skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just finished vol. 1 of Niall Ferguson's history of the rothschild banking family last night - and reading this makes me wonder how much great historical research we're missing out on because the economics of the historian profession is so bleak. There's got to be a better way to support people who want to work on these things than the present system - I personally know several people who wanted to be historians (who knows if they would have been any good) but ended up becoming IP and Tax lawyers instead. Sure, only a tiny fraction of historical writers will actually write things that I would bother to read, but stories like the above surely drive talented people away from these fields. (although I have to admit it's hard to imagine ferguson becoming an IP lawyer, or starting a web service company)
Hacker News? Of interest in general, yes, and it should rightly be of interets to everyone and not just hackers.

Does that mean it does, or does not, belong on HN?
Worth noting there are a few "comment follow up" posts on the blog as well. Especially one in response to Timothy Fitz from IMVU's comment:

http://www.developsense.com/2009/03/more-imvu-comment-follow...
I said something similar about A New Kind of Science, and that was ridiculously underwhelming. I respect Wolfram like crazy, but I want my money back on that thing :)
Printed Promotional Products, an Imprinted Product
Cheap and easy marketing with Promotional Products, there are plenty of goods available that will get your company recognized that don't cost a lot of money.
This is really kind of cool.

Curious to know what method you're using to generate the actual buttons?
This is really well done. I like the fact you put in examples and allow users to edit those examples. I will definitely use and recommend to others.
Excellent article describing what could be the biggest advance in the web since the launch of Google. However, I wonder if it will be inundated with 99% of the questions being about who Miley Cyrus's current boyfriend is - or some other frivolous usage.

Seems to me that this technology should have been released for some other scientific usage first (if it is indeed that powerful). It could be valuable as an engine for other applications as well in this manner.

I would also argue that one of Google's advantages is that it enables discovery of new information instead of just giving you the one page you for which you are looking.
Nice! Creating image buttons really isn't that difficult, but the gradients are very pretty. I can see how this could be massively convenient for some people.

P.S. I added your site to SU: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.dabuttonfactory.com/
Wolfram Alpha is coming -- and It Could be as Imporant as WolframTones!

http://tones.wolfram.com/
Your background css option produces code that doesn't work in Opera.

Otherwise, it's nice and simple.
TinyUrl is run by one dude in Minnesota, an avid unicyclist named <a href="http://www.gilby.com/whois.html">Kevin Gilbertson</a>. It gets 1.75 billion hits per month. How long is this going to last?
Good idea and seems to work well too. I'm not sure I'll be giving up Photoshop anytime soon, but this can definitely be useful for quick webapps and prototypes.

It would be great if there was a "randomize" button so that one could quickly try out different styles with the same text.

Two minor nitpicks:

- Hovering over "Da Button Factory" makes the text yellow but isn't clickable

- Your menu buttons at the top could use some adjusting so that the text is more vertically centered (in Mac FF).

Great work!
One time when URL shortening is useful is for paper. I write legal briefs that sometimes have to cite to web pages, and for that URL shortening services are very useful. You can't expect a human reader to type in 200+ character URLs.
The whole bug thread is good information, but: if application developers actually follow approach #3 en masse, won't that massively slow down the system? I see some cargo-cult potential in fsync-after-every-write here. The emacs example may be correct, but it has a couple steps that require extra thought depending on the context of the rewrite. Where data consistency and security are less necessary, example #2 seems just fine, assuming rename() is atomic and a power failure would just leave the old contents in the file.

For Gnome and KDE, Ted suggests using BDB or an idealized version of SQLite instead of the current dot-directories, but I don't imagine that change being implemented any time soon -- Firefox still has some lingering problems from that transition.
Really nice, but I'd suggest adding a color picker to the color fields. Not everybody can calculate hex values from the top of their head.
The most compelling counter is one throwaway comment I saw here - that things are just going to get so complex we will be overwhelmed with complexity and leaky abstractions and progress will crash into a wall before intelligence amplification helps us pass said wall.

I prefer the ideas of Aubrey De Gray, because while they require future-technology and future-developments, they don't require intelligence amplification or AI or thought-to-be-impossible technology, and if done successfully would give us longer lives which might be the equivalent of amplified intelligence allowing a way round said wall (i.e. work at the same level of smartness, but for longer).
Makes sense:
* If I'm usually hiding something, my muscle memory will keep my face in that shape
* If I'm usually open, vice versa
Of course if I really believe stealing is good, my face will be open. So it's basically showing others what I believe about myself.
Yeah, looks pretty useful. Any thoughts about charging anything for it?

I'm a huge fan of Joe Krause's advice to beta test a business model while you beta test your product: How you make your money is equally relevant in how people perceive your product. http://www.brendonwilson.com/blog/2006/04/30/joe-kraus-confe...
I would like to pick the color rather than enter the RGB numbers or the name.
Excellent. How does it work? :)
Can you really come to a conclusion based on inputs of just 25 MTurkers?
25 is less than 30 (the minimum required numbers to assume normal distribution) and also all being MTurkers is also not a good sign of unbiasedness.
Apple slow to process iPhone development contracts: would-be iPhone developers frustrated
It doesnt work in IE7 (stuck on this browser at the University Library, so no alternative). The progress indicator keeps going.
Great job. The buttons look great for such minimal effort. Suggestions for next steps:

1. Add an easy way to get hover and pushed states for buttons. Basically, provide some clever defaults that allow the user to get all 3 at once with minimal work.

2. Put in a paypal or tip jar link (it can't hurt, right?)

3. Add a pretty attribution link, "Buttons by Da Button Factory" or something.
Thanks everyone for all of your comments!

@brk: the method is pretty simple: the images are queried via Ajax to
the server, which runs a Fast-CGI script, written in Perl, to generate
the buttons. Javascript does the rest (visual effects, Ajax, CSS code generation...)

@zepolen: thanks for reporting the problem in Opera, I'll investigate ASAP!

@DXL: yes, color pickers and more powerful controllers in general (for
picking the orientation maybe, for example) are in the roadmap :-)

@exalo: you are not the first one to tell me about a "randomize"
feature. I'll think of it seriously. Thanks.
For the vertical
alignment: normally it should be centered, but the result of
"vertical-align: middle;" vary between browsers. I'll make it better
ASAP :-)
For the non-clickable title: actually it's currently just
a <h1> tag, but this will obviously change, you're right.
This is already discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506837
This is as you say a fact, something you can look up in a geographical info database. As I understand it Wolfram's goal is to also answer questions which require computation and application of laws or formulas, or inference.
I do too, and as someone who has just started using Git... the error messages need some help. Luckily, it's open source, so I decided to take a look and see if I could improve them... unfortunately, they are hard-coded into the source, and not in some central location, making it very difficult to change.
Thanks for your advice.

1. yes, it's in my mind, it will be the big step towards the "version 2"

2. and 3. it may come ;-)
If you're looking to improve the design of the site, you might be interested to know that the Chinese character for big is 大, pronounced "da4" (fourth or falling tone).

The character is simple enough it should be easy to work into any site logo, and the meaning works well with your URL ("Big Button Factory"). Mandarin is also cool.
Sorry, I didn't try with IE7 :-/ I could just put my hands on an old IE6 version to test the render. I'll definitely install a virtual machine or smthg :-) Thanks for the report.
Thanks a lot, especially for the link! I don't think much of any serious "business-ization", but hey, we'll see ;-)...
Oh thank you, so interesting!
This is great, works very simply and the results look fantastic! I've just created a few to buttons to use on my latest project and they're perfect for my needs - all in less time than it would take to open up PS and create just one button! An awesome app and I wish you every success with it, I second the call for a PayPal link/contribute link, I think many a time-starved designer would happily drop a few $ your way in gratitude.
Ray's argument against things getting complex would probably be something like: Why would things suddenly get "so complex" when the trend has been going on for millions of years.

Douglas Hofstadler (Godel Escher Bach author) says that perhaps humans aren't smart enough to understand and recreate consciousness.

Thanks for the Aubrey De Gray reference. Found a video interview of him here: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16508
There's already a company beta-testing this core technology: TrueKnowledge, based in Cambridge (UK).

http://www.trueknowledge.com/technology/

It's an interesting concept, and has much broader applications through their API.
> why couldn’t it just, you know, sell the farther-back seats for less money?

Variable pricing for primary sales is an idea but there is strong resistance to it.
The images are queried by Ajax to the server, where a Fast-CGI Perl script generates, caches, and sends the images.
Javascript is used, obviously for the Ajax job, for some small visual effects, and to generate the CSS code.
Ruby-style Blocks in Python
the solution has been at our fingertips since the web was born:

a href="longurl" : shorttext
Another option: use mmap() and rewrite it in place, using ftruncate() if necessary to grow/shrink the file, and msync() to flush the changes.

This is also risky because it could leave the file in an inconsistent, partially-modified state. However, in practice it seems to work really well, and Google turns up a striking lack of articles discussing the risks of inconsistency due to use of mmap.

I'd like to learn more about the risks of this approach, since I'm using it to selectively rewrite portions of a very important file in a project of mine. I'm pretty sure
that my usage pattern is safe. The writes are small enough that they nearly always affect only one disk block and never touch more than two, and I'm careful to msync() at the right places (actually mmap.mmap.flush(), since I'm using Python), but I'm interested in learning about potential issues. This file is too large to make copying it convenient, but I'll do that if necessary.
If you ask Google "What is the capital city of the country that has the 15th highest average rainfall in the world?" then you don't get a straight answer.

This software should be able to look up rainfall data from Stephan Wolfram's Bumper Book of Trivia, work out average rainfall for each country, work out which country has the 15th-highest rainfall from that result, then look up the capital city for that country.

All determinable facts with a straight answer; you should simply get the name of the city as a result.
There's some clarification on how the Turk was used at http://www.econsteve.com/?p=166 .
I was so happy that Microsoft moved from OLE - COM to the .NET
PostgreSQL: What happened to Hot Standby?
Is Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) useful?
Hi,

I am wondering if you have any thoughts on Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

I understand that it doesn't have great results in a lab but then I also see a lot of people referring to NLP techniques and I've seen presenters who seem to lead 95% of the audience like sheep using NLP techniques.

Is there any benefit to learning these techniques or is it a waste of time and money?

One source of concern for me is the NLP "practitioners" online who sell an endless rabbit-hole of training media.
Individuals of many species are capable of copying the behaviour of another individuals (usually of the same species) by observation. The other primates are the most well-known mimics ("monkey see, monkey do"), but most mammals and birds do this. We like to think we're special in this respect, but we're really not.

Birds, for example, learn features of their songs from other songs they hear. Over time, these features accumulate in a bird's repertoire, and even develop into a dialect for an area. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_song#Learning

Another example in birds is the behaviour of crows in Japan, who have learned to crack nuts by leaving them in traffic at intersections, waiting for the cross signal, then retrieving them. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0

This is the first example I've heard of a "play" behaviour being learned, but what can I say? The life of a captive dolphin would be boring; a new way to pass the time would be a useful thing to know.
Un travail bien fait!

I'd like to see some more font options. The stock web fonts tend to look a little stale because we see them in so many places.

It would also make things slightly easier if there was a download button next to the web address--this might be tricky to implement but it would save users several seconds.
Very nice indeed! I agree with yef that you need a simple method to create a hover and click versions for each of the buttons.
> If there is only one answer to one factual question, why not have it already written and available like wikipedia?

Wikipedia isn't all that useful for storing all of the sums of integers.

In other words, you can't enumerate all of the questions that have one answer.
> When Google came out they didn't make any claims. Only factual performance counts.

A cite to some Google claims when they came out would be nice. (Academic papers don't count.)

I was in the SF Bay Area at the time and the "publicity" that I remember was friends saying "check this out". I don't recall Google saying anything beyond "here's how many pages we indexed".
Merci !

Yes, I should definitely add more fonts, it's useful.
But does anyone know if embedding open sources fonts is fully legal? And what about commercial fonts, i.e: Arial, Comic sans MS, etc.? It is quite difficult to understand the licences for my usage.

For the download button: yes, I know it would be nice, I thought about it, but decided to delay its implementation, because as you say, it will certainly be tricky to make :-D It will come!
Is there any reason that it won't last just because it's a one-man shop? He's kept it going strong this far.
Successful search engines are innundated with questions about what its users care about.

> Seems to me that this technology should have been released for some other scientific usage first

Why?

Technologists need to get over the idea that technology is for science/technology.

> I would also argue that one of Google's advantages is that it enables discovery of new information instead of just giving you the one page you for which you are looking.

Huh? If there isn't a page that states which city is the fourth largest in eastern Montana, how will Google help you answer that question? (No fair going to the "populations of cities in eastern montana" page.)

Google doesn't (yet) do join queries.
Thanks a lot, it's so nice and grateful to see people enthusiast about it! The pleasure to serve :-)
Notice his comment 51 days ago that led to the autobanning. This wasn't just a random act of vitriol: there was something that led to the ban happening.

PG said before that his solution with fighting trolls and spammers is to make it impossible for them to see that they're being killed. That way, unlike banning, they don't make new accounts.
This article in Wired goes into a little detail about his pill regiment:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzwei...
While diving in Monterey, I came across a harbor seal who had found a float on a string, anchored so the float was about 3 feet off the bottom. (It looked like it was part of some experimental aparatus.)

She was batting it around, clearly playing with it.

(Unlike other seals we ran into that day, she was uninterested in people. She reacted to us when we swam up but soon went back to playing with her toy and ignored us.)

Animals play.
After having worked in Japan for 4 years, I have no faith in the software skills of japanese software engineers...

The universities are good at teaching engineering but do not really teach computer science properly (from what I have seen) and anyway passing without really ever learning the material is trivial. One of my friend who works for a big european software company in japan told me that even though they would like to hire japanese programmers, none of those applied passed their hiring tests.

Of course, there are a few very good software engineers in Japan but they are either self taught or studied abroad....
No, the copying is illegal as well. It's just that copying without redistribution is typically both hard to catch and not worth the copyright holder's attention.

At least, that's how it is in US law. Details at: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106
> It gets 1.75 billion hits per month. How long is this going to last?

How long has it lasted? What is going to kill it that hasn't killed it yet?
Hmm. PgSQL is rock solid as an RDBMS, but the lack of dependable replication options is quite annoying.

I'm curious to know if anyone here has actually used {londiste, pgpool2, slony} to do master/slave replication and made it work well?
I understand that this threat isn't particularly worrisome, but articles like this one remind me just how dependent I've become on gmail and how vulnerable as a result. I've now got years of info including everything from purchase receipts to personal conversations of high sentimental value. If someone were to either hack my password or simply cause my account to be disabled I'd be seriously screwed.

I'm now feeling like I need some sort of backup or other protective measure.
Looks great. Found a bug though. You've reversed the horizontal and vertical padding around the text. Adding vertical padding puts it to the left/right, when it should put it on the top/bottom.
For the button, just manipulate the 'href' attribute of the download button the same as you would update the textfield value.
You should port this project to canvas. It may be tricky to get it working in all browsers but the response time would be much faster and the server load would be reduced. I'd be willing to help with the implementation- sounds like a really cool project.
Uh yeah, the blogger is my son.
I don't think a formal system with symbolic inference is useful for describing the knowledge of any reasonably complex domain that doesn't have a mathematical model. And most of the human knowledge tends to be like this.

I'd love to be proven wrong...
"Remember, when Nintendo fails to deliver new Wii features, it won’t be because they aren’t trying. It’ll be because they’ve killed their chances from the start."

So what? They've outsold the X-box 3 to 1 and the PS3 7 to 1, and unlike either of them, they're making a significant profit rather than subsidizing the hardware. The Wii has already won its generation hands down and has generated enough profit to fund a more powerful successor.
I don't think that the average Japanese programmer is any worse than the average American or European programmer. They are all really bad. For important stuff like this, you need to find the above-average programmers. I know plenty of Japanese programmers that are above-average, so lack of supply is not the problem.

The problem with the Wii could come down to a number of things. Perhaps the best programmers don't want to work inside a huge Japanese company. (That is not the best place for creativity, and I doubt Nintendo is especially innovative in this respect.) Perhaps this lack of extensibility was a design feature -- less stuff running at one time means less bugs (and less testing), and less demand on the hardware. Both of those things make the system cheaper, which is what its target market wants. (Remember that Nintendo makes money on each Wii sold, where that was not necessarily the case for the Xbox 360.)
Whatever this guy thinks he can do, I am sure he won't be able to make humans live forever, or even "get his father back to life".

Maybe he can make a machine that lives forever, but he can't make a human to live forever. There are things that god forced in this world, and it will continue regardless if you believe in god or not. And I think that god forced humans to die, and this won't change in the future.
I had a chance to see this in action a while back. While I, and none of the people I saw this with, were not at all impressed by NKS, this project blew our minds. We watched as it pulled up and manipulated everything from Egyption fraction expansions to historic weather data to the human genome. If the author of this article is exaggerating, it's not by a whole lot. While Wolfram may not be bringing about the revolution in science he hoped to, don't forget that he and his crew made Mathematica, and are very capable of creating impressive software.
> I don't recall Google saying anything beyond "here's how many pages we indexed".

I think that's the point shimonamit is making.
I think your comment really points out the fact that Wii critics often miss the point entirely. I agree with the article, but don't see how that is going to affect its success.

Yeah, when you put it all together you have the software stack of a last-generation console, but so what? Most Wii gamers (those nebulous "casuals") are never going to use online multiplayer, download firmware upgrades, etc.; the person who I bought mine used from had no clue that it could get online. These people are not going to pass up a Wii because of these missing features; they are going to snatch it up from stores because it's got that bathroom scale you do yoga on, or that Super Mario Karts game where you turn the wiimote and it's like a steering wheel, or that tennis game we can play with our friends who, you know, we see in person. This all adds up to Nintendo having next-to-zero incentive to make the leaps and bounds their competitors are making in the firmware arena. The "everything on the DVD" approach is probably also a side-effect of the underpowered design they were aiming for at launch.

Perhap he's not trying to argue that the Wii sucks and will fail, and instead just making a purely technical argument. I'm grateful for the analysis because I don't pay much attention to consoles.
The Internet's librarian: Brewster Kahle, archivist and idealist
All-in-one I-have-no-idea
guilty of #2. I'll spend part of this afternoon putting in fsyncs().

Pseudo related: I wish I could have anonymous temporary files and associate them with a name later. Temporary name handling is just bugs waiting to happen. Even if you do it securely, how many programmers have a way of cleaning up spurious debris that might be left after an inelegant termination?
Oh, cool. I was wondering if there was a connection.
It wouldn't be the first time the world was promised something from Wolfram that went basically nowhere.