As the author of the Android app, it's pretty interesting and exciting to see an article on this. The project was an attempt to save or at least document this language which might go extinct soon, as many others in the region did. If anyone is interested in learning more about the language or the project itself, you can contact me and I can put you in touch with the project owners.
"Many developers look at NoSQL engines—such as MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, or Hadoop"
Noone uses Hadoop as a database. On the other hand, HBase which uses HDFS as underlying storage is a great NoSQL database that we use in production.
Nothing new here. As the article mentions, it's the Babelfish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've wanted to build one myself since I read the book, but the fundamental problem of machines translating languages is still a very hard problem. This thing won't work.
I like the write-up, but I disagree with the reasoning to avoid STM. It sounds a lot like "avoid ConcurrentHashMap in Java". It's true that web applications mostly persist their data in a database or some other persistent structure, and obviously an STM or a ConcurrentHashMap would not do you any good for that. However; if you are working with in-memory data, then STM is a very valuable tool just like ConcurrenthHashMap is.
I like the fact that you tied the Watson api and the Telegram api together in a simple app, but it's a bit far-fetched to claim that "building intelligent bots is not too hard" based on this example.
Impala, imitating Google's Dremel, is specifically designed for OLAP scenarios with its columnar storage structure and the compression algorithms that go along with it. This is not a fair comparison. Try doing OLTP with Impala and you'll see what I mean.
Out of the ones you listed, Haskell would be the most difficult for sure. For quick prototyping though, like others mentioned, the tools around the language would make a bigger impact than the language itself. So RoR or Django would make a lot of sense. You might also wanna take a look at Meteor (Javascript) for quick prototyping
"Haskell and LISP both have minimal syntax compared to C++, C# and Java". I agree that LISP does but I can't really say the same thing for Haskell, especially when you get into the whole monad stuff...
23AndMe doesn't tell you much about your DNA actually, they can only tell you some things about already known variations. If you really wanna know everything about your DNA, you should look at whole genome sequencing (WGS). WGS is usually done by companies like Illumina and analysis can be done by a company like Bina Technologies. The whole field is getting more and more data and analytics driven so there's lots of opportunities for software engineers and data scientists. Check out http://www.binatechnologies.com/vision to get a better idea of the field.
This is not news, this is something very basic related to direct navigation traffic vs. paid traffic. If 50% of traffic is through direct navigation (ppl typing www.yourcompany.com on their browser to land on your site), and Google ads can bring you the other 50%, then that's great, otherwise not. Saying that people would've come anyway sounds amateurish and easy to measure. Stop buying ads and compare your traffic to your prior traffic. Direct nav. traffic for big brands such as Amazon and Ebay is around 50% of their total traffic, so obviously they benefit less from Google ads then companies whose direct nav. traffic is 5%...
The whole "protecting intellectual property" thing could work if it was possible to issue patents in an unbiased and consistent way but patent examiners are human beings and they do some research on the issue, read the arguments from the patent lawyers and come to a (usually biased) decision. You even see cases where a patent is rejected 9 times and get accepted the 10th time. It is extremely difficult to come up with an unbiased, consistent and all-knowing (past work) way to issue patents, I'm not even sure if it's possible at all. And that's another reason why there should be no patents issued at least in the software industry.