skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inventor's machines make bubble rings:

http://www.deepocean.net/deepocean/index.php?science09.php
Most printers are simple to use and do the common stuff (printing black text on white paper for non-critical documents) really, really well.

That being said, if you want the iPod experience on a printer, come to a Japanese showroom some time and look for the ones aimed at women. ("You can sell electronics to women?!" -- US tech industry)

Sleek industrial design, appealing bright colors, focused mainly on easy integration with cameras (another consumer electronics item Japan does really well) with every single sample print being "three of the girls having a fun day out" or "the loving family, perfection captured on film".

Printers are not about putting ink on paper. That's just what they do.
It's tied to the life, and devotion, of one person. He could get sick, he could die without making arrangements, he could stop being able to pay his server bills.
I don't understand what the use of anonymous functions besides lambdas would be
Why don't you make a PEP or suggest this to the python mailing list? Might be more effective than blogging for this sort of thing.
i agree, add a color picker
and maybe have all of the options on one side
Yes, I agree that all NLP must include some computational model. However, it is an interesting distinction to the reader of this article that the natural language engine is not based off of a linguistically derived grammar - like Powerset, and many of the larger, more notable NLP efforts.

This is the point the author was making. Had you not paraphrased the article to skew the intended meaning of this observation, it would have taken on a different meaning.

The actual text: "It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset... Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions"

Computing the answer for 'what does a string of natural language mean' and 'what is the intended answer of the question being asked' are 2 different things.
"Hot Standby"?

Sounds like a porno movie set in an airport terminal.
The Sumerian magician enki found it effective/useful when designing his nam-shub.
Power of Twitter - My thoughts
converting -110 degrees celsias into fahrenheit
if the "adds a bit of value" is enough for your customers or new customers to switch to the alternate product then you were missing something all along that your customers wanted that you weren't providing, so:

* Listen to your customers
* Provide top-quality support
* Constantly improve your product

you will see loyalty and a growing business through more referrals, all of which will make the other guy look like a cheap imitation.
One thing I just noticed is that these fonts do not support Japanese. In earlier threads there was mention of adding more fonts so I'm sure you'll add them eventually.
One-eyed man creates prosthetic 'surveillance' eye
3d Bone Printer
This exact post is currently being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507172
A new kind of hype.
-2? Wow. For educational purposes, could those who down voted my comment provide an explanation. I mean... the linked article was about Google and a closed account... and someone seems to remember some Facebook thing and tossed it in, presumably to discredit the subject from the start. If those are not the very definition of OT and ad-hominem, what are they? No biggie, I care little about karma, but I would like to know why?
I don't think anybody (at least to my knowledge) on this forum actively is bashing learning, or even education. After all, heck, technology is one sector where if you are not constantly learning you're dying. We live on the edge. Everything we can accomplish is based on what we can learn and then produce, especially in a startup environment.

Nor do I think people are bashing the wonderful and professional folks that are part of the collegiate system -- although some comments anecdotally move in that direction. Part of growing up is realizing that good people can be stuck in bad situations, i.e., nobody goes to work thinking "I'm sure glad I'm part of a system that is terribly awful!"

The rub of the matter is twofold: 1) Do the packages of learning and education put together by institutions actually hold together into something you might find cohesive and useful 30 years later? 2) Are the results of consuming these pre-packaged experiences worth the clearly staggering costs?

When I look at systems, whether political, computerized, social, or process, I'm looking for feedback mechanisms. How does the system self-adjust? In democratic politics, for instance, we have elections which can completely change policy and the direction of the country. Likewise in programming we have unit tests and frequent validation with users to make sure we're doing what we're supposed to.

I don't see that in higher education. When I look at the inflation-adjusted costs for a four-year degree in the U.S., for instance, it looks an awful lot to me like a system run amok. There's simply no way we're getting that much more value from a 4-year degree than we were 40 years ago. In fact, to be frank, it looks like public funding has created a system where colleges keep pushing the limits wondering where the ceiling is. If Joe Blow School of Fine Arts is charging $40K per year, surely Harvard is worth $80K, right? And whatever Harvard charges, guess what? Rich folks will pay. And because rich folks will pay, the rest of us will pony up the money so poor kids can go too. It just continues. It's a system without any feedback.

People go on at length about the socialization that happens in college, and I believe there are some valuable things there. But I spent time in the military and in college, and I got a lot of good socialization skills in the military too. Got to spend a lot of time outdoors, both learning and immediately applying knowledge in real-world situations. The Peace Corps, I imagine, is the same way.

So it's not a good or bad question. It's more of a question of "can't we get some of these same things somewhere else in a less expensive and easier-to-consume manner?" What are our options for training our future workforce? You can't have optimum performance in a system with only one option. It's a recipe for stagnation and laxness.
I actually thought this was one of the best articles I've read in a while.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know try and try again and always come up short(myself included, though the success rate has steadily improved). This can be really discouraging because after a few attempts you start to wonder if you have the right characteristics necessary to create a successful startup. It's not like basketball where if you're 5'8" you
can quickly figure out you're not going pro and can move on to other things. So in this story you've got a guy who "was broke for 10 years", made a ton of mistakes, then went on to start 2 really really successful companies.

I thought that's really inspiring and I'm glad he shared.
HTC Touch Pro 2 A Phone About Communication
In Business, we are judged by how we communcate and how we deliver on our promises. The Touch Pro2 provides the entire spectrum of powerful commincation tools to get your point across. So that you always emerge at your best. It also doesn’t hurt that the Touch Pro2 appearance radiates the level of professionalism to match your carrer amnitions.
Mike Rowe: Celebrating Work
> Mandarin is also cool

It'd be even cooler if you skipped adding it to the site, and just tattooed it on your lower back.
Rabbi overcomes fear of Nazis by playing Call of Duty
I am not a fan of the show, Dirt Jobs, but this talk makes me want to give it a second look. An incredible talk from a very unlikely source, powerful intellectual lessons from very dirty "blue-collar" work.
Thanks for the link! I checked it out and TrueKnowledge is pretty interesting!
Fair point. I guess if you had access to a botnet, you could attempt a similarly broad attack; with this you'd only need access to a popular, less scrupulous site. (porn, torrent/warez, etc. sites spring to mind)
The use is the same, it's just that the definition can now be more than one line of code. It's pretty arbitrary to say "you can have one-line anonymous functions, but for two lines, the function must have a name".

No other language does that, because it makes very little sense. This proposal will make Python behave more like every other programming language that supports anonymous functions.
OK, I admit, I was expecting it to be super crummy, but you won me over.

The Examples section should be more prominent. I just assumed you could only do glossy web 2.0 buttons at first glance. But your examples are impressive.

I think, in general, you need to a) add a color picker (as everyone else has said), and b) offer a clickable "playlist" of button settings. Take your examples, make them into recipes, and put them on the front page. I want to click the Apple-style button and have the button I'm working on turn into that style.

Make sense?

BTW - do you know that song for kids about the button factory? "Hi, my name is Joe, and I work all day at the button factory. One day, my boss came up to me and said 'Hey Joe, are you busy?' I said 'no.' He said, 'So push this button with your right foot.'" etc.
Why not rewrite large parts of our DNA from scratch leaving only certain parts to evolve?
Our DNA sequence is a product of billions of years of evolution and is incredibly hard to understand and modify.

Why not figure out what various genes do and rewrite their implementations from scratch?

Maybe this could be done with all genes unrelated to intelligence, personality, and facial features as we would like those aspects to continue to evolve.

Moreover, we could also try to use redundancy and/or error correcting codes to stop evolution of reimplemented genes.
As frustrating as it is, PostgreSQL users have always benefited from the lack of defects in the software due to hard choices made like this.
Your logic is not correct here

You would be correct if you said:

"Isn't it true that any domain that can be described a formal system is also describable by mathematics."

If I have a friend Joe who is largely predictable then in certain situations, he is describable by a mathematical system (a logical system).

His full set of actions go beyond mathematics and if Joe realized how predictable he was, he might stop being so predictable.

Describable by mathematics does not mean "essentially equivalent" to mathematics.
Sorry, can't pay attention to The Economist for science/tech writing. They have far too many misses vs. hits.
Until CD sales really stagnate, all those revenue streams bring in more money than facing reality.

Sounds like it's urgent for CD sales to really stagnate. Do a Good Thing today: convince a friend never to pay for recorded music again.

On a less snappy note, I sincerely hope that these two-faced bastards will go out of business, along with their "360 plans" and other nonsense. The world doesn't need Big Labels - with or without free recorded music. Their only survival tactic is basically to maintain a cartel-like control over distribution - this time by making big payola payouts to music sharing sites.

I don't see why anyone should feel even slightly inclined to support that kind of mindset.
I would guess the combination of heavy sarcastic tone and light information content.
I recently read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" which describes how the economics of subsidies available to farmers mean that corn and soybeans are crowding out every other crop. It was talking about Iowa mostly but I assume that the same economics apply to Nebraska.
And when Joe started doing something new, you'd just extend your formal system to include all of Joe's new behaviors. Given enough symbolic content, no matter what Joe comes up with, you can model it.

Just like we extended our formal number system into negatives, imaginaries, quaternions, etc.

Math is a terrifically abstract, self-consistent model of reality. But that's all it is: a model. Sometimes the model tells us things we didn't know before, and sometimes we have to change the model to make it work with what we're observing.
Microsoft, Cisco, and Google don't buy companies and fire the developers (in fact, Cisco wouldn't even have developers if they didn't retain the ones from all the companies they bought). It was a .NET product from a tiny company in Chicago --- and, as much as Cringely thinks he may have put them on the map, nobody was really talking about them. I don't think Apple tried to kill it.

My guess is they're just embarassed.
I tried the query and the top of the list is the parent comment. (Google seems to be paying close attention to HN.) The second was an article about Uruguay which said it was colonized from Spain in the 15th century. Google replied with any old 15th. (The article is actually wrong. It was settled in 1536.)

The parent posting is correct. Google is particularly poor at complex questions, especially if you aren't sure about the exact phrasing. I have had several queries in the past couple of weeks where I have had to spend 30 to 90 minutes trying to get the right set of terms to return the right set of documents to look at. This is particularly true if the name of the product is a common English word.
Nice! I'd suggest adding a file input or url field to supply an icon image for the buttons. Better still, grab the FamFamFam icon set and let people use those.

(and add a color picker)
What their spreadsheets don't consider is that the world could change while they're delaying.

These non-technology people don't understand the speed of change or the danger of delay. That was what hosed Terry Semel, apparently. While he was trying to buy Google and Facebook, they were both growing rapidly. He was used to buying stuff whose value didn't change fast, like movie rights. But technology changes fast.
While I readily agree that the property syntactic sugar is ambitious and troublesome, I think it's overreaching to claim that reference counting is 'worse' than C-style manual memory allocation.

Reference counting combined with autorelease pools allows for simple shared ownership of shared references, without requiring domain knowledge regarding the ownership state of referenced objects.

Autorelease pools allow for returning objects to callers without "passing ownership" -- the caller is free to ignore the return value, and ownership is held by the autorelease pool.

I can't fathom how this can be claimed to be worse than API-defined single-owner object references.
And then his fear returns when he unlocks the Nazi zombie mode...

Anyway. He makes no mention that COD:WAW's, Nazi zombie mode the objective is to survive as long as possible until the inevitable of being ripped apart by Nazi zombies.

For someone whose fear of Nazis came after the fact, I wonder what would his reaction to this mode?
I just don't understand where you would need an anonymous function with more then one line
You really think I'm going to stop paying for Matador and Merge records because some d-bag at EMI told Arrington they were eventually going to "free" their shitty American Idol music?
The above post is a reference to Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. However, I don't think it contributes very positively to the discussion, because now someone ELSE will reply, and we'll have to have a circle jerk about how great that book was.
Come on! My 6-year old daughter is a result of one-night stand/casual sex. There were none negatives consequences for anyone. Everybody is happy. Wake up!
I did a search for "Motion Plus" and it's not there. Not every improvement to a platform has to be done in firmware or system software.

This writer does not understand how Nintendo thinks. Nintendo has certain "must haves" when they design platforms. For handhelds, it's battery life. For consoles, it's ease of development. For both, the hardware has to be breakeven. That's why, even though it could, the Wii does not play DVD discs. (The licensing costs to the DVD Forum would be too high.)

Because of these restrictions, Nintendo has forced themselves into add-ons to upgrade platforms. Rumble came to consoles with the Rumble Pak. 3D came with the FX Chip in StarFox. For the Wii, it's Motion Plus.

Yes, Nintendo's approach to designing its hardware restricts the company for radically altering the box. But Nintendo has always understood that games come first - the N64 controller was designed around Super Mario 64. It's a radically different development paradigm than Sony or Microsoft engage in (and one which this author prefers).
This problem isnt limited only to printers. In my opinion it is also present when buying internal PC components.

For example how do you choose which graphics card to buy? The model number / name of the product isnt gonna help you at all. So you would think that the specifications would help you compare products. They do, but only to some extent. For example is a 4 core processor at 2Ghz better than a 2 core at 4Ghz? And then sometimes the specs even "lie". For example graphics card RAM is cheap so companies like adding a lot of it to their products. It has come to the point where a 8600 nVidia card I saw had 1 gig of RAM, where Im pretty sure that it can only use half of that.

So all we are left with are benchmarks... which also have their downsides.

More: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7xiub/buying_a_g...
Both Matador and Merge are part of the "Alternative Distribution Alliance" - http://www.ada-music.com/ - which is owned by Warner Music.
Cool. I'm guessing you liked the book? I picked up a copy just yesterday, on the off chance that it would tie in with some of my other historical interests. Does it mention the Fuggers?

At any rate, there is a better way to support the people who do work like this, although the mechanism is peripheral and counterintuitive. A parallel example might be to say that stock markets are important innovations in the field of public health, because they fund corporations that can aggregate and compartmentalize the risk of new drug discovery.

So without beating any farther around the bush: prediction markets (like Intrade) could monetize huge chunks of information that are currently only interesting to theoreticians, if they were capitalized at the level of today's stock or commodities markets.

If speculators were laying billion-dollar bets on, say, whether the US would invade Iraq in 2002 [1], the opinions of prominent historians and political scientists who study the Gulf region would be much more explicitly in demand. Such people would still have to publish to get prominent (so that the benefits of an open academic environment would still accrue to the public), and there would be additional pressure to produce falsifiable predictions instead of... whatever it is that gets produced now.

Here's a short intro for people who don't like math, signed by a veritable Who's Who of economics and public policy:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/PromisePredMkt.pdf

Here's a more technical introduction by the guy who came up with the idea. (He focuses on maximizing GDP instead of secondary benefits):

http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf

[1] It ought to be obvious why arbitrageurs would want to do this. I picked an old and inflammatory example to emphasize how many current political disagreements are at root questions of fact, about which people ought to be able to agree eventually...
This is really nicely done. I like it a lot. Branding is important; make a "Buttons by DaButtonFactory.com" button that people can use.

Others have already mentioned a colorwheel. Adding that would help usability. Unless I've been doing colors recently, I don't know #f00 from #0f0.

Even a simple popup-grid of colors, something like what makebutton.com has for color selection would help here.

Minor bugs I came across:

Undo does not work for swapping the two background colors.

If I hammer the 'Size +' (or any other) button, I get rate limited. I didn't look at the code, is there a query for every button press when I go from 200 -> 250 for the width?

The error message for non-integers could be better:
Value "11.2" invalid for option text-size (number between 0 and 2000 expected).
Actually, the error messages could be better all around, but it isn't a huge deal.

West/East only shadows don't work:
Value "nonew" invalid for option shadow-orient (possible values: "n", "s", "e", "w", "ne", "no", "so", "se").

The top-left text for "Da Button Factory" should be an actual link. (Or just clear the button settings back to the default, or it could even be the 'randomize' link that others have asked for.)
This would be slightly more impressive if it actually had a... demo.
Is Google Rewiring Our Brains? Yes. fMRI studies of websearch in the Internet savvy.
it's not suitable for larger clusters of machines since communication costs grow quadratically.

Quadratically? Why?
But how would this new syntax work when you want to pass two or more anonymous functions to another function? Or when the anonymous function is not the last argument?

Having anonymous functions only for the situation where you are passing exactly one of them to another function and it is the last argument is much more arbitrary than the current style of always temporarily binding functions to names.
Yeah, hmm...looking back at my comment I am not quite sure what I was getting at. Wishful thinking is probably the culprit; I like learning languages, and I think it would be awesome to learn one day to communicate intelligently with another species.
http://camorra.org/swann/?p=230
And I hope it does change. Taking a cue from BSG, "It's not enough just to survive, one has to be worthy of survival." Some industries are blatantly not worthy of survival. I will not shed a tear when the last major record label shuts down.
Ditto on that. The two uses of with have completely different meanings. The was an interesting discussion of the use of 'there' as a keyword that ferreted out a lot of issues: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_threa...

Sorry about the url. Tinyurl couldnt digest it. :-)

I think 'there' could have good traction, but nobody has made a PEP (see python.org). If a proposal doesnt have a champion, it isn't going anywhere.
Can you give an example of a gene you think is poorly implemented? Because I think God did a pretty good job when he designed us 6000 years ago. Sure, maybe the code would have been a little better if he had spent more than a day on it, and it's possible that massive inbreeding (due to the fact that we are all descended from 2 people) has messed things up a bit, but on the whole, I'm happy with our existing genetic code base. And really, if you want to change it, you're second guessing god, and He's been around a long time. So that doesn't seem like such a good idea.
> Do a Good Thing today: convince a friend never to pay for recorded music again.

If you do that, how do you plan on showing support for artists whose works you enjoy?
The usage case is the same as for a named function of more than one line.
Very nice. A colour picker would be a very good idea. Perhaps display two buttons, one for the ordinary button, as you are doing now, and one for a selected version.

If you are feeling brave maybe animated buttons which cycle several lines of text.

Not sure about the css version though. Do you really want all these people hitting your server?
Saving; no 's'.
From the FAQ: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/creative/bonobo-conspiracy.php#stri...
Meditation Driven Development
This style takes care of 90 or 99% of the cases. If you have to pass 2 or more functions, revert to using named functions. The 'there' proposal that I mentioned before allows for arbitrary placement of the anonymous function, IIRC. If not, usage patterns will adjust to the new idiom.
If you want to catch up with an ex-pat Aussie for a beer or two while you're here, just drop me a line.