This comment is depressingly cynical. This is probably the single best definition of "hacking", as the community often refers to it, that I've seen in a very long time. One guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt, throws together a minimal prototype built on top of existing technology. Just look at the picture of it.

Claims of commercial viability or beating Tesla are a bit ridiculous, but this is pretty damn amazing.

I think it's a fair comment given his quote "I know everything there is to know" and the headline of the article claiming he's "building a self-driving car by himself". I've always thought the "hacker" community attributed value to sharing and building off other's work, but maybe times have changed.

Have you ever spoken to a journalist? It's their job to sell clicks with charged headlines and over-blown quotes. If they followed you for a day I promise they'd generate some equally stupid quotes.

Yes, that kind of journalism exists, but does it have a place here?

Seems obvious to me that the journalist was manipulating what he said which was that he is deeply familiar with the state of the art of AI tech.

To expand on that: '“I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple"', which seems like an attitude of someone without a solid understanding of ML. But who knows, maybe he's figured out something the rest of the field hasn't...

If this is the "hacker ethos" then I want nothing to do with it:

> “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

> “ ‘If’ statements kill.”

> “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology. I just want to know how it all works.”

Hotz is pretty eccentric, but he's also pretty incredible. While technology wouldn't progress very far if everyone was like Hotz, I also don't think it would get very far without people like Hotz.

Exactly. You can appreciate aspects of a person and the work they do without deifying them in their entirety. Linus Torvalds and weev (being an extreme example) fall into this category.

Agreed. I can appreciate people who can go heads down and get things done. Where it falls apart for me is when those people get deified--or deify themselves, like that last quote demonstrates. And when they demonstrate an unwillingness to collaborate.

Then may you get what you want.

He implemented methods from the literature using a sensor specifically designed for this application. Grad students do this for class projects.

It's not "one guy starts working on something only the biggest companies in the world dare attempt" though, it's something hundreds of people have been doing for years now. He's more of a media hacker than he is a car hacker.

You're just easily impressed, that's all :)

1. Make a working prototype

2. Impress investors

3. Hire others to finish the job

4. Profit

Tesla customers invest in Musk. Musk invests in Hotz. Hots invests in developers. Developers in researchers. We're all delegating until we find someone who can finish the job. We're investing in people to hire the right people.

You're assuming that Hotz then does nothing, and also Musk. You really think Musk is sitting around with all this free time not doing anything? You don't think it would all fall apart without the key people still in key roles?

It doesn't work this way. You just move up the value chain.

He didn't write the article, it's not his fault it comes off as cocky. He is tackling an impressive project on his own, and spitting in the face of corporations. He should be giving talks at DEFCON about this, teaching people how he did it.

Your comment screams a superiority complex, but I bet that you are actually a nice person in real-life. Hotz is doing good work, and everyone in the technical field is relying on work done decades before they were born.

He should give talks at defcon teaching people how he did it?

You mean like this one, from Defcon in 2013?

http://hackaday.com/2013/07/26/defcon-presenters-preview-hac...

Or The Defcon 19 How To CanBus Hack Workshop, that taught classes about this in 2011?

http://www.canbushack.com/blog/index.php?title=learn-to-canb...

Unfortunately for him, defcon prefers original content, not someone claiming credit for what has been demonstrated repeatedly in previous years.

He sure didn't write the article, but looking at him and what he's saying on the video gives me the same impression of cockiness. But I bet he's actually a nice person in real life. ;)

It's an impressive personal project, no doubt about that. It's however also important to recognize the difficulty of having a system that works in mass production and handles all kinds of situation. Like someone said earlier it's easy to have the car drive in clear day with very visible markers. The hard part is when it rains, when it's foggy, when things are less optimal, etc.

Once he get to that point he'll find that part to be a lot harder than what he's accomplished so far.

A good point. I did some HTML for my elementary school when I was a kid, and the local newspaper put me up as a 'whiz kid' on their front page. Not that anything I did was shockingly complicated in the slightest, even for the web of that era. Journalists hype stuff, that's nothing new.

Reminds of the quote from "The Social Network"

>> "If they had engineered a self-driving car, they would've engineered a self driving car".

You are just being absurdly accusative in your comment. That guy has done a self-driving car with nothing but tools available in the market.