skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always find the TIOBE Index fascinating, but mainly because I just don't get it! I have no idea how any index can rank Transact-SQL (not even just 'sql') over JavaScript.

I'm not sure where the index pulls in its data, but if its putting a specific branch of SQL ahead of JavaScript, I've got to say I disagree.

It does, however, provide a really interesting comparison to the GitHub version of the popularity contest. This article shows quite a different picture: http://adambard.com/blog/top-github-languages-2014/ (albeit a month or two stale now)

The most surprising thing I see from both these lists, however, is that even though we've had decades of programming-language progress, straight-up C still has a hugely strong showing. Sometimes simple is still the best, I guess!
I'd wager the phone cable is hooking to a WiFi router, so just stick the router right next to the first phone junction.
That's awesome and congrats, but my guess is you are an outlier and probably have some significant leverage in your market.
it was a brave try
On Sidechains, Bitcoin Maximalism and Freedom
"Our passion is building tools that make developers’ lives easier."

Is it? I thought it was distributing 140 character messages in an eventually consistent manner.
Palantir though in my opinion is kinda like a cult. I visited their offices (sick by the way), and they all had this mentality like they were the Seal team 6 of developers. The do not even call their devs devs, they call them "forward deployed engineers" or something like that. They all had "Go bags" from the Red cross to contribute to this allure. They have all 3 meals cooked there, DJ booth, rooftop parties in evenings, free gym membership down street, and unlimited vacation time*

To me it seemed as if the employees lived there practically. I wonder what would happen if you tap into that vacation time when the other guy is working 14 hrs a day with no time off. They also have a salary cap that is BELOW wages at other high tier employers. Again sickest office I have ever seen but it seems that they attract employees due to their "exclusivity" and great office. They are very successful recruiting young college grads due to this but I suspect when they get a bit older they will realize that the salary and interesting work are more important than a swank office they want you to live in.
Lack luster thesis aside, does anyone have any solid stats about the effectiveness of these new 'in steam' / 'native' advertisements?

Quite curious.

In theory they should be effective at engaging because they can be so narrowly targeted, but I still have such a hard time believing that they actually convert into user action (eg. purchase).
VIDs are not legally protected marks.

Unless there's a valid patent at issue (and nobody's mentioned a patent at all), there is nothing about the chips themselves that violates any law.

Defending vigilantism is disgusting enough when you have a colorable argument that the target of your act is the only one harmed, and is actually guilty of some sort of legal violation.

Here, however, you're defending vigilante destruction of the property of end-users who bought a product with a chip in it that, without the user's knowledge, may or may not have passed through the hands of someone who may or may not have labeled or described it deceptively.

The deceptive party may not even exist, and even if they do, they are not the victim of the vigilante justice. A user who may not have even heard of FTDI is the victim.
He's referring to http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea.... Verizon will happily take your money to give you 500 Mbps to anything on their own network, but for anything on the internet at large, be prepared to wait during peak traffic hours.
Extreme Privilege Escalation  on Windows 8/UEFI Systems [pdf]
I tend to agree with this assessment of his Mandarin more than the gp's. As a native speaker, I must disagree when gp says: "He does decently enough. There are errors, but it's not hard to understand what he is saying -- especially for a sympathetic native listener." Large parts were incomprehensible to me (in part due to the audio quality), and the host's repetition of what Zuckerberg said--he does this many times--were a breath of fresh air. Maybe the experience between gp and myself was like the one mentioned in the Foreign Policy article [1]. The author mentions that he was an adult learner of Chinese and was able to understand Zuckerberg's Mandarin better than a native Mandarin speaker who watched the video with him.

I do admire the energy Zuckerberg is putting into learning Chinese. It's not an easy language to learn. What I found interesting was the sycophantic praise from ABCs in the comments section with gems like: "As much as we are impressed with your Chinese, you made a lot of the ABCs here feel ashamed."

[1] http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/22/mark_zuckerbe...
Your pet is probably the best password manager around. I use it daily and love it!
I like to keep my passwords synced in Dropbox, and I usually work in *nix, but I occasionally have to access them in Windows, so I wrote a little batch file that uses gpg4win to read my passwords https://github.com/davidmi/ScriptsAndTools
Mapping uBiome’s Business Development Ecosystem
This article is incorrect.

1 - Lots of apps don't solve any "problem". Lots of apps don't sell anything other than ad space. Some of them succeed

2 - Lots of 'Apps' can be successful with one founder. Perhaps this writer means "startups"? I'd say most entrepreneurs would rather go it alone than make a bad founder choice.

3 - Sometimes all you need is to remove a single pain point to be a world apart from your competitors. Whatsapp was just another messaging app. But it made it easier to find your friends, by using your phone number and contacts to quickly 'seed' your network. Boom.

4 - The one valid point. If you can't explain it to someone, how do you sell it?
... at this point I think adobe has worn out their welcome. I'm actually surprised that security tools don't just uninstall flash player and acrobat reader preemptively.
I found it disruptive and inconsistent. First of all, it disables the scrollbar and Page Up/Page Down, so I had to resort to the arrow keys. Sometimes scrolling moves the screen, sometimes it activates an animation. I found myself repeatedly blowing past sections because I was trying to scroll enough to bypass the content currently on the screen.

There wasn't anything about the experience that wouldn't have been as well served by a normal scrolling page with animations activated by a click.
Just curious, do you work for Google now and have you worked for Microsoft in the past?
How i built Comme des bêtes
Zalewski was the reason I felt unaccomplished in 2005, when I read his "Silence on the wire" and noted he wasn't much older than I am.

His separate guide on CNC is great[1]. He also has a great intro to electronics[2]. His first book is an amazing survey of totally passive attacks[3]. His second book is a comprehensive survey of web application osecurity[4].

[1] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

[2] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/

[3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1593270461

[4] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1593273886/
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=Shigl...

Publishers got used to the idea they can charge as much as they want on US for textbooks. Higher education already costing so much, who would neglect books? This is not the case in developing countries (specially India).
Imagine a graph, with "effort" on the x axis and "value" on the y axis. I think you're down the bottom-right. I just don't care very much about remembering which movies to watch. That's not to say I wouldn't find any value in your site, just not enough to bother keeping around in my brain. Definitely not enough to sign up for.

So you need to either be less effort or more value.

It's pretty tough to significantly raise the value of what you're doing without fundamentally changing your idea. More integrations would help, and social features maybe (assuming you got the numbers for that to kick in), but ultimately it's not really going to improve my life that much.

Finding ways to be less effort could be a bit more fruitful, though. As others have suggested, I'd remove the signup requirement or delay it as much as possible. Improving the UI would be a good idea, not so much in terms of how it looks, but in terms of making it as fast and low-friction as possible to use.

One angle you could try is to add a super simple hook to get people started. Like, the front page just says "What's your favorite movie?" and an input box that does a search with auto-complete and live-updating results. When you pick the movie, it pops up a few recommendations. Each suggestion has "have you seen? yes/no", if yes: "did you like it? yes/no" that feeds back into the recommendation system. If they haven't seen it, a mini-blurb + "show trailer" + "want to see? yes/no".

If you kept that all snappy with ajax and a reasonably fast backend, a person could feasibly visit your site for the first time and have 5-10 recommendations within a minute. Exactly the same service, same value proposition, just a lot less effort. I think if I had visited that website instead of your one I would probably have a movie list by now.
If the counterfeit FTDI chips are using FTDI's registered USB vendor ID (I assume they are, otherwise the driver wouldn't recognize them?) I think the blame falls solely on the counterfeit chip makers.
Agreed. That's the worst possible argument against this happening.

I think HN is getting old. Certainly more conservative in how it views future change.
> I assume they intend for you to supplement it.

That is true, but it provides a pretty good foundation. Most other methods don't focus enough on listening and pronunciation.

> "I would like to order two beers." but CANNOT, if you rely solely on Pimsleur, say "I would like to order seven beers."

That doesn't match my experience with Pimsleur. Have you completed a Pimsleur course?

I've done Hebrew and I'm now doing Arabic. Pretty much every new sentence is used as a template and repeated with multiple variations. E.g. in Arabic, numbers are inflected, and they teach you that right in the first unit. So if you know how to say "two beers" then you know how to say "seven beers". It's definitely not an audio version of a phrasebook.

> I get made fun of for sounding like a northerner

Being made fun for sounding like a native is a win on my book!
Google will continue to own search on mobile.

As such, their ability to monetize that avenue will remain intact. And it's an extraordinarily lucrative position. It does not matter whether the ideal format for mobile ads is native or not, if it is then Google will adapt their search dominance to that approach and print money the same as they have been.

There has been no drop off in their mobile search position of power, and there's nothing likely to displace their role there.

There's no particular reason mentioned in the article, for why Google can't benefit with the reach of mobile in regards to advertising. I saw no explanation for why search won't get bigger with the mobile market's growth in the next decade. Nor why Google isn't just as well positioned as anybody to take a big cut of native ads via search.

The only way in which this is approximately peak Google, is that their PE ratio is likely to compress to half what it is now over the next decade, while their profits increase, leading to a flat stock for a very long time (as happens to most companies in their situation; eg Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, etc).
Well that and do they mean 50k options as traded on the open market or options enough to purchase 50k shares?

I had an employer promise one and then try to weasel into giving me the other. I threw a fit and made them fix it. Theynwere bankrupt a year later. :whomp whomp: But my point is when they say "option", ask them to define it
One is worth 100 times more shares.
It comes down to percentages. I think what the author is trying to say (and referencing others) is that your chance of success is lowered by being a single founder vs a team. He references the support network and skill sharing. I would argue that a large additional part of the value of co-founders are that by having to at least convince someone else of your decisions, you avert the true howlers. Similarly, you have someone that validates your priorities (really, assessing another shade of green on the logo vs calling the customer/PR/etc?).
I didn't downvote any of your posts and I believe you when you say you're not affiliated with FTDI. But I vehemently disagree with your stance that the sabotage of hardware is warranted or even that it's a minor inconvenience.

Let's take this from another point of view:

You purchase a device or some piece of hardware for a project which becomes useful to others and you decide to make the project marketable and release your own line. You source your components and one of them happens to have an FTDI chip that you believe legitimately came from the company. Your project is accepted by others and everyone is happy.

Then one day, your supplier decides to switch out a source for the chip in one of the components of your project to one that's cheaper (the supplier may not suspect these are counterfeit). You don't see any difference either as you haven't tested it with the latest driver, which may not be out yet. The project is now shipped.

A new driver is released. An overwhelming number of customers now hit your support system saying the update has stopped your project cold. Rolling back the update has no effect. You don't know which component caused the problem as your project uses several from different suppliers. It may take days or even weeks to track down the problem, but meanwhile, your customers grow angry.

This is now your fault and you're left holding the bag.

This scenario need not be hypothetical, as this is just the same as GM "fixing" a problem with their ignition switch that has already claimed lives, but leaving the part number the same. This makes recalling a nightmare as there's now no way to tell which cars are affected until the switch fails or someone dies again.

Just the same as there's no way to tell which one of your project's components carry counterfeit chips and you need to issue a recall for potentially 100K units since you don't know which ones carry a counterfeit and there's no software fix anymore as the chip is bricked. Your project is also potentially being used in mission critical infrastructure that cannot be shut down to do a test without costing a lot of money. Better hope no one follows "best practices" and updates the driver as it may also contain a security fix.

FTDI is well within their rights to protect their product. But are they doing the ethical thing by costing unsuspecting customers and potentially hundreds of other businesses that rely on their product valuable time and money? All for not knowing that somewhere along the supply chain, someone cut a few corners and got their chips from a counterfeiter? Should they be victims twice; once by the counterfeiter and again by the company?
I would challenge the core of Ben Thompson's argument, namely:

> $50 billion for worldwide search advertising (of which Google captures a huge majority) sounds like a lot, but it’s only a small percentage of total ad spend, projected to be $545 billion in 2014. The vast majority of that spend is not about direct response – i.e. ads that spur you to make a purchase on the spot; rather most of the money is spent on brand advertising.

Essentially his point is direct response is ~10% of brand advertising, and that other players are better positioned than Gooogle to capture that.

But what if that ratio itself were a legacy assumption? And thus, why should we take his following statement at face value:

> The idea behind brand advertising is to build “affinity” among potential customers.

I posit that brand advertising has traditionally been orders of magnitude larger than direct advertising because options for quality direct response advertising were limited. But thanks to the rise of the web and mobile, we're now moving into an era where the line between brand advertising & direct advertising is blurring. Not just that, but the time/distance between a customer's latent desires to purchase action is also shortening, thanks to 24x7 e-commerce.

In this world, why should direct response be 1/10th of brand advertising? Heck, why should direct response always be distinct from brand advertising?

Sure, companies will continue to run brand adverting, including ads masquerading as stories (advertorials once, "native ads" today). But the split (or even distinction) between direct response and brand advertising will continue to reduce.
Yea, sounds like it's a bit early to title this post "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Semiconductor."
Australia Building First Tron-Like Highway
B school graduates talking about accurate analogy... Better to pretend to be joking...
Palantir... I laughed...
Throwing a couple of minions under the bus when things look bad is a time-tested strategy.
I'm a firm believer that every filmmaking project is a cult, and that directors with cult leader traits are much more effective at getting the project made the way they want it.

There can be obvious downsides to that, of course, but the same thing likely applies to startups.

I don't know if you can force it if you don't have it, but it's probably learn-able.
The significant question here is whether providers will offer this both ways - i.e. symmetrical uplink/downlink. If the asymmetry is going to persist, then game over for DSL, welcome fibre.
Sounds like depression to me, but I'm not a doctor. Go see one.
Transactional SMS doesn't come under DND, so there's no restriction on that.
More likely a false perception based on the fog of scale and decreased intimacy: as a singular person, you have no idea what most of the people in the company are like once it passes a certain scale, and the larger it gets, the less informed your opinion can realistically be.

Not to mention, no organization can hire 100,000 people over time and have them all be top 1% talent. That doesn't mean they're not still acquiring more top 1% talent than anybody else.
He is probably the first CEO of a American $200 billion dollar company to do so though -- and in public.
I don't think we are at peak google. I think we are having this conversation a bit prematurely. Some other company in the future will disrupt google (who knows in how many years?), that is just the nature of this business. For now Google will enjoy it's dominance.
Cheap replica wathces
It's nothing like Wave.
Why? The counterfeits aren't seeking USB compliance certification, they're just trying to provide 100% compatibility. Are you saying that reverse engineering and spoofing for the sake of compatibility is wrong? Or do you think that USB vendor IDs are covered by some trademark?
How much are you willing to bet and by what date?

Google has had multiple missteps. G+, terrible customer service, lack of diversity in revenue, a lackluster post acquisitions track record besides android. The specific examples stated rely too heavily on personal experience. You site all these large companies in the US, but the world is much bigger than just the US.

10 years from now things could look very different geopolitically. It's not hard to imagine the "Amazon" of India or "Google" of China becoming the biggest in the world due to population and growing economies.
They often cook unevenly and typically lose power over time as the magnetron filament and cathode deteriorate. At last it is possible to replace the magnetron with solid state devices.

My microwave is several decades old now and its magnetron hasn't ever needed replacement, and I haven't noticed any degradation in power level either. I wonder if these new "all-solid-state" ovens will last nearly as long - I've read plenty of reports about the "inverter" types (essentially an HV SMPS) that use many more components which are often operated near their maximum limits and fail sooner, compared to the older design with a simple (but more expensive) large HV transformer.
The characters of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are normal in their fictional worlds. In fact a major running theme of Harry Potter's story is that he is not imbued with magical power that is any greater or more remarkable than his allies or enemies, but manages to prevail through bravery, loyalty, luck, preparation, hard work, etc.

The stories are set in fantastical worlds to make them more interesting to read, but the issues they address are mostly "normal" young adult issues like alienation, conformity, identity, family strife, censorship, oppresion, racism, bigotry, etc.
Comparing yourself to anyone else is silly, worshipping success is sillier, bemoaning failure is silliest.
The only genuine threat to Google's core search business at this time is government regulation.
For one thing, native ads tend to be more viral oriented versus paid, so they have much lower costs which can be as low as free.

It's not so much about the narrow targeting as it is about the engagement. These "advertisements" show up in your FB news feeds and Pinterest pages because someone else in your community thought it worthy to share; they go viral when many people find it worthy to share. They're also much more integrated to the platforms as they don't initially appear as advertisements, unlike say banner ads.

"I still have such a hard time believing that they actually convert into user action (eg. purchase)."

To your last point, the author argues that native advertising is more akin to Brand advertising versus direct response, so in the same way, they're not intended to function as direct response ads that encourage you to buy immediately. But I'd argue that these native ads are even more effective because they can serve both purposes; they can serve the purpose of bringing brand awareness as merely being subtly place subject matter into and article that brings awareness to a brand, or they can be as direct as a product endorsement by a celebrity on their Twitter feeds or Pinterest pages. Native advertising can be versatile enough to cover both direct response and brand building advertisements.
If you start thinking of Palantir as an consultancy agency that specializes in identifying, recruiting, motivating, then caring for software engineers who are contracted out to MNCs/NGOs while mimicking the intelligence community and defense industry culture--indirectly also a context to their company mission to motivate themselves--as a means of marketing and securing their services for said contracts then it will all be clear.
I'm one of those just out of school Googlers and while I obviously have no experience at MSFT I'll tell you why I don't see myself becoming bored at Google.

Google has a best-in-class (top 5?) product in pretty much every category of software. In 10 years a Googler could work on Drive, Android, G+, Gmail, Fiber, and Maps. While working on those things he/she will be exposed to an unparalleled developer infrastructure (Google's internal tools are rigid, but insanely well engineered). So why leave for another company when I could just change managers to work in pretty much any field on software? The only reason to jump ship would be toxic culture or money, and right now Google is at the top of the heap in both culture and pay.
Well, his wife is a second generation Chinese-American and a Cantonese speaker. So that wouldn't be a very compelling reason to learn Mandarin.