skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not so simple. Technically, you are not wrong but a video feed should have been sufficient here. It should also be considered that digital video has improved drastically over the last decade.

Even LIDAR aside, computer vision and a raw video feed should have been enough to have prevented this collision.

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. We are very capable of guessing the results of bright conditions but not dark conditions via compressed video.

Moreso, these cars should not be using consumer CCDs with compression. They should be utilizing the full possible scope of video.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction
This almost leads me to believe the LIDAR part doesn't even work...
In pitch darkness, IR cameras can only see more than a visual light camera if you somehow had IR headlights that were more powerful than the visual headlights (they probably don't; that would blind other AVs just like high beams blind other drivers). It doesn't grant you the ability to see in the dark with infinite range. Lidar can sense shapes with more range, but at the cost of dramatically worse resolution and latency. It's conceivable the radar/lidar sensor caught the person in the left lane with a bike and decided that was a reasonable place for a person with a bike to be, then lost track of the person while she walked into the right lane (where the visual/IR system could not see her yet).

It's also entirely possible there was an egregious bug. This video doesn't really tell us much.
Even an extra visual camera or hdr setup should easily have caught this. Or a $20 webcam with IR for that matter.
The parent said: 'use free software'

How does that in conflict with your FSF link?
Manchester University Students Sentenced for Selling Drugs on the Dark Web
The VAX instruction set, and the difficulty of building a pipelined implementation, was one of the topics in the first edition of Computer Architecture. (The second edition was already a substantially different book.)
Even the police already reported that the car did not brake.
Wow! You are saying no one in the US expects, or at least consider that could be an obstacle on the street in front of you? It doesn't mean necessarily a pedestrian. An animal? Cargo lost by a truck in front of you?

It is the responsibility of the driver to be alert and try to minimize the impact. Just because a cyclist shouldn't cross a four-lane road in the middle of the night, doesn't mean you shouldn't look for obstacles.
America isn't other countries. Guns are as ingrained in rural America's culture as lifted trucks and beer. There would literally be armed revolts if the government tried taking peoples' guns away en masse.
The point is not germane. What is germane is that a car that supposedly uses LIDAR and infrared, and presumably was approved by the regulators on the basis of such, should have had no problem seeing the pedestrian as LIDAR and infrared are unaffected by night and at least shown some indication of braking but did not. This suggests that the car does not in fact utilize any of those fancy (non-vis) detection methods. Alternatively, these fancy detection methods were fooled by the bicycle and thus misclassified as an error or something.
I agree in that I consider the safety driver to be irrelevant in this situation, because of the reaction time needed to take control, nevermind hit the brakes, nevermind after a complacent state of mind.

But as others have pointed out, it's hard to tell what the driver could have seen just from the dashcam video, which for starters, has a much less dynamic range than human vision. Because in the accident scene photos/videos, the ambient street light is much more visible [0]. I'm guessing driving down that Arizona road at night can't possibly be as pitch dark as the camera shows it, given how that area seems to be used for entertainment venues/festivals.

[0] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-drivin...
Even if you're not a cyclist, it's a good idea to wear something with reflective stripes when you're out on dark roads. This is actually the law in several European countries.
> I think it's important as a driver to hit the brakes as hard as you can even if you don't think you'll be able to avoid collision

It's good to hit the brakes, yes, but the best way to avoid almost all collisions is to steer, not just to brake. Braking combined with steering sharply to the left (since the pedestrian was moving to the right) would have been the best response to this situation.

(Note that, before anti-lock brakes became common, "hit the brakes as hard as you can" was not good advice, precisely because it would lock the wheels and prevent you from steering. In a car with anti-lock brakes, that's not an issue.)
On a collision course, there's zero relative motion of the object you're about to collide with. It's one of the quirks of the human vision system that makes it particularly ill-suited to operating motor vehicles.
"The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road!"

Humans gonna human. Our brains are trained by millions of years to not pay attention to things not directly important. It's hard enough sometimes to keep our attention on the road when we're doing the driving and the driving is too easy, like being alone on a highway at night. Expecting humans to passively observe driving while making no decisions and taking no actions... well... could you watch eight straight hours of video footage from a car, tomorrow? I know I couldn't. I couldn't even pre-HN/Reddit/instant entertainment constantly in my pocket, let alone now.

The idea that sitting a human in an otherwise-automated car will do anything after the first few hours is absurd. It's a feel-good measure and nothing more. I wouldn't have expected any other result.
My point is that it's likely the camera view we're seeing has nothing to do with the self driving portion of the vehicle (a good hint to this is the interior view--useless to autonomous driving, but a common feature of dash cams).
Hmmm... If I may ask you: I'm considering moving to LA for a job in Venice/Culver city. Wondering if I can live somewhat closeby for a reasonable rent. I definitely don't want to commute more than 30 min each way :/.

Edit: The offer is "developer salary" so I assumed it would be OK for a rundown but safe rental somewhere closeby.
Looks like somewhere between 1.0 and 1.2 seconds between when I can see the pedestrian in the video and when the collision occurred.

I don't think a normal human, even if they were paying attention to the road, could have braked or swerved in time to avoid hitting them.

Not sure if visibility is better for a real human than that video but from what I remember about the eye test at the DMV it is extremely lax. They had a vision test sign with a really big font and it was really close. I was appalled that they let people drive who can't see the vision test sign on the opposite side of the room -- even that was ridiculously easy to read.

Also, even if they reacted within 0.1 seconds (unlikely) I doubt the car would have been able to slow down in that timeframe.

I'm surprised IR and LIDAR didn't pick it up though. Would be useful to have the other data released. Video is only a small part of what the car sees and excluding this information is a huge disservice.

Not sure if they already do, but would be nice, no, imperative, for car companies to collect "black box" data of collisions and shared this with all other interested parties. This is a dataset that would be extremely beneficial for all self-driving AI engineers.
> But the gap between street lights is going to be very hard to see into.

Looking, right now, at a parking lot between two lights from a well-lit room. I can make out most of the outline of the black car in the middle of the "darkness" without any trouble. This isn't even the low light vision kicking in (which I agree isn't going to kick in if you're driving). Human vision should be able to make out the pedestrian earlier than the video footage.
Ive driven at night and the video is not representative of what I see. With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously.
I don't know of any studies to prove it is true, but I suspect that the US Midwest (in particular) has had a similar decline. Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds.

I wonder if we'll stop dumping this stuff into the environment before it's too late. It would require a whole new way of thinking about the industrial scale agriculture we have developed over the last 50 years, so I'm a little pessimistic.
It seems that the real test of whether or not it's useless pseudoscience is in the empirical evidence, not the narcissistic ramblings of a out-of-touch former stockbroker. Kosinski and Stillwell managed to make a number of predictions out of the models; it's a step from there to political ad targeting. There might be more effective methods of political ad targeting--maybe some steps could be skipped--but that seems to be an empirical question more than anything.

It's all bits of information in the end and how you use them. There's nothing "metaphysical" about them.

As for companies making overhyped empty promises? Not unique to political science.

I'm tired of this kind of imperious bigotry from overpriviledged silicon-valley types. It helps no one.

There's an important question about whether or not this stuff worked, but here we are, with Trump as the president when all the models predicted Clinton would win. That's not exactly an experiment I want to try again.
California is bleeding something like 60,000 residents to Texas each year. That sounds like a big number.

https://qz.com/1189388/conservative-californians-are-moving-...
LIDAR sends out pulsed laser beams to measure the distance to things.

It should work in complete darkness.
> This is literally the reason for high-beams.

I agree. From the video it doesn't look like they were on in this incident.
Keep in mind a lot of folks in this thread might be suddenly realizing they have reduced ocular ability at night, a likely common condition that pretty much nobody is aware of when it’s minor (because it’s not obvious something is amiss; maybe it’s just that dark). I agree with you that streetlights and headlights are almost universally sufficient in my experience. If they’re not, it’s worth getting your eyes checked out for light sensitivity at night. You never know.

I’m not sure a typical eye exam checks for it, either, because none of the tests I can think of seem like they’d be useful.

(As usual, an even keeled comment based on family experience is -2 and rapidly being silenced with zero feedback inside 5 minutes, which makes me wonder why I contribute to this community at all, probably time to stop)
Many of us, as software developers, are taught to solve general problems instead of specific instances whenever we can. That's what I see as wrong with 99% of the commentary about this recently. Sure, there might be a bug in Facebook. Maybe it's a serious bug, and it really needs to be fixed. But it's a bug that manifests in many other places too. It's even possible that Facebook is neither the first nor the worst. Facebook doesn't have "assistants" that listen to your every word like Google and Amazon and Apple do. It doesn't have all of your email, or your entire search history, or the very OS on a device you have with you all the time. But I digress.

The real point is that targeting any "fix" too narrowly toward Facebook, or Google, or any one party doesn't fix it for the others. It might even distract from or interfere with development of a more general solution. But that's exactly the path a lot of people seem to be going. By all means, criticize Facebook if you think they've done something wrong, but don't stop there. Make sure you understand the full scope of the problem, and the options for addressing it in a general way, and the benefits or drawbacks of each approach. Progress doesn't come from everyone saying "me too" on a bug report. It comes from people talking about and then implementing ideas to make the bug stop happening anywhere. I've seen precious little of that.
The 2nd Amendment does speak of a well regulated militia and it being necessary for the defense of the United States. I'm in favor a well regulated militia. I'm not a lawyer and have no expertise on the legalities but I do know that amendments can be repealed. There is nothing unconstitutional about repealing an amendment. The Constitution details the mechanism for amending it.
Human beings radiate IR do they not? Silly question, of course they do. Perhaps not above an Arizona level of thermal background?
Gotta add load balancing charges to this as well, but still ends up cheaper than CF in some cases.
That's an argument intended only to shift blame and distract. The car was going 38 in a 35 which is well within the legal margin of error on a speedometer[1]. For all we know, the speedometer read exactly 35.

There's enough blame to go around between the driver who was obviously texting and the woman illegally jaywalking, you don't need to invent a false controversy.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/speedometer-scandal
As an American, this general kind of situation is a reasonably common situation with people and animals (people more in urban environments, large animals more in rural ones, and both in many suburban ones) and something I was taught to be aware of in public school driver's education classes.

The particular combination of speed and distance may not be common, but the general situation isn't rare.
only person who bothered to point this out. A camera from the car doesn't even give the picture a human would see or what a million other sensors would see.
No headlights should not normally be on bright within city limits. Brights are something you tend to use on dark country roads.
Right, so assuming LIDAR caught her: I'd imagine the algorithm presumed that she wouldn't cross the center line till she did cross the line, I don't know what to think the algorithm would do there after?
I've deployed it a few times. In some cases it randomly spikes to 100% cpu usage until you restart it.

Is there a way to know how much RAM you are going to need for your dataset? I think I was using it for looking up restaurant names from a database of 100,000 and I wanted to factor in misspellings and partial matches.
Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings
Given what they'll probably teach, I bet it's actually backward-thinking
Well, there are some trends (such as dropping life expectancy for whites without college degree [0]), which are without precedent. It's literally unheard for developed country to have a dropping life expectancy in XX century.

So, maybe US being functional democracy, with working feeback loop from voters to elites (no sarcasm here) did something extraordinary because of extraordinary circumstances.

I hold no strong opinion here, but this is something worth evaluating, IMO.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/the-co...
Yeah, it's quite interesting how the parent skirts over all the history of US involvement in Latin American during the Cold War, while at the same time ignoring any inconvenient counterexamples.
Show HN: DIY Google News and Twitter brand mentions tracker using Zapier
Humans radiate in IR. A midrange FLIR can pick out a human against a cold background from miles away.
You've piqued my interest with this comment because, read literally, you seem to be against hate.

Hating isn't illegal, immoral or even necessarily a bad idea. Hate can be justified. Hate is dangerous in politics as is any strong emotion. Trying to hold a country together demands compromise, which in turn requires moderation.

Facebook is empowering mass surveillance and propaganda, and encourages outrage and knee-jerk reactions. Trying to separate out who is using that power for good or ill and judge equivalence based on that is risky. If the judgment is wrong great damage will be done.

It is better to to acknowledge that power in itself is dangerous, and political power should be carefully controlled. Controlling and limiting political power has been a very successful strategy leading to excellent results in the past.
How long does it take you to make out the black car and determine that it's a car? What if the car were coming straight at you out of darkness and you were standing in the light of a street lamp?

Also, are you looking straight at the car? Or are you looking elsewhere so that the car is in your peripheral vision, the way it would be if it were on the side of a road you were driving on?
You're missing the point. The OFA app determined who should share what with who by running all the extracted profile data (including that taken from opted-in users' oblivious, perhaps anti-Obama friends) through their psychographic models. It's identical, except, for "the good guys".
It was reported to be going 38mph in a 35mph zone.
I think you sell your driving skills very short here. Assuming you have normal eyesight, you would have likely a 10-fold higher dynamic range than the visible camera footage shown. The gap between streetlights would have been easily discernible with your eyes, unlike in the camera footage.
Sure, if we were actually sitting in the front seat we would have a different perspective. Want to convince me it was unavoidable? Release the IR footage too.
"If he’s right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain."

This concluding "slam dunk" is such an appeal to spooky-special-ness it makes me suspect the author hasn't yet grokked even the prerequisites to giving Dennett's views a fair shake.
Back to the Blog
See I wonder about that. In compromises conditions (many) drivers will drive slower and be more cautious. Perhaps computers need to be given a sense of fallibility? Computer can sense low light conditions and drive even more cautiously as a result.
Do you have a better idea? Be productive with your comments vs. just being a hater.
Everything in America should emulate Japan, pretty much.
Wouldn't this (Auto updating rolodex) be something trivial to add to any other platform? On almost every forum one can always click on the username and see post history and a bio. As long as the the fields of interest are included (phone/email/etc) it would serve the same purpose.

As usual its the critical mass problem but facebook has done nothing particularly technologically inovative.
a human would have attempted to at least move to the left to avoid a collision; specially since she had a very visible bike with her.
Hopefully the tests will prove that clearly.
I'm surprised the footage looks so bad, I wonder if it was altered to look darker to help lessen Uber responsibility.

Is there a technical way to check if some video filters were applied?
> You'd have to see someone crossing the road like that.

You could say the same thing about a car with headlights on coming towards you... From the little evidence we have it seems like the pedestrian, driver/monitor and the car all should have done better.
Interesting - given Cloudflare's real value proposition and domination of their sector, I've been half expecting Google to buy them for a year now.

Google are very good at internet plumbing, and I expect this to be a pretty compelling service. Serious competition and not being an acquisition target any more must have really hurt Cloudflare's value today.
It isn't obvious from the video if the human driver would have had time to react, but they certainly did not help their chances by being unalert. What is the point of having a human driver if they are not going to be watching the road or able to react.

If they aren't a passenger, are they merely there to get around regulation that requires a human in test autonomous driving vehicles?
A straight road, in dry conditions, obstructed by an entire person and a bicycle with REFLECTORS on it, and the car doesn't see her?

I think whoever wrote this code should be in prison, quite honestly, along with their entire management chain. I suspect many people will feel the same way. This is a really really bad look for automated vehicles in general. It also backs up my contention that anything less than full 100% automation is worse than no automation at all, as the driver was complacent and had less than zero chance of taking over.
> Social media itself is fine.

This is debatable. A completely ethical social media service still has the ability to control perceptions and thus decisions on a large scale. I think the problem is that everyone can know this and still use Facebook multiple times daily. To know that they contributed to the election of Donald Trump simply by using Facebook, and then go on Facebook to complain about Donald Trump. Surely that must be the problem, whatever makes people knowingly contribute to their own destruction, somehow without ever thinking about it.
"Even two cheap digital cameras one tuned to see the darker range and the other brighter"

Sounds a lot like rods and cones in our eyes, huh?

There's another difference with eyeballs that would almost certainly have helped here - the low light sensitive peripheral vision that the rods provide is also attuned to movement, we're more sensitive to movement in peripheral vision as well as being better able to see in low light.
Yeah the whole housing structure in the US seems to be geared towards creating a ton of wealth for the real estate business. Which isn't the worse thing; but lets not confuse ourselves that it is a legitimate way to build wealth (it is somewhat so; but you can usually get better returns from other financial instruments over the long haul).
There is a limerick to this effect with the same message -- you may have (or think you have) the right-of-way, but as a pedestrian you should never insist on it.
> Keep in mind that the gap is not arbitrarily chosen.

It's not supposed to be, no. But the gaps are not always optimal. The spacing of the street lights in the video (to the extent I can tell) seems to be quite wide, wider than I would think is optimal.
I would have thought that it should be irrelevant if the street lights are there or not with LIDAR.
So the pedestrian crossed the road directly in front of a car while wearing black at night? Incredibly foolish.

This is probably good for self-driving cars as a whole. We'll be able to learn from this incident without having to suffer the negative PR of killing somebody who wouldn't be dead otherwise.
Fluoride? Please explain how that damages the human brain.
Nice try, but these cars have GPS. Trying to evenly pin the blame for the pedestrian’s death on her is insane. Talk about trying to “shift blame and distract.”
What happens when the human grabs the wheel? Is it possible the car could/would have stopped, or reduced the danger to the pedestrian, but the human actually overrode any emergency corrective measure the car would have taken? Did the human prevent the car from working as intended?