skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are judges required to make a statement on each warrant justifying their decision to grant a warrant given the information presented, or is it basically just a signature.

I would hope that signing off on a warrant requires more rigor than a mere signature.

How adversarial is the warrant granting process. Is it common for warrants asked for to be granted by default, or is there an adversarial process in place that forces the police/detectives to go back and do more investigative work if they don't provide enough substantive evidence to justify a warrant being granted.

Furthermore, is warrant-granting by judges a matter of the public record. i.e. Can I go somewhere to lookup how many warrants a particular judge has granted, how many they have denied, and how many that were denied were eventually granted and the average number of resubmissions required to get those that were initially denied approved?
I recently made the mistake of calling the local police when I heard some ongoing disturbance outside of my apartment window around 3am. I told them it's probably nothing, but they may want to look into it. I thought they may send out one car to drive by and see if everything's OK.

I was shocked what I saw next and I was thinking to myself "What have I done?!". I'm in a high-rise and have a good view of the city. It looked like they sent the entire police force. Police vehicles were flying in from every angle, SUVs jumping over curbs, driving through lawns, etc. It looked like a scene from the original Die Hard. I was nervous they would trace down my cell # if it turned out to be nothing.
Outside of HN (and sites linked to from HN), I've never seen a media push to get women into STEM either.
"I want America like Europe where they'll educate your kid until his head explodes. You want to go to college, go, we need you, we need doctors because people grow up and fall down and go boom, everyone is going to need a doctor, let's have three doctors per floor of every apartment building in this town. How about that as a good idea? Like that is a good idea. Okay, so let's make college tuition either free or really low and if you have a country full of whip-crack smart people you have a country the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a country of educated people because we are so smart we'll build a laser that will burn you, the enemy, in your sleep before you can even mobilize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart and we will have foreign policy that will not piss you off to the point to where you have to attack us." Henry Rollins
It's also very important to note that approximately 40%[1] of Americans report having a gun in their home.

"Officer safety" doesn't ring very true when the rate at which firearms are confirmed in the home is approximately what you would expect, given the prevalence of firearms ownership in the country.

If around half of households have at least one firearm, and officers predict that a gun will be present every time, then they'll be right... about half the time.

These statistics mean absolutely nothing.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/14509/Americans-Guns-Danger-Defen...
Exactly.

Police believe themselves to be at war. Not with one-off groups of armed bank robbers, per se, but with heavily militarized cartels and street gangs like MS-13. If an ordinary police unit knocked on the door of an MS-13 safe house, they'd probably be met with heavily armed resistance.

The problems here are numerous. First, because this was not a cartel safe house, and any degree of diligence sufficient to obtain a no-knock warrant should have made that clear -- which means that either the diligence process is broken, or it was subverted. Second, because very few houses in residential neighborhoods are gang hideouts, and the police are using the theoretical presence of armed gangs as broad, categorical pretext to militarize all of their SOPs, regardless of context, circumstance, degree of escalation, or suspicion of crime. Third, because the level of police militarization in general is growing alarmingly. You'd be hard-pressed to draw a clear distinction, either in armaments or in operational charter, between some of the most heavily armed SWAT teams in this country and small military units.

Stories like this one are not only outrageous; they are horrifying. I don't want to subject myself to recency or memorability bias. But I'd be very curious to see the stats on how many of these incidents are occurring for every SWAT operation that, say, takes down a real bad guy. I'm not in favor of banning SWAT operations altogether, so much as I'm of the strong belief that the "S" in SWAT should always stand for "Special." As in, we've been building a legitimate case for months on this location, and we have extraordinary reason to believe that extraordinary measures are called for.
Drupal uses it to implement templates. I always got the feeling that it's one of those language features where you want to take a deep breath before using it; sort of like when you type `rm -rf *` and haven't pressed enter yet.
> Premediated murder requires specific intent to kill. Even if the kid had died, it would most likely be negligent homicide.

Honest question: I'm walking past the somebody's house with an assault grenade in my hand. I feel miserable and I throw the grenade into the window. 5 people die. Is that negligence? I didn't know whose house is it, is there any people there, etc.
English pubs are not quite the same as American bars. I wish that we had more pub-style establishments. American bars - even the ones that serve decent food - typically turn into semi-nightclubs after 9 pm.
America is a weird place. If we collectively felt it was out of control or being abused we would fight back through law or force if it got to that point. We're generally just glad to have those options.

I think this is a topic where the legal fight is ramping up. These stories are becoming too common and though currently "legal" it just reeks of negligence.
This looks like a really fun project. I'd be interested in any good Verilog resources anyone can recommend. Also, does anyone know if there is there an affordable way to get components you design manufactured on a small scale? (Not in the thousands of units, I mean.)
I'm pretty sure the poor child's situation is a direct result of a flash bang 'distractionary device' being thrown into his crib by law enforcement. The suspect was NOT in the house, and they found NO DRUGS in the house. As for having a semi-auto firearm, um every other single house in Habersham county probably has one or more semi-autos, big deal. This was a poor family in a bad situation, that the poorly trained sheriff's office "swat team" made worse.

It must be nice to never associate with criminals. For many poor families, this is not an option as the only uncle who will let you stay for free with him after your house burns down, just happens to sell some meth on the side. Is one grenaded baby worth finding even 100lbs of meth? Not to me. It's certainly not worth mauling a baby to find no drugs.
Military context is often safer and more humane than police context

The Police get all the "toys" but none of the training, or self control.

Just watch any SWAT raid then compare that to a true military RAID, the Control and restraint used by the military is vastly contrasted by the Uncontrolled and Free Firing of a Police Raid.

The police are very dangerous
The point is the second claim says nothing. You can also ask "is the use of blue uniforms systematically biased against minorities" or "is the use of police hats systematically biased against minorities" etc and the answer will be "yes" due to the dependent variable.
There seems to be a lot of utility here for folks developing hardware based public key infrastructure like BitCoin wallets.
> 1) It's unconstitutional, as a violation of due process, to suspend officers without pay, before they have been adjudicated as having done something wrong.

This is almost certainly not true, especially with modern executive interpretations that 'due process' in the law simply means any established process. Do you have any references for this?
"The idea that great education was never for the few and should always be available to all led to the creation of MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, led by Silicon Valley companies like Coursera and Udacity"

This is presented as a novel idea, but governments have been subsidizing education for a long time because of this long held value (see: student loans).

"You know a revolution is happening in Silicon Valley when the money shows up."

Correlation does not equal causation? Money does not a revolution make.
>You don't see gangs and cartels forming from around the trade of household cleaning supplies or consumer electronics.

However, they are starting to get into the trade of fake food.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/fake-food-c...

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21599028-organised-gan...

https://reportingproject.net/occrp/index.php/en/cc-blog/1758...
The YouTube Contract for Indies
Student Projects 2014 – Let's go to the video tape
This seems so disconnected from my comment that I'm not even sure you responded to the right one. Either you mis-replied or you have mentally transformed me into a bizarre caricature of what people who don't completely agree with you must be like.
Upon applying the changes 1 and 3 you suggested, this seems to be a reasonable solution to start from. At the end of the day we need some degree of accountability. Currently we have practically none.
Well sure, but the policy as it stands is to send SWAT into the house in the dead of night. Obviously, we need some sort of policy change.

My comments speculate upon the mindset of those involved in these raids regarding their choice of weapons and gear. They know they are going into a house, that much is given.
How effective are MOOCs really? I'm not saying that they're not effective, I'm simple asking the question.

Are people getting hired based on a resume of a MOOC education? Do you know anyone who really learned a subject by taking a MOOC? If so, that's fantastic.
Wordpress has a huge ecosystem of plugins, including a wide variety of powerful and innovative anti-spam plugins. I chose wordpress (twice), in large part because I am confident that the anti-spam offerings will continue to evolve at a rapid pace alongside the webspammers.

Yes, PHP sucks, but an easy-to-use, well-tested, flexible platform > a brand new ruby on rails framework.
You guys are killing me. I'm Mexican-American. I grew up an an urban U.S. city where many of my neighborhood pals ended up 'locked up or covered up'.

I have a pretty good understanding of race and the 'war on drugs.'
I've never seen a coherent argument against progressive enhancement on served HTML.
I agree that it's unlikely to be a problem...until your site gets popular and a .01% corner case becomes a weekly occurrence or until someone sees that you're using fast and exploits an attack vector.
I'm a low-lander cyclist who moved across the ocean. For the most part, you're right. A couple of observations though...

The "right on red" seems to be a hack to address the fact that there are too many traffic lights. Indeed roundabouts would be better, those narrow Euro city centers are often faster. They also like their ridiculous 4-way stops instead of just yields. Right on red is indeed dangerous for cyclists, and when there's a bike lane, it is sometimes disallowed with a sign. Many drivers ignore them, and you always have to double check or risk getting creamed.

The "taking it too seriously" part is I think because biking in traffic here is an adrenaline rush. I do things here that I would never do at home, yet they are often the safer option. I sometimes bike into the third lane to make a left turn, I sometimes sneak a block on the sidewalk if it lets me use a safer crossing. Every single trip involves careful planning of your route. Often there is no bike lane, and you just have to share the road with traffic, while avoiding the swerving doors of parked cars.

Even worse is when they put a suicide bike lane between the first lane and the second/third lanes. The idea is that the first lane is a mix of parking, bus-stops and right hand turns. So you have all of those crossing through the bike lane, often cutting it short at the light, and hating you for being in their way.

The streets I rode on as a child to primary school were safer than the stuff being constructed here today. Pretty mind-blowing. They are slowly learning, but the entitlement from drivers (to whom 80-90% of the paved road is dedicated to) is insane.

To make it worse, pedestrians here just don't seem to understand cycling is a third mode, and they will obliviously wander into any bike lane even though there's literally a sign every 10 meters telling them to go onto the other path. A "shared bike/pedestrian path" is pretty much a shit show of people having 0 spatial awareness.
Yahoo profile SSL cert is expired
While I support semantic versioning, people need to be aware that it's only as good as the package maintainer. I have used packages that have (unintentionally) broke semver conformity. Nothing really stops an author from releasing breaking changes when going from "1.2.1" to "1.2.2".
It's a good point but the people who legally own guns may be a largely separate population than the population who are being targeted by drug raids. So your point about them being right by default with the same % is wrong, since that assumes it's a random sample of the population.

That said I agree these stats are meaningless regardless of the position one takes so this report undermines it's credibility (and my trust that I'm reading something well researched) by trying to spin them. Which was my original point.
Would it have helped? It apparently infringes multiple patents Apple does not control. They lost to VirnetX and now Samsung is going after them.
Some departments apparently restrict people with IQ's over a certain limit.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

Makes you wonder if we really should be militarizing them.
Well, I mention Racket because it has extensive tooling for new language creation (I've seen C-like, Java-like, and SQL-like languages implemented in it), and they've done so much work in creating a very extensive standard library that compiles and optimizes down to relatively simple Scheme base language. You basically get tools and libraries and optimizations and other languages "for free" if you use Racket, much like with the CLR, but in a completely open-source, could-be-statically-compiled-if-you-want way.
Anti-Aging Solutions, And the Scientists Who Love Them
Data Hackathons: The Students Most Likely to Take Our Jobs
No?

You just don't do it for the pot dealer down the street. Instead, you wait for him to leave and break in to get what you need. Preferably in a way that isn't visible from the street so you can arrest the guy before/after.
It mostly happens to a different demographic than the one that reads HN.
Huh? If you have evidence for a warrant on a supposedly dangerous dealer you don't need to catch them with drugs. Simply wait them out for when they leave their house and pick them up then.
Who’s Getting a Good Night’s Sleep?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70

There are many citations in there. I don't remember who the researchers were though.
Remote control isn't the killer app for home automation, no control is.

I think you've got this exactly backward, at least as it applies to the Nest thermostat. I find the automation aspects to be pretty gimmicky, but turning the A/C down before I head home from work or turning it off completely just before I leave town on an airplane are killer features.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

from this single example I could say 'STL isn't bloated and contains just the things necessary while leaving plenty of room for extending. That is just the way it was designed' (And extending it is something I do regularly, resulting in a header-only library with tons of small helper functions containing something like noted in the other comments 'transform_inplace' and 'to_upper' which is implemented using the former. Also the resusability of most of these shouldn't be underestimated.) - but for this case I sort of agree that toUpper could have been a member of string becasue it's pretty basic and that if you work with strings regularly QString is nicer from the start as you don't need extra functions. But of course that opens the road to others saying that if toUpper is there, then why shouldn't x and y and z be there.. Never-ending :P. Which is also probably why the STL is the way it is.
Where Circumcision Rates Have Fallen
As written, that INIT section is really going to limit clock speed. I also don't understand why currentState is double clocked.
England is also part of Britain and the United Kingdom, but is also a nation, something many would prefer Quebec to be recognized as.
>Another time, I left my apartment to walk to the convenience store across the street once and was immediately met with six Springfield (OR) Police officers with weapons drawn, 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.

This happens with surprising frequency from what I hear. I know of a couple people with almost the same story.
My point was most Americans have no experience with these sorts of events despite their apparent pervasiveness, just as most Europeans have little experience with far-right parties despite their recent successes.
Thankfully it didn't take 30 years to admit that killing Jean Charles de Menezes was a mistake.

Actually, on the that subject I'm not particularly worried about a general level of violence by police in the UK. However, I am concerned that we could see something like the Troubles again if we continue to treat immigrant populations as scapegoats for all the ills in our society.
I just deployed a lot of these for fun on Heroku. Really interesting stuff. http://php-c99.herokuapp.com/
Every creative endeavor is 1% of inspiration, followed by 99% or perspiration. That's the only way to manifest the pretty pictures inside your head onto a tangible medium that can reach others.

Creativity without hard, and often dull, work is called "Day dreaming".
Your own honest question has an implicit answer in the fact that you can't indiscriminately throw shit into peoples property. Even if it was a barbie doll you threw in there and it killed 5 people.
The majority of your 'white coke' or powder cocaine busts are of Hispanic dealers (that's how it gets into the country and distributed to the big cities). Crack busts on the other hand were almost exclusively Africa-American dealers. They'd make crack out of powder cocaine once it got to their neighborhoods.
An important software development lesson I learned from Fight Club
Trying to figure out where electricity comes from by changing the color of light bulbs.
Hi, I'm the primary author of this library.

Setting the thread affinity of the current thread should be possible using the Affinity.setAffinity(int... cpuID) call. Underneath, it calls sched_settaffinity(0, sizeof(set), &set); I'm not sure if this set the affinity of the whole process or just the thread. I suspect it is the calling thread. Let us know if you happen to find that out.

Parsing the CPU layout of the machine you're running does not depend on any realtimethread code, and should work on any modern linux system.
Having taken 7 or 8 MOOCs, my unscientific opinion is:

1. Employers completely ignore them.

2. The vast majority of courses are not very good - poor preparation, bad lecturing, not well thought out course design. A small number of courses (mostly those based on existing courses at top universities) are very good. I think that this actually reflects the university experience in general.
Deep-seated bias, not lack of confidence, knocks women off the path to success
I give up. Some people here seem to really want to believe their calls are making a difference. I guess they do on an emotional level...
Mathematics is not a-priori. No form of knowledge is.
> The targets are guys with long rap sheets of felony convictions, often for violent crimes.

Well, it's also about violent dancing and parking.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/swat-t...

When SWAT raids are SOP, violent dancers and babies are going to get hurt. But at least the cops are winning.
This will be getting worse unless people disconnect themselves from the system that allows things like this to happen.

By "disconnect" I mean secessio plebis - either physical with a move out of $this_jurisdiction, or economic, when a person minimizes their participation in the economy of $this_jurisdiction.

By continuing to use money of $this_central_bank for selling and buying goods and services in $this_jurisdiction, a person sends the following message to the legislators and enforcers:

"No matter what I say, here's my money. Let it be the token of my willingness to take more abuse. If I did not like how things work, I wouldn't be supporting your pyramid."

PS
The main reward of government employess is neither money, nor vacation, nor pension, nor social perks, but immunity. It's getting away with holes in babies that makes the job attractive precisely to the people who like to make holes in others.
From my own experience, MOOCs are useful to get a base understanding of a particular topic. However, learning the topic at hand is necessary but not sufficient: I don't think many people are getting jobs by listing completion of a course.

As it stands, I think the people that (1) understand the topic well, and (2) are getting jobs are also people that take that understanding and have something to show for it. It's not enough to say that you learned code through Codecademy, you do need to build something of your own to show in order to be employable. I think that's the case even with traditional education: it's not enough to simply have a CS degree, but something to show for it as well.
"The book about the "Chandler" project (forgot it's title) is also a particular good read. Those two in particular are interesting reads about why things fail."

Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg. Highest recommendation. 10x coders hired by visionary engineer to scratch their own itch. What could go wrong?

http://www.dreamingincode.com
Is the C99.php shell any popular? This is such a classic exploit of `extract()` that it seems like very amateurish job. If they even use this function at all I imagine the rest of the script is not that secure either.
This is one of the best arguments I've seen recently supporting airbnb. However, I'd be curious to see how these numbers would be affected by removing all the undesirable airbnb arrangements - the ones where people are causing hell or even nuisances for their neighbors, the ones where people are turning long-term rental units into under-the-table short term rentals, etc.
Saw this the other day

http://alibertarianfuture.com/big-government/police-state/th...
(I work at Stripe)

Can you say more about "(a) stable"? If you mean that you've had problems with robustness or availability, I'd love to hear about that, because in general we believe it's been very good on those fronts.

If you mean that it the UI changes from time to time, then (for better or worse), that's a fundamental property of Checkout: we are continually iterating and optimizing and adding new features (like Alipay!). We do understand that it's not for everyone, but a lot of people use it for exactly that reason.
Spending per pupil is not necessarily the right metric. The net spending accounts for paying for teachers who can't teach, overly priced contracts to the businesses connected to school boards, corruption, etc.

It's not Switzerland, so you can't compare.