Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

I have to turn the pedestrian detection off every time I drive past the local school. Why? The kids figured out that it's really easy to make new cars emergency brake by just pretending to walk onto the road.

People suck.

View on HN

Personally, I would also brake if a kid pretended to walk into the road. There just has to be one kid who isn't pretending for it to become a really big issue.

As a human, this behavior does not look like a kid walking into the road. They wait, take a single exaggerated step forwards and immediately back off.

But hey, thanks for reminding me to buy a dashcam.

Beginning of pranks to come with self drive cars.

Imagine when someone realised you can slam on the brakes in front of X brand of car and it prioritises avoiding the car in front over all else

Hopefully the expensive self driving car can afford to integrate a $40 dashcam.

Won't be much use if it's a joy rider

You should be a more defensive driver. This sort of attitude could lead to you seriously hurting someone.

What sort of attitude? Could you be more specific? Turning the pedestrian detection off in that specific area is defensive driving, I don't want to get rear-ended because someone maliciously triggers it.

I live in an extremely busy city full of scooters (of all kinds!) and drunk pedestrians, it's not possible to get far here without extreme care.

people suck or kids will be kids?

Same thing I guess? It's humans sabotaging a safety feature intended to protect them.

I think it is more like testing your bounds or figuratively pulling the rope to see if it breaks. Both are innate human (and animal) behavior and in that both a blessing and a curse.

Kids don't know any better yet.

That being said I would probably lose my temper as well when faced with such a situation.

When I'm dropping off my kids and other kids run in my way I usually just stop to chat or play with them, but I'm doing this when walking or on a bicycle.

I guess if I wore a 2-ton suit of power armor I'd just be pissed off instead :)

The main problem here is that the 2-ton suit of power armor doesn't really care about what's behind it when it slams the brakes for a pedestrian, you would probably be pretty upset if you were biking behind me when this happens.

I think it's a great thing that the car prioritizes pedestrian safety, but it's very unfortunate that people would abuse this.

If they don't know by that age (attending school), something is very wrong.

Why are you excusing shitty behavior with a trite phrase?

Cars are the leading cause of dead children in the US and this is what annoys you?

How'd you arrive at this conclusion? That's a bizarrely uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.

I assure you, I'm annoyed by many other things too.

>Cars are the leading cause of dead children

You know, this obviously is exactly why it annoys me to turn off the pedestrian detection. It's not like it protects me, sitting in my car.

it also protects you in the car, if not from physical damage which at speed is likely when hitting a heavy object like a human, from mental trauma of killing a person...

The idea behind what I wrote (which I realize now was unpopular) was that a somewhat overzealous safety system shouldn't be a big deal compared to the possibility of it preventing thousands of dead kids a year, if deployed at scale. Asking such a system to distinguish pretend behavior seems like a big ask.

>somewhat overzealous safety system shouldn't be a big deal compared to the possibility of it preventing thousands of dead kids a year

I totally agree with you on this, I was just observing an unfortunate byproduct of an otherwise great system.

>Asking such a system to distinguish pretend behavior seems like a big ask.

I agree, I'm certainly not demanding that anyone do anything to "solve" this issue.

lol, cars arent the cause. people who can't drive are.

Truth be told I personally think infrastructure and cultural norms that take automobiles as the default preferred road use are the real cause, but at the point of impact the car, operated by a driver (or machine) is the cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com