skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Minecraft, zombies drop feathers, and feathers are used for making arrows. Normally, you have to go out and kill zombies or chickens manually to get them. What this guy did was make a trap where zombies spawn and fall into flowing water. The water flows to a field of cacti, where the zombies get stuck and die (cacti hurt you to touch them). Some of the zombies drop feathers, which continue flowing with the water to an opening. In effect, the guy gets feathers delivered to him automatically, with no effort.

You can rig up similar contraptions for other resources, like a "bacon farm" which delivers pork (pork heals you).
Because it's not the proper forum for it. You have N sites on the internet where you can talk about the TSA / tasers / politics / whatever to your heart's content. Please stop spamming one of the few good sites about startups and hacking with this stuff.
A comment on the page asks if there are REST libraries available. They really aren't needed in most cases. With a url lib and json/xml parser, you've got the libraries you need. It's easier to write an abstraction layer for your particular application than it is to adapt a library for your application.
Sure.

I'm assuming you know what parsing is, and what syntax-directed translation is. If not, the wikipedia articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax-directed_translation) offer a reasonable explanation.

The grammar file is generally laid out as follows:

Question ::= Phrase1 | Phrase2 | Phrase3 ...

Phrase1 ::= 'if' 'the' Noun 'is' Color 'what' 'color' 'is' 'it' [and now return the word which matched Color]

Noun ::= [sequence of characters]

Color ::= 'red' | 'blue' ...

The trickiest part of it was getting it to correctly interpret numbers like 'twenty one thousand eight hundred and ninety nine'

That part is basically laid out as

Number ::= Number QuantifiedNumber | Number 'and' QuantifiedNumber | QuantifiedNumber

QuantifiedNumber ::= NumberGroup | NumberGroup Quantifier

NumberGroup ::= SingleNumber SingleNumber | SingleNumber

SingleNumber ::= 'one' | 'two' | ... 'twenty' | 'thirty' | ...
I don't understand your point These two sentences seem to contradict one another. The first questions his ability. The second takes it for granted. The only thing they have in common is that they're two variants of unthinking dismissal. And while that similarity gives your comment the appearance of having a connected argument, in fact they're incompatible.
Tell HN: if you try to install a Firefox addon on chrome you fail
If RandomHotelBookingWebsite.com announces that for every five reviews you write you'll earn a $5 credit which you can use for any booking on the site, why would that make you less likely to write a review? I can see that it might not make someone more likely to write a review (why bother for $5?), but why would it stop you if you were going to anyway?
First of all while I am not a big fan of TSA, let's be fair to them: they've got policies that strictly prohibit sexually assaulting travelers.
Less IO for your Java Unit Tests
I hate the term "opt out" applied to this issue. You shouldn't have to "opt out" of something that is pretty clearly a violation of our constitutional rights (4th amendment at the very least) as citizens.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898123
Because I think it's irrelevant to HN.

These stories are all over Reddit and you can go and read about the TSA there. If the stories here were a discussion of technical aspects of the TSA equipment or procedures I'd be interested. But most appear to be scare stories (the rape victim one).

Also, I don't care about the TSA for two reasons: firstly I'm not in the US and the TSA is an internal US body and secondly it doesn't bother me if someone sees a weird black and white picture of me naked.

And I don't want HN to be consumed with a single issue with story after story because then it becomes another site where political/social stories are aired.
When I say literally, I mean that a for loop is constructed of the English word "for." I don't think of it like that. I think, "Okay, I need to iterate over the elements of this sequence, so I'll use a for loop." The code is literally just text, but I must understand their semantics to know what will happen.

Similarly, if someone was using what you proposed, they would have to keep in mind that the other person would see the proper English, not the net-speak. So they would - I think - end up thinking in proper English first, then coding the proper English using net-speak. They must think in terms of the end result, in terms of what the person they're communicating with will read. For that reason, I disagree with your assessment that people would be able to think "I don't need to bother learning to communicate effectively."
Thanks for the answers (both davidw & jgrahamc). (I expected getting downvoted out of existence.)

Points are totally understood and taken to heart. Thanks for clarifying.
as somebody in Seattle, traveling is a big part of my startup life -- and I think the same is true for a lot of people here.
Pilots and Passengers Rail at New Airport Patdowns
He's not talking about documentation. He's talking about making API calls to online services. To test that sort of stuff, you have to be online, and generally you want to test that stuff pretty often as you're building things.

I just did a PayPal API, and the docs were pretty bad/inaccurate, so we had to make frequent test calls to see what the real world behavior actually was.
With all due respect, wouldn't that be a little like upholstering your couch with the Bayeux Tapestry? While the Enigma machine isn't exactly one of a kind, it is quite rare and has a great deal of historical significance.
Completely Automated Sports Reporting
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

-- Jamie Zawinski
Fair enough, so campaign against US policy around the world that has put the US in a position where there are people who want to kill its citizens on board aircraft.

Fighting the TSA is dealing with a symptom and not the disease.
-Do enough somethings that you warrant your own Wikipedia article
How Engineers Manage Uncertainty
Ask for the sale.

You may need to create some urgency. It sounds like you're supporting them gratis right now. Ask for the sale nicely, and then, depending on the response, frame the issue in terms of "that's OK, but we have other prospects we need to work with, so before we disengage, can we talk about why you couldn't benefit from our solution?"

Be prepared not to like the answer you get. You're selling to edu's. Edu's aren't fun to sell to; they are the worst of both worlds between enterprise and consumer sales. Part of the discipline of selling to them might be learning when to disqualify prospects. Don't waste your time talking to people who aren't going to buy. They aren't snakes and you can't charm them.

You're in business. You are not an educational IT support charity. Next prospect you open up, don't frame the relationship in terms of 6 weeks of weekly phone chats. Instead:

* Burn a meeting (with your dog&pony deck) to map out the organization and who's going to benefit from your stuff, and who's going to be saddled with using your stuff, and who's going to cut the check.

* Follow up with a meeting (with the right person) to map out the buying process. Be direct. You're there to sell stuff. Don't pretend you aren't, don't sugarcoat it. Ask them about the last thing they bought and what the process looked like. Then get them to confirm the same series of steps for your doohickey. Write notes down. Recite them back.

* Ask for the sale. This is the difference between salespeople and techs. Salespeople are always asking for the sale. The word "sales" is in their job title. They aren't hiding their motivation. A soft "no" is still progress if it gives you information you can use to transition to the next state in the machine; a hard "no" is even more useful if it gets you the hell out of a sand trap and out to another prospect.
> that's a big relief to Java users and given the
HN crowd, budding Android developers

And don't forget the Clojure, Scala, JRuby, Groovy, Jython, Mirah et al users ;)
"Changed my life," a bit dramatic methinks.
Interesting... Not just that, it will be trivial to target spam directly at people and depending on the visibility of their profile, target it based on their public data.
It's interesting how in this thread there are several comments that are almost direct lifts from training sales books, and one comment that talks about experience with institutional markets.

It's the difference between reading and doing.

You'll (hopefully) know your prospect better than the people here. There's not much I can add to edw519's comment, other than to try to identify the things that are stopping the sale from going through, you may be surprised what the issue is. Update your view of when you think this is likely to close once you've identified what the hold up is, when to re-establish contact and divert your energy to other sales in the meantime.
Java will still be an "optional" install, much like Flash, Silverlight, et. al. Because Apple can't guarantee that it will be pre-loaded on every Mac, any apps listed in the Mac App Store that used Java wouldn't work on "factory" Macs. I'm guessing that's a deal-breaker for Jobs & co.
Projecting my own biases onto google: Maybe it's just because Instagram is the very definition of all sizzle, no steak?

It is innovative in the "gee nice idea" sense but it not at all innovative in the sense that our collective knowledge or capabilities have expanded as a result of its creation.
This stuff isn't new, it just isn't widely adopted yet.

OpenSearch does stuff like this:
http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1/Draf...

It describes an interface (Atom XML based) that further self-describes how it was called and what you can do to it (how to search within results, for example).

Simply applying that thinking to JSON based RESTful services gives you that question "What can I do with this?", and that makes building the API easier... for everything you serve describe what can be done with it and how you were called.

This then totally de-couples the request from the client, the client can send many queries and not care about them, and get back something that encapsulates the state of the request (search terms), the state of the result (search pagination) and the verbs for each entity (what you can do with it).

I never would've called this "Hypermedia Controls", I think that's confusing.

It's just having your interfaces describe themselves and be discoverable. Coupled with a WADL-style thing (but probably not WADL itself... perhaps JSON such as on the Freebase API: http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/ReconciliationSe... ).

Perhaps we all just need a new catchphrase or buzzword though, just to get the wider industry onboard? I'd rather just say that your services should be discoverable, and that means within the results telling us what we can do, in addition to a top level thing to describe which services exist.
If you have N seats, you have better odds for the best hand than you do with N-1 seats, yes, but what's even more important than that is that you know what cards the other players don't have. You have considerably more information, and this is absolutely essential. Collusion is the big problem with bots, not just smart logic.
Command line utility for github issues
The browser based issue tracking on github is cumbersome. This runs from the command line.

Usage is described in the README.
so your position is that we should just give in to the TSA and stop fighting?
Don't think will get many upvotes this is a great essay by an fascinating historical character.
Right. They could take the "opting" act and claim it was giving up of rights (pertaining to the search)?

(I'm curious why it was downvoted too.)
That is why they tell you what they are going to do before they do. If you object they will stop and ask you, "Do you want to fly today?" So every step of the way you have opted in.

I will be traveling with my 4 year old and 6 year old daughters and I am genuinely conflicted about which option to choose for my daughters: Unknown dosage of Xray radiation with un-tested effects on growing bodies, or groping by a stranger.

The ideal outcome from my perspective of challenging this terrible situation would be to have them start screaming "Bad Touch!" at the top of their lungs when they were groped. But I think it is un-fair to them to train them to do that.
A lot more people will complete it if you give them some idea how long it is. You should use Wufoo.
I haven't played Hold 'em since fixed limit died (RIP party poker) but knowing even just two additional cards would be a tremendous advantage. You have an easy fold in small pots if you know you only have 5 outs vs 7 (overcard and gutshot draw). Hell you probably couldn't even be beat in the short run if you knew of 4 additional cards in addition to your hole cards.
WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project (20th anniversary)
UBS rogue email sees General Motors pull $10m account
Tried:
Q: What does Python prompt look like ?

Desired Answer: >>>

Answer Given: None.
In my personal opinion (as opposed to my professional one) I think stories about the TSA are interesting, but don't belong on HN. The point is being done to death.

So I've started flagging them, simply believing them to be inappropriate. My criterion is that they are of interest, but not specifically to hackers or entrepreneurs. They should be of interest to everyone who travels.

If enough other people are of the same opinion then they'll start dying.
Well, considering that whenever someone posts on a technical forum (such as HN) asking what laptop to get to run Linux, they receive a lot of recommendations that they get Macs, I don't think "best personal computers in the world" is too far out of line for Apple to claim.

iPods completely dominate portable music playback, and the iTunes store is one of the biggest sellers of music in the world (didn't they take #1 a while back?). That would justify "leads the digital music revolution".

Take a look at Android's UI design before the iPhone came out, and compare to after iPhone. Look familiar? Take a similar look at mobile app sales before and after iPhone. "Revolutionary" is an acceptable claim, considering how much the mobile phone industry changed in direct response to the iPhone.

That leaves the iPad, the only one on the list they may have overhyped in the press release. Sure, it blows away every other attempt at a tablet so far, but most of the other table makers trying to capitalize on the iPad's success seem to be aiming for smaller tablets, so we can't yet say the iPad is "defining the future".
Ok, calm down.

I should've clarified no limit. This article is presumably talking about no limit - since that is by far the predominant game.

With all due respect, you have a poor understanding of poker if you really think there is a way to "memorize the correct action for every scenario". Poker is about interaction, spotaneity, 'feel', instinct. Mastering those things is where to get a real edge, not math - particularly in no limit. Hence my comment.
Great job! I wrote up that post about WolframAlpha and wonder if there's an API so you could integrate WA to make it more robust?
Cut that crap out. That's why people hate email. It is trivial in almost all cases nowadays to get off of those sorts of lists.

Today I have gotten emails: interview info from MS, an announcement as to why the University's power went out, payroll setup info for my Uni, tech advice from a startup friend, and an email from my TA about my lab today.

None of that would have been visible/accessible or possible to communicate to me through anything besides email.
How Kafkaesque[1]. To fly, you must "choose" either naked x-ray photography or molestation by agents of the government.

Don't say flying is a privilege. Where else should I have to sacrifice one right to exercise another? The 1st amendment to the US constitution implies a right to travel, and the 9th clarifies that the enumeration of rights is not exclusive.

[1] This is not the only example of the TSA borrowing from Kafka. The TSA employs secret directives, reminiscent of Kafka's Before The Law. The Supreme Court supported this secrecy in reviewing these documents in camera in Gilmore vs. Gonzales.
The thing that troubles me most about this article is that I'm not in the valley at the moment. I'm not reaping multi-million dollar bonuses for not quitting, I'm not getting money for my startup with no due diligence...

To me this isn't a warning, it's an opportunity - now is the time, we are almost at the peak of the bubble, get in now. (Get in on the entrepreneurial side where values are high; get out on the VC side where values are low - but I'm on the former side))

There is a lot of money floating around in the US economy right now courtesy of Quantitative Easing. Yields on most asset classes (especially safe ones) are low, and the stock market is lackluster... so it wouldn't surprise me to hear a lot of money is flowing into the entrepreneurial side of the economy - isn't that about the best possible outcome?

I don't see this bubble bursting as hard. Most companies involved (Google, at least) have solid incomes, and are not running on hopes, dreams and borrowed money. VCs might find they paid too much, and Google might wind up with a slightly too expensive (but quite possibly rationally priced) employee base.

But a VC that paid too much gets a haircut, the fund gives bad returns... so what? New funds spring up. It is not that bad.
Ask HN: Android or Blcakberry for productivity? 
I need a smartphone which can do all the things that a regular smartphone does but I am looking out for applications that can same me time and help me manage my time better.<p>Something that can track of my appointments and time commitments, give me reminders, help me track progress , collect statistics about my time etc.
Can Computer Code Be Greener? Facebook Thinks So
Regarding the newish talent drain: higher salary and equity packages for engineers is not a threat to VC/angel-funded startups -- not yet. Salaries have been depressed for the past 2+ years, and a little catch-up is in order. Obviously that could go too far, but I really don't think we're there yet.
I'm Tropo's product manager. We've got quite a few companies using Tropo in significant capacity. In fact, because of our ability to scale and telephony expertise (Tropo's a product from Voxeo, the largest worldwide voice application host), we regularly see customers switch from other providers to Tropo.
The scale of valuations described in the first part don't apply to Facebook and Google and in the case of Google, neither does the class of investors.

That's not to say Google is or isn't overvalued, but there are plenty of scenarios in which Google's recent action make good business sense, particularly when competing with a company on the scale of Facebook potentially using the Microsoft model of IPO timing (12,000 millionaires) to attract talent.

The only connection implied between the trend of increased valuations for startups and the grant of restricted options to an engineer at Google is that they are both signs of change.

In the case of the Google stock options, it appears that the real change is in the way the press operates. Key employees have always received counter offers.
How to create simple Mac apps from shell scripts
Collusion absolutely provides unfair advantages (which is why it's against the rules).

Poker is a game of incomplete information. The more information you possess, the better your odds are of making the right decision.

So, in the instance of 2 poker bots colluding on a table (the 4 suits are (c)lubs (d)iamonds (s)pades (h)earts):

Bot 1 has Ac5h and discards pre-flop (no money spent)
Bot 2 has KcQc and calls.
Player 3 calls
Player 4 calls
All other players discard

The flop comes up: 5c 10c 9c

At this point, Bot 2 has an excellent hand (a King-high flush), but it doesn't have the best possible hand; it's vulnerable to a higher flush due to the Ace. However, the because bot 1 & 2 have colluded, it knows with 100% certainty that it has an unbeatable hand and can play accordingly.

This is a pretty weak example, but it's the easiest I could think of without assuming any knowledge of poker. Having knowledge of cards that have been in play significantly increases a player's ability to make decisions in a way that give that player an unfair advantage.
This is great stuff!
and 'Open to taking your money'
The problem, at least right at launch, was not that users were idiots, it was that the confirmation screens that they did read were misleading. The confirmation screen said words whose obvious interpretation was "click here not to use Buzz," but the real meaning was "click here not to further configure Buzz." Users, even non-idiot ones, would be quite reasonable to assume that clicking that button would either deactivate Buzz or never have it become active in the first place, when in fact that button left Buzz running in its default state of sharing personal information with a bunch of people. Actual deactivation was hidden behind a bunch of config menus.
IBM ain't what it used to be, that's for sure. Still in the game, certainly. Similarly, I don't expect Salesforce to die out any time soon, but the market share it commands may diminish if seriously better competitors emerge.
It seems to me that providing monetary incentives (or incentives with a clear monetary value, like a cup of coffee in a specific restaurant) for submitting reviews would attract the wrong sort of crowd.

An entire new class of reviewers would start using these services. One example would be people who submit a review of a place just before they arrive to get their free coffee. A more worrying case would be users who write a script to generate and submit reviews automatically. Generating text that _looks_ like a review is not difficult and, unlike spam mail, it wouldn't require plugging a product (which is what gives spam its distinct spammy flavour :)) or generating millions per day.

In practice, it would be very difficult to filter that sort of thing out and there would be so much noise that the value of the site to real users would plummet.
The Rejection Therapy Challenge: Final Review
>We still have OpenJDK licensed under GPL. How's that closed?

See the Oracle vs. Google suit for how it is closed. There is one blessed open implementation, other implementations get the shaft aka Apache harmony, Google's Dalvik.
Sorry, but what do you mean by "knowing all the forms of the questions"? It seems like maybe you mean all that all the questions formatted via one of several formulas like: name <x> of list<a..z>. Which would imply your tool simply identifies the format then applies some specific logic to solve the question. I'm unclear that if that is what you mean, why then do you know all the forms of the questions? Text capture purports over 180 million questions, so isn't it likely you may not have found all the possible formats of the questions? Or perhaps did you know because you have a relationship with the text captcha creator and they provided that info to you. Or better yet, did your comment mean something entirely different.

Just curious, thanks.
Why did you assume I meant white kids were getting picked on? What? I specifically said I was NOT teaching in white, suburban schools.
Apple 1 on sale
maybe they'll let him out on Nov15th then: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/facebook-gmail-titan/