Sure, mildly clever ruse, but I always felt that the way it was done was a bit off - could have been more straightforward. I guess he thought people would not help him if he didn't use the pretext.

Somehow the rest of the story does not surprise me. Making his millions seems to have given him no peace either.

RIP

I wonder how many people would also spiral out of control.

Being on their own, they have their dark moments, too.

Guy Burgess was well known when a British diplomat for protracted alcohol binges accompanied by all sorts of poor decision-making, but he never let slip that he was a Soviet spy.

EDIT: I'm no doubt the angry alcoholic archetype who doesn't want to discuss it when my Windows-using friends try and tell me it's better than my Linux setup. Then again, I know my stance is the absolute right one ;)

There are some political stances that also imply a particular moral/ethical stance. I think it'd be pretty normal to not like someone if their morals are incompatible with yours.

It is easy to get along with people of various ideological positions, as long as you are willing to nod along, regardless of real world consequences of their ideological stances. As long as their opinion is the one ever said out loud.

What I have noticed in recent years is that people increasingly have little respect for those they disagree with and it’s largely on the basis of that disagreement.

@erwinkle Do you realize you touched a guy who touched John McAfee?

Interestingly, a minority of people seem to be somewhat able to see through the facade. I have ADHD and a brother who's very nearly on the autism spectrum, and both of those conditions seem correlated with this ability to have an unbiased sense of a person. Perhaps it's due to the way we are slightly detached from normal social interactions, or the highly analytical way our brains function. All I know is that there are definitely times I feel this. For instance, if you look online, there are tons of relatively recent videos that have special forces types (SEALS, rangers, etc.) commenting on movie scenes or so on. The comments are always full of people talking about how they seem like such a great person, or how funny/charming/positive/etc. this person is. Meanwhile, I just come away with this feeling of being very deeply unsettled by them almost every time. Everything about their demeanor unsettles me. Now I'm in no way saying every special forces operator is a closet sociopath. But the job does attract a certain personality type, and many of the ones on these videos are the most charismatic of the whole bunch.

Back on topic, John always seemed to be to be a pretty typical narcissist to me. He did some stuff that I found to be funny in kind of a black humor sense (that video of him supposedly telling you how to uninstall McAfee antivirus), but the idea that he was a truly positive person I just totally don't see. I mean, think about it -- the OP's story involves John having the guy call his wife and tell him how great he thought John was and how great his ideas were. That's pretty typical narcissistic behavior.

I couldn’t read people in teens. In 20s I decided to change that. Would stare intently at a person face and watch every muscle movement, tone, etc. read some books on body language.

Was absurdly exhausting for me. But I got very good at reading people. Eventually it went from intense analytical analysis to just “normal” paying attention.

GP was even very careful to concede that the traits they think they've observed aren't necessarily a strong proportion of that specific niche.

Not to mention that people on the spectrum who are trying hard to show emotions appropriate to a situation end up seeming just as unsettling.

So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?

I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.

I don't think that is what the person you responded to was saying. Quite the opposite.

Seriously though, thanks for this memory. My Gram and I were very very close.

Five other hits in the entire Google corpus, all of which are the same use from 1921. It's so uncommon it's literally a shibboleth until you ruined it.

This place would be one of the best to hit with a 0day. Lots of IT people with full admin rights to entire corporate networks.

Users at XYZ.gov gets the 0day, everyone else gets what is expected.

When a link can compromise an entire machine, having a machine you can literally throw away with no consequence is nice.

Hell, I'd wager to say that containers wouldn't be a thing if it weren't for this kind of behavior. Looking for ways to build up and destroy VMs even faster.

https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/system/i386/microvm.ht... https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/

Or maybe people just have temp VMs running anyway, and like others have said, if you’re browsing hacker news on your work machine you should probably do so with a healthy dose of paranoia.