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At the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.


Having worked behind the scenes at a state convention (granted, not in Texas), there is no such thing as grassroots announcements/efforts at those things.


How do you know that's grassroots?


That's what confounds the media [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN98wmzisn4 (Excuse this poor quality, it was the only version I could find that wasn't tiktok)


Next, I’d love to move in to text SPAM, the perplexingly unsolved problem that we’ve been particularly reminded of every election season for the past 20 or so years


The idea of a Lego AI sounds amazing... just thought of what might happen if you took a photo of your pieces then said "I like original Star Wars, make me a series of spaceships from that" and it outputted step by step instructions to create them. So cool. Sure, something seems a bit lost in the creative flailing that is the growth path of young Lego-ists, but it would be really cool.


They need more than that - they raised $22M but only for a portion of the company so presumably at a valuation of multiples of that. To get a 10x valuation it may have to become a unicorn.


Same - chrome on ios


Depends on the environment. In a startup, the top performers often say basically “what took you so long? Glad we can move faster now. And try to hire some more top performers for me to work with.”


RIP content writers scratching out a living on a beach in Bali


Firearm deaths just overtook auto deaths as the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761

Unclear the portion that is suicides but homicides are the fastest growing segment beyond unintentional poisonings


From the article:

> Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear,

Seems like there is a pretty obvious candidate for that, lockdowns.

Still, only time will tell, as they go on to say with the rest of that quote:

> and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels.


This bundles in firearm suicides with firearm homicides, obscuring the real issue.

When most people say "gun violence" they do not mean gun-as-tool-used-in-suicide, they mean nonconsensual use of a firearm against someone.

Suicides are way up. Gun murders are up too, but they're still pretty low in the scheme of things. They're "safe to completely ignore" low if you're not in one of a few specific counties in the US where gang violence causes 70-90% of the gun murders.

The movie plot/evening news gun violence stuff that you hear about is so rare as to be safely ignored in all parts of the US.


Making guns harder to access probably reduces suicide rates as well because there are few faster, easier methods of suicide than a gun[1]. I think it's valid to lump gun suicides with other gun violence for this reason.

> The consensus among public health experts is that there is strong evidence that reducing firearm suicides in contexts where more-lethal means of attempting suicide are unavailable will result in reductions in the total suicide rate (see, for example, Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012; World Health Organization, 2014; for review, see Azrael and Miller, 2016).

[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/suicide.ht...


There's actually better evidence gun control will reduce suicides than homicides.


Yet the US suicide rate is lower than other developed countries that have no guns.



South Korea isn’t a developed nation?


One developed country with few guns having a higher rate but dozens with few guns having a lower rate is not a very strong argument in favor of your point.


Yes it does.

It shows there is zero correlation.


Only in a simple world where any given phenomenon can only have a single cause.

For example, imagine we find that higher speed limits increase the rate of automobile accidents in a given area. That finding doesn't preclude that poorly maintained roads might also increase the rate of accidents. So just the existence of an area with a high level of car accidents and very low speed limits doesn't necessarily mean that there is no correlation or causal link between speed limits and automobile accidents. It may just mean that the area suffers greatly from other causes (like poorly maintained roads).

Similarly, I think it is fairly intuitive to assume that there are probably a host of causal factors in suicide rates. For sure, means isn't the only factor but it is an important one.

There's been research into means reduction, and it does seem to have an effect on reducing suicide. The hypothesis is fairly intuitive: many suicides are a response to a crisis, and a human in crisis-mode is not always a great problem solver; lack of an obvious means sometimes gives people some extra time to reconsider.

You can read a high level summary of some of the research here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/


Is this data like way off or something? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-deaths-firearms


Yes. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-deaths-firearms is the correct data. The US is worse than most other developed countries, but not that much worse.


Did you mean to repost the same link I did?


I did not. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates is the corrected link. My HN reader did not update the location bar after clicking to the correct page.


I started triathlon training and the swimming helped bring my back and knee pain into line such that I could actually run again and I haven’t had a reinjury of the back disc (previously every 12-18 months like clockwork for 10 years) in 7 years. I don’t even swim much anymore, just light maintenance through running. Swimming is magic.


Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever.

Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go!

Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript https://docs.near.org/


NEAR doesn't look like a good choice if someone wants to create "The most expensive implementation of Game of Life (Probably the slowest too!)" :D NEAR is perfect to run a high performance simulation, there is an existing project http://berryclub.io/ where users may play on a pixelboard and earn rewards in the meanwhile


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