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

Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 750 posts

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#151

Post by stronglikedan »

bagels wrote: post #85
Phrodo_00 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh I guess the Internet lied to me https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-stop-bi...

No lies in the article. "The bill now heads to Governor Newsom's desk" ... where it was vetoed, sadly.

> where it was vetoed, sadly

Sounds like the gov did the right thing. Cyclists shouldn't get special privileges. They're operating a vehicle on the roadway just like everyone else. Drivers of other types of vehicles shouldn't also have to remember special rules just for cyclists.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#152

Post by scarmig »

patrick451 wrote: post #109
ganieldackle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk. >I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities. Neither does a computer.

> A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk. A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates. The human mind is not a viable target for hackers. The risks of human drivers are individual. The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive. One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.

> One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.

Every year, human drivers kill around 1.2 million people every single year (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...).

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#153

Post by danenania »

babelfish wrote: post #117
babl-yc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drive and bike. It's more annoying on a bike to come to a complete stop.

If someone can't follow traffic laws, they shouldn't be on the road (regardless of mode of transportation)

So anyone who drives 1 mph over the speed limit shouldn’t be on the road?

There are laws and there are norms. The overlap is never exact.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#154

Post by tiahura »

data-ottawa wrote: post #125
al_borland wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If computers are so good at this, why am I (a human) asked to identify bicycles and motorcycles to train these computers when confronted with a captcha? A human needs far less training and can identify a person on a bike without ever seeing an actual bike. They can also infer what is likely to happen based on a lot of context clues. Even if an event doesn’t seem likely, I can still prepare. For example, if I see kids…

The captcha example isn't exactly fair, the images shown can be newly generatrd, repeated, or used as control images, and even if they are unclassifiable then you're not seeing the successes. Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.

No doubt all of your excuses are at least partially true, however, at this point, literally after almost two decades of billions of people training these things to see bikes, it still needs a lot more work.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#155

Post by belltaco »

tfehring wrote: post #141
adrr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Truck in intersection both heading in opposite directions. I dont get where the bike was. It says behind the truck. So did bike run the stop sign and cross into waymos lane because that is way it sounds. Article doesnt state who's at fault.

Yeah, my reading was that the bike ran the stop sign and then attempted to make a left turn in front of the Waymo as it was going straight through the intersection.

My reading was that the Waymo was turning left. Remember, the description is from Waymo's PR, so that's why it's vague on purpose and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. According to another comment bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California. If the bike illegally ran a stop sign I would think Waymo would say or imply that.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#156

Post by Groxx »

dymk wrote: post #93
lmz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accepting occasional small crashes? Is this not already the status quo?

The status quo is accepting cyclists getting mowed down by human drivers by the thousands every year

As a biker on the road, yes, you absolutely do consider that the status quo. Otherwise you stand a good chance of joining that statistic. Cars do a lot more damage to you than you do to them.

Which implies nothing about any ideal state, either practically or legally. But it is an accurate description of the real world in many areas, and therefore a reasonable expectation when your life is on the line.

---

On a more technical level, legally and practically, the acceptable number of accidents is essentially never zero. That would imply absurd costs involved in prevention. Everyone wants it to be lower of course, but humans do not have infinite value in policy decisions.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#157

Post by CobrastanJorji »

aaomidi wrote: post #71
xianshou wrote: post #7

If Waymo is truly as much better than Cruise as the statistics claim, this is a perfect opportunity to release the full video of the incident. Most collisions are avoidable, but a few are the result of a perfect storm of conditions that would be difficult to navigate for even the most skilled human driver. To know whether the truck's occlusion of the cyclist is one of those cases requires the actual footage.

This is one of those things that should be legally required tbh.

Well, maybe. It should definitely be required that they turn any accident records over to regulators, other parties in the accident, and police. But to the public? Imagine if it were gruesome. I doubt I'd appreciate video of a family member violently dying going viral.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#158

Post by jtriangle »

Terr_ wrote: post #120
jtriangle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only way that happens is if the cyclist signs a boatload of paperwork to waive his right to litigation. And on top of that, I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry. What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?", which is ul…

> I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry [...] how long was it from detection to action It sounds like you're making a deeply unreasonable assumption that no human could have detected or anticipated the cyclist faster than the computer did. Given the current state of the art, those times are frequently not the same, and the difference cannot be answered without seeing the human-consumable vide…

I'm assuming nothing. I'm simply posing a question, not answering it.

It's your post that is nonsense, as it appears you've read about half of what I wrote before you replied.

Re: Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

#159

Post by slg »

manzanarama wrote: post #101
km3r wrote: post #11

So the scenario (as described by waymo, surely with some spin): "Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines." A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly. Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leadin…

I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible? It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that n…

Let's be honest, anyone making any type of conclusion based off the information in the article is just giving in to their biases. None of us know enough to actually have any serious opinion on this specific collision.
Post reply on HN