skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's plausible that he's not crazy and everything on that blog is true. The whole situation is crazy enough that people probably approach it with preconceptions and interpret everything they read in that light.

There does appear to be rampant corruption in the government there. The press does seem interested in hyping the story, especially by portraying McAfee as a wacko. When I read the Jeff Wise story "Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness" recently, I was struck at how sensationalized it was, especially the part where he strains hard to make 8 shotguns, 2 pistols, and some ammo into "a small armory's worth of firearms", and "Vexingly for the police, all of this was actually legal." McAfee writing that Jeff Wise has some ax to grind, therefore, rings true to me.

I think the Russian Roulette trick involved palming the bullet, and was to make the point that things are not always as they first appear. Of course for anyone who's made up their mind that he's crazy, it's just simply more fodder to reinforce their beliefs.

The "Watchfulness" post does seem over the top, yet even that could be plausible. It's a shame -- the guy has been tried in the press already, so people assume he's crazy and a murderer.
I call bullshit on their stated reason for taking it down

we believed it was prudent to take it down to undertake a code review to assess if there were any issues

There's a lesson here in making apologies. The best 360s and/or apologies are unreserved, never give an excuse.
Isn't this the same group that had one of their '90-day' buildings collapse not long ago?
As someone who is just learning how to be okay at testing in rails/ruby, this both amazes and terrifies me.
> I'm in completely the wrong mindset about it

My friend, I think this is probably the case ... you've mistaken terseness for rudeness.
I know of two, but I can't think of either name right now. One of them presented at TC Disrupt in NYC back in, I think, 2010.
I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting.

Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.

I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.

I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.

The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).
Looks like they got owned by this:

QUOTE

I'm one of the 30 other individuals that acutally patched and commited changes for Bob to include in nvd3.js; I'm looking for contacts for the other 29 contributors. (Please contact me at using the feedback form on congocart.com or master-technology.com) I would like one of us (I'm willing to volenteer) to contact Mr. Qunibi of Novus partners in a position of consensuses from those who actually have code in the product.

My thoughts that would I believe be amicable (i.e. win/win) to both sides is that they can have our permission to take ALL of our changes closed source in the own future versions as long as we also (the community) may use the last release under the open source (Apache) license it has been under since shortly after it was released on there official novus github account and go our own separate way. I know my changes were really early to the library and some of my code may not even exist anymore (lol).

But I believe the cost for them to audit the whole library and rip out all of our changes and rewrite it all could be major -- I believe Bob could legally remove all of our code; but for the actual re-implementation Bob would have to hand it off to someone to do a fully clean-room version to make them legally safe from being sued. And that could be very costly in time and resources. Cost wise for them It might even be cheaper for them to ditch the last 6-7 months of changes and to just revert to the version before my patch/commit (which was issue #3 <G>). So I think we might be able to make this a win/win proposition if I can get the consensuses of the other 29 contributors.
Nathanael A.
I'm really surprised to hear NYC of all places didn't have one of these 9 years ago. I feel like there's always been a bunch of them here in Texas.

I'd love to hear more about your early days. I'm guessing you had to convince a bank to loan you money to buy a Ferrari, but you were a new business with no established credit history. How did that go?

I'm also very interested in learning about determining pricing for a service leasing out assets on a short term basis. I've had an idea that involves renting on a monthly basis (no, not exotic cars!) but I'm not able to figure out a pricing model to see if my target (low) prices are feasible.
I have seen issues quite a few times, and they are serious headaches to fix when they come about. I've had libraries implement Rails utility methods slightly differently, or conflicting implementations of monkeypatches on S3 libraries.

While it's not incredibly common, disrespecting namespace concerns is a sure road to problems.
I agree this is quite annoying. I just told them so. Consider doing the same so they know it's widespread. http://www.wired.com/about/feedback/
moot doesn't have a trademark on "moot", and "moot" does not appear anywhere in the 4chan branding. It's a guy's nickname on a forum.
Facebook Fans ++; Reach --
Lyft, Sidecar, Ridejoy, Tickengo, Reward Ride, Avego, Carpooling.com, RelayRides, and a bunch of other ones.
I don't believe that is true, you can use class_replaceMethod to dynamically swizzle methods at runtime. This gets rid of compiler error and warning messages that appear when just using categories to override existing methods. From my understanding, the compiler enforces compilation unit visibility for methods implemented in a category, but the methods actually are actually added to the global scope.

There is no "top level" object or class_eval in Objective-C, so the situation is quite different from Ruby.

Here is an interesting paper about classboxes[1] (same concept as refinements), and the source code for the Objective-C runtime[2]. I found them to be useful in my research.

[1] http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/archives/papers/Berg05a-CompLangE...

[2] http://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-532.2/runtime...
To the general public, no, but in this case the product is similar to 4chan, so users may be confused. If Moot.It had sold server hardware instead, I'm sure there would be no valid case.
Fastest production car from the 60's that I can think of would do 171 mph (Lamborghini Miura). The fastest production car today will do damn close to 100 mph more than that (Bugatti Veyron Super Sport).

Certainly the top speed of either of those cars isn't practical, but the reason that the Veyron can go so much faster is that there have been massive improvements in automobile technology since the 60s, in just about every every way imaginable. Safety, efficiency, control, materials tech, aerodynamics, etc. That we still drive so slowly can be probably attributed to momentum in automotive laws and/or driver skill / lax license requirements. If we were willing to invest more in our roads and stop thinking of driving as a right instead of a privilege, we could be driving much faster today.
Great read. I don't think PG addressed this in his essay, but I was wondering about the fear some startups have - whether their idea may be easily rolled into the product of an existing encumbent.

E.g. I read below someone's startup idea is for a new type of movie rating system ("because 5 stars just isn't good enough anymore") - but couldn't this be easily wiped out if an encumbent like IMDB just rolled the idea directly into their rating system.
I felt like I was in a similar position until I discovered that there are vibrant indie game scenes on many other platforms [0]. So now, when I get the urge to spend on games, I try to remember to support indie gaming first.

I will mention that news of Nintendo's support for indie devs on the Wii U is an unexpected trend in the right direction. This probably puts them on part with the PS3 & Xbox 360: not great but better than nothing. While MSFT has XNA, the iOS and Android ecosystems are killing the outdated distribution & publishing models of the consoles. Hopefully this ends well for everyone.

---

[0]: PC & Mac being the least encumbered, iOS and Android with similar developer access but distribution control. Also see kickstarter projects like FTL, which rocked my socks off.
Is not so off-base, it was kind of rude because he didn't say "The submission set off the voting ring detector", he literally said "You set off the voting ring detector" wish can be read as an accusation even if that was not what Mr. Graham had in mind.
Hello Tomasien,

Absolutely, Google, Apple products - all very clean interfaces. Btw, spoke with you 3 weeks ago on Hackernews and you told me to contact you. Couldn't find your email - so I sent you a message on your company's site. My personal email is gengyangcai@gmail.com - Let's chat sometime. Thanks a lot.

GengYang
Elon Musk Talks Hyperloop Transportation System
If Java applets don't make you wince too badly, I have some interactive music theory concepts and drills freely available here:

http://www.emusictheory.com/interact.html

and here http://www.emusictheory.com/practice.html

I largely ran out of time to extend/improve it several years back, but it still gets quite a lot of use; students of subscribing teachers can use MIDI keyboards as well, which makes the instrument/theory link quite tangible.
RelayRides comes to mind.
I work for a hosting provider, there are actual rules for registrars preventing things like this happening, I dont know what happened to you in the past but its very unlikely to happen, Registrars essentially risk their business doing this, here is a copy of the rules for .com.au namespace..

http://www.auda.org.au/policy/current-policies/
[video] How I built a self driving (RC) car.
I would love it if this were true. I have been saying (only semi-tongue-in-cheek) for years that getting shot out of a cannon would be a great form of transportation, if only the bugs could get worked out (i.e., eliminate possibility of mid-air collisions). :-)
Agreed - that is an awesome experience - its happened a few times to me - Cape Fear, Training Day & The Fugitive - all great movies.
Distillation: Small Data is the Purpose of Big Data
Interesting. The linear density given is 7 kg/m, which if you wanted to lift to the tropopause (density 0.35 kg/m^3, temperature ~266 K) you would need a continuous 30 °C solar Molgolfier balloon 18 m^2 in section, or a 10 meter strip of of 15 µm HDPE. Not as bad as I thought. Still, it would be hard to roll it out before sunset.

Hydrogen is another possible lifting gas, with all its associated foibles. Obviously lifting bags would have to be isolated to prevent catastrophic failure, but you could get a lot more lift out of them.

This must take place in a La Niña year, when the jetstream is north. Reel out the track, drag it into place with two airships, join the parts and start 'er up. You could even name the airships Jupiter and Number 119. ;)

This simplified strategy that would avoid the need for aerial stations at both ends, intead using a gentle curve achieved by anchor cables and varying linear density. Acceleration would begin immediately upon departure, leaching energy from the rotor (generating eddy currents), then contributing it back by braking off the rail on the descending side.

Of course, maybe I'm just dreaming here…
Please put what the thing is in the title.
"But the airport officials were scared. They didn't know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution-no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There's a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve
kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 x lO^8 Joules
to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another."

From Heechee Rendezvous:

http://www.amazon.com/Heechee-Rendezvous-Frederik-Pohl/dp/03...
Not to mention in-flight wifi cannibalizes existing revenues from individual in-flight entertainment units which carriers were still in the process of installing. Bored people without internet are more likely to pay $6 to watch live TV or movies.
This looks like a great resource, that is severely suffering from lack of accessibility (as pointed out by many others here). I emailed the author, hopefully they will be able to improve the usability. Following is the guts of message I sent, for reference. The documents look over a year old in most cases, so I doubt we will see much, but you never know!

----

First of all, thanks! These are some excellent notes. That said, it is extremely irritating trying to read them. If you could provide the ability to do one or all of the following it would be most excellent:

1. Download of the entire pdf as one document

2. View the documents as a web page/series of web pages

3. Open-source the documentation so others can contribute/provide fixes
Top 4 Mobile App Development Nightmares
Nightmare No 1. – Cost and Time to Market
Nightmare No 2. – App Store / Google Play
Nightmare No 3. – iPhone and Android Upgrades
Nightmare No 4. – Managing Content
I'd never use a registrar that hides behind whois privacy.
I hope he had the theme music to "Fletch" playing through hidden ear buds as he did all of this.
Visualizing the Structure of Pop Music
Many huge businesses have been built by solving seemingly mundane problems. The thing is, many of these mundane problems turn out to be big looming issues that represent huge inefficiencies in an industry. Businesses are willing to pay lots of money to solve these problems, especially if it makes them more efficient or profitable.

This spurs on a thought that I've had about the position of entrepreneurship and human society. The cohort of startups are all hard at work solving problems that consumers or businesses run into. It's like the human collective organism that is constantly evolving to become better, stronger, and faster.

Startups are the seeds of the experiments that could become a business that makes a huge impact to the organism. Imagine how much more efficient the world is with Google, for example!

If all businesses and founders were to take pg's advice here, the practical (and important) problems in society would be solved at a much more dramatic rate.
Was doing some research on Elon. Apparently he's quite the playboy too. Dumped his older wife for a pretty young actress whom he recently dumped again. Guess money really can buy a sequence of love affairs
The True Cost of Healthcare
The biggest factor is reaction time.

Also, above 100 Mph or so the aerodynamics change substantially. There is a clear cut-off point above you are definitely in 'no mistakes' territory, even ignoring a bit of cross wind as you come out from under an overpass get get you slammed into the guardrail or driven off the road.

Add to that ice, snow, rain, night conditions, glare, low sun and so on and pretty soon the driver (automated or not) is not the limiting factor but physics and getting reliable sensor inputs is.

Anything over 140 will probably not be practical for mainstream deployment, even in Germany where there are lots of skilled drivers and it isn't rare to see an old lady do 150 Km/h there is a sharp drop-off above that point reserved for those the possession of more money than brains. It simply isn't practical from a fuel consumption and safety point of view and even the safest cars are death traps at speeds beyond that.

See 'crashedexotics.com' for the end result of that route.
http://loopj.com/2012/11/16/nvd3-erased-from-existence/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4797461
Terse responses are pretty common among programmers, and are not generally interpreted as disrespectful.
This is great advice. As a person that is normally labelled as a job hopper (6 in the past 5 years) I finally settled down and got into tech by attending hackathons and helped ship apps (mostly android) it has given me the opportunity to work for a YC company and I am very happy here. It's just ironic that startups have been the most stable positions rather than corporate or bigger tech companies.

Hackathons are relativity cheap (time wise) investments, but make you stand out from the crowd.
Yahoo Is Among Those Mulling a TVGuide.com Bid for About $20 Million
Plenty of questions, few answers surface about early Windows 8 sales
So what they should be advocating is a change to loser pays for patent cases.
What got me in easy for my internship was a decent GPA (3.8 at the time) + working full-time as a shift manager from when I turned 18 until the company hired me. GPA + maintaining some sort of responsibility definitely helped
Black Friday's a US thing, while the Apple sale happens world-wide. No mention of Black Friday = one theme across all international sites.
Because I'm not an objectivist hack. Shame on HN for all the replies you've received. Your ignorant and wrong opinions do not deserve the air of legitimacy an honest discussion provides (and to be clear the honesty, in this case, is entirely one-sided).
Me. Hire me. :)
This is what happens when people with bad business sense jump into the arena. First and foremost, you need good business sense, no matter what you're doing.
This should be interesting to watch, as others have noted on the 30 story building they did it is both 'boring' since the floors are mostly identical, and largely built off site and then simply erected. I'm sure The Register will call it the "worlds fastest erection" :-).

At the MIT affordable housing design competition there were some entrants that had similar features. (pre-fab sections, erected on site relatively rapidly) By pre-wiring/plumbing the walls and floors you cut out a lot of things that slow people down. Having watched Hotels get built in Las Vegas really rapidly (for them, which is 18 months, ground breaking to opening night) you could see there are lots of things that can be disrupted. Staging carpet for example, when you start carpeting its rolls and rolls and rolls of carpet, lifted by crane to various floors, and later cut to order. If you install the floor with all the carpeting already installed at the factory you've managed to parallelize floor construction and finishing. That is a huge savings.

This building will house 31,400 people, (@ 11M sq ft that is like 350 sq ft per person so not really roomy) But an interesting way to throw together shelter. Building these things for Haiti could do wonders for that country, assuming they don't burn down.
Yes, but capitalists don't like trusting amoral people with their money.
Don't quote me, but something like $1000/month for employee +1 coverage. Of that, ~30% comes out of my paycheck and is tax deductible. Not to put too fine a point on it: $300/mo pretax is a steal. Even assuming the full cost would, IMHO, be reasonable. $12,000 sounds like a lot but I suspect that BCBS is doing more for me in real terms right now than the Federal government to which I hand over the equivalent of a mid-range Mercedes in income tax every year.
I think part of this would be similar to an OEE in operations management terminology, where one would analyze how one spends one's day.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overall_equipment_effectiveness)
Most of the things people do, they do every day.
For an OEE analysis of how one spends one's day, inputs could be turned into buttons-- just click the button with the task as you switch tasks. With the inputs in the system, it would be fairly easy to optimize, schedule preferred tasks, and see where the inefficiencies are.
It would be something like rescue time (http://www.rescuetime.com/) with the addition of tasks that are not performed on a computer.
I wonder how much just being aware of how one spend's one's time would affect how one budgets time for future actions.
I'm not defending his disapproval of PG's response.

Just alluding to the larger point he -- somewhat tangentially -- hit on, which is quite true.

The herdism part.

HNers incapable of presenting their own take -- worthy of some import -- often resolve to aligning with the closest agreeable opinion and / or down-voting opinions that are farther afar from them.

The problem with this is that often enough their own opinion -- if they actually took the time to properly form it -- is really not proximate to either of the viewpoints. Not even by a long shot.

They just want to express for the sake of expression.

And the least demanding form of expression is a vote, whether in favor or out of favor. PG agrees with this sentiment in one of his earlier posts concerning fine tuning the HN experience.

Herdism is bad. It gives you the Reddit quagmire.

Weak-willed people align with either of two equidistant opinions because they sense that some measure of expression of their will is more valuable than none at all.

Weak-willed people also have the established-majority bias.
When given a choice of two clear 'candidates' whose strengths ( vote tallies ) are clear for everyone to see, they are easily lured into siding with the trouncing candidate irrespective of the degree of concurrence of their opinions.

If we are to have a vibrant community, this kind of behavior (as well as those agents) should be actively repelled.
Which is why our tender responses do include the resumes - just in an appendix at the back. The bit at the front, with screenshots and quotes from happy users just talks about what the company has done.

You absolutely have to meet the customer requirements in your response. But its up to you where you place the emphasis :-)
> Unfortunately, I know this wasn't the case

You can't know -- just because it wasn't in your office doesn't mean it didn't happen.

One of the first readers to see it may have mass emailed his/her colleagues who all read/upvoted when they got into work in the morning, for example....
Oh, now. Doing that doesn't take money at all.
I'm a big fan of not using IB because code is easier to read, extract (constants, functions, component-ize), copy & paste, and version control. I also build a UIView class hierarchy so I can stash all my view-related code there instead of putting them in controller classes.

A major reason of using IB is you can position and view their layout visually. But when you build iOS apps that have (1) custom UI components, (2) uses a good amount of animation, or (3) have different enough portrait and landscape views, you can hardly see anything useful when looking at that nib in IB.

NB: re-reading this, I was more responding to Chad's point "Having over 30 screens to program (no Interface Builder here) meant that an overwhelming majority of the time on the app was spent writing interface code." rather than why not extending existing UIKit classes like UIAlertView/UIActionShet which MaxGabriel answered.