Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alphabettsy 2360 days ago
In what world is preventing 4% of serious accidents trivial? That’s likely hundreds or thousands of crashes per year given the numbers involved.
1 comments

See "probably much, much less" (since diagnostic systems have many false negatives, and only work on some subsystems) and my argument about wet conditions (which causes greater than 4% of accidents). Furthermore, the absolute number of accidents is not a sensible number to look at unless you're also totaling up the absolute number of drivers inconvenience. Both the absolute number of accidents and the absolute number of downsides (wasted time, driver frustration, unnecessary repairs) will be proportional to the number of cars, so you should divide out by the number of cars.
Probably much, much less is meaningless since it means nothing.

I’m pretty sure if there are 20,000 serious accidents per year and some lines of code alone prevent 100 (0.5%) that’s noteworthy.

First, you are not engaging with any of the points in my reply. (Do you disagree that the fraction of accidents that diagnostic systems can plausibly stop is <<4%? We can't tell.)

Second, you keep suggesting that I made claims about this being "trivial" or "noteworthy". I did not. I made a claim about what would be a good system, not the notability of the absolute number of accidents stopped.