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waitwhaton Host me in California

See my response above. This was originally submitted with a title similar to "This 16 year-old from Eastern Europe has a better sales page than you".

I was responding to this title by pointing out that this is not obviously or demonstrably true, and also arguably untrue.

waitwhaton [dead]

You are correct as far as you go, but gaming that heavily is often caused by (and hence a symptom of) other problems, such as depression.

If you simply force the gamer to quit, the underlying problems persist, and may continue to manifest themselves in similarly harmful/unconstructive/however-you-choose-to-describe-it behaviour such as a 100-hour-a-week TV habit.

A gaming habit is frequently (usually?) a symptom rather than the root cause of the problems, although poor life decisions can exacerbate depression making it hard to disentangle the two.

waitwhaton Host me in California

I wouldn't be a failure, but I certainly wouldn't be claiming (as the original submission title did, now thankfully fixed by the mods) that I was a better yacht salesman than you if I had never even sold a yacht.

waitwhaton Host me in California

He appears to have made zero sales. By most metrics, this is not a "better sales page".

waitwhaton The bizarre tale of John McAfee, spymaster

(Belize is not in South America)

waitwhaton Will Google+ Ever Get A Full Read/Write API?

It's not at all clear that having exactly the same content on G+ as on Facebook is a winning strategy for Google.

The twitter-clones tried this approach, encouraging content-"seeding" with a full r/w API. What actually happened is that they (nearly?) all ended up as networks full of bots spamming each other with duplicate content.

And it's hard to sell advertising when your only users are robots.

waitwhaton Vice.com Reveals John McAfee's Location In iPhone Metadata

(Belize and Guatemala aren't in South America.)

waitwhaton Vayable Guides Travelers Off the Beaten Path

Vayable launched with 70 guides in April 2011 [...] Since then, the company's been growing at a rate of 30 percent each week.

30% growth every week for 18 months would mean total growth by nearly a factor of a trillion. This doesn't seem likely.

waitwhaton Swedish Exchange paralyzed by buy order for "-6 stocks"

I can confirm the translating-names-of-currencies issue, but something even worse is that the names of languages can also be similarly converted.

For example, the word "Eesti" will often get Google-Translated to "English" rather than "Estonian".

This means that a film at my local cinema that my web browser assures me is in "English" will in fact be in Estonian. And an interview with a Russian saying that he doesn't speak Estonian gets translated so that he appears to say that he doesn't speak English.

The product designers special-cased language names, doing extra work to produce what will almost always be the wrong result.

(And what they can do to place names is often patently ridiculous. For example, "Peterburi tee" should either be left alone or maybe translated to "St Petersburg Road" but actually somehow becomes "Hertford Road". And the ZIP + City name "13415 Tallinn" becomes "thirteen thousand four hundred and fifteen Tallinn".)

waitwhaton Apple Reportedly Fires The Manager Directly In Charge Of The iOS 6 Maps Team

And as someone living in Estonia, Apple Maps lists just one restaurant for the entire country (a McDonald's) and no hotels at all.

For me, that's not just a showstopper, it's barely even a minimum viable product.

waitwhaton Surf Air: Unlimited Flights for $1k/mo

The article says that arrests doubled, not that the costs associated with theft doubled.

I wasn't discussing the article, but correcting errors in someone else's post.

I also like how you think that they should be happy with your model, that how they feel about the situation is of no consequence.

I never said what I think about the situation. I merely corrected someone else's financial misunderstanding.

They have to live with this situation; they've got skin in the game. You just post.

You're clearly angry at something. I strongly suggest you deal with this yourself, rather than continue to flail around and vent your frustration on strangers over the internet.

waitwhaton Surf Air: Unlimited Flights for $1k/mo

And very few retail shops operate at 100% margins such that a doubling of revenue would exactly compensate for a doubling in theft.

They don't need 100% margins to come out on top if they sell more units than are stolen.

So if a shop was selling 10 units an hour and losing 1 unit an hour to theft, and footfall doubled (simplistically doubling sales and thefts), then the shop is now selling 20 units an hour and losing 2 to theft. At realistic margins, the shop is more profitable than it was.

waitwhaton Pinterest, We Have a Problem

their ToS says you need to be either the copyright holder or have consent from the copyright holder.

I've seen warez sites with exactly the same disclaimer. It didn't work for them either.

waitwhaton Apple releases Ipad 3

I really don't want or need all my devices to have seperate data contracts -- one contract (for the phone) and hotspot capability is just fine.

waitwhaton Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

That list does not show where the money is being spent by each organization.

This is irrelevant to the claim I was debunking.

True, the great grand-parent post appears to be conflating where the research was done with the nationality of the company funding the research, and I admit that I only responded to one half of the argument, but that was purely because it was the easiest to fact-check. That doesn't make the other half of the argument true.

Specifically, consider Bayer. This is listed as a German pharmaceutical company.

"American" pharmaceutical companies also have employees in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

Better statistics are provided elsewhere in wiki, for instance US R&D expenditure dwarfs that of any other country.

Including, say, military and aerospace R&D with healthcare R&D to try and make a point about just healthcare is clearly ridiculous.

waitwhaton Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

In the past 30 years have you heard of any medical innovation or drugs coming from anywhere other than the US?

Of course the MRI machine was itself invented in the US

I have no way of judging the value of their respective contributions to the field, but I do know that the Nobel prize for magnetic resonance imaging didn't even go to Damadian, but was instead shared by a different American and a Brit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys... (2003)

The development of the MRI machine falls a little outside this 30 year window, but at almost exactly the same time that IVF was being developed in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brown

For more recent innovation, how about cloning? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_%28sheep%29

waitwhaton Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France

the entire world is dependent on the biomedical R&D of US companies

Inasmuch as it is possible for companies of this size to be from any one particularly country, large American pharmaceutical companies spent $27bn on R&D in 2009, while European ones spent €28.5bn (i.e. 40% more at today's exchange rate.)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companie...

waitwhaton What HN users don't mean to be

I am reminded of the classic "not here to make friends" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24

waitwhaton RESTful API Server - Doing it right

I doubt that sending a mimetype which the client has said it can't accept would be on anyone's list of best practices.

This is a good point, though, not sure why it escaped me:

    Accept: application/*+json

I think you're using a bad framework.

Probably. This isn't why, though.

waitwhaton RESTful API Server - Doing it right

Two reasons that I can see...

If the server generates custom mimetypes, clients have to ensure they "Accept:" the correct mimetype for every request. And if you have multiple data types (and you will have multiple data types), then this "Accept:" header will vary for every request. Getting this right is an irritant to client developers with no actual benefit to them, and a great potential source of bugs.

Much easier is if the client can just send "Accept: application/json" or "Accept: application/xml" for every request.

If the server generates custom mimetypes, and you update your API to v2 which produces an article listing in an incompatible format, you either have to introduce a version number into your mimetype (which seems messy and pointless busywork), or stick with the same mimetype and accept that your custom mimetypes aren't actually particularly meaningful as their meaning can change substantially over time (so why did you have them in the first place?)

Much easier is if the server had just used "Content-Type: application/json" or "Content-Type: application/xml" which will always be correct.

waitwhaton Raspberri PI Release Announcement

My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product.

So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.

waitwhaton Moving 6 Billion Messages Without Being Noticed

They weren't doing a master-master sync.

waitwhaton Moving 6 Billion Messages Without Being Noticed

Not according to your own website.

ChronicDB is a combination of a software engineer and a hosted database: You run your database in our datacenters -- http://chronicdb.com/how_it_works

Your database will be hosted in our datacenters -- http://chronicdb.com/features

waitwhaton Raspberri PI Release Announcement

After 25 minutes on hold with RS, I spoke to an agent. She was (understandably) a bit flustered, so this might not be correct, but what I gathered was:

    * She couldn't take an order
    * They weren't going to be able to take an order today
    * What I should be doing is "registering an interest" online when the website comes back up
    * Noone had ordered anything today, although a few had managed to register an interest before the website melted

waitwhaton Raspberri PI Release Announcement

The Farnell product page came up briefly for me: http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber...

(but the servers are still melting, so the buy links weren't working)

waitwhaton Raspberri PI Release Announcement

People might have some luck with their telephone ordering

    RS Online: +44 8457 201201
    Farnell:   +44 8447 111111

(Although I have been on hold with RS for a while now...)

waitwhaton Raspberri PI Release Announcement

Different people have different use cases. Apparently yours fits the Model B better.

waitwhaton ArmorText (Beta) - Military grade encryption for your text messages

My favourite bit is where the developer reviews his own product.

waitwhaton The uncanny valley of web scraping

FYI, BeautifulSoup is actually dropping its own parser entirely for the next version, in favour of being a wrapper around lxml/html5lib/html.parser http://www.crummy.com/2012/02/02/0

waitwhaton Bash Shell Scripting in 10 seconds

you need to doublequote $file on your second line:

      [[ -f "$file" ]] || continue