After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b36x27/its_back_after_6_months_of_working_fine_2019515/ <comment><USER2> I would be a lot more forgiving of these screwups if Tesla didn't constantly swear up and down that they've solved self-driving cars.

As far back as 2016 they were claiming they had full SDC capability above human driver safety [1], and their recent Model Y announcement suggests that the only thing holding it up is regulatory approval, and not failure to achieve the desired spec.

>Model Y will have Full Self-Driving capability, enabling automatic driving on city streets and highways pending regulatory approval, as well as the ability to come find you anywhere in a parking lot.

[1] [https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced- now...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have- full-self-driving-hardware)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19397942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19397942) (linking HN because it's hard to find the text in the page with their UI)

<comment><USER3> I don't want to dismiss your whole point, because it is certainly valid, but that isn't really the issue here. It is entirely possible for bugs like this to exist in the self driving tech _and_ for Tesla to be correct in their claims that Autopilot is on average safer than a human driver.

It is obviously troubling to see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too. The question shouldn't be whether this technology is perfect, it should be whether this technology is safer than humans. You and I certainly don't have enough data to say one way or another on that. I would bet even Tesla doesn't have enough data to say definitively. However writing this tech off as unsafe just because it makes what seems like an obvious mistake is a great way to slow progress which will result in more human deaths long term.

<comment><USER4> I think you're missing the forest for the trees. We're not even at the point where we're comparing safety rates. Can a Model Y drive through DC? Can it ignore traffic signals in favor of following hand signals from a uniformed traffic officer, or follow the directions of a construction worker having traffic in turns through a road that they've decided to turn into one lane? Can it deal with an unannounced presidential motorcade rerouting traffic? Because that happens literally every day in DC. If Tesla can't handle that, it's inaccurate to say it has "full SDC," even before you get into an analysis of safety.

<comment><USER3> As far as I'm aware, Tesla has never claimed their cars will be able to handle all those situations. "Self driving car" is a vague term that has different definitions depending on who you ask. You are considering "self driving" as level 5 autonomy and Tesla probably considers it somewhere between 3-4 autonomy. I don't think it makes sense to get angry because their definition of the phrase is not the same as your definition of the phrase.

<comment><USER5> Tesla skirts morality.

The feature is called 'Full self driving'. Their sales reps regularly told customers to take their hands off the steering wheel of their "Autopilot". Sure, the fine print says "always pay attention", but there's an entire marketing scheme going on here which is borderline dishonest.

<comment><USER6> > _" Sure, the fine print says "always pay attention","_

In fact the not-so-fine print in the user manual says to keep your hands on the wheels, but the promotional material tells a different story, as does Musk when he takes his hands off the wheel on national television.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, I'm surprised a false advertising case hasn't been pursued if this is the case. Marketing practices this inaccurate are well outside the puffery defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been yelling about this for a long time: Tesla is not going to be able to deliver full self-driving as promised. They don't have the hardware, for one (ranging is terrible; they need stereo cameras), and second, their software strategy seems to be a dead end.

They need sensor fusion. The system needs to make maximum use of all the information available to it: Where is the road striping? Where are the other cars going? Where are the road signs and signals? (If there's one in your path, you certainly shouldn't drive into it!) Are there camera-visible obstructions? What were the interpretations and actions of previous Tesla trips along the same route?

In these problem cases, all data _except_ the left and right lane striping seems to be completely ignored. There was even more information at the fatal offramp location (cross-striping over the lane separation zone), which the vehicle drove straight over. The system is not making maximum use of the information available to it, in fact it is using hardly any of it at all, and fixating on what it _thinks_ is a single most salient piece of data.

Sensor fusion algorithms tend to behave the opposite way-- each additional piece of data informs the interpretation of _all_ the other data. You can have very poor-quality data, but if it is even moderately over-constrained, your state estimate can be very good in spite of it. I think it would be completely reasonable to have a neural net in the loop of a sensor fusion algorithm, with fusion constraints informing the NN's interpretation, and the NN's estimates feeding back into the fusion algorithm as uncertain data.

IMO Tesla will do at _least_ one of:

* Very expensively retract their promise of full self driving for delivered vehicles

* Completely overhaul/redesign their driving software and start again nearly from scratch

* Get into a regulatory/legal tangle with the NTSA/courts/DOJ over all the dead people their system is making.

<comment><USER9> Musk is more optimistic than you - says late 2020 for sleep while the car drives [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=10m25s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8dEYm8hzLo&t=10m25s)

Also quite interestingly he says there will be a big jump forward in quality when they switch to their own computing hardware (18m40 or so)

<comment><USER10> > late 2020 for sleep while the car drives

Musk is often overly optimistic and he keeps underestimating the problem at hand. I call BS on this, it won't be ready in 5 or even 10 years. And then there is a regulatory approval.

<comment><USER9> Indeed though he's delivered some stuff. It'll be interesting to see how it goes.

<comment><USER9> Though the 2017 LA to NYC drive is behind schedule. ([https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341100/tesla-self- driv...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341100/tesla-self-driving- autonomous-road-trip-la-nyc))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Additional context: on March 23, 2018, a Tesla Model X, while using autopilot, drove into a barrier and killed the driver. This was fixed in a software update, but the issue seems to have resurfaced.

NTSB analysis of the March 23 2018 collision: [https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HW...](https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/HWY18FH011-preliminary.aspx)

Tesla's statement of the March 23 2018 collision: [https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last- week%E2%80%99s-accide...](https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last- week%E2%80%99s-accident)

<comment><USER11> Well, it wasn't really "fixed" \-- the driver is still dead.

<comment><USER12> Sure, if you construe the meaning of 'fixed' to mean 'roll back all events and time', which I don't think anyone expects. They probably fixed the software bug.

<comment><USER13> I think that it's important to note that "we'll fix bugs via live patches" is a deadly decision when it comes to self driving software.

Just discussing the incident in terms of a "software bug" does a disservice to the severity of the issue.

<comment><USER14> Remember, autopilot and autosteer are not self-driving. Tesla is very explicit that the driver must remain alert, and supervise, at all times.

That being said, drowsy driving is a thing, and it's very easy to fall asleep behind the wheel. The car really needs a better strategy to handle this situation.

<comment><USER15> Tesla's legal department is very explicit, the marketing department? Not so much...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The day I took delivery of my 2016 Model X with AP 1.0, Tesla announced AP 2.0. A friend of mine immediately ordered a Model X with AP 2.0 and rubbed it in my face.

For the entire next year, my AP 1.0 (which is non-Tesla technology -- Mobileye rocks) had no trouble doing adaptive cruise control and lane assist. Meanwhile his AP 2.0 would brake suddenly and swerve all over the place. It took a full year of OTA updates before his AP 2.0 was finally on-par with the functionality that I had the whole time. Of course, by then Tesla pulled a "we're sorry, but the princess is in another castle" and came out with AP 2.5.

Now this kind of stuff doesn't matter to me. I got tired of that company's shit and have pulled out of the Teslasphere entirely. I'm now driving a non- Tesla EV, and I'll never look back. I'm also letting my government representatives know that they should support a common EV charging standard and keep Tesla so-called "self-driving" shit off public roads.

</comment><comment><USER17> Eventually we need the NTSB to certify updates before they are pushed out over the air. Similar to what the FAA does.

These OTA updates are not ok for large machinery and endagers not only the Tesla driver but all others on the road.

<comment><USER18> I agree, but is there a way that could happen without slowing the process to a crawl? Depending on what's involved it could easily push the gap between updates from months to years.

<comment><USER19> This is a feature, not a bug, and should be expected in life critical systems. Would you want Boeing to push updates out as frequently as Tesla does with the same sparse release notes Tesla provides ("bug fixes") when safety system functionality is modified?

Disclaimer: I own a Model S

<comment><USER20> Imagine if Boeing got away with just pushing a software update to the 737 MAX8 and saying "it's fixed now".

<comment><USER21> Well, it might have prevented the second crash if they had treated the matter with a bit more urgency. Depends on whether the two incidents really had a common cause, which is looking like the case.

Of course it's also looking like they should have grounded the fleet after the first crash, given the history of the aircraft prior to its last flight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen.

This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 7500 YEARS. You have less than a 1 in 10 million chance of dying on any given trip you take. That is NOT risky, and is NOT dangerous.

<comment><USER23> _I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen._

I try to explain this to friends who are far too optimistic on self-crashing car technology. Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects).

Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor.

In my opinion, by the time all the money and effort is spent making SDC's capable of successfully driving from point-A to point-B in the near infinite possible conditions they could encounter, it would have been 50x cheaper to simply build a fully modernized high-speed rail network over existing highways and roads.

<comment><USER24> You are saying that the cost to develop successful self-driving cars is 1-50 quadrillion dollars using an optimistic estimate of rail costs. That does not seem reasonable. Perhaps 200 billion across all companies have been invested in self-driving cars so far (I.e., Waymo is just a fraction of that.)

<comment><USER23> Agree, SWAG was heavily W. Updated. I still think we're 50 years off from near-flawless SDC's though, assuming current LOE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Scary... software developers at these robotic cars and their mistakes/bugs aren't just going to bring down a business application(lose money) but kill their customers and innocent drivers.

Progress to where it's safer is going to be a killer and we the drivers on the road are unwilling guinea pigs to billionaires' dreams/goals.

<comment><USER26> Unwilling? Don't buy a Tesla. Don't believe the hype. It's that simple. Granted, there is nothing stopping _any_ ECU from killing you, but I'd trust a company like Honda _way_ before Tesla.

<comment><USER27> I generally have zero interest in cars and don't follow the new models, but my impression from articles I've seen in the last years is that Volvo is actually a top contender for driver assistant systems (when you don't fool yourself into thinking you have an autopilot, but you really want sensible safety augmentation features).

Is that impression accurate?

<comment><USER28> I have no idea. Volvo certainly has the culture to do something good out of it. But do they have the money and resources required? Today they are owned by Chinese Geely. I don't know what partnerships and capital they can work with to compete with the top contenders (who I assume have Silicon Valley capital behind them)

<comment><USER29> Geely has invested a lot into Volvo[1], and Volvo are innovating in interesting ways[2] . I would choose the electric Polestar 2 over a Tesla in the same price-bracket due to Volvo's culture of safety. Hopefully the cheaper versions will be released soon.

1\. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-24/volvo- is-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-24/volvo-is-better- than-ever-thanks-to-this-chinese-billionaire)

2\. [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/volvo-spinoff- polestar-...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/volvo-spinoff-polestar- reveals-its-battery-ev-the-polestar-2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how do unit tests work with NN (or if they're even a relevant concept at all).

You could replay some testing video frames and make sure the objects are correctly identified, but i suppose that's already what training is about...

If an issue like that resurface, does it mean that the original frames leading to the 2018 accident aren't part of the training (or at least frames from someone driving in this kind of scenario) ?

<comment><USER31> You don't unit test a NN. You can unit test certain functions, but fundamentally this is an integration test.

This is why serious scientific training is needed to understand these complex systems when health and safety are on the line.

<comment><USER32> "Autonomous vehicle integration test track" could make for a great setting in a spy thriller. The villain could own the megacorporation which makes the cars, and the heroes could find evidence of their evil plot among the sprawling acres of labs and potemkin streets. But then, in the distance, the sound of revving engines...

Seriously though, I wonder if that sort of physical test track will become popular. You would load your build onto an idle car, queue it up, and make sure that it didn't hit any of the silhouettes which spring up, unusual traffic and weather conditions, etc. They must already do that in some capacity, right?

<comment><USER33> > "Autonomous vehicle integration test track"

Just say "the 101", it's shorter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have always wondered... Does the AP have some higher-level notion of object permanence, continuity (road behind a horizon or after a curve) and things like that? Does it track a pedestrian that is momentarily hidden behind an obstacle and will probably reemerge in a second or two on the other side? Does it expect that kids may run after that ball that just flew from behind a car? Does it continuously track and improve classification of all objects in the field of vision, with their trajectories and speeds if they are moving? Personally I don't think it does, otherwise it would not erratically slam into clearly visible and marked large objects in its way, or it would be aware of a truck moving in a perpendicular way and so on. I am of opinion that without such higher-level awareness it can never succeed, hope to learn about the state of the self-driving art.

<comment><USER5> I don't think neural networks are wired to "remember" things. In theory, they could be hooked up that way. But your typical convolutional neural network is looking at things frame-by-frame.

In theory, ANNs could have an output layer that passes data from one frame to another frame to assist things. But there's no real programming to "hardcode" something like object permanence into an ANN. You pretty much throw a bunch of data into the system and hope for the best.

<comment><USER34> NNs are just the first step in the pipeline. Their outputs (detected objects, segmentation, etc) will be piped into other software that builds higher level models.

Considering the path-planning requirements I would be absolutely shocked if Autopilot wasn't build history models and estimated paths for objects around the vehicle (other cars etc).

<comment><USER35> Agreed; I imagine they use neural networks to detect and classify objects which are then saved into a scene-graph for use in pathing.

I expect what happened was that they trained their NNs for improved detection in one area but unknowingly reduced it in another. Perhaps now it can detect tricycles 99% but road barriers went down to only 30%. Having worked with NNs it's very common to see gains in one domain which come at a cost of reduced performance in another.

<comment><USER36> They must have known. I haven't worked with NNs for a few years but I don't believe the methodology has changed where you would stop testing it over different sets of training data.

Barriers are a pretty big part of driving on roads and highways and the only reason it would have been unknowingly reduced would be if they just weren't testing the NN against data with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Watching the video, '2019.5.15 - Try 2' is interesting. You can see the car moving normally, then it starts to follow the black crack in the road and moves to the right- at this moment, the white Nissan in front is blocking the white lines ahead where the lanes actually split.

Does AP use other cars as reference points, or just the road? Ideally in this situation it would be both: "The line has disappeared, and there's a new one now, but that car went over it". Instead it seems to just be following whatever lines it can see. Does that make sense?

Note- not at all defending the AP behavior here. Just thinking out loud.

<comment><USER38> >Watching the video, '2019.5.15 - Try 2' is interesting. You can see the car moving normally, then it starts to follow the black crack in the road and moves to the right- at this moment, the white Nissan in front is blocking the white lines ahead where the lanes actually split.

It seems like it's failing in different ways:

Try 1- Toughest to tell, but it looks like it failed to recognize any lines. Kept going straight which was at the barrier. Hard to tell if the car would have recovered.

Try 2- Looks like the car tried to go left into the closed lane. Seems like an error in detecting the barriers closing the road. I'd guess that it would have avoided the concrete barrier and driven down the closed lane

Try 3 - This one looks like it picked the wrong lane marker to be the left side of the road. In that it thought the right lane marker of the closed lane was actually the left lane marker. This one probably ends up with a smashed car and dead driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My Model 3 suddenly changed lanes today for no discernible reason. I think it considered my lane to jump over into the next lane, for some reason. I should have hit 'Record' to save the footage from TeslaCam.

(Notably, AutoPilot is not supposed to change lanes without explicit confirmation from the driver, which is clearly illustrated on the dashboard/panel.)

It's a stretch of road on which I have previously used AutoPilot many times.

<comment><USER40> Recently I accidentally changed lanes in an intersection. The road had 3 lanes in each direction (+ separate streetcar tracks down the center), including the right lane which was required to turn. I was in the center lane. After the intersection the road was still a 3 lane road - which didn't quite register on my brain. I moved from the center lane to the right lane (figuring it exited so I was supposed to be in the now-right lane) when I should have remained in the center lane.

While I am a novice driver, I've gone through that intersection before without blinking or doing the wrong thing. It's not a particularly complicated intersection.

Anyways, point is, driving is surprisingly hard. I think counting anecdotes on the internet probably gives you a sample heavily biased against Tesla, because most people don't go post "so I did this stupid thing" but they do post "so my car did this stupid thing".

<comment><USER39> My car and I are stupid in different ways. It has perfect attention and will always brake in time to avoid a fender-bender in traffic. It's also a lot worse than I am about reading and communicating intent with other drivers or simply recognizing the objects around us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> With demand for self-driving vehicles as high as it is, yet with the lag in advancement of computer vision, I think it's about time for a serious discussion about smart roads. I realize this isn't entirely relevant, but I can't be the only one thinking that we're missing the forest for the trees by trying to solve a transportation problem while simultaneously solving a vision problem.

<comment><USER42> Might as well put them on rails (Smart-Rails(TM)) and make a railway network for smart people. Transportation problems solved!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited-access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic. Do not use Autosteer on city streets, in construction zones, or in areas where bicyclists or pedestrians may be present. Never depend on Autosteer to determine an appropriate driving path. Always be prepared to take immediate action. Failure to follow these instructions could cause damage, serious injury or death.

[https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%...](https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%203%20Owners%20Manual.pdf#page=75)

<comment><USER44> And then... [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-breaks-tesla- autop...](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-breaks-tesla-autopilot- rule-2018-12?r=US&IR=T)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The comments are scary. People defending Tesla's misleading advertisement re: full self-driving hardware etc.

Because clearly "having full self-driving hardware" only means the hardware is there, not that the car can actually self-drive.

I bet those people find themselves misunderstood in pretty much every discussion with people outside their nerdy circle.

<comment><USER45> On the earnings call, Musk even claimed that the Navigate on Autopilot feature set is "full self-driving" [1]

[1] [https://youtu.be/oB0sAGykWT8?t=2895](https://youtu.be/oB0sAGykWT8?t=2895)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> One might suspect, given the reintroduction of the bug, that Tesla doesn't understand their code.

</comment><comment><USER47> Tesla should just partner or acquire a LiDAR startup already like Baraja [1]...They can let the computer vision do all the magic they want. Just have one scanning LiDAR as a redundant system so that it doesn't run into anything in front of the car.

[1] [https://www.baraja.com/](https://www.baraja.com/)

<comment><USER48> I don't know why, but supposedly they've made "no LiDAR" their hill to die on.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, it's such a weird mentality. Their new patent on a "CNN" ASIC is pretty neat but still doesn't solve a lot of their problems. Are they banking on a magical depth CNN architecture to be released or something?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The video really doesn't convey what happened. It's not really clear when the driver took over.

My Model 3 is very odd when going through forks like this. It just has trouble picking one side of the lane or the other. Yesterday I got a little scared when it swerved back and forth while trying to figure out how to take an exit.

</comment><comment><USER49> Since ModelX incident I have made sure not to drive on first lane. I always drive on the 2nd lane and it is much better.

<comment><USER50> For a $700 car I might consider crazy compromises, but $70k+? Absolutely not.

<comment><USER51> That's what I find so interesting with Tesla owner. They spend a fortune on a car, then they minimize every single issue they have with the car. My explanation for this is that for a lot of owners, the car is a way to be part of a hyped group more than being a utilitarian object (what a car should be).

<comment><USER52> Happens with a lot of stuff, certain American-made motorcycles, for instance. You're in the club now, and the only way to stay _in_ the club is to carry the manufacturer's water. In no case are we to admit that we spent a bunch of money on something that does a poor job of fulfilling its advertised purpose.

<comment><USER50> Or more relevant to the HN audience, Apple.

<comment><USER52> What, Tesla wasn't relevant enough for you to not take an "obligatory" dig at Apple product owners?

<comment><USER50> Trust me, if I'm taking a dig, I'm pointing at myself; I have probably $7k of Cupertino products within arm's reach at the moment. But I have to admit there's times when the comparison is apt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's a very strange way to close a highway.

Where are the blinkenlights? The words? The flashing arrows? The plastic jersey barriers?

The buckets full of sand or water?

The repainted lines directing you to the right?

Can't tell if this is temporary or long-term closure, but if it's a multi month thing, I would expect more "Don't you dare fork to the left" signalling.

Not everyone is a local.

<comment><USER54> Why would any of that be relevant?

<comment><USER53> Because the same things that confuse humans can confuse computers that are largely trained with human data.

<comment><USER55> Millions of drivers per year use roads like this in California and Washington. They're not very confusing for a human driver who's paying attention.

<comment><USER53> I'm from Toronto, so I never underestimate drivers' ability to do stupid like drive into streetcar-only tunnels past the end of the ashphalt, despite ample signage. 26 times.

[https://torontolife.com/city/queens-quay-streetcar-tunnel- dr...](https://torontolife.com/city/queens-quay-streetcar-tunnel-drivers- event/)

<comment><USER56> How many hundreds of thousands of cars for those 26 to make that mistake?

Now imagine if every Toyota did this instead?

FSD is being touted as a "force multiplier" for safe driving, but it could end up being a force multiplier for deadly mistakes

<comment><USER53> Few care about the 26 that missed the signs.

It's the multi-hour shutdown of the city's 3rd busiest transit route that connects to the continent's 3rd busiest train station that impacts a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I find it absurd how the NHTSA doesn't treat Tesla similarly to how it treated Toyota ~10 years ago with the sudden unintended acceleration controversy. [1]

Tesla has demonstrably flawed and dangerous vehicles operating on our roads. These persistent autopilot bugs are killing people. If we treated the Tesla autopilot as a licensed driver, it'd have its license suspended. (Not that it could have passed a driving test in the first place)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehicle_recalls#Investigations)

<comment><USER58> > These persistent autopilot bugs are killing people.

Are there any numbers on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> So far Tesla automation seems to handle edge cases. I have never rear ended or side swiped anyone, getting into such an accident or avoiding one is an edge case for me. Useful but not really automation.

For it to even have a chance during lane keeping of doing something only a sleeping or suicidal driver would do? It's utter bullshit. It's less safe than a human.

Autonomous driving is overhyped vaporware. Autonomous airplanes would be easier than cars, and we still are no where near that.

</comment><comment><USER60> Maybe it's merely that I'm used to cones rather than barriers of that sort, but that stretch of road looks rather confusing to me as a human as well.

</comment><comment><USER61> Tesla can only really gather depth data from there radars, while the cameras operate a DNN to detect features and make adjustments for steering and speed based on fusing those two pieces of data together. An error in the radar or the DNN detecting features incorrectly because of lighting, road color change or object on the road which the model was not trained on, can cause problems like this.

<comment><USER62> "Tesla can only really gather depth data from there radars" \- they can also do it visually through depth from motion

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> What I dont understand is, that yellow sign is actually very visible compared to other things the neural nets can detect. Why hasn't it been done yet? Detecting things as visible as that sign should not be a huge problem.

</comment><comment><USER64> I used to be a big supporter of Tesla, but I now have to apply Internet-of- Shit Rule #1 to them: No software updates _ever_ without explicit owner approval.

And "owner" is me, not Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can they simulate their sensors input pretty well? Do they use car driving simulators (video-game like) to see what would happen in similar scenarios?

Of course, real world testing would still be necessary.

<comment><USER43> When a customer disengages or corrects AP that periods sensor data is recorded and uploaded to Tesla. The uploads are curated and submitted into the neural network training data-set.

They basically have an infinite amount of real world data coming in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Tongue in cheek......this is planned obsolescence. New model with upgraded features is announced so you start to brick the old ones by making them run into things. :) Of course there is that pesky issue of it potentially injuring/killing the driver and passengers....

In all seriousness, these things are getting better, but Skynet is not here yet. Just because a company, governmental agency etc. says something is safe you always need to evaluate things yourself..and it's probably not a good idea to rely on these auto pilots unless you want to win a Darwin award. I love the cars, but the hype is a bit annoying around stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER67> That's one way to keep drivers alert I guess... Add a little bit of randomness into your boring drive.

</comment><comment><USER68> It troubles me that we use the term "software bug" to describe this.

</comment><comment><USER20> Said it before, saying it again. OTA updates to safety critical things is not a feature. It's a bug.</comment>


A victim of Economic Warfare - Zimbabwe - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080515/wl_africa_afp/zimbabweeconomyforex

<comment><AUTHOR> Say what you want about the policies of Zimbabwe, the seizing of the farms has nothing to do with 165,000% inflation. Other countries have done worse without the same effect. Zimbabwe has been under a propaganda and economic attack by Great Britain. This is the result, I guess.

War is now assymetric. Welcome to the new Economy.</comment>


Iojs: Initial Release - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/28

<comment><USER2> Whoa, what's this? The native parts of core Node without any of the support libraries, shipped on a regular schedule? When did this start?

</comment><comment><USER3> v1 on January 13th is good news :-)

Other io.js discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694953)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669557)</comment>


The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://forefront.io/a/beginners-guide-to-arduino <comment><USER2> I'm totally new to Arduino and hardware (also gained interest over the holiday). There are some good docs on the Arduino website, but once you get into less common components, it's weird to see how little info is out there. Programmers are incredibly lucky to have so many amazing resources and I think I've just taken that for granted.

I will say that Arduino has really sparked my imagination. I'm digging out garbage electronics (an old clock radio for example), taking them apart, and trying to figure out how to interface their components with Arduino.

<comment><USER3> For those of us who already spend an inordinate amount of time digging through bins of old and often dead electronics for components... I'm just glad that Arduinos and other similar devices have made my hobbies _more_ acceptable (and helpful!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're interested in Arduino and are familiar with js/node, check out Johnny-Five (<https://github.com/rwldrn/johnny-five>).

 _"My goal for Johnny-Five is to create a framework for programming Arduino Robots with nothing more then JavaScript. I believe that JavaScript, inherently asynchronous and the platform that Node.js has built around this paradigm, is the perfect environment for writing evented, streaming programs for controlling the highly synchronous world of hardware."_ \-- via [http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-arduino-programming- with...](http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-arduino-programming-with-nodejs/)

I don't know anything about robotics or arduinos (though I've done a bit of electronics hacking/tinkering throughout my life), but this project makes me want to jump right in head first.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know I think I may have seen this guy's videos/post before. Seriously one night I was just totally going around YouTube and just watching all the cool stuff people were doing. It's contagious!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty good write up for beginners. I think you should add a link to <http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage> in the Whats Next so people can see what else they can do with the Arduino!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea.

<comment><USER6> The Arduino website has a nearly identical tutorial to yours. Which is interesting because it was yours that prompted me to finally stop being unreasonably afraid of experimenting with Arduino and buy one. So I did.

Congrats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Congrats to you too!

What you said prompted me to think of a tweet I saw from smashing magazine:

"It's good to share what we know. You needn't be the first, you'll just help if you're the first that somebody finds." <https://twitter.com/smashingmag/status/278041226622668800>

Whilst it's not exactly what you said I think the sentiment is the same...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I also gifted myself an Arduino (Leonardo/Micro) over the holidays and have had a lot of fun working through the basic exercises and thinking up imaginative ways to use it.

Check out this Arduino for Beginners (In Comic Form) - probably particularly good for those of you who gifted an Arduino to children, and links to other resources in the last panels.

[http://www.jodyculkin.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/arduino...](http://www.jodyculkin.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/arduino-comic-latest.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Just as a tip for Arduino newcomers, if you want to put the UNO R3 into DFU mode [1], just bridge these two pins together with a jumper or a cable for a moment:

            ____________________
           | o       ···········
        RESET ---> + · ·
        GND -----> + · ·
          _|____
         |      |
         | USB  |
         |______|
           |
           |

Then, if you want to use the dfu-programmer[2], you need to apply a patch[3] to make it work with the R3.

Being myself a complete newbie, I found it time consuming to reach the state in which I knew how and what to do just to upload a new firmware.

[1]: If you want/are interested in playing with Arduino as an USB device.

[2]: <http://dfu-programmer.sourceforge.net/>

[3]: <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/dfu-programmer/>

<comment><USER9> All this reminds me of days when I tried to hack my Hayes modem to increase the speed from 300 to 900 bauds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a topic I've been interested in for some time now and this looks to be at the right level (i.e. absolute beginner) for me, so thanks very much for sharing.

Can anyone point me to a similar resource for the Raspberry Pi?

<comment><AUTHOR> I got my 5 yo daughter a Pi but I think there's several more layers of complexity (and purchases) to get it going with hardware hacking. It's a more fully fledged computer and can get people started with basic programming with Scratch, then on to things like Python and then C if you dare :)

I went to a hacker space open house in Orlando (FamiLAB) and a colleague and I were asking whats the difference between a Pi and an Arduino and a guy said what do you want to do and I said make an LED flash...And he said to start with an Arduino and I can see why now, if you want to get in to electronics (and you already have a computer) an Arduino is the way to go.

A Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer so you have to wait for it to boot in to linux before it can do any other tasks. An Arduino is (almost) instantly on and running you program. Both are great teaching and learning tools but it depends what you want to do with them.

<comment><USER11> > A Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer so you have to wait for it to > boot in to linux before it can do any other tasks.

There's nothing to stop you programming the pi bare metal style like an arduino. It's not as well documented but it's perfectly doable and quite fun.

<https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi>

<http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=72>

<comment><AUTHOR> How awesome! I didn't know that :)

<comment><USER12> This is true of any processor. If you had the inclination and the proper hardware to facilitate loading the machine instructions, you could program the processor in your computer the same way.

The raspberry pi is a much more complex machine than the arduino. 32 bit instructions vs 8 bit, 700MHz vs 20MHz clock frequency, GPU vs no GPU, 512MB memory vs less than 1MB. There is so much going on in the pi's chip, that a thorough technical reference manual could easily exceed 5000 pages, where as everything you need to know about the arduino's processor will fit in less than 500.

You certainly can make LEDs blink with a raspberry pi with your own non-OS code, but the difference in the amount of code required vs doing it in an arduino is pretty substantial.

<comment><USER11> > The raspberry pi is a much more complex machine than the arduino. 32 bit > instructions vs 8 bit, 700MHz vs 20MHz clock frequency, GPU vs no GPU, 512MB > memory vs less than 1MB

I have no arduino experience and am happy to be educated, but I don't see how any of those things makes the pi harder to program. Maybe the instruction set's harder, but that only matters if you're writing asm. There's more stuff you _can_ do, but that doesn't get in the way if you just want to code arduino-like stuff.

> You certainly can make LEDs blink with a raspberry pi with your own non-OS > code, but the difference in the amount of code required vs doing it in an > arduino is pretty substantial.

Here is some baremetal code that blinks LEDs on a pi:

[https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/blob/master/blinker0...](https://github.com/dwelch67/raspberrypi/blob/master/blinker01/blinker01.c)

It's not that bad, really. Admittedly some of the peripherals are much harder work than that. I should add that I have nothing against the Arduino, but as a n00b to baremetal / embedded style programming I'm not finding the pi particularly gruelling. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

<comment><USER12> I haven't actually worked with the raspberry pi, but I'm currently working with a similar processor, a Texas Instruments ARM Cortex A8 that runs at 720MHz. On my processor, you have to set up the PLL to take the 24MHz external oscillator to 720MHz, configure several clocks for peripherals, set up the MMU with a huge table of memory addresses and their cache settings, configure the GPIO bank, Select the proper multiplexed setting for the actual pin that the signal is output to, etc. This is all in C as well.

Are you saying that the code you linked is loaded with some sort of JTAG device, and is the entirety of the code running on the chip, or is it run from the command line?

Maybe Texas Instruments are just a bunch of sadists.

<comment><USER11> > Are you saying that the code you linked is loaded with some sort of JTAG > device, and is the entirety of the code running on the chip, or is it run > from the command line?

That's all the code _you_ need to write. You also need a firmware binary supplied by the raspberry pi people. You write your binary and the firmware binary to an SD card, and the pi boots and runs your code via some process that is frankly opaque to me. Alternatively you can stick a bootloader on the card and transfer your binary via an ftdi cable, which is a lot less hassle while developing. All this is detailed in the repo I linked if you're interested.

Using the onboard peripherals is admittedly fairly challenging, largely due to the paucity of documentation available. Hopefully more documentation and examples will emerge as more of us tinker with it.

I'm not yet in a position to compare and contrast to TI's stuff, but I have a Stellaris Launchpad I intend to start playing with soon. Will be interesting to see how it compares.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excellent. I recently got my 9yo daughter started on those simple electronics kits with various components mounted on a cardboard frame and springs for terminals to interconnect them in various ways. But that's rekindled my _own_ interest in electronics (which I haven't really indulged in >15 years) and I've been considering Arduino or some stuff from Parallax based on the DEF CON badge from last summer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got my 5 yo daughter a Pi and she's been playing around on Scratch (and typing) and it's surprising how quickly they pick this stuff up. She guess doing a minus number would move a sprite in the opposite direction!

I was experimenting writing libraries in C++ (I prefer a more OO interface to things) so I created an AnologLed and DigitalLed class and showed my daughter in the code how I made a red LED come on and she proceeded to make the orange and blue ones come on too.

This stuff it the literacy of the 21st century.

<comment><USER14>
      > She guess doing a minus number would move a sprite in
      > the opposite direction!

I'm curious how that is possible. Did she just move a slider towards the negative range? Randomly _guess_ it? Does she have a notion of continuity past zero?

<comment><AUTHOR> She's got a concept of addition and subtraction.

I typed in the number and prefixed it with I am putting a funny symbol before, and said they were before zero and that normal numbers had a plus in front but it's hidden normally, then I asked which way do you think this will go and she pointed left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks a lot. I've just got one Arduino, and was wondering where to start :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you know where now :)</comment></comment>


Yuval Noah Harari's History of Everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture <comment><USER2> it's a good, although pretty long piece. On Harari's popularity itself, I'm not convinced by it at all. as the article points out it's a weird mixture of Buddhist philosophy, futurology, and very broad accounts of history with some new age mixed in.

That seems to be a very popular syncretic combination these days but it often veers from speculative into science fiction and sometimes even pandering, both to a large mass audience fascinated by AI news and tech elites who like to be told they're controlling the world, even if Harari is scolding them.

On technical topics itself his takes, however, seem surprisingly shallow or outright wrong. There's is a very good case to be made that we're in fact not living in the transhumanist age and that society is not changing that fast at all. (secular stagnation, Robert Gordon on innovation, Thiel in the popular press) etc. In the discussion with Pinker, Pinker was very quick to point out that a lot of Harari's speculations about genetic optimization are fairly unreasonable given what we know about how complex genetic interaction is, and so on.

It seems to me ironically the way he writes is to feed into the common anxieties that are also reflected in the mainstream press and that are also popular among people like Sam Harris or Bostrom or others who have carved out their media niche in this space. They've found their audience but I'm not sure how good any of it is.

And also one thing that I find to be absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a writer who talks about the dangers facing our liberal societies:

 _" Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin's government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump."_

<comment><USER3> i've got nothing to say about harari, i don't like him myself either, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that society is not changing that fast at all. I wonder what you consider by society and change. Internet changed nothing? Everyone having smartphones etc?

<comment><USER2> Everyone having smartphones it's nice but it hasn't significantly increased economic output, the impact of computerization on productivity is in fact very small. The UK for example in the last 10 years (since the invention of the smartphone), has not seen increases in labour productivity at all.

Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall.

Robert Gordon also proposed imagining going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in the same spot in New York. Someone waking up would find the car, skyscrapers everywhere, the discovery of dna, haber bosch allowing 3 billion additional people to grow food, going to the moon, the commercial airplane, the computer, antibiotics,and so on. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 New York and, well it doesn't look so different.

<comment><USER4> _Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall._

This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you're trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?

And as to 1870 -> 1970 vs. 1970 -> 2020, isn't it obvious? One is a span of time twice as long! The fair comparison is 1920 -> 2020, or 1970 -> 2070\. In which case I think the point evaporates pretty quickly.

<comment><USER2> >This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you're trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?

Because a kitchen is significantly more representative on how much our daily lives overall have changed because the kitchen (or really you could pick any other place that represents labour or a place of gathering), says more than the VHS store.

The fact that you're bringing up the VHS store goes to show though what the crux of the problem is. Innovation over the last few decades has primarily only happened in the world of media and communication. Watching netflix instead of renting VHS tapes is nice, but it hasn't significantly expanded our productive capacities. In fact infrastructure, healthcare (remember watson?) and so on have largely stayed the same, or _even gotten less productive_.

Infrastructure, healthcare and housing represent a significant portion of both daily experienced lives and chunk of the economy. More social networks and more tv shows and online games are pretty cool, but they don't really touch labour organisation, structure of the firm or production, and it shows in stagnating economic growth and cost disease throughout the economy.

<comment><USER4> What? Productivity has expanded tremendously in the last 40 years!

[https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS](https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS)

I can't think of a space that hasn't been heavily impacted since 1980. Even the kitchen. In addition to the obvious examples of kitchen appliances and screens and devices like Echo that weren't available in 1980, how about the fact that there are many fewer meals eaten at home? Or cooked for families? How about the ways that women's roles in society and families have changed? How about the rise of single person households? Or meal prep and delivery services? Or the much wider availability of fresh or "exotic" foods year round than 40 years ago?

Sure, you can walk into a kitchen from 1980 or 2020 and see many similarities, but there are also many differences that you can't see at first glance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People's responses to Harari remind me very much of Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia[0]. Everyone seems to be impressed by his work until they get to their area of specialism, which is the only area they think he falls down in. I've had a number of conversations like this with people from different fields, all of whom think his analysis in their area was significantly flawed. It feels like he writes stuff that's very plausible for a lay audience, but subject it to any intellectual rigour from someone who knows their stuff and it crumbles.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect)

<comment><USER6> I find this to be the case with most pop-science books; the author's intention is to leave the reader with a feeling of having learned something rather than providing a full overview of the field, which may be too complex for the situation anyway. I often compare it to my response when non-CS people ask me "what I do."

Do you have some specific examples the people you spoke to frequently criticize regarding Harari?

<comment><USER5> No specific examples I'm afraid (what they said put me off reading him entirely so I don't have any personal examples either - too many other books I want to read!), although the two people who mentioned it to me recently were a neuroscientist and an economist with a keen interest evolutionary biology.

I do wonder about the value of pop science. It feels like it's almost always oversimplified to the point of being misleading. I have a background in psychology / neuroscience and find it difficult to read _any_ pop neuroscience without grinding my teeth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one." ― William Goldman

Bill Gates and Barack Obama, who both praised Harari, don't know anything about the future and neither does Harari. They make pretty good educated guesses, but are often wrong about what is actually going on. Harari seems like the latest incarnation of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman before him.</comment>


The ESP32 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-been-released/ <comment><USER3> There's a Technical Reference Manual[0], and a pinout[1] which show some of the features (multiple analogue inputs, huzzah!)

[0][https://espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/esp3...](https://espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/esp32_technical_reference_manual_en.pdf)

[1][http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/ESP3...](http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/ESP32_Pinout_a1_3.png)

<comment><USER4> That manual looks great, and probably should have been linked from the Hackaday post.

I'm confused by this, on page 12:

> The capacity of Internal SRAM 1 is 128 KB. Either CPU can read and write > this memory at addresses 0x3FFE_0000 ~ 0x3FFF_FFFF of the data bus, and also > at addresses 0x400A_0000 ~ 0x400B_FFFF of the instruction bus. The address > range accessed via the instruction bus is in reverse order (word-wise) > compared to access via the data bus.

That word-reversed mapping seems like a slightly nutty design quirk, but I find it hard to imagine how it could happen by accident. If it's a deliberate feature, is there anything it would actually be useful for?

<comment><USER5> This seems to be very odd. May be someone wanted to make access easy and fucked it up. Then they left it and defined it as feature.

The original feature is may be, that data access is byte wise, but as it is 32-bit CPU the instruction access is double-word wise. As it is also little endian someone may wanted to make the access easy.

<comment><USER6> It's weirder than that: within a word the bytes are in order, it appears that "top" and "bottom" of memory have been exchanged. It's as if one address bus is being fed through an inverter.

<comment> david-given I don't think it's an inverter. It looks like a subtraction (which is even weirder). Here's the example they give:

        0x3FFE_0000 accesses the least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFFC.
        0x3FFE_0001 accesses the second least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFFC.
        0x3FFE_0002 accesses the second most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFFC.
        0x3FFE_0003 accesses the most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFFC.
        0x3FFE_0004 accesses the least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFF8.
        0x3FFE_0005 accesses the second least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFF8.
        0x3FFE_0006 accesses the second most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFF8.
        0x3FFE_0007 accesses the most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400B_FFF8.
        ……
        0x3FFF_FFF8 accesses the least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0004.
        0x3FFF_FFF9 accesses the second least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0004.
        0x3FFF_FFFA accesses the second most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0004.
        0x3FFF_FFFB accesses the most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0004.
        0x3FFF_FFFC accesses the least significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0000.
        0x3FFF_FFFD accesses the second most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0000.
        0x3FFF_FFFE accesses the second most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0000.
        0x3FFF_FFFF accesses the most significant byte in the word accessed by 0x400A_0000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> TIL that Espressif (the manufacturer of the ESP8266 and ESP32) hired the guy behind [http://spritesmods.com/](http://spritesmods.com/). That's a very promising sign that they plan to keep their hobbyist/hacker user base in mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to see LLVM support for this so I can run Rust on it, someone wrote that "it's about a month of a part-time work for a single developer" (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994577)).

Is this realistic? A Kickstarter project might be a way to do this...

Update: also see [http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has- be...](http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-been- released/#comment-3183545)

<comment><USER8> It doesn't really have much RAM, I don't know how useful Rust would be for anything but prototyping, I don't think there's been much focus on size optimizations.

<comment><USER9> We actually added a "optimize for size" flag pretty recently.

<comment><USER10> Wow. How do you track that someone mentioned Rust. You are a machine Sir. :)

<comment><USER7> Mentioning Rust on HN inevitably summons Steve Klabnik. Its just the way it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I spent 30 mins reading about this chip and I still don't get it. I get why the ESP8266 was awesome ... MCU + wifi for super cheap. Why is this chip so exciting? Is it because it is supposed to be wifi+ARM (an ARM good enough to emulate a sega mastersystem game as per a youtube video)+other goodies? I saw rumors of other goodies being BLE. Is that confirmed or was that hot air :)

<comment> pi-rat ESP8266 was awesome, but lacked many useful features:

\- ADC (Analog to Digital converter)

\- IPv6 (IoT-chip without IPv6, come on..)

\- Bluetooth BLE

\- Enough RAM to pull of talking many of the protocols you might want to use over the internet.

\- etc.. etc..

ESP32 supports this.

<comment><USER12> How can a chip support or not support IPv6 in this case? Isn't it a layer below anything which would require direct hardware support? In other words, wouldn't it be implemented in software. I should point out that I know nothing about the ESP chips.

Or do you mean that the ESP8266 has hardware acceleration for IPv4 but not IPv6?

<comment><USER6> Probably the availability of enough code ROM and runtime RAM to support dual- stack operation, if it simply didn't fit before.

<comment><USER13> Eh, probably they didn't bother with IPv6 when butchering random BSD code for their hacked-together "SDK".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know that MicroPython was ported to the ESP8266, so presumably it will eventually come to ESP32.

I suppose that's probably going to be easiest way to get things done with it... or at least a really popular way.

<comment><USER15> It's already on the ESP32, kind of. This device:

[https://www.pycom.io/solutions/py- boards/lopy/](https://www.pycom.io/solutions/py-boards/lopy/)

is based on ESP32 and is running Micropython; I don't know if their port will be fully open source, though. They've said that they want to contribute as much as possible back to the micropython project, I think?

Edit: here's some info on their contributions to Micropython: [https://www.pycom.io/qa-micropython-multi-threading- garbage-...](https://www.pycom.io/qa-micropython-multi-threading-garbage- collector/)

</comment></comment><comment> semi-extrinsic CAN-bus? Iiinteresting. Maybe we'll see a wave of wifi-controlled car hacks (not as in malicious, as in HN) in the coming years?

<comment><USER16> Yes, there will be :)

<comment><USER17> Like what? I've tried to do CAN stuff with cars before, and outside of a few standard measurements it's almost impossible to find any documentation on what commands do what.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 270 mW is unfortunately too much to run on harvested energy, even for short bursts but otherwise this is a very interesting chip.

<comment><USER19> What chip would you recommend to do IoT which can run on harvested energy?

What would be the upper limit which harvested energy could deliver? Do you mean solar cells or harvesting microwaves from satellites, I could get about 1.5V or so from about a 60cm in diameter disk, have not measured the current available.

It would be really sweet to run something which speaks wifi even for short durations, if it recieves its energy from ephemeral radio.

<comment><USER18> I think bi-directional WiFi is out when running on harvested energy, the best you could probably do is to send out a single UDP packet.

That's why IoT applications tend to use other, simpler and lower power radios and protocols.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah)

Is very interesting but I'm not aware of any SOC that supports it.

> It would be really sweet to run something which speaks wifi even for short > durations, if it recieves its energy from ephemeral radio.

One interesting source of power is a simple coil-and-diode to harvest radio waves, do this for a while until you have enough power to boot your device, take a reading and send off a sample.

A few mW for a few seconds every couple of hours or so would be a good target. 100's to 1000's of mWs would take so long to harvest that you'd likely never get there because of leakage.

And 'speaking' is the right term, I don't seen an easy way for such comms to be bi-directional without a lot more power to be consumed.

<comment><USER20> I wonder how much energy you can harvest from FM broadcast radios stations, those signals are pretty strong.

Edit: I calculated a power flux density of 2.648µW/cm^2 from 3.16mV/m (70 dBµ) which is the 'city-grade contour' in the US. There seem to exist a patent for that, from a company called Freevolt ([http://www.getfreevolt.com/](http://www.getfreevolt.com/)).

<comment><USER18> Power law, so it's _very_ much dependent on your distance to the transmitter.

In NL some clever person figured out that he could power his fluorescent tubes from the broadcasting tower across the street and promptly got sued for theft...

<comment><USER21> Was the case ultimately decided against him? I mean, if they're radiating energy into his property, I'd imagine he could do whatever he wants with it.

<comment><USER18> I think yes, but it's long ago that I read about it. I'll try to dig up some info on this, it's interesting and now I want to know the exact details.

I've found another reference to this(dutch):

[http://www.philipsradios.nl/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=1...](http://www.philipsradios.nl/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=11835)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can preorder an ESP32 module(with 4MB flash) from SeeedStudio[1] right now.

[1]: [http://www.seeedstudio.com/ESP3212-Wifi-Bluetooth-Combo- Modu...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/ESP3212-Wifi-Bluetooth-Combo- Module-p-2706.html)

<comment><USER23> Does this have flash? I only see it mentioned ambiguously.

<comment><USER22> There are a Windbond flash onboard, pic is here: [https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/product/2016-09/7.png](https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/product/2016-09/7.png)

Some description above the pic:

              • The size of ESP-3212 Wifi module is 16mm x 24mm x 3m.

              • The ESP-3212 deploys 4MB SPI Flash with WSOP-8 package. It also uses 3DBi PCB antenna on board.

ESP3212 is an module, ESP32 is the chip.

<comment><USER23> Ah, okay, that agrees with what I understood, but I wanted to be sure (I didn't know if WSOP-8 is that footprint).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where is a good place (or what is a good book) to learn what all of the terminology in these comments and in the article mean?

<comment><USER25> Do you have particular terminology you're interested in?

The general subject is Micro Controller Units (MCUs) (and to a lesser extent System On Chip (SOC)s) which are becoming cheap ($5) and abundant enough to fuel the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) . There are various tangential topics such as:

* Computer architecture: e.g., "data bus", "SRAM", "Von Neumann architecture", "SPI flash", "Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC)", ARM, etc.

* Electrical engineering: e.g., "pulse trains", "servomotors", "Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) & vice versa (DAC)", "milliwatts (mW)", "milli-amp hours (mAh)", etc.

* Software engineering: "address spaces", "multi-threading", "stack", "Rust", "Low-Level Virtual Machine" (LLVM)", "[software build/compiler] toolchain", "Software Development Kit (SDK)", "GNU C Compiler (gcc)", etc.

* Network/Communication protocols: WiFi, "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)", "run-length-encoding", "little-endian", "Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)", "Transport Layer Security (TLS)", etc.

Make magazine (especially their electronics and Arduino YouTube channels--see below) might be a good info gateway for you.

Given the low prices already mentioned, I'd say that if you're interested in learning more, a good way to go would be to order something like an AdaFruit Trinket (link below) (or a fully-fledged Arduino or one of the ESP8266 or ESP32 boards in this article) and seeing what you can accomplish with it. Sparkfun also has some good tutorials if you're already confident on the coding side.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vCOKe4Rx50f...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vCOKe4Rx50fiW1ghQlpStY1)

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vAmrRwrT8fO...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vAmrRwrT8fOxpKE-D9ZsOLK)

[https://www.adafruit.com/products/1501](https://www.adafruit.com/products/1501)

[https://learn.sparkfun.com/](https://learn.sparkfun.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do any good competitors to the ESP32 exist at this point? E.x. something small with WiFi and Bluetooth that's usable by hobbyists?

Also, anyone know how to pay more to get one of these ASAP? Or is anyone who has one willing to sell theirs?

<comment><USER19> Ive seen these being mentioned from nordic semiconductors, [http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz- RF](http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz-RF) and specifically [http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz- RF/nRF24L01](http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz-RF/nRF24L01) but they're not quite in the same space as esp8266 or esp32 - they all just do WiFi or Blutooth, with much less power required than esp8266, but do not have any processor left over for doing anything else really, and memory is also very little. These are more like components when you want to build more to your wish.

Then you have this Realtek-RTL8710 which is ARM 32bit based, little less flash, more memory, and a bit more pricy, [http://www.instructables.com/id/Realtek- RTL8710-Alternative-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Realtek- RTL8710-Alternative-to-ESP8266/) buy here [http://www.aliexpress.com/item/RTL8710-serial-WIFI-model- ESP...](http://www.aliexpress.com/item/RTL8710-serial-WIFI-model- ESP-07-Authenticity-Guaranteed/32671501952.html) but it seems a bit more expensive than esp8266, which for IoT does make a difference.

So Id say, no not really, there isnt an alternative still. I think it is due to ARM requiring license costs which are higher than Xtensas so unit cost doenst reach $1.95 yet. Then it is also really difficult to both design a CPU and integrate the radio on it - with good power-management in such a small form-factor.

<comment><USER27> The Realtek is a competitor, the Nordics you mention are not. The nRF24L01 uses a proprietary radio. Some of the nRF chips are popular for Bluetooth Low Energy especially given that they do have Cortex M processors that can be used to run applications, but it ain't a competitor without WiFi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "As far as any new information regarding the ESP32 is concerned, don't expect much. It's released, though, and in a month or so the work of documenting this supposed wonderchip will begin."

<comment><USER29> If there's one thing they needed to work on it was documentation and they failed at it.

<comment><USER30> They are really serious about providing good doc. Here is what sprite_tm (one of their engineers) said:

 _" Also, keep in mind that documentation is very much a work-in-progress! The techdoc as it is is basically the state of the art with regards to what we've finished writing, editing etc. There's still way more coming up, and the basic idea is to document everything very well this time; apart from some sensitive stuff (mostly the WiFi and BT RF interface) we're trying to not have any secrets._" Source: [http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has- be...](http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-been- released/#comment-3183107)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Love the Chrome autotranslation of the linked Taobao store:

"Sorry, this baby has the shelf temporarily, you can browse other baby"

</comment><comment><USER32> It looks like it still only has 2.4GHz wifi. Is there a reason?

<comment><USER33> Only needs one antenna to also do Bluetooth. Compatible with all routers except ones owned by techies that wish 2.4GHz would finally die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone have a good idea on how it compared to for example the CHIP? ([https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip)). I saw the announcement for ESP32 a few days ago but it looks like it's around $7 for one which to me seemed expensive compared to $9 for the CHIP.

From my quick scanning, power peaks seems to be lower but if somebody with better knowledge of these things can chip in that would be appreciated.

Mainly wondering if I should add these ESP32 to my collection or not (as I already have 2 CHIP:s and a few ESP8266) :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> As I've been dabbling only with PICs (lower numbers and asm only), I'm looking forward to 'graduate' to something more like this!

</comment><comment><USER36> First ESP3212 breakout board immediately available (ESP3212 not included yet) [https://www.tindie.com/products/dude8604/esp3212-breakout- bo...](https://www.tindie.com/products/dude8604/esp3212-breakout-board-alpha/)

</comment><comment><USER37> From the 'Applications' list on Seeed Studio:

             • Video streaming from camera

Can anyone tell me how you'd hook up a camera to this device?

<comment><USER38> I assume they mean directly integrated into the camera hardware basically as a wifi modem. So some main processor would be passing it frames over SPI and it'd transmit them, not someone plugging in a webcam and streaming it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Anyone have any idea on bulk costs. If buying 5-10K of the esp8266 modules, its chhheeeapp. Would love to consider switching over but curious on costs.

<comment><USER40> Seems like these chips are unbelievably cheap too. The shop link[0] seems to say that the bare chips are $0.19 (USD)[1] even in small quantities.

[0] [https://world.taobao.com/item/537912657387.htm](https://world.taobao.com/item/537912657387.htm)

[1] [https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%C2%A519.00](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%C2%A519.00)

<comment><USER41> I am not 100% sure about this, as I can't read Chinese, but this is likely not 19 Japanese Yen.

> ¥ is a currency sign used by the Chinese yuan (CNY) and the Japanese yen > (JPY) currencies. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a > double stroke.

It is much more likely that it is 19 Yuan, which is ~$3.

<comment><USER40> Heh, I guess I shouldn't have believed the unbelievable price after all.

Still, $3 for a chip that does 'everything' isn't bad. From what I've seen everyone else wants 3x-10x more than that for chips (or, admittedly, sometimes modules) that do less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This thing has I2S, meaning that you can hook up an audio codec to it. I wonder if it could handle stereo audio without underrunning the output stream?

<comment><USER19> Yes, it has been done with ESP8266, it can produce shitty audio by itself and when the sender is close to the device with no interference - otherwise you need a dedicated DAC and it can be used as a simple webradio with mono audio output device.

With this ESP32, my bet is it can handle stereo without any other dedicated components and fluently.

Read more here [https://github.com/espressif/ESP8266_MP3_DECODER](https://github.com/espressif/ESP8266_MP3_DECODER)

<comment><USER7> Yeah I built the ESP8266 version with SRAM and I2S codec, works well. The ESP32 might have enough internal RAM to not need the external SPI RAM, and the hardware pwms might be usable for audio out (or do we have a usable dac now?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> getting started with the esp8266 was mainly for ppl with some background in soldering. also, flashing the esp8266 was not too easy (python script, some system libs needed to be present iirc). for beginners, i found arduino, tessel or espruino to be easier. also, espruino now runs on esp8266 - the ecosystem that will evolve around the esp32 will be interesting to see

<comment><USER44> You could also buy an NodeMCU ([http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html](http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html)) if you don't like soldering. Personally without a formal electronics background or great soldering skills, I had not a lot of problems with setting up the ESP8266.

But I do agree that out of the box it's less "plug and play" as an Arduino.

<comment><USER45> Agreed, although I prefer the D1 mini ([http://www.wemos.cc/Products/d1_mini.html](http://www.wemos.cc/Products/d1_mini.html)) - it's just a bit smaller (and cheaper?) than the NodeMCU.

The ESP-01 (which I started with) is quite painful to program, though - <USER2> uses a bizarre baud rate (78k?) and shares its GPIO with its programming pins.

<comment><USER43> exactly, this is what i meant, for simple projects, the cheap costs vs time to invest to get it running was not worth it

<comment><USER19> I dunno, I managed to get it running within a day or two, and had zero experience in this kind of electronics before.

Used a raspberry pi to control it, with a button to switch it into programming mode. No soldering, just wires and breadboard.

But now I use a d1 mini since its more comfortable/less breakage from accidentally removing wires when cleaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given Does it still have the built-in operating system? If so, is this required, or can I replace it and run my own bare-metal firmware?

<comment><USER38> It still has a built in RTOS like the 8266 and no I don't think you can replace it. Not easily anyway, Espressif could probably do it but I don't think users really are able to.

Your stuff _is_ running bare metal though - your code is linked directly into the same binary payload as the RTOS. One of the major selling points of the ESP32 though was that it is dual core, so that you can have one core dedicated to servicing your code and the other to dealing with keeping the radio stack alive and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> im starting a company around these devices in boston. if anyone's interested in joining, email me.</comment>


How Did Uniqlo Become the Hottest Retailer in New York? - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/fashion/features/65898/index2.html

<comment><USER2> That's easy: Cheap, fashionable clothes that have good fit and are of relatively high quality. The quality of Uniqlo blows Gap or similar stores out of the water.

I wish they had stores outside of NY. But Uniqlo is great.</comment>


Critics of Google Antitrust Ruling Fault the Focus - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/technology/googles-rivals-say-ftc-antitrust-ruling-missed-the-point.html

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been often said that consumers aren't the real customers of Google... now competitors are urging the FTC to take that into account in their regulatory approach: "Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google's competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google's actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google's site."

The logic is that competitors are forced to advertise on Google, driving up prices for everyone in that category: "Drawing fewer customers as a result of Google's free links, those competitors are forced to advertise more to draw traffic. And advertisers who aren't competitors have fewer places to go to reach consumers, meaning Google can use its market power to raise advertising prices."</comment>


Cocoa for scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.macresearch.org/cocoa_for_scientists

<comment><USER2> Not to be trollish or anything, but does Apple have any real presence at all in the field of computational science? I figured that Linux would have that space locked, especially due to its heavy use of high-performance clusters. And I don't see labs spending 3K+ for mediocre workstations.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Apple is making these tools. I just don't get what their intended market is.</comment>


Tech Internship Salaries That Will Make Your Eyes Water - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/12/05/tech_internship_salaries_an_even_longer_list_that_will_make_your_eyes_water.html

<comment><USER2> They don't make my eyes water. I wish these kids the best. Ms. Allen's argument is silly. One perpetuates privilege much more with unpaid or ill-paid internship offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe strongly that interns should be paid, but I had no idea some were paid this highly. Personally, I'm with you; I'm thrilled they are.</comment></comment>


Learn to Think Better: Tips from a Savant - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=think-better-tips-from-a-savant

<comment><USER2> the interview alone is interesting, I was not in for the "tips".</comment>


An Autism Diagnosis That Isn't Always Permanent - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/the-autism-diagnosis-that-isnt-always-permanent/ar-BBVcO1C <comment><USER2> Related, but possibly tangentially:

I'm convinced my father would've been diagnosed with 'high-functioning autism' had it been a thing in his day/environment.

But he's happily married to someone who compensated for many, if not most of his deficiencies. Together they form a pretty functional human, and as a son I'm very lucky to have grown up with that.

At the same time, many of his quirks have become very noticeable now that I've been officially diagnosed with 'high functioning autism' too.

From his inability to deal with emotions of any sort to OCD(-ish) behavior around the house, from a lack of social life independent of his wife to obsessive interest in the most specific things, all of it strikes me as rather autistic, and uncomfortably recognizable, but softened by a life-long partnership.

It often makes me think about such diagnoses and how insular/individualistic they can often be, and how powerless they can leave one feeling when diagnosed. If you're 'on the spectrum' but your symptoms are mediated by partner/family/culture, are you still on the spectrum? In some ways, yes, but perhaps we don't talk enough about the influence of others or environment.

All this not in direct response to the article, just saying.

<comment><USER3> You could be talking about my life. My family has the same characteristics, in my case both my parents and myself are clearly on the ASD spectrum.

I do think that there's a ton that can be done by support. I think it's especially interesting since, as my parents have aged, many of their supports have been removed or become irrelevant, as you say, making their neurological quirks more and more evident. I hope when we get older there will be a better support network in place for aging ASD folks.

In my case a big challenge for me has just been accepting that I do need a significant support structure, and not feeling like that makes me less of an independent adult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a four year old son who is diagnosed with autism spectrum. As a father I would like to know from adults with autistic tendencies what I should do to make him happy and to help him grow up to become independent and self-reliant and what I should avoid.

Autism spectrum is a very wide field, I realize, so I tell you that my son probably has neither Asperger nor AD[H]D, but perhaps early infant autism and as it seems not in a very severe manifestation but distinct enough that I sometimes have to explain it to other parents at the playground, for example.

August he will start kindergarten in a private school with Montessori pedagogy, in fact, he already attends a playgroup there two times a week and one afternoon outside in the woods and he always returns happy from there.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, by providing therapy to appear less autistic, these folks get better at masking their symptoms (by making eye contact, holding conversation)?

"Children who are longer diagnosed with ASD show improvements with communicating and interacting with other people, which can include more eye contact and an easier time with back-and-forth conversations.

The children, whose mean age was 2.5 years old, were diagnosed and treated at a university-affiliated early intervention program in the Bronx. They were re- evaluated four years later, on average. Most of the children received a mix of speech and occupational therapy and applied behavior analysis, the standard treatment for ASD."

<comment><USER6> You don't cure things like this you just get better at developing coping strategies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We changed the URL from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-autism-diagnosis- that-isnt-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-autism-diagnosis-that-isnt- always-permanent-11553526845) to one that isn't behind a hard paywall.</comment>


Sublime Text: My workflow and useful resources - <AUTHOR> http://skippednote.com/post/sublime-text-my-workflow-and-useful-resources

<comment><USER2> Soda + Tomorrow theme is money. You also just helped me figure out why my sidebar was white after switching to a MBP. Soda with the fix!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad it was helpful.</comment></comment>


MongoHQ is down (offline maintenance) - <AUTHOR> https://new.mongohq.com/

<comment><USER2> was this planned? I didn't get an email

<comment><AUTHOR> I have several free (experimental as they call them) deployments with them and I did not receive any email prior to the "maintenance."

Did anyone who paid for the service receive notice?</comment></comment>