If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!
"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mit-professor-shot-killed-home-bos...
Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.
They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.
[] Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark
1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.
2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.
3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.
4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?
To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.
I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".
And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.
If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.
The same weapon being.. a gun? Hardly a notable connection.
I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.
Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home. We have no information and can only speculate.”
edit to add: (For those who weren't aware, the Brown University terrorist is still on the loose).
The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.
It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.
Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.
ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.
The US doesn't have border security between states.
The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
It's a tough one to find a motive for...
And even more horrified about the thread on homepage about surveilance cameras. I knew that shoplifting and car theft is essentially decriminalized in US. And now I learn that home invasions are also.
I imagine most preteens in America have a better grasp of reality than the one you’re espousing here.
The us is only 5 times bigger
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
You mean murder?
It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
Although yours is more neutral than "CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" which you often hear from the same populations that cheered the assassination of a CEO that did nasty things and most definitely did not get away with it.
It's definitely become more politically charged in the wake of the Luigi event, when framing CEOs as violent people implicitly authorizes "self-defense" cheered on by what is usually associated with left-wing leaning actors.
And right know in America, it is squarely fascists and racists who win the numbers and are on the path to add some.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
There are multiple court cases decisions showing that police have no duty to protect people. All the way up to the Supreme Court
> Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981) is a District of Columbia Court of Appeals case that held that the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine.
(You'll note that even Yeshiva World News isn't speculating about motives here.)
That's some Uri-Geller-level mindreading you're doing there, of someone we can't yet identify.
People also get burgled and shot. Lovers take revenge. A grad student loses their mind.
It's entirely irresponsible to suggest that something is being hidden if there's zero evidence so far that someone's religion or political views are even remotely relevant.
People's religion and political views aren't generally considered relevant to a homicide unless there's an indication they had something to do with the motive, at which point they get reported. Otherwise, the media sticks to basic biographical details like occupation and family status.
Otherwise, the media gets accused of sensationalizing things, implying someone's religion is relevant to stir up controversy, etc.
If it turns out this was either a hate crime or a politically-motivated crime, do you really think the media will suppress that? Spoiler: they don't.
That is simply not true, every single news outlet without fail speculates, uncritically quotes a speculator, or leaves out warranted critical speculation at their own discretion. Pick a news site that you think doesn’t do this and I will happily find an example from their front page.
Pick a few frontpage stories from any news site you like, then see how its covered one a new source you don't like/leans the opposite way politically (short of the crazy outlets) and see how the same stories are reported. You'll see different quotes, different speculation, different choices of what to include or not include. Hell even the choice of what is covered on the frontpage will obviously vary if you just compare them. Saying that what a news outlet is reporting is "not the opinion of the news organization itself" may be technically correct in a legal sense, but that's worst kind of correct.
Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that area, and which has caused violence before seems like the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far.
This is problematic because most of the sources saying he was Jewish and pro-Israel seem to be quoting each other. The Wikipedia reference was added yesterday and removed today because the linked sources didn’t say anything about his religion, and I haven’t seen any sources about pro-Israel stances which I’d think would be easier to find if he was outspoken enough to be targeted. It’s still quite possible that he was the unfortunate victim of a stalker-most of the professors I know have had to work with security to keep someone off campus because colleges attract a certain brand of mentally ill people–but it seems odd that these sources are so confident about this assertion without citing sources.
Based on e.g. https://news.mit.edu/2018/nuno-loureiro-faculty-physics-1016 it really seems like his passion was physics and I think we should commemorate someone who tried to improve humanity’s understanding of the universe. If new details emerge, I’m sure they’ll be posted here.
Every time a lefty gets cut off in traffic, it's just one more data point.
(This is a general statement responding to your analogy. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I don't even know if this professor was Jewish or why he was killed.)
Some people refuse to acknowledge this reality and others attempt to justify it. Many resort to sarcasm as a defense mechanism, revealing their own biases in written records on major public forums.
Also, there is a massively asymmetric application of hate crime laws, as you can clearly see by the automatic “hate crime” conclusion you’re already seeing here simply because the victim was Jewish. This asymmetry is glaringly obvious when you look at the handling of these two stabbings.
In one case, the perpetrator stabbed a white woman to death, and said on camera "got the white bitch." In the other case, the subway stabbing happened "blocks from" a synagogue following an argument. Which one do you think gets the hate crime treatment?
https://abc7ny.com/post/hate-crime-investigation-victim-stab...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-charlotte-train-stabbing-i...
This asymmetry makes it impossible to gain much insight from the statistics on this. It’s very likely that 8x is a very high upper bound, and only in an exceptional year where those stats coincided with a genocide committed in their name, which has been a cause for global outrage and disgust.
The ~69% figure is not “probably based on” anything. It’s directly from the FBI’s 2023 hate crime data as summarized by DOJ: 2,699 religion-based incidents, 1,832 anti-Jewish. That is 1,832 / 2,699 = 67.9% (call it ~68–69%). Source: https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
Now you try to “debunk” that by quietly switching the denominator to all hate crimes. Fine. Do that math too: 1,832 / 11,862 total incidents = 15.4% of all reported hate crime incidents in 2023. For a ~2% population, that’s still about 7–8x disproportionate. So no, it’s not “not true.” You’re just changing the question and hoping nobody notices. You even implicitly concede the underlying statistic (“69% of religion-based hate crimes”) and then pretend it’s false by changing denominators mid-argument.
Your “only if religion-based hate crimes were the only type” line is nonsense. I explicitly restricted the claim to religion-based incidents, and the DOJ/FBI table does the same. You’re arguing with a strawman you invented.
As for “overreported” and “asymmetric” enforcement: that’s vibes plus two cherry-picked links about a specific incident. If you think the FBI/DOJ figures are inflated, show a dataset and a method, not anecdotes and insinuation.
Also, plenty of incidents never get reported at all. I’ve personally been assaulted for being Jewish and didn’t report it. That is what undercount looks like in real life.
Finally, please stop misrepresenting what I wrote. I explicitly said “religion-based hate crimes.” Your comment only makes sense if you pretend I didn’t.
Also, nice AI slop - I stopped reading at the first angle quotes.
The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti-Jewish. That’s 67.9%. https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
If you want to change the denominator to “all hate crimes,” say so up front. That gives 15.4% of all incidents, still massively disproportionate.
It's common to use angle quotes on HN, but either way, you accusing me of "AI slop" because you don't like the way I quote things doesn't change the arithmetic and is not a rebuttal.
Still, restricting it to “religious-based” hate crimes is transparently misleading. Using a statistic from a narrow category to imply a claim about the whole is a classic substitution error. Either you are lacking in statistical literacy, or you are being intentionally misleading.
And let’s not forget the massive, undeniable asymmetry here that makes the entire point meaningless. None of this is sufficient to assume that a crime against a Jew is automatically a hate crime until proven otherwise.
But the rest is just another goalpost move. Quoting a clearly labeled subset is not “transparently misleading,” as you put it It’s how statistics work. I said “religious-based hate crimes” explicitly, because we were discussing hostility toward Jews. The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti‑Jewish.
And I already gave the “whole” denominator too: those same 1,832 incidents are 15.4% of all 11,862 hate crime incidents in 2023. For a 2% population, that is still ~7–8x disproportionate, as I've mentioned. So the “substitution error” accusation doesn’t apply here, because I didn’t imply 69% of all hate crimes. I stated the subset and then did the math for the broader denominator as well.
On the “asymmetry makes it meaningless” claim: I see you're asserting that, but you haven’t demonstrated it. FBI hate crime data is not “crime against a Jew = hate crime until proven otherwise.” It’s incidents agencies specifically classify as bias-motivated based on evidence. The well-known problem in this space is underreporting and incomplete reporting, not some magical inflation that conveniently zeros out anti‑Jewish bias. I can attest to the underreporting having not reported an assault where I was beat up on the NYC subway and told "they should have burned you all" while minding my own business on an NYC subway.
Finally, none of this was me calling any specific crime a hate crime. I explicitly said we don’t know the motive in the professor’s case. This thread started because you challenged a statistical claim. The numbers stand. Given you opened with "liar" and "AI slop," you might want to recalibrate before accusing others of ‘statistical illiteracy'.
I did not use a “religion-specific metric to argue about hate crimes in general.” I said, explicitly, “69% of religious-based hate crimes.” Then, when you insisted on the “general” denominator, I gave that too: anti‑Jewish incidents are 15.4% of all hate crime incidents in 2023, still ~7–8x disproportionate for a ~2% population. Both numbers come from the same DOJ/FBI table. https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
So the “category substitution / base-rate neglect” lecture is just a rhetorical reset button. You keep pretending I implied “69% of all hate crimes” because that’s the only way your critique has a target.
At this point the pattern is clear: 1) miss what I actually wrote, 2) accuse me of lying/AI, 3) admit you missed it, 4) reframe anyway by inventing a broader claim I never made, 5) argue against your invention.
I’m not doing more laps of that. If you want to dispute the DOJ/FBI numbers or show actual evidence of systematic inflation, present a dataset and method. Otherwise we’re done here.
Genocide often is carried out in the context of war, and certainly it isn't harder for the winning side of a war to do so.
Israel's war against Hamas was part of a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people that has been conducted through much of that longer war, a campaign that it started decades before Hamas existed (and fostered the creation of Hamas, during the more intense period of its occupation of Gaza, as a tactic to facilitate through both dividing its opposition and making it less internationally sympathetic, as the primary constraint on the campaign has always been international, and particular US, tolerance.)
jimbo808 wrote: "The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16%... which came along with the genocide being committed in their name."
What kind of worldview motivates such a comment? He invents a genocide and says it's being committed in the name of American Jews? This is a novel claim even by the low standards of the antizionist crowd. Laughable.
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
International Association of Genocide Scholars
UN Human Rights Office
And even some Israeli organizations, such as:
B’Tselem
Physicians for Human Rights Israel
Or "some country" tried to recruit him and killed him when he said no to maintain the (nonofficial) cover.
You don't understand why a country without nuclear weapons would try to get a scientist to help them make them?
Countries that have nuclear ambitions but lack the capability have more than enough scientists of their own that could do it given the permission. It’s pretty available science which is why we put sanctions on it and prevent people from enriching uranium like that.
So again, why him?
>He also studied how to harness clean "fusion power" to combat climate change, CBS said.
Clean energy is pretty controversial in US. Most people are against it.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/poll-shows-americans-want-affo...
It'll be the same cabal that killed the inventor of the engine mod that allowed for 99mpg.
If people want a conspiracy theory, tell them to go with alien civilizations wanted to prevent humans from achieving fusion.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8&pp=ygUhU2FyYWggY29ub...
I'd assume bsky is blaming Trump death squads being sent after scientists, exclusive reporting on MSNOW at 11.
The only thing that seems true right now, if it's related to the Brown murders, is that the suspect shown on crappy security footage is overweight and walks like they're out of shape.
These murders are being reported, but feel a bit strategically different than murders from even a few months ago, maybe there's a turn for the better. It seems like the whole social media frenzy and fallout is being taken seriously, and they're letting professionals do the investigating instead of conscripting the public and seizing the news cycles.
Kinda crazy (scary?) how fast tragic events like this get instantly politicized on social.
Isnt it more likely that's due to him living in the US or the Terminator hypothesis?
He was working on fusion technology, so you could just as well speculate it was fossil fuel interests involved, but that also seems purely speculative.
BigFission
We'll probably find out it was mugging.
Horses, not zebras.
Also, jewel thieves don't abseil down from the ceiling.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.
Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."
Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.