seldo

I think this take ignores the history. After the Great Depression, a number of laws were put in place, in particular the Glass-Steagall act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Legislat... ) that led to 50 years of relative financial stability. In the 80s and 90s these laws were dismantled, leading as you point out to a series of bubbles.

The point is that we have data: we know what happened with regulation, and with less regulation, and with less regulation things were worse. Suggesting that the solution is to remove even more regulation seems a very strange conclusion to draw from this experience.

(As an aside, I'm not sure why bitcoin bubbles being "short" is helpful. What is the advantage of high volatility?)

Holy cow, that's amazing.

Q: Does MongoDB support transactions?

A: MongoDB does not provide ACID transactions.

( http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/faq/fundamentals/#does-mongod... )

It is crazy to be doing financial stuff in a DB that doesn't provide transactions. It completely blows my mind that anybody would do this.

I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.

Forget the difference in the exchange rates. Are you saying you have no system in place to monitor if transactions execute successfully? I'm not trying to be hyperbolic but that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution.

I wondered about that as well. Last-minute inclusion seems most likely explanation, but very odd.

If you have ever worked on something like this, you will know that merely getting these companies to agree to have their logos on the same page is a feat. They are listed in alphabetical order, and I imagine there was MUCH discussion about their relative sizes. But it can't be that Apple is disputing their logo size, since it's included at the bottom.

I really, really hope this was intended as parody.

A minor correction -- dotCloud the PaaS does not actually use Docker in production, as the article claims. It uses something pretty similar, which was the inspiration for the creation of Docker, but not Docker itself.

[Source: @solomonstre, in person at a Docker meetup a few weeks ago]

My parents, who live in Trinidad, have this problem every time they visit me in America. After a couple of days of everyone fake-smiling at them the whole time they get pissed off. To them, everyone's smiles come off as insincere and even slightly condescending. (They hate it even more when people tell them to "have a nice day".)

Sure, but that kind of data can be misleading. If your app works like a dog's breakfast in IE9 already (and it does), then hardly anybody using IE9 will be using it. That doesn't mean there aren't companies stuck on IE8 who would love to use Google but can't.

God, that graph in that article is so dumb it hurts. It appears to undermine their case, in fact. Actual graph:

http://cl.ly/image/1t2Y3d1B0A1y

My understanding is that by 11am Knight was clearly bankrupt, so there was no further point in staying at the office.

I think the difference between "old Google" and "current Google" is that old Google would have been honest and said "the closest available equivalents are Paypal and Amazon Payments". Instead the migration partnership (presumably with a rev share) is Braintree, which while capable is not really the same sort of product.

It sucks to have to close things down, but sometimes you do, and they gave everybody 6+ months of notice to migrate back in May, but being disingenuous about the best alternative is mealy-mouthed and "un-Googly".

<3

We were an early customer and love those guys to bits, but even on Stripe things get complicated when you've been around long enough to have changed your pricing plans a few times and have users who need to migrate from one to the other, etc.. Recurring billing is intrinsically hard.

I mean, just calling it "central america" would have helped.

Seems very like http://bellard.org/jslinux/ from a while back.

I think Marco is overly dismissive of shared hosting; the web should be inclusive and easy to use, and for lots of people with uncomplicated hosting needs shared hosting is a fine choice. See also: Heroku, AWS, any other level of abstraction you care to pick. Many developers outgrow shared hosting, but that doesn't mean the category is intrinsically bad.

(My personal site has been on Site5 for over a decade; they have mostly been pretty good)

How do you log in to a mobile site if you have to use your phone to scan the code?

To repeat my own comment from a few week back ( https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=rYqgO4wMtljd4zBdfWM3wt ): because enormous numbers of programmers already know JavaScript, and familiarity trumps + libraries being available trumps every other consideration when choosing a programming language, according to actual research ( http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/pap... ).

This is why the presentation keeps talking about web developers. There are more web developers than there are any other kind of programmer. If you want to make your programming platform accessible, make it accessible to web developers.

Those in the bay area can try the Covered California calculator, which gives more details on the actual plans that will be available:

http://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#calculator

As I am currently self-employed, these plans make insurance a LOT more affordable for me.

They're smelling hydrogen sulfide, which is a volcanic gas also found in combination with raw natural gas. It's the "rotten egg" smell.

I live in the Mission, and I agree with you. Oakland is 30 minutes away from SF. This is like moving to South San Francisco and claiming it makes a makes a substantial difference to your business. You're still in the middle of the bay area.

I scored zero: "You have perfect color vision!"

Huh! That's awesome. I had no idea Photoshop masks could be used to distort images in that way. Good job!

This is excellent, how on earth did you manage it?

How would you expect the audio to be delivered in a service you accessed via telnet?

This really fascinating article from 2010 predicted and explained Blackberry's imminent demise:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/10/whats-really-w...

It's super long, but scroll down to the graphs where he shows the declining growth and margins, and predicts that Blackberry sales are going to suddenly fall off a cliff two years later, which is exactly what happened.

I'm going to be paying a lot of attention to what this guy says in future.

(For bonus points, compare these graphs to Apple's current figures -- Apple needs to add a new adjacent category soon, or they are toast. TV/iWatch to the rescue?)

Yeah, I was confused by Windows' apparently-large share as well, and I figured it was a definition thing as well, but if you look at these sales figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Historical_sales_fig...

Microsoft sold 14 million smartphones (or rather, their device partners, probably mostly HTC back then) in 2007, but according to this article from 2007, RIM was running at about 9.6 million devices a year, which matches what wikipedia says:

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/1830466/blackberry-sales...

So at some point in 2007 Microsoft some crazy how had something like a third of the smartphone market.

Remember this is a percentage market share chart, so it always adds up to 100%. The "slump" you see is a spike in Symbian share.

Related: it's important to realize when reading this chart that the absolute number of phone shipped in this period was exploding from year to year: it's quite possible that every single manufacturer on the chart (except maybe Palm) shipped more devices every single year; Android and Apple just grew faster than the others.

How popular is ASP as a stack? I'm looking at

http://langpop.corger.nl/

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

http://langpop.com/

https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY...

And ASP doesn't make the list, presumably because it is a framework rather than a language per se -- both C# and Visual Basic make the list, but that's not really a good indicator. I don't really know anything about the Microsoft stack, and I don't know anybody who does.

To clarify: I'm not denying ASP is popular, I'm just asking if you know of a good metric to gauge its relative popularity. Apparently Github wouldn't be a good indicator either?