There are a few different sides you could take from this article. 1) this could improve flight experiences and help find individuals who are on the run or could cause a threat but 2) like the article discusses, it is invasive and there are no rules with regards to storing and selling bio-metrics in 99% of the states.
Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry. Plus they're far more likely to look towards other people going to those conferences for "trends" than to the majority who don't, thus reinforcing that bias.
Even most designers I know personally don't use macOS. But if I was going by what I see at JS conferences, you'd think Apple has a 99% marketshare (although things have improved in recent years with "full stack" bringing in Linux folks and Microsoft's investment in dev tools making Windows more appealing).
This is similar to how everyone at these conferences seems to have one of the latest iPhones yet (depending on where you live) the majority of smartphone users uses Androids and those who are using iPhones generally hold onto them for years before upgrading.
Also FWIW as a long time JS dev, it seemed to me like Rails actually was one of the major contributors to the macbook monoculture because Rails (in the early days) was popular with startups who also often focused on iOS apps first, which means they had no other choice than to use macOS for development. As iOS became less of a focus than web dev, the macbooks stayed and only now seem to be slowly replaced as Microsoft is making a heavy push into web dev relations and the opinion of Apple's quality gets tarnished by dev-unfriendly decisions and hardware problems.
As the other commenter noted, RoR precedes iOS third-party development by 5 years.
And Macs were already popular among web crowd in the early 2000s. I too got interested in getting a Mac after seeing countless screenshots in CSS books.
>Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry.
Yes, but they're also more influential in the respective communities, and more probable as presenters to be writing stuff others use (e.g. this Firefox dev tool).
So they'll use what they personally use to develop.
>Also FWIW as a long time JS dev, it seemed to me like Rails actually was one of the major contributors to the macbook monoculture because Rails (in the early days) was popular with startups who also often focused on iOS apps first, which means they had no other choice than to use macOS for development.
I don't think that's the case - Rails confs/devs was mostly Macs before iOS apps where a thing (which happened 4-5 years after RoR was released).
Interesting. It definitely didn't seem the case for web dev outside of Rails though. In the mid-2000s it felt to me like the default was Linux (because servers were running Linux) and beginners started on Windows (because that's what they already had at home). But then again web dev mostly meant LAMP (or WAMP for development, via XAMPP).
But this may be a regional thing (so selection bias again). When I was freelancing as a Python web dev, the few places that used Python usually used Plone/Zope (barely anyone used Django or Flask) and there were even fewer places using Ruby except startups. The popularity of Plone/Zope seems to be very much a German thing, just like SuSE Linux and Typo3/Drupal (instead of Wordpress). We've even had a very large Firefox marketshare until fairly recently (because of privacy concerns over Google Chrome).
That said, in European JS conferences over the past five years I'm definitely seeing more and more non-macbooks each year.
What you're experiencing indeed doesn't sound like burnout. It's plain old alienation. Big corporations are the prime example for this, small startups generally promise to alleviate this (though obviously this only holds true to a degree unless you hold a significant share in the company).
At least having worked in Big Tech you have likely built up enough resources to be able to just do something else now, rather than being stuck in this situation until you can retire (or become physically unable to continue working).
I have no idea how this became the widely held belief about markdown. Markdown is based on Gruber's buggy Perl implementation of a rich text format that's intended to be fairly readable while editing the raw source files. Gruber had zero concerns for how other people would use it, he didn't even support standardisation efforts that tried to resolve the contradictory informal spec he had published.
To be fair, his use case was/is for writing very simple things (blurbs on his blog), that simply don't get into painful corner cases. It's a simple tool that works great - for simple things. It can fail hard on more strenuous cases. As you say, he resists attempts to resolve the ambiguities, yet, he also guards the name "Markdown" - which has all the mindshare - causing headaches for others who try to resolve those ambiguities. So, we get things like CommonMark.
You'd think the solution to "scared" and well armed officers wouldn't be more weapons.
Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
I'm not from US and I've never been there, but I think the problem is not only about police abuse. When you're in a country where almost anyone can have a weapon (and kind of the military range), the police also is having more risk than in any other country...
I used to think that too, but the problem with gun ownership in the US tends to be more about gun culture than ownership. Other countries with high gun ownership rates don't have nearly the same problems, especially when it comes to accidental shootings.
The problem of law enforcement killing people also has little to do with gun ownership. The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives". This can only either be explained with terrible training or plain old racism (i.e. black men seem more threatening by default to the extent that an unarmed black man is considered more threatening than an armed white man), or most likely a mixture of both.
There's a lot wrong with how police in the US is trained and held accountable. Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem.
>The frequent (or at least frequent enough to be concerning) shootings of unarmed black men for example are generally excused with police officers saying they were "afraid for their lives."
Police officers only ever say that to lay the groundwork for a legal self-defense argument.
>Gun ownership is the smallest contributor to that problem
On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
> Police officers only ever say that to lay the groundwork for a legal self-defense argument.
Or on the other hand, being afraid for your life is one of the motivators for resorting to deadly force.
> On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, it's difficult to stab someone from a distance, so the effect of guns as a force multiplier is relevant.
It's a good thing that human beings are not equipped with appendages on their lower body that enable locomotion.
>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting
Tasers are routinely used to attempt to deescalate situations.
The problem is though they just aren't terrible effective and often fail. Simply wearing thick clothing can't prevent penetration, distance and wind can prevent them from even making contact, batteries age, etc. An enraged suspect, such as one on drugs or drunk, can also rip them out of their skin or outright not be deterred.
Here's one study that backs up what I've said above
> A total of 2,395 use-of-force reports indicated conflict ended at the first “iteration” (the officers’ first application of force). In the first iteration, TASER’s were deployed 2,113 times. Out of these deployments, 1,459 ended the conflict at the first TASER application (69-percent success rate); chemical agents had a 65-percent success rate; impact weapons had a 45-percent success rate at the first iteration; takedown had a 42-percent success rate; and compliance holds had a 16-percent success rate.
If you think using a taser is a way to "deescalate situations", you have a very different interpretation of what a "deescalation strategy" is meant to accomplish than most.
TBH the problem seems to be that US police is often trained to "deescalate situations" by shutting them down quickly and forcefully rather than actually deescalating, i.e. carefully defusing the situation.
Tasers are violent, less-than-lethal (i.e. potentially fatal) weapons. If they're ineffective at reducing casualties and decreasing the overall use of violent force, they need to be removed.
When you're confronted by someone larger than you, more muscular than you, that's enranged at their partner/coworker/family member and have been violent already and want to make you their next target, let me know how well trying to talk them down works 99 times out of 100.
Less than lethal options exist because in some scenarios the fact of the matter is you have to deploy a less than lethal option, shoot them or get hurt/dead.
While you might be able to talk your best friend down when he's mad that they put lettuce on his sandwich, that doesn't work when you're talking to someone that doesn't have respect for authority and is drunk/high/mad/mentally unwell and wants their way.
- Pepper spray/mace, despite spraying in a stream, are NOT targeted devices. They will immediately spread to the surrounding the environment and while the intended target may take the brunt of it, everyone in the immediate area will feel it to some degree
- Less than lethal rounds, like a rubber bullet, can be considerably more lethal than a taser
- Tasers can miss, fail to seat, and yes can cause death in some circumstances
- Bullets, at best, are going to cause permanent damage and at worst are instantly fatal.
I urge you to see if your local law enforcement has a community outreach program and if they do to actually attempt to talk to some officers about the sort of things they deal with daily and how they personally feel about their various offensive tools.
I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles. The extreme majority of law enforcement officers hope they NEVER have to draw their firearm or even need to deploy a taser or spray someone but the fact of the matter is when police are called to deal with someone that is being disruptive, or actively attempting to harm others, they've already thrown reason out the window and there is a realistic chance they're going to attempt to harm the officer(s).
A taser is a deescalation tool. Simply drawing it can be enough to back some people down although as the study I linked shows You've got roughly a 1 in 3 chance that even sending electricity into someone isn't enough to get them to comply after the first round. That alone should tell you something "shocking 1 out of 3 people causes them to continue to resist" is exactly why law enforcement carry firearms (again, that they hope they never have to draw and certainly never use).
> I come from a law enforcement family, I have many friends in local, state and federal law enforcement roles.
You didn't even have to say that, it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.
You can talk about "but what if a polar bear attacks you" all day but that won't ever excuse why it is literally every week that new video evidence of US police officers brutalising or murdering people comes out and barely any of the officers involved ever are seriously punished for it.
If this violence was inevitable because of the gun ownership, you would see similar events in Canada or Switzerland. If this violence was necessary to protect officers from civilians, you would see vastly more stories about injured or killed police officers in the UK.
That you think your scenario of the muscular angry brute looking for "targets" is even remotely plausible should tell you something. Suspects are suspects, perps are perps, not enemy soldiers or wild animals.
Police officers in other countries are trained to deal with these situations without shooting unarmed people. How little do you think about your friends and family that you think they're incapable of learning how to do that?
You've crossed into personal attack. That's not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.
When our backgrounds are distant from each other, we need to connect across those distances, not become aggressive. There are two options: conversation or war. Here we want conversation.
Edit: we had to ask you about this another time recently too. Would you please review the guidelines and use this site in the intended spirit? It's not always easy, but it's work everyone here needs to put in, if we are to prevent the commons from burning.
It's fine. I'm not going to engage you in an argument about whether policing tone is productive if you don't police content (or the effective politics you produce by what content you do police) but I'm mostly just annoyed that the HN blocklist extension stopped working for some reason.
HN seriously needs a way to hide (mute/block) specific users' comments rather than just relying on moderators or mob voting/flagging to decide what's "appropriate".
I don't know what you mean by the HN blocklist extension, but it doesn't sound like a feature we have. Are you using a third-party extension?
> the effective politics you produce by what content you do police
People tend to overinterpret that. Politically, HN is pluralistic (all major positions are represented, as you'd expect in any large population sample), but it turns out that pluralism is experienced by each side as bias in favor of the other side.
This is mostly an artifact of HN being a non-siloed community site. Nearly every other place where people encounter political views on the internet has already been pre-filtered (by subreddits, follow lists, friend lists, etc.) That's what everyone's used to, so when they walk into a place that doesn't work that way, they quickly encounter a much higher frequency of opposing if not offensive viewpoints. This is painful; it feels a bit like getting smacked in the face. Because this painful experience doesn't come with any explanation, people reach for the handiest and in a way most comforting explanation—not, "oh, this is about what you'd expect from a statistical distribution", but rather "this place is a (SJW|alt-right) cesspool". Even if the distribution were more in your favor, you'd still feel this way, because we're so primed to notice the things we dislike and to weight them more strongly.
(I know you said you didn't want to engage about this, but it comes up so often that every now and then I feel like writing out my latest take on the topic.)
>it was obvious from the lengths you go to in order to excuse the murders and brutality committed by police officers in the US.
992 people were shot and killed by police in 2018 [1] with 686,665 sworn officers [2] in the country. For a little comparison to killings by civilians - Chicago alone had 530 murders that year [3].
In 2018, there were an estimated 1,206,836 violent crimes [2].
106 law enforcement officers were killed in line-of-duty incidents in 2018. Of these, 55 officers died as a result of felonious acts [4]
So 'the lengths I go' are simply basing my opinion in facts and not emotion.
Calling a robot dog a weapon is a stretch without more context. Why can't this be used as a communication platform to replace no-knock raids? You'd just need to equip it with a loud speaker and a short range radio for the most part.
>Why can't this be used as a communication platform to replace no-knock raids?
Because telephones and loudspeakers already exist, and law enforcement clearly doesn't want to replace no-knock raids, because they could already do so if they chose.
This is just a land-based drone, expect law enforcement to put it to the same use as military drones - surveillance and violence. Maybe bomb disposal/retrieval.
>You'd think the solution to "scared" and well armed officers wouldn't be more weapons.
>Tasers were heralded as a way to reduce casualties because they were a less-than-lethal replacement for guns, but now cops are still shooting unarmed people dead and using tasers as legal torture devices.
>US police doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to the equation "problems + more equipment = less problems".
As much as I hate the entrenched corruption the MA state police stands for they seem to be content to waste taxpayer money on useless toys and enriching themselves (recurring falsified time-card scandal anyone?). It is thankfully very rare for them to kill people under questionable circumstances so I can't complain too much about them wasting a little more on a cool toy. This is kind of how the deal works, the state is basically buying their good behavior and letting them have toys a reasonable parent would say no to is part of that.
I generally agree with you about giving additional hardware to police not turning out well for the people being policed though.
I don’t think, that anybody uses a Taser in swatting situation. These are marketed in Germany as better replacement for tear gas instead of replacement for a gun.
In Canada's national capital region (Ottawa/Gatineau), where I travel to frequently, I've used Uber extensively even though it's more expensive and less convenient (taxi is right in front of hotel, Uber I have to call and wait for), simply because all cars were in good shape and all drivers were polite and reasonable.
For some reason in that region, majority of taxi drivers:
a) Have cars that are falling apart. Not just significant rust on the car, but frequently wonky suspension, brakes, bearings, etc.
b) They strongly believe they are rally drivers, and traffic lights, pedestrians, let alone bicycles, are their mortal enemies.
Further, all Uber drivers were happy to be Uber drivers, and 70%+ of Taxi drivers were profoundly, existentially unhappy to be Taxi drivers, and would spend entirety of their ride letting me know why.
----
Now, in principle, just from theory and articles, I'd agree that Uber feels it is / should be more exploitative of drivers and less safe for riders. I personally just haven't found it that way in practice... :-/
My god, the number of times I sat in a cab with the driver loudly honking and/or swearing at cyclists in the pre-Uber era... And all too often the awkward “conversations” where I had to um, hmm, yeah all the way...
Uber drivers are actually refreshingly polite, I even enjoyed the conversation a few times. Out of my more than a hundred rides there was only one bad experience (other than occasionally waiting for a driver that’s motionless or moving away from me): obviously new driver, didn’t know where the fuck he was going, couldn’t seem to follow GPS, asked for tip at the end of the exceptionally bad, twice as long trip.
> Well, Uber is more exploitative for the drivers and less safe for the riders, so the choice seems clear.
Have you ever driven for a taxi company as an independent contractor? Taxi companies exploit. People talking about drivers being “exploited” by Uber have never driven for a “normal” taxi company. There is a reason that many taxi drivers now drive for Uber. The taxi business is filthy. Journalists don’t usually write about it because it isn’t sexy like bashing Uber every chance they get.
Yes wrong. The first decade was either 9 or 10 years (depending on whether you want to be weird and include 1 BC), every decade after that was 10 years starting at 'X0 and ending at 'X9. This is how the common usage defines the term.
A lot of concepts in daily human lives get fuzzy near the edges. That's not a failing on humans, that's how language works. This isn't scientific or perfectly rational, yes, but neither are humans.
For those still unclear: it's a type of tumor that basically grows things in places they're not normally supposed to be. "Things" including cartilage, hair and teeth.
Fellow German here. I find it extremely annoying when people read out numbers for me to write down and announce pairs as numbers instead of digits.
If you mean 42 and read out "zwei und vierzig" I will pause and have to figure out if you meant 240 and you know it. This kind of thing just seems almost intentionally inconsiderate because of the unnecessary ambiguity.
I'm slightly confused as a native English speaker here.
zwei und vierzig versus zwei hundert vierzig are radically different to my ears.
The counting thing is annoying but not as annoying as French numbers in my not so humble opinion. Though I guess English had it at one point with things like 4 score and 7 years ago (a score being 20 years, so 87 years ago)
Guess maybe I'm weird but outside of the "flip last two numbers around in your brain in German" it never struck me as much more than: Well that's weird, least its not french numbers under 100 where I have to add mentally so no big deal.
French numbers are actually quite easy though if you learn even a little bit of French.
You don’t think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it as ninety just like in English.
I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the arithmetic statement.
I'm thirty eight years old. I've been using standard units my entire life. They just make sense. Eight cups? Oh that's half a gallon, or two quarts. Eight ounces of melted butter? Oh that's one cup. Probably two sticks unless it's that bullshit imported European butter, ugh. My indoctrinated brain can't imagine it any other way. "You want me to add what grams.. what? Who measures sugar by weight?!"
French numbers are the same way. If the only system you've ever used is a shitty system, the shitty system is the only logical way of doing things. Human brains are smart, but also dumb. That's actually the point of this article.
I am slowly training myself to intuit SI units, especially at work. It's better, and I know that, but it's fucking hard. I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to be able to replace it for cooking. It's just too deep. Probably the same as a Frenchman who learned to count in French. Learning to cook with standard units was coincident with learning to speak. You simply can't renovate those memories.
Parent is referring to situations where you pronounce the numbers pairwise with regards to the digits. Like we (or at least I and my friends) in english pronounce screen resolutions: 720p => "seven twenty p", and years: 1984 => "nineteen eighty-four".
No, the problem is that people read out long numeric sequences in inconsistent ways.
Consider this: "sixty-nine" is clearly 69. But when spoken out, especially in a long string of digits (like an IBAN, a banking code) that might be announced as "six, nine" or "sixty-nine" or "sixty...nine" or even "six...ty-nine".
So even in English there's some chance of ambiguity whether it is supposed to be 6-9 or 6-0-9 (consider: "forty-two, sixty, nine" for 4-2-6-0-9).
In German the awkward inversion makes this worse. So you might get "neunundsechzig" (6-9), "neun...undsechzig" (9... no, wait, 6-9? or maybe 9-6-0?) or "neunund...sechzig" (...6-9). Although the last one is unambiguous, you're basically stuck waiting for the end because you're trying to write digits down left to right and don't want to skip digits and backtrack.
As for why "neun...und sechzig" is ambiguous: with that weird pause it's not clear if this is still 69 or literally "9 and 60" (which is what the word "neunundsechzig" means), i.e. 9-60. As people sometimes emphasise the final digit or digit pair by saying "and" before it (like you would in a list of words), this is ambiguous and at least might give a listener pause.
"Hundert" and "und" generally aren't similar enough for this to be a problem and there's a special place in hell for people who read out groups of digits longer than 2 as numbers, so this isn't generally a problem. Most people do however tend to slur the "und" so e.g. "sechsundsechzig" becomes "sechsnsechzig" but this rather avoids the problem I mentioned (except for the backtracking).
>As for why "neun...und sechzig" is ambiguous: with that weird pause it's not clear if this is still 69 or literally "9 and 60" (which is what the word "neunundsechzig" means), i.e. 9-60.
9 und 60 vs. 9 hundert 60, if you speak quickly then the "ert" part of hundert is often swallowed, making it more difficult to discern between the remaining "hund" and "und".
I'm assuming you're a native German speaker too? Must be a regional accent thing, then.
The closest I can get to ambiguity by slurring "neunhundertsechzig" is "neun oder sechzig" or "neun, neununsechzig", never "neunundsechzig", and I have to make an effort to speak faster than I normally would even if I was reading out numbers in a hurry. I've also never run into this ("hundert" and "und" being mixed up) in my daily life, so I'm surprised to hear that this is something you hear often.
