The reason is explained in the front matter: “On one level, the data is simply a part of a mundane programming book. On another, each row represents immense suffering, lives lost, and in some cases amazing redemption and acceptance. In preparing for this dataset, I was deeply moved by a number of the statements and found myself re-evaluting my position on capital punishment. I hope that as we examine the data, you too will contemplate the deeper issues at play.”

It's deep and moving, it makes this course more than just a course. I just fetched a few rows and read Beazley's last statement and I now have a great respect for the creator of this course.

I strongly agree. Rarely do I see such a humanistic approach in tech. It brings an important matter to our attention and is meaningful. As a side note, what is meaningful is pedagogically valuable, because what has meaning is easier to remember.

it's data that asks to be investigated. There is no reason to query meaningless data. A query that tells you something you didn't know is infinitely more useful than a query that tells you what you already knew, and a dataset that encourages you to ask your own questions and craft your own queries is infinitely more effective than, say, an imaginary book catalog or some other nonsense that doesn't at all tempt the student to ask more questions of the data.

and besides: technology is a facet of society, it is not a purely rationalist act.

I love it :) It gives the data weight.

This breaks the site guidelines. You unfortunately have a history of posting uncivilly to HN. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, to make it thoughtfully; and if you don't, to not comment until you do.

Why did you choose executions over something mundane like blogs or comments? Reading last statements isn't exactly something I want to be distracted by. The data is interesting sure and if this just happened to be based on something you did recently, I get it. It's not something I'd recommend to students doing data science or getting acquainted with SQL when there's less morbid source material out there. The interactivity provided is cool though, no doubt.

I found it engaging, and a truly real world example of how what we do can impact others, provide us with insights we might not normally have, and can help us influence the world around us.