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

New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 413 posts

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#391

Post by rangestransform »

rubyfan wrote: post #317
kaliqt wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the answer is that we clearly need that car also to be a Waymo. Problem solved! Hah.

Why don’t we have cars talk to each other and coordinate their routing? Like some sort of peer to peer mechanism that helps them not crash each other. Why can’t vehicles be made to stop at cross walks when someone is crossing with some sort of communication to the vehicle?

As someone who works on autonomous driving, having wireless communications on a path where it’s responsible for safety guarantees is a nightmare

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#392

Post by dylan604 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #367
dekhn wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all the smart people at Google who worked on Quality (Ads Quality, Search Quality, etc) got promoted and moved away from those, and the revenue is good enough that google can maintain its monopoly without improving the product.

This is laughable. This isn't incompetence. The system was never designed to show you relevant ads that you want to see and would like to buy a product from. The system has always been designed to show you profitable ads. Those have always been and will always be a completely distinct set, with only coincidental overlap if at all.

It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#393

Post by YokoZar »

happyopossum wrote: post #338
hombre_fatal wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I wonder why insurance companies haven't led to the ubiquity of dashcams. I thought by now every vehicle sold would have one built in. And my suspicion is that insurance companies don't push for you to get one because it prevents them from fighting claims that they would've won had there been no evidence. Maybe it's similar for self-driving or whatever we're talking about here (sensors?).

They don’t care because at their scale it would be a wash - you’d only come out ahead if your insured drivers were consistently and significantly better drivers than every other insurance provider you fight claims against.

Then why not offer a "dash-cam discount" to the subset of customers that the insurer believes _are_ better drivers, like those with a long history of having no accidents or tickets and tons of miles?

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#394

Post by kajecounterhack »

mort96 wrote: post #384
kajecounterhack wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle that a privately run company could use information in nefarious ways internally, and that barring any additional knowledge you should not trust them. That being said, I have an anecdote as a former googler: the reality with Google though is very thoughtful and favorable for users if you ask Googlers who've worked on their software products. There are audit trails that can result in instant termin…

The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from. I'm not afraid of employees at Google or rand…

That makes sense.

Honest question - what's the harm in being targeted by ads? Is it just scrolling youtube more often than you should? Or is there a nefarious side that I'm failing to consider?

For me the thing I hate about location tracking and the ilk is primarily about its harmful externalities (e.g. put into use by gov't, abusive users, or by Google for anticompetitive reasons), not targeted advertising itself.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#395

Post by mort96 »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #394
mort96 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from. I'm not afraid of employees at Google or rand…

That makes sense. Honest question - what's the harm in being targeted by ads? Is it just scrolling youtube more often than you should? Or is there a nefarious side that I'm failing to consider? For me the thing I hate about location tracking and the ilk is primarily about its harmful externalities (e.g. put into use by gov't, abusive users, or by Google for anticompetitive reasons), not targeted advertising itself.

I find it disgusting that our society invests so much effort into manipulating everyone, companies spend billions on armies of psychologists, computer science experts and data centres whose only job is to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Targeted advertising is even more disgusting than non-targeted advertising, because there you're trying to find an individual person's weaknesses for more effective manipulation. It's simply evil.

That, and the existence of targeted advertising incentivises collecting and correlating as much data about people all the time. If it wasn't for targeted ads, I'm sure that Google would've actually just used data from their city-wide surveillance networks for improving their cars (at least until a government would've asked for the data, which is also an issue). But with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#396

Post by im3w1l »

im3w1l wrote: post #299
netsharc wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, if they're all computer-controlled, and can communicate with each other. I posit traffic jams is mostly caused by idiot and reckless drivers...

The throughput of a road is car density * speed. So from a pure throughput perspective, the ideal driver is a tailgating speed demon. To maximize time spent at high speed you should also floor it when the light turns green, and slam the brakes at the last possible moment when it goes red.

One thing I forgot to mention, braking as late as possible doesn't help you at all, but it does free up road space behind you, which can let people behind you get through an intersection they otherwise wouldn't.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#397

Post by vitus »

Lammy wrote: post #369
vitus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444... Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.

That's still not really what I'm looking for. I am curious about a “what we keep, for how long” policy for the sensors on the outside of the cars like the Flock one I linked above. Your second link does mention cameras and microphones outside the car but doesn't mention what they keep (full video? stills? LIDAR? RADAR?) or for how long: “Waymo’s cameras also see the world in context, as a human would, but with a 360°…

Right. I merely shared the closest thing that I could find, and as mentioned, the first link is specific to the ride-hailing service. Notably, in the second link, there is a reference to sharing information with law enforcement, but it's generally lacking in details.

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#398

Post by whimsicalism »

crazygringo wrote: post #157
VOIPThrowaway wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction is that car usage will go thought the roof when AI cars work. People can have a stress-free commute to a nice house in the countryside and work in the cities. Because the car is electric, it will be inexpensive to run.

Commute time still matters, and congestion pricing will become the norm. I can read on the subway, but while a 20 min subway ride is fine, an hour each way is still a lot , and a two hour train commute just doesn't leave much time in your life for doing social things. Also, I think there's going to be a huge surge in in-demand AI buses. Rideshares will take people to a random spot, you'll wait 2 minutes for a predete…

> congestion pricing will become the norm.

not with the current set of voters it wont

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#399

Post by whimsicalism »

MattGrommes wrote: post #211
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #28

Anecdotally, as someone who bikes a lot in SF, Waymo's are a lot safer than human drivers simply because they follow the letter of traffic laws. Stopping at stop signs, waiting for pedestrians to clear the box, following the posted speed limits, etc.

Just following the letter of the law is so huge. Even people who think they're being nice by doing something out of the ordinary make the situation so much more dangerous because now you don't know what's going to happen. Even if they weren't great drivers, the consistency makes so much of a difference.

california in particular has a big problem with people breaking the law to be nice

Re: New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

#400

Post by whimsicalism »

matttproud wrote: post #39
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #28

Anecdotally, as someone who bikes a lot in SF, Waymo's are a lot safer than human drivers simply because they follow the letter of traffic laws. Stopping at stop signs, waiting for pedestrians to clear the box, following the posted speed limits, etc.

I was just on a business trip to San Francisco for a few days, and I observed the near opposite of this from the Waymo fleet in SoMa: * Waymo vehicle creeping into the pedestrian crosswalk (while the pedestrians had right of way to cross), which caused someone to have to walk around the car into the intersection ahead of the Waymo. * Waymo vehicle entering a dedicated bike lane and practically tailgating the bicyclis…

entering a bike lane is safer, as many others noted.

sorry but many of us live here and interact with these cars daily. they are realky good, can't really see any situation in which they initiate a pedestrian collision

Post reply on HN