skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short, simple story (which is tough for an academic!): Sensory brain systems support perceptual knowledge. That is, when you think about apples you activate regions involved in perceiving taste and color. For cotton, you rely more on tactile areas used during touch. And thinking about the sound of a shotgun activates a sound region. These patterns even seem to explain how you understand television when you're watching the Discovery Channel vs Martha Stewart vs This Old House (work we're preparing for publishing). Your brain appears to simulate the experience as if you were right there participating in it whether you're dealing with a word, picture, or video.

Now that "British Empiricist" story only seems to work for perceptual concepts. When things get more abstract, it breaks down (as the Rationalists pointed out). For instance, I would love to figure out how the squishy grey stuff can produce a concept like "infinity". But we're even making centipede steps there. For instance, we have a paper out showing that even for simple facts about animals, the use of language to code knowledge helps to overcome perceptual inadequacies and these facts seem to rely more on the frontal lobe.

That all said, we're going to spend a long time refining all of these accounts and none will fully explain the meanderings of the great philosophers. The point is we are making progress (and answering some philosophical problems) and I could spend the rest of my life simply trying to understand how the brain supports our knowledge of the world.

For more see:
Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Fiez, J.A., Schneider, W. (2007). Selective retrieval of abstract semantic knowledge in the left prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 3790-3798.

Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Distinct and common cortical activations for multimodal semantic categories. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 214-222.

Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Perceptual knowledge retrieval activates sensory brain regions. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4917-4921.

If you'd like a .pdf, send me a note at robg AT psych dot upenn dot edu
Nice post. I especially like the "F*ck you" part. I never quite heard it said like that, but I agree.

Lessons learned from mistakes I made (and you shouldn't):

1. If they say they won't engage you because of your price, it's not because of your price. Find out the real reason.

2. If they're shopping on price, let them. You don't want them.

3. If you won't compromise your quality, then you shouldn't compromise your price.

4. If they legitimately can't afford it, then reduce scope, not price.

5. If you charge top dollar, you better deliver top quality. Otherwise, don't be surprised when word gets around and the well dries up.
Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds !
I know this exists because I've seen to happen and I shudder every time. But it's not just just "neurobabble". It's possible to obfuscate in any domain. The problem is: You can never be certain of what's babble and what's real without doing the intellectual heavy lifting yourself. In neuroscience, my ability to see a poorly designed study is only as good as the methods and theories get closer to what I know. So I decline being a reviewer of manuscripts if I don't know enough to sufficiently judge them.
No doubt in 100 years we'll know much more. But we have to start somewhere! And right now we're sketching the outlines.

And you're absolutely right - causation is very difficult to explain. Ask the philosophers!
Y Combinator Inspires Imitators
Paul Graham's intensive workshop permits investors and startups to check each other out with a minimum of risk and a maximum of potential
5 Reasons to Start Using Google Shared Stuff
Web 2.0 Start-Up Field Guide
Web 2.0 Start-Up Field Guide deck by Idris Mootee of the Toroto based design strategy firm called IdeaCouture.
The startup fail for various reason but most common reasons are
1. Idea: Bad idea, not a realistic idea etc.
2. Time: Right idea but bad timing
3. Team: Lacks of skills, confidence, collaboration within.
4. Money: Too much or not enough money, unwise spending on marketing, PR, salaries etc.
5. Focus: team is not focused on the idea 10000000000%.
If philosophy is to "enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation," how do you explain George W. Bush's relatively high marks for Philosophy 15b?

http://2004.georgewbush.org/bios/yale-transcript.asp
Looks like YC just got a little more ultracompetitive.

/Just the way I like it.
I commend your efforts. It's not easy to go through this. And it's smart of you to share and ask for help. Very smart.

You asked. I won't be bashful. Take my feedback however you want (or tell me to go to h*ll).

You do not have a startup. You have a hobby. A startup is full time. Greater than full time.

Like you, I'm a hacker. I simply cannot imagine giving up equity to a designer or an "idea man" (whatever that is). Design is grossly overrated (see Google). Ideas are everywhere. Only a fool pays for them. People should be paying you to give you ideas (more about that below).

I understand that these are your friends and that you love working with them. Nothing wrong with that. What's more important to you, the quality time you spend together or the outcome? I think you have a tough decision to make because, frankly, I don't see you having both. You don't need these guys.

I would seriously consider taking your employer's offer to relocate. This would give you a graceful exit from your current endeavor and preserve your friendships. Then I would bank every dollar I could in order to go back to my start-up full-time. You should be able to work full-time for at least 6 months, preferably a year. I would also try to pick up side jobs somewhat related to my start-up. Pick up a few extra bucks and get your ideas FROM THOSE WHO ARE PAYING YOU. These are real ideas coming from the field, not from some ivory tower. So the logic is reversed: you can pay for untested ideas, or get paid for real ones.

You don't mention whether your employment is related to your start-up in any way. If it's not, all the more reason to pick up side work.

I would also try to make connections with other hackers; maybe you can find more suitable co-founders.

(By the way, the comment about open and honest communication is spot on. Talk to your partners!)

You've got quite a few things to think about and a lot of good feedback from both places. Please - keep us posted. You never know where this may lead...
My guess is that it helped financial derivatives take off. I've read about people trading puts and calls on tulips -- and then when that got boring, trading the same instruments on commodities and stocks at more legitimate exchanges.

But my timing could be off.
I have, from time to time, responded to email after stumbling home drunk. It turns out that this not optimal. I think that a plug-in that locked the send function between 10pm and 7am over the weekend would dramatically reduce this danger.
I think AOL used to have this. The problem I had was that suddenly, 'send' was more like 'save as draft', so I'd only get the "I shouldn't have sent that!" vibe when it was already permanently sent.
> It sounds like what you've got is more of a painful group hobby. I think it might be time to consider a better format for being productive.

I think you're right, at least for my part. One problem is that the idea guy IS my friend, but I don't think he shares my point of view about this. I wrote up the blog post in order to collect my thoughts to relate them to him.
We are all idea guys in one sense. The reason I've been referring to one guy as the "idea guy" is that he's not a coder and if I were to gauge the number of ideas each of us has put forth, he would easily take the highest percentage. So because he mostly talks to clients on the phone, does other PR-related things, and brainstorms ideas, I find it easy to refer to him as the "idea guy".
RefactorMyCode.com Launched to help clean up your code
Good comments. I think I had some of those thoughts early on (specifically referring to your first paragraph), I must have just gotten disillusioned with them. I will attempt them again.

As far as getting him to stop looking at competitors, 100% agreed.
Thanks for the blunt comment. It's what I was looking for, and much appreciated.

I will attempt to let you all know how this pans out.
Google Testifies At Capitol Hill Regarding Online Advertising and DoubleClick Deal
Lets start from the beginning:
It's a Webapp right?... so, I asume you already know HTML and CSS, or maybe Flash...

If you don't, start learning it.
Microsoft Announces Upgrades to Live Search, Including "Blended Search"
The business side of this is cold and harsh, as it always is.

But as far as keeping a friend? He's a teacher, right? Why don't you sell him on the idea about learning how other startups succeed? I'll never forget reading "A Good Hard Kick in the Ass" several years ago. It completely changed the way I understood how startups work. Perhaps you could sell him on the idea that you're feeling a little frustrated, and perhaps other teams out there have learned something that might be useful to you guys.

I also liked "Founders at Work" which I read a while ago. I wouldn't bury the guy in material -- after all, if you give him too much he'll just blow it off. But I'd find some text that made the case and _was presented by another person who is an authority_. That way, it's not a you vs. him deal, it's just a couple of friends discovering how things work.

Good luck. If he's smart and your friend I'm sure he'll see the value of a structured approach to creativity. The trick is to be non-confrontational. Let the ideas battle it out, and not the people.
The Three Tiers of Software Revenue
I think Ellison and the Oracle guys consulted for years in order to eat while working on their relational technology until they thought they were close enough to go for it and drop the consulting and bet everything on the database as a product.

Maybe you could take a similar approach?
Really seems like from this and from other things I've read that Reddit was either PG's idea or was very heavily inspired by him. That true PG?
YC has wonderful PR! pg, care to quickly tell us how you guys manage to get into Time, BW, WSJ etc? Do you have someone doing PR for YC companies? How does it happen?
I've been in the same situation, but don't think your solution is the best, maybe changing a little bit the email UI in order to let you see the common errors.

- Spell checking.

- Letting you know if you haven't attached any file (in a way that you can't miss it).

- About rephrasing a paragraph, maybe saving drafts before sending your email (as intellectronica says in a comment), but it should be something the user does, not the UI.
New Advertising Model: Wish Fulfillment
The advantages of amnesia
That article didn't mention PARC's incubator program, although I think by contrast PARC's program shows what YC can do right. Before you even read much about PARC's deal you have to agree to a page of over-capitalized legalese: http://www.parc.com/about/startup/startup-form.php

Compare that with YC's entry point - read discussions without any barriers, then enter username, password, click create account - and start posting comments which will help YC get to know you.

YC's Reddit-style forum is much more enticing than Seedcamp's old-school forum (although Seedcamp's graphics are pretter.)

Is understanding of design and programming a predictor of good angel-ness?
Is that URL ok?

I cant see the site.
Enh, I dunno. I kind of see this in the same light as /.'s way of allowing you to preview, but not edit or delete, a comment. On the average, I think it brings up the quality of posts on an individual basis, the longer a person has regularly posted there. The nearest thing to a feature like this that I would want would be biometrics in my keyboard / mouse / desk / chair that wouldn't let an email send if I was clearly enraged and / or drunk. ;)
Jessica Livingston has apparently had a very successful career in marketing. I'd bet she has a hand in much of the PR.
we have some special sauce in our distribution, customer acquisitions, and business model that not only differentiate us from Yelp and IP, but give us some unique advantages.

We are not going to be beating Yelp at the game of Yelping, they rock in that space. As for IP, they recently got acquired by CitySearch for a pretty slim price compared to all the VC money they raised. IMHO - IP never gained real traction or consumer preference and it seems like they are having a very tough time gaining market share from Yelp.

In short, we are going to win through delivering bottom line impact to our customers and real value across all our user groups.
> I don't believe that row_number() is standard

Sure it is: see Section 6.10 of Part 2 of SQL:2003.

> I thought it couldn't be relied on for being monotonically increasing with inserts. It will also fail if you need to use a date column that may not be ordered by time.

I think you are confused: ROW_NUMBER() is a window function, and as such is applied to an arbitrary query expression:

SELECT x, y, row_number() over (order by z) from t

And I would beg to differ that cursors fall into "advanced-ish" SQL :)

I don't see how it is an "impedance mismatch": transforming sets of data is the fundamental goal of SQL, and this seems to fall squarely within that domain.
I'm curious. What did it do?
I like light on dark, as you say, but not bright on dark, as whacked said. Light gray or grayish blue / green on on black or dark, dark red is my preferred. I keep a .txt on my desktop with html in it to make font exactly how I like it. On sites that have bad colors, I just paste the text in between the innermost tags in the .txt, save as 'blah.html', and read at ease. :)
If there's one thing worse than an e-mail you wish you hadn't sent it is the Unsuccessful Recall Attempt.
"There already is a Y Combinator in your town: Y Combinator."

Bullshit. I live in South America. Show me the Y Combinator in Bogota.
Loads fine for me, but I'll double check our DNS and such (it's a new domain, so I might have screwed it up when moving it from a private server to a public one).

You can also hit the SitePoint contest link directly here: http://contests.sitepoint.com/contests/3497
This is a really great post, and Steve Yegge is always fun to read.

I think that this post reveals how programmers are in the process of speciating - ie., diverging into seperate groups that are no longer capable of reproducing, resulting in different and incompatible branches of an evolutionary tree. Why? Because resume that Steve recommends will keep you from getting a job doing java for the accounts recievable department of a big corp, and the resume that will get you that big corp java job will prevent you from getting an interview with Steve.

Big corps are, first and foremost, looking for a pliable, good natured person who will follow directions and largely do as told. Within that context, they'd like as much talent as they can get, but they aren't willing to break the obedience requirement to get it.

Negative indicators for a big corp are: contributions to open source projects, an interesting an opinionated blog, microISV work, startup experience, substantial side work, passion for (or borderline obsession with) "obscure" programming languages (like LISP, ruby, smalltalk...) These things show that you might be trouble.

Positive indicators for bigcorp are: buzzword bingo resumes, weasel words, long lists of mainstream programming languages, databases and operating systems (like Java, C#, VB, MSSQL...), vendor certification in the above list. These things suggest to the big corp that you'll play their game the way they like it played.

It turns out that you can't really cover both bases, which is why I call this speciation. We're rapidly moving toward a point where these two groups will no longer be able to interact or cross-pollinate. You can't be a bigcorp programmer and an innovative hacker at the same time, any more than you can be a sea cucumber and a clownfish the same time. One excludes the other.

Fortunately, you get to choose - and you can change.
As Jay said it's entirely dependent on the person, who they are and what they bring to the company.
The quote, "It's cheaper equity", seems like a bad p.r. move. I've never heard that as a stated reason for YC's investment model, regardless of whether it is one. I think it betrays one of the most significant differences between YC and the imitators - a certain level of class. But, I'm sure the other incubators provide great opportunities for young entrepreneurs.
PG explained some of that here http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html but I'd like to hear more.
Too bad someone can't just remove your soon-to-be-regretted letters from the outgoing mail a la Samuel Clemens' wife.
Stealth Windows update prevents XP repair
Paul Graham should start thinking about franchising ... another business with pay-day almost everyday :-) and I would be the first to take franchise (I'm damm serious) ... anyway mushrooming clones will be good for new startups ...
The point is that anyone can apply to YC from anywhere. If you're accepted, you'll still be required to move to where ever YC is that session, but it's still open to you.

There's a reason they ask you to move to the bay area or Cambridge. You can't just duplicate the atmosphere in a non-startup epicenter. This is probably the best reason not to have YC programs everywhere. And what good would a YC franchise be without the 4 partners? Unless the franchise owner can attract the same kind of speakers, the experience would be significantly less worthwhile.
Pretty easy to implement in any application just let the app wait for 1 minute before actually sending anything and show the user an undo button.

Of course if you notice something later that won't help you.
I copied this concept from a blog but I don't remember which one.
> Unless the franchise owner can attract the same kind of speakers, the experience would be significantly less worthwhile.

But as long as the franchise owner is of better caliber than the Y Europe guy, it's a lot better than nothing. YC only funds 50 startups a year, there is a lot of unmet demand for similar services.
[SF] Clickpass seeks HTML/CSS designer/illustrator
Clickpass is an angel-funded startup working on OpenID. Our remit is to make OpenID useable by the masses and consumer friendly and our product does exactly that. We are Oxford and Cambridge graduates from the UK and were also part of this summer's Y-Combinator programme in Boston as well as having funding from angels in the Valley and the UK.

There are currently three of us in the company and we are looking to bring a designer initially on an contract basis for 4-7 weeks but with a view to a full time position including equity.

The theme and design of our site is currently in place and more is being produced each day. We would however like someone to join us who can loop back over what has already been done and bring the quality of the layout and finish up by a notch.

You should be keen to take on the weight of the design and HTML/CSS work within the team and have a passion for creating great UI. You will be working with a product manager who will be producing wireframes and user-flow and doing so in an iterative environment.

If you're excited by being part of one of the product that will push OpenID to its tipping point that's something we strongly value.

Requirements
- Solid grounding in semantic HTML/CSS
- Solid demonstrable grounding in design
- Ability to work fast, iterate and to work within an existing HTML and designs
- Solid portfolio of work including examples of UI (not just static web-pages)
- Simple illustrative skills
- Ability to work onsite in San Francisco (North Beach)
- Willingness to work across the whole spectrum of design/slicing/wire-framing as well as sometimes being restricted to working in only one field as required
- Understanding of AJAX principles and how they impact HTML/CSS (actual Javascript skills not required)

Desirables
- Interest in a permanent position
- Rails experience
- AJAX experience
- SVN experience
- Flash/Flex
- Copywriting skills

Perks
- Free drinks, fruit and snacks in the office
- Breakfast out every Wednesday
- Occasional (optional) activity weekends (last one was white water rafting)
- Great office environment
- Be surrounded by English accents
- OpenID - it's one of the hottest spaces to be in!

HOW TO APPLY
Please make all applications via the form at: http://clickpass.wufoo.com/forms/clickpass-htmlcss-designer-....
I agree completely; I too sometimes have "sender's remorse". I even made a suggestion to Gmail about a month ago that they extend their useful "Undo" feature to sent emails (presumably implemented with some sort of small but non-negligible time delay before actually sending). I ended by noting that "this may seem like a strange feature to request, but I bet people would love it". I guess there are at least two.
<<Is understanding of design and programming a predictor of good angel-ness?>>

Yes, IMO.
For more info on this right from the reddit Guys, check out http://reddit.blogspot.com/2007/09/posterboys-for-yc-emphasi...
" I think the sort of people who choose Rails are more likely to succeed than those who choose PHP."

I'm sorry I don't quite get you here. Could you clarify this statement...cuz it sounds a hell alot like the elitist BS that is being peddled around by Rails fan boys as of late.
Go, NBC! You're SMURT!
Is it better? I read something from PG saying most people don't actually need to the money; they come to YC for the learning experience and the relationships develop. So if that portion can't be duplicated, having a second-rate franchise is only marginally better then just using angel investors.
Grid Layout Generator
Huge collection of entrepreneurship videos from Stanford
Video lectures on entrepreneurship from Larry Page, John Doerr, Guy Kawasaki, Vinod Khosla, Mark Zuckerberg and hundreds of other speakers, from the Stanford Technology Ventures program.
This is really interesting. PG seems to have recognized this for some time, though - you almost have to coax the entrepreneurs out of the engineering school. The best ones don't start out full of confidence.
For more info from the reddit guys, check out http://reddit.blogspot.com/2007/09/posterboys-for-yc-emphasi...
How much is a Facebook app worth? Facebook Application Logbook goes on eBay for $2,550
Are Photos Good or Bad for LinkedIn?
I say bad
"Scared of competition?"

more like curiousity - Yelp is that good (to me at least)

It's like saying you're building a better search engine than google
If you are using outlook, you can set up an outlook rule to automatically delay and sent mail by X amount of minutes.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/microsoft-office/use-outlook-...
Deals: The value of a Facebook application
3 Things you need to know about China - FoundRead
> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Holy cow, did they get slashdotted by news.yc?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1eA7znpS30
Was the change in the Reddits' idea really as complete as it's portrayed here? I've heard this story told before, but I always got the impression that Reddit was a variation on the theme of the original idea, not a complete change.
Inverting all colors. Very useful, sometimes.
No, I took this high-profile opportunity to geek out and fix the HTML validation down to the character encoding level, in case anyone checked. Then I accidentally committed a slightly broken version, and it took the entire site down. Then, in my panic, my darcs-fu failed me, and I couldn't get the patches to unpull properly.

Moral: even someone who looks great on paper can do something unbelievably stupid. (At least I wasn't charging anyone $100/hr. for it!)
Alibaba was founded as an amazon/ebay for manufacturing businesses seeking to find buyers overseas. It is not a Linked-in for businesses.