7 ms·

Who downvoted you? This is a very serious issue. A partial autopilot for cars is worse than useless: it will create distracted drivers who can't react when the

• iaw 12y ago
  There has been a ton more downvoting on HN in the last month and it's getting kind of absurd. It's like a group of redditors hit the downvote threshold and just started going at it. edit: case in point
  • Animats 12y ago
    I've noticed that saying something negative about Apple or, now, Tesla, produces a quick downvote. On Slashdot, there's a striking phenomenon that saying something negative about Apple produces downvotes after about 15-30 minutes. Unclear whether this is a fanboy problem or a commercial "reputation management" firm in action.
    • archagon 12y ago
      Or magbe it's because Apple is routinely (and unfairly) maligned all across the tech sphere, especially in the comments, and Apple users on less polarized sites vote to compensate.
      • aidenn0 12y ago
        Huh? Apple and Tesla are both darlings of the tech sphere.
        • rimantas 12y ago
          have you been to /r/technology ?
          • archagon 12y ago
            Or The Verge comments? Or Slashdot?
            • duaneb 12y ago
              I can't speak for the verge, but I associate slashdot with rabid apple fanboyism.
          • ceejayoz 12y ago
            Does /r/politics accurately reflect the political makeup of the US? No. Why would you assume /r/technology is representative?
      • freehunter 12y ago
        If Apple was hated, you would see the same thing happen to them that happens to Microsoft. How often do you see big Microsoft news on the front page of HN or a Microsoft liveblog on Ars Technica? Almost never, where with Apple every word they say is splattered across the news for weeks.
        • Retric 12y ago
          The interesting parts of Microsoft get a lot of press. Consider how much coverage a hypothetical Halo 5 would get before release. The real issue is MS produces little interesting new tech. Granted, I actually like developing for C# far more than most systems, but embrace and extend just does not make for much interesting news.
          • freehunter 12y ago
            Windows 8.1 release and Windows 10 announcements both got flagged off the front page multiple times before finally an article was successful enough to stick around for a few hours. Same thing with the Surface Pro 3 and Windows Phone 8.1. Meanwhile iOS 8 had an article for each new feature for days. The admins explained it that the Microsoft news triggers the flamewar prevention they built, and it happens almost every time. Microsoft articles need admins to explicitly allow them on the front page, or they're gone in minutes.
    • bs1011 12y ago
      It's mostly by the employees of the respective companies themselves. I once was working in a company (now a popular help desk company, famous within HN circles even) where the co/founder called up a few of his employees to downvote a comment that raised a serious but negative tone about his company. And all the employees were smart enough to use proxies to downvote the comment into oblivion. So, always think twice if it's worth losing your karma in a fixed game.
      • ObviousScience 12y ago
        > So, always think twice if it's worth losing your karma in a fixed game. Or I could refuse to accept the premise internet points are important and realize that downvotes aren't a reliable indication of post quality. I'm certainly not going to be bullied by companies in to being quiet because they might take away some of my internet points.
        • iaw 12y ago
          I value my precious internet points and feel emotionally hurt with every down vote.
        • mattgreenrocks 12y ago
          The year is 2014: anxious business owners obsess over Internet Points! How do I get more, they ask? Please RT.
      • dzhiurgis 12y ago
        Isn't gaining karma also a fixed game?
      • daeken 12y ago
        That's absolutely ridiculous. I'm not saying that employees of a company won't downvote negative comments, but they're a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. As in, I'd put any amount of money on <1% of downvotes related to Apple or Tesla coming from employees of those companies.
        • 12y ago
    • Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      Is it just Apple, or do other companies not get much negativity anymore that gets commenters downvotes?
• robot 12y ago
  Agreed, and similar accidents are helped by autopilot even on aeroplanes. See below as an example. While the main cause is not autopilot, it is heavily relied on, and certainly worsened the situation when it was suddenly cut off in the middle of the night. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_rep... "the crew lacked practical training in manually handling the aircraft both at high altitude and in the event of anomalies of speed indication; the two co-pilots' task sharing was weakened both by incomprehension of the situation at the time of autopilot disconnection, and by poor management of the "startle effect", leaving them in an emotionally charged situation;"
  • baddox 12y ago
    There are obviously high profile tragedies like that one, but it don't see that as evidence that autopilot technology doesn't on net make air travel much safer and more reliable.
    • cookiecaper 12y ago
      Obviously people believe that autopilot represents a net benefit to air travel, but there are far fewer planes in the sky than cars on the road, a lot more open space that is not impregnable by most foreign objects, and a ton more money per plane allowing for more sophisticated sensors and systems. There is a dedicated traffic coordination system for aircraft and each pilot takes instruction as given by the ATC. Planes are also constantly monitored by highly-trained pilots and mechanics and operations are closely supervised by multiple regulatory bodies. A great deal of the required operations for autodriving are offloaded or irrelevant in autopiloting. I know we were talking about an isolated case of the unexpected failure of an automated piloting system, but if we consider all of these additional complexities in typical road driving * millions more cars with barely-trained operators, it's reasonable to suppose that those types of problems would occur much more frequently with autodrivers than autopilots.
  • mikeash 12y ago
    Personally I think the only things that mattered in that accident were poor training and poor UI. First, one of the pilots held the stick back all the way down to the water even though the airplane was clearly stalled. This is completely inexcusable. The automotive equivalent would be holding the accelerator pedal to the floor while aiming at a brick wall. Even worse, the guy who did this was a qualified glider pilot, and glider pilots should have extreme familiarity with stalls and stall recovery since so much of a glider's flight time is spent close to stall. Second, the control system of the plane handled conflicting inputs from the two pilots by averaging them together. There was no indication to the pilots that they were fighting each other. Positive exchange of control of the aircraft is another really basic thing about flying, even more basic than putting the nose down in a stall. This setup made it far too easy for the pilots to be unaware of who was really flying the plane. If the control sticks moved together, it would have been obvious to the other pilot what was going on. One could put some blame on the autopilot in causing the one pilot to forget the basics of stall recovery, but it seems to me that the real fault was in not training for it sufficiently, since that's not something you do in normal flight in an airliner anyway.
• Animats 12y ago
  I used to work on automatic driving. I ran Team Overbot in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. (We lost, but we didn't crash into anything.) So I'm painfully aware of the problems of automatic driving. You need to be both looking at the road with cameras and profiling it with LIDAR. (Or terahertz radar, once that gets going.) It's not enough to just sense the car ahead. You need to be able to detect potholes, ice patches, junk on the highway, small animals, and similar problems. We could detect and avoid potholes back in 2005. Since we were doing off-road driving, that was a normal driving event. The reason for a high-view LIDAR is that you want to see the pavement surface ahead from a reasonably useful angle and get a 3D profile of the road ahead. Google uses the Velodyne spinning-cone LIDAR scanner, which is a lot of LIDAR units built into one rotating mechanism. That's a research tool. There are other LIDAR devices more suited to mass production. Advanced Scientific Concepts has a nice eye-safe LIDAR which can operate in full sunlight. It costs about $100K, but that's because it's made by hand for DoD and space applications. The technology is all solid state, not inherently that expensive, and needs to be made into a volume product. (Somebody really needs to get on that. In 2004, I took a venture capitalist down to Santa Barbara to meet that crowd, but there was no mass market in sight back then. Now there is.) You can only profile the road out to a limited distance, regardless of the sensor, because you're looking at the road from an oblique angle. Under good conditions, though, you can out-drive the range at which you can profile the road. That was Sebastian Thrun's contribution, and won the DARPA Grand Challenge. The idea is that if the LIDARs say the near road is good, and the cameras say the far road looks like the near road, you can assume the far road is like the near road and go fast. If the far road looks funny, you have to slow down and get a good look at the road profile with the LIDARs. Automatic driving systems have to do all this. "Driver assistance" systems don't. Hence the "deadly valley". That's just to deal with roads and static obstacles. Then comes dealing with traffic.
  • archagon 12y ago
    As someone with actual experience, do you think self-driving cars are in the near future (decade or two), or are the technorati deluding themselves?
    • Animats 12y ago
• krschultz 12y ago
  That's absolutely not true. What if you are drowsy or distracted and the autopilot brakes for you an avoids an accident? Keep in mind every car out there is currently built with a feature where you can accelerate to a lethal speed, then press a small button, and the car continues to travel at that lethal speed until the car runs out of gas, hits a brick wall, or the driver consciously disengages it. We call it cruise control. If all we are doing is adding automatic braking and lane following to cruise control, I don't see how it can be anything other than better.
  • knodi123 12y ago
    > I don't see how it can be anything other than better. Because in the real world, people won't exercise exactly the same level of situational awareness, such that the autopilot only adds a safety mechanism. In the real world, it will replace a certain amount of driver attention. And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? It's probably net superior, but I bet it will cause a couple of high profile accidents that a careful human could have avoided, and then people (or the government) will be scared of it.
    • weaksauce 12y ago
      After reading about the abysmal coding standards of Toyota in the court case regarding the deaths of those people in the unintended accelreration cases I am leery. Having worked with embedded systems before, I know how hard they are to get right. I just wish that all these companies would realize that it's better (for the greater good) to opensource this instead of try to get it right all on their own. Look at how much better the web has come since there have been a few major open source web browser projects.
    • Bjartr 12y ago
      > And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? The more valuable question is this: Does it perform better than humans in the most frequently occurring situations that lead to incidents, are those situations a large enough fraction of all incidents such that the number of overall incidents drop significantly, and will that drop be greater than the increase in frequency of less predictable situations. If the above turns out to be the case, then there will be fewer accidents despite less aware drivers.