skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All I know is is that Git i supereasy to use for a beginner for 1-man-projects if you get the right help or tutorial.
Preferrably start a repo at github and you will be waled through how to create a repo(not that there is much to it).

git init
git add .
git commit -m "blah"
git push origin master

git branch name
git checkout

easy-peasy
This reminds me of the Livescribe smartpens. As someone in this thread already said... these things really make me feel like I am living in the future.
For instance, here's a seminal paper predicting which category (faces, place, object) was going to be recalled from studied pictures and a second or two before it was actually recalled:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/310/5756/1963.pdf?maxt...

Still, that's a big difference from predicting (or mindreading) the particular item.

And here's a good review of that and similar work:

http://polyn.com/struct/NormEtal06_TICS.pdf
They've established the basic principle. All it needs now is refinement.

This "basic principle" is no different when they do other MRIs that can detect patterns in brain activity (specific to one individual). The computers aren't doing any interpretation of brain activity here, just recognizing what it has been preprogrammed to to recognize.

What you're proposing is that we build a recognition database of every single brain pattern and its correlating image. Damn, what kind of computer does that remind you of? Oh yea - the human brain!

Not only that, but each individual has unique brain patterns, so this "computer" would have to be able to interpret a wide variety of signals. We're so far off from understanding the brain that this isn't happening, ever.
I agree with your comments about Sanford, but as for "the New York Tech Meetup is THE event for startups" part, I'm not so sure.

Other than delicious (which was presented to a much smaller group, when the tech meetup was more hacker-oriented and far less marketing/gong show glitz style like it is now) what successes have come from startups who've demoed there?
Google and these days StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/)
MIT computer scientists developed this web tool to manage information
well they aren't an XXX porn site. More of a modeling site that allows nudity.
A fried of mine is into the alternative sexscene (SM stuff...) and runs a club and a blog. Through him I hear a bit about the scene and meet some of the people. One thing I have noticed is that there is plenty of money in porn, and most of it is in specialities. The reason for this is that there is an abundance of mainstream porn available for free pretty much wherever you look, but if you're into something weird it is much harder to find, and thus there's a paying market for it. I heard the numbers for a site that does a weekly liveshow with some pretty serious SM and they are making very serious money.

I've also noticed that some of the consumers of the more specialised porn and upscale swingerclubs are wealthy individuals in their 40's and 50's. Naturally these people have a very open view on pornography and adult-oriented startups. If you try networking a bit in the upscale swingerclubs in the big cities and/or the well-run specialised sites you might find an investor. These people are mostly very open and very nice. Probably because they, like the gay community, are an outcast niche that has to constantly defend their sexuality.
Web 2.0 entrepreneur cashes out just in time
When I hit a wall, I usually do something like this:

1. Google
2. Stare at ceiling.
3. Do something unrelated, like read HN, while my subconscious ruminates.
4. Try again.

I like to figure it out without bugging other people, unless it's something stupid and I know a guy who knows the answer.
I didn't get through the whole article, but "Google is building a new secret weapon that has more to do with the brain than search."? Google published their MapReduce paper in 2004... http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
AIKO android shown at computer science faire
I knew you'd say that.
So far from looking at my Mint stats after putting the site up here 5 hours ago, I've gotten only 50 uniques, 3 new user accounts, but only 1 person actually using the app through the AIR install.

That looks like a 2% conversion to user rate, with a 66% falloff rate between signing up and using the service.

Dismal!

To fix this, I'm thinking I'll try to simplify so the user only has to download the app. The app will ask for user/pass, or will generate a unique APP id from the server, which the user can use to subscribe to flash card sets.

This is the path of least resistance for the user, but I'm worried about problems with this approach. Anyone?
Scaling is hard!
Ask HN: Good sequel to "Making Silicon Valley"?
"The High-Res Society" mentions Lecuyer's book "Making Silicon Valley". It's a great read and it is amazing to see how the region bootstrapped itself and how the microprocessor evolved. Nonetheless, it only covers the period from 1930 to 1970 (gets to the release of the Intel 8008, but no further). Is there a good book to continue the history and the rise of personal computing?
Steve Chen (from YouTube), Aber Whitcomb (from MySpace), Jim Young (from HotOrNot), and Ashwin Navin(Bittorrent) are actually doing something like that right now.

http://www.ashwinnavin.org/2008/11/starting-new-gig.html
I think there was an experiment with a cat where they actually generated an image from what fell on the cat's retina.

The only study I've ever seen on this has been based on simply grabbing the image off the reflection of the eye. I can't imagine this actually involved hooking up a cat's visual cortex to some sort of interface, the sheer processing power required for that sort of visual information processing is unfathomable.

If not, link me!
I really doubt he does understand it. That's a terrible explanation of MapReduce, and then makes it sound like it's secret Google tech that will take over the world-- parallel computing isn't new, and even MapReduce itself has an open source clone now. It's really surprising to find an article like that on HBR.
Subversion, in my experience, is worth the effort of switching from cvs. It's a breeze to set up, and it's a lot cleaner than cvs.
Agreed, and I now appreciate the determination it took to complete the degree considering the spectacular number of failed courses on my academic transcript. It was a humbling experience, and for someone of my hubris at the time, really the only way I could have learnt persistence and followthrough.
Why would you spend a lot of time writing secure code for a news recommendation site?
I'm eager to see what people here have to say about this poll, but it's so badly constructed that I'm not hopeful about the quality of the results. I've thought about posting a similar poll, but it would be self-serving.
It just feels like the title is misleading for the purpose of getting clicks.
Still, "no adult stuff" is pretty much the rule in Silicon Valley.
They are using voxels from visual areas V1, V2, and V4. These are levels in the visual regions of the cortex. What you call "thinking", would correlate with the IT (infero-temporal cortex) and the PFC (pre-frontal).

This, while not directly relevant, might be helpful: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/What_and_where_pathways

Also, they are using fMRI activations, which means they don't record from neurons directly, but look at cerebral blood flow (which is linked to neuronal activation; the more the neuron does, the more oxygen it needs).
That is why I have placed that introduction.

If this news recommendation site is being constantly hacked to the point in which it has more malware than a porn site, then the developer should consider making it more secure. Otherwise users would not visit it anymore, unless the owner starts to place some hot picures to serve together with the exploits.
Financial realities of the iTunes App Store
Great quote.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dJMpQagbz_gC&pg=PA31...

The pre and postamble to that quote is particularly apropos:

I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend...was unbearable to me. Thinking for its own sake, like music!
I do find that If I do bug people and verbalize the problem (same as in a forum) it helps me to find a solution.
And caffeine. :]
Articles like this just encourage pointy-haired bosses who know just enough to dangerous and annoying.

"We're shifting over to a MapReduce-based architecture, just like Google! Google's website is only an interface to a larger architecture. It all ties in to cloud computing and SOA and..."
stop lying to yourselves. You're in it to make money, so if you have an idea that think will change porn, why not jump in head first?
Why do you think it is badly constructed?
This seems to wholly miss the point of YC, associating it with a sweatshop style mentality: live for work, etc. But, YC has many, many, companies, possibly a majority, that would not fit into a "Hotel de Startup" model.

It wouldn't have fit my company, for example. We have baggage...family, dog, lives outside of our company, etc. I kinda doubt several of the most successful YC companies would have signed on at all for such an intense sort of experience.

Beyond the basic expenses of buying a hotel in the valley (I think the cost is being underestimated, even in this economic climate), the expenses of operating it are going to be very high, even without staffing it as a hotel. It's obviously a mandatory expense, and everyone needs somewhere to live, but you're not going to save a huge amount of money over individuals placing themselves in their own apartment or house. And, more importantly you're going to self-select out of being able to fund any company that doesn't exactly fit the stereotype: Fresh out of college, no family, not from the area and thus not already settled somewhere in the valley, not needing to have a presence outside of the valley for business reasons, etc.

This is one of those things that sounds cool, but I think it takes the simple, and obviously successful, kernel of YC and adds a non-essential boondoggle that doesn't actually improve on the model.

I believe the solution to the "what happens after" shouldn't be "make sure the founders never have to think about after by infantilizing them and making sure they never have to think about necessities", but instead should be "make sure the founders are well-prepared for after". After is going to come eventually, if the company is to be a success.
Ask HN: Closest thing to Firebug for IE?
What's the best Firebug-style tool that runs in IE? I'm using "IE Web Developer", which is grotesquely bad. There must be something out there that makes testing in IE bearable (preferably IE6 and up).
Re: "a clever idea that could change the porn industry"

I think a lot of consumers of porn are interested in short clips (5-10 min) of consistently high quality. This is a niche that isn't well served yet. YouPorn and the like is a grab-bag of short clips -- You can rummage around and find good content, but isn't a place where you can just go, press a button, and know you'll get something with good content, tailored to your tastes, with high quality sound and video, instantly the first time. An application that presented tailored "channels" as a TiVo-like application would stand to make a lot of money.

Studios and other porn content producers would like this if it could guarantee them a payment for their content, provide data on the viewing habits of users, and add user interfaces so that a consumer could click a button to buy a DVD or other product.
Casual MMOs get 10-25% of users to pay
I agree that is cheap to fund grad school. I lived for 4 years with about $15k/year. But it is not fun to make this amount of money.
.:: Be Your Own Boss ::.
Your World View Doesn't Compute: A program for sorting out political contradictions
To get past the creepiness aspect, let's say that you can only view what someone else is seeing. That's still pretty useful.

Imagine that you make this high enough resolution that it's like watching TV, and then small enough that it'll fit in a helmet.

Then, you could record what someone is seeing and hearing, without having a cameraman around. It would be a cool way to, for example, watch a football play from the eyes of the quarterback. It might be a very interesting way to make movies.
It's too detailed and it has an agenda.
Some people love their work. Work is as interesting to them as any hobby they might have. I count myself among those who love their work. My boss has a hard time getting me to take my vacation time. Anything more than 4 days away from work and I start to get fidgety. Sure, I have my other hobbies, but work is my favorite.
Just googled this: http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=395 don't know if it is the same experiment I read about, and no time for more googling ;-)
That's nice. In reality, the security quality of a typical web application is quite low, especially compared to F500 enterprise standards --- few would survive a pentest. And yet most of them are not hacked in that manner.

Indie developers need to get better at writing software that is secure by default, but they do not need the whole process-driven juggernaut that Microsoft runs internally with things like SWI.

So, I asked because it sounded strange to me that a two-person news-recommendation startup would be spending serious time on security, as opposed to figuring out ways to make money on their property.
Map Reduce is hardly secret and it's not like other people such as Yahoo!, Facebook and others aren't using it. Google might have a head start but that's about it.

I wonder how long that head start will last with a collaborative Open Source project backed by some other big players (that would be Hadoop).
The article states that the actual images shown during the second phase were different than the "training" images that the computer showed to subject and used to "learn".
I think he must have heard the term "Artificial Neural Network" and made some hasty inference that it means something having to do with the brain.

On a side, is it just me or has HBR putting out more link bait in the past couple of weeks?
errrh why is this on hacker-news? does anyone here not know what mapreduce is?

i got really excited when i was about to find out abt googles secret sauce.. sigh
Have you considered that it's the lack of challenge and the fact you aren't actually working much that's the issue? Have you tried to embrace a project that involved a skill set that you didn't have?

On the issue of starting your own business:

There's a reason entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship: there is risk involved. It may work, or it may not. You may build something people want and sell it, cashing out - or you may fail or may only be able to get it into a state where it brings profit - but not into a state where you can walk away from it, wealthy. You can then move on and do something else (with higher chance of success) but now that's eight years of working longer hours vs. four and so on.

That's not to say you shouldn't start a business (I certainly want to start my own at one point or another), you just can't hope that it will magically solve your problems.

I've been reading Thoreau's Walden, where he mentions a Native American basket salesman who would argue when selling his baskets: "if you don't buy my basket, my people will starve"; Thoreau then argued that it isn't "how to better sell a basket" that the salesman should worry about but how to avoid relying on selling baskets not to starve.

Likewise, instead of thinking "how can I generate passive income for myself so I don't have to work" start thinking "how can I structure my work/life that I don't need a passive income to be happy and productive" (it could be reducing your living standards down to the basics where only consulting/part-time work is needed, it could be finding an area in which you're more excited to work - and if you can't find a job in that area, create one for yourself).
distributed anything is usually hard for people to wrap their heads around the first time.

I don't think that's necessarily so. Have you ever tried to get an office full of people to collaboratively author a Word document? What's their instinctive behavior? They all grab copies. Then each of them hacks away on their copies. Sometimes two or three of them email their hacked copies to each other and mash them up, using cut and paste. Eventually some poor SOB has to get everyone to email over their individual versions so he can merge them. Hopefully they've all been using Track Changes (which is, in a sense, a poor man's facsimile of a single-document DVCS!); otherwise it's an even bigger clusterfuck.

That's a distributed model. Ever since the invention of photocopiers and email attachments, people have had to develop a very good understanding of how that model works, and how it fails.

It's tempting to think that the way to sort this out is to centralize it. But in my experience, centralized document-management systems are not that intuitive, which drives people to secretly work around them. ("Why can't I save my changed document on the shared drive? Oh, no, Joe checked it out and then went on eight-week vacation! I'll just stash my edited version on my local drive and distribute it via email." Or, "I created an alternate version of the doc, but I don't dare upload it to the shared drive because I might make another mistake and overwrite the official version. That always makes the admin really mad. So here it is on this USB stick.")

I think the most confusing aspects of version control are the navigation of history (just look at the wacky extreme that Apple' Time Machine designers went to in order to make it very obvious that you're looking backwards in history), and merging, particularly merge conflicts. But those aren't special features of DVCS; they're tricky no matter which VCS you use.
When Your Mind Disowns a Limb
#4

This site comes to mind... http://www.privateislandsonline.com/

Just make sure theres no local pirates!
Typical order:

1. Google
2. Whiteboard
3. Flatmates
#8 mentions Coinstar as recession proof because people cash in their old coins.

The age of coins used in a purchase might be a useful economic indicator.

I always look through my transaction change for old pennies and nickles. Starting in October I started getting more wheat-back pennies, I speculate from people emptying change jars that haven't been touched in decades.
Balanced updates:

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/aust...

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/aust...
That is because english is not my native language and I didn't know how to explain it better.
i actually thought about creating a proxy server that monitors access to sites and reduces access to say the top 25 sites, to times during lunchtime etc. i.e parental filters for grown ups.

where the idea falls down is, that for the target audience here, rather than do the work they were supposed to be doing, they would spend the time to get around the proxy server.. :/
Honestly I couldn't tell you for successes of startups who have presented there.

I think Sanford would do more to bring the meetup back to a hacker type event, than the other candidates. Sanford is an engineer.

So far as hacker event in NYC go, the best that I have found is lispnyc.org , by far the brightest room I have ever been in.
"... Why web hosting businesses work ..."

Because "anyone can do it" and because "it has a business model" means it becomes a cut-throat commodity business. Now if re-define this and pick other types of processes that you can you can host, you might be able to apply the ideas of hosting in new/novel areas.
On one hand, this should be similar to finding investors in any industry: Look at work that you admire. Figure out who built and funded it. Figure out how to get into their social circle -- start where you can, and work your way to the right people by earning respect. And make sure you live in the right town (Van Nuys?) so you can be around the critical mass of people.

On the other hand, porn is special. The heroes of porn don't get famous for being smart or having great blogs. You probably have to wade through a lot of seedy people and organizations to find people whom you consider like-minded. You might never find them; perhaps you're better off working on a new-to-porn investor.
There are so many dirty connotations in this thread. I don't even know where to start.
Feel free to post your own Poll.

If you do, I can ask the moderator to delete this one.
I guess I also get pretty bored with jobs after a year or two. It's funny, though, I have been running this business for quite a bit longer than that, and it's not boring. I think the boring parts of the dayjob are the stupid that I can't change. I mean, sure, there is stupid at my company, too- sometimes a lot of stupid. but it's my stupid, and I'm allowed to figure out how to fix it.

I think most of us are working towards a point where we can choose what we spend our time on. Me, I'm currently working a full-time contract gig for the money, and then coming home, working on my book and my hosting company. The book is winding down, and the hosting company, well, I might not be an awesome manager, but I do seem to be pretty good at finding and hiring underemployed people who turn out to be quite good. (as confirmed by the salaries they command when they leave my company.) so I do have good help.

Obviously, I'm not to the point where I have less 'forced work' - in fact, I'm doing the opposite. Right now, I'm working way more hours than would provide maximum effectiveness (I think it's been more than a month since I've had a week with less than 80 hours.) I keep my productivity from going negative by switching tasks often and outsourcing many things normal people do themselves (for example, I pay someone to clean out my house once a week. It costs me $15/hr, and she's much faster than I am. Being as I bill out north of $70/hr even in my current state, it's a good deal) but it's still completely unsustainable, and there's one guy working for me that I lean on way too much. If he quits before I expect him to (usually people stick with me for around a year) I am so fucked.

I don't see these 80 hour weeks as a good thing; they are, in fact, really stupid. I'd almost certainly get more done if I could cut it down to 60. But the book needs to get out soon... the publisher is getting antsy, and already Xen has changed so much we have to rewrite parts. And the hosting company, well, that's kindof the point here. that's why I'm putting up with this other crap, so I can't put it on hold.

I figure after the book is out (assuming the hosting company keeps improving as it has been) I'll be able to cut my consulting hours, relying on the credibility of being published to reduce some of the marketing effort.

If I had to do it over again, I would have set things up so that I could support myself on a part time job, and grown the hosting company more slowly, so it could also be supported by that part-time job.

But I do find work, even work for other people to be pretty interesting for the first 6months or a year. This actually works out pretty well for me as a contractor. I mean, if you want someone for longer than six or twelve months, you shouldn't be using contractors anyhow, so nobody get's bent out of shape if I want to leave around that time.

If I didn't have the entrepreneurial bug, I'd probably work as a contractor for three to six months out of the year, and read (or write) the rest of the time. Especially if you spent your working time in the bay area and your relaxing time somewhere cheaper, you could live pretty nicely that way.