Hacker News: kevinchen

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:05:22 +0000

I believe the MTBF argument still applies to Starlink.

Regarding the minimal risk condition / fallback behavior, a central point of the article was that slowing or stopping are almost always unacceptable on freeways because of the speeds involved

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 02:17:01 +0000

Cell networks are even longer lead time and more capital intensive than autonomous driving ;) even if we only consider the fcc + local permitting time, it already makes this option difficult.

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 02:12:13 +0000

Author here. At the mean time between failures needed to exceed human performance, the uptime of the network connection quickly becomes a limiting factor. It’s possible to pick only routes that have great cell coverage but this limits commercial viability.

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 02:04:16 +0000

Most high end sensors, especially lidars, are targeted at L4 applications. Otherwise the price cannot be justified. It’s a safe bet that sensor makers are including AV developers in their market research.

For lidar, the range is also limited by power limits + physics, which cannot be overcome by increasing money/power/device size. Some dependencies on semiconductor manufacturing tech or better signal processing might be possible to solve with more money.

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 01:15:10 +0000

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive, not to mention other variable costs like staff for remote assistance, maintenance, and first/last mile

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 18:06:47 +0000

I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable.

That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...

(Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 18:03:45 +0000

Thst video looks fairly sparse and well structured by SF standards? eg interactions starting at 9:00 https://youtu.be/TOV0ndPr0Dk

Many examples of high pedestrian density in https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4

New comment by kevinchen in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

kevinchen — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:59:28 +0000

Author here. the shorter reaction times you mentioned are collected under ideal conditions, like the person knows they are being tested and only needs to push a button or whatever. In driving, the reaction time is end to end, including perception, decision-making, and actuation (moving your foot, pressing pedal all the way, shifting, etc.)

Also recommend checking out the citation. It is an accepted value used in American highway design.

Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

kevinchen — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 20:18:20 +0000

Article URL: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38973404

Points: 260

# Comments: 427

Tearing Down the Rewind.ai App

kevinchen — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 20:58:00 +0000

Article URL: https://kevinchen.co/blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34131160

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by kevinchen in "Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups"

kevinchen — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 07:46:36 +0000

"checksums of file and photo data are used to help Apple de-duplicate and optimize your iCloud and device storage"

This is likely describing content-addressable storage. It is the underpinning of many iCloud services that store user files / blobs. It is also a commonly used pattern in backend services generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage

Analyzing Tesla AI Day: Language models and computer architecture

kevinchen — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 20:17:28 +0000

Article URL: https://kevinchen.co/blog/tesla-ai-day-2022/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33059782

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Fair Equity Refreshers

kevinchen — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 18:13:55 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@jnaous/fair-equity-refreshers-41b01e13803

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473264

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kevinchen in "We Chat, They Watch"

kevinchen — Fri, 08 May 2020 06:44:56 +0000

I don’t think this is true. iMessage works in China (they can’t block all of Apple)

New comment by kevinchen in "Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer"

kevinchen — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 23:15:29 +0000

I guess this post is a little bit different, because VMs are designed to be portable across different hosts. Even hypervisor software without live migration still lets you freeze the VM’s state to a file which can be copied to a new host. However, an already running process is not designed to be portable in the same way.

Big Project Build Times – Chromium

kevinchen — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 16:32:10 +0000

Article URL: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/big-project-build-times-chromium/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760769

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kevinchen in "Hard Drive Stats for 2019"

kevinchen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 05:48:15 +0000

I don’t think this is accurate. Within a single region, S3 stores in multiple availability zones by default.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/

New comment by kevinchen in "Hard Drive Stats for 2019"

kevinchen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 05:46:40 +0000

I’m a Backblaze customer of many years & respect their team a lot. But seriously, “out-Googling Google” because they have cheaper storage is a meme that needs to die.

GCP and AWS both store full copies of your data in multiple locations by default (Availability Zones in AWS-speak). So it’s not an apples to apples comparison. The reduced redundancy is priced in, for people who can tolerate it.

New comment by kevinchen in "Hard Drive Stats for 2019"

kevinchen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 05:41:56 +0000

I’m sure Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc collect their own stats on drive failure. It would be almost negligent if they were just guessing in the dark every time they buy drives.

Main difference is probably Backblaze is small enough to publish these stats without hurting their supplier relationships. (pure speculation)

New comment by kevinchen in "Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera"

kevinchen — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 02:09:47 +0000

When I clicked the PoC link in Safari, it launched the Zoom app using a URL scheme. ("open in ...?" dialog put up by Safari)