Live data from Hacker News

Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

twitter.com

961–970 of 1001 posts

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#961

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the (admittedly comfy) narrative that the other tech companies are being diligent and careful while Uber are a bunch of cowboys rushing alpha code out into public, who only change stuff when they get caught. The autocar fan's worst nightmare.

I noticed that trend in comments, yes. Unfortunatly, the real issue with what Uber or Waymo (or anyone else) are doing it's with the limitations inherent in the technology itself, specifically, machine learning for object recognition and identification and for the learning of complex beheaviours. The limitation is -it's a bit technical, but basically, in principle, machine learning is possible under certain assumptio…

Yes, but that is not specific to machine learning. Humans have also learned to drive under the assumption that future observations will somewhat be alike what they have seen in the past. And yes, that is putting peoples' lives in danger.

But that has nothing to do with machine learning. It has to do with all control systems, human or machine.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#962
post #835
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most states, braking for animals in a way that might endanger others on the road is illegal. If that is true, then that is a very bad law. If something appers in front of a car I'm driving, the first thing I do, before anything else, is braking. And so should you, and everbody else. First, you save precious reaction time by first braking, then thinking. Second, it might be a human and thus worth much more than a…

The intent behind such laws is simple: You must not endanger others to save an animal. These are good laws, even if those without actual driving experience may not understand them. As the Globe and Mail puts it: "It doesn't matter why the chicken crossed the road — your responsibility is to the people around you."[1] "If you're forced to choose between getting rear-ended and hitting a small animal — hit the animal."…

> These are good laws, even if those without actual driving experience may not understand them.

No, they are not. You didn't even touch the arguments I gave.

If there is a risk of collision with the car behind you, then not you but the driver of the car behind you is at fault for not keeping a safe distance to account for their reaction time and brake performance.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#964

A lot of comentors are talking about the differences between the eye and a sensor. Here is a brief overview of those differences with references at the bottom: https://medium.com/photography-secrets/whats-the-difference-...

I didn’t see anything about light adjustment time in that article. Can the human eye adjust between high and low light conditions faster than a camera?

The article talks about that

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#965
I realize the self-driving/lidar/AI/IR is more interesting to the HN audience but what about the pedestrian? How can the pedestrian not see, anticipate and react to a 4000 pound SUV, on the road (where cars normally are), with headlights (I assume they were on), driving right towards her?

Did the pedestrian not look both ways? The pedestrian could have easily gone to the crosswalk, waited a few seconds for the car to pass and then jay-walked, at least stopped in the left lane when they realized the car wasn't slowing down, hurried to get across, or something.

Based on the video it looks like the pedestrian was just as clueless as the "driver", only looking up in surprise at the last second and making no move to avoid the collision. Maybe it sounds cruel blaming the person that died but they certainly played the largest part in their death.

I am making no excuse for Uber, I know nothing about self driving cars or the tech behind them. But come on- how can a 150 pounds person walk into the middle of a road without making any effort to check for their own safety? It seems similar to stories of people wearing headphones and walking down the middle of a train track.

As a 200 pound ball of squishy flesh and my life on the line, I feel it is my job to be very aware, very cautious, very careful when entering the domain of 2 ton speeding metal objects, especially in the dark.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#966
post #818

Someone on Reddit posted a comparison of the same spot at night but with a good camera: https://m.imgur.com/a/PM7uu from a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 That paints the whole accident in a very different light from the video from Twitter. Would any human not notice someone crossing in the good camera screenshot?

That picture is shockingly clear. I have trouble imagining how any human driver would not have seen that pedestrian. The road seems incredibly well lit.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree. Just like a normal camera has issues in low-light, it is clear that this camera is diminishing exactly how light the road ahead was. While I can't say confidently that I would have been able to stop to prevent hitting them, watching the video in full screen does lead me to believe that I would have seen them and been able to apply the brakes at least enough to reduce the impact. Also, watching the vi…

> clear the driver was looking at his phone or doing something ... Seriously, what else can you expect. These companies who do put these things on the road with the justification that "There is a human behind the wheel" should be taken out back and shot in the head...Just pull the plug. No more self driving cars for them. Those are just the kind of tech companies we don't want around... See, it is not a mistake that…

I feel sorry for the 'safety driver' here as it seems likely much of the liability will fall on her. As a transgendered ex-felon she can't have had a lot of fantastic job opportunities. I wonder how much Uber was paying her to sit in the hot seat.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#968

As expected, when there's a death, there will be overreaction. I'm surprised the Hacker News crowd is part of it.

Go to the doctor and have yourself checked for psychopathy, mate.

Lol, talk about overreaction. Why are you so anti autonomous driving?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#969
post #419
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me as extremely disingenuous if this is all Uber gave to the police. They should be making as much raw data as possible available. At the very least it'd let other companies test their AIs against the scenario and see if they would catch sight of and be able to avoid the pedestrian, if not then this is one more data point to train them on so it doesn't happen again.

The NTSB is also involved and I’m sure they’ll have more than than video to go by.

I hope so, but I'm not certain what sorts of legal precedents could be leveraged here. Uber, for instance, might try and avoid sharing non-visual recording data on the basis that it's proprietary information. IANAL but I'm very curious if companies can be compelled to share proprietary formats and tools for examining those formats or translating them into non-proprietary formats (which... is that even a thing legally speaking?) in a case like this.

For instance, if law enforcement had testimony and other warrant allowing things that indicated that a user had stored some vital secret plan in a password field what could the government compel a company to do, assume the disk it relies on is also encrypted for extra fun time

1. Hand over the physical disk

2. Hand over the disk image

3. Hand over the decrypted disk image

4. Hand over the unobfuscated (enc or hashed) string of interest from the decrypted disk image

5. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted with a common algorithm (i.e. AES)

6. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted in a proprietary manner (i.e. in-house custom encryption)

7. Compel the company to devote resources (how much?) to brute force a one-way common hashed string (i.e. bcrypt)

8. Compel the company to discover a hash salt assuming the company doesn't store it locally but may be able to procure it from the user to do the above.

9. 7 & 8 if the one-way hashing algorithm is proprietary (and weak) and the company raises objections that the process of breaking this string will reveal key components of how the algorithm works (i.e. the hash is just md5(string) XOR "IMMA SECRET_STRING")

10. 7 & 8 if the proprietary algorithm is not weak but the company raises objections over trade secrets for other reasons.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#970
post #818

Someone on Reddit posted a comparison of the same spot at night but with a good camera: https://m.imgur.com/a/PM7uu from a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 That paints the whole accident in a very different light from the video from Twitter. Would any human not notice someone crossing in the good camera screenshot?

It took me a bit of back and forth to try and exactly match various videos and pinpoint what actually happened. I've take a screenshot of Google Maps [0] and added some annotations [1].

It's confusing because in the Twitter video it all looks like there is two lanes, but at the actual collision there's four lanes.

What is stupid to me is that there is a pedestrian path that leads right up to a 4-lane highway without any kind of barrier with nowhere close to cross over.

edit: I added a screenshot of the victim's view of the on-coming car [2]. You can see how clear the road is leading up to the crash site.

[0]: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4363673,-111.9425082,3a,75y,...

[1]: https://imgur.com/ujik94t

[2]: https://imgur.com/Z6QteJC

Post reply on HN