skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comments do get downvoted on HN.

The question is, what kind of HN participant upvotes a comment like that? Who is deciding that that was a comment worth promoting, and why?
Exactly. I would never advise someone to use CoffeeScript without first knowing JavaScript, but I think very few people would do this anyways.

And even if they tried, aside from debugging issues, I think the article shows that it's pretty hard to work with CoffeeScript if you don't understand the underlying output code.
Oh, that's what I meant, yes. Have the code as it is there, but the user can keep going.
They rejected the UN-supported unification plan. They have no excuses.
This is a pretty bold assumption that the 46 you selected where the top 46.
Why aren't you quietly penalizing people who upvote them? They're damaging the site.

Here is a better question: why aren't you quietly penalizing people who submit the stories that generate these comments?
Even so, do you know of any method which would have less overhead?
I felt the same way a few years ago. If you'd like some advice, here's what I learned on the long climb out:

Dedicate at least one night a week to a project. When you get home from the day job, you start work on the project, and you keep at it for at least 6 hours. Make sure this night becomes a sacred obligation, you don't skip it for anything but weddings/funerals.

This helps ensure the project progresses on a weekly basis.
It protects the time from family/friends/spouses who may not understand or accept that you are busy at random times, but can understand a scheduled obligation.

caveats:
One night a week is usually too slow for any project, so don't use this as a crutch, you should still pour hours into whatever you do throughout the week out of passion - this is a safety valve for busy or passionless times.

It is a lot easier to pull this off with a group of like-minded people, try to get a couple other people (even remote) to join you in the endeavor.

Good luck!
In spite of arguing about this 'objective' readability, it doesn't address the issue that CoffeeScript is no more readable than Javascript is, because it introduces its own plethora of quirks and crypticness. Given the choice between the two I would opt consistently for Javascript.
Why good financial management is not a competitive factor amongst banks?

As in: bank with us because we are financially sound (instead of: because we pay higher interest, or whatever). It's not happening yet.
I think what is happening in the US right now is a wide sum of money but a shortage of good ideas.. (or there are so many projects that good ideas are hidden in the middle of confusion)

And i think part to blame, is a cultural aspect.. it looks to me that nobody want to work in a normal job these days.. so even when you need the talent for your startup.. or he will be working in a big company, or will be launching its own startup.. common guys, its madness..

For example when i see cases and protfolios here in Brazil, theres not that much of projects being backed up by investors.. but the one that does, are actually pretty good projects.. with more distinct ideas..

i fear that because of the cultural aspect of entrepreneurship a lot of people that shoudnt be starting a company, are jumping itself into the jungle.. so when the hard times hit theres no emotional spring to make the things workout in another way.. (and this emotional aspect is one of the most important things.. you need something to push you up.. no matter what)
Er, I'd be rather surprised if some of the banking entities were not established by foreigners and monies not actually coming from their country of operation.

Hell, Harris Bank in Chicago is owned by Bank of Montreal--so, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the situation, it would be entirely possible for Canadian executives to set policies that could affect clients in the US. That's not those citizens' faults.

I think you have an incorrect view here.
> If/when viable alternatives to petroleum fuels are available, the transition will happen.

"Are available"? You seem to misunderstand how things become available. Usually people spend time and effort to make them available. Financial incentives makes research departments and universities spend time on it.

> Companies like Tesla and every major automobile manufacturer have R&D going on in this area right now.

Surely that has not been enough.

> Grabbing $2 billion via a new tax on oil production will do nothing to further that, however.

"nothing"? You are horribly mistaken here as well. Progress is the direct result of people doing research. $2e9 pours many more researchers on the problem. I am curious to know how much R&D money has been spent on improving batteries in Sony, Apple, Tesla and other manufacturers altogether.

> Look at results of similar "stimulus" spending a few years ago.

Usually "quickly grab this money and do research" is less efficient than organic research. So, it all comes down to how the stimulus plan is executed. Nothing is wrong with the whole idea, though.
Sure, people like coming up with reasons why they aren't racist and xenophobic, and how it's perfectly logical, see?!
It's the Norwegian word for "reader", or something like that.
Just because I love Norway :)
He's being downvoted because his comment is extremely asinine. One person paying more than their share won't do anything, even if they are a billionaire.
You may be correct but I like to follow the money. Since it is not a product that is sold, the value must have been in Google learning what we like to read. Google did not learn anything new about our interests from Reader and therefore it had no value.
I'm sorry to say that using the same sentence to reply to different comments four times in a short period seems to have tripped YC's spam detectors.
Good luck man.

But you should just try to achieve doing something that makes you happy.

Making boatloads of money, the next Google, or some other goal that 1/10000000 people would ever achieve is not the be all end all of it (if it's even a valid life goal).
Stefano Quintini of Fenwick & West (via RockHealth)

Link: http://www.fenwick.com/pages/default.aspx
Rather than recapitulating the same discussion of the general issue, might be better to consolidate it in this other story that's been on the front page longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387228
This is an example of a how to do a great OSS website:
http://git-scm.com/

Granted, it is a bit easier to make a succinct website for something like Git rather than the entire Python project.
> EWww, people used to be HETEROsexual?

There is actually a short sci-fi story about a future where homosexual relationships are the norm and people are grown artificially. I can't remember the title or author and apart from the premise, there wasn't anything interesting in it.
It doesn't surprise me at all. Just like lower-tier universities have harsher rules for students, or cheap hotels have to ask for a larger % as a deposit, the more exclusive you are, the more you can trust the people you choose.

If you have the pick of the best people, you don't need to take a big cut to show a return.

I saw one accelerator in the UK that takes a 75% cut. (Not joking).
This grab from domestic savings is a new item.

Yet will anyone outside Cyprus, EU or small niche communities like HN take notice ? It is hard to say.

Portugal seized money from pensions (2.5%) and hardly anyone noticed. They called it a "Solidarity Tax"

http://www.portugaldailyview.com/whats-new/press-review-gove...

There has been a lot of head-in-sand citizen behaviour. This lack of alarm is aided by shockingly bad press reporting of the issues.
Newry Times Special: St. Patrick's Weekend 2013
The market can and will not fix this. Thats the whole point. There are so many negative externalities associated with oil and all its derivative products (gasoline, combustion engine cars) that are not currently compensated for through taxes or the market. It's essentially an ongoing trillion dollar subvention, and "good government money" has been making up for it all along.

Many of these externalities are impossible to account for, even if we would be willing to do so. Leaded gasoline contributes to a rise in lead levels; lead causes mental retardation. What is the correct price to pay for inhibiting the mental capacity of whole generations?
> It is a lot easier to pull this off with a group of like-minded people, try to get a couple other people (even remote) to join you in the endeavor.

Thanks for your kind advise. This is what I intend to do. If anyone else would like to join me, please let me know. My gmail id is kungs10.
Scientology Leader's Niece Speaks Out
I really appreciated the end of this article where he argues that some users could appreciate a service more if they realized how hard a problem it is solving.

It makes me think of the first iMacs having clear backs so you could see inside and see how complicated but tidy it was inside. Contrast that with a modern iMac where you'd have a hard time even opening it.

I think most people on HN belong to a segment of the population that wants to know how things work, that is always asking questions, that grew up taking things apart to see inside. As much as I wish it was different, most people are not like us. They want things to just work, they ask for the elevator pitch, they want the milk not the cow.

If you're making something for the HN crowd, then by all means give them a peek behind the curtain. But if you're selling mass market, keep it simple and abstract away all the "messy" details.
Same happened with the Icelandic banks: in mid-2000, I knew several Americans who rather ill-advisedly created accounts with forex brokers just to get ~8% interest on ISK, a currency and economy they otherwise knew nothing about. Seems to have been common, because the Icelandic banks had large deposit inflows up until the crisis hit.
Yes, but so far, I literally haven't achieved anything. I'm not shooting for Google or Facebook. If only I can find a small niche market, I would be perfectly content with that.
> there is no fair play among warring nations.

This might be a fair point if the US government was only claiming that the (supposedly inalienable) human rights which it respects in its own citizens are only suspended as against citizens of countries the US is in a state of war with.

But it doesn't. It claims that they don't apply to any non-Americans (outside US borders, at least - non-US citizens inside US borders do have some protections, IIRC). And the US courts seem to agree (e.g. US v. Verdugo-Urquidez)

The US is not at war with the entire rest of the world.

> If foreigners can't submit to our responsibilities, then they can't have our rights.

The original assertion was about what is moral. To make sure I understand you correctly - you're claiming that because I don't have responsibilities to the US government (I don't pay US taxes etc. being not a US citizen), it's not immoral for the US government to act in a way that, if I was a US citizen, would be an actionable breach of my fundamental rights?
It has. With the older meaning of the term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence
Namespaces in operation, part 5: User namespaces
I was a rock star at Ticketmaster at age 20 (1990) programming in VAX assembly language on their VAX operating system while going to school and getting a degree in ... basically ... embedded systems from ASU, then, getting a master's in electrical engineering.

I was an atheist until God appeared in 1996 like St. Paul and I quit my job at Ticketmaster, gave away everything and lived homeless. Nothing turned-up so I tried my dream of a business. I made a 3-axis milling machine -- mechanical, electrical and software.

"LoseThos" was not a self inflicted wound. It is like you tell someone to get rid of a dorky bike helmet or something.

----

God says...

4:21 Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an
hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into
his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep
and weary. So he died.

4:22 And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him,
and said unto him, Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou
seekest. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and
the nail was in his temples.

4:23 So God subdued on that day Jabin the king of Canaan before the
children of Israel.

4:24 And the hand of the children of Israel prospered, and prevailed
against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin king
of Canaan.

----

My jobs have always been as meaningless as a Truman Show Movie job, thank's to the CIA. Fuck-it.
I love it. The aesthetics are nothing special, at best you could say they are inoffensive but with a big community organization like python and so many opinions to cater to, inoffensive is probably as good as it gets.

More importantly, it is properly responsive, well laid out, touchscreen friendly, and a flexible enough design that it should be easy to add sections later. Everything a modern site should be.
Mms is not practical to support because of the absurd implementation in the us. Emailing a picture is easy, but making an investment in an mmsc at a time when mmsc use is being deprecated makes no sense (unless it takes 20 years to be deprecated).

Google has to keep their costs down since GV doesn't make any money. You're not paying for the calls, you can't really complain about the quality. If you care about quality, setup a really simple PBX with call forwarding and connect it to flow route. Better quality and under a penny per minute.

Google isn't going to devote time to fixing the existing GV product, they want a new GV product, but there are infrastructure integration problems within google (grandcentral had a robust telephony stack but I imagine elgoog had quite the time integrating their switch into the infrastructure fabric 'google-ifying'). They likely see no benefit to improving the old platform as its just a loss leader, and increasing use of GV increases the losses. It's an almost Faustian bargain; buy Grandcentral, control the patents for VM transcription with an iron fist and never innovate.

It's both terrible and strategically correct in a view of absolute profits and losses (one that google admittedly rarely operates in).
Do you mean until they start charging for it? They've been saying for a number of years that "next year" it will no longer be free. But I have not heard they plan to sunset the service altogether.
Namespaces in operation, part 6: more on user namespaces
I agree with niggler, I guess this tax would eliminate >95% of all trades. Therefore the expected tax income of 352 billion would be significantly lower (~ 20 billion) over 10 years.
Still I do believe the tax would have a significant positive impact on the economy.

The tax would most effect arbitrage trades. Arbitrageurs get between buyers and sellers. When a seller offers a stock for $95 and a buyer is willing to pay $105 the arbitrageurs buy the stock for $95 and sell it to the buyer for a premium (~ $102.5). Arbitrageurs have trading algorithms which can do this millions of times per second, that's how they can buy faster than the "real" buyer. They behave like vultures fighting for the scraps (so to speak) and getting in the way of "real" market participants.

The act of arbitrage trades is taxing market participants already. The proposed tax of ¢3 might make buying stock cheaper on average. (I don't know the real numbers, this is just a guess)
Further more I would rather see the money in the hand of the government, as there is a chance that some of the money is spend on better streets & health care. The alternative is to fund hoards of highly skilled engineers to improve algorithm that pick up the scraps. I personally know engineers at broker firms who feel their extremely well paid job provides absolutely no good to society.

EDIT: The main argument for the existence of arbitrageurs is that they provide liquidity to the market when there are not enough buyers & sellers. My personal believe is, they liquidity they provide today comes with a to high of a price. 20 years ago when it was a few guys yelling on the trading floor you could always count on one guy yelling (the arbitrageur). Today the number of market participants & electronic transactions make trades near perfect; The utility of arbitrage trades vanished almost completely.
offtopic:

"Don't play the combative divisiveness game. It's for suckers. It serves the politicians, it doesn't serve you."

I wish someone would say this every time people start yelling at each other over political decision.
Can you please list the well-known ones?
Heck, if you're going to do that.. you don't even need JavaScript.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://malware.com />
Thanks, yeah we've heard that from several people and it's on the TODO list to add some hover intent detection for sure.
You can get all these tools easily from the Anaconda Python Distribution, which is free, well supported,and includes all packages mentioned plus way more, including things like scikits learn. I work for continuum

http://continuum.io/downloads.html
I found it a bit disappointing that the divio slides look nicer than the final result. I loved the clean look of the original design.
Looks great for restaurant owners who need a quick site. Well done for launching.

One of your competitors will be http://www.happytables.com/ who are doing an amazing job with a Wordpress backend.
I told myself this too often. I have to succeed this time. Thanks for your support!
...you do the right thing. You give competitors fair coverage. Period. Let the users decide.
Shameless self-promotion: http://js1k.com/2013-spring/demo/1423
I wrote a Tumblr (=Editing backend) to static S3/Cloudfront script on App Engine for my linkblog. If there's some interest I might put it on Github.
I really appreciate your kind words!
Thanks, that was an excellent read.
I like the design but I've some feedback.

- Search bar has to be well integrated with the primary navigation.

- Alignment of the search text field & the search button.

- Search text field has sharp edges while the button is slightly bigger and has rounded edges.

- I think increase/decrease your text size is redundant. Your target audience is programmers or people who want to learn programming. They already know how to zoom in/zoom out.

- Instead of showing an image of how to create an array. Wouldn't it be awesome, if we create a simple interactive shell where-in you show how to manipulate strings (reverse, capitalize etc. It will get user's who are new to Python excited about the language and its simplicity.

How can I contribute to the project?
> I don't have too much time left. My 20ies are gone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Bankruptcy_a...

"By age 32, Fuller was bankrupt and jobless, living in low-income public housing in Chicago, Illinois. In 1922, Fuller's young daughter Alexandra died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis. Allegedly, he felt responsible and this caused him to drink frequently and to contemplate suicide for a while. He finally chose to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.""

You're a young man from Switzerland whose biggest problem (from what you say) is loneliness. Could be worse, don't you think?

Your life is hardly over, it hasn't even begun. Justin Bieber is 19 and has quite a few #1 albums already, should every 20-something singer feel bad about themselves as a result? You need a new yardstick to measure yourself by.

Happiness, whatever that means, peace, it comes from within. You can't succeed your way to it really, money and position will only marginally improve your internal world. Don't conflate the two. My advice is to more accurately attribute your ennui to "wasting your 20s" as in postponing life to when you "make it" - allow yourself to start living now the way you truly want to and enjoy yourself, time goes by fast. You can be happy no matter how things play out, at least happier than you are now, and try your darndest to make your mark all at the same time.

Edit For context : I'm 23 and have been hell bent on "startups" since I was 16 for various reasons. Sometimes I can't sleep because the ol' noggin won't shut off and thoughts fly at a million miles an hour, its a certain feeling that burns you from within. It is a good thing, ride it.
Thirty?! There are many folks who make a big name for themselves at double that age. Not everyone has their day early in life, and no one has their day if they keep thinking they are past their prime. The main thing is keep working at stuff, fail, fail again, and get back up, and see what the next try will make.

I think of my age not as wasted but experienced, I have learned and observed things that only come with experience of time. Many creations of greatness can't come early because it takes experience to get there.

Here is one of many articles of folks who found success after middle age (which is still a number of years away for you, BTW):

http://www.arinanikitina.com/top-10-late-bloomers-why-age-do...
Now I believe in you. :)
Do you already have concrete plans?
Thanks for the feedback, good stuff.

BTW, please do try the nav on mobile devices, especially tablets. They work there, too, and I think our designers did something especially slick :)
"It has been my goal to start a business since ever I can remember."
"This is my chance to turn the boat around, and realize my goals."

Make lemonade, sell it on the streets at weekends. Voila! You have a business, and realised your goals. Right?

I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that your goal has more to it than that. You need to understand your constraints, and where those constraints come from.

One constraint might be that the business needs to generate EUR x thousand per year, and the source of that constraint is probably your bills, rent/mortgage, etc. Another might be the location, or you might decide that actually that's a constraint you're happy to take away.

Either way, and it's by no means the only consideration, thinking through these can help you focus the direction your business goes in.

Oh, and good luck!
I would prefer to get someone's ear before my startup fails, not after. Sadly, most of my friends aren't into startups so I have few choices. Ideally, I would have a circle of say three other founders who serve as advisors to each other, but unlike typical advisors they would be peers rather than mentors.

I would call them co-dvisors.
"Reading light", actually :) Quite appropriate and unique. Greetings from the frigid north!
He sounds like the perfect boss for an R&D department.

I never heard of him before, but now I feel like back when Dennis Ritchie passed away unnoticed outside of the tech crowd, while everyone was mourning for Steve Jobs.
I came here to say the same thing. Every day is a new chance to succeed, and no single day is your last chance. Happiness is a long game, and the process of getting older is a process of trading simple pleasures for complex ones. Success is a long game. Never give up!
I'm not convinced a (singular) massive capital investment is exactly a good idea... but Startups? Corporate R&D?

For it to be entirely efficient there has to be market incentives... such as having a clear economic outcome with manageable risk.

Otherwise it will mostly just be throwing money at it with hopes that something will come of it. Something the government is always more than willing to do. But more capital efficient channels... not so much
I wish it was so easy. The 6% and 55% numbers for wind and renewables are percentage of CAPACITY not actual power used.

And your own references undermine your argument. In addition to qualifying that this is capacity the Bloomberg article goes on to mention the current weakness in the wind production equipment market and strength of gas. The Wikipedia article contradicts you in the second paragraph:

"renewable energy supplied 8%,[4] which was mainly from hydroelectric dams"