So does that mean if the driver accidentally leaves their phone in your Tesla — which is something that’s easy to do accidentally — it stays unlocked and anyone can drive off with it?
In addition to bad use of statistics, this article really buries the lead, making the identification of solutions difficult. US pedestrian deaths steadily declined over 20 years from 2.6 per 100K in 1990 to 1.4 per 100K in 2010 -- a 46% decrease -- but then in the following 10 years increased to 1.96 per 100K -- a 40% increase in half the time.
Furthermore, the curve is V-shaped, with the best year in 2009; it seems like some thing or things happened around 2010 that suddenly changed a long-term downward trend into a much more rapid upward trend. It's hard to see how a change in human behavior would cause such an abrupt turnaround or such a steady increase.
I think what fits the data best is that this is due to a technological change, and I suspect it might be tied to sales of hybrids and EVs, which are quieter vehicles that pedestrians are less likely to be aware of, and sales of which really ramped up starting in the late 2000s. Every year, we add more of these vehicles to the roads -- which is a very good thing overall -- and that would explain why the pedestrian death rate is steadily increasing.
In other words, it may be that this is not due to a change in human behavior, but rather that human behavior hasn't caught up to a technology change. In addition, it looks like NHTSA's "2015 Pedestrian and Bicyclist Data Analysis" suggests that pedestrian deaths for kids continued to decrease between 2010-2015, but that adults 50+ suffered the largest increases. In other words, the demographic that is both hardest of hearing and had the hardest time to adapt to hybrids/EVs was hit the hardest.
I had a 2008 version of a vehicle that I replaced just this year with a 2017 version of the same vehicle.
I have several times found pedestrians walking right in front of me and I slam on my brakes and the pedestrians yell at me as if I'm a negligent driver, yet previously I don't think I did such a thing more often than once every few years, if that.
What I have come to discover is that the front frame rail of the 2017 is so huge it blocks my view exactly where pedestrians step off of a curb into traffic, especially because the pedestrian is elevated on the curb and completely behind the frame rail.
I recognize that drivers should of course carefully inspect every intersection, but reality is that they cannot, and what pedestrians really need to do with these newer vehicles making up a larger percentage of the vehicles is make sure they can see the eyes of the driver, else the driver likely cannot see the pedestrian, at all.
In all countries and ever since I can remember I treat every vehicle as a death machine out to kill me - the idea of doing a maneuver that requires the death machine to react correctly to me is as foreign to my thought as expecting a train to stop for me.
Still doesn’t mean we should ignore things like a pillars growing.
I agree with the problem but to me that sounds like those vehicles should have mandatory automatic braking systems to be considered street legal. There’s an arms race building them stronger to withstand impacts from large SUVs and trucks but that shouldn’t be used to justify making them less safe for everyone else. IIRC, the last figure for the SUV safety “improvement” had it at 4.3 additional lives outside the vehicle lost for every life inside saved.
It's SUVs, not EVs. There's an arms race amongst drivers to have the largest vehicle to push the consequences of collisions onto other people. Pedestrians are just collateral damage.
SUV/truck drivers kill 4x more of the pedestrians they hit.
this example of "bad use of statistics" is so common, especially in journalism, that it is now just "use of statistics". If you don't squeeze every last gram of hype and horror out of your numbers, you're obviously not a serious advocate fo whatever cause.
> some thing or things happened around 2010
My first suspicion is another weight bump to meet safety mandates. The heaviest car sold in 1992 was lighter than the lightest car sold in 2012. F = mv^2, v hasn't changed in most of those accidents.
I don’t know if this will help, but I can tell you what helped me. Quite a few years ago, I stopped working as an employee and started working as a freelancer/consultant. I get that that’s probably not an option in your case, but let me continue.
In doing that, I changed my perspective, in a way that I think may also be possible while still working as an employee. The only company I worry about now is me, my own business, my own career, my own success.
That’s not to say that I don’t want my clients to be successful, or that I don’t work my ass off trying to help them be successful, but I don’t worry if they aren’t. Why not? Because I understand that I have no control over them, no way to prevent them from making bad decisions, no way to prevent them from being managed poorly (as most companies are).
The problem is that employers want you to have an emotional stake in their success — to take personal responsibility for their success — but you ultimately have no control. That’s kind of the point of stock options — making you care the success of the company as a whole so you’ll work hard and stick around — but really you don’t have real control over the company’s success. And that dynamic — giving responsibility without control — is a classic sign of bad management.
So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves. Focus on the success of your personal business — how you do your assignments, the next step in your career, your mental and physical health, your family — and let the rest go.
>Why not? Because I understand that I have no control over them, no way to prevent them from making bad decisions, no way to prevent them from being managed poorly (as most companies are).
I think this is a necessary attitude to adopt, even as an employee. You need to draw boundaries about what you care about, and one of those ways is to evaluate if people you work with actually care about something or if they only say they care about it. If you're not responsible for it and others don't really care, you should also try to not care.
I'll give a concrete example. I worked on a project recently where I was dependent on somebody else to finish something. They are perceived as a somewhat competent but lazy person and they took a very long time to get it done. Certainly much longer than other people would have done. Despite claims from our management that this was urgent, no additional people were added to that task to speed it up. Actions speak louder than words - if it really was urgent they would have asked somebody else to do it. So when my part was delayed I simply said I was blocked and tried my best to let it go and not get frustrated.
I had a major burnout years ago and one of the big reasons was because I took responsibility for my management layer understaffing projects that were supposedly a top priority. The priorities were always talk, but no action to add people or manage expectations with the user/customer(s). It look me years to realize that instead of fully putting the blame on my management, I should have stood up for myself and said I can only do what I can do and that's it.
>So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves.
100% Agree. You can strive to do the best you can do so you don't feel like you, personally, are doing a half-baked job. But beyond that, it's not your problem anymore.
Exactly this. I've been through what OP described. I eventually resigned this January after a 8 year long abusive career, and decided to freelance with my friend who had already been doing this for years.
Changing your perspective and worrying about yourself as a business is the best thing to do.
I don’t think the Russians are going to care about a felony conviction. The major security holes in embedded devices that are part of our critical infrastructure are national security threats.
Despite Putin’s bluster about nuclear weapons, cyberattacks are the easiest way for Russia to inflict pain on the US and Western Europe in response to economic sanctions and our support for Ukrain militarily. And those could do a lot of damage, both in terms of our economies and even civilian American/European lives.
I taught myself to code on TRS-80 Mod 1 at my high school. I had seen a friend write a three line basic program that moved a dot onscreen, and about six months later told my math teacher I wanted to try drawing a circle using the formula we had just learned. I sat down with the Basic manual and did it. A few months later my folks got an Apple II and there was no looking back, I was coding nonstop.
I got my first paying job six months later; walked into a store to buy a book on assembly language, and saw a sign that said “Basic programmers wanted”; I applied, and they hired me for the summer. I kept getting summer jobs writing commercial software. I learned Pascal my first semester in college, taught myself C on their mainframe the following year. Took a year off school to travel and got hired to write some game software, and never went back.
Over the last forty years, I focused first on Apple II, Mac, MSDOS, and Windows apps; then Web development. The last 20 years I’ve focused on embedded development. I’ve worked as a freelancer / consultant much of my career, but also was Dir of Software Engineering at a several startups along the way.
Be sure to talk to them about the embedded industry, which doesn’t get much attention on HN. It’s a huge part of the industry that most people don’t know about. We’re the guys who write the software that makes rockets, robots, respirators, and routers do what they do; most things powered by electricity these days have a got a little processor in them, and someone has to write the software that makes those things work. Practically every form of transportation, medical, communications, and consumer electronics device is either an embedded device or has embedded devices inside it.
Creating good embedded devices is extremely challenging; you often have very limited RAM and Flash, and yet have to create sophisticated, multithreaded software that might communicate with the Cloud via wireless protocols, but have to run for a year on a single battery without failure. In other cases you might be building an embedded device based on Linux, requiring custom drivers and complex applications. In others, you have to create software reliable enough that it can be used in safety critical devices without injuring or killing people, and that is able to withstand hacking attempts to turn your IoT devices into a botnet.
What’s interesting is that I originally didn’t think I wanted to be a professional software engineer, even well after I started coding at paying gigs; it sounded boring. But looking back, as a kid, all my heroes were great inventors, but I was inept as an inventor of physical things. Programming allows me to constantly invent and develop new things, and with embedded, those things also consist of mechanical and electrical components that other engineers create. I love it, and it pays great.
Finally, your students might be interested in this: according to the 2017 Stack Overflow annual developer survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017), while CS/SE are the most popular degrees among professional developers, most professional developers don't have a CS/SE degree. Of the professional developers surveyed:
* About 23% had no bachelor's degree
* About 42% earned a bachelor's degree in computer science or software engineering undergrad
* About 8% earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer engineering undergrad
* About 7% earned a bachelor's degree in computer programming or web development undergrad
* About 20% earned a bachelor's degree in a non-programming-centric degree program (other engineering, natural sciences, math, humanities, system admin, etc) undergrad
Not really, because it lacks core features that made MacPaint amazing and Atkinson a genius, being able to: draw rectangles, ovals, and rounded rechts with patterned fills in real time; draw filled polys and arbitrary regions; lasso arbitrary regions and move, copy, or resize them; etc.
This is a pretty basic paint program in a browser, which is great, but it’s a long way from what MacPaint could do 35+ years ago.
Welcome to Hacker News. This project was written by a fellow HN user for fun. I think it's pretty clear, based on the quality we've seen so far, that the author is capable of making it do all those things. I like to judge projects and startups by envisioning their completed state, rather than worrying about details of how they exist today. I think DitherPaint is a cool project and worth encouraging.
Wait, do you actually know the author? I only ask because he's a good friend of mine, and another friend was just showing me your APE code. Small world. :)
Not to my knowledge. I just saw a random comment in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410662 I noticed he had submitted it as a link that no one upvoted. I thought the work merited further attention, so I posted this link.
