Top all-time · #1623
Brad Templeton
Personal blog · ideas.4brad.comhardwareeconomicsscience
Brad Templeton writes Brad Ideas, a personal blog at ideas.4brad.com about hardware, economics and science. Since 2007, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 174 times, most often “The overengineering and non-deployment of SSL/TLS | Brad Ideas”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Robocars & More
Most-linked posts?
- The overengineering and non-deployment of SSL/TLS | Brad Ideas3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-06-26
- The thing that went wrong in the Uber fatality are both terrible and expected3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-26
- Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-10-27
- The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 12 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-04
- Now That We Can, What If We Don't Wipe Out the Disease-Spreading Mosquito?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-23
- Sharing the ride: Less sharing better for transit, more sharing better for cars2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-01
- Critique of NHTSA's newly released regulations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-20
- On Google's self-driving car acident rates2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-15
- Navia's INDUCT officially for sale for $250,0002 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-09
- Comma.ai's neural network car and the hot new technology in robocars2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-25
What Hacker News says?
Big victory for Uber http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-v...
Comment linking /uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-victory-uber
on “Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement”Submitted On Google's self-driving car acident rates as a story · 165 points
HN discussionBasic slow models are availble now , so that's a good sign: http://ideas.4brad.com/navias-induct-officially-sale-250-000
Comment linking /navias-induct-officially-sale-250-000
on “Apple CarPlay”Submitted Live Google transit directions change the value of transit as a story · 106 points
HN discussionMany analysts have crunched the numbers, and come up with similar results, but Brad Templeton has been thinking and writing about Robotaxis longer than anyone else, so I'll link to his numbers: http://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics
Comment linking /robotaxi-economics
on “Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules”Submitted It certainly looks bad for Uber as a story · 86 points
HN discussionI thought http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-price-la-approaches-robocar-chea... was interesting in that light. In short: as the cost of a ride approaches the cost of operating a privately-owned vehicle, it approximates owning a driverless car.
Comment linking /uber-price-la-approaches-robocar-cheap
on “Elon Musk: Tesla cars will have “autopilot mode” by summer”Submitted Solve the Proposition 13 problem by paying off the difference when you sell as a story · 51 points
HN discussionBrad has written a bunch about robocar economics. Here's one piece. https://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics
Comment linking /robotaxi-economics
on “Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey”Submitted Barak Obama wants to solve robocar "Trolley Problems" as a story · 49 points
HN discussion- 05 · 2021-11-03
Yeah, nope. 'smart' roads mean wasting billions on sensors that would become outdated soon after being installed and banning non-'smart' users is political suicide impossible even in China. Also, do animals, pedestrians and cyclists need to wear a transponder to avoid getting squashed like a bug? https://ideas.4brad.com/forget-smart-cities-you-need-make-yo...
Comment linking /forget-smart-cities-you-need-make-your-infrastructure-stupid-survive-future
on “Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City” Submitted The Electric Car may be entering its “cell phone” period as a story · 44 points
HN discussionBrad Templeton, who's been working on self-driving cars for a few years now, analyzed this in http://ideas.4brad.com/critique-nhtsas-newly-released-recomm... . He says, "Broadly, this is very much the wrong direction... the progress of robocar development in the USA may be seriously negatively affected." This is a big deal.
Comment linking /critique-nhtsas-newly-released-recommendations-states-and-regulations
on “Self-Driving Cars Must Meet 15 Benchmarks in U.S. Guidance”Submitted Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals as a story · 41 points
HN discussion> They rebutted that individual cars are much easier to hack and after they are first used in a terror attack we will get the political will to fix the problem. Was that meant to be a joke? Sure, they can establish a new standard that will apply to all the new car models coming out four years later. But who actually expects hundreds of millions of cars that are already on the market, to receive a software overall wi…
Comment linking /disconnected-car-right-security-plan-robocars
on “Self-Crashing Cars”Submitted Portugal's Velocidade Controlada – speed control traffic signals as a story · 41 points
HN discussionNo, that's not the "most" they can do. Not even close. This is about the minimum they should do with self-driving cars, yet it's still about an order of magnitude more than their "most they can do" right now: http://ideas.4brad.com/disconnected-car-right-security-plan-... Tesla cars' "features" such as remote control, accessing any car from its servers, over-the-air updates, and more features like that will have a d…
Comment linking /disconnected-car-right-security-plan-robocars
on “Tesla Model S outsells German luxury flagships in Europe”Submitted Google's self-driving car crash is a positive sign as a story · 28 points
HN discussionPeople hate using real buses because they are so expensive in all the non-financial ways. Robot buses won't be much different: https://ideas.4brad.com/sharing-ride-less-sharing-better-tra...
Comment linking /sharing-ride-less-sharing-better-transit-more-sharing-better-cars
on “Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet a Teen Who Rides One Every Day”Submitted Designing Olympic sports for the spectator as a story · 24 points
HN discussion"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficie…
Comment linking /sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficiency-solo-transport
on “Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality”Submitted The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1 as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSee the following analysis by Brad Templeton, a SDC expert: Road wear There is strong potential to reduce the damage to roads (and thus the cost of maintaining them, which is immense and seriously in arrears) thanks to the robotruck. That's because heavy trucks and big buses cause almost all the road wear today. A surprising rule of thumb is that road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight per axle. As such…
Comment linking /otto-and-self-driving-trucks-what-do-they-mean
on “How to stop the decline of public transport in rich countries”Submitted Walking consumes more gasoline than driving as a story · 21 points
HN discussionWhy do you believe that? Which is to say, is this something you've worked out with numbers or is it a reflexive intuitive judgement? Because if it's the later you should recognize that your intuition is based on prices that include the labor of the person driving you which won't be included in a self driving car. Brad Templeton did some math and thinks that self driving cars will be cheaper on a per-mile basis if yo…
Comment linking /robotaxi-economics
on “Lidar Is a Crutch”Submitted Towards frameless (clockless) video as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI don't know what would have happened if "this guy programmed it", but the answer should be yes , the car should have seen the cyclist and it should have pressed the brakes. This was an interesting post, too, by Brad Templeton who worked on Google's self-driving car project for a while: http://ideas.4brad.com/almost-every-thing-went-wrong-uber-fa...
Comment linking /almost-every-thing-went-wrong-uber-fatality-both-terrible-and-expected
on “Why collision avoidance is harder for an AI-based system”Submitted Where will 3-D cameras like Kinect lead? as a story · 12 points
HN discussionGreat points regarding aligning precision/recall of AI systems with actual human supervision capabilities. One quibble: I hate seeing articles uncritically repeat Uber's line that a human driver could not have reacted in the same scenario. The dashboard cam footage they released does not accurately represent either human or car perceptual capabilities [1], and folks recreating the scene have shown that it doesn't ev…
Comment linking /it-certainly-looks-bad-uber
on “Fatalities vs. False Positives: The Lessons from the Tesla and Uber Crashes”Submitted Dodge leading human resistance to robocars as a story · 11 points
HN discussion
