skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. We changed the title to say "Council of Europe". We're also burying this post since there is nothing on the page now.
I don't agree, the grenade that was thrown is not part of no-knock, it's because of the extreme violence that gang style criminals are apt to use.

You could have no-knock raids to capture evidence without needing to stun everybody.
Front.phone – JS lib that identifies, validates and formats phone numbers
Evolution of Wind Power
This swat team just committed a violent crime.

If you're looking for a small amount of drugs on a person who you aren't even sure is present in a single room with a whole pile of occupants including children and you start throwing flashbang grenades then you should be 100% culpable.

Stuff like that has no application in regular policing, definitely not in raids to arrest people on suspicion of some small time crime.

If you go after the hold-out of a nest of armed bankrobbers that have been spotted going into some warehouse then you could make a case for it but even then preferably only after they try to shoot their way out.

This is an absolutely ridiculous level of escalation in a residential area.
Yeah, nix does look pretty awesome and aware of (even actively designed for )both the system administration and development use cases. If it becomes the native package manager for some popular operating systems, I may have to eat my words about language-specific solutions.
I don't think "nonviolent" is a good description of a lot of hard drug rings. They aren't being violent right at the moment, but if they see a cop standing outside the door, they very well might just shoot him.

No-knock warrants are by and large a horrible thing and SWAT teams are drastically overused, but that doesn't make the problem they are meant to address any less real.
I'm pretty sure it was already done in the Symbolics Lisp Machine.
You really can't say it has "nothing to do with it." Just look at the sentencing guidelines between crack and coke. Listen to the original hearings from when pot was made illegal. Look at the proportion of people in prison for pot (hint: It doesn't reflect the racial make-up of users). Yes — in some parts of the country the disparity is based more on class than race. But that's definitely not the whole story.
"in the comments" doesn't count??????!!!!!

I'd wager that most people who read Hacker News spend at least twice the amount of time reading the comments as they do reading the actual articles. The discussion is one of the primary reasons for the site to exist!

Often the comments section is way more informative than the actual article.
Use the 10-10-10 Rule to Make Better Decisions
Caveat: I don't support frequent use of no-knock warrants.

That said, this is another article on the story: http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/us/georgia-toddler-injured-stu...
According to CNN, the offender had sold meth to an informant "a few hours earlier" at the house and had a previous felony weapons charge. Their target is a meth dealer who brings a gun to the table.

Given that information, it seems less crazy to think that a law enforcement team would feel that weapons and aggressive entry were the safest option to prevent a gunfight.

They got it wrong. They entered a civilian home in the same way a US military operative would enter a war zone. They focused on the one target, the one objective, the one outcome and forgot about children. They forgot this is America and we believe in protecting the rule of law and we also believe in protecting innocent children.

But put yourself in their position. If your job is to protect against the propagation of methamphetamine and you have a target who they believe has a weapon, would you knock?
There are quite a few Scheme implementations, and Racket isn't necessarily the obvious choice. However, it does surprise me to see a reimplementation rather than using at least one of the existing implementations.
And for social context too, this roughness is probably mandatory in a country where it's so easy to buy weapons : they never know what they will face (I'm not defending them either).
You're going to have a lot of kids choking on legos...
Not sure why you are being downvoted, as I can clearly see a media bias. HN is getting very PC.
Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition and hypnotize the media
Knight News Challenge awards $3.4 million for ideas to strengthen the Internet
San Francisco attacks parking spot auction apps
Did you read the article?

1. The suspect is the nephew.
2. The nephew is not the home owner.
3. The home owner wasn't the one dealing meth.
4. The nephew/suspect wasn't present at the home at the time.
>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.

"Your values are different from mine, and that is sad, because my values are better than your values."
Hypervisors Are Dead, Long Live the Hypervisor (Part 2)
White people get arrested sometimes. That doesn't mean that the war on drugs doesn't have a race discrepancy problem[1].

[1] http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/crime09.htm
The judge likely knew that his or her job is heavily contingent on his or her willingness to sign off on raids like this.
As a Canadian, I'm most interested in when Stripe will start supporting our Interac debit cards. At that point, from my point of view, it'll have taken over the world. :)
JS is executed in a single thread, but optimized JIT compilation happens on background threads. So if you don't have free cores in addition to the one the JS is running on you'll end up running in interpreter or baseline JIT for longer before the optimized code is available. Whether that affects scores depends on how the benchmark is scored and how long the lag is before the optimized code becomes available, and so forth.
There isn't really SWAT violence/school shootings happening on a "significant scale" in the context of the US either.

Re: Europe — http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/25/world/europe/eu-elections/ etc.
This should outrage any thinking citizen.

We need a new policy for instances of excessive use of force by police: if any such is suspected, all officers involved must be immediately suspended, without pay, while an impartial judge, not a police "Internal Affairs Division" (since police officers too often try to "protect their own"), investigates to see whether the claim is justified. If it's not, the officer(s) can be reinstated and given back pay.

If, however, the police did use excessive force:

(1) The officer(s) involved must be criminally indicted and prosecuted for any applicable charges. In this case, it would likely be "premeditated assault with a deadly weapon," and, if, God forbid, that child dies, the charge becomes first-degree murder. If convicted, the officer(s) must then be fired, losing all pension and benefits.

(2) The officer(s) must lose any and all immunity to lawsuit and/or damages under state law, including any "homestead exemption," making it possible for the victims' families to sue them for every penny they have. Yes, leaving them and their families living under a bridge if necessary.

Perhaps knowing that there might be consequences like this will make some of these officers think and double-check their facts before deciding to play G.I. Joe. If they think these rules are too tough, well, they always have an option: They can resign and go work for a living. To paraphrase Super Chicken, "They knew the job was dangerous when they took it."
Before deciding on a particular evaluation board, check how far they are supported by the "free" (as in beer) synthesis tools. The high-end chips are almost always excluded, but sometimes random low-end or retired parts, too! Also: Advanced features (support for high-speed serial (SATA/PCIe), embedded CPUs or advanced embedded logic-analyzer) are often subscription only. If in doubt, download and install the tool (several GB) and try to make a dummy project.

Don't start with a complicated board (including DDR-RAM, digital video out, high-speed ADCs, ...) for a few 100$ but try a very simple one first for <$50 off eBay. Your first projects will be very simple. (Mine were and still are.)

Try to learn the command-line tools as early as possible, so that your VHDL (or Verilog) sources are well structured in a source-control repository -- and builds are reproducibly created by make or maybe some build shell-scripts. The integrated development tools (with graphical configuration wizards for everything) are great for exploration, but a nightmare for proper configuration management, they produce way too much undecipherable junk.
OK, but the judge can only go by the evidence s/he is presented with. This judge might have been rubber-stamping SWAT raid applications, or might have been given sufficient evidence to think there was a serious risk of a firefight.
Is the hoverbike about to become reality?
It was out when just now, but it's already back
It's also useful when your PITA sys admin won't give you SSH but also hasn't taken any precautions against exec.

Of course, the better solution is to leave ASAP...
I wonder what the scenario is in Nordic countries which (supposedly) have much more female friendly society.
2 in 2014, 0 in 2012, 6 in 2011. Don't know what happened to their 2013 data but ~8 in three or four years shows how rare an event it is.
It might help you understand why a significant portion of Americans are reluctant to allow the government to place further restrictions on firearm ownership.
For me, it's difficult to hire an engineer that's not specifically interested in what my company is doing. A very common reason I've passed on engineers in the past is "they're okay... but they don't seem really excited about what we're doing here..."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

From what I've seen, the other 99% of resumes are people trying to break into the field but with no actual programming experience. Competent developers with a track record get snapped up really quickly, while newbies without a track record go on to apply to 100 more jobs.
The difference is that blacks may want to join the middle class. Most women (certainly the ones I have come into contact with) don't aspire to be techies.

Very poor comparison.
Illinois buys cell-tracking gear complete with NDAs, no-bid process
Unicode support is common in recent languages but only for identifiers. I was encouraged by Fortress, which used generally accepted mathematical symbols throughout, but it's gone now.
My thoughts exactly. When I saw "Perhaps the Verilog language is not so good, because some nice standard language featuers (forever-loop etc.) are missing in the Xilinx-Tools.", I had flashbacks to VHDL class, students writing loops and then wondering why they couldn't synthesize the code. You have to get yourself into a hardware mindset, thinking about clocks and state machines and enable lines rather than infinite loops.
While this specific story is staged in Atlanta, this is happening throughout the country, in every state.

We need to stop the demented practice of selling surplus military equipment to local police departments. We're not saving money. Cops don't need armored cars, drones, grenades, etc.
Aerofex's Star-Wars-Like Hoverbike
It's more of a money thing. In the US, law enforcement agencies are allowed to keep and liquidate assets seized during drug raids. This generates a lot of money for the agencies, many of which have small budgets otherwise.

As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).

I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.
>but the vast majority of Americans will never be subject to a SWAT raid or anything like it (especially if they're not involved in illegal activity). Or terrorist attacks. Or mass shootings. Or etc etc.

While that's true, it's somewhat beside the point. US citizens are far more likely to be a on the receiving end of a SWAT raid or a victim of murder than citizens of other countries at a comparable level of development. The fact that it's only a minority of the population doesn't mean there isn't a serious issue.

To put some numbers on it, the US annual murder rate is ~5 people per 100k population. Yes, it's small, but compare that to 1.0 in the UK, 1.1 in Australia, 1.6 in Canada (0.4 in my country), and clearly it's a more dangerous place.

There are estimated to be ~50-80k US SWAT raids per year annually. Of those in Maryland for example:

- half are for non-violent "part-II" crimes

- a third resulted in no arrests

- >1% resulted in an officer's weapon being fired

I didn't know those SWAT stats prior to today and I find them shocking.

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/17/s...
He's referring to the recent success of fascist parties like Front National in France. Other parties are less openly xenophobic, but as so often it's just hidden behind a thin veneer of nationalism.
An important life lesson, surely?

Actually, I remember now, before Lego I had some large wooden bricks. Building towers and bridges was pretty neat. Playing physics based puzzle games is still great fun!
I highly recommend his blog as well http://tomtunguz.com. Apparently he processes his data points in R before laying out all his recommendations. Pretty awesome.
I made between 5% and 15% on the sale. Sales were typically $10,000 - $50,000, and I was selling capital equipment. I sold about 1.2M per year, at an average of 12.5% commission (in the 90's). There was a $600 per week draw against commissions, and health care. All the other expenses I had to cover - fuel, vehicle, etc.

Top sellers liked the program, because they made a lot of money. Lower sellers would complain and want to be put on salary (so they would earn more). I preferred the full commission, but I was always #1 or #2 in sales so I earned on the high side.

It was nice, only worked 4 days a week (Monday morning and Friday afternoon off).
This Startup Says It Can Make Any Car Autonomous for $10,000
Aye, not everyone can do it. My backup plan, if dropping out appeared to be imminent, was to take on student loans. I think that for a CS major, taking on student loans isn't actually unreasonable, since CS majors have pretty decent earning potential.

What you really want to avoid is taking on student loans, then dropping out. If you do that then you'll be left with little but debt to show for it. If you instead try to work your way through school, but still drop out, at least you won't be in debt. Dropping out is far less damaging if you don't take on student loans, which is why I made student loans my backup plan.
Jerry Seinfeld on How to Not Be a Jerk in the Digital Age | Underwire | WIRED
Hey, remember that time Google accidentally made Skynet?
The far right has been rising across Europe lately[1]. And the far left for that matter[2][3].

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elinadav-heymann/sudden-rise-o...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEKr_sDUPTE&list=UUZaT_X_mc0...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1MYMVfyHi0&list=UUZaT_X_mc0...
Western and Northern Europe, more or less, would be my guess. I'm not so sure about the Baltic states.
It isn't that simple. Google's app store comes with a whole lot of tie-ins (e.g. Google Search as the default search engine, Google apps as the default apps for many things, etc). Google's ecosystem is competing directly with Amazon's ecosystem in some areas, in order to have the Play Store, Amazon would have to cut off their leg to save their arm.
I was thinking that "no-knock" raids happened very little around my area (Denver) but this map proved me wrong. While not exactly commonplace, I found several instances of raids in/around Denver based on nothing but a single informant. Some of the news stories were just like the OP--police bust into wrong place and kill someone completely innocent.
Very innovative.
I love the idea. Always thought about it.
Is this working? Is there anyone using it?
> I know they are real but I have trouble believing that people, human beings would actually act like this.

These are humans who decided, probably at a young age, that they wanted to do this sort of thing for a living. They then deliberately pursued training for this sort of thing, and got hired to do this sort of thing. Their livelihood likely depends on them continuing to do this sort of thing. It shouldn't be surprising that these people do this sort of thing. What else are they going to do?
A college acquaintance was tackled by a SWAT officer, still blinded from looking directly in surprise at the flash bang that had come through his window, bound with a zip tie, then "accidentally" kicked in the face as they tore his entire apartment from floor to ceiling looking for the cocaine being sold. When they didn't find anything in any room, they started tearing open his bedroom walls with an axe, sure he was hiding the pounds of cocaine somewhere.

Turns out they had the address of the apartment correct minus the street. He was at 3033 X, they wanted 3033 Y. They realized this about a half hour into the raid and said "oops, sorry," and simply packed up and left. His story is not in that map. I looked.

Another time, I left my apartment to walk to the convenience store across the street and was immediately met with six Springfield (OR) Police officers with weapons drawn and pointed directly at my center mass. I was ordered to kneel, not move, and provide identification, conflicting orders with which I was afraid to comply due to itchy triggers in my face; they ended up pushing my face into the sidewalk and taking the identification themselves. They thought I was a car thief they had been chasing.

The fun part of the second story is that they found my press credentials in my wallet first (this was when I worked in television) and a lieutenant magically appeared, apologized extensively, and offered me a bottle of water. She also called a bus to come treat the laceration on my forehead, and gave me her card and said if I had any problems, call her first, and we needn't make a big deal out of this, right? Just a misunderstanding, no big deal.

Police get it wrong a lot. Just because it's not near you doesn't mean it's not happening, believe me.
It was obvious from reading the story that there was more to it. The hurt and pain caused is of course awful but leaving out this sort of information is disingenuous and makes this piece essentially propaganda when it didn't need to be.

That said, your comment is off. The suspect is not the father of the child as it appears they were visiting the suspects house.
They also have the opportunity to not enter the house.

There is a reason that burglary is dangerous: it invites a confrontation that doesn't have to exist.

I'm not so starry-eyed as to imagine that the cops never need to enter a house forcefully. But they can make this happen at a time and means of their choosing. They can watch to determine how many people are in the house. They can wait for some suspects to leave and detain them individually.

It's easy for me to second-guess from here. But the time to think through all these things is before you go into the house.
Comprehensive formal verification of an OS microkernel with complete PDF available for download

http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/nictaabstracts/Klein_A...
I almost really like this tool. It's close to being seamless and Unixy, offering a pretty small command-line-option-language that expresses a bunch of journal-related commands. I like that idea, a lot. But the recipes dive right into piping text through wc and grep, so I wonder: what exactly does this offer over some bash functions and raw textfiles? I've already got cat, grep, find, tail, xargs et al.

More nitpicking: the * escaping bothers me. That's a core feature, using the * to mark things, but you have to avoid letting bash expand it. Are there any better characters? Does 'single quoting' help anything?

The fuzzy date parsing looks great. (: I also think the no-dash (new entry) vs dash (filters..) vs double-dash (action) convention is fairly neat as far as calling conventions go. Tagging things with @ seems like a useful convention, too, even if I end up using notepad.
AppScale (Open Source Google App Engine) 2.0.0 Released
Yet again in the Lisp world, the past is more futuristic than the present.
Vim for people who think things like Vim are weird and hard
People separated by a few thousand miles or a few hundred years aren't all that different.
2.3 is Groovy's current stable version. 1.4 is comparatively ancient for Clojure.
A society like the one you describe should not have nuclear weapons. Now I'm afraid that if it weren't for the MAD (mutual assured destruction) US would have been much more genocidal.
Russian government dumps Intel and AMD in favor of homemade processors
Atlanta spends over $15,000 per pupil per year on schools, 50% over the OECD average, and about as much as Switzerland (although, adjusted for PPP Atlanta still spends much more than Switzerland).
> The thought of people dying in the streets from preventable disease and injury sounds pretty horrendous.

Funny that you raise FUD in your very next sentence, because that is itself FUD. Since the 1980s hospitals have been obliged to treat anyone who shows up.

> And it turns out that this medication is not as effective as the generic that would cost $2 per pill. But because there is no profitability this medication is not currently manufactured in the US.

That doesn't make sense. A generic is the same as the name-brand. You mean a different drug for the same disease, I presume.

And it doesn't make sense that there would be no profitability; by your numbers, a generic drug manufacturer could produce the $2 pill which works better than the $100 pill and sell it for $50, or $25, or whatever it wanted.

> America needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize we are little better than a third-world country for anyone below median income who doesn't have a good group health insurance policy.

Actually, one of the nice things about real third-world countries is that one can just go to the pharmacist and buy pills, instead of having to go through a professional gatekeepers' union (the AMA) to do so.
Nikki made it very clear that she felt talking about failed startups is valuable, and even suggested a curated collection. Mixergy would bring a nice big spotlight where she asked for it.
What is involved in blocking the sewer line coming from a house? Is it even possible? (short of a back-hoe)
Make no mistake, there are plenty of literature-oriented sci-fi novels. Frankenstein was one of them that's taught regularly in schools, but there are plenty of modern examples as well. And I remember very recently a handful of stories on HN describing mathematical dating models. The problem is that the literature teachers aren't trained enough to discuss the STEM parts in any real depth; they're trained to think that readers are just supposed to accept the sci-fi assumptions in order to generate an interesting narrative conflict. And while that's partly true, it also results in throwing out a lot of really interesting discussion.
And again, US has the largest per capita number of prisoners in the whole 190 countries. Most of these prisoners are in prison for drug-related charges. Think about that. Yes, SWAT attacks are not happening on every single street, but government destroying lives seems to happen on most streets.
The old Styx song "Too Much Time on My Hands" comes to mind :-D

Still looks like fun, though.