coffeemaniac

15% of the US prison population is a huge number of people.

This is addressed in the FAQ[1].

That three millisecond time doesn't make sense as the timeout for a connect() call.

Yes, I know. And it wasn't the timeout, actually. In the story, I make it sound like it took all of ten minutes from being made aware of the 500-mile email limit and determining a 3 ms light-speed issue. In fact, this took several hours, and quite a bit of detective work. The point is, eventually I came up with that figure, ran units, and gagged on my latte. (I'm fairly certain it was a different latte from the one I started with.) So what, in particular, is your question about the 3 ms figure?

[1] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html

This is a dangerous game. Be aware that just because it might not seem like anyone is using these data against you right now, doesn't mean they won't in the future.

I'm so sorry that happened, were you able to find something else in that range quickly?

If you don't need a database at all I kinda understand not wanting to "sandblast a soupcracker" as the saying goes.. but I've definitely seen a very similar trend with Flask apps!

To be frank django has been my go-to for almost every app I've built or prototyped which required a db, sometimes if exposing a REST API is more of the main goal I'll use DRF and then build a minimal frontend SPA using React (served by a separate app within the project). Not sure why it's not taught/used more tbh.

In my experiences the vast majority of websites allow it -- a select few disallow. Although that group will expand. One trick I've found is to register the 2FA with a "real" number, and then port that number to a voip service. I never use a real cell phone number for anything.

It's not a perfect "solution" but I've had so many instances of services requiring phone numbers for 2FA that I've dedicated a voip number for it.

Almost everyone, deep into trad Republican groups, agree that the Floyd killing was a sickening murder, a symptom of a broken system, and Something Needs To Be Done.

I need you to know that this is not the case. A not insignificant portion of the right does not feel anything wrong was done in this case, and would prefer for police to "crack down." Some will openly discuss that they need to publicly concede that there is A Problem in order to suggest ineffectual solutions to it which will satisfy politicians and pacify mass movements.

The rest of your comment is very correct, but it should be mentioned that bad actors exist and not every American's ideal version of America is completely rid of police murders.

This might not change in the way it sounds like you're expecting..

They specified no career benefit. I'm almost certain they view increased trust from their patients as a benefit, and the extra confidence you gain from keeping up with the latest clinical science is hard to measure in terms of personal value but almost certainly comes out to $0 in financial terms (or negative if you value your free time).

I recommend setting up an aliasing service no matter which provider you ultimately use. Blur or Anonaddy (sure there are others..) will give you a burner email unique for each new service you sign up for which forwards to your real email, and if one day one of them gets spammy or is sold to a data aggregator, you can just get rid of it entirely.

If I'm going to be actually corresponding a lot with an address (these days this is the exception in my email usage) I'll skip this middleman and make an alias/sending identity in fastmail.

To more fully answer your question, I believe I now have hundreds of unique email addresses in use. But it doesn't feel that way.

Historically, people of color arming themselves has been the biggest catalyst for gun control measures. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that's going to be a priority for the next administration. As usual, these measures won't apply to police officers on- or off-duty, for service or personal weapons.

They're seeking a monopoly on violence.

Assertion 1: deleting his blog is a meaningful way of hiding his surname, by way of adding an extra step to anyone who wants to search for it.

Assertion 2: deleting his blog is NOT a meaningful way of hiding gross and reactionary discussion happening on his blog, by way of adding an extra step to anyone who wants to search for it.

These seem contradictory to me. He is absolutely trying to hide or obfuscate something, we're just debating what it is.

Crime has decreased everywhere since then (not just NYC) while the US prison population has increased 500% over the past 40 years.

Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of policing.

Thanks for pointing out very clearly what you believe to be the purpose of policing. For a lot of cops as well, brutality is the goal. What we're seeing right now is Americans re-aligning those priorities.

Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police.

I see this suggested a lot, and I want to reiterate that having studied these sports -- being able to subdue an opponent without hurting them is a point of pride already. All reputable instructors will instill this. We can't allow the excellent reputation of these sports to influence our understanding of how police operate.

Police are not good-faith participants in the goal to injure fewer people via policing. If you teach them more BJJ, they'll use those skills to establish a dominant physical position. A practitioner of BJJ will take this opportunity to de-escalate the situation and escape without injuring anyone else or themselves. A police officer will take this opportunity to use weapons like mace and tasers, or stomp on necks and gouge eyes. They only escalate and when given the opportunity, they brutalize with impunity.

I believe we can influence the the amount of harm done by police by removing the tools they have available to do that harm. Take away all their weapons, and I believe they will more wisely evaluate how they decide to engage with citizens. Hold them legally responsible for any injuries sustained in the process of an arrest and they'll need to purchase insurance -- officers who do more harm will be uninsurable (or the expense of the insurance will make them unhireable).

Correct, and this has been the story with every piece of technology or tool we've ever given to police. We give them body cameras and they're turned off or used to create FPS-style snuff films of gunned down citizens. Give them rubber bullets and they're aimed at protesters eyeballs. Give them tasers and they're used as an excuse to shoot someone when the suspect "resists." Give them flashbangs and they'll throw them into an infant's crib. Give them mace and it's used out of car windows to punish journalists for standing on the sidewalks.

The mistake is to treat any police department as a good-faith participant in the goal of reducing police violence. Any tool you give them will be used to brutalize. The only solution is to give them less.

I agree that he does not fit the common stereotypes of reactionaries. But that's really beside my point, I'm referring to his ideas and writing, not his ethnic or religious groups etc.

Oh yes it is. His blogroll is absolutely full of neoreactionaries, and the comments sections are a cesspit of racism and sexism (echoing many of his own views in more crude terms), even before you account for many articles he's written where he takes their argumentative points at face value.

We're talking about a guy who once put up cartoons of people making fun of nerds/gamers next to Nazi propaganda to show how they were the same. If that's where you're getting your "arguments" on workplace sexism and police violence, you're probably a reactionary.

The modern left is constantly diving into the statistics of these topics, and if you think they're not it probably signals more that you're just not a part of that discussion. If you've let your conclusions be influenced by SSC and other reactionary blogs I'd urge you to check out some leftist spaces and ask around.

There's a lot of nuance, and more importantly, a lot of disagreement even in those spaces on these very issues.

Yep exactly. In America we used to have SWAT teams who would fulfill this latter role, for situations when violence of action was urgently needed. The first letter in the acronym stands for "special." These days it's not abnormal for regular beat cops to acquire surplus military equipment and roll up to a petty dispute in an MRAP.

I think taking away officer's weapons will drastically change who they decide to engage and how they do so.

I am unclear what statistics you're interested in, but would be happy to look into it if you can clarify which claim I made that you dispute.

Well, when you're witnessing multiple instances of officers willingly and enthusiastically assaulting defenseless and innocent citizens/journalists on the street every day, you're past the point of "bias" correction.

These instances are not the result of some nebulous ingrained tendency to view others as less than themselves, they're the result of a coordinated and deliberate attempt to assert power.

Your assertion that removing police would create a "vacuum" assumes incorrectly that there is currently a sense of "order" established. This is not the case, as there is no set of behaviors black men in particular can adopt which will not result in their extrajudicial execution. Police are more accurately viewed as an occupying militia and I see no reason to believe it would just as soon be replaced by something similar.

Good, and their word can be treated exactly like we treat the word of any other agency full of non-experts that roll their own analyses with excel. No need to lend them the legitimacy of established mathematicians and other academics.

So you have the option to leave an institution, which distinguishes it from a population.

When you generalize about a population of people, you're unfairly attributing characteristics to them which weren't decided upon by them (and likely doesn't apply to all of them).

When you generalize about police, you're fairly generalizing about a group of people who have decided to be a part of that institution, have decided to behave in such a way that would not get them kicked out of the institution (ie. they haven't agitated for any significant change in almost every case), and have decided not to leave it with full knowledge and in spite of its abuses.

Drug addicts will continue to be drug addicts, and will do crazy things while they're high, and crazy things in order to get money to get high. Such people will continue to interact with non-criminal non-addict people, who will feel threatened. But now the police won't be there. Now what?

As someone who has had many of these encounters, I've never had the police help. At best they'll show up a half hour later and take a report. The police were never "there" in any meaningful sense.

because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person

Time after time, this has proven to not be true. When a frightened gun-owner reaches for his weapon, he knows he is risking all his money and probably his freedom if he's found to have fired it when it wasn't necessary. And so they tend to use some discretion. Cops do not risk the same, and so they shoot people all the time when their life isn't threatened.

I appreciate your honesty but I am not willing to pursue this as I feel it directly perpetuates a lot of historic inequality.

Thank you, I'll google around for bootstrapping techniques going forward. Seems like one of those things where you need to know the right words to ask about or you have to really clumsily search around until someone tells you!

Of all my side projects, I've never thought of a way to monetize one. Would probably also be worth consulting an expert on that.

I'm not exactly late in my career but having been doing this for ~7 years I'm not clear how people are able to accumulate the capital to start a business and have enough cash to live on until it makes money. It's something that seems like a great experience, and I can see myself wishing I had been able to, but I just don't know how I'd afford it.

Even assuming you have virtually no business expenses other than cloud hosting, are you just supposed to watch your emergency fund disappear?

Tax money could be used for better things But now the police department will buy 2 more cars.

Police departments around the country are being downsized, kicked out of their unions, and in some cases defunded entirely. That's good news! The money will be used for better things.

It's not the sort of thing HN likes to hear but the techniques used in these protests are pretty much working as expected.

How would you feel if someone set your car on fire? Probably like someone doesn't appreciate you very much, right? Well this is how they want the city to feel about their police force.

It also demonstrates that by and large, police don't prevent chaos and property damage. Most of the time, people simply decide not to do this, and when they decide they want to, police are largely powerless to stop them. This should lead others to more broadly question whether police are capable of stopping other bad actors, rather than merely reacting to them.