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alexdiason Portugal gets own Silicon Valley

I don't know how far this is from Porto, since the article just stated "Not too far from the northern Portuguese city of Porto", but there's a notable engineering university in Porto, FEUP (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto). The other one (Instituto Superior Técnico) is in Lisbon, around 300km away.

alexdiason Breaking a WoW addiction

I think you're mainly viewing WoW from the PvE (player-vs-environment) perspective. In PvP (player-vs-player), there is a system much like the one present in Starcraft II (except that there are no leagues, only ratings).

In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills.

If you spend years playing Quake/Starcraft, you will be good at it.

The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at

I don't see how that combats addiction. I played competitive Counter-Strike Source for some time, and the main thing that kept me going was just that feeling of competition, and wanting to become better.

WoW's addiction factor is different. It's more like "if I don't do X on day Y, I get behind other people" where in games like Quake/Starcraft, that just doesn't exist.

alexdiason Mark Zuckerberg Named TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year

As an example, the President of the Portuguese Republic said this to the USA Ambassador: "I met Chavez, and he's a crazy man, but we have 100,000 portuguese on Venezuela".

That's something that he definitely (spelling?) won't say again.

(Although this example is more of a problem with information leakage and not Wikileaks itself, Wikileaks greatly increased the easiness of acessing leaked documents, by allowing anyone with an internet connection to see them and analyse them for themselves, instead of waiting for the media)

alexdiason How I got someone on Ebay to buy something they backed out on after winning

Unpredictable events happen.

He didn't go to the ticket booth and say: "Hey sorry, I can't go, so give me a full refund."

People make mistakes, but they have to be responsible for them.

alexdiason How I got someone on Ebay to buy something they backed out on after winning

She didn't say that she didn't have the money.

Quote: "I overbid and my husband won't let me buy these. Sorry and enjoy the game! :)"

Yes, I do agree that it was wrong to scam her on it, but her attitude over the whole situation wasn't the best either.

When she got the offer for 1,000$, she raised it to 1,100$. Then that e-mail that she sent in response isn't so good either.

alexdiason WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?

They aren't safe in their own country. Huge numbers of them die prematurely of random causes every month.

That can be said for every country. Not every country is a target of a terrorist attack though.

I look both ways when I cross the street.

If you don't look, there is a higher probability of being hit by a car. Therefore, you're trying to control the probability of being hit by a car. You can't do that in regards to a terrorist attack.

I don't check my car for bombs every morning.

Of course not. A bomb on your car would be an attack directly towards you, and you know there is a low probability of that happening.

You weren't directly affected by 9/11, but many people were (or by the London and Madrid bombings, for instance). Of course people are also affected when someone close to them dies prematurely, but as pyre already replied to you, people accept those random causes better than they do accept a terrorist attack.

alexdiason WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?

The thing is, those 150,000 humans don't all die of the same cause. These 3,000 did.

Also, this has been stated multiple times, but 9/11 wasn't about killing 3,000 people, it was about attacking America as a whole, making people feel that they weren't safe in their own country. Surely you don't feel that way just by knowing that 150,000 humans die of random causes each day.

This is major speculation, but what do you think would've happened if the fourth plane reached the White House/Capitol Building ?

alexdiason Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

Windows also lets you review whatever it is going to download in an update, so you can just disable the download of the X extra stuff that you don't trust signing up for.

alexdiason Ask HN: Music while coding

I wouldn't consider Pendulum as trance, though. They started as Drum and Bass, but seem to have gone a bit further away from the genre, into something more mainstream (which has worked out very well for them, their newest album is indeed amazing).

As for trance, I'd recommend listening to something from a few years ago. A friend of mine (registered here actually), advised me to listen to Tiesto's In Concert 2003. On his words, it's one of those sets that once you start listening, you just can't stop.

PS: Also, Tiesto's In Search Of Sunrise 6 has a beginning that I just love: the sound of sea slowly transitioning to trance. You can listen to it on youtube, on a video with the first two tracks from ISOS6.