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PBS video on rare earth mining in China, specifically mentioning the Prius engine and battery e.g. the battery contains 22 pounds (10 kg's) of lanthanum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL4fluj004o

I drive a 2001 Ford F350. I get dirty looks from Prius drivers every day. Little do they know (and the econ article mentions this) that their little buzzbombs contain 2.2 pounds of neodymium which is both radioactive and massively damages the environment in its production and disposal.

I bought my truck used. I bought it with 150k miles on it and I plan to put on another 400k miles before it goes to the big diesel garage in the sky. These f'ing Prius yuppies buy a car every 2 years thinking that saving a few gallons of gas is going to save the planet. Try saving the environmental cost of producing that horrible pile of radioactive and chemical garbage by buying a 10 year old used car and driving it for the next decade.

Edit: And buy American darnit!

It's not hard to launch terminal and type whois <domain>. Just do it and have a much higher likelihood that your new names and business concepts are safe.

Note that you're not guaranteed they're safe because it's trivial for an ISP to sniff all port 43 traffic, but it's a lot better than giving your unregistered name to someone who has a conflict of interest.

Also the applications are enourmous. Watch the end of the video for ideas. For example, it will be a huge enabler in robotics and some of the quadcopter applications you've been seeing.

This is massively ground breaking. You'll get it if you've used motion tracking on several game interfaces and had to make perfectly white backgrounds with bright lights to make it work. This is incredibly accurate - really game changing stuff.

So brad is asking us to ignore the irrational exuberance that surrounds funding and acquisitions in our sector? That sounds like bad advice. Business is not done in a vacuum and if you ignore the weather you risk freezing to death or dying of heat-stroke.

The example he uses of the 2008 economic crisis is a bizarre one because the only short term effect it had on startups, since we don't use the money markets, is that we all made sure our money was below the FDIC deposit insurance limit. Other than banks going under, it had little short term effect on us. [Longer term it resulted in a recession and less customers]

Not being able to raise money has a profound effect on cash flow planning and the competitive landscape. Asking us to ignore that is not good advice.

McAfee screwed our site over the same way with siteadvisor. It took 2 months and us harassing their support team almost daily to get it resolved. Also hurt revenue. I'd love to participate in a class action lawsuit.

Wil's metaphor is brilliant and the values he describes are exactly what our industry needs to hear. I have been jumping from product to product for years, with the expectation of dump trucks arriving one day out front and unloading tons of money. I'm doing it again with my current company. We have a solid niche, strong traction and are leaders in our space, but rather than making what is good, really excellent, I'm considering jumping to the next shiny ball that may be the home run. This blog entry has caused me to reevaluate.

You can eat banana peels, but beware of pesticides because the producers assume you're going to throw the peel away. I'd go for organic or once you grow yourself.

Tesla's corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to respond to something that hurts their brand this badly. Top Gear is the most popular car review show globally with around 350 million viewers world-wide.

Apparently a lawsuit is the best response they could come up with.

This is an incredibly well written blog entry. Having followed the accepted pre-court etiquette that Andy mentions in the past, this inspires me to take a different approach next time around and have my say in hopefully as professional a manner. [...In close consultation with my legal team as I'm sure Andy did]

Stop fucking around.

The graph is US traffic only and they peaked at 16.6% of the entire US population visiting the site once a month. Google called this the "law of large numbers" in 2006 when they predicted a slowing in their growth and Microsoft did the same a long time ago when they hit saturation.

The drop is only during the last 6 months, is less than 10% and could be a variety of factors including a stats gathering quirk, recession, etc.

Antirez why did you title the HN post as "almost the same thing". They ARE the same thing. You are 200% correct. Lets turn it around: Is there an example where speed and scalability are different? Maybe the level of concurrency which behaves differently because performance can drop suddenly when you max out, but really that's just another type of speed. Even in an async environment like node.js you may handle a lot of connections but if there's no speed they hang around for too long waiting for something to return so we're back to speed === scalability in all environments.

Lettuce, Bacon, onion rings, SD card, oranges. This is weird it works so well.

You mean The Cloud has disgruntled employees?

There is no hunting in the Serengeti just north of Zimbabwe and consequently it's the only place in Africa you can see a full wilderbeest migration. Game farms have fences and are basically zoos that let you shoot the animals. They are not a form of conservation.

What offends me is the godaddy baseball caps. As a customer I feel like I'm going on Bob's trip with him in full support of what he's doing.

Parsons hunting Leopard in Zimbabwe in 2009 with some propaganda at the start of the video on why killing leopard is a good thing:

http://www.video.me/ViewVideo.aspx?vid=501

As a citizen of a southern African country I can tell you that A) The educated locals are disgusted by this kind of hunting for sport as opposed to food and B) I can assure you that the "foreign currency" that it supposedly brings in is not converted to Zim dollars and spent on the local economy.

So far 19% of HN readers are full time entrepreneurs and 81% are either employed by someone else full-time or contractors.

This also proves that it's not McDonalds fault.

What I find most distasteful is the lie that he "saved a village and fed them". That's just bullshit.

There are more guns in Zimbabwe than most other parts of Africa. If the locals really wanted that elephant gone, it would have been machine gunned by two guys arriving on foot.

What really happened here is that a hunting party arrived, killed an elephant and left the carcass for the locals to eat.

What a hero.

PS: I spent my childhood and early 20's in South Africa and we hate this great-white-hunter tourist shit, but it sure pays the bills if you're the driver guide or booking agent.

Oh hell, I'd buy this. It seemed gimmicky at first, but I love the marketing, product design and packaging. Good luck guys!! These will make awesome xmass gifts.

What an absurd comment. Newtonian physics seemed sufficient and special and general relativity seemed academic until we applied them both to build GPS. You stand on the giant shoulders of theoretical physicists from the moment you open your eyes every morning. How dare you deny them any available tool to continue to keep you in the style to which you've become accustomed.

All the applied research and aerospace programs you're referring to would not have been possible without the strong foundation that theoretical research provided.

Think you're going to build a star drive by continuing to throw matter in the opposite direction as fast as you can? Some hard working theorist who you deem to be too philosophical could be coming up with the fundamental laws of nature that we need to go to the stars if guys like you hadn't denied funding for the SSC.

In retrospect I think the collider would have been a better investment than the ISS because it would have yielded science that has game changing potential for us as a species and more science that we can use. I'd rather understand what we're made of than know how flora and fauna behave in orbital space.

This is completely brilliant. Mark Suster is rapidly becoming my favorite VC blogger.

Not to be pedantic, but it's not a functioning viral loop if it dies after a few days and requires another HN or TC post. A true viral loop has exponential growth with each participant recruiting > 1 new member.

You may be. I'm an experienced software dev and I've never done that with any of our family's windows machines. That'll be changing.

Good tips. Ask for more than you think you'll get. Throw out a price before the buyer does that is high as it will create the perception of value. [Google "Price Anchoring"]. If they throw out a price first, flinch. [It sounds silly, but it works. Read The Art of Power Negotiating for more tips]

It's been 5 years and 8 days since work on Twitter started on March 21, 2006. Several other founding employees will be fully vested by now, so I'd expect a few more departures, particularly now that Ev has made it OK to leave.