Ever since the Snowden leaks HN has seen a massive increase in skepticism, which is healthy, but along with that has come rampant cynicism, unfounded assertions of insidious malign actions that solely cite the fact "we don't know" as evidence. There is a point at which "assuming the worst" goes too far and becomes an echo chamber for conspiracy theory. It did for Michael Hastings, and it does here -- at the very least until we know more.
A man has just died, for crying out loud, and I'm sorry to hear it. Let us use wisdom and reason to assess this, not snarky, dismissive comments.
It doesn't strike me as that unlikely (oh god I can't believe I'm going to actually work this out...)
Going on 1990 data [0]
US white male, age 30: 1.77 / 1000 per year
So in any two week gap, we're looking at about a 7 x 10^-5 chance of dying. Lets call this variable x.
There are about 35 speakers at blackhat, so the chance that at least one of them dies within the two weeks before the conference is 1 - ((1 - x)^35), in english 1 - (chance nobody dies). This works out at ~0.25% or odds of about 1 in 400. That's for one year. For five years, four conferences per year it goes up to about 5%.
So it's not that unlikely. It's not likely to the point where we expect it to happen regularly, thankfully, but it's not in the conspiracy range.
Please don't mistake what I'm writing here as saying it's not shocking or terrible. It's a great loss. I'd just like to provide a counter to the conspiracy side using actual figures and numbers so that the news of him dying isn't taken over.
I wouldn't really say that at all. His largest presentation was at Black Hat and he hasn't done anything nearly as publicized since. The pacemaker presentation would have been his first presentation of note in quite a while.
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy here, I'm just not saying there's necessarily not one.
Hacker News, a real person with real friends and a real family has died. Can you please not make this about your paranoid NSA delusions for at least one day?
It absolutely is a stretch. You're comparing apples & oranges. To me it seems like saying "A soldier kills militants in XYZ country. Therefore it's not a stretch to say he kills his family if he's mad."
I don't find this analogy meta-discussions valuable. The only stretch is whether or not the killing could happen inside USA. Of course it (perhaps) hasn't happened yet, but that's what we are discussing: if it could happen. Any evidence on the truth of "could it happen?" has to has some differences, otherwise it would have already happened and we wouldn't be debating this in the first place.
Actually I think the stretch was the other way around. We already knew, from a long history, that the US intelligence establishment kills people. We only recently found out that they ALSO record all our phone calls. Just sayin...
The NSA is recording phone calls? We wish. The NSA is capturing all (most?) data going in and out of America and frequently cooperates with other countries by exchanging data, thus having access to a large chunk of worldwide communications. It also cooperates closely with the CIA, to catch or kill 'terrorists'.
How is it a bit of a stretch to think an organization that powerful might kill someone?
I look at it from the standpoint of trust. How can we trust that no foul play was invloved. I'm not saying take it as the gospel... Best just to keep an opened mind at this point.
That seems excessive. Can we trust that the government isn't setting up an elaborate "Truman Show"? I'd just go with the Occam's Razor test: it doesn't really seem to make sense and seems like a much higher risk than whatever "they" are trying to cover up. Manning -- not dead. Snowden -- not dead. If the US really wanted them dead, they would be dead.
Ever since the Snowden leaks HN has seen a massive increase in skepticism, which is healthy, but along with that has come rampant cynicism, unfounded assertions of insidious malign actions that solely cite the fact "we don't know" as evidence. There is a point at which "assuming the worst" goes too far and becomes an echo chamber for conspiracy theory. It did for Michael Hastings, and it does here -- at the very least until we know more.
A man has just died, for crying out loud, and I'm sorry to hear it. Let us use wisdom and reason to assess this, not snarky, dismissive comments.