If they are, they're falling for an urban myth, because IQ tests in white-collar employment are legally fine, and several household-name corporations use them openly. I'm a noodge about this particular issue because there's a folk belief that IQ tests are the secret perfect hiring mechanism; it wouldn't bother me so much if it was so obvious how badly a pure IQ-test process would perform for a job in our field.
I'm not sure austerity wages for founders are really a thing anymore. Serious investors understand that team turnover is as or more scary than fiscal drama.
There was a longstanding "ramen profitable" ethos on HN, but part of that is rooted in a much older set of YC deal terms and lower expectations for seed rounds. But YC is now one of the principal components of all tech startup funding, the standard terms are much better, syndicated seed rounds have gotten pretty big; I think you're expected not to be silly about comp, but I don't think people are looking for you to signal commitment or virtue or asceticism with your comp package.
If you can't pay yourself a real comp package, something is probably wrong with your business.
This is all great. One thing I wanted to call out in particular is Thomas' take on investor verbal agreements. YC has a thing about this: it's called the Handshake Protocol.
The idea is: you and your investor agree on (1) an amount to be invested, and (2) a valuation or cap. Maybe you shake hands. Then, after the meeting, you memorialize the deal in an email. The deal is then socially binding: reneging on a Handshake Protocol deal is a big thing, gets noted in Bookface, whatever.
There's nothing magic or even interesting about the protocol; all it does is eliminate a form of ambiguity that professional investors are facile with and founders aren't. Investors are very good at saying "yes" and meaning "no"; they want the option to invest without the commit. If you don't put it to them directly, they'll take the option! The Handshake Protocol puts it to them directly: "are you committing?"
Most of the time, you're going to get a "no" answer to that, which is exactly what you want: clarity, so you can make decisions.
This is great, simple advice that is obvious in hindsight.
It works in all sorts of places too! Like negotiating a job offer or a raise or promotion or time-off. It also works outside of the workplace such as following up with social acquaintances ("hey let's play tennis sometime").
It excels at identifying the party unwilling to commit. And in my experience the sooner you figure that out the better.
We used to do this in the software documentation team I worked with for 9 years: we would discuss something verbally, then the person who'd called the discussion would summarise the conclusions in an email to team members. They could then edit the summary as needed. It really helped further down the line as a communal memory device.
Police cannot access privately-owned Flock cameras unless the owners authorize them to do so, or a court orders it (in the same sense that a court can order access to any information on any device).
Yes that is what I said. Most private owners opt in to this data sharing arrangement. Keep in mind some of the largest deployments are with big box stores and retail property owners.
I don't know where you live, but if you lived in Chicagoland the advice for how to engage on this would be easy: there are 1-4 (depending on your muni) Facebook groups where all the meaningful policy discussion happens. Hold your nose and log into Facebook and look.
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
Characterizing vehicles based on stickers (which easily can indicate political leanings) is absolutely problematic. It's just not considered problematic by conservatives, given police in the US are overwhelmingly conservative.
Look, I agree that's problematic conceptually, but it's absolutely not what's happening. ALPRs don't select cars on spec, like, "this car looks out of place here". Nobody has time for that. They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".
Here's another way to look at this. Municipalities are the primary operators of ALPR cameras. Any municipality that would scan bumper stickers looking for Trump opponents is not going to be receptive to any appeals for regulation.
One problem with this whole debate is that people are coming to it with movie plot concerns rather than understanding what's actually happening with them. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a slam dunk public policy case, but it isn't: there is broad bipartisan support for these devices.
There are deeply problematic things happening just with license plate pings!
They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents, like, "this vehicle has been present at the site of 5 previous package thefts".
You're hand-waving a hell of a lot of things away and you expect that everyone knows what you're talking about. Please stop doing that.
- Who is "They"?
- Why do you say "nobody has time for that"? What is "that"?
- Why are you dismissing genuine concerns through unhelpful language like, "coming to it with movie plot concerns".
- Why wouldn't "that" be a big deal? What is "that"?!
- What are the deeply problematic things?
- "They're matching specific descriptions of cars to incidents" -- no they're not. Just looking at Bloomingdale's audit logs, there are 13k examples of searches done for the simple reason, "suspicious".
- Why does municipalities being the primary operators matter?
Asking from a place of genuine confusion by how you think about these things.
"They" are public bodies operating ALPR devices; in the main, municipal police forces, though obviously other public bodies (like the Illinois State Police) operate them as well.
The antecedent of the first "that" was "the use of cameras to detect cars with politically disfavored bumper stickers".
I am, yes, dismissing the concern that ALPRs are being used to detect cars with politically unfavorable bumper stickers. I think that if advocates for ending our Flock contract had come to the board table with that concern, rather than the quality of Illinois LEADS, we'd still have the cameras up.
The antecedent of the second "that" is "organizing around easily dismissible movie-plot concerns, like that municipal police are going to dragnet for people with anti-police bumper stickers". Unwinding the sentence, the "big deal" is, as I just said, that centering implausible risks takes real risks out of focus, and gives ammunition for advocates of the cameras --- of which there are a great many --- to push back on efforts to get the cameras down.
I spelled the "deeply problematic" things out elsewhere on the thread.
Feel free to tell me more about what Bloomingdale was doing with their cameras. With no detail, I'm inclined to believe the force simply didn't give a shit about the description field in the search request, because no serious, rigorous effort was made to regulate ALPRs in Bloomingdale, and so there isn't much signal in the logs.
hmm, ok. kind of odd to put yourself out there for so many years, then be willing to die on this issue, given the political state of things. but, you be you
Edit: I can't respond to your reply, but my original question was why is it so important to you, and you didn't answer. But, I guess I'll go back through your comments to find out. Us 'passive observers' are just trying to figure out who's on which team. Feel free to ignore us. No offense intended
"Weird that you sound so defensive, given you're willing to die on this issue and ruin your reputation". Do you hear yourself?
What's especially funny about this is that you haven't taken the time to even figure out who I am or where I'm coming from on this issue. It's pure uncut schoolyard behavior. Maybe reflect a bit!
Nobody's reading this thread but us at this point.
Please actually just look at any audit log and just search yourself. If you think there's no signal, then you clearly haven't looked. If you're going to continue to be lazy in your analysis, then ask a damn LLM. There are 528 agencies who used "suspicious". This is not a bloomingdale problem; it's much larger. Just fucking look, man.
select count(*),org_name from flock_bloomingdale where reason = 'suspicious' group by org_name order by count desc;
count | org_name
-------+--------------------------------------------------
2678 | Skokie IL PD
828 | Joliet IL PD
678 | Houston TX PD
391 | Fayette County IL SO
309 | Chicago IL PD
256 | Katy TX PD
245 | Itasca IL PD
244 | Steger IL PD
229 | Athens-Clarke County GA PD
215 | Lucas County OH SO
209 | Oak Lawn IL PD
208 | Westmont IL PD
199 | La Salle County IL PD - OLD
194 | Zion IL PD
191 | La Grange Park IL PD
174 | Kenosha County WI SO
173 | Champaign County IL SO
170 | Roselle IL PD
160 | Lake Villa IL PD
152 | Bradley IL PD
152 | Madison County IN SO
143 | LaSalle Co. IL SO - New
135 | Flossmoor IL PD
132 | Sauk Village IL PD
116 | Oak Brook IL PD
106 | Crete IL PD
104 | Villa Park IL PD
101 | Darien IL PD
97 | Cicero IL PD
94 | Wilmington IL PD
89 | Rockford IL PD
80 | Lake County IL SO
80 | Dolton IL PD
79 | Texas Department of Public Safety
76 | Will County IL SO
75 | Naperville IL PD
72 | Minooka IL PD
68 | Hillside IL PD
63 | Carpentersville IL PD
55 | Kent County MI SO
55 | Zanesville OH PD
54 | Winnebago County IL SO
51 | Logan County NE SO
46 | Romeoville IL PD
46 | Menomonee Falls WI PD
46 | Homewood IL PD
44 | Burnham IL PD
44 | Baldwin County GA SO
43 | Venice FL PD
39 | Elmwood Park IL PD
37 | DuPage County IL SO
36 | Greensboro NC PD
34 | Lowndes County GA SO
34 | Henry County GA PD
34 | Tinley Park IL PD
You're going to need to tell me why I'm supposed to be freaked out by the word "suspicious". Further, it is not my claim that (1) ALPRs are not problematic or (2) that they don't direly need more regulation; that's exactly the work I was doing in Oak Park before we cancelled our contract.
My common experience is that people dismiss these risks without evidence, while I've seen plenty of stories of such things happening in this context and in others. Possibly those stories add up to a lot of anecdotes, but these aren't arguments based on reason or evidence:
> easily dismissible movie-plot concerns
> implausible risks
Those are just words. People who use them, IME, imply their conclusions are already well-established. But they never are. Where is the evidence and argument for these claims?
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
I came in to the thread anticipating a highly placed tptacek comment defending Flock without grappling with any of their numerous problems, and claiming that "regular people" love Flock. Weird how predictable that's become.
> normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
The effectiveness is dramatically oversold. This has literally happened to me. Called 911 midway through the theft, cops pulled it up on Flock, the best they could tell me was "they went towards the highway" (no shit, Sherlock).
I saw the parts on marketplace a week later (definitely mine, unique staining), 2 hours after they were listed and called it in. The PD where the parts are wouldn't do anything unless my PD called, my PD said the officer in charge was on vacation so they can't do anything until he's back.
Take a wild guess who hasn't heard anything back. This should be their ideal situation; they got called mid-robbery, and someone else located the parts afterwards. If they can't solve that with Flock, lack of information is not the holdup here.
I completely agree with you about the effectiveness, or rather, I do if you stipulate a community that has a problem with curbing cars for innocent drivers (many communities don't recognize that as a real harm and will look only at the top line interdiction numbers).
The thing that Flock does that's alarming is that it provides operators with a search engine for arbitrary vehicle descriptions which include but are not limited to license plates, with history stretching back; misuse scenarios are obvious, the search histories allow you to track the movements of specific people with fine granularity.
The thing that Flock does that is actually immediately problematic is that it operationalizes BOLO/hotlist databases that weren't intended to be used in real-time. Our deployment of Flock curbed more innocent vehicles than actual stolen cars, because Illinois LEADS isn't reliably updated, and so pings on vehicles that were reported stolen (whether or not they actually turned out to have been stolen as opposed to borrowed by a family member or something) weeks ago and recovered.
My car was reported stolen mistakenly, long story but was cleared up within a few hours (an officer came out to confirm vehicle was in my possession). Then a few days later Flock identified my vehicle driving and notified the cops. It was me driving my normal commute and I was pulled over at gunpoint. When I finally explained the story, they were like “oh yeah, we see that in the system but sometimes there’s a lag between databases.” Really? Wtf guys
If I had to guess, it's like when an expensive medical test gets more accessible and they have to update their model.
If the cost to get an MRI means everyone that gets one has a combination of symptoms and risk factors raising the pre-test probability, then it makes sense to treat MRI findings aggressively. If they become cheaper and start using them as screenings, they need to update their approach.
Similarly, if license plates are scanned when cops are already pulling someone over for moving violations (or the car is accumulating a ton of parking tickets, having been dumped), it might be ok if their status isn't updated that frequently, and it still might make sense for cops to approach the car with the idea that it might be stolen (something a drivers license check against registration can quickly clear up, which shouldn't matter too much if they were getting pulled over anyway).
If the system is being used to justify pulling people over in the first place, it needs different parameters.
It doesn't. As drafted it applies to exempt employees. (It's just a proposed bill; it's unlikely to happen and if it picked up any steam presumably it would be drafted more carefully.)
I snagged right away at "the kind of low-level reliability judgment that most teams only notice when something breaks." Real people don't talk like the J. Peterman catalog.
For sure, but I also expect real people who do cold-reaches like this to be using LLMs. I wouldn't have assumed it was indicative of malicious intent, just laziness.
reply