kiddo

You might want to read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".

Maybe, but I doubt it. In fact, an outdoor ATM is probably an appealing location in which to rob someone. And now we have ipods, iphones, laptops, etc that almost everyone is carrying. Casual theft is still appealing and there's much to be stolen.

I don't think it's fair to compare her analysis with someone on HN who says it's becoming Reddit. The author is a Rhodes scholar herself, and she's been serving on the selection committee for 20 yrs. She's seeing a trend firsthand. Since you disagree, what evidence would you consider worthy of testing her claim?

Clever answers to broad questions? I don't think either adjective you're using is accurate. She asked thoughtful questions directly related to each student's area of study, and she found that the students hadn't spent much time thinking about the reasons for their own actions.

I knew the basic outline of this story beforehand and yet I read the article anyway.

A few new things that stood out:

- the description of Dagan's mgmt style and how it negatively affected the mission

- the way the author (a presumably non-techie) described the lock picking and practicing of lock picking (did the picker actually test the picking of the locks as the author suggests or did the team assume the locks would be electronic and simply bring a device that could pick any known lock?). the author glosses over this and makes a short inference, but it made me wonder.

- the Austrian private switchboard. i didn't know this kind of thing existed. can i get access to one?

So I agree with comments from many other people about it just being an interesting story, but those are 3 bits that made me think and made it worth my time.

Traveling through India I saw many people using what I think are called neem sticks. I don't know much about the science or efficacy, but if you're curious, explore away.

Regarding hiding handles, I understood him to mean hiding the handle from a user until that user votes on it.

Can you elaborate on Africa being free?

Why don't they collide at the source level? I'm assuming the db updates get checked into your central source code repo. Wouldn't the collision happen at that time?

What happens when developers create branches and use time stamps? Developer A working on trunk might check in db updates at 4pm and 5pm. Developer B working on a branch checks db updates into his branch at 4:30pm and 5:30pm. When working on the branch his db updates don't affect the "trunk" db. As soon as he merges does his 4:30pm update get run on the "trunk" db, or is it skipped over because the 5pm db update already ran, and only the 5:30pm change gets run?

Where I come from we use int values for our db update script names. When I merge from a branch I renumber my db update script file names starting at the tip int value +1 of the trunk db update.

fyi - I'm not coming from a Ruby/Rails perspective, if that matters.