Author of the medium post here. First I want to apologize to Max for not linking back to his blog, as he said I referenced his work and image multiple times and did not provide his name or blog in my post. I was in no way trying to pass this off as a novel idea as I said multiple times in the write up.
As for what was perceived to be critiques of his work I was merely trying to emphasize what I was doing differently in my analysis and project. His project is great, I just used a slightly different approach and wanted to highlight the differences. I definitely did not mean to come off as malicious or mocking, but upon rereading I definitely see how it did come off that way.
I stumbled across the code to make the day of week and times here https://github.com/minimaxir/hn-heatmaps/blob/master/hn_heat... after I had started the project. I had posted on StackOverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33263015/converting-day-o... and had gotten an answer that seemed close but not quite perfect. So I researched it a bit, and happened to find that GitHub code. I figured that a couple of lines of code probably weren't worth attributing, but I can see now that I should have been more thorough in my attribution. I have since taken down the article.