
Yandex’s on-demand taxi service debuts its self-driving car project - bobuk
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/30/yandexs-on-demand-taxi-service-debuts-its-self-driving-car-project/
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salimmadjd
Yandex has some of the best programmers in the world. This was a surprise to
me, but in the past 5 years, I've been spending few months a year in Belarus
with various engineering team and have been learning a lot about this region.

Yandex has it's own school within the universities where they recruit the best
minds early on and train them. I've heard from programmers who now work at FB.
That they could pass google's interview tests, but could not pass the Yandex
test at all.

Add to that, Yandex Taxi is currently the second most popular on demand Taxi
service in Russia. They might also be able to easily bypass many regulations
we face here in US and get to a lot more driving data than
google/uber/apple/lyft might have.

What does that mean? I think, the self driving car might finally give Yandex
team something to do with all the talent they've been recruiting. So I would
not dismiss their efforts at all. They could become a real force very quickly.

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ex3ndr
Most of the Yandex developers are not that good or not loyal to a company.
This classes in universities is a scam: instead of teaching people of real
world things, they teach how to work with yandex tech stack.

Yandex lost almost all good developers and it is continue even further.
Companies rent offices near yandex and find yandex developers in the
restaurants around this buildings and convince them to leave. This is very
easy to make a decision to leave yandex for them.

Once i came to talk to yandex and ask - why they don't make good experience
for mobile apps in their search results? Why they are not indexing anything
related to apps? Answer was simple - user then will use this apps instead of
yandex.

And such toxic ideas are pretty common in the company.

Talking about maps - they pushed out of the market one of the most awesome
maps application in the russia. It had crappy UI, but it always make correct
estimates and was able to learn your behaviour (more than 5 years ago!). While
their app doesn't work at all but it couldn't because they need real drivers
to make sane navigation. Then they pushed it to a taxis with a very simple
trick - for taxis they made routes LONGER than it should be. This got them big
fleet of a taxis. (sorry no proofs, but they are on russian and you won't
understand it anyway)

I hope they won't be that successful with their crappy product on the roads
(they failed in almost everything in last years) and it will be much harder to
compete for smaller teams as everyone will say "huh, but there are yandex guys
already!".

This video is a too dumb for a year of work. Voyage are better already, but
they are a small team unlike yandex. Geohotz was even faster.

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getsiu
As a former employee of Yandex I totally disagree with what you said about
'not that good' developers and their loyalty.

It seems to me that the most common reason for leaving the company is
immigration, which has nothing to do with Yandex itself. All my ex colleagues
who left Yandex work abroad at Google, Facebook, MS and etc. Also I've seen
many very good developers who cared a lot about their products. So my
impression is somewhat opposite to what you described.

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dmix
The OP doesn't seem to work there and seems like an outsider who thinks he
knows how to run a company better than the people on the inside. This
obviously misses a lot of moving parts and internal incentives (which yes may
ultimately created a bad product). But I'd personally rather hear the
experiences of people directly involved with the company.

I don't see anything wrong with training people on their tech stack either.
That's not a scam, that's a highly valuable skillset if it gets you a job and
experience. You can always learn other languages on your own, which is 10x
easier after you know one.

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Animats
That takes me back. That's about the level of performance we had with our
DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 1985. Driving around barrels is a basic test;
we did that too. Ours worked OK at 15MPH, but faster than that we'd out-drive
the LIDAR range.

It's much easier now to get to that level - good multibeam LIDAR is available,
GPS/INS integration is common and cheap, and powerful computers that will
survive in the automotive environment are available. Progress in vision has
been huge, there's good software for digesting point clouds, and 3D SLAM
works.

Most of the hard problems today involve dealing with other road users.

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georgecmu
> DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in _1985_

I think that date is off by two decades ;)

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muthdra
So they did have self driving cars in the 60's. I knew it!

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georgecmu
Right. Jokes aside, though, they did have self-driving cars in the 80s:
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/)

If you scroll down to the PhD theses names, there are some pretty well-known
names that defended their dissertations as a part of the NavLab development.

(The Second) Grand Challenge, of course, was 2005. If I remember right,
vehicles didn't have to deal with other road users until 2007 (Urban
Challenge).

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cr0sh
They actually had "self driving cars" in the 60s, and earlier - for given
values of "self driving":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars)

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sAbakumoff
Yandex taxi is really, really the best ride hailing service I have ever used.
Wish them luck with self-driving cars, that would be a real challenge to start
such a thing in Russia where drivers could be insanely careless about safety
rules. For example a couple of times Russian taxi drivers asked me about WTF I
buckle up for - is it a traumatic experience or something? :D

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old-gregg
Does anyone else think the steering wheel movements are unrealistically
aggressive? The car is barely turning, yet the wheel is doing 60+ degree
turns. Has it been calibrated to be this way, or Prius steering ratio is that
relaxed?

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djsumdog
Yea that did seem weird. Also as far as collision avoidance, shouldn't the car
come to a complete stop if a van pulls out in front of it instead of just
trying to move around it? What would happen if the van kept going?

I hope this is an early prototype.

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cr0sh
Remember, this is Russia we're talking about - or haven't you watched any of
those dashcam videos? If it drove what we in the West think of as "normal", it
would probably cause more accidents, not less.

/s

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virtuexru
Too bad most roads in Russia are a joke. This will never happen until Russian
infrastructure improves; albeit this tech will stay in the huge provinces,
Moscow & St. Petersburg.

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vbezhenar
This tech won't be used in small cities, it makes no sense, and big cities
usually have good roads.

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Grue3
I live in Russia, and none of the roads outside of Moscow Ring Road have any
markings at all. Yes, even big cities. At best the markings are painted in
spring and disappear within a few months. Getting autonomous cars to work in
these conditions is a huge challenge.

There's a famous saying that Russia has two problems: fools and roads, and
it's just as true as when it was first coined.

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konart
Well, that's not true for at least two cities I lived in. St.Petersburg and
Cheboksary. Cheboksary always had pretty good roads, even outside the city.

But - yeah, this kind of vehicles won't be a thing outside of Moscow for a
quite a while.

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pilsetnieks
Isn't every taxi service on-demand?

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delegate
Yes. Also, from a passenger's perspective, it's self-driving.

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muthdra
I don't know how to drive. From my perspective, all cars are self-driving.

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batat
Powered by Ubuntu?

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runnr_az
In Russia, the cars drive you?

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a-b
Can't resist. First thought this post is about
[https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/6e03eh/driving_through...](https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/6e03eh/driving_through_an_airport)

