"Now, our cars will focus on Jersey barriers as well."

yeah like collision avoidance, which is not safety /s

Engineers, more than anything else, don't like it when you piss on their leg and tell them its raining. Musk's statements here are Ballmer-esque marketing doublespeak: We've been focused on "safety" to date [don't mind that our cars run themselves into concrete barriers], and will roll out "full autonomy features" in the next software update [don't mind the NTSB report that shows that our technology is a glorified version of the lane-keeping everyone else is already doing].

I think a lot of the reaction on HN is the result of people simply realizing the large delta between what Tesla claims to have, what people thought Tesla has, and what it actually has.

What you perceive as emotional venting I think is actually frustration that we are again seeing a media darling company making grandiose claims about its products while the experts on places like HN insist that those claims are dangerously exceeding its true capabilities. A person died as a direct result of Tesla's insistence that they can call it an autopilot/self driving car while knowing full well that it was not designed to avoid stationary objects in the roadway. Press F to pay respects.

n=1

The sample size is irrelevant. The NTSB report reveals that the Tesla crashed into the median not because there was a glitch, but because the design of the system fundamentally wasn't capable of avoiding it. Tesla can't stop in response to stationary objects (likely because it can't tell the background apart from real obstacles and enabling breaking would cause too many false positives). That design is only safe if you have a human in the loop to do what the computer cannot do.

What seems weird to me is that when the car would get closer to the object the probability that a crash would happen should increase, Tesla could not get a high enough crash probability at all, even from 1 meter or 1 millisecond before impact and continued to accelerate.

There was a good analysis of this elsewhere that effectively boiled down to how the tech being used (I want to say LIDAR, but it could have been lasers or cameras) had evolved. It's apparently really good at detecting how fast other objects are going, and really bad (or, at least, not designed well in its current state) at detecting stationary objects, since it's primarily been trained to ignore the millions of stationary objects all around it throughout a drive to be able to focus on moving objects (cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc).

Apparently, moving and stationary objects are treated differently, and both have to be intentionally trained, and that this was a case of seeing the stationary object but ignoring it, just like it does with most other stationary objects that aren't in the road. I'm not technical enough to go into specifics, but that's the gist from the article I saw-but-can-no-longer-find.

You're mistaken, that was about radar not LIDAR. Telsa cars have no LIDAR.

The radars in use have poor angular resolution meaning they can tell if something is moving toward or away from it, but cannot tell where that object is. Since driving down the road will necessarily involve many objects on the side of the road, but the radar apparently can't tell where they are because of it's poor angular resolution, the 'solution' was apparently to filter out everything moving towards the sensor at the car's current speed (e.g, all stationary objects.)

It's unclear to me what if any circumstances will cause the emergency breaking system in a Tesla to fire.