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Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

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Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#271

Post by hga »

smackfu wrote: post #263
a_p wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most accurate information may be gleaned from police scanners. News cameras may give you pictures of the amount of police officers at the scene, but they cannot get close enough to give you video of what's actually happening. The irony is that of those three sources of information (Web site, radio, news camera), the best source of "real time" information is the oldest. Yes, it's true that the scanner is being bro…

Only problem here is that people take the police scanner as gospel, even though the police may be as confused as anyone else. And because it's not a news source, no one feels the need to explicitly correct things that are wrong.

Absolutely, it's full of the fog of war.

But I'd rather try to interpret that myself than get it filtered through the traditional media in quasi-real time (vs. the much more reliable reporting that happens, say, a couple days after everything is over).

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#272

Post by hga »

bconway wrote: post #266
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #143

Breakdown of what is happening on this reddit thread [1]. You can listen to the police scanner here [2]. Live steaming video here [3]. For those listening on the scanner this is the area/streets they are talking about [4]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th... [2] http://tunein.com/radio/Boston-Police-Fire-and-EMS-Scanner-s... [3] http://www1.whdh.com/video/7newslive [4] https://maps.goo…

Say what you want about the "enlightened liberal sensibilities" of the northeast, the Massachusetts death penalty sure is swift and efficient.

You should hold off on that judgement, e.g. there's plenty of talk about suicide vests, or injuries that go beyond just gun shots.

ADDED: There's no particularly kind and gentle way to deal with someone throwing explosives at you....

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#273

Post by Radim »

hingisundhorsa wrote: post #251
Udo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update: it looks like that was utterly false information, originally spewed into the ether by Punditpress. I'm really glad it didn't turn out to be this guy. I hope they do find him or he decides to go home again.

This whole thread puts HN to shame. It is a shame on all of us. Horrific. Just horrific. Shame on the people who threw some innocent Brown (yes, the school, not the skin color) kid under the bus, or MIT or whatever other school. The kid is missing and his family gets death threats for something he didn't do. They even had to take down their searching for him page. Shame on all of us for participating in this.

Speak for yourself.

I flagged the entire thread immediately. I suggest you do the same in the future. This does not belong on HN.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#274

Post by eranation »

The MIT shooter was one of the marathon bombing terrorists according to CNN if I got it correctly

http://bit.ly/11pohgx

> The search followed a violent night in which authorities say the men allegedly hurled explosives at pursuers after killing a university police officer, robbing a convenience store and hijacking a car.

> ...Soon after, in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer was fatally shot while he sat in his car, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office said in statement. Police believe the bombing suspects were responsible for the shooting.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#275

Post by intended »

StavrosK wrote: post #246
intended wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that resolution level, the second image should look similar. Heck video games depended on people filling in the blanks when using low rez sprites to convey information, and it still works swimmingly. People will see everything from Marlin Brando to the Mona Lisa in low resolution images, while their brain will happily fill in the blanks.

Sure, but I mean to ask "who's white hat guy" and "what does Sunil have to do with either of the two attacks"? I saw the name thrown about here but nobody really clarified.

Ah, Redditors were in a large thread looking at the marathon bomb blast pictures, to identify suspects. Someone on reddit linked pictures of one suspect to the missing student, Sunil.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#276

Post by mindcrime »

kellishaver wrote: post #170
a_p wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most accurate information may be gleaned from police scanners. News cameras may give you pictures of the amount of police officers at the scene, but they cannot get close enough to give you video of what's actually happening. The irony is that of those three sources of information (Web site, radio, news camera), the best source of "real time" information is the oldest. Yes, it's true that the scanner is being bro…

Maybe it's the fact that I spent my youth growing up around HAM radio and then did several years of EMS dispatching, but I much prefer listening to the scanner than the news. It can be chaotic at times, garbled at others, but if you're used to sorting it out, it's the best way to get accurate information.

Former firefighter and 911 dispatcher here: I agree completely. It takes a while to get a feel for it, but if you want to know what's going on in real-time, listening to the emergency comms is the way to go.

Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions that's hard or impossible to do, as they use digital systems with trunking that made it hard to monitor with a scanner and/or use encryption.

Need I say that I think encrypting this stuff is a bad idea? Even if it may, on rare occasion, benefit a "bad guy" to listen to the police channels, weighed against the need for government transparency, I think the need to keep the comms open for everybody wins out.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#277

Post by fyi80 »

buro9 wrote: post #227
trobertson wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain threads generate enormous amounts of activity, and the reddit infrastructure will automatically place those threads into a temporary 'Read Only Mode'. This effectively ends the thread when it revolves around rapid updates, so redditors normally start 'Incident Thread 2', then 3, and so on. During the Boston Marathon bombing, there were, if I remember correctly, over a dozen threads that continued the original…

I guess I'm just curious on the technical side, about why they go into a temporary read-only mode. What issues forced that to be implemented? I am mostly wondering whether it's the threaded nature of a thread on Reddit that makes this a difficult problem, or whether this is reflective of some limitation in the underlying datastore or something.

It's because a the database isn't completely agnosticly load-balanced, and a single story is stored/processed with more co-locality than a random sample of, say, 10000 randomly chosen comments.

It's easier to cache and serve a fixed piece of content than to constantly insert and re-compress it (which kills cached versions too)

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#278

Post by fyi80 »

shpxnvz wrote: post #260
ghc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gun violence is a very uncommon thing in Boston or Cambridge...it's big news here every time it happens. Now outside the city, in the areas where poor people live, it's a different story...but MIT and Harvard are located in some of the wealthiest, safest areas of Cambridge.

Boston has about 60 murders per year. 56% of murders in Massachusetts involve a firearm. Therefore, Boston sees about three murders involving a firearm per month on average. This does not, of course, include justifiable homicides. ETA: So as not to scare anyone remember that in major cities typically between 65% and 91% of murder victims are criminals, and most of the killings are gang related.

Still scary -- plenty of kids live in neighborhoods where they get dragged into gang turf issues.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#279

Post by homosaur »

darkarmani wrote: post #259
homosaur wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some crime happens on a college campus probably every day. Most likely hundreds of violent crimes a year. But the reason this is on HN is MIT, nothing more.

Or because it is connected to the terrorist attack on monday...

I wasn't at the time, dude.

Re: Shots fired at MIT - report of an active shooter near Bldg. 32 (Stata)

#280

Post by [deleted] »

homosaur wrote: post #11
untog wrote: post #5

Don't wish to make light of this at all, but I do wonder- how often does this happen? After all, "shots fired" is not an uncommon thing in many cities in the US. I just wonder whether we will look back in 12 months time at the "week of hell" and realise that it was actually just a week in which we found all the things that usually go on every week that we don't hear about.

Some crime happens on a college campus probably every day. Most likely hundreds of violent crimes a year. But the reason this is on HN is MIT, nothing more.

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