skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to post a link to that exact book - the one thing I will say is that the book is basically divided into two sections. The first section is a history of the militarization of US police that is fascinating, well-researched, and full of 50 years of context that I was totally unaware of. The book is worth reading for that alone.

The second section, really the last 1/3rd of the book, is a series of essays and articles, more op-ed than factual history. This is where Radley Balko's libertarian streak comes out full-bore, and it moves from semi-scholarly work to libertarian polemic. It's fine, of course, it's his book and he's entitled to write what he likes, but there's a lot of anti-government rhetoric and anti-social policy language in there that I found offputting.

In addition, throughout the book, the police are described in aggressive terms, they're always "threatening" or "menacing" or "assaulting" - while the people being arrested are "cowering", "hiding", "pleading".

It seems like it would be hard to know exactly in many cases what everyone was doing, and instead Balko is putting his emotional slant on what was happening. Then, in the second section of the book, he freely admits that he started tracking and writing about when dogs were killed during SWAT raids because it got a much more impassioned response from readers.

None of this removes the value of the book, which as I said was excellent. But I think I would have appreciated a little more nuance in some of the tone.
3:0 to Physicists I think
Well, first off, you're technically correct in the general sense that women don't need tech jobs, and that the tech industry doesn't need women specifically. But STEM does need more people since the number of applicants for STEM jobs is dangerously low in the USA, and our science literacy as a nation is dangerously poor. So since there's all these women on the planet, and they're underrepresented in the STEM field, it makes sense to increase the number of STEM jobs by taking that underrepresented population and moving it toward STEM. Getting more women into STEM helps everyone.

As for why you believe there isn't a demand for these things, it's basically confirmation bias. You don't personally hear a need for more people in these sectors so you assume the need doesn't exist. But in fact there's been a lot more need for nurses in the past decade, so male nurses would definitely be welcomed in terms of increasing the applicants for those jobs. Teachers less so because they have a hard enough time making ends meet with miniscule budgets without adding more teachers to the roles.

All these industries are different and have different motivators as to whom they try to get more jobs to. But behind any great push to get more people into an industry you'll probably find economic motivators, not a demand for social justice. So focus less on the fact that it's women, and focus more on the fact that it's half the population not going after STEM jobs.
CERN experiments report new Higgs boson measurements
Crosswalk – web runtime for ambitious HTML5 applications
Spot on, for sure a mentor is great but introspection is a powerful tool.

The first thing I ask when I start coaching someone is what are your goals with your career? In my career I can literally boil it down to four points:

1) Passion

2) Leadership

3) Compensation

4) Hybrid (Tech + Business)

At any time in my career I can score these 1-5 (5 being best) and the closer I get to 20 the better I feel. That said this is just the "what's your motivation" phase, next comes the "what's standing in your way" phase where you look deeply at your strengths and weaknesses and see how they block your ability to receive what you're looking for in your career. Then comes the "ok so now what" phase where you start setting goals to help shore up your weaknesses and magnify your strengths. Then it's "rinse and repeat" basically measure, adjust and execute.
Consistently journaling has been my most valuable habit over the past 5 years.

It's the only way to relive thoughts I'll never have again because I become jaded. It's also a great way to grasp just how much of everything I forget. I wonder if I'd even have any personal stories to tell from the time I studied in Prague if I hadn't written so much of it down while enamored by it all.
And if the child gets to live, the family is stuck with the healthcare costs circus. What a terrifying story.
Race has nothing to do with it. Lots of meth labs getting busted in rural America are run by white dealers.
IMO,a multiplexing system should be done: a stack emits a given standard output. Which then gets read by a operating system package builder and ginned into the OS standard format.
At minimum, you need citations for the claims, hence I downvoted you. As for the rest, I simply disagree.
I think the mentality among the police is "I'm going home tonight, no matter what."

Given the opportunity to wear body armor and carry a rifle when confronting a perceived threat, many will take it.
On a personal level, I'm very excited to know that I won't have to try and integrate Alipay in any of our products anymore. It's nightmare to deal with, even for our Chinese team.

But for Stripe, it's a huge step forward into tapping in a massive market. Most Chinese people can't (or won't) use card to pay online; they simply have Alipay connected to their bank account or use prepaid cards. Good move Stripe.
> Maybe there needs to be more publicity about drug gangs and the slaves created by the drug cartels. They exist, and they are heinous.

This is really my main concern with the "war on drugs". Keeping the drug trade illegal doesn't get rid of it - rather, it just pushes it underground. The result is organised crime, violence, and so many other major problems.

Admittedly, I'm very far removed from the situation, but I find it difficult to imagine that there'd be so much of these problems if you could just walk into a store and buy your drug of choice in the same way that you buy cigarettes or alcohol. You don't see gangs and cartels forming from around the trade of household cleaning supplies or consumer electronics.
It's entirely legal to own a semi-automatic AK47 (although not if you use and/or possess drugs...but my point stands, as the gun itself would have been perfectly legal).

Signs point to this guy not storing the rifle in a safe fashion, however.
Just to be clear, are you saying that this new payment method will only be supported (at least for now) for those with a checkout.js integration, not those using stripe.js and their own front-end/branding?

Obvious feature request #1: Support it via stripe.js and the usual APIs as soon as possible.

Obvious feature request #2: In the meantime, provide a version of checkout.js that is (a) stable and (b) simplified to support Alipay only (so those of us who prefer to accept other payment methods can still do so via stripe.js without winding up with multiple confusing options and bad UX).
Drug cartels and drug slavery are utterly orthogonal to what amounts to misdemeanor possession, which is essentially what many of these cases (including, for all I know, this one) amount to.

Should the SWAT team be able to toss a flashbang into your child's crib because you have a dime bag in the nightstand?
Introducing the Orchestrate Ruby Gem
You probably would have been better off with typed arrays and fragment shaders, if you were going for performance.
Would rewriting the application just to be able to provide releases make sense? What other benefits can one get when writing command line applications in Go? (as compared to python)

I am asking this because I myself plan to write a small command line tool in Python. I have never wrote (or read) a line of Go though, so would like to know.
Intuitively I agree with this, and think militarization of law enforcement is terrifying, but this report at a glance has some issues. I want to understand the trade off here, but they fail to pose SWAT as a real trade off for officer safety in many cases. For example, they cite that of the raids where police predicted weapons, 35% of the raids turned out to have weapons, 32% did not, and for the remaining 33% it is unknown if they did or did not. The way they interpret this data is:

"We found in the course of our investigation that the
SWAT team found weapons (the overwhelming majority of
which were firearms such as handguns, but rarely assault
rifles) in just over one-third of the incidents in which they predicted finding them, which suggests the police are not particularly good at accurately forecasting the presence of weapons."

This is transparent bullshit, because in their very table they state that a third of the raids it was unknown. If we assume that the 'unknown' state is random (an assumption), ie ~half of those unknown accounts had weapons and the rest didn't based upon the known positive and negative rates being close to even, this means that no, the police didn't guess only one third of the time correctly, they guessed correctly approx 53% of the time, more than half of the time. The next step is to ask if a 50/50 chance of being right that you might be under threat of a weapon means you should err on the side of SWAT, but they don't ask that, they just say that we should "we would expect them to find weapons in nearly all of the incidents studied." Says who? Risk is a game of probabilities, and obviously there needs to be some threshold for which cops deploy SWAT with regards to the likelihood of weapons being present. Regardless of if the randomness of the unknown assumption is true, they are transparently mis-characterizing the data here.

Additionally, their section on race seems transparently broken. They are measuring absolute measures, not relative measures. To understand race bias in SWAT, you need to understand the rate at which SWAT is deployed for warrants for a given demographic. Instead, they spent most of their analysis (if this rate is in there, I missed it) on absolute metrics; but we all know already that on an absolute basis, law enforcement spends a disproportionate amount of time in minority communities. You can argue if this is due to systemic bias or not, but this is obviously a dependent variable if we're trying to answer the question "Do cops deploy SWAT more if they are dealing with minorities?", and it doesn't seem to be treated as such.

edit: Classy downvotes, HN thought police!
I think this type of thing is happening much more than people think.
Audiophiles are funny.

I had a huge problem of making an D/A converter with enough precision for instrumentation a while back, but designing some digital I/O with enough bandwidth for it was a nightmare. Then I looked at the Internet and saw an audiophile complaining that a soundcard[1] with 20dB less noise than my design was crap.

1 - A PCI express card, of course. Didn't try that bus. I'd have a really bad time manualy creating a board for it.
I was with you all the way up until your demonstrably bullshit conclusion.

This is HN, so remember to get the polish out before you commence with the bootlicking.
Features Swift stole from Eiffel
How To Learn Angular
Indeed, in years of writing PHP I only know of C99 because I found endless copies of it squirreled away, obfuscated, appended to other files, base64 encoded, and/or masquerading as jpg files after one of our servers was compromised.
Dvara: A Mongo Proxy
> > get a mentor

> Seems easier said than done.

Point made, it's work, and successful people will tell you that the road ahead is full of work. Take the challenge, figure out how to find and develop a trusting relation with someone who will be able to help you progress in your career.

> Probably not with coworkers either..

Yes I would suggest outside the org or if the org is big enough someone who isn't directly up your reporting tree. At one job I picked an exec who had lot more experience then me but he was in finance so he wasn't worried about my motivations, I didn't want his job nor did he want mine.
The problem is most people think/thought the police are there to "protect and serve" them (the people/individuals) when they are not. The police are there to protect and serve the government.

ADD: The government is SUPPOSE to protect and serve the people.
And, of course, you are right.
Not really. There have been monkey studies showing males like physical things like cars and girls like nurturing things like dolls. It's PC to deny genetic differences in play at this point, but it isn't scientific.
it is even frowned upon to stay at home to work when I'm sick.

That's just stupid and lazy management. If people do not work when they are working at home then get rid of them. Period. For all the talk of people getting fired in the US, it seems to happen so rarely.

As for coming in sick that is horrible. Both my current and last job wanted sick people to stay home so as to not get the rest of the office sick.
Oh come on, you can do better than that.
Will containers kill the hypervisor?
That's a fascinating map. One of the interesting things it shows is that the density of botched raids is not correlated to population density.

What that suggests is that the raids are the results of authories in some areas not knowing what they're doing while authorities in other areas do.
I have a feeling that certain things (e.g., reduce) will suddenly become much more performant with tail call optimization coming in ES6.
This looks pretty interesting. I've never been contented with the iOS default contacts but haven't really found a way to replace that.

I think I'll download the beta and play around with it for a while. I do like the Android way of handling contacts.

I'd be more reassured by seeing a fuller privacy policy rather than a vague promise not to violate privacy, but perhaps that'll come in time.
Not really, he was saying people have been and continue to be capable of terrible things.

United States law enforcement included, as described in the article.
One of the local stories I heard was about a PE teacher who knocked on the girls' changing room and told them that whatever activities they were doing are starting. He didn't enter, just wanted to get their attention and shouted this through the door. Someone got scared by that, reported that he wanted to enter the changing room and that resulted in lost job - not sure if he was reported anywhere higher in that specific case. (it was mentioned in discussion between coaches, because the local club had changing rooms that had to be used)

Would the same thing happen if it was a female teacher? Probably not. Would it happen with female teacher and boys' changing room? I'd say highly unlikely.
You're certainly always allowed to use a typedef. I can just tell you from my experience that auto is more than "a nice thing to have in very specific circumstances." For me, at least, it's "a nice thing to have in almost all circumstances, with a handful of exceptions." When in doubt, I type "auto."
That, exactly. And I simply cannot fathom how the response to a flash-bang grenade in a cot with a child in it can ever be "well, obviously there was no way for us to know there were children, so don't blame us" instead of "OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE WE'RE SO SORRY!"
If only we spent the money on schools and social programs instead of prisons and SWAT teams!
Completely disagree with just about every point.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's HIGHLY relevant to the discussion.
> Teaching kids from an early age that their gender doesn't limit the career they pursue will make this more the norm than not.

I believe this is one of the main issues. We tell kids they can "be whatever you want to be", and then look at a girl funny when she wants to be an engineer or make fun of a boy for wanting to be a nurse. Society has ingrained certain ideas into what a person in a given career looks like that people are deterred (consciously or subconsciously) from that career if they don't fit the norm.

For example, what is the first image that pop's into your head when you think of a nurse? This seems to be one of the fields that has been pushed so hard into a female career in our societal consciousness, that an entire genre of porn exists around this single occupation (I want my male naughty nurse Halloween costume, damn it!).

It's at a point where societal norms would need to be broken down from the ground up, with regards to gender roles and careers, starting with kids.
>Police tend to treat suspects (and those around them) not as law-breaking citizens, but as enemy combatants. //

Isn't that at least partly because they arm themselves as if they were enemy combatants and treat the police as such. As in this case where apparently there was an AK47 in the house.
That part is really simply: they're being paid to perform precisely these actions.
I'd argue PR made any changes. Monetary damages have little to no affect on large orgs.
You don't even need to have a cop in the unmarked car. You can have a remotely viewable camera that the desk-duty cop watches from the precinct headquarters.

EDIT to address the troll: you can run these off of a car battery and stream it over the cellphone network. Quality will be rather good even then. If you can park a car, you can set up the camera. PTZ, too.
I hew to the economic view that they respond to the combination of the two, in contrast to this position paper: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/deterrence%20briefing%2... which I think begs the question. The problem is that certainty of punishment is difficult to achieve, especially where co-offenders have a strong incentive to back each other up - in this case, groups of police officers :-(
What makes you think it will ever end?
I agree with the gist of your comment, especially the clause that someone who's not passionate about a field shouldn't be forced into that field. However, I'd like to address some other points.

>I chose computers because [...] they interested me more than most other things (sports, history, friends, ...)

This sounds very sad to me. How do you mean that computers interested you more than friends? I don't see how anyone could come to say this.

>social perceptions about geeks are changing, thanks to shows like Big Bang Theory

I think TBBT is doing more harm than good to the "geek culture", whatever you want to call the "geek culture". What it's doing is enforce and rehash the stupid "nerd stereotypes" of the old, but somehow present it as "being cool". The world doesn't need that. All cultures need less poseurs, not more.

I didn't think I'd ever cite Maddox on HN, but I agree with him spot on. Take a look: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
It's not "completely" silly at all. For "normal" users, it's true that they may never need to do this. It's also a largely "safe" assumption that your site's visitors will have JavaScript enabled.

However there are security concerns when dealing with JavaScript. For example, if you've ever surfed the darknet, disabling JavaScript is highly recommended to avoid present and future exploits that could compromise your anonymity, funds, etc.
Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives?

If you treat a field as gendered in your recruiting of kids, the sum of your efforts may ultimately balance the scales more than they're self-defeating. But don't think for a moment kids are stupid enough to hear a gender-specific, or gender-targeted introduction/recruitment to some field and not walk away with some notion that a field is "for" a specific gender, or that one is "better" at it than another.
That's not an exclusive or.
Iraqis use Firechat messaging app to overcome net block
...maybe I should also add: A doll and a hair ribbon or something, too.

Hey, while not dolls, I had great fun with my teddy bears as a kid. Served up some mean teddy bear picnics. With the participation of my sister, made some teddy bear magazines for them to read. My mother baked them some miniature cakes. Of course, the bears went parachuting and such too.
This would be interesting, but it looks like it has been barely started - the CPU is barely what I would call a CPU, let alone a Lisp interpreter.

Verilog isn't a programming language (it tries to be, unfortunately). For synthesis, it is a hardware description language. Someday I'll write up some decent Verilog tutorials because there aren't any good ones on the Internet.
Ask HN: Who are the engineers that don't get hired?
All I hear about is how no one can find (good) engineers. I had dinner with a friend last night complaining that this is killing his company's growth...but they only make offers to 1/100 resumes that come-through. I've heard this before and don't think it's uncommon.

What's really wrong with these developers: undertrained, low mental horsepower, bad "fit", imperfect industry experience? All of these are true, but 99/100!?!

With such a developer shortage, can these companies really not get productive work of a slightly broader group?

Something isn't fitting together here.
My point is not to use the system package manager, but to replace the various language-specific ones with, say, Nix. It should be flexible enough to work with the different languages' build systems and conventions, while reusing all the existing systems for managing dependencies, conflicts and so on. Very little of all that logic is language specific, and it's traditionally done poorly by language-specific package managers.

Basically, I do agree on using a single package manager. I just don't think that the need to be integrated with the language is severe enough to warrant writing a new one for each language! It's much less effort for everyone involved to set integration up for an existing package manager instead.

In other words: replace Pip/Cabal/Babel/whatever with Nix, maybe with some plugins for the needs of your specific language. You would even still ship it with your language (optionally), so the only change would be maintaining a plugin, if necessary, instead of a whole manager.
I'd like to see a modern CPU that handles dynamic typing in hardware. Registers can store values as well as the type, e.g. 32 value bits and a few type bits. Basic arithmetic like addition can automatically compare the type bits and just do the right thing with a single instruction (fixnum add, float add, bignum add, etc.).

Would this be cool or am I dreaming?
Non-Aggression Pact of Gijón
The waffle cover letter: http://www.general-forums.com/threads/job-hunting-heres-the-...
"Merge pull request" Considered Harmful
We felt that Checkout was the best integration point because it let us do some nice dynamic authentication logic instead of Alipay's usual redirect-based flow. Given that subtleties involved, Alipay's constraints, and the fact that it'll no doubt need to evolve in the future (as compared to the static standardization of credit cards), I think it'd be pretty tough to expose it via a straight API.
Blackberry amongst endangered brands
Hmm, if only there was an app store with > 1 million apps already on it they could have included support for...
Young women raise big bucks for startups
So, a third of the time there were guns (though not specified if they were being used against the officers, up in a safe, or tucked away somewhere), a third of the time there were not, and a third of the time the cops were too sloppy to accurately assess the presence of firearms?

And these are the bozos we want to let have automatic weapons, body armor, and carte blanche to show up in the middle of the night? Fuck that.
> Police enforcement efforts are almost entirely preoccupied with trafficking.

I find that hard to believe. It can't be that hard to actually shut down distribution networks with the amount of resources the government uses. But if you just focus on the parts of the network near to the end user, you can burn a lot more resources and argue that you should be given even more resources. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively protect or support the major distribution networks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffic...