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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Of course the Lidar wasn't at fault. That's like blaming your laptop for the bugs of your own shitty code.

Hardware is not faultless.

The analogy doesn't stand up - there's a non-trivial chance that a memory module or your hard drive in your laptop will fail over the lifetime of the device.

Furthermore, a LIDAR unit is complex and has firmware and lower-level software embedded that may be at fault.

Yes, I've even seen this first hand where it was, in fact, the laptop as the issue source. Not that I'm taking Uber's side at all, just saying it is a possibility and we should wait for official evidence of the fault before jumping to conclusions.

If the software is well written, any of those types of failures should raise an alarm to alert the safety driver to take over, and then shut down the self-driving system.

It isn't anything like blaming your laptop. Lidar is a crucial sensor that allows the car to "see." If the lidar couldn't "see" the person, it doesn't matter how good your software is.

Well, it COULD be at fault, if the sampling rate was too low to see a human walking across the road, or if it couldn't see the materials of the bike or human, etc etc. But we all know none of these things are true.

No, that still wouldn’t be the Lidars fault. That would be a fault in safely setting the specification for the Lidar sample rate, and not catching the design flaw in testing.

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