skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, what they are asking for is oversight on budget and practices, except that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "abolish the police departments!". If they are actually asking to abolish the police departments, that's painfully naive.
It could land on its tail.
> What could go wrong? Lunatics are running the asylum it seems. Authority is always here. Disband the police and you will get another arbitrary authority (being gangs, some kind of political repression, and so). There already are no-go zones in Europa where the police don't go anymore, believe me, you wouldn't want to live there.

> If you don't want the official police anymore, why not starting with your place, your home and your family?

Europa? I hope that’s a typo and not a dog whistle. I’ll assume good faith but your comments in this thread have a lot in common with views promoted by Identity Evropa and other white supremacist groups. Just in case you weren’t aware of the ambiguity in a typo like Europa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement
Notable people who have died from Covid-19
It will be interesting to see what crime does in response? Or more significantly, how other societal functions affected by police ( like traffic, MVA management,etc) change.
My guess is there's a contract with the current MPD and police union that currently hampers all attempts at reform. This would no longer present a problem if they started over from scratch.
>We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight.

The idea that 400 years of structural racism can be proven seems highly doubtful to me. Do you really have 400 years worth of evidence of literal outright racism? How can we hope to inspire change with rhetoric like this? This is the equivalent of simply screaming louder to get a point across. Highly ineffective unless annoying them into submission is your goal.
Happened in Baltimore after Freddie Gary and the result is over 100 more murders of black men per year than before, just not by police.
> Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better?

Probably, at least in the case of the specific precinct that killed George Floyd.

https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playgro...

> One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.

> These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
Do you (or others) actually believe this statement, or are you being contrarian to make another point?

If you do, what sort of experience / data leads one to believe that policing in western societies are top-line equivalent to the strong-armed lawlessness that exists in many failed states around the globe. Genuinely curious.
Seems like a reasonable question. A relevant example: SELinux came from the NSA.
Would it help if murdering unarmed peace keepers or whatever had extreme punishment attached? Even criminals can be trained. Kill an unarmed peace keeper, your life is effectively over.
I think a lot of it comes from opinion pieces such as this one https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... which makes incredibly confident and general statements from a very small sample size, while there are many success stories of successful complete rewrites

Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf
I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant.

They're very highly compensated too.
From the article @citylab:

"Other cities are still struggling. Kansas City, Columbus, Phoenix, and Birmingham saw homicide rates reach new highs in 2017. In Baltimore, homicides hit a new per-capita peak."

If I have to place bet, the fate of Minneapolis will be similar to that of Baltimore.
This experiment is indeed rare and very interesting. I hope they will gather data during and after the transformation so that other cities can make more informed decisions in the future.
Yes. It's even disputed whether Hilbert discovered it first. But regardless of einstein or hilbert, technological advancements would have necessitated the discovery of general relativity. Just like the advances of telescopes/observation lead to kepler's planetary laws or the advances of computing technology led to the theory of computation.

Science can lead to new technologies, but new technologies lead to new science as well.

https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/whathassciencedone_03

The general direction of science and technology in the first half of the 20th century indicates that general relativity, theory of computation, etc would have been discovered.
Related:

https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362

At some point the complexity of a system becomes great enough that it's impossible to simulate it perfectly.

The interesting question for me lately is how and under what circumstances can you ignore the complexity for some purpose.

For example, underlying what is represented in that poster is some set of physical processes that are ignored in that poster. The system at that physical level of description would be even more complex, probably too complex to represent on a poster. So why the level of analysis of the poster? Similarlly, at some point it's easier to talk about eating and fatigue than it is the citric acid cycle. How and why do you move from one level of analysis to another? Some of it probably depends on what is being explained, but some of it might not.
I often do.

My point is that this stuff doesn’t have to be boring and dry. It’s okay for content to reflect having fun when you’re having fun.

Even my college professors used jokes in their lectures.
Sonic 3D’s Impossibly Compressed Logo – How’s it done? [video]
No, my point was that decisive governments willing to move quickly who are also able to motivate their populations to move with them (be they capitalist or communist) are doing far better here than governments whose leaders just put their fingers in their ears and tried to ignore the problem.

I lived in the US for 20 years, half my adult life, people there pride themselves in having a national government that is structurally deadlocked and unable to make sudden changes ... while this may be a useful attribute much of the time there are times, and a pandemic is one of them, when the government has to move really quickly - if you've fired all the experts and are more worried that your party's investors will lose money than you are that your voters will die then you get just the wrong sorts of results
He didn't even read it before approving it. Amazing. No wonder he had to resign.
Only because it was filmed. The entire system tried to cover it up at first from the police force, to the coroner, to the DA.

When two police were fired and charged with assault for shoving a 77 year old man. 49 other officers resigned in protest.

There are plenty of cases where police acted inappropriately. Like raiding the wrong house and shooting a lady while she was sleeping.

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/855705278/sleeping-while-blac...

And nothing happens. The entire system is corrupt.
Even so, the third world is not our standard. We’re ready for the version two improvements by virtue of the iterative process, and our own expectations for ourselves.
I think consensus is that it depends on the code.

There's a consensus against pointless rewrites, but that's different.
>> Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test,

This is true, but I think the new problem that our industry is facing now is "How much effort and how many resources are required to make this software work" - This leaves a lot of room for manipulation and people do exploit it in most companies (especially large corporations). These are many tech companies these days where it takes 20 developers to produce results which could in fact have been done by just 1 developer in the same amount of time. I'm not exaggerating the numbers here.

I think the problem lies in perverse corporate incentives (or rather, the absence of meaningful incentives) and the way in which it affects how people pick their battles. Most employees pick all the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons.

The more money a company has and the more solid their monopoly is, the more employees will be focused on internal politics rather than value production.
Usually incrementally fixed code doesn't actively fight back.

(there must be some programmer war-stories out there about code that has somehow rewritten itself to restore a previously fixed bug)
Any references you could share?
I can tell you what isn't a defense against a gun: A baton, a taser, teargas, or any of the other toys that ordinary police get to use in the UK.
A model for this is the PSNI in Northern Ireland. Irish catholic’s faced arguably worse racist violence from the Royal Ulster constabulary. Faith and trust was lost on both sides within the community. Seems to be working given that there’s been 19 years of peace over there.
It should be, but the market is distorted :/
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion here either way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that all medical advice is (or at least should be) sensitive to the broader context of a person’s life. Consider: is it safe to take morphine? If I’m a healthy 20-something looking for escape, absolutely not. On the other hand, if I’m an 85 year old hospice patient, anything harm morphine causes is vastly outweighed by the good it does.

It doesn’t seem an irresponsible or unprecedented extension of that principle to say that if your country is rocked by civil unrest, dealing with that is more important than preventing the spread of disease.
I don't understand why there isn't a professional license required for LEOs.

I'm a paramedic. If I harmed a patient once (let along 31 times), my card would get revoked and that would be that. A cop, meanwhile, is likely to face no consequences at all, and in the absolute "worst" case scenario, they would just get a job in the next town over.
The Gold Stack: Golang and Lambda and DynamoDB
> Network failure (or configuration error) is a reality. The probability of having one part of your software unreachable is infinitely bigger now.

Network partitions are indeed a problem for distributed software in general. By the time microservices are worthwhile, however, the application likely already necessitates a distributed design.

> Remember your nice local debugger with breakpoints and variables? Forget it, you are back to printf-style debugging.

...why? What's stopping you from using a debugger? A microservice v. a monolith should make zero difference here.

At worst, you might have to open up multiple debuggers if you're debugging multiple services. Big whoop.

> SQL transaction ? You have to reimplement it yourself.

...why? What's stopping you from pulling it from a library of such transactions?

I don't even really think this is a "problem" per se. Yeah, might be inconvenient for some long and complicated query, but that's usually a good sign that you should turn that into a stored procedure, or a view, or a service layer (so that other services ain't pinging the database directly), or something else, since it simply means bad "API" design (SQL being the "API" in this context).

> Communication between your services is not handled by the programming language anymore, you have to define and implement your own calling convention

Which is arguably a good thing, since you're able to more readily control that calling convention and tailor it to your specific needs. It also gives ample opportunities for logging that communication, which is a boon for troubleshooting/diagnostics and for intrusion detection.

> Security (which service can call which service) is checked by the programming language (with the private keyword if you use classes as your encapsulation technique for example). This is way harder with microservices: the original Monzo article shows that pretty clearly.

The programming language can do little to nothing about security if all the services are in the same process' memory / address space; nothing stopping a malicious piece of code from completely ignoring language-enforced encapsulation.

Microservices, if anything, help considerably here, since they force at least process-level (if not machine-level) isolation that can't so easily be bypassed. They're obviously not a silver bullet, and there are other measures that should absolutely be taken, but separation of concerns - and enforcing that separation as strictly as possible - is indeed among the most critical of those measures, and microservices happen to more or less bake that separation of concerns into the design.
> Why would you remove the MS branding?

Barely-educated guess based on Debian / Mozilla stances on the matter: un-branding an OSS project can be necessary to avoid trademark infringement.

edit re sibling comment: yup, the MIT licensed code provided by microsoft is apparently unbranded (i.e. it wasn't "removed"). This is almost certainly done for trademark protection.
Cities live and die based on those with real roots in the city. Which is why it’s largely not worthwhile to shape city policy on the desire of “tourists” who are either transient or “if 1 bad thing I don’t like happens I’m leaving immediately”
Police in the us hold an unbroken history from the runaway slave patrols: https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a... they also feel that the public are dangerous and need to be suppressed: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/08/18/th...
There is already extreme punishment for peace officers. It doesn't stop criminals from doing it, though.
You can't teach people how to think. Like everything else only once it gets applied to do learn how to use it i.e. like everything else if you don't practice it's mostly useless because you have developed the intuition for using it (and even when you do it's still a lot of practice and you will still get it wrong.
> Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws

Do you have a citation on that? I don't think that's true. ICE detains a lot of people here legally, including citizens.

https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+det...

Regardless, ICE should be obeying international laws for human rights, which they are not.

It seems to me that ICE is meant to intimidate entire groups of people regardless of their citizenship or legal status.
> You're asking police officers to be less armed then the general public.

But most policing tasks don't involve interactions with people looking to fight to the death. Do people really react to being stopped for speeding by starting a firefight? Is that genuinely a routine concern?
What the bees know and what they do not know (1964) [pdf]
Not really comparable, but related still:

> In 2005 Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili fired "the entire traffic police force" of the Georgian National Police due to corruption, numbering around 30,000 police officers. A new force was built around new recruits. The United States State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law-Enforcement Affairs has provided assistance to the training efforts.

Haven't heard any reports of traffic mayhem in those months. Afaik after that traffic police went from post-Soviet bandits and bureaucrats to polite workforce and their DMV started handling routine procedures in ten minutes instead of ‘file your request, go home and wait for a response’.
I don't know what you want me to say.

I haven't used jitsi or uberconference. If you have, tell me why they aren't popular?

Do they do anything that Zoom doesn't?
I've watched dozens of videos from the protests, and while some people are wearing masks, many do not, and of those that do, many routinely remove them - e.g. to chant, or wear them only on part of the face, or even move them to the neck or forehead for extended times. A lot of them frequently readjust them with their hands - without washing the hands of course, which kinda defeats the whole purpose. Regular masks aren't super-efficient at long-time mass close contact anyway - they are lowering risk when you are walking on the street passing another person, with contact time measuring in seconds, but I don't think they would provide significant defense when staying in close contact for hours, especially while moving around, running, chanting, etc. Even less goes for homemade cloth masks, which many are wearing, which provide even less protection than surgical ones.
Can you provide more details?
You're actually proving my point. :)

You never defined what it is that you mean by "homoiconicity", nor did you motivate why homoiconicity specifically is important or advantageous. You made, essentially, two points:

- homoiconicity is "very very advantageous"

- excessive, non-essential complexity will hinder progress eventually

You did not argue that homoiconicity defeats complexity in any way, and you can't make such an argument without first defining what exactly you mean by "homoiconicity".

Like I said, this has only proven my point: people like to argue in favor of homoiconicity without defining it sufficiently. Until someone comes up with an unambiguous definition that exactly fits all of their preconceived notions about the word, the word itself is absolutely useless.

For further clarity: I was never arguing against any of the features that people often mean when they say "homoiconicity is important". Rather, I was arguing that the word "homoiconicity" is unimportant because nobody knows what it means. I have yet to find a truly great definition of the term that encompasses exactly all those languages people tend to feel are homoiconic and none of those that people feel aren't.
Several Asian cultures have a 'Pale is Upper-Class' belief which is why you see outside workers in those cultures being well-covered so that they don't tan too much. That's very likely also why many geishas have that snow-white make-up.

I suppose having a white sperm-donor is the ultimate in "Pale is Beautiful". It will backfire though, because humans don't usually take to mixed-race children very well, on both sides. https://www.pri.org/stories/2011-09-02/vietnam-war-babies-gr...
I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.
Racial bias is absolutely disgusting. Nothing about the color of a person's skin or their family lineage could ever give indication of the actions they're likely to take. Culture on the other hand, which by definition includes behavior, can be a pretty good indicator. Either way, the room for error grows as the time taken to make a judgement decreases and unfortunately in the situations police find themselves in they have very little time for consideration.
I think the specifics matter here and I'm not in any way versed well enough in law to know so correct me if if I'm wrong but:

Mozilla could absolutely use and distribute x265 but that would also require them to have a license for the patents required for HVEC and would also require the users to have a license (which is of course unrealistic).

The only reason firefox can play h264 is because Cisco paid for an unlimited license with subdistribution and assigned it to mozilla.

So as h265/HVEC is concerned the problem for mozilla is that even if someone wanted to pay the bill like cisco did they would not be able to get a straight answer who and what they needed to pay for a license, right?
Bitcoin won't help the economy, especially due to the gini coefficient of Bitcoin's algorithm simply creating another crypto-oligarchy.

It's a simple mathematical model, existing capital has full access to co-opt any crypto software relying on capital based supply generation of the cryptocoins. Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work systems which run warehouses full of hardware generating random numbers is no different than the existing system, unless you're trying to extract wealth from uninformed targets who are unaware of how the algorithm was designed.
The data that we have is racial bias in stop and frisk (no evidence of crime before the stop), bias is traffic stops, bias in tickets being issued for the same offense, racial bias in sentencing.

Not to mention that almost every case that came to trial against police came about after video came out. Before the video, they tried to cover it up.

How many times have we seen recently that when “the few bad apples” were fired and/or charged, “the good cops” objected?
Perhaps you are one of the few who can get an uncollateralized loan for billions to pursue endeavors that cannot pay for themselves and be able to continue to finance it with more uncollateralized debt…
> Except not, because "just dump that on a database/kv-store" is an all-too-common workaround chosen as an easy way out.

Then maybe we should be criticizing that instead? Like, that'd still happen with Haskell or Rust (or, in my experience, Erlang, with that KV store specifically being ETS). Seems like that's the thing that needs addressed.
The white flight from Minneapolis is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen before if the city council goes through with this.
If I had to put my finger on why Forth is hard for most programmers, it's like this: the structured program theorem suggests using sequence, selection, and iteration to control program logic. Assembly code on hardware architectures will assign all meaning sequence-relative, late-binding the selection and iteration. Forth doubles down on this sequence-first approach through a more versatile assignment mode(the stack) while only minimally accommodating the other two. That makes it easy to implement, while not explicitly addressing expressability.

Forth written "flat" with shallow data stack usage is assembly by another name, a wrapper for load-and-store; Forth that does everything with intricate stack manipulation is a source of endless puzzles since it quickly goes write-only.

But, like any good language with meta expression capabilities, you can work your way up towards complex constructs in Forth, and write words that enforce whatever conceptual boundaries are needed and thus check your work and use the system as a compiler. That's what breaks Forth away from being a simple macro-assembler. But you have to write it in that direction, and design the system that makes sense for the task from the very beginning. That falls into an unacceptable trade-off really easily in our current world, where the majority of developers are relatively inexperienced consumers of innumerable dependencies.
Sorry, I'm even less interested in arguing with what you think of another user who doesn't need your help defending their point.

In any case, that Java's OOP cannot be successfully deployed for business software is counterfactual. Anyone insisting on that point is unfamiliar with Java.