How Americans Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-die.html <comment><USER2> The data is interesting, but somewhat difficult to draw conclusions from without considering how different rates are impacting other rates. What is really noteworthy here is the approach to showing the data. Its effortless to scroll through.

Here are some things I noticed after the fact:

1\. I naturally wanted to finish the presentation and was compelled to click to see if there were any amazing insights.

2\. After the fact, I have no idea how I even advanced the presentation, all I knew was that I clicked something. It was 100% natural.

It fully pulled me in. I can't remember if there were ads on the sides or more information.

[added] I went back and looked at it again and I think what made it so flawless is that the first page gave me no option but to click the right hand arrow which taught me what to look for. I clicked the right arrow, and then I knew to click it again to advance. The progress dots on the top let me know that I didn't have much time left. Really amazing work here.

<comment><USER3> Agreed the data is interesting and the UI is pretty slick. I found the graphs to be poorly designed, both in terms of y-axis labeling and transitions (sometimes it's %, sometimes deaths/100,000, etc.), as well as things like labels.

In some cases, the findings in the text don't seem to be reflected in the graphs.

<comment><USER4> My thoughts exactly. The axis labeling could have used some units, and for me, the colors were too similar to differentiate and pair up with the key at the bottom. The data seemed interesting, but these issues kept me from fully appreciating the data.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't really _solve_ the problem of similar colors, but clicking on the legend entries highlights the data on the graph.

<comment><USER4> Interesting. That's helpful. For some reason I wasn't seeing that behavior on my ancient FF that I use at work. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So to achieve longevity escape velocity [0]

1\. Don't have unprotected sex if you're less than 44 years old.

2\. Don't kill yourself, or do drugs, if you're less than 54 years old.

3\. Invest heavily in heart disease, cancer, and alzheimer's research.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity)

<comment><USER7> Not really. Actuarial escape velocity is a concept that emerges from the SENS proposals [0]. Next to nothing you do with your life has truly significant expected impact on your future longevity other than providing support and funding for SENS and SENS-like research aimed at repairing the root causes of all the big killer age-related conditions.

(Less significant here means a ten year swing in life expectancy. Exercise, not smoking, calorie restriction - these are things that can make 5-10 year expected differences. Everything else is pretty marginal if you exclude the obvious exogenous line items like risk of accident. But an improving implementation of SENS provides indefinite extension of healthy life out to the expected limits due to accident rates, which is somewhere in the 1000-5000 year range for present data).

The mainstream medical research community is largely focused on patching late stage manifestations of aging. Most work and funding goes towards either manipulating proximate causes rather than root causes, or trying to find ways to alter the operation of metabolism to make the disease process less terrible - but again without addressing causes. Until such time as the research community is overtaken by the "address root causes" disruption currently taking place, of which SENS is an exemplar, but by no means the only movement, then progress towards extended life and defeat of age-related disease will continue to be painfully expensive, slow, and marginal.

The trends in life extension achieved through medicine to date are all largely incidental, unintentional. Where aging itself as a collection of processes [1] has been slowed it wasn't because that was the deliberate intent. Again, because until very recently no-one has been trying to address aging itself rather than focusing on the nature of its outcomes. It is the same difference as that between working to reverse or prevent rust in metal structures versus working on repairing structural failures that occur due to that rust.

[0]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/)

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens- research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

<comment><USER8> I'm a bioinformatics guy trying to move toward this research. Do you work in the field?

<comment><USER9> I do research at the interface between aging and bioinformatics.

It's a great place to be because many aging researchers, while smart and capable at their own techniques, are basically in the informatics stone age. So there is a lot of collaboration potential.

As for GP's comments, I'd agree that there needs to be more focus on "root causes" and fundamental mechanisms in aging research. But SENS itself is broadly considered hokum.

<comment><USER7> I expect the informatics stone age in aging research will start to dissipate more rapidly in the years ahead, given that Calico and Human Longevity look to be focused in that direction.

I would love to see more of the people who dismiss SENS criticize it on the published details of ongoing or proposed research rather than just hand- waving. Sadly all too few seem to be willing to do so. Clearly it isn't nonsense, since there are SENS labs and allied research programs in a number of universities now, including Cambridge, Wake Forest, etc, and a range of important figures in aging research and other life science fields relevant to regenerative medicine support SENS.

<comment><USER9> My concern about Calico and the other commercial efforts at aging research is, will the tools and data they develop be made public so that others can build on them? Also, supposing they succeed, I find the idea of commercial ownership of a (real) anti-aging drug morally repugnant in the extreme, perhaps even dystopian. But I certainly can't deny that Google has informatics experience.

SENS, as I understand it, can mean (at least) 3 different things:

a) The idea that we should focus on root causes rather than late-stage manifestations. I agree with this.

b) The idea that we should attempt to repair aging-related damage without needing to know what caused the damage. I find this debatable. We _have_ stumbled on to some big treatments (aspirin, penicillin), without knowing how or why they worked. But in general, if you take a broken, complex system (e.g., a car, some source code) and attempt to repair it without understanding how it works, you will fail. With aging, many changes occur. How can you determine which changes are "damage" and which are compensatory regulatory changes without understanding the chain of causation?

c) A specific list of 7 aging-associated markers of damage and proposals to clear that damage, with the implication that if we do so, we will drastically reduce or eliminate age-associated morbidity and mortality. _This_ is the part that is seen as hokum. At best, it is a hypothesis. Let de Grey get a grant and prove it, like everyone else does, rather than publicity-hunting and implying that it is only the stodgy old aging research establishment keeping us from eternal youth. But if you want semi-technical criticisms:

\- On what basis are these 7 types of damage chosen and not others?

\- One of the proposed treatments for the natural shortening of telomeres over time is the periodic, whole-body addition of telomerase or the equivalent. Considering that telomerase is overexpressed in cancer and is an important ingredient to uncontrolled cell division, do you think this is a good idea?

\- On a related note, SENS presupposes that a cure for cancer must be found before the entire program can be made practical. A minor problem.

\- The technology for several other of his other proposed interventions does not currently exist; for example, expressing mitochondrial genes only in the nucleus.

Anyway, I actually share SENS' goals but not its unwarranted confidence in its specific proposals to achieve them.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for your comment. I'm really fascinated by the efforts people/organizations/corps are putting into such research and the roadblocks that are potentially in the way of progress.

One thing I'm also fascinated by are the bio "hacker" labs/spaces, and I was wondering if you think something in that direction would be more suited for people to build on and if you think that such labs are even close to being in a position to pursue such endeavors that have mostly been relegated to universities (and the funding environment for such research) and corporations (and the closed source environment typically better suited to monetization)?

<comment><USER9> Every aspect of wet-lab biology is very expensive. Beyond the equipment and reagents, if you want to do in vivo aging research, you need a pathogen-free environment to house rats/mice for months or years and food to feed them.

Hackerspaces are promising in that they are finding ways to do certain techniques inexpensively. But to do the kind of wet-lab research that results in a published paper requires a wide array of equipment that I don't see available to the layman anytime soon (unless they're independently wealthy).

On the other hand, there is nothing specifically preventing interested amateurs from doing bioinformatics or aging informatics themselves. Only a few things (e.g., sequence analysis) require big clusters; you can do quite a lot on your home PC. If you need data, tons of it is freely available: [http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) is a good place to start. [http://rosalind.info/](http://rosalind.info/) provides good tutorials.

I wish we would see more open-source developers creating well-designed bioinformatics platforms under the auspices of e.g., Apache or GNU. In general the programming experience of bioinformaticians is quite low, and we are under tremendous pressure to publish often, so there is little incentive to maintain projects over the long-term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugh, the fact that many of these charts show raw # of deaths versus deaths/100k really masks how much things have improved. In 1968, the population was 64% of our current population... So a flat line is actually a pretty massive improvement.

<comment><USER12> Thank you, so THAT'S why in the 10th slide it says, " _cancer and heart disease have become much less deadly over the years_ ", but the data in the graph says the opposite?

I.e., the graph in slide #10 says:

Cancer in 1990 killed 40422, but in 2010, 50962.

Heart disease in 1990 killed 36545, but in 2010, 45783.

That seems like cancer and heart disease have become worse, not less deadly over the years. That slide is baffling unless you realize that the population must have increased significantly between 1990 and 2010.

<comment><USER13> In short: more people die of cancer and heart disease now that communicable diseases are more under control in first world countries. The AIDS death epidemic was the rare exception.

Graphs like this are misleading and it's often difficult to collect all the raw data to do the datacube aggregations across multiple dimensions to visualize the data and understand these sorts of details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Probably the four most important things you can do to change your odds of making it past 80 are:

        1. Not smoking.
        2. Eating healthily (fiber, vitamins, low sugar; this is a nascent field).
        3. Exercising regularly.
        4. Wearing sunscreen and minimizing sun exposure.

These will collectively reduce your risk of common cancers significantly, as well as protect against heart disease. Additionally, they can help strengthen your immune system and body against other diseases that e.g. the malnourished or obese would be more likely to succumb to.

<comment><USER15> But don't minimize your sun exposure too much or you may end up depressed and kill yourself. Maybe the lesson is one of moderation (but not for smoking!).

<comment><USER16> Or just take Vitamin D to sidestep this rather terribly "designed" body mechanism.

<comment><USER17> I can attest that Vitamin D is no substitute for outdoors / sun in combating depression and/or SAD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _" And, how do suicide and drugs compare to other violent deaths across the population? Far greater than firearm related deaths, and on the rise_

In 2010, 19,392 of the 38,364 suicides were "by discharge of firearm" [the same term used for classifying 11,078 homicides and 606 accidental deaths]. Seems a bit odd that the report classifies the accidents and homicides as "firearm related deaths" but the suicides as unrelated.

From a public health perspective, a 50% reduction in suicide by firearm would save more lives than the complete elimination of HIV deaths or cervical cancer deaths or uterine cancer deaths.

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Should also point out:

       The category ''drug-induced causes''
       includes not only deaths from dependent and nondependent use of
       drugs (legal and illegal use), but also poisoning from medically
       prescribed and other drugs. It excludes accidents, homicides, and
       other causes indirectly related to drug use. Also excluded are
       newborn deaths due to mother's drug use. (For drug-induced causes,
       see Technical notes.) Between 1997 and 1998 the age-adjusted death
       rate for drug-induced causes increased 5 percent from 5.6 deaths per
       100,000 U.S. standard population to 5.9, the highest it has been since
       at least 1979.

And doing a little searching for number of deaths from prescribed medications:

        In 2010, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the United States;
        most (22 134; 57.7%) involved pharmaceuticals; 9429 (24.6%) involved
        only unspecified drugs. Of the pharmaceutical-related overdose deaths, 16,451
        (74.3%) were unintentional, 3780 (17.1%) were suicides, and 1868 (8.4%)
        were of undetermined intent. Opioids (16,651; 75.2%), benzodiazepines (6497; 29.4%),
        antidepressants (3889; 17.6%), and antiepileptic and antiparkinsonism drugs
        (1717; 7.8%) were the pharmaceuticals (alone or in combination with
        other drugs) most commonly involved in pharmaceutical overdose deaths.
        Among overdose deaths involving opioid analgesics, the pharmaceuticals
        most often also involved in these deaths were benzodiazepines (5017; 30.1%),
        antidepressants (2239; 13.4%), antiepileptic and antiparkinsonism drugs (1125;
        6.8%), and antipsychotics and neuroleptics (783; 4.7%)." -
        See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.gaJ8WlzN.dpuf

I think the "drugs kill more people than guns" statement in the slide show is a little disingenuous because "drug deaths" implies "illegal drugs" and not "your doctor gave you some shit that killed you". Also, I find it hard to believe that that number starting in, what, the late 70s? is anywhere near accurate. I'll ask you this: do you think more or fewer people were using dangerous drugs in the 70s than today? During disco, coke, free sex, and a general environment of nihilism? My guess is same or less, not the quite significant growth suggested in the slideshow.

<comment><USER20> > [...] "drug deaths" implies "illegal drugs" [...].

This probably depends on your community/social circle. Some groups heavily advocate that pharmaceuticals be limited to life saving emergencies and not ongoing usage ("pill for everything").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you liked this, you might enjoy some of their previous articles. It's interesting to see them iterating on the technique.

Consumer spending (from last December): [http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2013-12-20/how-we- spend.ht...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2013-12-20/how-we-spend.html)

Housing prices (from February): [http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-02-25/bubble-to- bust-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-02-25/bubble-to-bust-to- recovery.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> "This is particularly striking since cancer and heart disease - the two biggest killers for 45-54 yr olds - have become much less deadly over the years"

Except your graph shows that cancer death rates have increased by almost 20% from 1968-2010... Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER22> Because the graph is not accounting for population increase. The deaths increased, but the population increased even more. The percentage decreased.

<comment><USER21> Ah yes!! That is why, how silly of me. When put into the context of population increase, it is an incredible decrease in percentage of people who die from cancer.

1968 US Population: 200.71 million

2010 US Population: 309.35 million

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very nice graphs and visualisations, but am I alone in finding most of them hard to understand?

<comment><USER24> Nope. I had to think about Slide 3 for a few minutes: "...because old people die sooner than the young".

<comment><USER25> Yeah that slide made me lose it and I gave up on the rest of them without even bothering. How anybody could look at the statement "Old people die sooner than the young" and think "yeah, that definitely explains what I want to say" is both baffling and hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I heard once that one cigarette a day as a stress relief may actually extend your life. I'm not sure about that, but I do think we need to be mentally and emotionally healthy too. Our health and well-being is not purely physical.

I would think that happy people who are not constantly under stress live longer.

<comment><USER27> Obviously, there are stress reliefs that don't carry a risk of giving you lung cancer. I'll take those, thanks.

<comment><USER26> I agree, and I think that the COPD is probably worse than the cancer.

I only meant to point out that many people in affluent western countries smoke, over eat, drink excessively and do other physically unhealthy things (because they have the money) in order to reduce mental and emotional stress. If we could reduce stress in general then we'd probably live longer, healthier lives.

General social issues lead to general health issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So in 1968 all age cohorts had the exact same mortality rate of 100 per 100,000? Why is that?

<comment><USER29> I believe the 100 (or any of the numbers in that chart) are scores which he normalized to 100 in each age category for 1968. I don't know what the per 100,000 is supposed to mean. As a death rate per year, it doesn't seem possible. Consider that it's showing ~70/100,000 in the 85+ category. Given that they'd all be dead in 25 years, that number can't be right.

This presentation is style over substance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> About three or four slides in you get the take-away message, which is often missed in discussions about mortality here on Hacker News: "If you divide the population into separate age cohorts, you can see that improvements in life expectancy have been broad-based and ongoing." And this is a finding that applies not only to the United States, but to the whole developed world. I have an eighty-one-year-old mother (born in the 1930s, of course) and a ninety-four-year-old aunt (born in the 1920s) and have other relatives who are quite old and still healthy. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[1] An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here's why."[2] explains what incremental improvements have led to better health and increased life expectancy at all ages in the United States. The very fascinating data visualizations in the article submitted today highlight the importance of research on preventing suicide, reducing drug abuse, and preventing senile dementia such as Alzheimer disease, which is where some of the next progress in prolonging healthy life will have to come from.

Professional demographers try to think ahead about these issues, not least so that national governments in various countries can project the funding necessary for publicly funded retirement income programs and national health insurance programs. Demographers have now been following the steady trends long enough to make projections that girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100,[3] with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing"[4] by James Vaupel, originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."

I was in a local Barnes and Noble bookstore back when I was shopping for an eightieth birthday gift (a book-holder) for my mom, and I discovered that the birthday card section in that store, which is mostly a bookstore, had multiple choices of cards for eightieth birthdays and even for ninetieth birthdays. We will be celebrating more and more and more birthdays of friends and relatives of advanced age in the coming decades.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[3] [http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[4] [http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

<comment><USER31> There are a couple of messages later on that are important as well.

1\. AIDS was a really important retrograde factor in this general story, and developing the commitment to research and deploy strategies for dealing with it was a major victory.

2\. Alzheimers and similar illnesses are a huge factor in terms of healthcare for the elderly. A similar success there would yield tremendous results.

<comment><USER32> I'm not so sure you can really sketch thing out like that.

AIDS was a virus-born epidemic and it is normal for such things to experience exponential growth and decline.

Dementia is part of the process of degeneration resulting from aging, from people basically wearing-out. Like with heart disease or cancer, it seems likely we can only really expect halting and expensive progress in this field.

The most problematic thing is that extending the life of a cancer victim ten years without an actual cure would be seen as a modest gain. Similarly extending the life of an Alzheimer's victim wouldn't be so seen.

<comment><USER33> The precipitous decline in AIDS deaths (not HIV infection) after 1995 was due to the introduction of protease inhibitor drugs like Crixivan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any info on how they create these visualizations? Are they using any particular libraries or frameworks?

<comment><USER35> I'll ask the team if they're using anything special beyond d3/jq. The team is run by Lisa Strausfeld, an MIT Media Lab alum. You can also find videos of her talking about them floating around Youtube, etc.

<comment><USER34> That would be great, thanks. I suspected they were using d3, but based on how consistent some of their visualizations are with each other I suspect they have an in house library that they are using as well. Would be cool to hear from the source :)

<comment><USER36> yep d3: [http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/global/js/d3.v2...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/global/js/d3.v2.js)

and jquery cycle for the slide show: [http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/js/jquery.cycle...](http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/js/jquery.cycle.all.js)

<comment><USER37> JQuery Cycle is used for the IE<9 version, which is a slideshow of screenshots taken from the piece. Everything else is done with d3 and jquery as mentioned. We have a custom framework for these dataview pieces, all other work is just based on the same style guide. As seen here: [http://www.bloomberg.com/visual- data/](http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The part about suicides is pretty interesting and perplexing. Are there any insights into why the rate has increased?

<comment><USER39> One can spend a billion of studies on the causes of increasing suicide rates, really. I can name a few random causes:

* The US economy, at least for part of the populace, is pretty crappy; working three jobs, money worries, the financial crisis, it all adds up. * The internet; more (negative) news from all over the world, telling people how terrible it all is. At the same time, "Facebook Envy", people getting told how bad their life is in comparison to their facebook friends (which is skewed because a lot of people only put the good stuff on there). * People are dicks.

<comment><USER40> It's a lot more socially acceptable to commit suicide for the elderly and terminally ill these days.

<comment><USER41> How can suicide become "more socially acceptable?" What does the delta consist of, between suicide being "not socially acceptable" and suicide being "socially acceptable?"

I've had no experience with anyone I know of committing suicide, but I am not seeing how to evaluate whether it is or isn't socially acceptable.

<comment><USER42> In conversations about suicide the suicidal person can be talked of as "having given up"/"took the easy way out", "been selfish to their loved ones", "gone against god's will".

On the other end of the scale we can talk about "Dying with dignity", "Not being a burden to loved ones", "finally at peace", "being in a better place".

When more people hold the later views then it is more acceptable in society for someone to commit suicide because they don't feel that they are hurting others as much/aren't as evil for doing it (not that I believe they're at all evil I used that wording as those considering suicide may be self loathing).

You could even make arguments on a case by case basis if you wanted from the heroic last stand to a single parent leaving behind their children. It all comes down to what obligations we feel people have to stay alive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> <script src="global/js/jquery-1.8.3-min.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/modernizer.2.7.1.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/underscore.1.5.2.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="global/js/less.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="global/js/d3.v2.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script src="js/jquery.cycle.all.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

It looks like the majority of this visualization was from the D3.js library. I've been seeing more and more web-documents of this style, it must be because of the rise of D3.

</comment><comment><USER44> Black males die at such a higher rate from AIDS. Are they having that much more unprotected sex, taking that many more drugs from dirty needles, or getting that much inferior treatment than the general population?

<comment><USER45> A big heaping of options 1 and 3, with a bit of 2 tossed in.

Homophobia has AIDS and AIDS-related mortality as comorbidities. There exist fewer support structures for gay black men than exist for gay white men, which e.g. reduces knowledge transfer, makes it less of a cultural norm to stay on your drug regimen, provides fewer role models for how to live as an HIV- positive man.

It's also important to note another factor: our disproportionately black prison population and our epidemic of prison rape. Anal rape by multiple men, many of them with one or more other STDs, is an ideal way for an HIV infection to be transferred. HIV also gets transferred in prison through consensual sex: most prisons don't offer free condoms to inmates. The net result is the rate of contracting HIV is 10 to 100 times higher within prison than outside it.

<comment><USER44> I wish we would treat prison rape like rape which is wrong, period, with no exceptions. I also wish we would treat the mental problems that lead to depression and suicide with the same seriousness as that which leads to drug addiction, prison, and AIDS.

We've greatly reduced death by cigarette related diseases. That was mostly a behavioral problem, so is AIDS. The rest of the items on this site seem to be scientific problems.

Not to get too political but we want to do our best to eliminate all these causes of death. Black males with AIDS seems like low hanging fruit disguised as a real problem with our society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It interesting to see that drugs and suicide are the highest causes of death, well over that of guns. But we seem to be progressing more towards a drug open world and gun closed world. Do you see the Irony?

<comment><USER47> No irony at all. Tobacco is the biggest killer, about 5X alcohol, and alcohol is about 10X illicit drugs. On top of that, illicit drug deaths could be brought down by taking the prison and police resources used in the Drug War and using them for harm reduction. Another thing about the Drug War is that zero deaths result from marijuana, and that's still a big component of the Drug War.

On the other hand, guns are used in about 2/3rd of suicides.

<comment> V-2 "guns are used in about 2/3rd of suicides" \- correlation does not imply causation, it is especially clear in this case

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "That's why total deaths in the 75+ category has stayed constant"

I thought that was a particularly funny statement. Reminded me of the onion: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/world-death-rate-holding- st...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/world-death-rate-holding-steady- at-100-percent,1670/)

</comment><comment><USER49> I created a visualization on a similar topic that looked at mortality rates state-by-state using the 2010 census data. It was on HN about six months ago.

[http://www.matthewisabel.com/projects/deathrates/geographic....](http://www.matthewisabel.com/projects/deathrates/geographic.html)

<comment><USER50> Thank you for sharing this. It's effective and straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I got the presentation's/graph's main takeaway, but did anyone else notice that women's mortality rate hardly changed since 1968? Why was this, I wonder? Is this a population thing or because women were mostly kept inside doing safer house duties or what?

<comment><USER52> My initial guess would be that Patriarchy historically oppressed women off of the battlefield, kept them out of the coal mines, prevented them from enjoying asbestos work, excluded them from steelworking and construction, and barred their empowering path to firefighting and heavy industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Need some error bars on that data.

</comment><comment><USER54> "progress stopped in the mid 1990s" maybe i am missing something but it seems like the mortality rate would be a lagging indicator progress hence progress would have "stopped" earlier?

Not that I necessarily would say it stopped at all...

</comment><comment><USER55> If whomever contributed to the code on this is around, could you give us some insight into building this app, or do a writeup? I'd be super interested to see how you designed/architected such a smooth and experience.

</comment><comment><USER56> Pretty incredible user experience on mobile, haven't seen graphs that look that good in a mobile web browser (and interactive no less).

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't care much about the topic, but I thought this is a great way to present data !

</comment><comment><USER58> Surprised how nice the visualization looks, given how ugly the Bloomberg terminal is

</comment><comment><USER59> Any reason why the 75-84 group was out living the 85+ group until recently?

<comment><USER39> Well if the average age steadily increases, then if your life expectancy used to be 75 and climbed to 85, the people that would previously die at 75 now die at 85. As the chart states, average life expectancy is increasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I couldn't figure out any way to navigate without using the mouse.

<comment><USER61> The left/right cursor keys didn't work for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> That's neat, but it's very hard to tell the colors apart.

</comment><comment><USER63> _Everyone_ knows that the most Americans actually die in terrorist attacks. How else can you justify such emphasis on fighting it? Hmmmmmmmm.

<comment><USER64> Terrorists driving cars, apparently.</comment></comment>


How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how-much-good-teacher-worth <comment><USER2> The fundamental issue I see with the conclusions/recommendations is that the primary blocker preventing raising teacher salaries isn't the union. From my own time as a grade school teacher and the friends I still have in the profession, I can comfortably say that there are very few teachers who wouldn't cheerfully toss out the entire tenure and pension systems (and honestly, probably the whole union) if they were offered a pay scale comparable to that of coders in their area. The unions aren't powerful because teachers are ideologically attached to unions, they're powerful because teachers have been screwed over and over again and unions are literally the only protection they have. The unions took lower and lower salaries over the years in exchange for pensions and tenure; now everyone still wants to pay poverty wages _and_ they want to strip away the other benefits.

Teachers know who's good and who sucks, and for the most part, they hate the bad ones as much or more than anyone else. But the actual solution (a flat trade of salary in exchange for giving up their protections) will never happen, because too many people would rather nickel and dime the education system and then whine about why the ranks of a job that requires a college degree and pays below minimum wage aren't full of the best and brightest.

<comment><USER3> A true voucher type system that made schools competitive would help with that. In the current system you either work for the district or you don't. A voucher system would include many employment options and even a reason for them to advertise and promote their teachers competitively.

<comment><USER4> We have a voucher system in sweden and it sucks. It sucks bad. Schools compete to offer better 'test scores', so the test scores go up, while the quality goes down. Sweden has been on a downward trajectory in the Pisa rankings since vouchers were introduced. Finland do it right. No vouchers, pay teachers well, high status job. As it should be.

<comment><USER5> How do you know the quality goes down?

<comment><USER6> PISA scores

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment)

Considering the cultural and ethnic similarity between Sweden and Finland as Nordic countries, PISA score trajectory based on voucher vs highly paid public professionals is really shocking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was a physics teacher immediately after undergrad. I think I was a good teacher,as my students seemed to enjoy class, and excelled in physics later, in college.

When I left after year 3 I was making $42k a year. While that is a good salary, I didn't see myself able to support a family on that salary. So I left, went to grad school, and now work in industry.

It may sound vain or materialistic, but had I made $80k, I likely never would have left teaching. I really enjoyed being in the classroom.

In order to get great teachers, you don't necessarily need to make teaching lucrative, but you do need to be able to provide a salary that enables the teacher to support a family.

<comment><USER8> I strongly suggest reading Adam Smith on wages.

First: _all_ work must support raising a family.

Second: he enumerates a set of five factors, remarkably enduring, which should account further for wages paid various sorts of work, based on the pleasurability, training, regularity, risk, and trust required.

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_10)

<comment><USER9> > First: _all_ work must support raising a family.

Really?

What about the work of a Twitch streamer? Or a rock musician?

<comment><USER10> Neither of those are standard work.

<comment><USER11> What work is standard?

<comment><USER12> I don't know what Adam Smith meant by all work, other than the plain language, but I think it's reasonable to say that all work for the government ought to support a family.

The government shouldn't engage in work that isn't worth supporting the employee's family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article makes a fundamental error, and its sad they never even acknowledge it.

You can't talk about the value of a good teacher without mentioning supply or demand. Yes, I know, here we go again. But this is basic economics. If the United States decided to train 100,000,000 good teachers, you can bet that the 100,000,000th teacher will not add the same value to the country as the first. There likely won't even be anyone for the 100,000,000 teacher to teach! Yet this is what the author here assumes. That the value add of a good teacher is constant. No mention of supply or demand whatsoever.

Fortunately, there's a clever trick we use to incorporate supply and demand into value-determination. It's called the market.

Unfortunately for students, teachers unions have done their best to destroy a free market for teachers, school are usually not even _allowed_ to pay better (in the schools eyes) teacher more as per union contracts. And this country has no doubt suffered for it. All for a few extra thousand in the average teacher's pockets, its sickening.

<comment><USER14> If this was the case, then why do private school teachers get paid less? Private schools are the free-market and are ununionized.

In case you're curious, the reason is that teaching at a private school is easier, so people who love teaching are willing to take the pay cut.

<comment><USER13> Your reasoning about why private teachers make less is completely wrong, im afraid.

First, realize that if teachers were not unionized, their salaries would without a doubt go down. Unions function very similar to monopolies in that regard.

So just intuitively we would expect in a freeer market that teachers salaries would go down. That said, even in the private sector teachers are still unionized --its hardly a free market -- so why haven't private teachers been able to negotiate as high of a pay as public sector teachers?

> why do private school teachers get paid less?

Because public sector unions have much more negotiating power. It's really that simple.

Unions don't have infinite power, the can only negotiate as much as the 'pot' allows. In the public sector, the pot size is all tax revenue. There are almost no limits on how much public sector teachers can ask for.

This is exactly why FDR opposed public sector unions.

In the private sector, schools have to deal with remaining solvent. Teachers can only ask for at most -- the whole pot of revenue. And that pot is smaller in the private sector. The national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 in 2015. Way less than the public sector at $12,922 per pupil in 2008.

As such, private sector teachers cannot demand as high wages as the public sector teachers can.

<comment><USER7> I agree with most of this. However, teachers' unions have done their best to prevent schools from paying teachers with less common skill sets (like STEM) more than teachers with more common skill sets (like PE). It's this aspect of lack of free market and supply and demand dynamics that prevented me from staying in the classroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As the child of two teachers, my parents always told me "do whatever you want in life, don't be a teacher".

Both of them got into the profession out of a desire to teach, both ended up in administration roles out of a desire not to be poor.

The problem isn't just we "under pay" it is that we "over ask".

For those of you who haven't visited a school recently, getting into the building is more of a hassle than getting on a plane. Want to volunteer at your school, go get fingerprinted and give up your SSN to and underfunded and over worked staff and hope they don't let that amount of personal information out. Want to send your kid to school in CA, well you need to get them vaccinated, and tracking that has fallen to schools (what ever your position about this, shoving it into the department of education makes NO sense). Hell the paperwork to just enroll your kids is monstrous, its easier to register to vote, than it is to register your kids. I won't even cover sports > art(s) when it comes to budget: [http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public...](http://thinkprogress.org/education/2013/08/05/2412381/public- schools-slash-arts-education-relying-more-on-private-arts-funding/) is a good read if your interested.

Meanwhile, how much of a teachers job has become acting as an extension of an overzealous CPS/child saver environment? Well the leadership at institutions is doing stuff like this: [http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story](http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story) and if you think insanity at this level is isolated, you just haven't looked. There are schools who have gone so far as to "ban peanut butter", for the safety of other students: your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter.

You want to fix pay, and quality of education... give more money to hiring teachers to do NOTHING BUT TEACH. Lets pass a law that says you have to spend as much on students as you do on prisoners: [http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs- prison...](http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison- costs/)

Schools are now a direct path to jail: [https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what- school-prison-pipeline](https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison- pipeline)

<comment><USER16> >> your more likely to get hit by lightning than die from peanut butter.

In a school of 1000 students, there are students who could die by eating a shared peanut butter sandwich[1]. It's not many, but more than would be killed by lightning...I wouldn't say that warrants a ban, but I could see how some would think that.

I'm glad I'm not going to be raising kids in the U.S.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_allergy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> tl;dr The way to close the achievement gap between the US and stellar foreign nations (here compared to Finland) is by increasing the number of average and above teachers. Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

Proposed fixes are a probationary period for new teachers and removing the fixed pay scale that dominates the teaching profession.

<comment><USER18> > Classroom size, homework, or any other measure is only weakly related to > performance. Nothing beats a stellar teacher.

I think you'll find that the impact of teacher quality on student achievement is dwarfed by the impact of student quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change student behaviors toward learning.

<comment><USER5> The chetty paper is a classic. They claim that raising a teacher from -2sigma to 0 adds 1% to a student's earnings.

[http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf](http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf)

If you scroll to table 3, you'll see how huge an effect non-teacher quality factors have. Table 5 shows huge specific roles for parent income and minority vs non-minority status.

Perhaps a simpler way to think of it: if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to blame. Do you really believe this?

<comment><USER18> > if teacher quality dominated everything else, then a teacher getting poor > scores out of a class of poor black kids, relative to another teacher > getting great scores out of a class of rich asian kids, would be entirely to > blame.

Well, using the weaker-but-still-absurd claim that teacher quality matters more than student quality (but isn't necessarily the only thing that matters at all), that teacher would only be almost entirely to blame.

However, switching the teachers around should cause the poor black kids to start outscoring the rich asian kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note: Interestingly enough, teachers in Finland (the country US is being compared against in the article) are fully unionised: 95 % of teacher workforce are members in the main union, OAJ.

source: [http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta](http://www.oaj.fi/cs/oaj/Tietoja%20OAJsta) (in Finnish)

</comment><comment><USER13> As others have said, the problem is union contracts.

Unions, have negotiated to _not_ pay teachers based on performance. And unless we reduce union rights, I'm not sure that's ever going to change....

</comment><comment><USER20> The advice in the article talks specifically about the US, but I've seen the exact same issues come up in a lot of other countries (and to an extent other jobs too).

Good teachers need to be paid more, and for that to happen, normalized salaries should simply disappear. They look nice on the surface because you can pretend everybody is getting equal treatment, but the harsh reality is that people don't perform equally. I see the same issue first-hand in public healthcare: no matter how well (or poorly) you perform, you get compensated the same, which can considerably reduce incentives. Since this is generally organized through unions and collective agreements, there's also quite often considerable overheads associated with managing all of this. I think there should be base salaries that can then be re-evaluated based on performance, as a lot of other professions have done for a long time. (not saying unions themselves should go away, but I believe they should definitely rethink the approach)

At least in public settings, a lot of parents need to stop acting like they're customers ("always right"). It always baffles me to see parents offload absolutely everything on teachers, including responsibilities that should at least be shared (e.g. sex education) or downright theirs (e.g. manners). I've seen parents blame teachers for their kid having a foul mouth or for beating up other kids and whatnot, if we expect teachers to do actual education, we can't have them also play cops, it's your responsibility as a parent. Parents who fail at this should also be educated, as part of the overall education program (I'll admit that identifying failure can be a hard one, though a lot of social programs do similar things).

Not everybody needs to go to school until 18+, seriously. It doesn't help anybody, it spreads resources thin and it perpetuates the same stupid incentives (e.g. by extension, not everybody needs a college degree to end up being a manager at Starbucks...).

Stop trying to push normalized education, it's a complete disaster. Not all teachers teach the same way, not all students learn the same way (and combinations thereof), not all regions have the same culture or the same needs, etc. and it's fine, let each class adapt as it needs to, just make sure you provide equal opportunities. I get the point of systematization for assessing grades on country-wide and international levels and such, but when we get to the point that tests have become the end-goal rather simply a control, we've messed up, badly.

And I could go on... The state of Education as it is saddens me: the general population seems to assume schools will just take care of everything, teachers either end up simply not caring, burnt out or depressed (not necessarily exclusively) and many politicians have forgotten that there are actual people behind the numbers they've worked so hard to game.

I firmly believe Education, once essential needs are met[0], is the biggest factor in a successful and caring society. If we spent a fraction of the money currently spent on fixing the after-effects of bad education (e.g. policing), we'd all be better off for it, on all fronts.

[0] One could argue that basic education is essential to covering basic needs in the first place.

<comment><USER21> Pay solution:

Since teaching quality increases when classes are small and decreases when classes are large, we can adjust class sizes to equalize the quality delivered by each teacher.

Having equalized the quality, we now simply pay teachers for the number of students they teach. A good teacher might deliver standardized quality to 90 students, while a bad teacher might deliver standardized quality to 5 students. The good teacher gets paid 18x as much as the bad teacher and the students all get standardized quality.

The main difficulty here is physical classroom dimensions.

<comment><USER22> My understanding is that research does not in fact show a strong correlation between outcomes and class sizes, so I doubt that this would work.</comment></comment></comment>


Is WebVR Ready? - <AUTHOR> https://iswebvrready.org/ <comment><USER2> I haven't been able to get a WebVR page to work on on Samsung Galaxy Gear so if it is ready... I can't figure it out.

In anyone who has a gear has it figured out and can point me to an instruction and demo that would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, in chrome, apparently.</comment>


Scaleway BareMetal Snapshot Improvement, Fast Provisioning and Hot Snapshots GA - <AUTHOR> https://blog.online.net/2018/06/21/baremetal-cloud-server-snapshot-improvement-fast-provisioning-hot-snapshots-ga/ <comment><USER2> Is "BareMetal" an invented one-word marketing term, or should it be written "Bare Metal" with two words?</comment>


Implementing Language Engine – Pluralities in Semantics (part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://languagengine.co/blog/pluralities-in-semantics-1/

<comment><AUTHOR> I decided to start writing a devblog for the project I'm working on (a conversational AI toolkit). Lemme know if you have any questions or comments! :)</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Instant (3 hour project) - <AUTHOR> http://hninstant.com

<comment><USER2> Looks good. Except when you type a single space character the app enters into an infinite loop making it very difficult to do anything else in the browser (Chrome). Even navigating the window to a different page is impossible.

[Edit] Scratch that. Typing anything followed by a space character tends to make things crash. Why would this happen? I find this bug interesting. Let me know what the problem was when you fix it.

[Edit2] Okay looks like the problem may be with anything that needs to be url encoded.

[Edit3] I think the problem comes down to your call to encodeURIComponent in your search function and the behavior when the hash changes. Basically, we enter the search function when the hash changes. But then you call encodeURIComponent and assign the result to the hash. If the query contains characters that need to be escaped then the new value is different (meaning the hash changes), which means that your search function is going to get called ad infinitum.

In order to fix this I think you need to do two things. 1) Keep track of the in flight request unencoded and 2) if your search function is triggered by a hash change decode the query and compare it to your in flight request. If they are the same then you can bail out of the search function early. Otherwise you should cancel the in flight request and launch a new one.

<comment><USER3> how come this post is still on top with such a serious bug? Hitting space makes it enter into infinite loop. It crashed my browser while I was in middle of something important.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the bug makes it any less noteworthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Little known fact: SearchYC does instant search if you add &instant=true to the URL: [http://searchyc.com/hacker+news?sort=by_date&instant=tru...](http://searchyc.com/hacker+news?sort=by_date&instant=true)

It's not enabled by default because it's not as useful without autocomplete.

<comment><USER5> I thought you were shutdown by Comcast, nice to see you're back

<comment><USER6> It is still down here.

<comment><USER4> It's been a rough week. Hopefully things will return to normal once DNS propagates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Using new HNsearch.com APIs, designed, developed, launched in 3 hours. More coming, this is about as MVP as it gets. Same ranking algorithm as used on HNSearch.com. BTW, hidden feature...you can double click words in search results to load a search for that term.

</comment><comment><USER7> I built the same thing, was planning on finishing the app and buying the domain tomorrow.

Oh well, this is better than what I would have had anyway.

<http://nickcammarata.com/hninstant/>

<comment><USER8> I like your implementation/UI better... very little change from the existing site!

<comment><USER9> yes. but please add a bit of left margin to the search box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe hide the "0 points" in every submission until pg brings visible karma back?

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found its messing with history incredibly annoying. Here's why...

Every single letter typed creates a new history item. It got to the point where so many history items were added that HN was pushed out of my history: I couldn't use "back" to get back to HN. I had to type in the URL to get to HN, then I had to find the comments page to get back here again to see the discussion.

I continued on looking at other HN stories. Once, I went back too far and landed on the HNI page again. I typed "L" as one does in Vimperator and Pentadactyl to go forward and get back to HN. The only problem was the text box stole my input, this resulted in a new query and a new history item, erasing, once again, HN's history item. I had to (again) type the URL to get here!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry - what I've done now is only updated the history/hashtag when hitting enter, similar to Google Instant search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting idea but on my first query, it locked up Chrome on me and went absolutely batsh1t crazy. Had to shut down Chrome and relaunch it.

Will wait for MVP2.0

</comment><comment><USER13> Love it. Give me the possibility to search titles only (a checkbox) and this will be my favorite search tool for HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, there ya go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "3 hour project" - I wonder what the author's intent is to point out that it took him 3 hours to implement? (I've equally been curious about the ones where people share their _weekend_ projects and remark it explicitly)

<comment><USER15> Both signify that the project was done quickly & may have bugs. Also, they aren't necessarily attempting to turn the project into a business, or even make money off the project.

It's a warning. They aren't looking for startup advice, they just want to show a (hopefully) helpful project that may have a few bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> you should cache local results, so as I type:

        drop > dropb > dropbo > dropbox

I get no white screen in between, rather previous list filtered

<comment><USER2> Based on the way the search API works I don't think this is feasible. "dropb" is not a token that the system recognizes as being part of "dropbox" so I think dropb essentially returns no results. It would be nice if they had some sort of autocomplete functionality. That is how Google Instant works- it makes an educated guess at what your query will be and uses that rather than using the partial query. It's pretty effective much of the time.

Seems like ThriftDB is still in a pretty early stage of development so I doubt that they support this. But autocomplete is a solved problem so I'd be surprised if it doesn't make it in at some point.

<comment><USER17> We definitely want to add autocomplete to ThriftDB.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I feel like you can't have true instant search without autocomplete. Lots of people don't realize that the reason Google's instant search is effective is that they can tell what you are going to type before you finish typing it. Autocomplete would be huge.

You guys can probably do a pretty effective version right now but I imagine data about what people are searching for allows you to create a better autocomplete feature. And that data only comes with time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. Is it normal that the browser's back button is essentially rendered useless after a query or two?

<comment><AUTHOR> Back button support should be there (for most browsers) :)

<comment><USER19> It's on a letter by letter basis though, maybe best to only update the browser hash say after a second or more of no letters added to the search bar.

<comment><USER20> Upvote.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I've done for now is only updated the history/hashtag when hitting enter, similar to Google Instant. They have some other conditions in there as well, but there's not a whole lot of a use-case on here for wanting to use the back button within a search query.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice work. Could you highlight queries?

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice work Vib!!

</comment><comment><USER23> No thank you. <http://i.imgur.com/bywAE.png>

<comment><USER24> Why such a negative approach? Wouldn't it be more useful to specify how to reproduce the problem, to let the author fix it?</comment></comment>


European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/european-copyright-law-isnt-great-it-could-soon-get-lot-worse <comment><USER2> There was a previous discussion based on a similar article from Creative Commons a couple days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16810999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16810999)

c3o (Christopher Clay), who works in the EU Parliament according to his profile, posted several informative comments including one explaining the backstory behind the proposed legislation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812099](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812099)

> _The back story of the law may shed some light._

> _First, it 's no secret that the intent is to prop up the business model of > struggling publishers by getting internet platforms to pay them for > spreading (links to/tiny snippets of) their content._

> _After a "link tax" law was introduced in Germany, some publishers decided > to waive it. Google reacted by removing snippets from those who didn't in > Google News, making their links less likely to be clicked on. Afraid of > losing traffic, these publishers then granted Google a free license._

> _The government of Spain looked at this result and decided to implement the > idea as an inalienable right, to make sure some publishers couldn 't opt > out, and Google would have to pay up. In response, Google shut down Google > News altogether in Spain._

> _This is the version that the Parliament 's chief negotiator now wants the > EU to implement. He believes that Google (and Facebook and Twitter, which > have been added as targets) wouldn't dare shut down a service across all of > Europe._

<comment><USER3> I keep hearing Google News, but I can't see how and why people would use it frequently.

Is anybody here using it? What for?

<comment><USER4> I check it most days as I like to skim a variety of international news sources in one list. I'd welcome suggestions of alternatives - especially if I could filter out the Daily Mail and other low quality sources.

<comment><USER2> You can filter out the Daily Mail in Google News, too. Scroll down to "See news from your favorite sources" for how to block/prefer certain sources: [https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405](https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the "link tax" proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss's latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to."

"...that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to."

This is horrendous.

I generally favor: "Do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

However this seems like a blatant attempt to shut down any interpretive or third party news sites in favor of centralized media control.

<comment><USER6> That's a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith.

The EU is worried about publishers both big and small. Currently, investing half a year's worth of a journalist's work into investigations is a rather bad business decision, because everyone can freely reuse the facts you uncovered: spend a year finding corruption, write it up in a day, 10 minutes later it's on AP.

Ther 'inalienable' is to ensure you're not pressured into giving those rights away by a stronger actor such as Google. The principle is the same that makes it impossible for you to agree to buy something new without warranty.

Your idea also doesn't make much sense because the current crisis of journalism has hit smaller publishers hardest. The New York Times will survive. The Bodunken Tribune is probably long dead already. And the major players for centralization are obviously Google and Facebook, the two largest targets of this legislation.

All this DOES NOT mean I believe this proposal to be a good idea! I think it's too much beaurocracy for too little effect, plus probably unintended consequences.

But it's hard to completely disregard the true motivation and ascribe malice.

<comment><USER7> If a newspaper in a town of 1,000 people was devoting half a year of a reporter's work to a single investigation, that newspaper was already going to fail as a business. Even if every link to the eventual story required the linker to pay €100, because in that case people would just refuse to link.

There is nothing good about link taxes. And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Meanwhile, this cannot help even responsibly-run small news organizations, because it will just direct all the large aggregators and large news companies to make deals with each other, and the small news companies will get zero links and collect zero "link tax", and small/new aggregators will not be able to afford to operate. Result: large organizations stay large, small ones continue going out of business.

Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.

(unless you'd like to have news organizations be funded by government, which can work but has its own set of problems)

<comment><USER8> > _Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying > on rich people who don 't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos > and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who > can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what._

I'm not sure it can (or _should_ ) be any other way. If you try to run journalism as a for-profit business, you end up with ads and clickbait. Good journalism is like medicine - very important, and very unable to bring in profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing this is an unpopular idea but is it possible we just don't need as many journalists? I 100% Agree that journalism is important but before the internet, for the most post, every news paper needed people to cover every story they wanted to run. Even if they took a story from the AP or Ruters they still needed someone to dig that up. Now, there is no reason why the AP and Rutere can't just publish their content themselves to the entire world. Similaly a local newspaper doesn't need to pay someone to cover the world news. We don't need every major news paper from every country to have reporters in every other country as they can just use someone else's reporting.

I'm guessing your first thought to that is we need multiple voices and points of view and I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that in 1975 you probably had 2-5 reporters from Sweden in NYC, 5-15 from Germany, 5-15 from France, 4-7 from Italy, 2-3 from Spain, 5-15 from the UK, 3-4 from Ireland etc etc. Add up all the major countries and their might have been 400+ NYC foreign correspondents. Do we need all 400 or has the internet made it so we only need 10-20? Apply that concept everywhere, even to local papers and it seems like the biggest hit to journalism isn't Google, it's the internet itself. Just like a few wheat harvesting machine replace hundreds of workers the world has changed to one where far less journalists can do the work of what used to take many more?

<comment><USER10> I know I'm a day late, but thought I would provide my perspective.

I think there's two aspects to this, is journalism sustainable and is journalism worthwhile. I think publishers are having a hard time with the former, but I think undeniably it is valuable in the latter. As the world becomes more complex and bad actors are becoming more sophisticated, I think the world needs more journalists to uncover truth and reality, especially since there is profit to be made from writing fake news. I think the fact that it's not sustainable now means that we should move to a model where we subsidize news with public funding; not sure what the best structure is, but there is so much good public externalities to journalism that it's worthwhile to fund it with public money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article mentions Spain, but Germany had a similar initiative, sometimes called the "Google tax": Allow newspapers to charge for snippets. Newspapers did because after lots of lobbying it would look bad if they didn't. Google News delisted all that charged money. Shortly after the large newspapers allowed Google to use snippets without payment. So small websites (search engines) lost while those delivering substantial traffic (monopolies like Google) still strive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers)

<comment><USER12> > The article mentions Spain, but Germany had a similar initiative

There'd be little point in making the post longer by mentioning Germany inline as well. The shorter and more digestible the post is, the more likely people will read and share. Germany's case is mentioned in the post they link to when referencing Spain's situation[1].

[1]: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts- shop...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop-spain- thanks-ancillary-copyright-law)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The news industry is already in trouble. This seems like it could backfire in a way that news services might automatically be de-listed from many services and simply lose ALL of their traffic. Seems like it's meant to save them but could sink them by accident.

<comment><USER14> What they really need is for sites to stop ripping off their stories. How often do you see an article that is essentially a reprint of a story written somewhere else. It's not really a reprint, it's written as an alleged summary of the other story but contains all the details and some irrelevant banter by the author. This stuff is all over the internet and prevents readers from needing to read the original source.

<comment><USER15> Is it really any different in print media where half the stories come from AP or Reuters? Everyone is rewriting the same stories.

<comment><USER16> Pretty sure print media pays AP and Reuters. Which is the point here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is anyone really surprised by this?

We (America) just signed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) into law last month without so much as a blip from The AP or Thompson Reuters.

The internet is sorta like the printing-press but more important. Of course it's threatening the powers-that-be & of course they're gonna' try and get that under control.

<comment><USER18> The idea that the powers-that-be are working on getting this new Internet thing under their control has been a recurring meme for a long time. I'm sure it was around in the 1990s. They don't seem to have been doing a good job so far; unless they are somehow secretly behind Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER17> > _"...I'm sure it was around in the 1990s. They don't seem to have been doing > a good job so far"_

Totally agree except RE: the last year or so. If you look closely "they" appear to be wising-up.

The CLOUD act (at least how I'm reading it) says that the American internet is American...in other words, "If we wanna subpoena your s#!t in Thailand, we can cuz your cloud-provider is probably based in Seattle, WA, USA."

Law is ultimately about precedent, and there is now a precedent for America to get a warrant allowing them to see any American company's consumer-data, regardless of where that data is geographically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, let's suppose the legislation is voted into law.

Every news outlet with a grain of reason offers every major search engine or news aggregator, or maybe a whole self-publishing platform like Twitter a blanket deal: €20 per month for unlimited use of blurbs and links, as long as blurbs are short and are actual quotations.

So, the market would have fended off the attack on the way it operates, and ready to continue as usual.

The losers would be the non-commercial sites. Wikipedia would have hard time showing you all these Creative Commons-licensed pictures. Free (as in beer) publications would see large drops in traffic, not being able to offer their content _legally_ for free, or re-licence it (it's often quite involved).

What a useful law that might be. /s

<comment><USER20> €20 per month is an _astonishingly_ optimistic figure.

<comment><USER19> I think that large papers could ask, say, 1000 or something, to avoid being ridiculed, but no public news source in their sane mind would turn this fee into a profit center. They'd have much more to lose if their traffic slumps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The underlaying question in this law is about estimating the monetary value of a piece of information and creating a market for selling information. As an example, here in Spain the master of Madrid Community's mayor has been deeply investigated, here that information has strong political implications, and produces monetary value for some political parties. A law can't be easily applied to Giants and ants, to huge actors and to individual bloggers, the model can't scale appropiately. So I would suggest just to impose a tax to huge actors and forget about creating a law that ranges from bloggers to google or twitter, those entities can't be measured with the same rule.

Googling about how to quantify in dollar the value of journalism, I found

1)[http://mediashift.org/2016/10/much-investigative- journalism-...](http://mediashift.org/2016/10/much-investigative-journalism- worth/) 2) The limits of quantification: [https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ref...](https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://mediashift.org/&httpsredir=1&article=4265&context=californialawreview)

3)[https://www.amazon.com/Democracys-Detectives-Economics- Inves...](https://www.amazon.com/Democracys-Detectives-Economics- Investigative-Journalism/dp/0674545508)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how this will hold up with AI written summaries that don't use any of the original text.

</comment><comment><USER23> I generally have a favorable opinion of Europe but this copyright law proposal, and the stupid "right to be forgotten" nonsense, shows that they are far from perfect.

<comment><USER12> See also: the law that ended roaming charges also shoehorned the taking away of Net Neutrality rules.

</comment></comment><comment> th-ai If Kryder's Law holds, then by 2030 local hard drives will store petabytes (4x library of congress or 500 mp4 years). 32 terabyte thumb drives will cost $10. Routes around ISP's will be plentiful. How can copyright survive?

<comment><USER24> Because it's a huge "if" and assumes that by 2030 the A/V standard won't grow as well? I hope you're right, but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains.

<comment><USER25> > _but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains_

Yes, but to your question regarding A/V standards, that works both ways. While past performance often isn't a great predictor, human biological specs _are_ a decent predictor for the near future. If we take 8k as the current bleeding edge (given actual beyond-the-lab 8k screens exist, albeit at horrendous bleeding edge pricing), we're somewhere around one more doubling (quadrupling of pixels) away from the point where the number of image elements will literally exceed the number of retina in a human eye. Now yeah, the human eye jitters around a fair amount, and maybe there'd be some value in peripheral vision coverage too in theory, but even taking all of that into consideration to be very conservative we're still rapidly approaching the point where our display tech can exceed the limits of human visual acuity, at which point it's reasonable to predict that we will in fact be "done" when it comes to A/V standards (post-human seems farther away then 2030). And even that is getting into heavily diminishing returns territory.

It really does make for something interesting to think about, similar to that of audio where we've already been "done" for a long time now. We've lived in an era where a significant amount of innovation and money flowing around and such came out of a lot of work to ever more closely match our synthetic light outputs to the input capabilities of our vision systems. But that's not a forever thing, our vision system is such a powerful part of our senses that it's been a very hard target, but there is in fact a hard physical limit there. When it's reached, and there will be no more video format changes ever again, and no more screen changes ever again, no more chances to sell "remastered" and "updated" versions of older visual products, etc., it may make for some real changes in the industry.

And to GP's point, the theoretical limits of information storage in matter do seem to be a lot farther beyond the theoretical end of information requirements necessary to match a human's AV. Optimistically for all parties though, the music scene seems to have done alright through that transition so far, on both the production/industry and consumer side (where we enjoy near universal DRM free high quality competition). Granted, that was after a lot of very ugly thrashing...

<comment><USER24> You're thinking in terms of one big screen, but by 2030 maybe it's VR that rules the day? What does 16K per eyeball look like? How about a movie with a dozen perspectives in the file? There are loads of foreseeable ways to blow up file sizes in a dozen years.

<comment><USER18> 360 degree video already exists: I believe it works by transmitting the entire output from 2 or more wide angle lenses and letting the viewer select an angle to display. Search for 360 video on youtube for examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Upload filtering would be required for code sharing sites like Github? WTF?

<comment><USER12> See their blog post on it[1]. I think it made HN's front page at the time.

[1]: [https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload- filter...](https://blog.github.com/2018-03-14-eu-proposal-upload-filters- code/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This 'link tax' sounds awful. Will WikiPedia need to start paying 'link tax' ?</comment>


Stanford researchers solve a mystery of dancing droplets - <AUTHOR> http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/dancing-droplets-prakash-031115.html

<comment><USER2> This was shown in a Ted talk by Martin Hanczyc [http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_hanczyc_the_line_between_lif...](http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_hanczyc_the_line_between_life_and_not_life?language=en)

It shows that there is no fine line between life and non life and life is more like a spectrum with complex life on one side and a simple life-less item like a rock on the other side.

</comment><comment><USER3> This (derivative) article has some cool animated GIFs that show the effect in action: [http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/04/dancing- droplets/](http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/04/dancing-droplets/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of SmoothLife, a variation on Conway's Game of Life: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I)

</comment><comment><USER5> Give them 3rd dimension (ie. water tank), make droplet that can grow and divide and maybe you've got origins of life.

<comment><USER6> But then you would lose the evaporation that is needed for this phenomenon to occur.

<comment><USER7> Evaporation could be replaced by any type diffusion in this system. I imagine a similar process could arise out of difference in salt concentration.

Edit: Updated to clarify the relationship between evaporation and diffusion.

<comment><USER8> It is a phase transition, it takes energy to evaporate because of the change in entropy/volume (from Clausius Clapeyron).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Awesome Swift a curated list of awesome swift libraries and resources - <AUTHOR> https://swift.libhunt.com <comment><USER2> Released as a gift for its second birthday :)</comment>


GitBook 2.0.0: Open source publishing and documentation toolchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.gitbook.com/blog/releases/version-2-0-0

<comment><USER2> GitBook co-founder here, let me know if you guys have any questions !</comment>


Two periodic functions such that their sum is the identity function - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/projectfermat/WNOVWmCj-gg/lz3ZyyjNFAAJ <comment><USER2> How is the set of real numbers seen as a vector space over the set of rational numbers.

If I take a real number like 2 it just looks like 2. I don't see it as a vector. Is 2 a vector? How?</comment>


Boycott docker - <AUTHOR> http://www.boycottdocker.org/? <comment><USER2> If you want a boycott site to be taken seriously, you shouldn't start it with a tone such as:

Best features of Docker:

\- Easy to get a project to the top of HackerNews

\- New Github stars for old ideas

\- Has lots of Twitter followers

This only serves people who already have a disdain for docker to smile and say "year, fuck Docker!" but you've already lost anyone by the end of your terribly written introduction if the goal was to actually change anyone's mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand 'one process per container,' and as near as I can tell it is not enforced. It's just a guideline.

I always thought 'one task per container' or 'one service per container' made sense, but Postgres for example has many processes and can easily be containerized.

I am a bit of a Docker skeptic though. I wrote this on the subject:

[http://adamierymenko.com/docker-not-even-a- linker/](http://adamierymenko.com/docker-not-even-a-linker/)

This is also _indirectly_ about Docker and the reasons for it:

[http://adamierymenko.com/privileged-ports-are-causing- climat...](http://adamierymenko.com/privileged-ports-are-causing-climate- change/)

</comment><comment><USER4> "Docker is a poor-mans Nix." \- [https://twitter.com/bendlas/status/634542478209753088](https://twitter.com/bendlas/status/634542478209753088)

</comment><comment><USER5> I stopped reading at the first comparison line "Docker has lower memory footprint, because of forcing to run only single process per container" which is patently false. Also boycott? what about don't use it if you don't like it?

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a great many factual errors in this article and I'm sure someone will write a proper response, but I thought someone should address the most glaring:

\- The repeated assertion that you can only use one process container is false. As an example, the most popular non-official base image (phusion/baseimage) provides a full system including SSHd and Cron

\- No integration points

Docker provides an extensive event stream[0], as do their tools (such as Registry[1])

\- "ps, ls, find [...] are useless here"

This depends on your system setup; on a standard Debian setup, all container processes are visible to the actual system. ps, top, netstat, etc will all work just fine

\- "You can not easily and directly access your durable non-volatile data storage"

One of the most basic concepts in Docker is that of a "volume"[2]; essentially a directory that bypasses Docker's abstraction layers, for performance and durability. Additionally, using your normal storage is absolutely trivial[3] - if Linux can see it, you can use it.

\- No authentication for images

This one's true to a certain extent. While most images aren't currently signed (that's a relatively new feature[4]), it's disingenuous to say that there's no authentication at all. Docker enforces the use of HTTPS to talk to registries, and requires HTTP authentication for registry accounts. It's not signing, but it's something.

Finally, just as it's a personal bugbear of mine, I would note that the userland proxy is a very real problem. It causes major issues if you need wide port ranges, spawning an instance of the proxy per port per container. There's work being done to remove it, but it can't go soon enough in my opinion.

There are a great many reasons you might not want to use Docker, but a lot of what's listed on this site just doesn't check out.

EDIT: Formatting

[0]: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_a...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_api/#docker- events)

[1]: [https://github.com/docker/docker- registry/tree/master/docker...](https://github.com/docker/docker- registry/tree/master/docker_registry/extensions)

[2]: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/dockervolumes/#data...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/dockervolumes/#data- volumes)

[3]: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/dockervolumes/#moun...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/dockervolumes/#mount- a-host-directory-as-a-data-volume)

[4]: [https://blog.docker.com/2015/08/content-trust- docker-1-8/](https://blog.docker.com/2015/08/content-trust-docker-1-8/)</comment>


Data structures to name-drop when you want to sound smart in an interview - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amynguyen.net/?p=853 <comment><USER2> I think that "name-dropping" of something that you don't really know is pretty dangerous strategy in interview.

From other point of view, why not to excercise an idea? :)

KD-trees and other spatial data structures "True time" when talking about consistency Fenwick tree for right problem

</comment><comment><USER3> Python and C++ standard libraries should include the prefix trie, suffix array, Bloom filter, T/Q Digest, and Count-min sketch. Also generic dense/sparse matrix-matrix multiply, and lazy/streaming algorithm interfaces to operate on network supplied data.

<comment><USER4> More importantly, those libraries should use the same on-disk representation so that bloom filters and HLL can be exchanged. Most libraries provide no way for these to be reused, or they require the library be everywhere. Some systems _cannot_ install your (the library author's) libraries.

<comment><USER5> That's a serialization/deserialization problem, which is mostly orthogonal to the implementation of the data structure itself.

<comment><USER4> The hashing algorithms and their configuration parameters need to be fully specified, or the whole lib needs to be compiled into WASM.

We need a portable standard for the external encoding of Bloom and HLL that captures important internal implementation details.

I can serialize a map as a list of key values, but I cannot do that with a Bloom filter. The same case could be made for maps, when one has multiple GB hashmaps, rehashing and inserting on load could make it untenable. CaptnProto aadresses some of this, but more work needs to done to treat the heap as a portable database with internal visibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have just one thing to say - never ever "name-drop" a data structure in a coding interview unless you are going to use it in your solution. It doesn't add anything to your interview but has the potential to get you in trouble.

The title is extremely ill-chosen for an otherwise acceptable blog post. The post itself really has nothing to do with tech interviews.

<comment><USER7> The title is facetious. It is 100% consistent with her writing style (which I love) and is therefore exactly correct.

The footnote #2 for bloom filter is especially good. "The real interview pro tip is always in the footnotes."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is what seems to be a repeated typo in footnote 1: "You take the length N. N % M (pronounced N modulo M) gives you a value Q such that 0 ≤ Q < N." I assume the author meant taking M % N here, and later on.

</comment><comment><USER8> The LMAX Disruptor is a fun one for anyone into Mechanical Sympathy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would this actually be effective or could i tback fire?

<comment><USER10> I had one interview derailed when I did this (earnestly answering, not name- dropping).

<comment><USER11> So what happened?

<comment><USER10> I wound up having to explain finger trees from memory over the phone to somebody who did not want to listen to a high level description of an algebraic data type. Upon being asked for a more low-level description, I gave a word-by-word description of the pointer layout of a tagged union. Then I got asked for the simplest possible data structure, so I answered with an array, and then the guy scoffed like I was an idiot because that was _too_ simple. So then I went with a cut buffer. He tried talking me into using a doubly linked list, and IIRC I wound up going for a doubly linked list of arrays varying in size between 40 and 80 bytes, because I wouldn't want to waste so much memory. Didn't get an on-site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Who still uses prefix tries? I thought most uses have long been replaced by ternary search trees. No one wants to waste memory storing 26 pointers at each node.

<comment><USER13> Memory Use and speed will vary heavily depending on the workload; sometimes the ternary search tree isn't a good solution, especially for small sets - where a radix trie is probably better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once I encountered this curious recursion:'

Here sounds infinite loop maybe, but it should finishing calling each other (a calling b that calls a that calls b again...infinite...)

But when there is a Top maximum Parent that is the top of the parent child pyramid (like a html Body "div", I mean, the one that contains all others") It should stop...well

def a

self.insert //something to make it child of the parent, like a html structure maybe

b //call the second method, the b method below

end

def b

self.insert //same here, same logic//

a //call the first method, the a method above

end

thisHtmlDiv.a //crazy example

So the subject on which you call the method will be added in all the hierarchy chain of the parent child pyramid.

<comment><USER15> This is called mutual recursion. Interpretors rely on it heavily.

<comment><USER14> Thank you very much , sincerely, jeromebaek. This is the real nice spirit of Hackernwes, and you are one of the heroes who help pass the good Knowledge. Thank you very much, buddy.

Cheers!</comment></comment></comment>