Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

visionzeroreporting.com

101–110 of 213 posts

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#101

I like the general idea, and the use of NLP to implement it. But I am dubious about some of the principles behind it. - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit the pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two people, not between a person and a vehicle. (Of course this does not apply to a phrase like "the vehicle fled the scene" - it is clear that it was the driver who fled the scene). Wh…

> the driver hit the pedestrian

Seems reasonable. Cars don't kill people of their own volition without a driver. And in similar circumstances we wouldn't say something like an AR-15 killed a person, we'd say a gunman/gunwoman/shooter did. Why should drivers get treated differently?

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#102
post #81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space since they have historically been prioritized. It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.

But the solution that comes out of that framing is to somehow shame drivers into being better, as opposed to making roads better.

Blaming the driver starts the root cause analysis in a different direction than blaming the pedestrian.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it, the training and the testing was much more rigorous than anything that has existed in the USA.

I live in Ireland, used to live in the US, and had to take the Irish driver training and test as an adult, experienced driver. (Who had been driving approx as long as my instructor had been alive). The test was difficult, picky, and the things that they were looking for were not necessarily correlated with safe, strictly legal driving. (e.g., target speed in a 50KPH zone (urban area) was 53, not 49, and to not approa…

I know nothing about the infrastructure in Ireland, but the drivers in the US kill at least twice as many people. Letting people drive cars at 50 km/h in an urban area is crazy, everyone you hit at those speeds die.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#104
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tail…

I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it, the training and the testing was much more rigorous than anything that has existed in the USA.

Germany's training is easy compared to what would be required to make humans be good drivers.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#105

this seems to me like it's designed to shift the blame from unilaterally on the VRU (bad), to unilaterally on the driver (also bad). You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things. As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight the context around the crash if th…

If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would be the exception to the rule, right?

When operating a car you should be expected to be in a heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian.

The bias in the current narrative (against pedestrians who have little autonomy vs a car) is so strongly on the wrong side that I don't think asking for a middle-ground approach is worth arguing.

I can't tell you how many times I've read stuff like this: https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity; people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus disinc…

I dunno, some of this is also the fact the US people are huge babies about certain things, like being able to walk places. For example, there was a reddit thread from an American flabbergasted that people in the UK will actually go on 30-minute-long walks down to their local shops. Is a 30 minute walk really that absurd?

> Is a 30 minute walk really that absurd?

Yes, because the number of stores in that 30 minutes is so low. Most of them are also setup for cars, including selling quantities that assume a car to get home.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#107
I'm somewhat concerned about the ethical implications of this beyond the scope of just car crash reporting. While impressive, the nlp model will have to be tuned by someone, someone with biases the model will inevitably inherit. Seems to have obvious potential as a propaganda tool, which might be used by the 'good guys' today, and be used by malicious actors tomorrow.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#108

    A liar on HN, chiefofgxbxl, died earlier today when he was run over. It was not the driver's fault. It was reported by police that chiefofgxbxl deserved this fate for being a pedestrian in the way of an SUV, and for claiming to use "Natural Language Processing" when all he was really doing was using Javascript to scan text for a hardcoded substring list.
Your tool believes this article has no problems.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#109
post #102
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the solution that comes out of that framing is to somehow shame drivers into being better, as opposed to making roads better.

Blaming the driver starts the root cause analysis in a different direction than blaming the pedestrian.

Neither solve the root problem - poor road design

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it, the training and the testing was much more rigorous than anything that has existed in the USA.

I think we're fine how it is in the USA. Germany's licensing system is absurd overkill and the cost and time commitment leaves out a lot of people who have a need to drive but can't afford it.

In 2019, USA rate of traffic-related deaths was 7.3 per 1 billion vehicle-km. Germany's rate was 4.2 per 1 billion vehicle-km.

If the USA had Germany's rate, 16939 lives would've been saved.

And you think that's "fine"?

Here's where I got my info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Post reply on HN