.

mikeash 8y ago

Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety. If this guy worked on motor control or braking system firmware then that would be scary, but he didn’t.

SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
> Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety. Only if it's deliberately isolated in the vehicle. It should be. Aaaand, it isn't: the firmware upgrades to all other car computing elements go through it.
- freerobby 8y ago
  Runtime isolation is distinct from compile/build-time isolation. You're citing the latter, but it's the former that matters. Tesla gets this right, e.g. an interrupt in the MCU does not have any effect on braking, drive-by-wire, or ADAS systems while a car is in operation.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Just to back this up: I have rebooted both my MCU and my instrument panel while driving. Critical systems are not affected.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 8y ago
    Fair enough, but if those bits pass through the infotainment center on the way in, controlling one allows you to control the other.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Ignoring the infotainment system for this argument (as they firewall it off from CANBUS and other life critical systems [1]), I argue that their IT infrastructure is safety related, as it governs Tesla's velocity in getting patches and security fixes out to vehicles in a timely manner. Can you imagine a zero day being found in Windows with Windows Update being down? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng

frozenport 8y ago

Hacks and safety aren't exclusive. You can have a hacked together system that is also safe.

dewey 8y ago

There's still the problem with exploding phones and batteries so even if it's just a phone it can go wrong in dangerous ways. (If it happens on a plane for example)

f4rtcl0ps 8y ago
or if the phone weighs thousands of kilograms and is traveling at highway speeds

snowwrestler 8y ago

The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which they invited a couple reporters to tour, etc.

nomel 8y ago
> The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case. A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car. A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail. But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.
- rconti 8y ago
  Is a Tesla steer-by-wire? No. It seems you have to prove that failure of these hack-y systems would lead to the disastrous result you postulate.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Brakes aren’t either. You might lose ABS or boost, but you’ll still have brakes.
nathancahill 8y ago
That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").
mcguire 8y ago
Didn't the iPhone use a dual processor set up like the other manufacturers at the time? One ui/app processor and a separate radio processor stack?

Nelson69 8y ago

Are there any interesting papers on formal verification of some of the most modern machine learning algorithms? Clearly when we "verify" Waymo or Tesla auto-pilot, we're going to want to use that stuff, right? Surely they won't just provide insurers with some data about the billions of miles they've driven without accidents and how humans can only drive like a million miles without an accident and try to get the insurers to give them policies... Just like when we hand out licenses, we always check to make sure the 16 year old took some formal driving classes from professional driving instructors... I wish things were better but we don't care about this stuff as a society until much later usually. When did the car first appear? When did the first seatbelt law appear?

atomicthumbs 8y ago
lol they'll never bother with that

weaksauce 8y ago

Read the Barr report on Toyota’s unintended acceleration incident. They didn’t have the right failsafes and watchdogs and only a single bit was responsible for a critical feature. Meaning memory corruption or a cosmic ray flipping the bit can cause disaster. They didn’t follow anywhere near best practices in their firmware development. It’s not just the young upstarts that mess this up by being “reckless”

aglavine 8y ago

Indeed, cars currently move fast and break things. Tesla is an improvement on current situation.