jordyhoyt's comments

I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine that the gunner seat in a chopper like this is pretty high anxiety. Your life could depend on shooting the right people at the right time. Not only your life, but the lives of all your buddies flying with you, not to mention the fact that you're protecting a piece of machinery that cost your country millions.

All I was saying before was that gunners like this are used to facing insurgent tactics. When they see vans like this, they aren't looking to give them the benefit of the doubt. They have been trained that, if they do, they may be putting their lives and the mission at risk. This guy is probably scared out of his mind. He has a huge responsibility, and screwing up - as we've seen today - has enormous consequences.

To me, the laughing and joking isn't making light of slaughtering the enemy, it's nervous laughs and desperate attempts to bring everyone out of it. We're human, we don't deal with this shit well. The comments here are good proof of that.

None of this excuses slaughtering innocent unarmed civilians, it's just my attempt at bringing some perspective.

How does this sound to you as a former marine?

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/bmooi/wikileaks_video_j...

It seems plausible to me that these guys are seeing this situation all the time: they fire on a group of people, some are left wounded, and vans show up to collect weapons, but also grab wounded/bodies to try and look legit from the sky. Being used to tactics like these, I can understand how anxious they were to get clearance to fire on the van; who knows if they are going to fire on the helicopter or speed off. It wasn't clearly marked as a medical vehicle, and it sounds like everyone over there knows that you will be fired on if you do something like this.

Two spaces before a line of code does the trick:

  var default_settings = { brightness: 2.7, saturation: 1.4, lamps: 5, block_size: 40, update_interval: 500, fade_time: 400 };

"post-9/11"

VirtualBox is so great. I found it by accident and now can't imagine developing without it. So simple, so many nice options.

Has it become any less bloated over the years? I tried it some 5 years ago and it devastated my computer's performance. Was very surprising for a google app, too.

Immediately profitable <> successful. They're pushing console gaming to the next level, and you can bet that their next iteration will be wildly popular. Turning a huge profit at the expense of not providing significant value is how to remove yourself from future competition.

I see genetic programming as an interesting solution to lots of different problems, but I don't think debugging is one of them.

Bugs in my code usually reflect errors in my thinking (or typos). The genetic program would likely come up with the quickest hack that will get the code working, not the correct redesign that will be easiest to read and maintain for humans.

I think I will probably avoid Hacker News tomorrow. At least one story every day has been ridiculous, I can't imagine what it will be like after the announcement.

This has been around for years, through RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com/) by the wonderful Ryan North.

To add to this, threatening to chargeback can be an excellent way to get decent customer service out of some places. Most customer service associates are trained to go way out of their way to avoid it.

They are very aware of how they are speaking, and in person, they are the most precise people you will ever meet. I recently had occasion to speak with a patent attorney, and not only did he explain the patent in plain English, but I was floored at how unambiguous he was. We spoke over the phone and he was able to guide several people through the details of the patent quickly and clearly.

I do agree though, the way these are written is almost completely unreadable. Almost like how we use English words in programming languages, but without the domain knowledge, it is meaningless.

The interviewed

Good point, I had not considered that. Agreed

How to reverse a linked list in C is not hacker _news_.

Additionally, sites like these are a disease. At work, I overheard a phone screen in which the interviewer asked the question, "you have a collection of numbers, all of which appear twice, except one number which appears a single time. How do you find the number?" The person being interviewed gave the "clever" answer (xor all numbers together, result is your answer) within seconds. The interviewer said, "that's nice, but not what I'm going for. What if it's a collection of strings?" She couldn't do it.

I think the main issue is just that on a given project, there needs to be agreement on what will be used. I hate opening up a file in vim and seeing some lines tabbed and some lines spaced and things not lining up right at all.

:retab has helped on several occasions.

Right, I would have thought it impressive if any major DB was the source. Getting it to the point where the source DB is taxed as much as possible seems to be the point of all your optimization. Nice that you could get there.

The linked blog post gives more details on how he did it and the throughput he got.

http://practicalcloudcomputing.com/post/284222088/forklift-1...

Very interesting that Oracle became the bottleneck.

I think that's just a coincidence. I received a similar notification about a year ago. I think they just get hacked from time to time.

My high school US history teacher said this (during the ramp-up to the Iraq war): "Posturing for war can be very good, actually going to war is NEVER good."

The parallel here, in my mind, is that Google has an opportunity for accomplishing several things while "posturing" for war with the Chinese government:

* Put pressure on the Chinese government to change. This is the public-facing goal of the campaign. The cause.

* Make up for any negative press about privacy by reinforcing the idea that their users' accounts are meant to be completely private and secure.

* Align themselves with human-rights causes, garnering trust amid doubts about trustworthiness and projecting a policy on censorship.

Posturing for war will likely prove very good for Google, and may result in the Chinese government caving. But if they actually have to go to war, it will be painful.

In my mind, it would be ideal for Google to posture for as long as they can, and as loud as they can, and see if they can't get the Chinese government to back down at all. Any significant win, without going to war, could be cause to not go to war, for it could be wrapped up as the government "cooperating".

Never attribute to goodwill, that which can be more adequately explained by good marketing.