skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the article:

Scientists extract images directly from brain

<image>
"Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

For now, the system is only able to reproduce simple black-and-white images. But Dr. Kang Cheng, a researcher from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, suggests that improving the measurement accuracy will make it possible to reproduce images in color.

“These results are a breakthrough in terms of understanding brain activity,” says Dr. Cheng. “In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy.”

The researchers suggest a future version of this technology could be applied in the fields of art and design — particularly if it becomes possible to quickly and accurately access images existing inside an artist’s head. The technology might also lead to new treatments for conditions such as psychiatric disorders involving hallucinations, by providing doctors a direct window into the mind of the patient.

ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”

The research results appear in the December 11 issue of US science journal Neuron."
No worries. There's no clear cut reason for that limitation, it's just there.
Funding an "Adult Oriented" start-up?
No we're not making dirty movies, but, we've created a neat way to syndicate them.

The problem is, we haven't really liked (or felt that we could trust) any of the investors that we've spoken to thus far.

FOSS, CC, Design. These concepts seem foreign to many that we have spoken to.

We would rather not take money from a traditional pornography company or an adult investment firm such as AdultVest. We see ourselves as technologists, artists, and writers who happen to have a clever idea that could change the porn industry.

We don't want put ourselves into a position where we're forced to promote content that we find unseemly.

Our mantra is: "Don't be seedy." And, we aren't.

Mixing money and sex has always been a recipe for disaster. We believe that we can walk that line, but, we want to hedge our bets by finding like minded investors.

How do you go about finding respectable investors for an "adult oriented" start-up?
Where is the new YScraper these days? (I thought the original one evicted YCers after a justin.tv incident.)
Because diet and exercise are two of the most obvious ways you can control or "hack" your body. Therefore, they are interesting and voted up.

Though I don't think this particular article has anything to do with diet. It's just an interesting, counterintuitive discovery. I would have thought that exercise in general made you hungrier, but apparently it doesn't. See? That's interesting.

To your last point. I'm from California. We don't.
Some grad school is.

But yeah I couldn't get those.
They took the images from the brain, but they might not have gotten it from the mind - it may have come for circuitry associated with the eyes, rather that the circuity associated with thinking.

I would like to see if they could read images if a person just thought about them, rather than actually saw them.
I can think of a lot of negative implications if this technology progresses the way they think it will. Can you imagine how excited governments will be about being able to "read the terrorists' minds" with this new toy?

Are there any good implications? The "get images directly from the artists brain" doesn't sound too exciting to me, compared to the potential for 1984 style chicanery.
Estimated to be 4-5 million people, and the city is keeping bars open until 5am.
Read the facts, again?
I'd guess on average grad school funding (in EE/CS) is still easier to get than making money from a startup. How hard did you really try?
It would have been an MBA or med school, which don't traditionally offer the programs you mentioned.
Works just fine for me, but http://www.pinktentacle.com.nyud.net/2008/12/scientists-extr... should work
But kids can be a hobby too
Facebook adds Washington Post CEO to board
http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2808%2900958-... is the abstract. Some anonymous soul will probably Scribd the paper at some point in the future also.
Is there also a voice recognition service this can be tied into?
Even in Hard Times, Japanese Companies Still Invest in Themselves
Devising the Perfect Coding Assistant
Bad idea? Don't want to install? Website doesn't get the idea across? Help me out here! :D
FT: PHP Developer/Programmer for web-based medical application. (hayward / castro valley)
He's poking fun at all the "X ways to Y" posts.
This is both awesome and creepy. That makes it aweseepy or creepsome.
I've been reading PG's stuff since way before YCombinator existed, and that was my initial analysis of YCombinator.

First of all, my belief was that PG graduated from five different colleges around the world because he liked being around smart young people, and to continue to be in a college-like atmosphere of optimistic young people without going to school in the U.S. and Europe for yet another degree, he started YCombinator, where he convinces smart young people to come to him, which is a much more efficient way of being around smart young people.

Another way I've thought about it was that PG was like a manager of boy bands of 2-4 young people, who try to entertain fellow college men instead of young girls (and later on, the general population, once their "act"/app caught on). These bands couldn't always sing, but they used technology to help them get a marketable product out, similar to how startups make up for their inexperience by using frameworks and web services to make their product improve, so they could continue to release "new records" regularly.

Over time, I've found that both the number of startups YCombinator has launched and the addition of the jobs page to news.ycombinator has shown that PG is actually not like a manager of boy bands, because the companies hire their own people and PG does not micromanage every decision, from what I understand. Also, I've noticed that media articles now describe these companies as their own beings, without always mentioning that these companies are part of YCombinator, something that is different from when YCombinator first started.
And the MBA/med schools are also more expensive
Are there places like this today? How do I join such a place?
Failing any of those, just relentlessly promote your product ;-)

I kid, I kid...
Great pr/bizdev move on the part of the creators (airbedandbreakfast.com)
Reason given for mostly static or unimportant to be slightly out-of-date content. Plus incremental content. No cookie.
You can interpret formal process as systematic process.

The logic for each answer is this:

Answer 2. If you claim to care about security, you should understand the security implications of what you are doing and you are an expert. You can take care of it on your own.

A 1. If you care about security and you aren't an expert, then you don't really understand all security implications of what you are doing and should be basing your judgment on the recommendations of those that do using a systematic process created by experts. You don't need to hire a consultant to do it. You can just buy a few books or read it for free in the Internet.

A 3. If you care about secure software but aren't an expert nor use a systematic process created by experts, then you aren't checking all security implications of what you are doing, but instead checking only for a few generally know flaws.

A 4, 5, 6. You don't understand the security implications of what you are doing and refuses to take the recommendations of those that do.
Yeah. Hacker News discussions are great.

I agree entirely with your definition of art. I'm not certain about how sustainable porn is as an artistic medium, though. Money has to come from somewhere. And the problem is, most people who would appreciate it as a medium would be people less desperate for porn. I don't know if more artistic porn filmers would be able to sustain their craft.
About time. Emacs is one of the few OSes that's still single core...
I'd say the bigger "risk" for YC is that the competition to get in becomes so fierce that building a profitable company would seem easier by comparison.
It would have been lame if they had gotten the information from the neurons in the retina, but the article says they took the readings from the cerebral visual cortex. I'm pretty sure that it's used both for processing vision and thinking about images.
Google's Secret Weapon: MapReduce
Why is the data not useful? If any content comes from Google, I suppose the Google cookie comes with it. And then you have a history of pages a user visits. Doesn't Yahoo do the same (only with a Yahoo cookie)?
Exactly. The visual system produces a very stable activation pattern, relative to other senses and multidimensional objects. The noise inherent in those other systems is probably the best protection of our inner privacy. There simply isn't a code to be read because there's little systematicity from one moment, or person, to the next. The visual system is as good as it gets and even then only when you're looking at a prescribed object.

In other words, ignore the PR about downloading thoughts and dreams. We can decode some stuff from fMRI activity patterns but we're soon swamped by noise, even when using machine learning techniques. The data just isn't there. It's like trying to predict the weather two weeks from now. The system is inherently noisy.
They thought this in the 90s too. I remember acres of unused colo space when the bubble burst.
Interesting stuff, but I think a far cry from the reading people's dreams they believe is possible in the future.

Why? They've established the basic principle. All it needs now is refinement. Have you ever seen a picture of the first transistor?
This Could Be HUGE Celebrates MofM - 1,690.30% growth
ThisCouldBeHUGE.com celebrates month over month growth of 1,690.30%
Not thinking about. That far back is a reconstruction of the data compression that happens in the retina. Attention can shift activation there slightly, but there's little abstraction from the retinal image.
Not to shabby of a stat, they deserved a mention.
Puppy Cam: Viewed 15 Million Times, For 773 Years
But at the same time you may not have appreciated it as much. Of course that doesn't change how you feel but it just comes to show that almost everything has both a cost and a benefit.
10 Tips for Launching Your Startup
Don't be scared. If you're ever placed in an fMRI with scenes of the crime, just start recalling your childhood home or Snow White. And for godsakes don't start remembering the crime.
Its time to elect a new organizer for the New York Tech Meetup, I'm supporting Sanford
What about a tip to wait a year so you can raise money when the economy rebounds?
I'm not sure this generalization applies to even a significant portion of either designers or programmers. As a human who uses tools, I want my tools to be reliable first and foremost, but since 100% reliable is a fantasy, it is always wise to be both on the look out for more reliable tools _and_ to know the tools you to use constantly intimately, inside and out, so you are more productive and less surprised by gotchas that the tools have. A tool that fails unpredictably or in a way that can't be fixed is a useless tool. You must know the limitations of your tools, to not know the limitations is to be unable to recognize when something better comes along. Not exploring new options and not being well versed with your current tools, or just doing one or the other, is wearing blinders.
Actually, the suggestion came from authentic on the IRC channel:

[15:09] < authentic> for HN i would recommend a title of "A List of 1 Way to Get Rich in the Construction Industry (iPhone)"

I thought it was a brilliant title for submitting it to HN, and even considered changing the title of it to this article altogether, on the blog itself. However, I decided to keep the original title on the blog and use this title for submitting to HN. As one of the authors of the post, I feel I can allow myself the artistic freedom to pick a suitable title for submitting the article to HN. In practice, it seems the title definitely did what it was supposed to do, so I consider it a good move.

Oh, and it is related. I certainly feel that building out the tool mentioned in the article could provide a profitable business to someone. At the moment, we're busy with another part of the construction pie, but if no one else does it within a couple of years, we'll probably have a look at it ourselves. Hence the "way to get rich" part of things. The "List of 1 way" part if obviously poking some fun...
Neat idea, but I think the execution needs some work. You have definitely done something cool here, but take it a step further. I haven't checked it out too much but I imagine you can make your own packs as well?
Pros and Cons of Building a Site around FBConnect
It works on college campuses, why not elsewhere? Dorms largely eliminate the apartment-hunting roadblock and provide very close contact with (theoretically) interesting people.

I lived off campus for the last two years of college, and it made the experience suck a lot more.

This is the reason why I gave my upvote, nothing about a linkbait title or talk about VCs.
Disclaimer, this is probably spam, or might be flagged as such. If the moderators feel that it is not in keeping with hacker news, take it off. Now let me state my case.

In New York City, the New York Tech Meetup is THE event for startups. Presenting at the meetup is a big deal in the growth of any New York based startup. I know that there are a lot of members here from New York

I moved to New York because of the New York Tech Meetup and Sanford. Detailed in this post http://paddymullen.com/2008/11/08/how-i-moved-to-new-york-ci... .

Sanford gets tech and people. If other people are voting, or voting differently I'd be interested to hear the hacker news opinion on candidates.

Sorry if this is spammy or off topic
Subversion isn't even better than CVS across the board: it's slower, wastes a lot of space, is way less stable, and doesn't have independent implementations.
You seem to have some unrealistic expectations about the pornography industry.
Howto Reduce Costs of Expensive National Instruments Test Systems
I wish there were a good way to try out all these ideas. I've considered the idea of wikiable applications, perhaps on top of a common database, that might be a possibility.
In the world we live today, the cost is considered one of the most important characteristics of a product. No wonder then, keeping production costs down is an important part of the manufacturing of a product. This concept has also been extended over the development costs. In many cases, especially for projects which pioneer a specific filed of electronics, the development costs represent a significant part of the final price of a product. Keeping them down would obviously make the managers happy and win a pat on the back for the engineers (stop hoping for a pay raise!)
When this kind of technology replaces keyboards, mice, and touch screens, do you think that mainstream audiences might begin to appreciate the value in knowing exactly what the software on your personal devices does, and which master that software serves?

I would never put so much as my private SSH keys on a closed source machine that pulls updates in the background or a device on which a third party is root (iPhone, G1). I certainly can't imagine plugging my brain into any such creature.
Very insightful,well balanced, beautify written and entertaining.
Here's an idea. Instead of throwing around "Subversion sux", "Git is the new hotness", how about we all just use what works for us and the projects we're working on.
Timing Is Everything For Funding Success
A product of by-gone years.

If I recall correctly, some of these companies subsidize research at universities. I think your best bet would be to find an institute that's doing stuff you like, or has faculty you want to be around, and get associated with them.
I'm a native Washingtonian, and I'm totally going to go if it's remotely possible for me to be in DC.

Mom's apartment
* 0.6mi from National Mall
* Couch in living room
* Internet available
Vague and misleading at best. If the author does actually understand MapReduce, he's taking the brain analogy a bit too far here.
For open source, there is hadoop:

http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/mapred_tutorial.h...
I wish that I can actually read all the stories in HN tomorrow instead of now.
I don't think the respectable investors would want to sully their reputation by funding porn.
"Well, I accepted the Bell offer - in fact I would have worked at Bell for nothing, but I didn't mind getting paid for what was for me a dream come true."

This is the kind of company I want to create...someday in the future, I hope.
Not quite true. Zivity.
I don't think it is reading pictures from the brain at all. The way I understand it, it can only recognised pictures the computer has learned before.

As an analogy, imagine your eye lid twitches every time somebody mentions George Bush. The computer would then learn that when your eye lid twitches, you are thinking about George Bush. Not very exciting imo.

I think there was an experiment with a cat where they actually generated an image from what fell on the cat's retina. THAT was scary to me.
You, sir, are an Oxygen Thief.
"Yes, the evils will happen - but why bother worrying about them too much?"

Because the next evil might just be the one that kills you.
Not true. We just don't want to lie down with the wrong dogs :).
Steve Chu: Consider the Refrigerator
That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

There are going to be riots and the capital (and capitol) will be burned to the ground.

On second thought, that's maybe not a bad thing. We could get some real change then.
Ask HN: Where do you go for hacking help?
When you hit a snag when writing your code, and you need help, where do you go? Do you hit up one of your contacts who is just better at it than you? Crack open a book? Hit the forums? Or do you just fire up Google?
The quote about assigning jobs to engineers instead of lobbyists is what intrigued me most-- I wonder to what degree that actually happened/happens.

"Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells."
Condescending, much? You make it seem as if all Digg users are retards and Hacker News readers are inherently superior in both intellect and manners. Well, yeah maybe in some cases.. but come on. I find it insulting that you seem to suggest that I'm of an inferior breed ('oh look he's a digg user') and I shouldn't be allowed to infiltrate this community.

And I've been here for a while, didn't just sign up last month to submit spam. See my user history and join dates.
wow, record series A valuation? Did this company start working on their product near the beginning of their YC funding cycle or had they been working on it for a while? It appears to me that a higher percentage of YC companies are coming into the program with a developed product and traction than we had during the reddit, loopt, kiko days.

As an aside, I love the author Jamie Siminoff, I enjoy our product brainstorming sessions, and think his company Phonetag is awesome, but I think this article is a bit empty. I wonder if companies would be as hungry to succeed if they had guaranteed place to stay in a hotel that resembled a 24 hour lan party? Probably not.
FWIW, Tom Evslin made a similar point:

"So, if you’re just now starting up, don’t get blinded by the successes of the first people to realize a platform could be built and operated on the cheap. You already missed that wave. Now, unless you are extraordinarily lucky or well-connected, you aren’t going to succeed in publicizing your new service and getting up to a critical mass of content or subscribers or both unless you raise or have enough money to create initial awareness or value. There is too much clutter from which you must emerge."

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/01/web_20_greater_.html
* cue editor war *
it only evicted Justin.tv. There are still a lot of startups (YC and non-YC) in the building.
Web developers should test their pages for CPU usage
Put the kids to work!
The author makes the mistake of equating efficient markets with rational markets. The market is not rational (whatever that means) but rather efficient. All known information (whether it is correct or not) is reflected in the price of a security.

Rational markets lead us to the communist/central planning trap. If the market can be shown to not be "rational" the government can assume control (nationalize) of the market.

Does the weather/climate appear "rational" on a large scale? No of course not. It consists of the local weather at each measurable point on the planet. Assuming we can make systems "rational" is plain foolish.

See "The Systems Bible" by John Gall.
On the Stanford iPhone class they have some sample code for using AVAudioPlayer (it's in 2.2) and they are loading an mp3 from within the project.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php Lecture 20 - 20-AVWSamples.zip

This is an intersting area to me, so post any reasons you shy away from it. Cheers!
Yes, you can create your own flash card sets through a batch sytax or simple form.

Curious, did you install the AIR app? If not, I'd love to hear your reason, as I'm worried most people won't install or will fall off during the lengthy air install process.

Thanks!
Eviction in California cannot be based on association with a particular group...only behavior, and, thus, only Justin.TV was evicted. It was not a mass exodus. There are as many YC companies in the Y Scaper as ever, if not more, as far as I can tell.