skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>However, if my house were on fire with 10 of my family trapped inside, and the firefighters racing to the scene accidentally ran over one family member in putting out the fire, I would not consider this to be "murder".

What does this example have to do with occupation? Likening an invading military force (especially when there was no reason for the invasion as is the case in Iraq) is pretty insulting to everyone involved except, of course, the invading force.

>There are definitely people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have had family members killed, but who overall are still happy the US invaded.

This might be the case in Afghanistan (I can buy that you might find someone somewhere, but I doubt the average Joe is very happy about it) but you're going to have a hard time finding someone "better off" in Iraq after the invasion. The country is less stable, less safe. There are extremist roaming around kidnapping and killing that were not doing so before. I've met several families that had decent lives in Iraq that had to leave after the invasion.

> There was one report about a guy who had a US bomb hit his house, killing several family members, who then went to the US commander, told him what had happened, and asked that we be more careful and continue to get rid of the Taliban.

Were they two such reports? What was the source of this story? Was due diligence done on the story? Sounds too patriotic/"feel good" for me to take it at face value.

>and in a lot of ways, even at the peak of badness in each place, outside of localized areas, quality of life is better for most civilians.

In the case of Iraq this is demonstrably not true. In fact the situation is almost exactly the opposite. What do you think Sadam was doing exactly? He was for sure a bad person and not someone who's radar you want to be on but for the average citizen there were definitely worse people to have as a ruler (e.g. Kim Jong-il).

>The US has killed maybe 200 Afghan civilians in about a decade of operations.

Based on what definition? The one you gave elsewhere about following US military protocol? My definition of civilian death is if a non-American who isn't a terrorist gets killed, regardless if the people who killed him where within their protocols or not. If they hadn't been there the person would likely still be alive. Given that definition your "200 in 10 years" sounds impossibly low.

>There are definitely grounds for not wanting the US to be there, but they're more "moral" or "honor" than practical quality of life, for most people.

This statement could only possibly hold for Afghanistan. Clearly it doesn't apply to Iraq.
Related post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546864
I would say in prehistoric times resources were more available than now - people could just walk away from each other and live on what nature provided without fighting. I think this is why people spreaded over the whole world. So why should zero sum bias be encouraged by evolution?
I don't disagree that the media has done a horrible job of reporting on Iraq/Afghanistan.

However, I think you really overestimate the downrange reporting coming from Vietnam (I don't know how old you are; the war was over before I was born, so I only read about it after the fact).

There was definitely a lot of focus on US casualties. We were losing about 300 per week, whereas now it is more like 300 per quarter or per year.

The main difference was in Vietnam, the journalists had free reign to go anywhere in the allied area they wished; in Iraq/Afghanistan, reporters are generally embedded with a specific unit. Maybe psychologically embedding with the unit makes reports identify with the soldiers more.

The only really stunning difference between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan was down to Walter Cronkite giving his opinion that the war would end in stalemate. I don't think very many other Vietnam war reporters (from Vietnam; not US based) gave personal commentary like that. I think that is down to Walter Cronkite as a person, and that he had experience with a previous war (he flew on bombers and covered landings during WW2) before reporting on Vietnam. None of the embedded reporters in Afghanistan or Iraq covered a major war other than Gulf War I before (Anderson Cooper, Geraldo, Christiane Amanpour, etc.)
2010 Vimeo Festival: Interview with Blake Whitman, Vimeo Founder
The year is 2010, and Vimeo.com has planted the first annual seed of the Vimeo Festival and Awards, which provides filmmakers with the opportunity to win $25,000, and more importantly, an opening to expand the audience of their film, beyond just family and friends.
Debian GNU/Linux device driver check page
Some jobs require travelling for work. I know someone who's job was to go around conferences in Europe and set up and maintain wifi networks. Some people interviewed for the job just didn't like travelling, and so weren't hired. This person has shown that they clearly are OK with travelling.

Another advantage is that it shows a level of maturity and self-sufficience. If they can pack their bags and go off to India as a younge person they are clearly not a stay-at-home-very-shy person.
I was on the verge on having the same experience at fowa london, however they had set up some game consoles to play on and they only had games you could play with two players.

It's a very good icebreaker, I can only recommend the practice.
I would love to start using tipfy, but haven't read a compelling argument for porting existing projects that are using webapp. (Working django projects seem clearly not worth it because the routing and other code patterns appear quite different.)
That sounds like any other KV store then. One of the usefulnesses (wow that's actually a word) of Redis is that it has all the rich data types and operations that are atomic. At that point, if you're not going to use them, why not look at TokyoCabinet, or something similar?
As far as I understand it there is no fundamental reason why a hedge fund has to take on any debt at all - just that the investment strategies they often employ actually have very small returns so to make the overall returns to investors attractive they often borrow (or used to) large multiples of investors capital.
JASON - Classified Scientific advisory group for the US Govt.
note the emphasis on "serious stuff".

I did in fact touch MySQL since then in the process of setting up various open source applications that require MySQL.

While back then, I needed Postgres for some features MySQL didn't have but otherwise didn't really dislike MySQL, over those 10 years, I really learned to hate MySQL:

- try (erroneously) adding or inserting latin1-data into a UTF-8 table. You'd expect an error message, but instead your data gets truncated at the first byte with the high bit set. No warning. This means that you have to re-read and compare whatever data you stored to be sure that you didn't lose any.

- once, mysqldump stopped dumping after coming across a corrupt table. It did so while still exiting with a 0 exit code. That meant that for months my backups were incomplete.

- "alter table sometable add somcolumn integer not null" will gladly add the column and place null values in each row. Null values that should absolutely not be there. No error. No warning.

- Same goes for date columns, but there it's even better as it'll set the date to 0000-00-00 which is invalid if you try to add this in an insert or update.

- I said "corrupt table" earlier. Yeah. That happens with MySQL, whereas it never ever (with the exception of faulty hardware of course) happens with any other RDBMS - including PostgreSQL.

Now, in my opinion, a database that doesn't guarantee that the data you put in can then be read back out in unaltered form (or at all) is, really, no real RDBMS.

Sorry.

(edit: reason for not posting this in my original reply: I'm basically repeating above points over and over here on HN and I thought people would know my gripes by now)
“what companies have generous vacation policies?”

most of them outside the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...
Loopt was a service too US centric. At least in Mexico, the current trendy option is Foursquare. As for Gowalla (My favorite one), didnt do so well in the beginning.

Maybe, what the trend is showing is more adoption from outside the US.
It seems to me that debt is virtually a necessity created by prosperity: otherwise, the folks with all the capital end up with very lumpy mattresses. Take the Japanese government debt (please!): the reason they're able to sustain such a staggering amount of it is that the debt is owned mostly by older Japanese folks who spent a few decades with savings rates in the 20% plus region.

I'd be more worried about pissing spending away than about debt-financed spending, per se. ($20k to get a degree, OK, $240k to get a master's degree in traditional dance... well, I hope you marry well. Buying houses on credit, OK, asset bubbles a little less OK. Constantly increasing QOL caused by expanding public services, ambivalence, capture of budgeting process by public service unions less OK.)
There are a lot of examples. Afghan society is generally willing to sacrifice individuals for their tribe, so it's not that hard to understand.

Example: Kandahar, Marines under MajGen Mattis, late Dec 2001/Early Jan 2002. ODA 574 enroute from Tarin Kowt, Dec 2001.

For a more recent example:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Afghanistan/special-forces-apologiz...
16 Techi-rific Google Logo Doodles
When Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to do something creative with their logo back in 1999 to signify their attendance at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada Desert, things were simple for the Google logo; just a stick figure stuck in the middle of the second ‘o’.
Not specific to this article:

I find it unrealistic that threaded vs evented (or blocking vs non-blocking I/O) comparisons always use a slow database server as the prototypical thing to wait for.

I get that this is not the point but to a newcomer it must seem like "oh.. database servers are super slow, I must first and foremost worry about optimizing access to them".

If your queries regularly take more then 10ms to complete, something is wrong with the database (do caching, put database closer to querying server - maybe even on the same machine).
Note that the difference vanishes when the language allows for closures. With closures, you can write code that looks like "one thread per request", but could in fact be using asynchronous I/O:

wait_for_response(request, function(response) {
do_something_with_response(response)
...
})

This becomes even more clear in Ruby syntax, where you don't have to nest the reply handler into the wait_xxx function:

wait_for_response(request) { |response|
do_something_with_response(response)
...
}

Using monads, you can even abstract the difference away completely. That way, the code looks like ordinary imperative stuff:

response <- wait_for_response(request);
do_something_with_response(response)

If your language provides continuations, you can even handle multiple responses that way. Paul Graham did that in Viaweb (http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt, section "Closures Simulate Subroutines").

tl;dr: The asynchronous I/O is only hard to use in languages which lack essential features. In modern languages you can write "intuitive" code that works for both cases, and you are free to switch from multithreaded sync I/O to asynchronous I/O as you like.
I'd like to see all the reports plotted in time on a map. We can then watch the flow of the war over the months and years.
In Sweden we had our crash in the early 90s. The government was forced to borrow huge amounts of money but after a few rough years cleaning up the balance sheet the economy
recovered.

We now have probably the strongest balance sheet in Europe.

Of course a weakened krona fueled the export sector in the late 90s, a luxury the euro countries don't have but still, recovery can be surprisingly fast if you avoid the fate of Japan.
Heh, looking at the title, my first thought was this was about the Go language.

It wasn't, so I closed the tab.
Poll: Semicolons in JavaScript
Question: Should people always use semicolons in Javascript?

For those unfamiliar with the matter, Javascript allows semicolons to be omitted sometimes, see:

http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/javascript_semicolons

Update: This poll was started as a result of a discussion on the node.js mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/35810f231cb289aa
A better question would be: who uses MySQL as anything but a glorified key-value store when reaching large sizes? I personally have been involved in trying to use MySQL as a "real database" in the 10-100TB range and let me tell you, it's not pretty. I'm not sure about the open source PostgreSQL, but I know Greenplum has petabyte level warehouses running on a distributed version of it.

A few observations:

1) MyISAM's performance is highly dependent on certain idiosyncrasies of a lot of applications. Using MyISAM in this day and age is a very bad idea. InnoDB at least gets closer to real database behavior.

2) The "query optimizer" is insulting at best and actively impeding getting things right if you use it for much more than simple queries. Something that's more along the lines of what really large databases (as opposed to KV stores) get used for can implode the server.

Personally, I think too many people try and stick things in relational databases that don't belong there simply because they've got the hammer in their hand and it's easier than pulling out a screwdriver.
23andme engage in infotainment with an additional helping of candidates disease thrown in for each and every one of their customers. GPs are already amongst the most overworked people on the planet, the last thing they need is a herd of people with waving print-outs they (the people) don't understand in support of yet another round of imaginary diseases.

It's the perfect product for the hypochondriac.
Are you suffering from burn-out?
Your logic is flawed. The impressiveness of current and near-future x86 processors (and they are, considering they are still compatible with 8088's, quite impressive) has no relation to how impressive the x196 and its support chips are.

To use my previous analogy, the X-15 or the SR-71 are impressive machines, but that doesn't make a 8,000 TEU freighter, or an aircraft carrier, less impressive.

The differences in basic technology are being reduced, but all it does is to make the current crop of x86s look less crippled compared to POWER and zCPUs. And, mind you, POWER makes a top-of-the-line x86 look like a toy.
How Stallman browses the web (2007)
How many people are needed to maintain current living standards?
5 Best Php Web Development Frameworks
As we know that web development is a software framework that is designed to support the development of a website or a web service. Web development is somewhat difficult in the absence of a framework.
The paper is really focused on separated request-response connections that do not interact between each other (eg. HTTP, SMTP).

Synchronization between threads becomes a lot more complex if the connections are interacting with each other, for example for multiplayer games.
I was trying to use an example/scenario which might be more relevant to 99.999% of HN which does not live in a war zone.

More precisely, "If I lived in a town where a criminal gang would kill members of my family, confiscate my property, and oppress everyone, and someone came in to kill the gang and stray gunfire killed my family". In the case of a legal invasion (pretty clear in the case of Afghanistan), that someone would be the police; in the case of Iraq, that someone might be a random concerned citizen.. I would definitely be upset, but it would not be murder -- it would be anywhere from purely accidental to some form of manslaughter. During a legal war, it is clearly legal, provided the belligerent obeys the law of war. Depending on the exact situation, I would be more or less upset; there are definitely situations where I would remain very upset (i.e. if the shooting was highly negligent).

Under pashtunwali, accidental death during a conflict, if you take responsibility for it and apologize, is not the same level of offense that it is in western culture.

The quality of life in Afghanistan is probably better today for 90% of Afghans than it was in 2000, although definitely worse than it was in 1954.

In Iraq, the quality of life is absolutely better for the Kurds, and quite possibly better for most Shia, than it was under Saddam. Around 2009 and 2010, it's probably reached the turning point of being better on a daily basis than it was in the past, at least for those who didn't leave Iraq; there are definitely displaced persons who are worse off. I don't think the decrease in quality of life from 2003-2007 was inherent to the invasion, but to incompetence during the occupation -- if the military vs. state department were doing the same thing today, it would have been a lot less bad. Perhaps still not worthwhile, but definitely less bad.
Based on a lot of these comments, a decent subsection of the hackers here don't really understand the enterprise very well at all, much less the types of barrier to entry technology service providers face when targeting potential customers (or their problems).

I'm sure I'm not the most experienced here, but I am an IT director in a global enterprise and have ten years experience managing an internal appdev group, as well as owning our messaging, collaboration, and content services platforms/org. If there's interest, I'd be happy to kick off an IAMA to facilitate Q&A from folks who might like to know more about how the vetting process tends to work in a large corporation, or things they might do to wedge their foot in the door.

If this would be useful or interesting, let me know and I'll post.
Personally I think the Google Javascript Style Guide has it right:

> Relying on implicit insertion can cause subtle, hard to debug problems. Don't do it. You're better than that.

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
"In-game tutorials are both hugely important and difficult to pull off, and today's game-designers have gotten pretty clever about putting them together."

Disagree heavily. Many of the most complicated games from the past had no tutorials, but people were still able to figure them out. Figuring out was part of the fun in fact. Most people I know simply ignore tutorials.

And I can't blame them, because developers tend to be horrible at putting tutorials together. Most tutorials today start with the most basic things imaginable- moving your character and moving the camera. These things don't change from game to game. Only a very small number of modern games have tutorials worth playing.
Is Facebook tracking your browsing history?
Sure, at some point it will become cheaper to grow the fish in fish farms, at which point we aren't going to be fishing in the oceans anymore.
I think the most compelling reason is the list of extensions. They integrate several missing functionalities from webapp; you just pick what you need. You could also build them around webapp -- that's what we are doing with tipfy.

I wrote a list with some other reasons: http://www.tipfy.org/wiki/why-tipfy/
I already read "How to get rich" ( Hint: It's not by working for your boss, so I think I have my answer ;)
I understand it can be beneficial to work for a company, but I'm not sure if working as an engineer and being surrounded by engineers ( as smart as they are ) will help me significantly for my future startup.
Thanks for the book recommandation, I'm going to order E-myth revisited right away.
Purchasing decisions are made by managers, not the ones doing the actual work.

Hence Oracle fits the bill if your company can afford it: It's number one, expensive (which implies good quality), and everyone else uses it. Ergo, no one ever got fired for choosing Oracle, licensing costs be damned.
Catch shares and more room for local governance (cf. Ostrom) should go a long way.
I am expecting F# people in the next year to say that Go is a very complex language and that it doesn't address the problems we are facing in enterprises.

That is every big house has a horse in the language race.
I think Nolan struck a decent balance between ambiguity and exposition. The moments that were heavy with "tutorials" were still fun because of the visual effects, like when they were folding Paris. The OP forgets that the Matrix had plenty of exposition too. Not to mention, Nolan waits until the movie is well on its way before he starts to explain the rules of his universe. I think inceptions concepts are more complicated than the Matrix's, anyways.
Yes, that also happens from time to time. But I don't spend a lot of time on prioritising stuff at all, I just take the top item on the list and get it over with :)
Have breakfast in the Inner Sunset at Park Chow (http://www.yelp.com/biz/park-chow-san-francisco), then walk across the street to Golden Gate Park and go up to the observation tower at the De Young Museum (it's free, and the view is nice).

Once you are finished there, hop on the muni light rail (N-Judah line) at 9th & Irving (it's the intersection up the street from Park Chow. Take that to Powell Street, and then walk around Union Square for awhile. Once you get bored with that, go back to Powell St. station and hop on BART. Go to 24th & Mission station, and make a U-turn into El Farolito (http://www.yelp.com/biz/el-farolito-san-francisco-2), which has the best burritos ever. Believe me, I've had a lot of burritos in my life. Make sure to have the salsa verde. It has small chunks of avocado and is the most amazing salsa ever. Seriously.

Next, walk up a block or two to Valencia street and check out the shops. If you start to get tired, grab a cup of coffee at Ritual Roasters (http://www.yelp.com/biz/ritual-coffee-roasters-san-francisco...) or Four Barrel (http://www.yelp.com/biz/four-barrel-coffee-san-francisco#que...).

For dinner, go to Monk's Kettle (http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-monks-kettle-san-francisco) for amazing pairings of beer + delicious food.

Also, if you know someone with a car, check out Baker Beach (http://www.yelp.com/biz/baker-beach-san-francisco#query:bake...) for the beautiful beach and the incredible view of the Golden Gate (though beware that it is informally a nude beach).
My first thought: Bigdis with a FUSE filesystem mapping to Amazon S3, you can have a huge database that's stored in triplicates, backed up, can be accessed from anywhere, and scalable.
I don't know. Personally, I'd prefer an interviewee that comes to the interview with an open mind and actually tries to make suggestions based on the view of the infrastructure that they have acquired based on the information I have given them or they inferred in their research of my company.

Of course they might be wrong because naturally, they can't have the full picture. But I'd much rather have an employee I can hold a discussion with and get input from then one that blindly does what I tell them to. In the end, I might as well have made a bad decision or overlooked something.

In fact, having an engaging discussion during the interview is quite a sure-fire way to get hired if you are in an interview with me (provided the stuff you talk about makes sense).