[ColinWright]

I'm really disappointed to see this as the top voted reply. Of course the reporter is wrong, of course his article can be ripped apart, of course this is a momentous achievement and the reporter is just too ignorant to know that, and we're all clever enough to see how amazing this is.

You're missing the point and the lesson:

    This is how normals think.

I've written more here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4018684

Don't just laugh at the ignorance, learn from it.

[robterrell]

The reporter is right, and we're wrong. The question the article is answering is "Are Google's self-driving cars ready?" The article explains in general-interest terms why they're not.

You or I might be tempted to buy that exact car today as a beta, knowing that we'd have to tweak a lot of things, but (a) I don't want to drive in a world where your beta car with your rooted ROMs is driving around (and you definitely don't want to drive on the same streets as my inexperly-rooted ROMS, trust me); (b) the grandparent comment is underestimating the work involved in micro-mapping all of the possible routes, let alone the vast array of possible interactions between other vehicles, humans, animals, new road hazards, weather, etc. all mixed together.

I'm sure it's going to be a few years. Maybe more than a few. But that's okay with me. The stakes are pretty high for two-ton hunks of metal moving at 60 mph. This is something we all definitely want them to get as close to correct as humanly possible before it's available to consumers.

[semanticist]

On a slightly meta note, HN comments are weighted by the average karma score of the person leaving the comment, not just the number of up-votes that specific comment received.

So this comment being at the top could easily be down to the poster's karma/average karma.

[ColinWright]

I'm not convinced that's true, and would be interested to know your evidence. In particular, the commenter in question has no average karma, apparently not having made sufficiently recent previous contributions. Looking at the contributions made, they don't look to be the sort of thing that garners lots and lots of karma, but I only really glanced at them, so that impression could be wrong. But I doubt it.

It's impossible to tell without comment scores being displayed, but my feeling is that any ranking influence from average karma must be small, if any. I'd be interested in any concrete information, even if circumstantial.

If, however, I find that average karma does have an effect, I'm going to stop replying to individuals, stop providing information, stop correcting misapprehensions, and concentrate on only submitting populist items. That's clearly what PG would want, if that's how the ranking systems work.