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- Hacker News
- For an Amber Alert that could be really helpful.by fearmerchant
- Kidnapping like how you’re thinking of it (stranger grabbing your kid from the park) is a myth. Non-family abductions are 1% of cases.
Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/nonfamily
by edot - Highly anti social people (flock executives, mark zuckerberg, other surveillance capitalists, etc.) should simply be expelled from society to a separate island to fight each other for scarce resources.by jsrozner
- Fitting the typical stereotype of a villain company, the greed with no ethics isn’t surprising, what’s surprising that it’s backed by “hacker” news.. shouldn’t HN be backing the counter efforts against such company not the other way around?by tamimio
- Are we living on the same planet? Almost i see on HN is hate and vitriol about flock.
Im genuinely perplexed how someone could come to this conclusion.
- Why is it surprising?
YC is a billionaire led organization whose founder has written openly about the virtue of discriminating against women and parents, and more recently has written bad faith responses to criticisms of billionaires.
This site is a Safe Space to promote those investments, regardless of societal impact.
edit: to be fair, pg walked back some of his pro-bigotry-against-parents shit once he became a parent. But that's the kind of sociopathic cunt who runs this place...
by flockingbird - Flock is a Y Combinator alumnus. It’s not backed by Hacker News, scare quotes or no.by WalterGR
- Pretty sure this is the same person who made "your flowing data" many years ago. Assuming it is, that was a really cool project!
You could follow their twitter account and DM semi-structured messages at it. He would generate personalized charts and tables from the message you sent.
Looks like it's the same account, but that service seems down at the moment.
Really great demonstration that created value from semi-structured data streams.
- Hm, two questions:
- Who is paying for surveillance? - To whose benefit is it used?
by nullorempty - Police departments until the constitutional aspects are settled, then they'll be cut down en masse.by bigbuppo
- Part of the backstory here I think is that ALPR cameras are a commodity technology. They're not defensible by themselves medium term; the market will go to whoever ships the cheapest most reliable cameras with the best pre-sales team, which is a tough space to compete in. For Flock to defend a growth-stage startup valuation, it needs to come up with value-adds.
For a while it looked like that was going to take the form of single-pane-of-glass fusion products (think: Grafana for public safety orgs), but post-AI that seems pretty hard to defend too; Axon doesn't need deep roots in SFBA tech culture to compete on that anymore.
So I guess expect a lot of wacky ideas.
by tptacek - Don't they have network effects? Let the locals search the next few towns over? Obviously this diminishes with distance; there's not a lot of benefit to Denver sharing with Minneapolis.by rconti
- I don't think Flock is going to care that much about profit and growth. Their CEO seems to be a true believer, as opposed to the typical SVer whose god is cash. And at this point they need to win hearts and minds a lot more than they need new installs.
Data is the real product (the whole point of this is having a large network of correlated data, not just putting one security cam in an office), so at some point the Ring<->Flock combo may be proposed again, probably as Flock acquiring Ring (if they get the cash together). Ring was un-ironically marketed as "pre-crime", which is basically Flock for doorbells.
by 0xbadcafebee - The CEO of Flock said his mission is to "completely eliminate and eradicate crime in America". I think I saw that movie, it was called Minority Report.by 0xbadcafebee
- With the final movie in the series being Saving Private Ryan.
- Sumaritan from Person of Interest is more like what they are aiming for I think.by hypercube33
- To eliminate only very specific types of crime, to be clear.by flockingbird
- I’m not convinced that there’s any solution to this besides direct government regulation and an enshrinement of privacy rights into the law. Cities stop paying for flock access? Other cities still will. Regulations preventing public property from being used for cameras? Private companies will allow it. Vigilantes destroying cameras? Start using mobile drones or something. It’s a losing battle, and everything done so far to fight it is just causes an escalation. Constitutional right to privacy (from government and private companies) is probably the only durable solution.by LadyCailin
- This is blogspam of https://www.404media.co/flock-wants-to-partner-with-consumer...by driverdan