Bed that saved me from the Taliban (opens in new tab)

I discovered last week that my best friend, who's in her 20's, has lung cancer and a 36% chance of survival. That's only 3 months after being in a car crash where the doctors said she might never walk again, yet she made a full recovery.

It's really put things into perspective for me. There's no point in spending time and effort doing things we don't like, there's no point in staying in a job you hate, or spending time with people you don't like. I might get hit by a car and killed tomorrow and it would be fucking awful if my final thought was how I wasn't looking forward to going to work in the morning.

Obviously I understand that I'm privileged that I'm in this position. There's so many people out there who need to work shit jobs to feed themselves or their family. But most of us here on HN are in the same position as me. Why spend time working working some shit corporate job in the valley, paying a fucking fortune for rent, just so that you can get a job somewhere else earning more money? I earn enough money to be comfortable, I'd rather direct my efforts towards making meaningful human connections and enjoying life.

Work to live, don't live to work.

You don't need to go through a NDE. Try going hiking on the mountains. You'll come back with a better attitude about life and your usual problems will look meaningless. I used to go at least once a year. Need to get back on it.

A lot of people that go through and NDE come out the other side with crippling PTSD.

NDE = near death experience, presumably.

The story just kept going. I thought it would be over after the initial hiding under the bed and the men leaving his room, but it was only the beginning. It's amazing this man is still alive.

Same here, that would make a great movie.

I read this as more of a tale of a man that fell into the insides of a machine and managed to hide in a crack to avoid getting crushed untill the machine stopped its course.

This kind of attack and response is like mad contraption fueled by old human stupidity and borderline futuristic deadly powerful technology.

As a civilian you are supposed to keep very safe distance from such a powerful tech but someone, somewhere gets inevitably confronted with it mixed with a dash or a lot of human stupidity and most often dies.

I wonder why they shot at the tidy bed but not the unkempt one. The narrator seems to imply he knew hiding under the unkempt one was the better option. Why is that ?

Also, what's with "holding the bed with my toes and fists" ? I don't picture that really well.

And to have the bad guy quite literally sitting on top of you. I cannot imagine the mental fortitude it takes to maintain your composure to keep perfectly still and silent in that situation.

Not to belittle anything he went through, but don't discount survivorship bias.

It seems pretty evil to me if you laugh about murdering humans like it's some sort of game.

Not to excuse them obviously but I wonder if it could have been a nervous laugh. Later in the article even the author had to cover his mouth in case he laughed during the ordeal. I know I tend to laugh myself when something really stressful happens, it's an awkward habit.

They may have been high. The Taliban is known to have given suicide bombers drugs before sending them to their deaths.

Thats why the sniper missed

Somebody or training made the sniper question the action

One thing that struck me about this story was that he made some good decisions and some bad ones, but as he points out he got really lucky a bunch of times. None of his habits would have mattered if he’d been in the restaurant, if he’d have been in the wrong room, picked the wrong bed to hide under, or hadn’t moved just out of the way of a sniper’s bullet, and if a tank had fired on his room.

It’s easy to assume that a given set of habits correlate with survival, and even easier to write a book effectively engaging in survivorship bias. It’s a lot harder to get lucky many times in a row, to have the opportunity to not die. So read the book, keep your back to a wall and an eye on exists, but recognize that none of that would have helped this guy. The two big tings that seemed to have saved this guy is temperament (look at his job for indication she that job followed temperament and and not the other way around) which allowed him to remain calm, and sheer dumb luck.

I haven't gone through your link yet, but sounds like Survivorship Bias here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

From the original story sounds like one of the traits you have to have is luck. Lots and lots of luck.

Depending on who's after you, that could just as easily draw attention, concentrate the search on both floors and escalate to a pursuit. Without the means to outrun or fight a pursuer, every animal's natural instinct is to hide...which guarantees you're close by.

When it comes to hiding/camoflauge, the goal is not to mislead-- you don't want someone to look at you and see a random shrub or find fake evidence of an escape. That raises suspicion. The goal is to make someone looking directly at you have no idea you're even there, where you were or where you're going.

Reading it, I actually had the same idea.

But still, the possible would exist that there's someone in the room who didn't dare climb down in the end.

I saw that too but later in the article it gets explained.

> early in the morning the international forces began to fire from a tank into the rooms. They concentrated on room 521, the one next door to me

The blackened rooms to his right aren't the fire he was talking about. There must have been another fire out of view of this picture.

or he was on the balcony, facing the building describing the the fire was on his left hand side. Amazing read, amazing he made it out, his training and being calm helped him, luck was a factor as well.

In hot conflict areas some hotels are usually used to house people who are still having to go about their business. Such as airline pilots, journalists, ngo people etc... usually the fact that the hotel is being used for such purpose is common knowledge and there is some sort of extra military protection given. Of course this can also backfire as depending on the multiple interests of the factions involved in the conflict it can be in their interest to attack, ignore, or defend such buildings...in the case of this hotel in particular it had already been attacked in 2011 before this attack described in the article (which happened in 2018). You can read more about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Inter-Continental_Kabul

There's an old story (that I can't find right now) about a bank employee that falls for a scam that costs the company hundreds of thousands. He goes to his boss and says "I guess you will be expecting my resignation", to which the boss replies "Resign? I just spent thousands of dollars training you!".

I would apply the same line of thought here: I don't think this hotel is any more insecure that any other. In fact, I would expect it to have more security than the others from now on.

I understand the emotional point - it's pretty much the same point that Chris Rock made about renaming the new Twin Towers the "Never going in there tower". But I can totally see the hotel making a comeback - if Charlie Hebdo is still in business, I don't see why the hotel can't follow the same steps.

The hotel still needs to make money, so getting it open as quickly as possible even after a horrific incident is important for the bottom line of the company that runs it.

Fix all the damage, put up a plaque or other memorial to the victims, and then move forward.

This may seem harsh, but economic interests don't permanently go away when disasters happen.

I was a regular at the JW Marriott in Jakarta after it was bombed in 2003, and so was my boss, who was actually in the hotel at the time of the attack. In addition to being an excellent hotel, they also took security very seriously, unlike the security theater put on by most of their competition. And besides, lightning won't strike twice, right?

Only problem is, they were bombed again in 2009, this time with the help of a staff insider...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JW_Marriott_Jakarta

Afghanistan has been at war since 1978. The Kabul Intercontinental Hotel was partially destroyed by shelling in the 1990s. It was attacked by suicide bombers in 2011, then again by gunmen in 2018. That's completely typical for a landmark building in Kabul.

If the Afghan people abandoned everywhere that had been the scene of an atrocity, there would be few places left to go.

Moreover, Inter-Continental was already attacked 7 years before, in 2011. [0] If you agree to a job in an unstable place like Kabul as an outsider, you already accept some risk. You have to stay somewhere, and there might not be many safer places to stay.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Inter-Continental_Hotel_K...

The Intercontinental and the Serena are the main hotels that house journalists, pilots and aid workers. They have both been attacked multiple times.

If you need to travel to Kabul, as many people do, there are no truly safe options. Both hotels are beautiful and well guarded. They are also high-profile targets.

If your employer doesn't have access to a lower-profile private compound with private security then you are going to the Serena or the Intercontinental.

Hotels work (and get customers) in all kinds of hot zones...

It didn't feel like that long of a story, I read through it in one go. It reads so matter-of-factly. The guy was really lucky.

Or once on the balcony, he turned back to face the facade in order to better watch it...

I think that was from the tank blasting at the window.

Me too, I assumed its the electric blanket one which is right after that paragraph.

>What's the excuse for the hotel not having any security?

https://ewn.co.za/2018/01/23/afghan-hotel-attack-stirs-fresh...

"KABUL - A bloody Taliban raid on a high-end hotel guarded by a private company in the Afghan capital ...

[...]

“There were 15 guards on duty at time of the attack and none of them engaged the attackers,”

It's a hotel in Afghanistan, a country presently immersed in turmoil.

This isn't true at all. Luxury hotels, most especially managed or chain brands are some of the safest places in third-world countries.

The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and high-end clients.

They have the best security and are usually located in prime areas making them less susceptible to some of those claims you made.

And they also have a brand to protect. Except they are very expensive relative to the cost of living of those countries but their target market is foreigners, short-stay expats and government delegations so they still get patronized.

I spent a year as "nomad" traveling the world. A friend of mine who works for the State Department told me to always "stay where other Americans aren't."

Huh? Millions of people go to luxury hotels in third-world countries, and are, for the most part, completely isolated.

If they venture off the hotel area, and generally the safer city areas, it's on them.

You sounded like one of the few sane voices in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953040

I have no other way of discussing this further since that comment is too down the page for me to expect you to see replies to- but what would be a good "front-end framework" according to you? And if I may ask- what do you use?