skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Can you elaborate?

Sure.

>I would have thought that any language with an explicit compile step would be at a disadvantage in this space.

Not exactly, and not always. In fact it can be the opposite. It depends on a few factors, and there are tradeoffs.

Consider that so many of the command-line utilities that come bundled with Unixen (Unix, Linux, BSD) are written in C - just look in /bin, /usr/bin, etc (some of the default dirs in $PATH). (Do a "file * | less" in those dirs.)

(Though there definitely are utilities that are written purely in *sh, or Perl, or Python, and more so these days than some years ago. Still, some, particularly shell scripts, tend to make calls to compiled utilities such as sed, awk, grep, ls, du, df, ps, and many other commands.)

For utilities used often or heavily, or where performance is important, a compiled binary can often be a good choice: lower startup time (don't have to start the interpreter to run the script, often faster run time (because running compiled machine code vs. interpreted or JIT'ed).

Go has performance closer to C than Python does, and also has some aspects of HLL's (High Level Languages) like Python. The compile only has to be done once per machine or platform, remember; also, Go compilation is quite fast, which was a design goal of the language. And if you compile once on one machine, you can just copy the binary (in an automated way, too) to any number of other machines running the same OS and version. With a self-sufficient binary, you avoid both the issues of missing or incorrect dynamically loaded libraries of languages like C (if the C program uses them), and the issues of missing or wrong versions of required libraries, with languages like Python.

Those are some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head. There may be others, both pro and con.
Space Monkey's wording maybe could have been better, but I understood it as they intended and they appear to be dealing with a customer issue in a very reasonable manner.

It's a little discouraging that public "exposés" of startups seems to be the cool new thing on HN and that this is so high up on the front page.
I can't speak for him, but I haven't had to take cash out of an ATM in years. The last time I used an ATM, a few months ago, was merely to ensure that my card still worked. It turned out that it had expired a year before and I hadn't noticed.

I just don't spend cash that often. I used cards for almost everything. A little bit goes a long way like that.
Having a $/month service on top of hardware does not change the nature of ownership. Mixing hardware and network seems to be a constant with SpaceMonkey's communication strategy. I'm sure that a law student could show how none of the KS campaign qualifies as a rental/lease offer.
Note that this article is a lightweight edit of Asimov's original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h...

In particular, the article is edited to only show you reasonable predictions, rather than all his predictions. I thought his mistakes were just as interesting, because they give us a window into what life was like in 1964. Asimov predicted that moon colonies would be common by now, for example. The overoptimism may have been due to the rate of technological growth leading up to 1964. On the other hand, perhaps it was due to the times. People were abuzz with the possibilities of the future partly because Kennedy had recently (1961) set a national goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the 1960s." So it's pretty interesting to try to see the world through the eyes of someone 50 years ago and try to diff societal trends to the modern day.

(It's also fun to imagine someone 50 years from now looking back on us. I wonder which of our societal trends will survive 50 years? It's an interesting game to try to figure out which of our current beliefs are crazy even though no one presently thinks so.)

There are many interesting aspects of Asimov's piece, so it's well worth the read. For example, does this point about future societies sound familiar?

"The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders."

He's mistaken about 2014, but only time will tell whether this is temporary.

I was also surprised that there were fewer than half as many people in 1964 than 2014. Asimov mentioned that the population is predicted to double every 40 years. I wonder it that's still the case, or if growth has slowed?
Yes there are many...for instance visual layout driven web development is one obvious example.

I know people who prefer native tools always get defensive about the idea of the browser becoming the default platform for web development (and possibly software development in general), but I really don't see it happening any other way.

The ways browser tools for instance can use the browser itself to help simplify web development is something native tools are never going to be able to do. For instance I envision being able to integrate the debugging/developer facilities built into the browser directly into my browser-based developer product without much heavy lifting.

I may be bias given that I am a founder of a startup (see profile for link) building a browser-based developer product...but I have also spent years working with native IDEs including attempting to build my own IDE (http://bit.ly/IwZCEL), the browser advantage is just apparent to me. Granted there are still improvements to be made to browsers in order to bring them to parity with native environments for software development in general but I think it is just a matter of time.
Here's to the great idea of Federalism, and hoping that Colorado and Washington show everyone else the way forward.
I think this is the biggest thing too - no personal money allowed either. I don't know why any congress would pass this, though, because their existing fundraising infrastructure gives them an advantage over any new challengers who would have to build that up from scratch.
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I know the Space Monkey guys from working together at Mozy and I can vouch that they wouldn't be deliberately misleading about this.
One can argue that too much entertainment is no entertainment really. I feel that we are yet to witness the effects of boredom on humanity.
The Kickstarter FAQ mentioned the return policy, and explicitly said that pro-rated refunds would occur once the device was returned.
Having read the post, I honestly do not see anything that remotely approaches a "scam". You need to be more careful with words, or maybe just to learn to take disagreements or disappointments more in stride, and to maybe try to see things from others' perspectives.

What you have here is some kind of disappointment in an upgrade offer; Space Monkey, as far as I see, is a) still honoring the offer it gave you on Kickstarter, and b) is willing to refund you the whole sum in any case. That's not a "scam". I kept reading this article and waiting to see how Space Monkey stole your data and sold it to advertisers and identity thieves (that would be a scam), but, instead, you're basically displeased with them and their phrasing was possibly unclear.

When you raise that to the level of "scam" and spend who-knows-how-much effort on writing 13 long back-and-forth emails and a blog post (at what rate do you value your time that you find this worthwhile for a $10/month service?), you just make yourself sound like a spoiled child.

FWIW, I have nothing to do with Space Monkey and have never even heard of them before 10 minutes ago.
Although there are some problems with the implementation, I've come to like it for a couple of reasons:

(1) It authenticates features of your browser (like user-agent, IP address) to score the transaction. These are somewhat hard for an attacker to duplicate.

(2) With some UK banks, it is combined with a hardware one-time password generator to form a reasonably robust two-factor authentication.

Now there are certainly problems, such as it appearing in a frame, and not appearing as a subdomain of your bank, and those should be fixed.
When you lease the device if the hardware fails then Space Monkey replaces it. If you own the device and it fails outside of the 1yr warranty, then you have to replace it. The difference is about recouping hardware costs over the lifetime of the device.
Funny because fiber optic cable have been in use for more than a decade?
I'm tired by "Rails should fundamentally change" crowd
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I'm a designer and author who now creates training courses on design. I’m hiring a freelance designer to help create video tutorials on Photoshop and design for a new course.

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"Family Planning": Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Production, Starring Donald Duck
Turn on your cam, citizen.
Ever since reading the original Popular Science article on this company it has amazed me how little attention it has received in the media. It seems like they are really on to something and their budget compared to other fusion projects is tiny. I hope they receive continued funding.
It's just a landing page at this point. Probably minimal time was spent setting it up.
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http://www.gethightower.com

Ground floor opportunity at a commercial real estate software startup :)

Commercial real estate (CRE) is one of the largest parts of our economy ($7T in U.S. asset value) but incredibly underserved by technology. We've actually met teams using different color sheets of paper to manage and track their sales pipeline. One of our investors described the opportunity as "finding the proverbial lost tribe in the amazon" [1]. If reimagining this world sounds interesting, come talk to us – we've got a product in market, just closed a 2.1M seed round, and are hiring engineer #1.

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Drop me a line to learn more – niall.smart (at) gethightower.com.

Happy new year!

[1] http://www.bvp.com/blog/hightower-poised-modernize-commercia...
[2] http://www.pehub.com/2013/12/hightower-secures-2-12-mln-in-s...
More reasons: some of the Go language creators were heavily involved in the creation of Unix and C, and while I don't know it for a fact, it's pretty likely that they intended and designed Go to be useful for command-line tools as well, e.g. servers, utilities, etc. Also, Go has the flags package for handling command-line arguments (though other languages like Python do have various libs for that too).
Erm... we seem to have read different articles...

"After tabulating all the major component costs (plus another $99.99 US for Windows 8 Pro), we are at a total of around $11,530.54 US using today’s prices at retailers that actually stock the hardware. I’m not afraid to admit that compared to the asking price of $9,599 US, the new Mac Pro seems like one heckuva deal for these components."

and

"You simply can’t build a smaller form factor PC that matches the Mac Pro today"

????
First of all, that comment is very exciting to me: you totally get what we're doing, you just didn't know you got it. That's awesome. Two things I'd like to clarify:

1. We DO oAuth (or whatever protocol they provide us) into your bank - we don't ever "know" your username or password, the system just goes into your online banking and gets the info it needs to make the payment. We're Regulation E compliant, so we can't do anything you didn't authorize us to do and if you have a disputed payment, we can reverse it.

2. The "middle man" thing you're talking about is what we are. The demo you're seeing is of our consumer facing payments brand, but at our core we're building this as a bank neutral OS/API for good-funds ACH payments. This means merchants or apps won't have to do all this integration with banks, they won't have to pay fees on payments (we don't charge fees on payments), and they won't have to deal with Credit Card BS.
Smoking a bowl to celebrate! :-)
The system can't get right because it is fundamentally corrupt. It was carefully designed for this very purpose from the beginning. Too many smart and intelligent people are in charge for the system to get this fucked up by accident.

Just like mediocre software architectures, sometimes a full rewrite is the only way to go. No amount of refactoring will cleanse a self-corrupting system.

Just like a Windows installation after a while, nothing will help but a fresh reinstall with a blank slate.

However, it is the nature of our institutions to try and stay alive, even when they are outdated ideas, have been proven inneffective time and time again. Above all, they want to survive, even if the cost for this is a massively decreased quality of life for virtually everyone not holding the reins.
Here's what Space Monkey promised on their kickstarter page[1]:
"Space Monkey is the next generation cloud. For $10 per month, you get a full Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes) of storage you can use anywhere, any time."

No device is promised, and even after re-reading his blog post, I'm not sure what emil10001's argument is. He feels he owned his Space Monkey, because what? Because he felt that he should own it? Because there wasn't a big red font on the kickstarter page that said "YOU DO NOT OWN THE DEVICE!!!"?

Maybe emil10001 has a point and Space Monkey is running a huge scam. That, of course, is premised on the assumption that Space Monkey sold him a device, then insisted he didn't own it. Emil10001 has provided no evidence that this is the case. That's not hyperbole, go reread his blog post. It's like a kid throwing a temper tantrum because he isn't getting his way. I can't believe this is getting upvoted on HN.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-tak...
Agreed, but they are technical in that right now they're really hard to use. We're fixing that.
See a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/spicyj/3tn45/
Warning rant:

All this can add is satisfaction for attention-seekers, and public shame when it's not achieved. I find new year resolutions as offensive as St. Valentines' Day.

If I want to do something (stop smoking, write an app or redecorate a room) I just... get to it. It doesn't need to be January 1st. I simply need to want it.

Valentines is much the same. Society shames you into spending money - the message is if you don't, you don't love her. Fuck that. It has much more value when I demonstrate my love in private, on my own terms, without the social pressure of anything.

What I do is my choice. How I react to something beyond my control is my choice. I choose value over approval-seeking.
There is this thing you're told when you're in school in America: People want freedom and this desire has shaped history.

But I am not so sure about this anymore. It might be that people just want a minimal level of comfort. Maybe everybody just wanted a big screen TV.
So it sounds like you are mostly upset with our support staff? Could you help me understand what you believe would have helped to resolve this for you? What we did wrong?

Going back through the exchange, it looks like our staff offered you a complete refund very early on.

Maybe send me an email outlining an example of how you think the exchange should have gone? alen@ I'm sincere -- I'd like to improve the experience if you have insights to share.
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco Bay Area or Remote

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All of those things were possible with medical marijuana.
So if it breaks, replacement will be free right? (As long as sub is valid)
What does gaining industry traction or adoption mean
> Ethics are a social contract that Starbucks won't participate in.

Really? This is a really strong assumption. So people as a group cant act in an ethical manner?

> Also, I don't believe I'm generalizing at all.

But you are. Here are your generalizations:

* Ethics are a social contract that Starbucks won't participate in. (What proof do you have?)

* But at some point they [ALL corporations] abandon humanity and are literally incapable of making an ethical choice independent of business value.

> Also, I didn't say it gives anyone a blank check. There are obviously legal consequences, and the law increasingly vastly favors entities like Starbucks, because money buys law in the US

yes might equals right and the ends always justify the means /s
Psychiatry is coming.
Vim - Cheatsheet
Talk is cheap, show me the code ;)
The surrounding states are already awash with cannabis (even and especially Utah). Right-thinking people just have to keep browbeating the prohibitionists back into their corners until they can't do anything any more. I'm the first person to try to appeal to another's sense of logic, but logic is obviously not what the Prohibitionists are operating on.

Prohibition has failed, failed spectacularly and expensively and there is simply no room to try some sort of half-measure to appease those that think it can still work. These sorts of people simply need to understand that their opinion doesn't matter at all and will be completely discounted, sad to say.
>Why fight it in court when he can get this much free publicity by conceding?

What I am saying is it would never get to court. It is one thing for Starbucks or anyone else to send a C&D, it is a whole other ballgame to bring a Trademark lawsuit in Federal Court, exposing Starbucks to sanctions and attorneys fees.

Separately, the free publicity is not tied to the Brewery conceding (except the bonus points for doing it in a comedic way), but the free publicity is tied to Starbucks sending the C&D in the first place, the story would get a lot more publicity if the Brewery told Starbucks to fuck off - which could be done in an equally comedic way. However, if you think this is a lot of free publicity, this case actually going to court would result in 10 fold the publicity. Plus when the little guy prevails over Starbucks, gets their attorneys fees paid maybe even gets the Court to sanction Starbucks and their Corporate outside counsel... maybe 100 times the free publicity, again it would never go that far this C&D is a lot of posturing and very little legal merit, the attorneys know that and that is why the got the result they were seeking with nothing more than a certified letter.
Finally, I am certain once other states see the revenue they will follow suit in legalization.
Well it's a little different than guns. (Old man voice) "They don't grow on trees, you know!"

If it's couched in terms of black/white:pass/fail for keeping it out of other states then it's doomed to fail and the DOJ will come down hard. But Colorado shouldn't be in charge of watching the movement of stuff that's legal to own and sell inside it's jurisdiction. It's duty is to regulate how to own and sell inside the same area. Period. It would, however, be the job of neighbouring states that didn't want it to spill over to maintain their borders appropriately and of course it falls on individual citizens to respect the borders.

Where it differs from guns is, unlike Supreme Court reasoning to the contrary, if there was adequate intrastate supply b/c of the ability to maintain personal plants then interstate exchange shouldn't be much of an issue anymore (obviously that's a gradual process).
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This should be written in the email they sent out! Thanks for clarification.
That is probably the best prediction I've seen anyone do.

He greatly overestimated our capability to store/generate power, the reason is apparent in his Foundation series as what he got wrong (cordless appliances and hovering transportation) basically comes down to this; we don't have miniature nuclear fusion devices. Well, actually we do, they just aren't commercially viable to the extent you'll see them in a blender, yet.

I don't know if our most beloved word is "Work!", "Growth!" seems more applicable to the western world, the two are tied pretty close together, though.

Very interestingly our foray into holographic projection so far is in fact just as he describes them: fully transparent cubes where an image is rendered.