The way things are going if a SWAT team rolled up to my house ( I know this is going to sound silly). I'd call 911 and have them on speaker phone coaching me through it.
Most people are not trained to handled these situations properly and they will be nervous and start slipping up which a not well trained or inexperienced officer may wrongly interpret as suspicious/dangerous.
If I am truly innocent then perhaps I am the one that needs the hostage negotiator from the threat on the other side of the door.
>The way things are going if a SWAT team rolled up to my house ( I know this is going to sound silly). I'd call 911 and have them on speaker phone coaching me through it.
Who said you're going to get any chance to call anybody? They could just as easily break into your house shouting and pointing guns...
Right, most of these calls are designed to provoke no-knock forcible entry... "hostages actively being threatened", "domestic violence in progress", etc.
Neither of these situations should trigger no-knock forced entry. The response to most situations should be careful assessment of the situation at hand, the involved actors and the dynamic of the situation, especially since swatting has come up. Police truly need to expect that an anonymous tipster is trying to goad them into action. There’s few situations that should probably trigger an immediate forceful response, active shooter for example and that should be relatively easy to confirm on site.
Agreed. Though this "swatting" thing is horrifying and tragic, I think the Wichita police should shoulder most of the responsibility. Am I wrong in thinking that they could have done some reconnaissance or something? In any case, I hope they revise their procedures to give a horrible prank like this zero chance of succeeding.
I utterly agree, as I think my other posts should say. But regardless of the should, for better or worse, we are in the "they likely -will- provoke...".
Of course there are scenarios out of our control. In this one particularly the victim walked out of the house and then was shot after he slipped up on one of the commands.
Not to blame the victim, but his mistake lead to their over reaction. My point is even us citizens aren't experienced these situations and some guidance could help.
>In this one particularly the victim walked out of the house and then was shot after he slipped up on one of the commands.
In what other first world country a person would just be shot if they merely "walked out of house" and "slipped up on one of the commands"? Even if they had a gun on them, unless they actually fired, they still might not be shot by one of the actually competent police forces -- they'd tried to talk them down first.
Then again, in what other first world country a person can be shot if they walk out of their car after they have been stopped by the police?
Heck, unless he has been messy with their wives and they just found out, nobody in a first world country would shoot an unarmed man sitting on the floor and BEGGING not to be shot:
"Congratulations! You've survived another year without being brutally murdered by the public servants whose generous pensions your city has gone bankrupt to fund! If you want to keep your streak 'alive', here's how you can help these heroes not murder you and your family!"
Yes you are blaming the victim. People should not be required to perform jumping jacks just because someone in uniform tells them to. That's not cooperation, it's coercion.
It's not right, but we have a broken system that favors them over us. And I don't think it will be fix soon.
Another problem we have is people getting falsely accused and sent to jail when they make mistakes in interrogations. It's why you always if you can afford one, get a lawyer for guidance.
I'm debating whether to learn Python or Ruby. And the initial post as well as this one has me leaning towards Ruby despite all the good things that have been said about Python.
Are there non CS majors out there that picked up Python as a first language and had doors opened for them?
I majored in Economics and taught myself Python starting my Sophomore year of college. I am now gainfully employed in a job creating modeles (economic and otherwise, essentially R&D) for the rail industry. My day to day activities consists of writing Python code, and my ability to rapidly prototype ideas with Python was one of the major reasons I was hired.
That being said, don't debate, just pick one and go with it. For every person who tells you that Ruby is better at X, or Python is better at Y, you'll find another person doing X in Python or Y in Ruby. The best advice I can give you is to find a book/tutorial that works with your learning style and go for it. Then grab a fun project as soon as possible and work on it.
If one is starting to learn on their own in their 2nd or 3rd year in college, I think Python is definitely a good place to start. You will have more doors still open to you as a college student as far as internships go.
I also think people who are still in college might as well take the intro classes so they can take the more advanced data structures and algorithms classes, in addition to extra maths.
It's also good to be around other people who are studying CS while in university. The networking benefits shouldn't be underestimated. And making friends with people who are also passionate about the topic is great for many other reasons.
Python is great in itself, but it seems to me that there are significantly more jobs for junior Ruby coders than junior Python coders... there is no reason you can't learn one after learning the other, though
The two are about the same with regards to employment and educational purposes. If you happen to like one, go with it, otherwise you can just flip a coin and get to the real problems!
I used to hire in a shop that did a lot of Ruby and if we were hiring for a junior position, Python was perfectly acceptable as a language to know. Knowing a dynamic language, being the type of person who teaches themselves, and being able to have visible code was what really mattered.
We found that we could drop capable juniors in a project that has some senior leadership and they were able to pick it up quickly.
If you're from more of a math background (with maybe a little MATLAB knowledge). Python's a great language for machine learning and natural language processing tasks. Great glue language, lots of libraries, prototype quickly, scale with multiprocessing or Hadoop streaming or pycloud. Build your own analysis stack or classifier then display the results on the web with Bottle or Flask.
These are true statements about Python's strengths. I don't realistically see how those are going to help you get a job unless that job also takes an advanced degree, or at the very least a BS touching on a field you have specialized knowledge of.
I've been stuck in this exact same place for the last one year or so. I wanted a job in machine learning or possibly NLP and python is my language of choice, while the language is an excellent tool for these tasks I have not been able to find jobs in ML or NLP possibly because both of these fields involve quite a bit more than the programming related work.
To top this off I live in India and it has been difficult to find quality jobs here; the ones that will hire a less experienced person like me, of course :-)
Good point. I'm perhaps generalizing too much from my own experience (which is admittedly of having an advanced degree in mathematics and being a recent Silicon Valley transplant).
I think every minute spent thinking about which one to pick is a minute you could have spent learning either of the languages, I think it really doesn't matter which. Once you master one the other one will be a lot easier to learn as they're so similar. Just flip a coin, pick one now! :)
If its still all about perspective, might we say those 5% are still yet to fail.
Given a long enough timeline even currently successful companies can become future failures.
Edit:By this I mean even successful companies can eventually lose out to competition when they lose their edge. Only the Paranoid Survive - Andy Grove.
I would like someone to sit me down, and explain the economics of why accept a buyout immediately after raising. And NOT the part of accepting $1 Billon. But why they closed a round with a buyout just around the corner.
a) You don't know if the acquisition will actually happen. Therefore if it doesn't, you aren't left with nothing.
b) It gives you a stronger bargaining chip to increase the price of the acquisition because you literally have a strong alternative. Instagram could tell FB to screw off, they are already getting $50M.
I wonder if the investors (Sequoia, Greylock) knew of the pending acquisition offer from FaceBook when they put forth the 50M investment? If they did, that was the easiest investment ever.
I believe I read that Marc Andreessen is an investor (and board member?) in both companies. Seems painfully unlikely they did not know. And why wouldn't Instagram TELL them?
They may have brokered the deal, and at least gave credibility to the investment to make it easier for Facebook to pay the price. Beautiful result for the portfolio - we are in a bubble and flipping this so quickly means that they have $ return in the bank way before the more speculative investments.
Raising a round SETS the pre-money and post-money valuations of a company. I've known companies that have taken a measly $8M round when they are already independently profitable.
It's basically a bargaining chip. Let's look at two different scenarios:
1. Your last round of financing was two years ago and you raised $2M at a post-money valuation of $8M. Two years pass and you're hot, what is you company worth? Look at some comparables (which the acquirer will try and rip apart). Do a multiple of your revenue (which the acquirer will try and rip apart).
2. Now you're hot and you think you might be acquired (or maybe not!), you raise $5M at a $50M post-money valuation. Now when you sit down at the bargaining table, you can say "Well that VC over there thinks we're worth $50M, what do you think we're worth?"
In option 2, you've got a lot more bargaining power.
Where there will be at times small or major fragmentation in the branding, Android app development is still the unifying factor, and while apps are still the name of the game in town, Android will gradually gain strengthen.
Most people are not trained to handled these situations properly and they will be nervous and start slipping up which a not well trained or inexperienced officer may wrongly interpret as suspicious/dangerous.
If I am truly innocent then perhaps I am the one that needs the hostage negotiator from the threat on the other side of the door.