skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have seen those studies pop up from time to time on HN with conclusions altering between "it's reachin worrying proportions", "there is an increase", "there is no increase", "they are so rare as to not worth considering".

From what I understand, the decision of what kinds of shootings are included has a large influence on the conclusion - e.g., the "there have been 18 shootings in 2018 so far" articles from a while ago used a comparatively low threshold for inclusion.

The threshold for this study seems to be "4 or more victims", which I think is similar to the threshold official publications used at the beginning of the Obama administration. I believe there were complaints that the threshold is unreasonably high which caused it to be adjusted - however, I don't have any sources for that ready, so if anyone knows more, please correct me.

In any case, it's important to look at the criteria if one wants to compare those studies.
Absolutely agreed
> Through its core design—short messages, retweets, engagement metrics—Twitter incapacitates the safeguards necessary for civil discussion. It eliminates context, encourages us to present each other out of context, prevents us from explaining ourselves, rewards the most incendiary messages and most impulsive reactions, drives us to take sides and build walls.

The market-based way to fix this would be for there to be lots of social network platforms, with different features, trying lots of different things out, competing with each other, so that eventually we're get ones good for civil discussion. (And also we'll get ones good for other things, for people who want those other things).

Building a twitter-like platform is not a particularly complex thing to do. Indeed, it's so simple that tutorials for web development frameworks often use it as an example!

So why isn't there a massive amount of competition in the social network space, with users having lots of high-quality options to choose from? And why do we often see complaints from users fed up with how Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc work?

The answer is network effects. If I started a competitor to Twitter/etc my site would (initially at least) have few users so there would be no interesting content that would make people go there. Incumbents have an enormous advantage.

One solution to this would be to require that all such sites, once they are a certain size, have an API (e.g. something like RSS) that allows others sites to download and re-use the content that their users put on them. This would break down the walled gardens that the internet is increasingly becoming and permit more competition. This solution however requires lawmakers to be both clueful and desirous of increasing freedom on the internet, factors that make it unlikely to be adopted.
Uber does minute-to-minute dynamic pricing, so any one ride isn't indicative of the actual cost. It may well be more expensive, but one or two ride anecdotes would not prove it.
CBT has been shown to be as effective as Prozak. We can't outright discount the impact therapy may have. All depression is "organic" depression, such that it manifests itself physically. This doesn't persist as if in a bubble independent of all other life factors; things are interconnected, they can all fall into a downward spiral, and spring back up together.
The rate of false-positives is almost always non-zero. So having an MRI scan may show a problem that doesn't actually exist.

I think I remember seeing something about not doing mammogram and/or prostate screenings too often, lest they find a false-positive and do a whole bunch of followup tests and procedures that in turn keep widening the risk for complications.
What % of medical expenditures does this scenario encompass?

You're describing a corner case that can be, at least partially, planned for ahead of time (by consumers, insurers, a combination of the two, etc).

And sometimes your hand is forced in all sorts of markets. But if enough shoppers are even somewhat price-discerning, the "value per price" that you pay for a given good or service should be significantly lower than it is in the current state of affairs.
> Github can probably do better at SRE than I can with a self-hosted server

GitHub maybe but for BitBucket, I'm not sure at all that it's true.
Future of digital forensics faces six security challenges in fighting cybercrime
I used to think that.

Then an Englishman asked for my John Hancock.
I've been strongly doubting that there is such a thing as "the collective health and society." At best, we're in a growing pains situation as a species. At worst, we're simply not built to have this type of communication. There is nothing in nature that makes me think this simple, open-sky way to "communicate" with hundreds of thousands of faceless people is necessary.
> incidents involving 4 or more school deaths

That number seems suspicious; you'd get a very different answer if your criterion was "any gunshot wound at a school", for example. But that definition might be a better match for what people think of as a school shooting.

(e.g. Northern Ireland had a very large number of terrorist attacks where a warning was given allowing evacuation - would they not count as terrorist incidents even if nobody was killed? I suspect not)
Desperate for book sales.
It varies, my local surgery has a triage system that brought down appointment times. Fortunately I haven't had to use it recently.
“
Over the last decade or so, there’s been an absolute explosion in student loans, growing from $260 billion in 2004 to $1.31 trillion last year.

So, the total value of student loans in America today is LARGER than the total value of subprime loans at the peak of the financial bubble.

And just like the subprime mortgages, many student loans are in default.

According to the Fed’s most recent Household Debt and Credit Report, the student loan default rate is 11.2%, almost the same as the peak mortgage default rate in 2010.

This is particularly interesting because student loans essentially have no collateral.

Lenders make loans to students… but it’s not like the students have to pony up their iPhones as security.

That’s what made the subprime debacle so dangerous.

Millions of homes were underwater, so when borrowers didn’t pay, lenders didn’t have sufficient collateral to cover their loan exposure.

With student loans, there is no collateral. Lenders have no security to recoup their loans.

So when students don’t pay, someone is going to take a hit.

That ‘someone’ will likely be you.

That’s because hundreds of billions of dollars of these student loans are either owned or guaranteed by the United States government.

So as borrowers stop making payments, it’s the taxpayer who will suffer yet another massive loss.

Let’s be honest, though, there’s something seriously screwed up with this system.

Young people are pushed into this system by a society that places an irrationally high value on university degrees.

Kids are told for their entire lives that if they study hard to get into a good school, there will be a great career waiting for them.

For many young people this turned out to be a total lie.

In fact, Federal Reserve data once again show that, for at least 25% of college graduates, salaries are no higher than for people with just a high school diploma.

Racking up so much debt hardly seems worth it.

It seems bizarre to begin with that an 18-year old will know what s/he wants to do in life, to the point that they should take on $50,000 in debt for a piece of paper that might not even make them marketable.

What did any of us really know at age 18? And how many of us could have accurately predicted our life’s path?

Very few.

And yet there’s an absurd amount of pressure to force young people into this system that heaps debt upon them.
“

— Simon Black
> In mathematics and most programming languages, summation is defined in terms of the (+) operator.

(+) is not SUM. All languages treat these basic operators as fluid logic that depends on surrounding context and data types. You can't add a null or string to a number in most languages either, and dynamic languages like Javascript will usually create equally strange results. Likewise (+) means concat if you're dealing with 2 strings. SUM() is an explicit function that clearly says that you're adding numbers, and within that function context making NULL = 0 is a reasonable coercion as they are mathematically equivalent.

> but I cannot parameterize a query

What is the parameterization issue exactly? Instead of a view, you use a stored procedure or function which accept parameters. Even normal queries can use parameters which you can then provide them separately, either as variables or even the output of other functions. You can even use functions to write dynamic SQL and then execute that if you want.

Views are usually meant as static projections (which are an abstraction) but you can still join them on some other table which can act as a control, or use if/else/case statements within the view.
Medical care in the US seems... unhealthy.

I'm glad to live in belgium, where i won't go broke if something happens.
This is overstated. Would you say that if everyone knows how to read, nobody does?

There is a large amount of signalling in college. It's wildly inefficient. But it's not all signalling.
We know at least some widely used surgeries are probably no better than a placebo. "Placebo" in surgery is when they get a surgical crew together, anesthetize the patient, make an the appropriate incision, and then dick around for the time it would take to perform a surgery, maybe passing some tools back in forth.

Basically, an elaborate ritual.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/surgery-is-one-hell-of-...

>A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.1 Consider the middle-aged guy going in for surgery to treat his knee pain. Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 692,000 of them performed in 2010,2 but the procedure has proven no better than a sham when done to address degenerative wear and tear, particularly on the meniscus.3

>Meniscus repair is only one commonly performed orthopedic surgery that has failed to produce better results than a sham surgery. A back operation called vertebroplasty (done to treat compression fractures in the spine) and something called intradiscal electrothermal therapy, a “minimally invasive” treatment for herniated disks and low back pain, have also produced study results that suggest they may be no more effective than a sham at reducing pain in the long term.

There's even the question of is the pain even caused by the thing we are trying to fix?

>And then there’s what Thorlund calls “car repair” logic — something looks broken, so you try to fix it. A patient comes in with knee pain, and an X-ray or MRI exam shows a tear in the meniscus. The tendency is to assume that the torn meniscus is the cause of the pain and so should be fixed. However, studies show that MRIs can find all kinds of “abnormalities,” such as cartilage damage, even among people without knee pain. One such study looked at the MRI scans of more than 300 knees and found no direct link between meniscus damage and pain. “You can have a meniscal tear without having any problems,” Thorlund said.

>Back pain follows a similar pattern. Studies that examined MRIs of people’s backs show that things like slipped, bulging or herniated disks correlate very poorly with pain. Herniated disks and other supposed abnormalities are also common in people without back pain, and it’s telling that studies find that spinal fusion, another popular back surgery used to address disk problems, does not produce better results than nonsurgical interventions.
This is a poor comparison and I hope you can understand why. If not let me know and I can clarify.
Even if this included an interpreter, that wouldn't allow you to package anything besides the PHP runtime (e.g. the "php" executable etc) as a Go binary.

You wouldn't be able to distribute PHP programs as go binaries; it would still be an interpreted language, so you'd still have to make sure your programs, and their dependencies, were correctly deployed to wherever you had installed the interpreter.
Current Trends in Visualization: Physical Visualization of Geospatial Datasets
Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system
I choose to believe you actually don't know the risks becaues the alternative is that you are a terrible human being.

It seems vastly more likely that you simply don't understand that you risked everyones lives.
There are actually quite a lot of services down across the web now. Maybe they are unrelated... but it could all be related to AWS. https://statusgator.com/services/amazon-web-services

My side project, StatusGator, monitors something like 250 status pages and there's quite a spike in warn or down notices at the moment that I can see.
> Nobody else has millions of dollars in US military/intelligence cash to build and advertise their alternatives ..

You don't need millions of dollars to build an anonymity system, just look at how much funding projects like I2PD receive.
Similar experience, but with Faroese. You'll be hard-pressed to find people who don't speak Faroese, Danish and English. Fourth language, not so much, but yeah.

However, I do think we Faroese are too bad at Faroese grammar.

Side-note, because we were occupied by the British during WW2, a _lot_ of British slang has been incorporated and turned Faroese, and a lot of regular English words turned into Faroese slang.
> In the words of Syndrome "if everyone is super, no one is". If every one has a BS/BA , masters, PHD then in a real sense no one really does.

This is a very small minded view of the world.

If I have a PhD, and everyone else does too, it's like I don't have one? No! I learned many things during my PhD, and that knowledge doesn't disappear because others have more knowledge too.

It seems the only thing you consider is jobs, but even there you're wrong. The job market is not zero sum.

> Yet governments may actually be overestimating the economic benefits of higher education. While universities are places of learning, they are also social sorting mechanisms.

Yes, so? The universities being a social sorting mechanism does not stop them from also being places of learning. This is American anti-intellectualism 101.
"learned to stop thinking about myself" -- what does this even mean? Happiness is entirely about yourself.
That doctor needs to be somehow shielded from lawsuits, or they'll be incentivised to give undue weight to the risk of leaving something real untreated.
Thats not the only reason to use HTTPS though. It is just as important to be able to ensure you are communicating with the server you think you are.
I like to ask my "ban the AR-15" friends how they feel about the TSA.
It's precisely because we have far more control over heart disease that we do not fear it.

I can accept getting heart disease—maybe it was my fault?—much more readily that being actively, senselessly, killed by someone else. Terrorists know this too, which is why definitionally terrorism is meant to induce fear by way of its unpredictability.

You wrote "security theater" to imply that we shouldn't attempt to address terrorism and school shootings because they don't kill enough people. I think that we ought to fund research into good, effective, ways to reduce gun violence _because_ it's something that we don't control ourselves.
Here you go:

https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/20/putting-data-in-the-driv...
Reflecting on reflections as 1 terabit DDoS attacks become a reality
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501630.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501330
I don't think it is fair to discriminate against anyone at all and certainly don't think that this "shifting discrimination around" game is going to work well at all in the long run...
This isn't news, but it has always been the thing that made me doubtful about Tor.
> Money doesn't make you smart, but perhaps college would have helped him.

It says in the article that he went to Stanford and Stanford Law.
How do you know what he thinks it means?
Actually crime rates in Australia and the USA decreased similarly in the period following Australia's gun ban, despite America's inaction.
Terrorism and gun violence is and has always been about economic impact. 9/11 had more concentrated economic impact than heart disease ever will.

If you think people are being overly emotional over these issues try to imagine a plausible reason why.
Well if you can't read then you can't see what you're writing to right?

But I agree, it's not ideal that Bitbucket has been experiencing issues. I am also looking at alternatives, most likely using AWS CodeCommit and Upsource. It's been at the back of my mind to move away for a while.
I think this is k-12 only data
Current Trends in Visualization: The Emerging Genre of Data Comics [pdf]
Can attest to this, but it's probably incrementally harder as you age. Best hack/alter your brain as early as possible. Same goes for any habit-forming.
> nothing about "education" is about actual education

Nothing? Education, like every human process and institution (and technical creation) is very imperfect, but I certainly learned a lot and found it invaluable. One thing I learned was that hyperbole is drama but not reason; nobody knows what you actually mean in any substantial way, it doesn't inform or encourage critical thought; but it is exciting!
“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples - while judging ourselves by our best intentions." -GWB
The Role of Luck in Life Success
Misleading graph! https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40697/did-the-u...

"Tthere are notes about anomalous events included in each year's numbers. Since the numbers are so low these can throw the graph off. In particular two large events which happened in previous years were reported for 2003 and 2017 respectively which accounts for their anomalous spikes.

2003 includes 172 victims of Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in history. While these killings happened over 25 years, they're recorded for 2003.
2017 includes 96 victims of Hillsborough which happened in 1989.

The data notes other large, anomalous events are noted which can explain spikes in individual years.

2001 includes 58 Chinese nationals who suffocated in a lorry en route into the UK.
2004 includes 20 cockle pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay.
2006 includes 52 victims of the 7 July London bombings.
2011 includes 12 victims of Derrick Bird."

I would also add that that data is for England and Wales, which excludes both Scotland's notorious history of stabbings and the three thousand deaths in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, prior to 1997. Some of which were using Armalite AR-18 rifles, as made famous by the murals.
Toute l’expérience d’un individu est construit sur le plan de son langage.

[An individual’s experience is built entirely in terms of his language.]
There's been a few times where the yellow cab flat rate to JFK was cheaper than Uber in NYC as well.
Electric Vehicle Subsidies Hurt the Poor and Help the Rich
I'm pretty sure French doesn't think of itself as dying. Or Spanish. Or Portuguese, even if many more people speak it in Brazil than in Portugal. Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Malay, Korean -- English may be the most popular second language for all these populations, but there's lots of new work being produced in all of them, and thriving populations who use them all day long.
Perhaps they should do a case control study - places that had mass shootings vs places that didn’t? I’m pretty sure there have been no mass shootings at gun shows or gun clubs, I wonder if there might be some relationship there worth exploring?
So you deny that implicit bias exists? Implicit bias has shown to affect areas as dry as medicine to scientific research, yet racial bias is somehow made up?
I'm currently only able to read over SSH. Write operations seem to hang forever.
It's difficult to see how a lurid view of how some people with money live (e.g. the article) improves peoples lives any more than say, porn.

The idea class mobility needs some sort of moral "defense," is certainly challenging. Sure, it hollows out the ranks of the aggrieved, but that's the point.
Who is the author that makes them an authority on this? I couldn't find much, but it looks like they are just a student or journalist that writes opinion pieces. Shouldn't the professors designing the courses have much more say than someone that does not appear to be an expert?
How Visualization Can Foster Diversity and Inclusion in Next-Generation Science [pdf]
I think what's troubling is that this conflates really problematic, damaging speech with what is merely controversial.

Dismissing "healthy speech" as a category is one thing, but let's not have any illusions about some of what falls outside of that category. Twitter has a problem with anonymous users sending mass quantities of death threats, racial slurs, and other horrible invective at anyone who says something controversial. Twitter has a problem with bot accounts that deliberately disrupt and overwhelm healthy conversations. Twitter has a problem with literal Nazis being all over its service.

So far Twitter has been pretty much unable to fix these issues. Now it's broadening what "healthy speech" means, looking at the problem differently, in other words flailing around and trying yet another strategy for fixing its mostly-toxic platform. I doubt it'll work, but I think it represents less Twitter trying to become Big Brother and more Twitter trying whatever it possibly can to fix these glaring problems in its service.
The local language is likely to have a lot of associations and nuance. Common languages can lead to cultural collapse; the world becomes less rich. "Chinglish" (bad translations) are one extreme outcome of this, but it's not always funny or trivial.
It would never have occurred to me to look for studies in which "placebo surgeries" had been performed. Thank you for the data!
Anecdata: I talked with an Uber driver the other day in London who said his weekly target was to make £1000 gross per week and would adjust hours (ie less or more) accordingly. On the side he was trying to bootstrap a business.
and 3 is well... without mentioning the 'B' word, there is a very smart chap Feng He working on solutions to these problems, https://www.deepbrainchain.org/
Strange Programmer Habits
How to change the course of human history
I think a good solution to this was implemented by Barack Obama: make it illegal for you to not finance in the corrupt and misguided medical industrial complex.
The most interesting tidbit to me: only about 4% of the drivers keep doing it (for Uber anyway) for more than a year. Does this mean Uber requires an ever-replenished supply of fresh drivers? If so, then they might have a not-very-sunny future once there aren't as many left. Like a virus that has infected too many members of the population, who now have an immunity; not enough fresh births to keep it going.
>Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living

So by taking his advice we're ignoring his advice and by ignoring his advice we're taking his advice? Well isn't this a fun little paradox.
It's trendy to criticize the monetary cost of higher education, but it's perceived as a near-necessity, with counter-examples being considered noteworthy ("Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of college!")
> The job market is not zero sum.

To expand on that, the more educated your neighbor is, the more productive and capable they are, and the better off you are. Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones? Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?
Deep learning: No. 1 tech trend for 2018 will revolutionize industrial robotics