skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we're coming from the same place here.

Modern society seems to be good at creating situations where people feel powerless or like lashing out. The offender obviously makes an awful choice, but maybe we should think about how to make things so that society isn't so brutal?

I say that gun control is the "easy" answer because it is a response to a specific event. That doesn't mean that I think that gun control is "bad". I'm just saying that the underlying issue that leads people to do awful things has other negative (but not as horrific) effects too.

As an unrelated illustration, the 14 year old inner city kid walking around with a gun or knife feels miserable and powerless. The weapon makes him feel empowered, but in a negative way -- if he grows up that way, that's going to leave him vulnerable to substance abuse and that mindset will be passed on to his kids and his social circle too.
I'd settle for a [drone].
This reads like a badly-explained piece of Taleb's most recent book "Antifragility". Taleb specifically mentions most of the points mentioned, "the focus on teams" and "learning from past mistakes". Granted, these are obviously a huge part of startups in general, but if you pretend that you knew what a Black Swan was before Taleb popularized the term in 2001, you're a philosophy of science PhD or a liar. The fact that our young blogger gives absolutely NO credit to Taleb's book is disingenuous at best.
Yes. They're great at naming variables with one word. ;)
The guy used basic handguns in this shooting. The problem is his mental health, not his access to guns. If he were motivated enough, and guns weren't available, he could use any manner of other means to kill a bunch of people - bombs, molotov cocktails, home-made flame throwers, samurai sword, vehicles, etc.
I think you mean false dichotomy, not straw man.
And then it stackoverflows and you learn that there are actually two standard monadic state datatypes :)
This is insane. Amazing, but insane.
Wow, I love the idea.
I have always wanted to manage my mail via terminal, but didn't want to set up Mutt or something similar.
Tell me more about how 1998 is your arbitrary yardstick.
Takeo, Japan: The Facebook City
I think this is the best comment in this discussion. Instead of relying on imperfect governance and enforcement to achieve a goal, which is rationally naive to begin with, why don't we take these imperfections as given and try to work out a solution?

What about security technology? Maybe if the school had smaller, less expensive and less obtrusive metal detectors? Improved inter classroom comm systems for coordinating lockdowns? Cheap, integrated access systems ensuring only qualified personnel and students access the campus?

On the margin, all these could improve the situation without the need for lofty dreams of a societal paradigm shift or pouring hours into a solution that is already exhibiting diminishing marginal returns.
Who's pushing for this? Where does support for this come from?
Whatever you do, don't tell them about the statue of Lenin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle
It's the not getting a law job at all part that blows. In Ontario, it's a 4 year Bachelors plus 3 years of law school... that's a heavy price to pay, mainly in money but also in time. The job better be financially rewarding to some extent.

No I'm not talking about spiritually or intangibly rewarding. I'm talking about whether the huge investment ends up being wasteful and an unnecessary burden.
Malcolm Gladwell outlined the Black Swan strategy Taleb used at Empirica in this New Yorker article from way back in 2002:

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

Here's the part that resonated with me:

"We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death," Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. "Say you've got a guy who is long on Russian bonds," Savery says. "He's making money every day. One day, lightning strikes and he loses five times what he made. Still, on three hundred and sixty-four out of three hundred and sixty-five days he was very happily making money. It's much harder to be the other guy, the guy losing money three hundred and sixty-four days out of three hundred and sixty-five, because you start questioning yourself. Am I ever going to make it back? Am I really right? What if it takes ten years? Will I even be sane ten years from now?" What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress.

[Hmmm. Can't get italics to work on the quotation.]
> it's that copy-pasting is a terrible way to learn - even worse than just typing it out.

Can't disagree with that. :-)
Unless you ban everyone from stadiums, malls, movie theaters, and other such venues where people congregate, I don't see how that'd do anything to reduce mass shootings.
I (with minimal physics background, I admit) would bet on systematic error. We're seeing one mass from one decay path, and a _very slightly different_ mass from a different decay path. The best explanation seems to _me_ to be that, for one or both of the decay paths, there's a problem in how we're computing the Higgs mass.
> The answer is probably more guns, not less. Any number of armed school personnel could have lessened this nightmare. If you're tasked with protecting children, shouldn't you be prepared for a gun fight?

Any number of armed school personnel could have made this situation WORSE by firing into a wild crowd in an attempt to attack the shooter, whom they might not even identify correctly in the first place.

Keep in mind that school personnel are NOT tasked with protecting children from violent assault threats. They are tasked with education and a kind of child care for 7-8 hours a day. School systems already have tremendous difficult providing support for larger scale issues that fall outside of those realms, and we shouldn't expect that arming school staff would make for anything other than a climate in which those weapons will be used against students. We already have enough problems with making school systems more like prisons, arming the staff is not a solution to fixing that.
This is a tragedy, but why is it on HN?

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html we have:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

That fits this story.
This seems like a good strategy for Linode - rather than decrease their prices as their running costs get cheaper, they offer more for the same price. This keeps them competitive on price, but keeps their revenue high. It reminds me of the way that car manufacturers tend to make their smallest car get bigger with each new iteration, and then introduce another smallest model. People stick with the model they like but are now paying for the second smallest car, at a higher price.
When teaching people to code, I'll dictate for a bit, and then start asking questions as I go, and move them gradually toward building things on their own. Really only a technique that works one-on-one but it's worked very well.
Some data: In the US, there are about 3.45 homicides with firearms per 100,000 population per year. In Germany (where I live), this figure is 0.19, that is roughly factor 18.
Option 3. Prevent widespread news coverage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4

Though that seems about as likely as "1.Disarm everyone".
What about Alfred or Quicksilver? How is this different and why do you need a round of funding to support it?
An inside look at the app that powers Sesame
That guy was working security at the event and was a trained (ex-)LEO. Most people who have their fantasies about using their concealed weapon to save the day don't have nearly that much training or preparation.
This is just bad statistics. School massacres are somewhat uncommon. If you look at a history of mass killings at schools in the UK then you'll see that the expected amount of time between them is actually longer than the time since the most recent large shooting, Dunblane, and today. Which means that we have no clue whether or not gun control has "worked" to prevent such things or not.
In the late 90's I joined a startup that had its application server similar to OpenACS (Apache + in house dev Tcl module + DB bindings).

With a way of doing objects to table mapping, similar to what Rails has.

This back in 1999.
What a delightful breath of fresh air. I get awfully tired of the hash-tables-are-constant-time and worst-case-behavior-is-too-rare-to-worry-about nonsense that floods the web.

And here we have the problem and proposed solutions clearly explained, and presented in a pleasant, readable design.

Excellent post. Keep up the good work.
Is sanity really a possibility here? Sure, we don't have a diagnosis, at least yet, but I would say by definition this person was not sane. A mass shooting is no crime of passion.

It seems to me that there are two problems here. The first is that we suck at finding/handling the mentally ill. These mass shootings are rare, but the connection between crime and mental illness in this country is anything but.

The second issue is of course that we do a piss-poor job of keeping guns away from the people they need to be kept away from.

Ideally both issues should be tackled.
Well, at least you're consistent. :)

Anarchist and anarcho-capitalist ideas are fascinating but I'm still more than a bit skeptical.
for vim fans, another option is mutt or alpine with vim as your editor. Both work with gmail.
Copying and pasting is fine if you're copying code you've written yourself. However, as you said, it's a lot more beneficial when you type out code because you'll make mistakes and have to figure them out.

It's very hard to learn how the code you're using works when all you've done is copy and paste it.
Support the FSF to make your voice for software freedom heard
Apparently this is the second time they've increased storage on their systems since I've been with them. I have a Linode 512 plan and I had 8GB of more storage to add to my existing disks (they only added 4GB today to my plan level).

I also have to say, it was painless to upgrade the storage. Click Shutdown in the UI, resize partition, boot back up, and you're done.
Part of why it is so effective is because the perspective changes it induces not only lessens the desire to divulge, but changes the outlook you have on life that is causing you to do it in the first place. It's not a "cure" rather than a means to get people to look at their life differently, which is what motivates them to go an opposite direction.

While they can provide a social outlet for support, I don't think that AA or religion can have such an immediately life-altering impact on someone as much as they, themselves, can.
The basic idea behind "the black swan" is that given a limited sample it's foolish to try and estimate the probability of tail events, and thus in particular the expected value of convex functions.

Say for instance you have a random variable which follows the following mixture: draw from a standard normal 99.99% of the time and from a standard normal 10 standards deviations away 0.01% of the time.

If you collect 1,000 sample, 90% of the time you won't see a single instance where the value was drawn from the second mode. You plot your data and find that it perfectly fits a normal distribution. Neat!

I then ask you, what the probability to get an event >10 standard deviation away.
You punch in the numbers and come up with 1.31e-23. The real answer was about 1/20000. You're wrong by about 19 orders of magnitude.

Moral of the story: if your model spits a probability much lower than the inverse of the sample size, don't trust it.

Many financial instrument, like options, display convexity. This places greater emphasis on the tails of the distribution than on the center. If the option seller underestimates tail risk, it would be profitable on average to buy such options.

There are many reasons why they might underestimate tail risk. They could ignore the theoretical argument I've exposed above. It could be that in a marketplace, sellers who ignore tail risk can stay in business long enough to put those who don't out of business.
Kill WikiNews
The really fun thing about this is that folks have realized this and, instead of focusing on intrinsic motivation, have just added more metrics to try and balance things out. Enter the "balanced scorecard" with 30 different metrics that the manager or employees have little/no direct control over.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237399...

Yes, the Balanced Scorecard has some use but I think it's still missing the point.
Thanks! Yes, (in my 4 years of trading experience,) I've only seen pharma stocks move up 30-40% in a month (or day!).
Looks nice man, good work.
Or cars used in any accidents. Thousands of people die in car collisions every year, accidental and intentional, whether they were drunk or sober, reckless or diligent, or just an innocent pedestrian or cyclist who happened to have bad luck that day.

A few days ago someone posted a web site called http://www.banthecar.com where they laid out detailed arguments for banning all cars, because of all the problems they cause, including accidental deaths. Obviously banning cars is not reasonable or realistic.

We have a process for who is and is not allowed to drive a car, and we are fairly comfortable with it, even though it still fails to prevent thousands of deaths. The process of firearm ownership could use some adjustments, but ultimately we cannot prevent all deaths. The best we can do is prevent those who are obviously unsuitable(1) from owning firearms, and ensuring we have a system to remove the rights of those who abuse them.

(1) this is very dangerous due to the history of gun control being used to enable racism and genocide. The criteria must be objective, not subjective.
as HN gets a broader audience different iterations of this kind of stuff will be recycled ad infinitum
If anyone is wondering the answer is: No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines
Thanks to google killing free Google Apps accounts, I won't get a chance to use this. It's really sad because this is exactly what I was looking for.
Does it have support for two-factor auth? In the event of 2FA/MFA, I'm assuming one needs to generate an application-specific password and keep that in the .rc?

Alternatively, I see there are requests for using OAuth, which would be a similar approach to have a "token" that can be revoked.
Why gmail and not email?
How will common small arms deal with a determined gunman with assault protection gear, esp. in a chaotic, high stress situation like that? We would be better off finding a way to lessen and stop these kinds of events from occurring.
Posting an article on a website isn't sensitivity. It just lets people gawk.

Despite what pg says, this article does not belong on Hacker News. This has absolutely no relation to hacking in general. There are a multitude of sites that will provide content like this article. There are precious few sites limited in scope to what Hacker News should be about.
Sorry, thought you were insinuating that changing the laws on obtaining one would make a difference in stopping those who will essentially do whatever they need to to get it. :)
I really like using Linode. More than the size, space, and cost (which I do value), I appreciate their straightforward and detailed documentation library for administering. That, mixed with their tools, makes using Linode quite enjoyable.
We[1] need to begin tearing down the stigma of mental illness before better care can really have an impact.

[1] Canada/the US, at least; I'm not familiar enough with other cultures.
The lesson is "Don't establish dumb goals".

I thought the point was that you can't anticipate the side effects setting a goal will have. People are likely more creative in reaching it in ways you didn't imagine.
there's a python replacement: http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/pexpect.html
I only say this because I'm surprised you posted another comment just linking to a comment that's already been made. Usually the practice is to add your opinion under the existing comment or upvote it. It seemed to me that you posted it again just so that your comment would be at the top of the page for the limited period that new comments hang there, in order to get more attention. And the reason I mentioned the upvotes was exactly this reason - if people actually thought this was important, they would have upvoted the original one more - you posting the exact same thing again is unnecessary and frankly should be discouraged.

Like I mentioned as a response to both your and the other comments, I explain how to install it without that shortcut directly above, so it's not too difficult to do this if you are concerned about security. In addition, it is very simple to just check the source of the link if you are suspicious. I asked in the other comment thread if it would help if I put a "view source" link next to it to make it even more convenient and nobody responded, so I figured it wasn't something people were after.

I'm not sure how to respond to your questioning it's simplicity. It's not a complex script - it checks if you have node, and if you do it installs roots. If you don't, it tells you that you need node and opens up the node.js website. It's just a little helper, not a mind-blowing, life-saving tool. Is it saving you hours upon hours of time? No. But does it make the process simpler? Yes.
I'm not numb to this... it is seriously getting to me. I'm pretty appalled at how may people have jumped at the opportunity to get on their soapboxes in this thread.
I agree completely. Everyone should flag this and it should be removed.
It seems that there are two schools of thought (generalizing obviously): 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons.

I think these are actually two extreme positions to which almost nobody seriously subscribes.
UC suspends use of new logo!

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/12/14/uc-suspends-use-of-...
The Secret, Shady World of Infographics
Recommend any fiction authors off the top of your head? I read more non-fiction, definitely.

Last fiction author I read was Alice Munro ("For the love of a good woman")
I don't know why Clojure does not do TCO, but I would be surprised if the Java VM has something to do with it. I mean, why? TCO is just an AST transformation. Takes a function, returns a function and a for loop. Yeah, yeah, the easy implementation needs goto, but it's not necessary. AFAICT any tail-recursive function can be implemented as a for loop plus continue, break and return.

Now, while Clojure just not implementing automatic TCO would not be a bug or a design flaw per se -- clisp does fairly well without it, because the developers just didn't bother -- if implementing such an AST transformation in the Clojure compiler is impossible, then the compiler's design is faulty. It's like programming FizzBuzz so that you can't later modify it to add a case for multiples of 7. OK, yeah, TCO without goto is not such a piece of cake, but you get the idea.

And I don't think it's a trade-off in the least. If so, what are Clojure programmers winning now? The glorious overhead of thousands of function calls? Those tasty "stack overflow" back-traces, with thousands of calls to the same function?
Brazil is as big as the U.S. and we don't have this kind of trouble here often. I am 32 and I remember it happening twice in all those years and in both cases the shooter said he was inspired by U.S. shootings...

I don't believe the shooters are mentally ill. There is simply sad, evil people in the world that think that shooting a lot of people will get them some attention/fame/recognition. In a society like the current U.S. society where being unknown and alone is worse, in the mind of some people, than being known as a serial killer this kind of thing is bound to happen.

Due to the nature of your society, you will never ban firearms. They will always be available and those wanting to kill can always find another ways.

In mu humble opinion, your problem lies in the fact that some very weird and sad people there find that serial killing is a glamorous life/ending. The worship or desire of a thug life or being known/recognized as a criminal by the media and society drives these wackos towards this behavior.

When consumerism is king and money/oportunity/perspective is low, when not being the most popular thing ever is worse than dying, when parents don't impose limits to their kids and just keep pumping meds into them, this disaster will keep happening.
Other people have already responded to you, but I think they've fallen into the common trap of assuming that privacy is about having something to hide. Yes, the data collected might be leaked by poor security, and yes, you might not want your neighbors installing cameras in your shower, but that's not the point.

This is an excellent paper on the problem:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

In short: privacy is not about hiding things. It's about an exchange of power. A government with more information about your life is one with more power to make decisions about you. There are many reasons to oppose this:

* Chilling effects. People may be more afraid to conduct legal activities for fear they will be misconstrued and used against them by the government. ("Sorry, you can't fly anymore.")

* People are powerless to fight decisions the government makes on their behalf, because they do not know what data the government has collected, and all of it is secret. It's not Orwellian; it's Kafkaesque.

* Small bits of information gathered through surveillance can turn into much more interesting information about a person combined. You might not mind revealing each individual tidbit, but what about the picture they paint when combined?

There's more the the argument, which you can read in the article linked. Privacy is not just about secrecy.
First of all, the country I grew up in was South Africa, which history can tell you was almost destroyed by what people called "safeguards" at the time. The government was trying to rid the country of "terrorists" and it brought the country to the brink of civil war. So what is the relationship between these societal and intitutoional safeguards you refer to, and the warrantless electronic surveillance that was also on the front page of HN this morning with vocal opposition from the vast majority of this community?

edit: In case it wasn't clear, I don't actually believe the South African government was doing what it claimed - but believe when I tell you we had no idea just how bad the government was until after it was all over. My point was that safeguards aren't always what you think they are, and they they won't always be there. You can't decide to give citizens rights only when the government decides they need them.
Screen doors don't keep all the bugs out, but they sure do help. The alternative, a solid door, is a political impossibility in America. You may as well wish for a pink pony.
As someone who learned to code recently (last 3 years), this advice is good but dangerous in the long-term.

I started by typing out other people's code from various books or tutorials, but found that it produced a feeling of "success" that made me lazy in taking the step to producing my own code from scratch. I had that feeling of progress, without actually making real progress.

In my experience the best way to learn to code is to pick a small-ish project that you personally want to use and just get started. You'll screw up a bunch of times, but it's the only true way to learn coding.
Most people who write about Black Swans nowadays would acknowledge the phrase comes from the book "The Black Swan". It's not disingenuous to not mention Taleb in every piece of writing which uses the phrase "Black Swan" precisely because Taleb is famous for creating/popularizing the phrase.