Recent submissions

Comment · 20 days ago
I lived in Eugene previously and CAHOOTS is (seems they are still operating in Springfield) quite effective in the limited response work they do, particularly de-escalation and triage of mental health crises. These are classic situations that (American) police are not needed nor are most properly trained for, and several crisis intervention teams modelled after CAHOOTS have been stood up elsewhere in the US in the past several years (e.g. BCR in Minneapolis) with seemingly good results.

However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.

But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.

Comment · 1 year ago
In my experience, wi-fi calling works as if on the home network, regardless of IP location/endpoint. So this would work similarly with an eSIM.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Interesting to see this brought up again by Businessweek but this is far from news – Nestlé and PepsiCo were featured in the 2009 documentary Tapped, which came to many of the same conclusions, and brought up other potential health issues with bottled water, such as the use Bisphenol-A (BPA) in bottle plastics.
Comment · 10 years ago
Signup seems to be broken? I've tried a few 'random' (keyboard-mashing) usernames to no avail. As guptaneil pointed out, some immediate form feedback on username availability would be very helpful as well.
Comment · 10 years ago
Perhaps they meant that foreign (specifically Chinese) competition has done much better globally than those companies currently holding most of the US market.
Comment · 12 years ago
The idea that we should create a ban on private primary and secondary-ed institutions to fix the public system is incomprehensible to me. Should we force people with enough time and effort to devote to quit homeschooling, too? How about those who can afford private tutors? How far do you plan to take this to eliminate any economic advantage? Inciting conflict and anti-governmental feelings is a great way to inspire creative workarounds by the upper class, not creative solutions to a broken shitpile of an educational system. Ask yourself: would you really be inclined to fix something that someone else broke because you were forced to by the government?

The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?

What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.

The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.

Comment · 13 years ago
> The only way to type math notation is LaTeX.

No it isn't. Perhaps by far the best and most practical way, but not the only way ever to type math notation.

Comment · 13 years ago
I see there's a mini-shitstorm going on here, but let's say Google is in fact a business acting in its own self-interest to some degree, which seems reasonable. Let's say they're giving away Chromebooks because a) they wish to do good in the world, and b) they'd like to get more people using Google services, and this seems like a rather effective method of gaining long-term users. Now, ignoring the fact that you can indeed use crouton, enable dev mode, or otherwise "hack the platform" so to speak, where's the actual issue in having these kids using Google services? Google's offering them free computers. Does we honestly think that a poor kid in India wouldn't eagerly give written consent to become a user of Google's services, letting Google benefit from that as they do from any similar user, especially when they're not being forced in any way whatsoever to continue doing so in the future?

I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.

*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.

Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
You should move the survey response bars into a more neutral organization, otherwise it places "respectful" and "team player" in a context where they appear to be lacking compared to your other traits. Also, I believe you mean 'persistent' in your scrolling text bit at the top.
Comment · 13 years ago
You're criticizing The Atlantic (which happens to be a print publication as well, not just online) for an article stating that Bitcoin won't become an everyday currency, but saying "it doesn't have to fit [that] role." The article never said it did have to fit that role. The journalism is perfectly fine here, quit being defensive and make an actual argument.
Comment · 13 years ago
That 30% price change in a year was an anomaly, and it was in 1980, during a severe global recession. Bitcoin, meanwhile, just gained value approximately eightfold over several weeks ago, and it's relatively unusual that it isn't highly volatile, especially lately.
Comment · 13 years ago
I kind of wonder if that's because a lot of updates are rolled out poorly to older devices. On my previous two phones, I've ended up running CyanogenMod or another third-party ROM, even at the same base Android version at the stock OTA updates, because many times even the RC versions run better than what's getting pushed by the carrier. Verizon customer here though, so I don't know if other networks are better about that. I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if that effect (wanting a new phone over an update) is intentional.

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