skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My answers:

Can terrorism be justified?

Sure, it's worked many times in history. Just the first example i can think of: Beirut barracks bombing.

It targeted military personnel, I believe the victims were overwhelmingly professional soldiers, and it worked. The international force pulled out of Lebanon.

Would you have burned Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, as he requested in his will?

Yes, we have legal precedent that authors have an automatic copyright to their works, and they can choose to not publish.

If the Greeks invented democracy, what is it?

Working on the premise that they invented it, then it is easily and accurately described as representative democracy.

Is Amazon.com good for literature?

Yes, the ability to quickly and easily search a HUGE library like Amazon can not be matched by a brick and mortar.

Is China overrated?

It depends on your rating. In the short therm you can make an excellent case for overvalued stocks.

In the long term, it easy to argue that for most of history China was the most powerful and advanced nation on Earth.

It declined compared to the rest of the world only when it cuts itself off from the rest of the world.

Or put more succinctly, humans are the cause of innovation and wealth. A region which has the most humans with the most freedoms will out compete regions with significantly less of either people or freedoms.

It is a very reasonable assumption that the future will look much like the past and China will be global super power.

What can we learn from Las Vegas?

Gambling is profitable and popular and does not in and of itself destroy civilization.

Is Dark Energy more interesting than Dark Matter?

Dark matter is theorized to be non electromagnetic matter.
Dark energy is supposedly accelerating the expansion of the universe. Interesting is an ill defined term. Dark Energy is more interesting to me personally, by my own definition of "interesting."

Whither social democracy after Tony Blair?

No.

Can animals think?

Yes.

Why was resistance to the Mongols so seldom successful?

Nomads like the Mongols and the Huns live on land that can not support crops humans can survive on.

But it can support animals which can then support humans.
This leads to lower population density but a lot more horses per human.

Following pasture also necessities a nomadic lifestyle, thus making every member of society an excellent rider.

Populations on better land can achieve higher population densities with fewer animals. Thus animals become a luxury.

Cavalry is militarily superior to armed peasants.
Because the Eurasian steppe is HUGE, the lower population density of nomads still leads to very large numbers of nomads.

When these nomads move, like the Huns or the Mongols, they essentially practice asymmetrical warfare against non nomad populations.

Calvary vs peasants, much like US military hardware vs Iraqi military hardware, with similar results.

Write on any one of the following: games, food, body parts

I like food.

Water

wet.

I have a funny, mind I can literally feel ill when I am forced to answer stupid questions like Water?
Clearly I am not made for the All Souls club.
As a musician and a developer, I can agree with most of this. I do however, see it as two opposite sides of a defined spectrum.

When I am playing an instrument, I typically lose any connection with thought or the rest of my body not directly involved in playing. My mouth sorta drops down and I begin to almost drool. Something my girlfriend loves to remind me of. I am literally lost in the music.

When coding, I am almost hyper aware of the thought process. I am surely focused on only what is happening relating to the code, but the disconnect from myself never happens.

I think the connection is the desire to create something and an inborn understanding of modularity and the flow of ideas/actions. People with these qualities are often drawn to both.
Ask HN: review my app whereslunch.org
I've been working on whereslunch.org as a side project and I'd love good feedback on it. It's designed to help you find new restaurants to try for lunch.

If you create an account you can rate restaurants and get suggestions about restaurants you might like. (and you can sign in with OpenID!)
The problem with this is users are allowed to enter in data so I will never be able to control what is in the site and not.
Not quite related to the article but...

"Christopher Parsons, a grad student at the University of Victoria (the Fightin' Vikes!), has done yeoman's work by combing through the numerous (and lengthy) ISP submissions to CRTC and compiling them into a set of tables (PDF)"

Shouldn't someone in the CRTC already have done that? It's nice that it's a transparent process and the data is available (as it must be) but couldn't they have made it easier to go through it all?
awesome, wish there was a UK equivalent.

How about you make a Cambridge, UK version and I'll try to get some people to use it?
suggest another text color? I was wondering about that too.
> From an owner's perspective, I would never spend future revenue today. What if your not making enough money to pay the bills, yet have to give a percentage of revenue to a developer? They aren't going to stick around if things get tough.

If they developed the product that's producing said revenue, why does it matter whether they're still around?

Suppose that your product required an expensive piece of equipment and you didn't have enough cash to pay for it. (Or, you didn't want to pay cash.) Would you object to paying over time? Does the answer depend on whether the payments go to the manufacturer or a third-party?

Yes, you might well prefer terms with a fixed cost but there's a considerable risk that they'll get nothing and it's unlikely that they can reuse the code elsewhere. (Besides, you probably insisted on an exclusive license.)
Thanks!

I'll see what I can do - sadly the database schema is somewhat tied to the US right now, but as long as Google or Yahoo geocoding works over there it shouldn't be too bad...
"The problem is that bandwidth is a finite shared resource (much in the way that clean, potable water is). For most of us, there's more than we would ever want or need."

Hm, the problem I think is that ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines. Even when they're allowed to have a monopoly.

ALSO! There is another problem! The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling, the article says,

"And speaking of transparency, most of the important information in the filings was provided on a "confidential" basis and is not currently available to anyone but CRTC staff. This includes link utilization thresholds, detailed traffic growth numbers, and (most) vendors of the DPI gear involved in the throttling."
Crime helps point out design flaws (case in point: Email) and can be therefore be thought as a force fostering or even forcing innovation.

Not defending crime, just pointing out that eliminationg crime is not a pure win-win situation.
comments:

Hurrah, email optional & no verification & having a delete my account button!

I think you need to prettyfy your UI! Little bit of CSS and curves goes a long way :)
Monopolies make sense when building up infrastructure. But after a certain period of time, the company blessed by the government as a monopoly should be dismantled or broken into smaller competing companies. Otherwise the companies, as you said, take advantage.
No Doubt. Still being plastic is rough, but at least the specs are at or very near the aluminum macbook with a $300 discount. For some people price for aesthetics isn't justifiable.
Twitter Blog: It's Business Time
Ask HN: HTTP compression from client to server?
I never noticed before, but it seems you can't send compressed data from an HTTP client back up to the server. You can't set the enctype to 'deflate' or 'gzip'. If you compress it yourself, say with lzw in Javascript, the %FF url-encoding that happens before data goes on the wire defeats the purpose. Since most clients have a much slower upstream than downstream, compression seems like it could be a nice win for webapps.

So, clever hackers, can you think of a way to do it with existing protocols and implementations? I offer a frosty beer for a 2:1 or better solution. Points off for using Flash.
A little shout-out to two PHP tools I love that weren't mentioned:

The Kohana framework - An offshoot of CodeIgniter, only written for PHP 5. It's cleaner, with generally fewer surprises and (I'm fairly certain) faster.
http://kohanaphp.com/

Komodo Edit/IDE - A general-purpose IDE written by the folks at ActiveState. Even the free Edit version is the best PHP editor I've used yet.
http://www.activestate.com/komodo/
> We have been working on a project part-time for over a year, but could use another rails developer to help out on our front-end work.

The fact that you've been working for a year isn't all that relevant. In fact, what you've got now isn't all that relevant. The important thing is what goes into the next step. If all your work is a small part of that, the folks doing the rest get the big piece of the pie.

Think of it from the other side. How much would someone pay you for what you've got now if they have to do the rest?
...and thus was born the Matrix. Although it sounds appealing, It may prevent general trauma, but it also might create many news susceptibilities.
I started reading this book on Oreilly's Safari service a couple days ago, recommend it (nb: I am a remote services/concurrency guy learning UI principles/techniques, not an experienced designer).
At first I have to question how this can compete with places like Yelp, etc. (we have a dumber app here in NYC called menupages.com) but your use of Google Maps totally sold me.

I would suggest changing the language regarding accounts, specifically instead of 'login with openid' which some people may not have heard of, just have a register button. Also, definitely have an option for users to submit restaurant menu links to the restaurants they've reviewed.

Great job!
I agree. I think they have a problem with that "after a certain period of time" - perhaps because of lobbyists.
I'd go elsewhere.

There are almost always other options and the cost of going to another website is lower than the cost of changing browsers.

Users don't care about your pain.
- Let users add photos/videos
- Make design more fun, cheerful, drunken...
- Maybe link to social networking sites
The concept is brilliant and filled with potential, but like every other joke on Uncyclopedia the delivery is pretty disappointing.

For example, they set up an awesome joke here:

uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help

--help Displays actual help.

--i question Interactive version of actual help

Then totally botch it with a lame juvenile punchline:

--omgwtfbbq Secret Feature

uncyclopedia@uncyclo-laptop:~$ help --help

NO HELP FOR YOU N00B.
Would love to have this populated for the NYC area.
I went ahead and added a location for Cambridge - let me know if you're able to add locations or not, since I haven't tested the geocoding in the UK...
> Equal wages/prices for all regardless of geography,

Why?

There are different costs and benefits to living in different places, so why wouldn't the wages vary as well?

And, if you think that that the cost differences can be eliminated, Hawaii is going to become very crowded.
So a person would accidentally take a photo of a sniper, upload it on the internet for PhotoSynth to build a panorama out of, the Secret Service will then look at the panorama, spot the sniper, and take care of it. All of that will happen in several seconds.

Seriously?

There definitely is a case for using technology for protecting VIPs, but it would be smarter for the Secret Service to just get several high-res infrared cameras and hook them to computers analyzing the images for irregularities (ie. "there's a person on the window of that supposedly empty building").
Using The Scientific Method In Entrepreneurship
Yeah, the big problem is where to pull data from legally. I'm definitely open to suggestions!

Went ahead and added NYC as a city.
I love music. I never actually tried to learn any instrument, so i may buy a guitar this sumer and just have fun with it(i doubt its going to be any good).

From what i know about music, and other creative activities, i can say that programming has some similarities with the other creative arts, but it an entirely different art of its own. We can draw connections between all the arts, painting is like music, programing is like dancing, i can write a blog post on all of those, but they are still different arts.

Maybe knowing how to play doesn't make you a better programmer directly, maybe it does it indirectly by making you more creative in general. Those are my thoughts on the topic.
How much data are you submitting? Usually, the overhead of everything else that goes on outside of your browser is a magnitude slower than the data transmission itself. Unless you're submitting hundreds of kilobytes, I wouldn't worry about compression.
The issue with this is common with all insurance. As we approach perfect information, the price becomes such that it is equal or greater than the value of any accident that may occur, which defeats the purpose of insurance. In my mind, the solution is to abandon traditional insurance and instead create a tax-free holding account where people can put aside money for critical accidents only. All else should come out of pocket. Of course, you do have a good point about your idea improving driver safety.
Can everyone trying to check do so on this comment? It would be much appreciated :)
Assume it's 50KB going up over a 50kbit uplink. But even turning a 5-packet transmission into a 3-packet transmission could be a win in some situations. I don't have a burning need for this, but I did run into a situation where it might be nice, and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
I think it's art and open to interpretation. To me, "--omgwftbbq" hints at the bazaar development, leading to inconsistency and unbridled enthusiasm about some features.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_queuing

AFAIK, transit costs $5-10/Mbps/month (probably closer to the high end in Canada), so 463GB/month would cost the ISP $15/month. Given the cost of maintaining the last mile, 463GB/month is probably a generous allowance.
Eliminating hunger is a noble goal. Equal prices is a terrible goal and not a way to eliminate hunger.

You can't have equal prices everywhere. If you want to try to force prices to be equal, you would ruin the price system. Without a working price system you would end up with something like the USSR.

Why is equality the ideal? It's not people in the "first world" that are starving, so why not look at what works in the first world? The problem is that in the countries where people are starving, they don't have the economic freedom that enables the wealth that means you don't have to starve.

So I hope that there will be more economic freedom in poorer countries. Then they will be able to achieve a higher standard of living.
Inauguration Photosynth
when buying a domain make sure the .com of your .org isn't porn
A good programmer will do more work in 4 days, than a crappy one can do in 7. So its a net gain overall.

And the shorter work week will help you attract the higher quality of talent who are willing to take a paycut in order to get more free time.

If someone is good enough, why would he want to work his ass off for 12 hours a day for someone else. That type of workload is co-founder territory.
Heh from an Australian point of view this is all amusing - we've been paying for a usage allowance for data since broadband came in. Pretty much just shaped to 64k speeds (dialup essentially) for the rest of the month once you go over a limit. Some dodgier outfits (most notably Telstra, the national telecommunications company) will charge users an exhorbitant excess fee for excess data. This is why Australians will bitch when torrent sites post a fake file as an April fool's joke...
Ridesharing in the Future
More here: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...
Using Erlang for efficiency is like using C++ for simplicity.
There is also a lot of evidence contradicting the Whorf hypothesis. In <The Language Instinct> by Steven Pinker, Pinker suggests that humans think with separate thought-modules and then only express the substance of thoughts through arbitrary languages.

That being said, I think there is something to be said for diversity of culture, and perhaps better more fluid translation services are the true solution.
Sorry about that! Good, clear domain names are a little hard to come by. I probably should have thought of a more clever name...
I never noticed before, but it seems you can't send compressed data from an HTTP client back up to the server.

Not true. It is perfectly valid for an HTTP client to send an entity (as part of a PUT or POST, for example) with Content-Encoding: gzip. RFC 2616 specifically mentions this case, in fact.

That said, in most situations this isn't worth the effort. Until you've established a connection to an HTTP server, you have no way of knowing if it will accept any particular Content-Encoding; a server which doesn't understand the encoding of a provided entity SHOULD return a "415 Unsupported Media Type" response code, but trusting that every server you'll ever encounter will respond correctly is probably overly optimistic.

Of course, there's always the ultimate in portability: Send your data with a Content-Type of "application/octet-stream", and decompress at the back-end.
ISPs are over-selling their bandwidth and refusing to upgrade their lines.

Given that some customers have effectively infinite bandwidth demand, upgrading the network just allows them to download more without paying more. I think there's a diminishing marginal utility at work here.

The ISPs are being extremely secretive about how they're throttling

Yes, this is a problem. If ISPs adopted fair and incentive-compatible bandwidth management policies there would be no way to game the system and thus no need to keep the details secret. Unfortunately, most of the bandwdith management products on the market are crap or ISPs configure them wrong.
This story is exactly why TechCrunch is such a joke. You can't make giant, sweeping statements like: "The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us" and then, in the second sentence of your story, deliver a bunch of incredibly impressive stats about how successful the various streams were.

I like how the last paragraph reveals the true point of this post though. It's just a veiled advertisement for another lame P2P video service.

How does anyone take these people seriously? It's kind of fun to watch them flop around making mountains out of mole hills but anyone who considers these jokers to be a legitimate news source should re-think how they get their information.
Multi-core Processor for Automotive Applications Announced
Positioning - Your unfair advantage to sell more
Surefire ways to keep meetings from wasting your precious time.
I appreciate the fact that there is a disclaimer about not drinking and driving. Perhaps one could further add a disclaimer that once one gets into the order of a dozen or more shots in a single night, one runs a risk of dying from alcohol poisoning, and that can happen with these kinds of "drinking games", so sort of a "proceed at your own risk" link might be appropriate and link to a medical article on the subject.
I think it would be a great incentive to work less hours than 40. I feel I only put out 'great programming' 6 hours a day. The rest of the time is wasted.

Having a great life-work policy as a startup may net more good people than wanting them all to work 80 hours for little pay and the promise of a payout. You will burn them out. That helps no one. Give them time off. Treat them well and they will do good work.

Also by not paying them well they will have to work smaller jobs outside of work. You NEED them to do this for the longevity of your company if you will not pay them. I have heard of companies barring people from working outside of their current job. They'd have to offer me more to have me sign.
Could anyone here explain how this fit in with Google's mission?
Not sure it's clear what the point of your website is...
I've been thinking of building something along the lines of this, but the data required was always the limiting factor for me.

Where do you get your data? Do you use Yelp's API, do a little data scraping, or are there sources with this stuff?
NOKIA 3600 SLIDE BLACK UNLOCKED
Nokia 3600 presented by Nokia again a rocking handset for you to rule in the world of wireless communication with multi features and amazing look. It has a nice oval shape with a 2 inch screen. 3600 Slide has a decent 3.15-mega-pixel camera.
Notice I hedged my bets with "generally agree with"

The fact that the question is still open is why (in my opinion) the thought experiment is so interesting.
Totally agree. Featured games, plus (possibly) photos of college kids (your friends, i'd assume?) playing the featured games, possibly a video...
I'm still impressed that photosynth works, I think the ui could be improved so that you can navigate as if you were in 3d world, but otherwise its damn impressive.
It has the same problem as all social networking sites, only more so. At least facebook can (claim to) target you with specific ads because it draws data from its users - twitter knows nothing about it's audience so all it has is raw, unquantifiable traffic - which is actually pretty useless.
Of course in an AJAX app you know exactly what the server supports.
This has happened to me on numerous occasions. I've checked the numbers before and after, and PG is correct; the second vote is ignored.
P=NP is a problem I always wonder about. Can an answer that can be verified in polynomial time also be solved in polynomial time? I do think, modeled correctly, NP problems can become P problems, but that is the trick. How to model an NP problem so that it becomes a P problem? Or, if this cannot be done, then demonstrate a proof of that. Show exactly why an NP problem can never be modeled as a P problem. Maybe this will never be solved, but certainly worth thinking about.
Apprentice failures giving business tips
I've started saving and tagging screen captures of sites I like; this terminology will definitely make it easier to consistently tag/identify layouts.