skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably the algorithm had a pretty good idea of where the lanes were, and if the LIDAR detected a non moving object in an adjacent lane and decided it was fine to ignore it because it presumed it was not going to start moving, that's a pretty broken algorithm.

I don't have the link handy, but I was reading a webpage yesterday (related but not about this crash) which showed Google's self driving car's "view" of a road scene - it's clearly painted different color boxes and identified pedestrians, bicycles, other cars - along with "fences" where it had determined it'd need to slow or stop based on all those objects.

Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public), it was faulty (but being used anyway, either because its self test is also faulty, or because the driuver/company ignored fault warnings) - or _perhaps_ Google's marketing material is faked and _everybodies_ self driving tech is inadequate?
It sounds like you're in search of a solution without a problem.

Programming language for what exactly? When you know what the intended use case is, you'll probably have a reasonable idea of what you need.

Some projects might warrant all kinds of different programming languages. If you're looking at server-side security for a website then maybe it's Python, PHP, or Ruby. Embedded systems are probably not running PHP. If you're talking about reverse engineering an application then maybe learning IDA's C-like scripting language is best.

Being able to understand syntax and nuance of a language reasonably quickly are probably more important than programming in any specific language, unless you're pursuing a career specializing in one type of system. In that case you would likely know which programming languages are appropriate.
> When a digital camera records an image, a gamma curve is applied to it before display, which makes up for our bias against the darker portions which the digital equipment does not have.

Gamma correction makes up for a bias against darker portions in the display, not in our eyes. It's a holdover from the CRT days where the change in brightness between pixel values of, say, 10 and 11, was far less than the change between 250 and 251. Human eyes have excellent low-light discernment which is why 'black' doesn't really look black and you can make out blocky shapes during dark scenes on some DVDs.
I've noticed that pedestrians in the US tend not to look at cars coming their way when they cross intersections - I'm not sure if it's an attitude of "you're supposed to stop for me" and and they're willing to bet on that happening every time, or if they're really unaware of the danger of a few tons of steel coming at them.

This always struck me as very strange as someone from Europe - they teach kids in elementary school to look both ways and not to underestimate the speed of a car.

There are about 2500 pedestrian deaths in the US every year [1], it's just tragic and some of these fatalities could certainly be avoided :/

Edit: Since sgc mentioned 6-6.5k pedestrian deaths per year in the EU, which didn't sound any better than the US, I tried to come up with pedestrian fatalities per 100k population (data for 2012 or 2013):

| Country | Fatalities per 100k | % pedestrian | Pedestrian fatalities per 100k |
|---------+---------------------+--------------+---------------------------------|
| USA | 10.6 | 14.1 | 1.4946 |
| Italy | 6.1 | 16.2 | 0.9882 |
| Germany | 4.3 | 16.7 | 0.7181 |
#+TBLFM: $4=$2*$3/100
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A997?lang=en
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A998?lang=en

This example really speaks for itself.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record-i...
And your point is what exactly?
This isn't new, is it?
To all the armchair experts: try recreating this accident scene in the real world.

Sodium Vapour (monochromatic) lamps, then a large darker area with a pedestrian in dark clothing with car’s headlights dipped.

You will be alarmed at how much stuff you can put on the road and not see it because the road has a lighting pattern that makes it less safe than no lights at all.

With no lights at all, and a hedge between carriageways, the car would have had high beams on and the driver may have seen the pedestrian with plenty of time to brake and either avoid collision altogether or reduce the impact to non-fatal energy.

Now go recreate the scene for yourself and see how it works for you.
You either kill a deer or get killed by a moose... at highway speed.
The alternative speculation is silly. Whatever you might think about Russia, it's a rolled gold certainty that they don't want to be involved in an accidental nuclear exchange.
Anything that is tracking an object moving on the road should be looking at the velocity of the scanned object as well as keeping track of some sort of difference from normal. I would think the car should know it's on a two lane one way road, realized an object was moving in one lane with some sort of velocity towards the path of the vehicle, and that perhaps something was not normal.

From the reports of cars running red lights and then this I would imagine they have an extremely high level of "risk" (what it takes for the car to take actions in order to avoid something/stop) that is acceptable.

What would be far worse than a hardware or sensor failure would be to learn that Uber is instead teaching its cabs to fly through the streets with abandon. Instead of having cars that drive like a nice, thoughtful citizen we'll have a bunch of vehicles zooming through the streets like a pissed of cabby in Russia.
> It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum.

I'm not sure, pls look that pic https://imgur.com/a/VfBck, you can clearly see there exists at least 10-15 meters b/w them right at the time when she pops up. Now I don't know the speed of the car, but I'd wager, a human driver (if s/he was alert) would have attempted a breaking at that moment.
I don't think Uber are stupid enough to doctor evidence before handing it to police.
“Overvalued” compared to your own opinion.
Elasticsearch is a search engine built on Apache Lucene and basically makes it much more usable. It's similar to Apache Solr but easier to get up and running.

It's good at text but can be used as a similarity search system, so you can index and find similar images, audio waveforms, binary data, etc.

Over the years, search queries have become useful for log analytics and so the ELK stack has been developed to become a single solution to do both text search as well as ingest logs and run all kinds of queries, aggregations, and even machine learning.

I think that's what fundamentally hurts it as they are very separate use-cases trying to be served by the same system. We still use ES for search but wish it just focused on that with much better performance, reliable clustering and proper transactions instead.
But that's not true. Theranos were absolutely doing finger-prick tests, as is stated in the article.

The fact that the journalist didn't see any may well be cause to go back and try to find evidence, but a lack of evidence isn't a story in itself.

I'd point out, too, that if the journalist believed at the time that it was an outright lie, I seriously doubt that she would have dropped it - it's too big a story. More likely she had some misgivings which have been amplified in the wake of the recent news.
Belgium would still need a way to enforce it, and unless they build their own Great Firewall, they cannot physically prevent FB from doing business in their country, nor could they collect fines from them. The best they could do would be to petition the EU and/or the US to do something about it.
I am American and own a condo in the dense downtown core of Chicago among a sea of high-rises. I do, though, understand the desire for many other people to want a single family home. That is not my desire, but I get it.

My question was why the above poster doesn’t consider condo ownership “true” ownership? The condos on my block run between $500,000 and $3m, and the single family homes on the same block start at $3m and go to $7m. If I don’t buy one of those single-family homes, why does the poster not consider me a true homeowner? That was my specific concern with their remark.
I don't know about "unfiltered". There are certain items I won't buy on Amazon that I would buy if it weren't tied to my profile.
> I can sign that I give you the right to kill me, but if you do that you have still committed pre-meditated homicide

This sounds as if nobody can agree to voluntarily take part in a potentially fatal experiment, like testing a potent medicine or be a test pilot. I believe legal provisions exist here.
The footage from a normal camera should not matter, a self driving car is equipped with stuff that works regardless of light conditions like LIDAR oor IR cameras. This looks to me like a software failure.
If the autonomobile was speeding... it is very definitely at fault.

And given that it's Uber we can expect that there's an email chain where a programmer is told to ignore the map layer with speed limits on it.

I hope the prosecutor (best case) or plaintiffs lawyer (worst case) finds it and makes Uber suffer.
If the article were about a cyclist who, while riding without a helmet, was run over and killed by a car whose driver didn’t do a safe lane change, and I commented:

“Not trying to blame the victim... but this is a teachable moment not only for drivers, but for cyclists...”

... it would be a true statement, which is why I didn’t say the GP was making a false one, but a normal native speaker would at least recognize it as a strange thing to say.

Cyclists should wear helmets, and the cyclist certainly is partly to blame. But no one was suggesting that the cyclist is guilt-free, so the actual effect of the statement is to try and draw a false equivalence.

It’s like saying “sure, global warming is real, but let’s not forget the effects of gradual and natural cyclical climate change.” No educated person in the discussion “forgot” the second, but by phrasing it this way you’re implying we should be paying equal attention to a large effect and a much smaller one.
I'm not an expert in IR or computer vision by any means, so take this with a grain of salt.

Air has such a low thermal mass that it doesn't measurably affect most IR sensors. Hot pavement could be a potential issue, but that shouldn't have a major effect on forward-facing sensors.

Besides, it's only March. Even Arizona isn't that hot yet.
"Overvalued" compared to what its price would be if it were not subject to government interference.
This car should have slowed down below the speed limit if it cannot safely stop or maneuver upon seeing something enter its field of view.
Journalists don't get paid enough to not act in their own best interests. You're getting mad at the wrong person here.
In some areas that maneuver is a strategy to collect an insurance payout. If the car had many passengers (who would all get soft tissue injuries) this might have been a "swoop and squat."
Even if the bike itself was too spindly to be picked up, there's no excuse for missing the solid mass of a human body.
I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. This incident has my wondering: of all the companies working on this, why is Uber trusted to be testing this technology?
I think you are missing a key point here. Have you ever been on a street with streetlights and had difficulty seeing past two lane divider dashes? The point is that the camera footage is vastly under-indicating the amount of distance a human eye would have been able to see.
> someone jumped into my lane and slammed their breaks on for who knows why

Insurance fraud, possibly. Depending on jurisdiction if you rear-end someone you could automatically be 100% at fault (assuming the fraud is not discovered/proven)
Accident aside, if Uber is so "strict" on their background checks for drivers, how do they let a convicted robber be apart of their high profile pilot?
You must be unfamiliar with US traffic speed.
This is covered in the article:

Detailed analyses, initially stimulated by questions about why the alert went on for so long, showed that a specialized space-based Russian early warning system called Prognoz was then under development. Analysis of the Prognoz satellite constellation and of available Russian infrared sensor technologies indicated that even if the satellite system had been working, it would not have been able to provide surveillance of the North Atlantic. Today, Russia has stopped launching satellites into this constellation and has instead focused enormous resources exclusively into building a highly robust and redundant network of ground-based radars. It is now very clear that Russia’s extreme de-emphasis on satellite early warning systems and its extreme focus on building numerous, technologically varied ground-based radar warning systems is due to the lack of critical technologies needed to implement a space-based ballistic missile warning system.
This is pure speculation, but it is my working theory: The car's so called "AI" thought the thing in front of it was a four legged animal (e.g., see <https://goo.gl/images/3qAmiM>).

In most states, braking for animals in a way that might endanger others on the road is illegal. So, it decided to go ahead and hit the thing in front of it on purpose.

I am not sure if the people who program the firmware for these contraptions have ever driven cars in difficult conditions. Between Teslas ramming into trucks and Uber cars taking out poor homeless people for a bonus score, it seems to me they are programming things, but they have no idea how this stuff is supposed to function outside of ideal parameters.

Sure, provide the driver with more information. But, taking the driver out of the responsibility equation is stupid.
Not "center line", because this is a divided highway. So she had to cross two lanes from the median, in order to step in front of the Uber. "Human-sized object in the roadway" should have been enough to trigger braking, even if the trajectory wasn't clear.
I recall reading that the speed guns where I am from have a tolerance of 5 km/h or 5%, whichever is greater.

3 mph is beyond the margin for error, you'd get fined for driving that quickly.
I prefer the situation of no lights other than headlights.

I'm from Maryland, and my neighborhood is off a country road with a single streetlight at the head of the neighborhood. If the weather is doing anything (fog, rain, snow) even a little bit then it's completely awful to drive through that intersection.

If the light didn't exist, I could keep my vision adaptation the same before / during / after, and could compensate for inclement weather the whole time. As-is, I go from very-dark to bright-light and back to very-dark over a hundred feet or so, and it makes it very hard to adapt safely.
free is dying
I'm a broken record here, but:

Seriously. Go spend some time in /r/roadcam on reddit to get yourself accustomed to what a typical dashboard camera video looks like. People here are drawing all sorts of conclusions based on seeing an unfamiliar type of video, and that's a really bad thing.

The two biggest things to get used to are:

1. Dashcams do a terrible job in dark or low-light scenes. The car's headlights, and the streetlights, were almost certainly functioning just fine; the scene only looks as dark as it does because that's the best the camera can do. A dashcam video of a dark/low-light incident will always look significantly darker than how a human would perceive it when actually present.

2. Dashcams often have a wider field of view than their human operators. Which means you often see obstacles in the video before they'd be in the field of view of a human driver (this causes no end of "well I saw that coming way before the driver did!" snark in /r/roadcam discussions).

And in theory this vehicle has infrared on board, and a LIDAR system scanning the road ahead for trouble. Any such system should have had zero difficulty detecting the pedestrian in time to stop or avoid. The fact that it didn't is a very bad sign for Uber's implementation.
Is the number of bedrooms increasing faster than the number of humans? If not the supply of units isn't increasing that much.
What is striking to me is I haven't seen anyone talking about evasive maneuvers. The car must have been able to see the person, and the road looks empty, why not swerve?
I'm holding out hope that a good chunk of the public will understand this footage is not at all indicative of the vision capabilities of even the human eye, lest the actual sensor tech on that Uber car. Certainly a good number of people on Twitter do.

If Waymo understood how to stick a knife in they would have replicated this scenario yesterday and released a video. Hell, you could take a Mercedes S class with night view assistant and it would spot this, no problem.
> anything except perfection in self driving cars will lead to more accidents.

Only if perfection is defined as "statistically better than humans".

I do agree that these "assistive" technologies have the potential to do more harm than good, but the bar is actually far lower than "perfection".
This video just reinforces you can NOT be kind of driving. Google has been pushing this point for awhile and I completely agree.
The footage from the normal camera does matter in that it's the main way that we (humans) can process the scene. The parent comments are just pointing out that the camera footage is likely darker than the actual scene in person.
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.
Sooner or later, Google is going to come after this guy. The ProTube app on iOS did most of this stuff, and they made him shut it down.
Both. My friends hear it as potification ;)
> There is nothing unconstitutional about repealing an amendment. The Constitution details the mechanism for amending it.

I didn't say it was unconstitutional. The constitution makes it very difficult to repeal for a reason.

It's why only 1 amendment has ever been repealed and that amendment was written nearly 150 years after the founding of the country.

I'm fairly certain that the 1st and 2nd amendment are pretty much untouchable.

But I wish you the best in trying to get it repealed. The more you try to get it repealed, the more people will support the 2nd amendment and remind people that we actually have rights that we need to protect lest it be taken from us.
There is sadly a very clear reason why China banned Facebook - its use has the potential to destroy social consensus, which is necessary for social cohesion. I’m not surprised Zuck has been hiding, in his heart of hearts, he realizes his invention has sort of destroyed America (and Britain, but I concede he probably cares less about that).
In principle, I agree. But, I wonder if holding a bike in front of you is almost like holding a mirror that obscures the lidar ability to detect a solid mass.

edit: but she is in front of the bike, so this shouldn't matter. Does the darkness of her clothing impact any of the sensors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwt2dxx9yg
*brake
All bikes sold in the United States are required to have reflectors on the wheels for reflection to the right and left. Enthusiasts often remove them.
I expect the original was probably much better quality. Twitter's video compression is terrible.
Could you explain what you mean? I’m genuinely curious if Apple has taken an anti-privacy stance.

From what I can tell, they’re the best tech giant for user privacy. They’ve fought the FBI in court to not put in a government backdoor to unlocking user’s devices. Lawyers ain’t cheap.
Yeah, there's that videogame about driving a bus constantly, on an empty road, for hours and hours. It occasionally veers off, so you have to pay attention, but that's all. That game should be a minimum "driving" test for safety drivers. (Not really, but something like that)
> Theranos were absolutely doing finger-prick tests

Yes--much, much less often than their PR led people to expect. Also, they were actually getting much less information from a single finger prick than their PR was claiming. That's why they were having to do full venipuncture blood draws for tests that their PR led many people to believe would only require a finger prick.

> The fact that the journalist didn't see any may well be cause to go back and try to find evidence

Which she didn't.

> if the journalist believed at the time that it was an outright lie, I seriously doubt that she would have dropped it - it's too big a story. More likely she had some misgivings

Which she should have followed up at the time, if she were really an investigative journalist.
I would hope self driving cars have better sensors.
There are high dynamic range cameras that simultaneously take multiple exposures and composite them in real time.
The dynamic range in this video is horrible. An HDR camera should have made her visible much sooner. Further why not use larger CMOS sensors, something like on a DSLR camera. Finally, the headlights appear fairly ineffective too. I would hope these cars are using Xenon headlights or something that does a much better job illuminating the road.

bi-xenon example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNjckOUEqWo

HDR video at night example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyaSHGQc49s
Literally everyone is constantly saying self driving cars will be better than humans. So, yeah, that's the standard.
Well, you consider it to be cheap and effective -- in 2018.

But back in 2016: Obama said there was “no serious” person who would suggest it was possible to rig American elections, adding, “I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.” [0]

I wonder how public opinion shifted. Back in 2016, the idea of rigging elections with facebook ads was alex-jones-level of tinfoil conspiracy, and now we are discussing it as an obvious, cheap and effective tactic.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election/obama-tells-...
I'm no fan of YouTube, but to be fair to them, it's probably not so much about maximizing profit as it is an effort to avoid the wrath of the RIAA.
It’s that last possibility that’s horrifying above all others. The backlash either way is going to be terrible, but if these cars are just not up to the task at all, and have driven millions of miles on public roads... people will lose their minds. Self-driving tech will be banned for a very long time, public trust will go with it, and I can’t imagine when it would return.

This is going to sound bad, but I hope this is just Uber’s usual criminal incompetence and dishonesty, and not a broader problem with the technology. Of the possible outcomes, that would be the least awful. If it’s just Uber moving fast and killing someone, they’re done (no loss there), but the underlying technology has a future in our lifetimes. If not...
The case has just come under NTSB investigation. This is not at all the sum total of information that will be revealed. https://twitter.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/976215176323194880
It is relevant and related to their track record regarding how they treat user privacy, what data they have previously released to third parties, and what their current legal standing is with regards to the same issue, especially in light of Cambridge Analytica.
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