skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reread what he wrote, I don't think he was using Switzerland as a progun argument.
I think we have to be careful when things like this happen. It's god-awful. I can't imagine if I was in third grade and a guy barged in and started shooting up the place. But this makes me think of "You can always find evidence for your beliefs." I could take this story as evidence that the world is such a crappy place, but I don't believe that so I won't.

Everything will be okay.
here is a way to combine technology and transparency to make it more difficult for someone to do this:

guns owned in America have mandatory geolocation installed. guns lock if geolocation is disabled or hacked, an alert is autosent to local people and authorities with the last known location, and law enforces speedy investigation of the guns whereabouts and reinstallation of the geolocator. i'd like an app that tells me where the nearest guns are to me and some info about who they belong to, i.e. police, citizen, military etc. if a gun is brought near public spaces, schools, theaters, etc., it should tweet, sms, or otherwise alert local police and anyone who would like to know. i'd like to also set my own alerts, such as alert me if a non-police gun is within a few hundred feet of my location, or my kid's location, etc. the constitution says there is a "right of the people to keep and bear arms," but does not use the word "right" to defend privacy.
Damn, This.

There are options available for people that want to have a family, and god knows there are far to many children out there that can really, really use a loving parent or two.

As a father of two I may come off as smug here, but I can tell you that the first year of a child's life is more going through the motions. The following years are really where you can make a difference, and where they certainly make a difference in you.

I seriously hope once they are over their grief period, that couple takes your advice. A child out there could have his life changed forever because of it.
I find myself agreeing with you, this guy is too much. (Also did you notice how he think's we are all liberals?)
I always hear people worrying about this, but it doesn't sound likely at all. Has it ever happened?
OK I cheated and used google and found (60 chars):

for i in range(1,101):print'FizzBuzz'[i*i%3*4:8--i**4%5]or i

Pastebin of my explanation: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=00Db30FF

EDIT: ugh, sometimes I hate markdown, moved post to pastebin.
It's easy to blame the person --- the offender. But when you think about the way society works, often times the most effective solutions to risk are a combination of social campaigns to educate the masses, as well as physical controls or barriers to prevent bad things from happening.

For example: think about speed bumps. Sure, we could just blame any drivers who crash into pedestrians in parking lots, but by adding speed bumps, we are reinforcing what people already know --- that speeding through parking lots can be dangerous.

Same thing with seatbelts --- you know that annoying chime that won't stop until you've buckled your seatbelt? Why do we need that? Why not simply blame any drivers who crash? Because it reminds people to do what they already know they should be doing. It reinforces safe behavior. It helps to reduce a burden on society --- the negative effects of fatal car accidents.

So I have a hard time whenever I hear someone say 'the problem isn't guns, it's the people who use them', because I think that's only part of the solution. Should people be allowed to purchase firearms "same-day" at gun shows? Should people be allowed to purchase and own as many guns and as much ammo. as they please? Is there something wrong with at least discussing possible reforms to make it more difficult for people to buy guns?
Really not the time for jokes.
Totally agree with this strategy. I have used it to learn mathematical proofs and it is awesome!!!
I'm Canadian, so my insight into the US' situation is limited, but the reason pro-gun people keep bringing up Switzerland is that it puts the lie to the idea that more guns, or even "scary" guns like assault rifles, leads to more crime. Switzerland has huge gun ownership by responsible, trained adults. In addition, it has incredibly low poverty, excellent social services, very low crime rates, and a very high GDP/capita. The argument among pro-gun liberals like myself is that it is the latter factors which affect gun crime far more than the mere prevalence of guns.
It is increasing less difficult to manufacture a gun or really anything else that can do mass damage. 3D printers will become a reality and any lockouts won't last any longer than the DRM on a DVD.

We haven't put the money into brain research to figure out if there is a test we could do. Checkpoints are the easy part. Look at all the places we test for drugs (employment, school sports). If we figured out the mythical dipstick that tells if your brain chemistry is broken, I would imagine it would come up in a lot places that drug testing does now and probably be part of peoples regular checkups. We just don't have a clue and no amount of dealing with the how will fix the problem, we need to get the courage to look at the why.
Attempt to achieve many Black Swans in parallel so that the overall probability of hitting one is higher

This can be misunderstood. One of the most valuable lessons I learned in life so far, is keeping focus. At least I am unable to do more than a few things with full force. And a half baked attitude will be counter productive towards reaching black swan moments.
Hardly. Just because the public doesn't have nuclear weapons doesn't mean that they are incapable of resisting an oppressive regime. Ordinary firearms are for more than sufficient for that purpose. A populace doesn't need to be able to defeat conventional armies on an open battlefield in order to resist oppression. What would be the likely result of, say, an American insurgency against an oppressive government? You wouldn't see militias fighting against tanks, that's just stupid. You would see widespread assassination. You'd see guerrilla attacks on police forces and so forth. You'd see guerrilla forces with ordinary firearms making targeted attacks to gain access to more powerful weaponry. You'd see the public at large making life more difficult for the forces of the regime while giving support to the forces of the insurgency.

A mass of civilians aren't going to be able to stand up to a column of tanks easily, but just a hundred civilians armed with AR-15s are going to be able to stand up even to massed police forces. And if an insurgency is supported by the public at large then life is not going to be easy for the police and the military. This is the way that all guerrilla wars go, and there are many examples of successful insurgencies when they have widespread popular support, even against very well armed government forces.
> Make the odds of him having his tables turned on him by respectable law abiding citizens, and suddenly he'll be more afraid to do harm.

Uh, we're talking about people who are frequently suicidal and are mentally ill enough to shoot up a kindergarten. I suspect they're not weighing odds in a logical manner, somehow.
Listen, there are two parts to this: 1. The horrible tragedy, and 2. The hopes to prevent this from happening again. If we are going to talk about this, we need to all fall under the assumption that we agree that this is both a very tragic act perpetrated by someone who is obviously disturbed/mentally ill, and that it is all of our desires to do what we can to make sure senseless acts of violence like this never happen again.

So where do we go from here? How do we prevent this from happening again? It seems that there are two schools of thought (generalizing obviously): 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons. Regardless of which side you fall in, neither work perfectly unless they are complete (i.e. all weapons are gone thus criminals don't even have access, or everyone is armed and no one has the upper hand). The problem with both absolutes, is a deranged person will always find a means to carry out their ill will, whether that's a gun/knife/driving a car into a crowd.

The safest computer is encased in concrete, and buried 6 feet underground. Much in the same way, the safest society would have each of us locked in a room, with no interaction. What we have to figure out is this: How much liberty do we all give up, to limit the devastation of the senseless acts of a few?
The key difference is that the author is a CEO. His job is setting direction and talking to people.

In any organization that I've worked in the CEO/Managing Director/Commissioner is a person who spends 6-10 hours a day in meetings. Talking to customers, internal stakeholders, random external people, the board, etc. I couldn't imagine doing that work over email.
Isolation doesn't matter if you're absorbed in your work since your work is your world. If work stagnates (a project, a startup or a job) that's when it's felt.

The trick is to always love what you do and to feel part of something whether it's guaranteed to succeed or not.

I'm finding this out slowly.
Couldn't agree with this more, but I'm not sure it's a valid argument in most people's eyes.

The Clackamas shooting was a perfect example of an incident that gun control likely would've prevented. It was not premeditated, it was a bad kid on a very bad day that found a gun easily. If he didn't find it, I think it's safe to wager he wouldn't have done it.
It is sad that degrees have become 'character classes'. I think people lose perspective that a degree is at worst a piece of paper describing what you may have been studying for a very brief part of your life.

It cuts both ways too. It's laughable that an English literature degree would somehow make you more empathetic than an electronics student.
Dark Juno - A Dark UI Theme for Eclipse 4+
Pretty soon, anyone who wants a gun will be able to 3d-print one. I think "gun control" will soon become "technology control", which is going to be tricky because this community appears to be largely anti-gun and pro-tech.
Procuring a gun doesn't mean it was done over a counter.
One way to reduce the possibilities of a crime like this is to reduce the centralized system of public education.

My family home schools our children. It coincidentally helps solve this particular problem. (Perhaps it also reduces the likelihood that we spread viruses like the flu).

Making public education more distributed by the use of technology could certainly help with security.
[video] Is Writing More Important Than Programming?
I know... I'm not trying to be a dick about it. My mind just recoils from this stuff.
I come from India, thrice more populous than US, things like these rarely happen there. Please don't blame it on a singular aspect. A lot of things are in play here,to name a few

1. Easy availability of guns
2. Lack of a family based society. In my opinion, insanity gets aggravated by loneliness
If you look in the history of states which had a problem with gun-violence, you can see that banning guns actually works. After banning, destroying and controlling guns, the amount of massacres and murders falls down. One example of this is germany (i think in the 1970s), but you can look earlier or at the history of other countries to find examples for that.

The situation over here is a tragedy, because all school shootings were commited by sons of fathers who were members of a shooting clubs (and therefore had access to guns). Even though it was not politically possible to ban those clubs and weapons.

But the situation in the USA is even more a tragedy. The USA have shooting after shooting with so many dead kids, and still the political forces are not able to ban guns. Or even slightly control them. Sickening.
I see you saw my comment before my "probable" edit :). The purpose of spoons are to feed. The probability of getting fat as a consequence of using a spoon is small. The purpose of guns is to make killing efficient.
20,000 children starve to death _every day_.
I knew I could also drop the "var ", but I like to operate within the 140bytes challenge rules that say you're not allowed to leak into the global scope. I'll give you the 3 chars from the parens and semicolon, though - I got caught up with the idea of "hey, you can do this whole thing inside the for statement itself!" back when I did this!
Take this argument to its logical conclusion and we should just be handing out firearms to all U.S. citizens, since it's not the guns, it's the people.
I really recommend "The No Asshole Rule" by Robert Sutton. It's not just that life is too short. Working with assholes will literally make your life shorter. Kudos for calling somebody out in an attempt to stop the madness.
Or a HAMT with O(1) time operations.
Really? Quicksilver has always felt like a natural extension of my brain. Then again I've never tried Alfred, so maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.
even if i came up with a disruptive idea that was poorly executed

https://sites.google.com/site/verticalwindfarm/

it still doesnt matter because everyone gets screwed.

http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print...

apparently there is no value in ideas.

also the only scholarship i ever got was from Chevron. the irony will save us!
Internet Safe From Globalized Censorship as UN Treaty Fails
I don't know how anyone can seriously discuss gun control, as it's an impossible and naive goal. A majority of the really public shootings are done using weapons legally acquired by persons with no prior history. If you want to stop that, then you can't let anyone have a gun.

There's absolutely no way to prevent people from losing it, so the focus should be on minimizing the damage and finding a good process for dealing with the aftermath.

Politicians don't want to touch it because of votes. There are idiots who vote solely for whoever is against guns, or for them, or against abortion, or for it. That's what really drives every election, very select issues that they abuse to extremes. The media doesn't look for the truth any longer, because why do something new when you can just repeat the same pattern every cycle and milk the shit out of it. When a politician takes a stand, and tries to discuss something real, they are sidelined and derided by their own people. They don't want an honest debate because then they'd have nothing to pretend to argue about.

Guns aren't going anywhere, ever... Any attempt at additional control would only lead to violence. Abortion isn't going anywhere, ever... Not even the supposed anti-abortion politicians have any intent of changing those laws. People need to realize this.

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?
I have no idea. I live in a country without the general public having access to handguns.
There are a lot of other angles we can look at this as well: The user ("I need.."), The cocky contributor ("This is right, accept my pull request!"), The belittled contributor ("I'm not sure.. but let me try.."), The helpful leader ("I can't accept this because it will break xyz.") The douche leader (As the article stated: "LOL!"), and the cocky leader ("No, that's wrong." - And then they realize later it's actually right, but they're attitude made them not look at a worthy contribution in the right light correctly.)

The article makes a good point - But there's a lot more we can take out of this, that being that for any community to succeed, it needs to be just that: A community. A place where others help each other grow.
NoteAPI: Simple demos of Note
I won't argue the science, since you're likely correct, but taking one substance to counter the effects of another doesn't do anything to address the root cause of the problem.

It's no use curing alcoholism only to have it replaced by gambling, drugs or sex.

The issue is that the addiction is used as a crutch to avoid dealing with the real problem. Until you deal with that real problem - and some of them are extremely difficult to "deal" with, so I'm not trying to downplay this - you will not really be "cured".
Am I the only one who finds it strange (or even slightly disturbing) that this is essentially an after the fact live-blog of the event? For those connected to this school, I can understand wanting information and not wanting to wait. For anyone else, it just seems like obsessive rubbernecking taken to the extreme.
How Main Street will fight big business with ‘big data’
Go (golang) - 157 characters/43 score

package main
import(o"fmt")
func main(){s:=o.Print
for i:=1;i<101;i++{f,b:=i%3==0,i%5==0
if!(f||b){s(i)}else{if f{s("Fizz")}
if b{s("Buzz")}}
s("\n")}}

Compiles and runs fine but obviously not go fmt compliant. I feel bad for even attempting it.

Seems like the score should vary by language, Go (thankfully) makes it hard to be too terse. And of course in Java you're doomed prior to writing a single line of real logic code
I'm not sure if you're entirely correct here. True, VC has had a long history of exits and failures. However, PG & co have generally had a better history of Black Swan-type events in their portfolio (e.g. Dropbox).

Taleb's Black Swan theory and approach to hedge fund management is similar to VC.

From his Wikipedia entry: "As a trader, his strategy has been to safeguard investors against crises while reaping rewards from rare events, and thus his trading career has included several jackpots followed by lengthy dry spells."

His fund steadily and intentionally loses money or breaks even on a normal day, but vastly outperforms other funds on days when the market swings wildly in either direction. The strategy is not for the faint of heart.
This is a terrible, very sad event. My heart goes out to everyone affected by it.

However, the idiocy of the tweet, designed only to spread FUD, the mindless retweets and ignorant comments, really piss me off. A few people have pointed out that .223 is a calibur, or 'shell size', and one of the mindless retweeters said she thinks shell size is gun specific.

i mean WTF... such epic ignorance...
Works to login having trouble submitting however now
I like the author's suggestion of setting a focus rather than a specific goal. For example, weekly revenue growth rate (from pg's growth essay).

A company wide focus on growth rate can crystallize alignment on the most important dimension. But setting a specific pass/fail goal ("growth will be 5% a week") could reduce intrinsic motivation, cause weird short term behaviors, and even cap the upside.

Benchmarks are very useful (5-7% is great, 1% means you're still lost, 10% is a blockbuster), but there's no need to set a specific number. Just get everyone rowing in the same direction.
All the gun control in the world doesn't prevent you from getting someone else to buy you a gun (or getting one on the second hand market). I'm certain if we banned guns completely there would be a drop in gun violence, but tragedies like this are clearly a mental issue and I think they would probably just drive their car through a playground at recess if they didn't have a gun.
my bad. not as familiar with Trello but if it has a full navigation support via keyboard than should be as quick to use as RTM. Fogcreek guys are very smart so I'm sure that implementation is a pleasure to work with. Did you switch to Trello for GTD stuff?
Reductio ad absurdum: I would like to own my own [nuclear weapon], please.
Don't get too excited. It strongly depends on the group you're playing with. I like silence and dislike disruptions. I hate people who won't shut up when playing a board game. Playing board games online can dramatically increase the fun factor of a game, especially if the game has a lot of score markers to keep track of (Seasons) or people don't say "end of turn". With many people, playing face to face is just a mess.
I think today's news shows that the non-foreign threats are hardly imaginary (and I would argue much more relevant than foreign threats).
It's quite doable today at the level of a "garage physicist". I keep thinking to try it. Maybe one of these days.
The article misses the definition of "Black Swan" - you CANT bet on Black Swan events or farm Black Swans. If you could, it werent a Black Swan.

"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology"[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
I recommend against reading the principal's last tweets.
> I should emphasize that it is not physically being alone (i.e., not enough contact with other people) that bothers me, it is the lack of peer-level teamwork towards a common goal that I lack.

I wonder if Roger Federer feels that way?
I fail to understand the point of your comment. Why do we need to be aware of a gun manufacturer wanting to sell guns?
Can anyone else relate to this? Back in the day (early 90s), I would go down to the public library, pick out a thick book full of computer games written qBASIC, and of course I had to type them in all by hand. We didn't have internet yet, the idea of copy-and-paste from somewhere did not even exist in my mind. So I would copy these 10,000-line BASIC programs in by hand into our 386 computer, one line at a time.

For some reason, probably because I was a tiny kid learning a new thing, this tedious task was so much fun. And that's how I learned my first programming language. Never opened a single tut or instructional book.
> 1. Disarm everyone, and 2. Allow everyone to carry weapons.

Nice strawmen. There are obviously options in the middle, namely, increasing traceability of weapons and ammo and shutting down channels that where weapons are allowed to change hands anonymously.

The proliferation of weapons is one thing, but the fact that these tragedies occur and we don't have a way to follow the chain back to the disreputable dealer who sold these armaments - and shut them down - is just non-sensical.

The 2nd amendment fundamentalists who don't even want question how these weapons can get in the wrong hands - often use that same strawman you pose above - which is rediculous - many folks support the 2nd amendment yet find the need for further action to prevent these events from happening.
>> I don't understand why that means children should be murdered en masse, or that I should have to dodge bullets in my own neighborhood (yes, really), all so that you can sleep easier at night knowing that the far-off, nebulous specter of the 'oppressive regime' is held safely at bay by your Colt 45.

Pardon me, but I grew up in a country where 'oppressive regime' was not far off at all, and where brutal murders happened in my neighborhood all the time. I knew my Dad didn't own a gun and it scared me to death. So how dare you belittle my beliefs in the need for armed civilians. Disagree with them, by all means, but do you really think I'm arguing children should be murdered en masse?

What you're proposing is, in my opinion, that same thing as arguing that the government should regulate or perhaps even ban internet access because of all the child pornography. Screw civil liberties, think of the children!

edit: Also, I would argue that confiscating laptops at airports will save as many lives as trying to ban guns in the US at this point.
Why you should set a 4 pin device lock
Ah yes. A "portal play".

snort
5 Reasons Why The U.S. Rejected The ITU Treaty
This reminds me of a Stephen Fry interview commenting on the same point.

http://youtu.be/4byn2CIwec0
Sorry, the Web form only allows 15 items max. Do books count as a single item or lots of items?

Note: I teach maths to teenagers. This business could form a nice interesting project for them, one that they could actually understand the logic of. I live at least 5 degrees of latitude below Dundee!
How do you have them have social interactions with other children and adults? (Just curious since I believe it's extremely important).