skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are some cool things about handedness.

We all 'know' that left-handers use their right brain and right-handers use their left brain. In one library book about handedness, the author had found studies about which parts of the brain are used by two groups of people, one left-handed and one right-handed.

For right-handers, it was about 95% left-brain, and 5% right-brain. However, for left-handers, there were three possibilities. It was about 60-65% right-brain, 20-30% left-brain, and the cortex for 5 or 10% of them.

I don't remember what they were measuring, but a third option for left-handers is interesting in itself. (It may have been a study about which eye is dominant based on what a left-hander would say, so those for whom the cortex functioned in a different way were grouped with left-handers?)

Another book says that in those people who 'hook' their wrist when they write (so their hand is actually lower than their wrist), they do it subconsciously because their wrong brain is being used. They are NOT meant to be using that hand as their brain is struggling to use the correct brain. So, if you're right-handed, and you hook, you might actually be right-brained and left-handed. And, if you're 'left-handed' but you hook when you write, you're actually a righty.

I thought about this a bit and noticed that with about 10% of people self-identifying as left-handed, the stats above might fit. If 3-5 percent of right-handers use their right-brain, maybe they 'hook' and are in fact natural left-handers ('fake righties'). And if 20-30% of left-handers are actually left-brained, then that's a few percent of the overall population who are actually right-handed ('fake lefties'). Those could also be 'hookers' who aren't actually using their natural hand.
Why India crashed so hard into Asia (producing Himalayas)
It's a direct result of Obama's lack of understanding for basic economic theory.
I'll own up to it :)

It was a 5 minute rant to be honest, not a well thought out exposition on OpenID's various shortcomings.

So, apologies if it was inarticulate/verbose. I really should clean it up and edit before I submit to YC.

I modded you up BTW :D
It looks pretty cool, but it would take more than a few bells and whistles to pull me away from firefox and the 38 plugins I currently have installed.
oh haha i had no idea you actually wrote it. i mean, you make really valid points, there's a reason nobody likes openid.
Man lives normal life with mysteriously tiny brain
Haha, no worries dude. Your criticism was spot on and appreciated.

I don't usually submit my own writings to YC (first time I believe).
I'm for it! We've already taken the plunge and now are settled in MV. It's nice out here. Ran into the fuzzwich guys yesterday. Been to SuperHappyDevHouse and Googleplex. Come on out!
Cellphones on planes within a year?
I hope not. Then the jerk talking loudly on his
cellphone in the row behind you will keep it up
the whole flight.
Hackers Wanted in NY/Toronto/Waterloo area
We're creating couple of demo web2.0 products in coming months - looking for hackers who are interested in joining us. Hackers should be highly motivated to join startup with stock options but low/no salary. Interested ??? then reply here mentioning your skills & expertise.
And don't say, "It's friggin' _blank_ online!" when trying to relate the merits of your idea when you feel like you're bombing.
I see, but how do you solve the upload problem? Does your data stay local? Does it sync when you connect? Syncing doesn't dodge the upload problem and if it's local you loose many of the benefits of a web app.
The strange case of Mr Hyde: conflict at Startupweekend
http://hackrtrackr.com shows all the ycomb readers in your area interested in a meetup. hopefully they provide their email in the profile.
Great job! I hope there's enough hungry teams that this gains momentum. I bet a small site like techstarsblog.com or startupweekend.com would keep the community active.
in for meetups...applied to fb group
Allow me to vent!
Aargh. Javascript. DOM model. Internet Explorer!

Having spent all day writing Javascript for a nice reporting application I came to the dreaded moment when I started cross-browser testing. It's not that everything was broken, it's just that IE debugging Javascript is death by a thousand cuts, or a thousand little incompatibilities.

Aargh!
Cox Communications appears to do this as well; at least in Arizona.
Best Practices for Web Developers v1.03
I agree, yesterday I got denied for Y Comb, but this morning I leased my startup's software for one year to a company for the same amount of money Y Comb was going to give me. So I don't think I'm a loser. Denial doesn't mean those rejected weren't wrong, it just means they weren't right for Y Combinator at this time.
Battle brewing between Pirate Bay, recording industry over IFPI domain coup
Firebug Lite might come in handy. I am strongly considering only supporting Firefox for the next application I build out of protest for IE's quirks.
Internet preparing to go into outer space
Self-Marketing for Software Developers | Software by Rob
I TOTALLY thought this was going to be about Steve Ballmer. But then I realized that he's not really living a normal life.
I've used voipjet because they're cheap and they work. I don't know how good/reliable they are; I haven't done anything important with it, just dicking around.
Unrelated, but sort of not:

I'm in the process of setting up some Windows servers. I haven't really touched Windows as an OS in a number of years (linux and OS X mostly). I can't believe how horrible the interaction is, ESPECIALLY with IE. Holy crap, quit with all the popups about adding sites or whatever. It took me a dozen clicks after I typed in www.firefox.com just to get the page to load.

I'm amazed that people actually use IE, it's user experience seems like an experiment in cyber-torture.
I was going to make a comment about how he might be well-suited for a career in politics. But, I won't.
Speaking as a resident of France, the fact that he was a French civil servant was not lost of me :-)

John.
Ah yes. Welcome to the party, dude.

What I did was start with IE, make it work, then "fix" it for FF, Opera, etc. Somehow that's less fretful than the other way around.

Cross-browser DOM programming will drive you to a good rant, for sure.
I think based on that and my other comment in this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70299) I'd like to start http://ynot.bg for all of us who may be willing to go to Bulgaria and work on their ideas there. Hey, I think I even have 200m2 of class A office space available there. Hmmmm :-)
Well I'm sure that forex had a slight positive effect. My point was that it wasn't the only cause of the increased profits. The fact that revenues are up 57% and profit is only up 46% with the slight forex leverage probably signals that they are getting big enough that their margins are falling off. I would guess that is why it is only up 1.2% (as of close of market) on such a huge increase. The other reason probably has to do with the generally bad day on the market today.

Of course, seeing it around $650 makes me wish I hadn't sold all mine at $425. ;)
Yeah, looks like they did get an interview eventually, but didn't make it all the way:

http://www.adiunnithan.com/blog/?p=100
While it might be difficult to give reasons based simply on an application, I'm sure there are valid reasons for an interview rejection. That would be very useful information to know.

Although I understand many of the reasons are probably due to simply not being compelled by the founders, which is much more difficult to tell someone than simply that "there are too many competitors".

The truth can hurt, but sometimes that is what someone really needs to hear.
That is related because as I was debugging my scripts I figured I'd use the Microsoft Script Debugger. Big freakin' mistake. The debugger crashed and took IE with it.

I use OS X most of the time and Linux most of the rest of the time. Every time I go back to Windows to do something Microsoft finds a way of kicking me in the teeth.

John.
I'm from mexico, the google groups idea sounds cool to stay in touch, did you just start that?

Saludos!
Tufts researchers delve into the human brain with cutting-edge 'light imaging' technology
Dartmouth researchers confirm the power of altruism in Wikipedia - 10/17/07
Self-Improving Chips with Speed Warping
Multi-touch display can 'see' objects too
Rebinding attacks in browsers
UCSD Researchers Give Computers Common Sense
Strange Bedfellows: Why an Apple/Google collaboration has been so difficult to make happen.
Mr. Murdoch, Take Down This (Other) Wall!
Ahhh, to be so fortunate :)
I think type of article is specifically mentioned as not appropriate for YC News.
From the actual filing with the SEC:

"International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $2.03 billion, representing 48% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2007, [...] Had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the third quarter of 2006 through the third quarter of 2007, our revenues in the third quarter of 2007 would have been $121 million lower."

Additionally, their total reported profit (net income is the figure that increased 46%, so I will assume that is what they mean by 'profit') was $1.07B. If you assume that the $121M due to forex was pure gravy, then their pre-forex profit was $949M. This is still a 29.5% increase on a year earlier (when their profit was $733M in the third quarter).
Yes, like 2 hours ago =)
Personally I wouldn't recommend Romania as a place to do a startup yet, at least not to incorporate in Romania. I moved to the US from Romania about 7 years ago and while some things have improved in the mean time I think the current system in Romania would impose too many road bloacks for a startup. Great place however to outsource.
Pogo.com Deserves a Lot More Love
I know the feeling. However, sometimes this can be largely avoided by using an already tested javascript library such as the yui tools or jquery as base. I'm not sure if they're pertinent to what your doing, but when they are it sure speeds these things up.
svn Time-lapse View
Lets do!

I am interested to move to Bay Area and share apartments with like-minded folks
Are Malmo living costs significantly lower?
Well with what you describe, the graph would become the commodity, the sites themselves would remain unique and competitive, but as interfaces to the graph.

Overall I think your idea sounds like a win for all. Users could have a single presence at the site of their choice, with friends from other sites, new entrants would have a lower barrier of entry, and existing sites are less likely to lose users to the network effect. Of course, the big players would probably have more competition from niche players too, so I guess that would be the downside for Myspace and Facebook.
Microsoft's Visual Studio doesn't do a horrible job of IE debugging. Just download the web dev Express version (free) and turn on script debugging in your Advanced Options.
Count us in on the getting together part. We can also host events at our SF SOMA office.
Thanks. I'll do that.

John.
This was a pretty heavy prototype/scriptaculous based application. I'm pretty familiar with the YUI stuff, but have never used jQuery. How does it compare to prototype?

John.
Skype and MySpace to announce partnership
Twine: a social network with brains
IE7 loads up twice as fast as Firefox, has almost universal compatibility with web sites, and isn't to my knowledge lacking any significant functionality that would compel a switch to Firefox (including blocking popups).
Marketing Chief Leaving Yahoo
Facebook App (feedback welcome):  My friend said I'm like which fictional character?
Planning for a Crush of Startups
This week's Web roundup: Paul Graham predicts a glut of new ventures, a survey on the small-biz vote points Republican, and more
A mighty torrent of news!
Loads up what twice as fast? Pages or the app itself? I could care less about app loading times, I hardly ever reboot anything, so once I launch FF, it stays running.

IE7 now has popup blocking, but it came years behind FF.

Of course, I also use Windows as little as possible, so IE isn't an option in most cases. And where it is an option, I prefer FF for the extensions anyway.
I'm totally in!

I know the Facebook group has been mentioned, but we need someplace to discuss logistics and whatnot.
If you would have to choose between small brain and small penis - what would you do?
vi(m) cheatsheet
Are we seeing a glimpse of what the NYT will be at decades end?

And what will we call this decade? The turn of the century, I guess.
Today it's P2P, tomorrow it will be online video and music, and after that, they might even go after blocking individual sites.
Maybe a more relevant picture for the group would be a good idea?
They wouldn't, People are supposed to work at home and basically sleep where they work
>Markus Frind is a moron

Not a very nice thing to say... really.

>who was in the right place at the right time.

You can say that about everyone who is successful.
This is interesting. One of the recent YC benefactors could be the one who proves that Marc Canter's vision is the real future of social networking.
Because of the all the people move in, it's pretty expensive around here.
I lived in Bulgaria over the summer while working on my startup. Good fun, very very cheep (but maybe there was some recent inflation? Also the dollar vs euro problem, and the Leva is fixed to the euro.. still extremely cheep though)

It does help greatly to have someone who is a local to negotiate the rent for you though. My girlfriend did this for me and we got an far better deal than an english speaking foreigner probably could.

It is very true that labor was also cheep there.
Radar Networks Unwinds twine.com
http://www.paulgraham.com/hottoplessgirlsliveineurope.html
In fact, the ugliness of girls in the major startup hubs is probably a feature.
Are you looking for money?
Is it really so hard to incorporate in the US but operate from overseas? I don't think it is.
Touch orders with RFID dongles
Give us a little more credit; we may not be quite as dumb as you think.
The movie is basically an enumeration of:
(1) Evidence that global warming is occurring.
(2) Consequences of global warming.

Clever parsing aside, do you really want to argue that he wasn't suggesting that catastrophic ice melt wasn't in (2), but just a random fact thrown in?
[SF] Xobni: hiring for QA / Support position (entry level)
I used to get frustrated too, until I switched to Flex!
You know, I love that rich client, cross-platform stuff. But heck, are users going to tolerate those load times?
I'll try to be there!
Probably not, but I don't think you get any of the benefits of the corporation unless you also register a local branch of it, and then you're back to square one. Meaning you can't really be employed by your own company...stuff like that.
couldn't this be ameliorated by forcing dns responses with short ttls to be persistent for longer periods? how much of an impact would that have on load balancing strategies? would anything else be affected?
Tim Westergren was rejected around 350 times by VCs
Hacker News is a pretty good place to organize, right? Since we're already all here.

Maybe we need a mailing list too.
Cool! Good luck with the MSc!
Ballmer: "[Microsoft's online unit] are 3 year olds playing basketball with 12-year olds!"
"You're 3-years-old and you're playing basketball with 12-year-olds. You're going to dunk on the other guys some day!"

If that's what the CEO really thinks, maybe time to short MSFT.
That girl sure does have a very hairy arm
That statement predicts the growth of the online unit will trump the growth of other units. I believe Ballmer is just too smart for most people to understand and he uses his own language, he doesn't care if others understand he knows that only action is going to prove himself correct.
I'm going to ignore your more pedantic points (e.g. method "signature" vs. method "name", and the silly notion of "overloading" in a dynamically typed language), and focus right on the meat of the argument:

Every "experienced Ruby programmer" may well come to understand that standard expressions fail to mean standard things when used in Ruby; that doesn't make it a good idiom. The problem here isn't that the bracket operator fails to reference into an array -- it's that the bracket operator might behave inconsistently for certain subscript values.

The STL map class is a perfect analogue: rather than implement an operator[] than could fail in certain contexts, the C++ standard demands that map::operator[] must always return an object. This is consistent behavior. Allowing operator[] to fail for subscript N-1 when it works for N? That's inconsistent (and confusing), but apparently, it's the Ruby Way.
Common sense reasoning is one of the hardest parts of AI. I don't think top-down solutions will work. Look to a project like Cyc for one of the best efforts, and most wasted money
http://www.cyc.com/

You can't build a top down taxonomy of ideas and expect everything too work. You can't just "hard code" the ideas.

I think building tools from the ground up, with increasingly complicated and capable recognition and modeling, might work. For example, a visual object class recognition suite that first learned faces, phones, cars, etc. and eventually moved on to be able to recognize everything in a scene, might be able to automatically perhaps with some training build up the taxonomy for common sense.
Wonder how it would do on this image: http://media.funlol.com/content/img/cute-tennis-balls.jpg
How about using meetup.com? They seem to have a lot of decent tools built around this idea.
Good, I guess it's coming. I only hope that people will make it open not only for dating, but meeting other interesting people...
I was lost though on how they decided to do a MRI scan of his skull while the man complained of weakness in his leg.
Not sure how the first sentence leads to the second. Also, there are millions of people who like (love?) myspace, so obviously you're not their target audience. Although I don't like myspace either, I do appreciate that not everything on the web is varying shades of gray boxes.
I dislike object-oriented programming in general
"... Twine provides one place to tie everything together: emails, bookmarks, documents, RSS feeds, contacts, photos, videos, product info, data records, and more ..."

Danger Will Robinson, danger. Gushing quote ~ http://www.twine.com/about

Listen to Eben Moglen to understand (more) why. ITConversations, "Eben Moglen, 'Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy', mp3, 18Mb, 40min" ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html
Thanks for the recommendation for voicejet, I just signed up and happy to see that they gave me a $.25 credit so I can test for free before I commit to them!
> I agree with your other comments.

Oh, that didn't make sense. I meant to say, "I agree with the rest of your comment".
Judging Social Media: Listen to CAIT
We have a space we might be able to use. I'm checking to see if it's cool. If it is, I'll start a Meetup group so we can get together and hang out and chat and compare notes.
It's Europe, what do you expect...
Dvorak version:

http://boredzo.org/vi_tutorial/vi_tutorial-Dvorak-Color.pdf
"... we don't understand this ..."

Is it the lack of communication skills conveying the idea? Or is it something more fundamental along the lines of, "we don't understand this 'foo'"?,

Where "foo" is 'idea is too derivative', 'you have no users in mind'... etc?
FOCS 2007 Trailer (well, now you have to go!)
It's a good place to meet, not necessarily to organize.
How do you make money from ads on your site?
It's like nerd summer camp all year round out here, isn't it? (I came from Austin, which is pretty nerd-friendly, but the valley is just silly.)
i'm going to launch a free web service, and wondering what method of getting paid for ads is best. i heard adsense is starting to yield diminishing returns these days.
For VOIP, check out Vitelity.com which I have used with some clients and they have been happy with them.

For datacenter, I would recommend InterNAP bandwidth, available in many datacenters. Cheapest place I have found so far is Houston and Atlanta, GA, but I have not researched it recently. About $1099/month for full rack with 10Mbps of Internap bandwidth.

I have not used them but some swear by zogmo.com or steadfastnetworks.com .
Your bad Google recruiter experience wasn't that unusual.
Great! We are only 349 rejections away of success!
Flick: Photo editing via Picnik
He comes off as arrogant and psychotic.
PG: Was this something the magazine initiated, or a PR effort from your side? (If you don't mind my asking)
It looks like you've done a really good job putting this together.

I personally only shy away from the sillier side of social networking. Apps like "Where I've Been" or "Last Fm Plus" are nice because they are simple and clean looking, but share useful information with my friends.
Social networking faces uncertain future
"... Datamonitor said the current growth in social networking offers opportunities for businesses to get involved in supporting the infrastructure needed to run such sites, and it advises technology providers to look for ways to support social-networking services in the areas of scalability and availability ..."*

A theme suggested in a previous post, "Un-sexy is good business" and other rules from Scott Rafer ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68621
Because of cartoon swearing. What are we, in kindergarden?
In my opinion, this guy doesn't understand what he's talking about and substitutes his experiences of bad OO for OO in general.

One could make a similar argument against any language, simply by pointing out all the ways people screw it up.

I see this a lot in language religion wars. In fact, languages are just tools. Some tools are better for certain things than others. A lot of coders never understand that.
Paul Graham only drives a car when his cdr is in the shop.

Paul Graham can be written in ten lines using macros.

Paul Graham can make NaN finally equal itself.

Paul Graham will resurrect Usenet on Judgment Day.

Paul Graham is the World Champion in Ambition.
Maybe you don't remember the pop-under x10 web cam ads of the dot-bomb? =)
Maybe this is a retarded question, but what is Matt Maroon's startup? A quick search on google turned up nothing.
Amazon's $100,000 Startup Challenge
Part of Microsoft's history is actually being good when it really matters, I don't know if they still have that in them.

'Asked if he thought Google's word processing and spreadsheet applications were good, Ballmer was blunt: "No, I don't."'

He's right, you know.
Time Management 2, with Om the guinea pig!
Well, you could incorporate in Delaware but be located in Romania for a while. Also, Romania has probably improved a bit since you left.
Extremity weakness is a common side effect of strokes.
A point of relevancy to this site is that Serge Belongie started a biometrics startup while an undergraduate at Caltech. Failure for biometrics companies is even higher than normal for technology startups.
I think people have done worse in exchange for a lot less than half a billion...
Not public but you can probably hunt it down if you read the archives of his poker blog which is definitely worth reading if you like poker. The startup has a business model and a very viable one at that.
What made HyperCard great
WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage
One thing to try is providing unique, high-value content with properly placed ads that are relevant to the topic being discussed.
Donald Knuth's lectures on Mathematical Writing - CS209
I, on the other hand, wish that the OpenID team had consulted some 14-year-olds earlier in the design cycle.
jQuery Logging for Firebug
Avi Bryant: Code as Screenplay
Rails: Introducing resource_controller: Focus on what makes your controller special