Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 445 posts

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#211

Post by 0x00000000 »

dahart wrote: post #147
0x00000000 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Fines can increase without hiring more people or buying more cars Fair point. >Why would they need to make a net profit? At the end of the day the resources either come from somewhere else or it costs more taxpayer money. Yes, I agree it would improve safety. >The argument that it costs too much to increase enforcement in any way doesn't really hold much water. It does though because it is the only solution and the…

> It does though because it is the only solution and the fact that is costs too much is the main reason it isn't done already. More spending is not the only solution. And cost is not the only reason we're not doing more. Despite my suggestions to increase fines, the people making and enforcing traffic laws are not out to make a profit, and they are sensitive to the costs to drivers. Where I live, the state lawmakers…

>state lawmakers mandated raising speed limits in opposition to the Highway Patrol's safety recommendation for lower speed limits and increased enforcement. The speeding laws and their enforcement are lax here because of politicians

"Your comment seems to indicate you might not know how traffic laws are made or enforced. They are rarely touched by elected officials."

>I would hope that in doing so, all participants might be willing to offer constructive ideas and not just criticism.

People try to dismiss criticism by saying "well do you have a solution?" but that is fallacious and you can make a valid point without offering a different solution that addresses that point

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#212

Post by fjsolwmv »

blahedo wrote: post #208
uptown wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPR had a story about how self-driving cars in Pittsburgh wouldn't be adhering to the "Pittsburgh-left": "Even harder for autonomous cars to master are local quirks; things like "the Pittsburgh left." That's a custom unique to the city that allows the first driver trying to make a left turn to do so before oncoming cars pass through an intersection. It's one thing that Emily Duff Bartel says Uber's fleet of self-driv…

Not unique to Pittsburgh (also prevalent in Rhode Island, among other places), but more importantly, letting the first car turn left first is useful to keeping traffic flowing on narrow roads—which, in the areas that use this tactic, rely on it. So, not following local customs is a good way to snarl traffic (since the oncoming traffic will be waiting for the car to take its turn).

Obviously if the law is wrong it should be changed. Then the question becomes, can a car be programmed to follow the more complex law.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#213

Post by fjsolwmv »

vkou wrote: post #210
matte_black wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the same as pulling straight into the middle of the intersection with live traffic swirling around you on both sides then making the left after the lights have reddened and traffic has cleared?

No, what you're describing sounds a hell of a lot safer. (It's also how people make left turns in Vancouver. The fact that it's illegal in Seattle infuriates me to no end.) The Pittsburgh left sounds like a recipe to get T-boned by an inattentive driver. Pulling into the intersection, and making a left turn when it is safe is a much better alternative.

What's illegal? Stopping in an intersection? Or exiting the intersection on red? The light would be red on exiting the intersection unless cars are illegally entering the intersection on yellow when they should be stopping because they weren't speeding and have time to stop.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#214

Post by fjsolwmv »

matte_black wrote: post #199
joncrane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. It's also possible that human/pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.

Nope. You can never count on humans to change behavior to fit a technology. As soon as self-driving cars learn local customs, the customs will have been changed. Self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.

Pittsburgh left custom is 50years old or more

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#215

Post by erobbins »

ars wrote: post #15
tlb wrote: post #4

The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...

> get 5 9s reliability That's it? Humans have greater than 7 9's reliability when driving. (As measured by fatalities per time of driving, and assuming a fatality takes 5 minutes, and average speed is 30mph.) If the cause of a fatality is 10 seconds of failure, not 5 minutes, humans have greater than 9 9s of reliability. Math: 10 seconds / (1.13 / (30 miles/hour / 100 million miles)) Fatality rate is 1.13 per 100 mil…

> There's this belief that humans are horrible at driving, etc, etc. Until you run that math and realize, no, they're not. There's just a lot of driving going on.

I've been hammering this concept for a while :) Unimpaired, non distracted humans are actually really good at driving. We're optimized for processing visual inputs and making fuzzy decisions, have high dexterity and coordination, and fear death. All of that is alien to software.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#216

Post by Someone »

matte_black wrote: post #199
joncrane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. It's also possible that human/pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.

Nope. You can never count on humans to change behavior to fit a technology. As soon as self-driving cars learn local customs, the customs will have been changed. Self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.

It may be worse. If cars are very good at avoiding colliding with pedestrians, why would pedestrians look out for cars at all before stepping onto a street?

We may have to tweak the car’s software to be assertive, bordering aggressive, in busy neighborhoods, if the car is to make progress at all.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#217

Post by fjsolwmv »

zdragnar wrote: post #127
marnett wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if this happens i will surely protest self-driving cars. cities should be built for pedestrians, not cars.

Don't protest self-driving cars, protest the laws you feel shouldn't apply to you. After all, there are plenty of other reasons jaywalking laws might become more strictly enforced.

The term "jaywalking" was a slur invented by car companies to steal rights from pedestrians. If cars can't avoid people, the cars need to be separated by physical barriers or removed.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#218

Post by megablast »

Waterluvian wrote: post #53
freditup wrote: post #18

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…

There's a road near the University of Waterloo where students get hit, some killed, on pretty much an annual basis. Often it boils down to the large number of foreign students who come from a part of the world where for one reason or another, you just don't need to bother looking before crossing, so they don't and walk right in front of cars (and in one case a city bus). To me this is an example of the overwhelming i…

> To me this is an example of the overwhelming importance of locale-specific context. When I'm near UW, my driving behaviour changes significantly even though the laws do not.

To me this is the incredibly danger of road and our current reliance on cars. Should it be ok to be killed if you aren't paying attention.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#219

Post by lhorie »

drcode wrote: post #197
lhorie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the video was released by the police the next day > We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident. From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam…

> so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative. Well, at the end of the day this is all involves a strong element of PR & perceptions, so regardless of the quality of other data, it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video be in the initial stories about this accident.

> it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video

Why? As soon as the video came out, the first thing people (correctly) pointed out was that the dynamic range of the dashcam was crap. Besides, everyone knows that self-driving cars are essentially giant self-telemetry collection machines, so one would have to be either extremely short-sighted or incredibly stupid to think they would be able to get away with a "well it was too dark!" lie after the NTSB got on the case and the media caught wind of the shenanigans.

Also, as I said in my linked comment above, the logistics of actually attempting to tamper the video would be borderline comical.

It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#220

Post by oldgradstudent »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #22
freditup wrote: post #18

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…

And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.

You're underestimating the difficulty. Self-driving cars will always be 5 years away.
Post reply on HN