Oculus Rift co-founder killed by gang trying to escape police

Oculus Rift co-founder killed by gang trying to escape police(abclocal.go.com)

726 points by ajg1977 12 years ago | 288 comments

Sukotto 12 years ago |

I feel badly for his family and coworkers. :(

Make sure you let your family know how much you care about them. Also make sure they will be taken care of in case you're suddenly gone. Firstly by picking up enough term life insurance to cover your dependents' needs until adulthood. Secondly by writing up a will and giving it to someone you trust. [1][2]

We joke about "getting hit by a bus" and a project's "bus factor"[3] but it really does happen. It could happen to you or to a critically important person on your project team. Make it a policy to have all critical info recorded in some systematic way. You don't have to get all iso9000 but you should, at the very least, have everyone do a brain dump into a wiki once a month and keep it in a central location (along with the password file, list of client info, etc.)

[1] DIY will: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Own-Last-Will-and-Testamen...

[2] Reasonably priced template: http://www.legalzoom.com/legal-wills/wills-overview.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

InclinedPlane 12 years ago |

This is a good reminder to always be a defensive and aware pedestrian. Just because you have the light or the right-of-way doesn't mean you are guaranteed a safe crossing of the street. Whenever I cross an intersection as a pedestrian I always look both ways (even on one way streets) and I always keep an eye on cars that are still in motion, especially those that don't appear to be slowing down. It's good to make these sorts of things just an innate habit, it could safe your life one day.

entropy_ 12 years ago | |

I've grown up in Lebanon -- a third world country still recovering from a 15 year civil war(1975-1990). Traffic lights and rules are merely suggestions to people around here. If something is physically possible, like a car being able to fit in an pedestrian-only paved road or two cars being able to fit in a one-way street you can be sure that people will do it. It becomes an innate habit to always check both ways and never assume that a car will stop or slow down or that the driver has even seen you when you're crossing the road. It's not "you might get hit" if you don't, it's "you will get hit" if you don't. It's sad, but it's true.

As an anecdote, there's a road that ends in an entrance/exit to a freeway that I use pretty frequently when driving from my home to Beirut. Two years ago, because the fact that the road was a 2-way road(people could use it to leave the freeway as well as enter it) was causing a lot of traffic they changed it into a 1-way road you could only use to enter the freeway, you had to leave from an exit further down the line. This reduced traffic jams immensely. However, before that could happen they had to go through several iterations on how to enforce this. First, a simple traffic sign was tried, this was largely ignored. Then they placed plastic barriers(those triangular things that can be filled with sand or water). Every night somebody would stop, get out of their car and move them to pass and things went back to how they were before the next day. Now they've closed it off with concrete barriers. It's working, but occasionally, especially at night, somebody will stop after the entrance, then back up into it and then use it as an exit. I once almost rear-ended someone doing that while I was going onto the freeway.

JabavuAdams 12 years ago | | |

My Dad is often amazed at how pedestrians in Canada leave their own survival up to the whims of drivers. They'd be dead in the developing world.

dhughes 12 years ago | | |

I live in Canada in a small town with a fairly large (per capita) Lebanese population (Tweel, Haddad, Rashed, Jabour).

We have bad drivers here but I am willing to bet we exported the behaviour to Lebanon not the other way around.

tracker1 12 years ago | | |

They could put those one-way ("severe tire damage") spikes in the freeway entrance.. that would at least reduce the ods of it happening.

mtrimpe 12 years ago | |

After being hit by a car when I was young, that's exactly how I navigate traffic as a bicyclist/pedestrian.

Traffic rules create a useful abstraction but, if you want to be safe, the only non-leaky abstraction is seeing traffic as a collection of objects moving at various speeds which can optionally change acceleration or direction based on things like traffic lights / your presence / cats running across the road after the required reaction time has elapsed.

It's a bit less relaxing of a way to travel, but it sure as hell beats waking up in the hospital with brain damage, a leg whose foot no longer points in the direction it should and an arm that's no longer moving or ... not waking up at all.

SiVal 12 years ago | | |

After living outside the US for many years, I now play the "invisible man game" even in the US. I've taught it to my kids, too.

The rules are: you imagine that you are literally invisible and find a way to cross the road that doesn't rely on the drivers' cooperation with you or the law. The drivers don't know you exist, because you are invisible.

Playing that game allowed me, for example, to jump onto the hood of a car that stopped at a red light briefly then hit the gas just as I walked in front of it. I was playing invisible man, as always, and had imagined what I would do if that guy, who was stopping, decided to take off again just as I got in front of his car. I imagined jumping onto his hood, which I did so quickly when he hit the gas that I landed on his windshield staring in at him with a grin on my face (instead of ending up under his tires.)

You can't protect yourself from everything, but playing the invisible man game each time you cross a street with traffic is a good strategy. I should add that I can't really play it if I'm on the phone, so I pause my call ("oh, um, hold on a second, I'll be right back"), play the game, and resume the call on the other side.

malandrew 12 years ago | |

As someone who's been hit by a car twice (neither were my fault), it's also a good reminder that cars simply don't belong in urban areas with a sufficiently dense population. I still don't get why most American cities still don't reach a tipping point then go whole hog in making certain parts of cities pedestrian and bike only.

grannyg00se 12 years ago | | |

Wikipedia has a list of car-free places

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Wish there were more.

snogglethorpe 12 years ago | | |

Cars are still often used as a sign of conspicuous consumption, especially among older people who came of age back in the "car era" (the '50s/'60s, when there was an overwhelming sense of the automobile as the "glorious future" of transportation, and before the many problems of mass car usage were clear)—and older people tend to be richer/more influential.

So you get a disproportionate amount of car use by rich/influential people (including many politicians), and they have far more effect on public policy than the average person. Even if the right thing overall is to restrict automobile usage, any politician has to be very careful how he introduces such policies lest he quickly feel the wrath of the well-connected...

Nux 12 years ago | | |

Agreed!

xanadohnt 12 years ago | |

A highly engineered network of lights, signs, warnings, and all other sorts of traffic guidance actually makes pedestrian and vehicle travel less safe. It's a psychological phenomenon - discussed here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html - where the actors stop using situational awareness and total rely on external devices to do their decision making. Safety takes a back seat to obeying the law. Upon removing most of the signage and guidance do humans become more situationally aware, cautious, and more personally responsible for their safety. Believe it or not, the car driving down the sidewalk ultimately makes everyone safer.

oftenwrong 12 years ago | | |

I just watched this short video about a busy intersection that was successfully redesigned in this way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzDDMzq7d0

neilk 12 years ago | | |

There's a difference between a situation where boundaries are not respected (driving on the sidewalk), and a situation where we choose not to orchestrate people's actions (lack of traffic lights).

e40 12 years ago | |

My rule: if there are cars around, never cross (legally!) unless you have eye contact. That person making a right turn on a red light? They're likely looking left and will you over if you legally start to cross in front of them.

However, I will note: even if you follow this rule, be prepared to jump out of the way. I have to, and often. I walk 4 miles/day in city streets. The number of times I've had to jump out of the way when I had the right of way... ridiculous. Defensive walking or you won't be walking for long.

dhughes 12 years ago | | |

When my friends and I discuss such things I like to emphasize that even if you as a pedestrian or cyclist have the right of way but you're hit and killed your objection is invalid since you're dead.

gaius 12 years ago | | |

Eye contact is so important http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

klenwell 12 years ago | |

This is the only moral I've found in this story so far. It all seems so tragic and arbitrary.

I used to drive through the intersection Andrew Scott Reisse was hit almost every day (until major road construction re-routed me). It's part of what strikes me as so random about this event. Unless he lived in one of the homes in that area, it puzzles me why he was walking through that intersection at that particular time of day. Unless, that is, he just really liked to walk and covered a lot of ground. In which case, this reminder is especially poignant.

My partner and I have a short commute so whenever we're crossing a street (often its one of the same cross-streets Andrew was hit in), I remind her: crossing this street is probably the most dangerous thing you're going to do this week. Put away the smart phone and pay attention like your life depends on it.

danielharan 12 years ago | |

Much as I agree pedestrians should be looking both ways and keeping an eye out for cars...

Can we please stop blaming the victims?

The main way to stop the carnage is to change our infrastructure. It's a political issue.

shabble 12 years ago | | |

I've seen one or two pedestrian crossings which included fast-reacting automatic bollards, similar to ones in [1]. They took maybe 4-5s to raise and lower, and afaik were highly effective at protecting the users. The initial capital costs, maintenance, and throughput disruption if they fail-up make them impractical as a general solution, at least for the time being.

[1] http://www.edsuk.com/item.php?id=260

InclinedPlane 12 years ago | | |

I'm definitely not blaming the victims here. Certainly the fault lies with the drivers who were operating their vehicle recklessly and without regard for human life, I think a charge of negligent homicide or manslaughter is warranted in cases such as this and I think life in prison is likely not too harsh of a sentence. At worst Reisse is "guilty" of nothing other than inattention, which certainly nobody deserves death for.

That said, regardless of the assignment of culpability and wrongdoing I think it is fundamentally important for pedestrians (namely: all people) to understand that it is with in their power to dramatically reduce their risk of injury by developing defensive habits. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if you died noble and innocent, dead is dead.

By the same token, it's not ok to blame children for sexual abuse, but it is smart to educate them about the dangers and to empower them with the skills to be able to avoid it.

reader5000 12 years ago | |

True but if your expectation is traffic travelling at 30, it's unclear if normal defensiveness will help you for a car going at 60+.

InclinedPlane 12 years ago | | |

It's hard to say without knowing the exact circumstances. Personally I think it would help. If you see a car on the road headed your way as you're crossing the street it's pretty easy to tell how fast it's going, especially 5 mph vs 15 vs 30 vs 60. And if it's going fast your inclination should be to keep a sharp eye on it and maybe try to run out of the way if it appears as though it's not slowing down at a point when it should. But then again there are some intersections where you just can't see or keep track of all the traffic that could be dangerous to you, but on the whole I'd say it's smarter to do so than not, it takes little effort.

dllthomas 12 years ago | | |

Wonder if he'd have heard the sirens...

ryanmolden 12 years ago | |

Heck, I would say the same for when you are driving, multi-ton pieces of steel in motion are unforgiving. I have never trusted people to, say, not blow a red light/stop sign, to turn, even if they have their blinkers on, to not try to cram in front of me at the last second on a packed exit even if there is no room, etc.. Obviously it is more important for pedestrians as they are unprotected, but people generally being more aware/defensive while driving would be a good thing.

base698 12 years ago | |

Same goes for train crossings and green lights. Don't delegate your life to a signal that can break when all you have to do is look both ways as a cross check.

readme 12 years ago | |

This. I am constantly asked when driving, sometimes walking, "why don't you go" -- the answer is "I'm waiting to see that everyone else has stopped first!" The same is true when crossing through an intersection in your car. Someone rolling up to the stop sign, don't go! Wait for complete stops, always.

rocky1138 12 years ago | |

Frustrating, but true.

ChrisNorstrom 12 years ago |

After watching police chases on TV my whole life, I really want to know:

What's the logical strategy in a police chase? Just keep driving after each other? It risks the lives of hundreds living and walking in the path of the chase all for the sake of punishing 1 or 2 individuals. It just doesn't seem to add up to me.

What a shame we lost someone so brilliant for nothing.

jtchang 12 years ago |

It is always sad to lose someone in your community. The Oculus Rift seems like a pretty cool invention and hope things turn out well.

What do you even say when stuff like this happens? He was a developer and in a way we never know when each of us will meet our ends.

enraged_camel 12 years ago | |

A couple of weeks ago, one of the VPs in my company suddenly passed away. A day of vomiting and diarrhea, followed by hospitalization, and shortly after that, gone.

He was 43 years old. Incredibly active, healthy and fit guy. He died of a very rare staph infection. By the time he was diagnosed, it was too late.

I think the lesson is that life is really short, and you never know when it will end. So you better make the most out of the time allotted to you, and the fact that you don't know how long you have left should only fuel your efforts.

R.I.P. Andrew.

TwoBit 12 years ago | | |

Rare staph infection you say?? Was he recently in the hospital for an unrelated reason?

waterlesscloud 12 years ago | |

It's awful when anyone dies, but I have to confess this seems so much worse to me since he was on the verge of seeing the fruits of his labor result in a historic success.

lmm 12 years ago | | |

It was getting hyped up by the tech press and he was doing what he presumably loved right up to the end. I think this was probably a pretty happy point in his life. For me, actually finishing a project like this means a brief rush of satisfaction and then a funk of ennui. I think I'd rather die while I'm still working on something than when it's finished, and certainly it would have been worse to go while the company was still scrounging capital.

slacka 12 years ago |

It's a sad day. His many contributions to the open source and the gaming communities will live on, like his work on VBjin-OVR, a Virtual Boy Emulator.

http://code.google.com/p/vbjin-ovr/source/browse/oculus/Comm...

samatman 12 years ago |

Last night, I was walking to the store (the Walgreens next to the Berkeley Bowl, for you Bay Areans) and a drunk driver shot up onto the pavement about twenty feet in front of me. It was mere coincidence that my partner and I avoided the hospital or worse. This is a sobering thing to read the morning after that.

Seriously: there was nothing I could have done to avoid that. By the time I was reacting, the car was already on the sidewalk. It was luck. Yeah, be careful out there, sure. Can we have self-driving cars REALLY SOON PLEASE? I hear rumors that they work, and don't drink on the job.

ChuckMcM 12 years ago | |

I had a similar experience about 20 years ago, except it was a car in front of me that got hit in the side. The occupants were seriously injured (I don't believe either of them died) but it reminded me how random life (and death) can be.

I try to use that memory to motivate me if I'm procrastinating on something.

krakensden 12 years ago | |

I don't know why, but I regularly see drivers who are clearly, obviously plastered, weaving about between the Ashby BART and the Shattuck/Adeline split.

daeken 12 years ago | | |

Get the plate, note the direction they're heading in, and call the police. That's what they're there for, and you may just save a life (or lives).

devrelm 12 years ago | |

Had a similar experience a few months ago while out with my wife in NYC. We had the walk sign at a Y intersection. A driver came through the turn going at least 30 mph. He came within an arm's length of hitting us. I definitely pay more attention now when crossing the road, even if I do have the walk sign.

sbuccini 12 years ago | |

Berkeley can get crazy, especially that area of town. Glad to hear you're okay.

ck2 12 years ago |

Was it responsible for the police to chase them at this time?

two vehicles full of people involved in some type of criminal activity

Was this yet another incident where the police self-escalated the situation?

I sure hope there was a precise reason this happened and not that "they smelled pot".

seanmcdirmid 12 years ago | |

How can we even judge? The police back off often when they sense that a chase is too dangerous, they make a judgement call. Sometimes they don't have perfect information however, and shit just happens. It is not like the movies.

I'm sure the officers involved are second guessing their behavior now, its not like people die every day like this. But really, its a tough job, we aren't really in a position to judge.

ck2 12 years ago | | |

Police in the US are notorious for causing chases in dangerously crowded areas and endangering innocents.

So much so they had to pass laws to make it illegal for police to do chases in many cities/situations to stop them.

http://www.pursuitsafety.org/

http://kristieslaw.org/

http://abcnews.go.com/US/police-chases-california-injured-10...

More bystanders are injured or killed during high-speed police chases than by stray bullets. In California, more than 10,000 people have been injured and over 300 people killed because of police chases in the last decade, according to newly released statistics from the California Highway Patrol.

Nationally, it's estimated nearly 300 people die each year as a result of high speed police chases.

Xanza 12 years ago |

I just wanted to say two things here. One, this is an incredibly damaging tragedy. I truly wish the best for the community, for the Reisse and Oculus VR family.

Secondly, my father has been an officer of the law for more than 25 years -- can we please not turn a thread which is being used to inform the community at large of a tragedy as a way to defame those who wish to do good in their community.

I ask out of respect of Reisse, and my good natured father that we keep at the very least this thread on topic.

jader201 12 years ago |

I've not been following the Oculus Rift very much, other than waiting for its release and keeping an eye on which games might support it once it's released. So I don't really know much of the history or the company.

Can someone share how Reisse was involved w/ the Oculus Rift? Looking at the company's profile[1], it makes no mention of Reisse, and lists Luckey as the "Founder".

Even searching their site[2] makes no mention of Reisse, other than a recent discussion[3] about his untimely death. And those discussions seem to only refer to him as an "employee".

Is calling him "co-founder" in the title truly accurate?

[1] http://www.oculusvr.com/company/

[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=reisse+site%3Aoculusvr.com

[3] https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&...

SolarNet 12 years ago | |

Many early employees are truly better called founders, just ones that didn't officially work at the company until after it's founding.

He could have been moonlighting for them, he may have helped come up with the original idea, or work with the company to solve some of the core design challenges.

Just because his title wasn't co-founder doesn't mean he wasn't as important as any other founder or early employee.

jader201 12 years ago | | |

I agree, and I wasn't trying to diminish his role. I was just trying to understand where the "co-founder" in the title came from. How did the submitter know he was truly a co-founder?

I couldn't find mention of this anywhere, so I was assuming the submitter knew some history of him that I couldn't find on their site.

mckoss 12 years ago |

I was about to lament how reckless the police were to be in a high-speed pursuit, but it's hard to fault them when this began with a fatal shooting of an officer at the beginning of the encounter.

Just a really sad turn of events.

indrax 12 years ago | |

>there was a physical altercation between police and 26-year-old Gerardo Diego Ayala that ended with a fatal officer-involved shooting.

That doesn't necessarily mean the officer was shot.

guttermaw 12 years ago | | |

It was not. A man got out of the vehicle, the police shot him, and then the chase began.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/05/santa_ana_pede...

He died of his injuries. His name was Gerardo Diego Ayala.

peter_l_downs 12 years ago | |

Doesn't seem to me like the police were the ones who hit Reisse:

    > Investigators allege 21-year-old Victor Sanchez and two
    > other suspects then took off in a Dodge Charger. With 
    > Sanchez at the wheel, the Charger slammed into two
    > vehicles during the pursuit before hitting Reisse, police
    > said.

(from the article.)

neotek 12 years ago | | |

The argument is that the police should never be involved in a high-speed chase because it threatens the safety of the general public and often ends in tragedy like this.

mhartl 12 years ago |

People are missing the main point here. This was a terrible, but not a senseless, tragedy, and there is an important lesson to learn.

It's not "be more careful when crossing the street". Being a super-defensive pedestrian might have saved Andrew Reisse, but that's not the main point. It's not "don't have high speed chases". Perhaps different police policies might have averted this tragedy, but that's not the main point, either.

The main point is that roving paramilitary gangs rule large swathes of Santa Ana, California, and virtually every other big city in America. These gangs have not been broken because the police lack the mandate to break them. (My father consulted for the Santa Ana police department for nearly 30 years; they feel powerless against the gangs.) The gangs probably wouldn't last a week against a vigorous application of military-grade force, but such an application of force is politically untenable at present. This means that the current political system itself is complicit.

Don't blame the pedestrian or the police. Blame the gangs and the system that protects them.

djloche 12 years ago |

Saddening news aside, this is terrible reporting. Reisse was killed in a car accident caused by gang members who were fleeing from the police.

tyoma 12 years ago |

This is extremely sad, but it made me think of an important topic: contingency planning.

Pretty much every organization I've worked for was missing a "key developer got hit by bus" plan for at least one major project.

Buttons840 12 years ago | |

If that key developer did get hit by a bus then:

1) A new key developer would be hired to maintain the project, and things would be a little rough for a couple months but the company would survive.

2) Every decent person would care more about the key developers life than the "major project".

This so called "bus factor" has always bugged me. Documentation is good, but talk of untimely death by bus is silly.

cperciva 12 years ago | | |

This so called "bus factor" has always bugged me. Documentation is good, but talk of untimely death by bus is silly.

The reference to untimely death by bus strike is an example of macabre geek humour; not a serious suggestion that the greatest threat to developers is posed by motorized mass transportation.

Most often developers leave projects -- and especially open source projects -- for far more banal reasons: They move to a different position and don't have the time or inclination to continue maintaining their old code.

csense 12 years ago | | |

> things would be a little rough

Can someone else get access to all the company-owned code the developer was working on? Is someone insisting that the developer doesn't keep three months of work on a laptop? Who else can get access to the passwords and keys for company-owned servers and services maintained by the developer?

statusgraph 12 years ago | | |

I agree with you, but I think most bus factor considerations are about poaching/the developer leaving =)

untog 12 years ago | |

I don't know that there is any need to be so dramatic. "Key developer gets a new job" is pretty much the exact same contingency plan.

smacktoward 12 years ago | | |

Not really. "Key developer gets a new job" means they are still available for you to ask questions to, get help locating passwords/keys from, and so forth. In the "key developer gets hit by bus" scenario, you don't have that luxury.

The idea isn't so much about being hit by a bus as "what would we do if a key contributor were to vanish off the face of the Earth with no notice or warning?" If the specific idea of the Death Bus seems too grim, feel free to replace it with another deus ex machina that would have the same effect (alien abduction, Christian rapture, surprise release of a new season of Firefly, etc.).

vertis 12 years ago |

This reminds me of something my dad, a minister of religion, used to repeat constantly "No-one is promised tomorrow". I'm pretty sure he was trying to impress on a given audience "Repent now, you may not get another chance".

I tend to approach it from a different angle. Be brilliant and live your life now, you may not get the chance to do so later. It sounds like he was doing awesome things, so one can only hope that his work lives on.

My condolences to Andrew's family.

dynjo 12 years ago |

Terribly sad news, at least he got to experience the VR dream in his lifetime and see that Oculus is destined for the history books.

elleferrer 12 years ago |

This is truly upsetting. We just lost a brilliant mind and creative genius. RIP, Andrew Scott Reisse.

znowi 12 years ago |

Damn, news like that surely make you note the fragility of our lives. Too bad. Condolences to the family. Keep yourself safe fellow hackers.

joeblau 12 years ago |

My prayers go out to the family and his colleagues. I was just watching the Kickstarter video about Oculus yesterday.

csense 12 years ago |

The HN headline's grammar is ambiguous and could be improved. It could be read to mean "The co-founder was killed by a gang while he (the cofounder) was trying to escape police," or it could mean "The co-founder was killed by a gang while they (the gang) were trying to escape police." (According to the article, the latter meaning is intended.)

The HN headline is still many times more informative than the linked article's headline, "Santa Ana police chase: Pedestrian identified." Even considering the newspaper's audience (who, unlike HN, might not know or care enough about Oculus Rift to merit its mention by name in the headline), the fact that the pedestrian was killed by a gang while the gang was trying to escape police would presumably still be of interest.

navs 12 years ago |

My co-worker and I were talking about the Oculus Rift only a few days ago. We finally got our hands on the Leap motion device and were thinking up wondrous mashups with the Oculus Rift. What a terrible tragedy. Such a pity he can't be there to witness the Rift's success.

venomsnake 12 years ago |

This is sad. Condolences to the friends and family. I do hope that this won't kill the momentum behind the Oculus Rift - seems like amazing piece of tech and will be sad to be lost because of that.

scoot 12 years ago | |

Unfortunate choice of words...

ddispaltro 12 years ago |

It's so easy to focus on the bad in a situation like this but I wonder how many successful police pursuits that resulted in lives being saved. It reminds me of airbags, if they save 99% of lives but end up causing 1% of deaths then it is seen as a bad thing, but in reality it is really saving lives. It's just a terrible situation that's hard to understand, there is no black in white right answer.

sthkr 12 years ago |

Seriously? :( this sucks.

aespinoza 12 years ago |

Wow this is just a couple of miles from our office. This is definitely shocking, and scary at the same time.

moron4hire 12 years ago |

You can be a defensive pedestrian, but that's not always going to work. Something like this, a police chase, it defies predictability. It could happen so fast that it doesn't matter if you're completely present and aware, you could still get hit.

kurd_debuggr 12 years ago |

This is really sad and a great loss to the community over in Santa Monica. With this sort of thing happening so infrequently in tech, it makes events like these all the more of a loss, for our entire industry.

Condolences to the family and Oculus team.

gohrt 12 years ago | |

This happening so infrequently in tech makes it less of a loss. There are communities terrorized by criminal- and police-related violence, that lose so much more. Events like this should be a wake up call to be aware that tragedies happen all the time outside our bubble. And what can we do to prevent them?

bking 12 years ago |

This is horrible. The Oculus is just gearing up to be something great.

It is kind of morbid, but This is going to turn into an interesting case study on how a company stays afloat when a major influence is removed from the picture.

RIP Andrew Reisse

sjtgraham 12 years ago |

It's always sad when someone brilliant loses life at such a young age. It's even worse that it was at the hands of a piece of shit criminal trying to save his own skin and is still alive.

Very sad. Rest in peace.

dataisfun 12 years ago | |

I totally agree. It's the fact that a degenerate like that can end the life of someone awesome--the asymmetry--is what is really curse-worthy hard to understand.

haydenevans 12 years ago |

Just terrible :( Why does it always seem like the worst and most insignificant wastes of human beings always take away great ones?

est 12 years ago | |

> the worst and most insignificant wastes of human beings always take away great ones?

Because you never cared about non-great ones. Observer bias.

soheil 12 years ago | |

Just because he wrote some code that was used so widely doesn't make him more significant than a janitor who cleans after you, or the "gang" member who was evading the brutal cops for a chance for his freedom. The sooner we realize people are equal because they're human fucking beings the greater hope for humanity to avoid its imminent demise.

sejje 12 years ago | | |

What makes someone more significant, then? What's your measure?

People aren't equal, you can't make it so by saying it.

The man who died was more significant than the man who killed him.

tomjen3 12 years ago | | |

Gang members are absolutely not equal humans, as they make their life by taking, not creating. Janitors do.

CamperBob2 12 years ago | | |

Wow, this post is crazy enough to deserve its own DSM V entry.

yarou 12 years ago | |

Because life is random and stochastic. The sooner you realize that your very existence was simply a roll of the dice, the more liberated you will become.

ori_b 12 years ago | |

Because worthwhile people generally don't go around killing others.

lostlogin 12 years ago | | |

Don't be too sure - some of histories supposedly greatest people have also been mass killers. Your views on them largely just depend on which side of the conflict(s) you were on and what time you are in. To take a fairly simple example, Churchill. Lots of good, lots to admire. But plenty of dark decisions and many deaths attributable to these.

philliphaydon 12 years ago |

RIP Andrew Scott Reisse, you wont be forgotten.

mikeflynn 12 years ago |

Horrible news. He seemed like a brilliant guy,

serf 12 years ago |

a guy dies, and the number one comment is a guy spouting off a public PSA about pedestrian safety?

kickingvegas 12 years ago |

Rest in peace Andrew Scott Reisse. Cliché but true, nobody is ever promised tomorrow.

boneheadmed 12 years ago |

Too sad. What a loss. Condolences for the poor family. We never know the day or the hour when death will come, which is something to be mindful of. I have found this an interesting site to reflect on our eternal destiny: http://needgod.com/

bjliu 12 years ago |

So depressing...a grim reminder that some things are simply out of our control

sidcool 12 years ago |

Saddened. RIP, sir.

felipelalli 12 years ago |

legalize the drugs and the gangs will die.

tomjen3 12 years ago |

And they even let the driver recover in a hospital, at tax payers expense.

And of course no mention of the officers name.

Joeboy 12 years ago | |

> And of course no mention of the officers name.

I'm guessing you think a police officer was killed, because of the ambiguous (I would say misleading) wording of the article. Or are you saying you want the name of the officer that killed Gerardo Diego Ayala?

tomjen3 12 years ago | | |

I want the name of the chasing officer.

Not to harm him, I just want to show his family the picture of the guy their father helped kill.

mpclark 12 years ago | |

>And they even let the driver recover in a hospital, at tax payers expense.

What would you prefer to happen?

tomjen3 12 years ago | | |

Through the guy in prison. He is a murderer, and he had an arrest warrent for parole violations; there is no question about his guilt.

If we must spend the money, at least spend it on somebody who deserves it.

kenrick 12 years ago |

This is just awful

edo 12 years ago |

F* this.

Demiurge 12 years ago |

W T F :(

flaktrak 12 years ago |

so sad!

nutate 12 years ago |

kmasters 12 years ago |

I believe if I remember correctly, LAPD had a stand down on high speed chases years ago due to the property damage and personal injuries of innocent bystanders.

The police have a job to do, but in some areas, the level of aggression with which they pursue their duties is beyond reasonable and seems like adrenaline addiction.

ninetenel 12 years ago |

my heart goes out to his family and friends.

junkilo 12 years ago | |

We've lost one of our own. May the oculus team benefit -- not suffer from his passing. Makes me sad.

monocoder 12 years ago |

That's what happens when a government gives rights to it's citizens to own guns!

venomsnake 12 years ago | |

<sarcasm>That is what happens when a government gives rights to it's citizens to own cars and have freedom of movement.<sarcasm/>

He was hit by a car.

hga 12 years ago | |

Given that happened in California, in an area where none but the rich and famous can legally carry guns in any manner, you're basically wrong (I grant that criminals have an easier time getting guns here, but they don't have much difficulty in many countries where guns are banned).

Houshalter 12 years ago | |

*cars