Computer scientist had bike stolen and tried to explain binary search to a cop | Hacker News Reader

Computer scientist had bike stolen and tried to explain binary search to a cop

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65 pointsrobaato21 comments

The argument didn't go well not because the cop doesn't understand but because the cop doesn't care when the bike got stolen, how it got stolen, who stole it or that it was stolen at all.

I had an expensive motorbike stolen. It had a tracker so I could see exactly when it was stolen, where they took my poor bike to remove the tracker etc. I gave all this data to the cops and they did precisely nothing whatsoever about it.

They don't care at all about bike theft.

That conversation gets even more interesting when you tell them you are going there yourself, with some friends.

At that point might as well never involve the police so they have no leads on the recovery.

The only reason to involve the cops at all in this stuff really is to get a police report for insurance purposes.

yep, I had my apartment broken into years ago and never bothered filling out a police report. It's just not useful.

Main article: https://archive.is/RyZI0

git bikesect

can't upvote enough

I thought that's what they already do?

if is_black: search() else: pass

The cops have tools they can put video through which tell them the sus activities at the station, and even match potential suspects. Any kind of human based search is super naive unless these tools fail to work.

Funny but cops know this trick

Computer scientist patronizes the little person. We really are the most arrogant profession.

You have to be pretty stupid to think cops are too stupid to understand binary search

its annoying how those in power want us to forgo cars and bike but also are happy to normalize decriminalize crime…

Just sounds like a lazy cop to me.

Normalization of lazy cops is part and parcel of normalizing the decriminalization of crime.

It shouldn't controversial that crime shouldn't be tolerated and yet here we are tolerating it and normalizing that tolerance as 'just' how things are.

if people want to avoid the normalization of crime they should try to learn what the criteria of good and bad are and not forget it

but there's an obvious push back against that

chances are those who push against it are trying to hide their own crimes in the darkness and confusion.

Bike theft was normalized long ago.

Largely by the pro-car group.

'If you didn't want your bike nicked you should have bought a car' is a phrase often uttered by the public and police alike.

is it actually?

Always cool reading a HN post to a reaction Tweet/Toot of a screenshot, from a newspaper article, about something the reporter read in a chatroom, that happened to someone else.

That is a form of humor, but obviously cops know binary search and any smart person wouldn't get this joke.

They'd be thinking, having actually searched video for an incident it's a PiTA. It's not just half, half, half. You won't necessarily be able to see the bike well. The store won't want to hand over everything they have to a cop who doesn't even know when it happened.... did it happen, is the cop lying if they know so little?

Not great cops having the right to search all footage to the dawn of humanity without a warrant either.

But I guess for a kid in high school having learned an algorithm they can pwn cops with (in their head) it's more funny.

The missing next paragraph from the newspaper article -

"I made a (slightly more diplomatic) nuisance of myself and they eventually looked at the footage. The policewoman I dealt with was lovely about it, but in the end the image wasn’t clear. Maybe they were right not to bother."

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