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Comment by rxhernandez | Hacker News Reader

> And that this is a test version of the software isn't irrelevant, it makes a huge difference—I am much less opposed to internal company testers who know what they're doing than I am to a public beta in the hands of people who believe Tesla's (really egregious) marketing.

There is absolutely no reason you should assume "testers" know what they are doing. I have met plenty of people with decades of experience in "testing" barely know what they are doing. Even in the case they know what they are doing, they shouldn't be testing a *deadly* vehicle with potentially broken software on heavily populated *public* roads.

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> Even in the case they know what they are doing, they shouldn't be testing a deadly vehicle with potentially broken software on heavily populated public roads.

This is another way of saying that self-driving vehicles shouldn't exist at all. At some point we have to test them on public roads, preferably before putting the software into the hands of regular users. If you ban even internal company testing, then what you're saying is that self-driving vehicles should never exist.

Not even remotely the same thing. You completely glossed over me saying potentially broken software and heavily populated. Surely there is a way to simulate a left turn signal in a more safe manner on software this early in the testing process.

All software is potentially broken. If you've only ever tested your software in a controlled driving range, then you don't know how it will behave when you take it out into the real world. If you've only ever tested it on lightly populated roads, then you don't know how it will behave when you take it onto heavily populated roads.

It's not surprising that it made a mistake during testing. That's what testing is for: rooting out mistakes.

No. Public road deployment is for validation, not testing.

Testing is for rooting out errors. Validation is for proving you achieve the desired specifications and failure rate. Validation occurs when you believe you are done or when testing becomes inadequate to discover failures. It is about “proving” the negative with respect to errors.

Broken, incomplete software where defects can be routinely discovered after light usage has no place being used by consumers on public roads.

"potentially broken software" = "all software", therefore you said self driving software should never exist and you are happy to support 40,000+ people dying in the US every year who could be saved with autonomous vehicle technology. Your lack of ethics is worrying.

Agreed, but I'd go further.

> This is another way of saying that self-driving vehicles shouldn't exist at all.

It's another way of saying that self-driving vehicles should be invented somewhere else, so that in 10 years you have to beg and plead for an overpriced second-rate implementation with a worse safety profile.

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