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Comment by swang | Hacker News Reader

> A source close to Uber’s operations says its engineers watched the intersection where Uber’s cars were said to have run the red light, and that this text refers to them recording a number of normal, human-operated vehicles also breaking the law. Uber has never officially admitted that its software was to blame.

is the implication here that that intersection has a lot of red light runners? if so, are they so dense in not understanding how normal people running red lights is less of an issue here than a machine running that red light?

normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention (or even worse, is an asshole).

someone could have died because uber decided the rules didn't apply to them. it's ridiculous that they're still allowed to operate in california.

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Don't forget illegally running autonomous tractor trailers in Palo Alto and on the roads of Nevada.

These guys are criminals... total disregard for human life (but their own) in every shape and way there is. From potentially killing people, too treating everyone is who not their BRO like trash; drivers, employees, customers, business partners, etc, etc, etc... GROSS!

Your comments come off as if you are more bitter about some company you can just choose to ignore than benchamark is about Travis.

Are you saying that we should ignore companies that act badly?

> bitter about some company you can just choose to ignore

This is not about some product you buy, or some service you pay for, it's about sharing the road, and whether the other people/entities on the road with you operating multiple thousand pound machines at 24-65 Mph have a legal right to be there and are safe. That's not something you can necessarily "ignore" without consequence.

I am only referring to this person's tone being unlike most of the people on this forum. "GROSS" "burn Uber down to ground". It is concerning how angry this person is. Also yes the car ran the signal, it was bad they should be fined and what not. This is not L5 autonomy so the driver is also responsible for not breaking at that signal . Stop making this sound like the car ran over someone or did not stop for pedestrian.

Yes Travis continues to meddle with Uber and be involved he may just well burn it to the ground out of pure ignorance and hubris. Only hold the ashes he built then burnt!

Their behavior is so GROSS it's almost illegal.

As for concerning that's funny ... Uber stole my money and laughed, then caused other ppl I know financial harm and then all this stuff comes out in the press about them. I loathe Uber that is all ... no more no less.

Why do you care so much ... what skin in the Uber game do you have?

21 ppl upvoted my comment at the top.

If you ever walk through a crosswalk, ride a bicycle (or motorcycle), or drive a car, you may pay with your life for ignoring self-driving cars that violate traffic laws and/or fail to react intelligently to unusual situations.

I am very bitter after Uber pretty much laughed at my Uber account being hacked and thus $1k stolen from me. These hacks were happening about a dozen or more a day for months and years and did they respond properly by alerting users that they should change their password? No, their PR blamed it on the users saying those getting hacked should have used a stronger password or something to that extent.

Further, thousand of us aspire to reach Kalanick's heights and to see all lack of graciousness and humility for his position is disgusting! His persona is one of a greedy BRO who thinks he's king one who needs to be kicked off his horse and learn humility! Thankfully it looks like this is slowly happening!!!

Give it up Travis and save Uber or continue being your greedy BRO king self and in turn burn Uber to the ground.

Just had a look at furioussloth's comments. Every single one is an Uber related story and an Uber related comment.

Reminder to us all to please declare your interests if you have them. even if it's only:

Full disclosure: I quite like Uber.

For me, full disclosure, I do actually, quite like Uber. (Although not everything they do, or endorse all their policies or individual employee abhorrent behavior etc).

Being pro-Uber here is like being a downvote magnet so yes I do maintain an account for non-technical comments. Also I do not try to condone their bad behavior; I am very amazed by what they had achieved by disrupting the taxi industry. I sometimes feel people have such knee-jerk reaction to certain things which are not really that scandalous or incriminating.

No it isn't. Declare your interests.

Normal humans also run red lights when the yellow-to-red light time is too short. Transit guidelines generally state that yellow lights should stay lit 1 second for every 10mph of the speed limit. When the yellow light is shorter than this, it's easy to get caught in the middle of a red.

Have you seen the video? It's way more jacked up than what you're implying:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pzzQ42D9Srw

Watch that and tell me that it's reasonable or caused by a short yellow...

I saw his reply as adding "too short of yellow to red time" to the list of "not paying attention" and "being an asshole" for human reasons to run red lights. I'm not sure why you're attacking him for a claim he didn't appear to make.

I don't think this was an attack; rather, an example furthering the case of "too short".

Holy cow.

With a pedestrian in / on the edge of the crosswalk. And there was even another car that had been moving just a few seconds earlier stopped there too...

You don't think it was going to stop if the pedestrian stepped out in front? If autonomous cars can't do that, they can't do anything.

Who knows? This Volvo didn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTxS6tg6xc

It's not an autonomous car and that particular car doesn't even have "pedestrian detection system" installed. It only can detect big objects like cars without optional hardware.

It's driverless. Are you sure that Uber had a pedestrian detection system?

I've run that light myself by accident. It's a hard light for humans too. This light is in the middle of a block rather than at the end. The area is full of activity including people walking but also popular sights. That brick building to the right is SFMOMA. Its hard to notice the traffic lights amongst all this activity not to mention that you don't look for it. Also that middle lane can easily have its views obstructed on both sides.

That area is also messed up because you need to be in the correct lane else you will be forced up different streets so you have many cars trying to change lanes. Lastly, that area has its share of asshole drivers that cut you off, speed, etc....

From my perspective, that car is behaving like someone not aware of the light and not sensitive to context (should have driven more slowly). You can call that asshole behavior if you wish.

Its hard to notice the traffic lights amongst all this activity not to mention that you don't look for it.

That makes it hard for a person, especially if they're new to that road, but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?

I barely know anything about how self driving cars work so someone else should answer that. I am not affiliated with Uber or its competitors.

Perhaps I should have said that its a hard light for humans but that I don't know anything about how hard it is for cars.

The standard approach to detecting signal lights is to have a database of GPS positions of the signals, along with rough location in the camera where the signal is expected to occur [1]. Then, when the car nears the signal, it locates the signal and detects the current color.

This mechanism really shouldn't be susceptible to the same biases as humans. The described signal may legitimately be more challenging for the self driving car, but more than likely the signal was missing from Uber's database. Their lack of explanation for this failure does not inspire confidence in their approach.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/zkolter/pubs...

>but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?

Who said a self driving car is doing a "database lookup"?

If anything, a good self driving car should NOT do any kind of database lookup (of the location of traffic lights etc) and be able to recognize and respond to a moved, impromptu (e.g. because of road work), new, unfamiliar, etc. traffic light.

Getting additional data from a predefined map is expected, even if it's just for something to test the data coming from the sensors. If the car knows there's a traffic light on the map but it isn't 'seeing' one then it should be handing control back to the human, not just carrying on regardless on the assumption that the map is wrong.

A level 5 self-driving car would work completely autonomously without any prior knowledge of the area it's driving in. We're not there yet.

I see -- checked the paper. I knew they were using maps data for the routes and assistance (and that would extend to traffic lights) but I'd expect them to be able to spot all kinds of movable traffic lights (e.g. when there are works or an accident) by pure image recognition/AI.

Honestly I thought it was the vehicle just before it, until that one came out of nowhere on the right. That was WAAAAAY after. I nearly closed the browser tab before it came through.

Looks like it didn't consider a traffic light in the middle of a block as a thing that could happen.

This is a cartoonishly uncharitable interpretation of "Quick update on that special intersection in SF, we taped 6 red car violations within 2 hours".

A more reasonable interpretation is: A techie pointing out that this is a really confusing intersection, and trying to ease his boss' concerns that the software isn't going to work. Surprise surprise, people have trouble with it too.

Uber is saying that this text doesn't mean Uber knew that its self-driving cars were running the red light - instead, it refers to Uber engineers recording normal, human-driven cars running the light.

>normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention (or even worse, is an asshole).

Obviously a machine can be safer if it doesn't pay attention (can't recognize the light being red) on a smaller rate than humans.

I.e. if humans cross red lights 2% of the time because they don't pay attention, and a machine 1%, then the machine is safer -- despite still crossing red lights.

> if so, are they so dense in not understanding how normal people running red lights is less of an issue here than a machine running that red light?

I disagree. A machine might be able to completely verify that it's safe to ignore the light. I wouldn't trust a person to do that.

weren't they suspended? Also i doubt they coded it in their software to break the signal , can't believe you just implied that. It surely was a bug in software and I hope they got fined for it and took steps to fix it. Testing self-driving cars is not trivial, pretty much everyone who is testing them have screwed up here and there. That's the reason the person behind the wheel should be vigilant.

i'm not sure why you reached that conclusion but i didn't say they coded anything into their software.

also they weren't suspended insomuch as the vehicle registration of the cars they were using were revoked. at that point i'm assuming at that point uber stopped messing around with the ca dmv.

Given there is no further context in the messages released I humbly submit that this "explanation" provided by the unbiased source at Uber is full and utter bullshit

Like, they are standing there taping other people running red lights? And Kalanick cares how, exactly?

No, this is them taping their own cars running red lights. Which is a very likely scenario since they are 1) testing on a small subset of streets and 2) if it makes the mistake once, bet on a computer to make it again.

No, if their car is not running any lights under normal circumstances, but has ran it even once at a particular intersection, you bet I will send my engineers there with some cameras to tape the intersection so we can analyze it and see what is happening. If the intersection is poorly designed/timed, why would it be implausible to happen to catch human drivers make the same mistake?

>If the intersection is poorly designed/timed, why would it be implausible to happen to catch human drivers make the same mistake?

Unless they had already pulled the self driving cars, which the timeline presented suggests they haven't, why would that data be important enough to text back without the corresponding number of Uber violations?

I'm saying there's not enough context in the released messages to declare this unambiguously bullshit, and provided a reason why they would record the intersection, as parent comment asked "why in the world would they be taping it".

The number of Uber's violations could have been communicated previously, or could have been implicit in the context of the conversation (at least 1 violation, causing the investigation) - either of these 3 explanations seems equally likely.

Considering how dangerous this is, I really doubt they would run a red light SIX times through the SAME intersection purposefully, risking the life of REAL PEOPLE around them each and every time.

Uber's management and engineers may be irresponsible, but I don't think they're that evil, and I would hope no self-respecting engineer or human being would go along with that. "Oh, that's funny, let's try that again" works for software development, it's emphatically not how real world testing involving danger to life and limb works.

As to "why would this be important enough to text back", that's pure speculation, but if I was tasked with investigating this, I would be pretty relieved to see that this is a location that's confusing human drivers as well, not just my software, and would be pretty likely to communicate that back to my team.

>The number of Uber's violations could have been communicated previously, or could have been implicit in the context of the conversation (at least 1 violation, causing the investigation) - either of these 3 explanations seems equally likely.

The implicit one doesn't make sence, if an event caused the investigation surely how well Uber did would be the primary focus. Which leaves he knew already, meaning they already had a meeting or something to discuss the results and they were significant enough that he wanted a comparison.

>Uber's management and engineers may be irresponsible, but I don't think they're that evil, and I would hope no self-respecting engineer or human being would go along with that. "Oh, that's funny, let's try that again" works for software development, it's emphatically not how real world testing involving danger to life and limb works.

This was their illegal self driving car test on the streets of San Fransisco. They were unwilling to follow the legal safety rules, and unwilling to provide the deposit in the event they did cause someone serious harm. That they left on the road while they tested if the light was to blame.

Because it obviously isn't either of that. Did you watch the video?

I watched the video. You asked "why would they be taping the intersection", I gave you a pretty obvious explanation, not sure why you are so vehement about it.

In turn, why would any sane person run a two ton piece of gear through a moving intersection, endangering pedestrians and cross traffic through a red light where it is known to have failed once already, not once, not twice more, but six times in a day?

Why would you, as a responsible person, not immediately tell your test drivers to avoid this intersection until the issue is root caused, or, more likely, suspend testing for that day entirely?

Or do you just assume every engineer at Uber is a cackling mad scientist blinded by their quest to create our new machine god?

You put quote marks around something that I didn't ever write. Sorry, I don't believe there is a basis here for discussion.

I apologize if I misunderstood your question here:

> Like, they are standing there taping other people running red lights?

It sounded like you were rhethorically wondering why would they be standing there taping the intersection, but perhaps my interpretation was faulty.

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