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Comment by tyrw | Hacker News Reader

It depends on what you're optimizing for. Others using LIDAR are optimizing for speed to market, while potentially sacrificing ability to solve the problem as fully. Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues, because that's how humans do it. We do not know for certain that this is possible with LIDAR.

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  Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the 
  entire road system can be navigated by visual cues

We know for certain that human brains can be assembled out of regular atoms, but raising funds for a company that manufactures brains would be getting rather ahead of our current level of technology. The same might be true of computer vision and autonomous vehicles.

So you believe the technology gap for assembling a human brain out of regular atoms is similar to that for navigating a road using cameras?

JFC. I don't get why otherwise rational people become so stupidly aggressive when faced with analogies.

Obviously not, the former is far easier.

Please don't quote with code blocks. It messes with formatting on both mobile and desktop.

  It messes with formatting on both mobile

HN has never been mobile friendly, (element spacing, upvote button size) so I'm not terribly worried about that. If YC wanted HN to work on phones, they would fix their CSS.

  and desktop

Oh?

Block quoting can screw up desktop rendering on HN if the quoted line is too long. Say you put a 1000 character line in a literal quote:

  1.......1000

The whole page would render at the length of that line. So this text that I'm writing now, it'd normally wrap once or twice depending on your window's width. Instead, it'll only wrap after approximately 1000 characters. This is why when I block quote, I put in a line break every 60-70 characters (similar to what you did a few posts up).

I know this behavior happens with IE, I believe I've seen it in other desktop browsers but can't verify at the moment.

On desktop long block quotes go in a scrolling box. One that's pretty wide, so it doesn't usually cause a hassle to have to scroll it. But not so wide it breaks anything.

Additionally to what Jtsummers said, quoting on desktop can drastically reduce the line length compared to the rest of the lines in the comment, which is both ugly and annoying, especially since it makes it more difficult to read since your eyes are whipping back and forth.

There are a multitude of mobile apps for consumption of HN, most of which solve the code-block-line-overflow problem by adding a horizontal scroll, which only makes the problem worse by forcing users to scroll side to side to read the full quote.

Just use `>` at the start of the line to signify that it's a quote, please.

> There are a multitude of mobile apps for consumption of HN, most of which solve the code-block-line-overflow problem by adding a horizontal scroll,

HN does that natively - just drag the code block around with your finger. Still sucks to use though, so > quoting is the way to go.

Humans also learn how to drive using several orders of magnitude less training data than self-driving car efforts are using. Do you think that means we should strip down the training data sets to human-equivalent levels?

People and machines behave and understand the world differently. Just because it works for people doesn't mean it'll work for computers.

How on earth do you reach that conclusion? Every person has at least 16 years of high bandwidth sensor data experience before getting behind a wheel, plus millions of years of evolutionary training built into the structure of their brain.

A vast amount of data has produced every driver.

Data specific to driving is still quite limited for people, even when counting all that passenger time in childhood. The average driver in the US drives maybe 10-15k miles a year, so optimistically a person may have 200-250k passenger miles before driving? Consider that Waymo's cars drove 3 million real world miles in 2016 alone, and 25 billion virtual miles in a simulation, and all those miles are potentially used in a model shared by all the cars.

Now if you want to just look "total experience in the world as a whole" the numbers look a bit different, but if anything that just accentuates the differences here. We don't currently have a way to teach computers to construct mental models of how the world works the same way humans think about it, which would be necessary to use training data that was about the world as a whole.

What's more important, we can teach people much more effectively than machines by communicating concepts. Imagine the driving performance of a hypothetical person who is not capable of speech, so the only way to train them is having them drive in a simulator, and feed them candy when they get it right, while administering electric shocks for every driving error.

Humans are pretty bad at driving though, so I'm not sure that basing self driving technology on us is a good idea.

Humans are bad at driving because they can get distracted and can only look in one direction at a time. A computer system based on visual processing shouldn't have either of those issues.

I agree fundamentally though that it's a weak argument to say a certain approach should be taken just because it's how humans do it.

The argument is not that it's because how humans do it. The argument is that the entire system was designed to be consumed as visual cues.

As far as we know, humans are better drivers than every other species in the universe.

> Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues, because that's how humans do it.

i'm hesitant to argue against Musk, yet the actual goal is to navigate better than humans, and it seems reasonable to suspect that having wider range sensors would be a good (and may be necessary) foundation to achieve it.

just watching the current system navigate at night on poor lightly stripped streets is frightening enough to keep me away. search youtube for autopilot fails and there are some videos from just this year.

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