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Sloppy Reporting on the Self Driving Car
- geogra4 15y agoA million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive
- AndrewDucker 15y agoA pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.
- geogra4 15y agoI guess it makes sense when only large businesses are the ones to own these automobiles. It puts individual ownership out of reach.
- endtime 15y ago>Businesses wishing to test their self-driving cars have to buy a million dollar bond from the state. It's not for individual owners.
- baconner 15y agoWell its not about individual ownership its about businesses testing commercial self driving cars right? Seems to me that a company is going to need to sink many millions in to design, build, and test a truly road safe self driving car no? Even considering it as a hardware and software mod to an existing model.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoIndividual ownership of driverless cars is out of reach, and always has been. This pilot program brings it a step closer, despite clearly just a test (e.g. requires two drivers in the car)
- maxerickson 15y agoIt isn't even that big a number. People with lots of assets carry that much or more liability insurance and they aren't paying enormous amounts for it.
- stonemetal 15y agoHow is a robot caused pile-up any different from a human caused pile-up? Do human Nevada drivers have to carry a million dollar bond?
- tzs 15y agoHuman drivers are not a new technology being field tested in a new and challenging environment.
- jcdreads 15y agoDrivers in most U.S. states (I can only speak for VT, PA, and MA) are required to carry liability insurance in order to drive legally. The amount varies. Robot drivers are a new and unproved technology. After not too many years I'd expect that they will cause way fewer accidents per mile driven than human drivers.
- protomyth 15y agoAdd that there is not a whole lot of case law on robot driven vehicles to understand how far the accident will go legally (unknown expense for an unknown number of parties)
- damoncali 15y agoFunny. I was thinking it sounded low.
- maigret 15y agoNot excessive as long as Nevada has a complete monopoly ;)
- larrik 15y agoOne crash survivor with a broken neck could eat up that million quick.
- bh42222 15y agoThat would restrict it to big business. But the requirement that two drivers need to be in the car will restrict it to no one who wants to invest in it to be more profitable. Right now this is simply for experimentation and I wonder who'd drop one million dollars just to experiment?
- Schwolop 15y agoLet's see now: CMU, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, USC, LAAS, USyd, Oxford, Caltech, just to name a few. All of these universities have already dropped at least that much building technology for the DARPA Grand Challenges or related research demonstrations.
- bh42222 15y agoRight. But I want my car to drive me to work and back while I sleep or read. But to get there I think first business must commercialize it through their simple desire to increase profits, then it may become cheap and accessible enough for average Joes like me. When you require two people with a driver's license in the car at all times you kill any profitable commercial reason to use self-driving cars. And that to me is a huge mistake. Commuting to work (if you drive > 2 0minutes at highway speeds) is probably the most dangerous thing by far that all of us do on any given day. Distracted drivers, drunk drivers, sleepy drivers (like me!) this is why we need self-driving cars. But I think the path to mass use of self-driving cars goes through commercial use of self-driving cars.
- wmf 15y agoI guess it wasn't clear enough that this is the regulation for testing autonomous cars on public roads, not for deployment of autonomous cars.
- kokey 15y agoIt's a quick thought, but what we could do is the following: Have a wiki-like site, where the community update source information about news items. On the items pages, they also make links to news articles on the web. Along with this there is an analysis tool, so if you see an article on a news site somewhere, you pass the URL to this site, and it will point you to the relevant wiki page based on the URLs that are set on the wiki page or by guessing the best one for you based on content and similarity to other news reports.
- dredmorbius 15y agoYou mean, like, say, WikiNews? Specifically: citing your references: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your_references http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Style_guide#Citing_your...
- rkalla 15y agoThis obsession with self-promoting links is what makes reading sites like BoyGeniusReport and everything in the Engadget family so frustrating. Editorial rules seem to be that any in-story link MUST be a self-reference to some keyword match inside the site and the only external link (singular) allowed is the one at the end of the article using text like "Source" or "via XYZ.com".
- freehunter 15y agoGod I hate this on About.com. They're almost always the first result when I search for something, and every link on their page goes to another About.com page. And none of them have the information I'm searching for. I've added them (along with all of gawker media) to my hosts file.
- gravitronic 15y agoOne of the neater features I've seen Google implement is that if you click a link and then hit back within a short period, a little link shows up next to that search result that says "hide everything from about.com?"
- benologist 15y agoMashable now link all companies and products to their seo spam pages too. These sites are just getting ridiculous. I posted a lengthy complaint about the ridiculous state of news blogs the other day but it didn't quite make it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564257 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564257
- dredmorbius 15y agoThis is a great article detailing a manifestation of several problems: - "News" as entertainment. The primary purpose of many articles isn't to inform, but to entertain. Or otherwise provide utility other than a deep, informed, and/or unbiased/NPoV perspective. - "News" as marketing. This is so prevalent in tech (and has been for decades) it's passed from "not funny" to trope. Company launches (itself, product), hires PR team, shops story to various media outlets, breathless hagiography ensues. The real market is usually 1) investors and 2) market shaping (for consumer products), though influencing legislative and regulatory environments (as in the Google car story) may also be a goal. - "News" as linkbait / attention generator. Though we think of this as a modern phenomenon, and Web-based concepts of eyeballs and social networking don't help, it's also old as dirt. So you get crap like PC World, Engadget, and even the New York Times with recursive, internal references, and lacking (as Clay Johnson points out) the truly useful references to original sources. HN is a great antidote to this -- the "Ron was wrong, Whit is right" direct link (and discussion of) PKI RNG weaknesses. And yet ... to a large approximation of "it works", it works -- as a business plan, these are fairly successful market strategies. Hard information markets are hard.
- bh42222 15y agoThey are only hard to support from advertising. For any service which requires payment for access to the information, said information tends to be hard. Blomberg news and the Wallstreet Journal, are examples for this in terms of financial news.
- dredmorbius 15y agoWSJ is largely a mouthpiece / propaganda arm of Fox and the Murdoch empire these days. Some would say it's always had a strong bias toward, shock, surprise, Wall Street interests. There's a great quote somewhere by Warren Buffet if you can find it about the WSJ's editorial staff believing its own writing. There are a number of information venues that are member/subscriber based, and which do relatively well: NPR, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor, Consumer's Union. The Economist Newspaper (as it styles itself) has a rather interesting revenue model, roughly one-third each subscriptions, ads, and EIU. The last is the Economist Intelligence Unit, a bespoke research arm, though I suspect much of its work ends up in the public edition at least in the form of background and depth. There's a great deal which could be written on markets and funding streams for information goods -- not just news, but arts, invention, data, and other works. Over the past several millenia, we've seen patronage, sponsorship, performance, publication, subscription, advertising (both direct and sponsorship), data mining, music sales (sheet, player roll, analogue recording, digital downloads), mechanical royalties, and other methods. Each has a profound influence on the nature, quality, and form of work produced.
- jey 15y ago> Two people are required to be present in an autonomous vehicle, both holding a valid driver's license. Why?
- maxerickson 15y agoIt's a pilot program for legalizing on road research projects. Presumably, someone felt that two people paying attention to the autonomous actions was better than one.
- jws 15y agoOne paying attention to the research and one paying attention to the traffic situation sounds like the right division of labor.
- onedognight 15y agoIn my experience you need the driver to fully pay attention to the road with one hand on the kill switch and the other on the wheel while the passenger works the computers doing the driving. This is just legislating common sense. These are Research Vehicles, not final products.
- rauljara 15y agoI really like the ideas behind this "infoveganism", but lord do I hate the name. I think the author chose it because in his mind veganism has to do with health. Nothing wrong with that association (i don't think there's anything wrong with veganism, either), but in most people's minds veganism = restrictions mixed with a sense of superiority. And the thing is, there's nothing about demanding that actual content be present in your media that places a restriction on what content enters your brain. As the author points out, the content you are presently getting is what's restricted by virtue of being so barren of fact. So if you were to stick with the food metaphor (not that I think that's a good idea), veganism doesn't real work. It's more like adding 13 essential vitamins and minerals to your otherwise toxic fruity pebbles.
- cjoh 15y agoActually no, I think it has to do with both health and ethics, as sticking to a plant based diet involves both. Our information diets have as much social ethical consequence as our food ones do.
- corin_ 15y agoBut for those of us who are more than happy to enjoy meat, veganism often doesn't mean either health or ethics, it means people who go without some of the best food and often feel superior about it. Not saying that this view of veganism is correct or fair, just that that's the immediate connection.
- cjoh 15y agoSure. I mean hey-- the most dangerous place in Washington is between me and a chicken wing. The good news is, the term ticks of as many vegans as it does non-vegans.
- true_religion 15y agoI don't think its an unfair commentary, since even the poster you're responding to suggested veganism has much to do with ethics. Presumably those who feel they are behaving ethically by committing an action, also feel that those who do not follow their standards are less ethical. That's the feeling of superiority that wafts off vegans.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI so wish so called 'journalists' would take this to heart. Although sometimes they would 'harsh the buzz' as it were. I recall a series that ABC news did on unemployment and they profiled a gal who, in their story, seemed like a sad case of working hard and not getting anywhere. Unfortunately for them there was enough PII in the story that one could do a bit of Googling and figure out who this person was, only to find they were a convicted felon (drug possesion with intent to sell), in and out of rehab, and recently 'laid off' when their Nova job term timed out and the employer elected not to hire full time. That is also a sad story but it would not have 'worked' for what the news producer was going for 'Regular folks, working hard, and unable to find work.' I agree its quite different to omit facts to make your story more credible, buts another form of this 'info-veganism' which. Generally I've been happy with the Economist (they seem less tempted by this sort of thing than others) and it suggests that there is once again an opportunity to create a news organization. (If you are old enough to remember, Fox News was created on the back of the first Iraq War with the tagline 'we report, you decide' trying to take the editorial spin out of reporting which was so evident in CNN's coverage, of course once it was a going concern that changed.) I believe there is a really disruptive opportunity here which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested.
- kragen 15y agoYeah! What's the disruptive opportunity?
- ChuckMcM 15y agoSo the opportunity is to create a video news network based on a streaming / store model rather than the 24hr model. Lets say you put together such a network, as you cover stories you put them up on your server. Your customers click 'the news' and they get a newscast of all the current news, but once they've seen a story they don't see it again unless there is actually additional information. Things like sports highlights, weather, and finance have a regular 30 minute update cycle. So push the button and you can watch a 'show' which is probably 30 - 40 minutes long of the current news. If you watched the news this morning and its a slow news day the icon indicates no new updates. You click news you are interested in and it tailors your broadcast to you're interest. Don't care about entertainment? not there. Don't want to hear about the latest hijinks on the debate circuit, not there. Interested in updates on NASA's budget? there. You can surface potential stories of interest in the 'crawl', click/press it and that story gets added to your newscast. Same basic organization as any other news organization, but the transmission is network based. News transition Nightly -> Morning + Noon + Night -> 24hr Differentiation Liberal leaning / Conservative / more local / less local / more weather / more sports / etc. Monetization - advertising. Disruption - remove transmission costs, pull cable networks out of the middle, move to NetFlix/AmazonPrime/Hulu with a higher revenue share. Product hook is "like a Tivo that watches the 24hr news channel and only records the new/interesting/current bits." Value add - saves time for you, no need to wait around for the top story to repeat, press go and its there. Partnership opportunities with business hotels for additional monetization revenue (they pay for your feed (probably generic version, not customized) and insert hotel specific ads into the video (rev share). The customer value proposition is news now, no repeats. When it happens it will disrupt the crap out of Fox/Cnn and will add a missing service to the NetFlix/Roku/Amazon/Hulu's of the world.
- kristianp 15y agoI don't like the fact that comments require connecting to facebook. Which might explain the lack of comments on the page.