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Heyo Hacker Noon subscriber,
We couldn’t get to all of Septembers best tech stories (so far), but this newsletter covers revolution, the science of how millionaires talk without talking, dev, machine learning, entrepreneurship, A.I., marketing and more.
Enjoy these 23 top Hacker Noon stories:
REVOLUTION
The Attention Revolution: Your next browser will pay you by Frontend Developer Daniel Colin James [9 min read]. You’re about to witness a movement that will make the shift from desktop to mobile look boring. Google and Facebook amass staggering amounts of money by harvesting your data and charging advertisers for your attention, but that’s going to change very soon. The power is about to shift from the tech giants of Silicon Valley to the foot soldiers of the internet: me and you.
College is Dying, Design Your Own Education. by Johnny, who’s on a quest to optimize for judgemen[13 min read]. College is dying. I’m not referring to the institutions — those will probably survive for a few more decades. I’m referring to the paradigm.
Leaving Apple & Google: /e/ first beta is here! by Software Engineer & Entrepreneur Gaël Duval [10 min read]. Less than a year ago, I posted a series of articles “Leaving Apple & Google…” [part 1, part 2, part 3] to announce that I was planning to create a smartphone OS. A new OS that would: (1) be free from Google (no Google services, no Google search, no Google Play store, etc.) (2) be far more respectful of user’s data privacy (3) be attractive enough so that Mom and Dad, children and friends would enjoy using it even if they aren’t technophiles or geeks. Today we release a first beta of what we have done so far to make the initial vision a reality.
HOW MILLIONAIRE’S TALK WITHOUT TALKING
The Millionaire’s Problem With Sherlock Holmes And Hercule Poirot by Pilcro Founder Patrick Woodhead [7 min read]. The Socialist Millionaires Problem asks whether two millionaires can learn whether they have the same amount of money, without revealing how much money they each have. These are both examples of secure multiparty computation (SMC). SMC is an area of cryptography receiving lots of attention in blockchain and internet-privacy companies, in attempts to protect personal data online. This short story gives a non-technical variant of the Socialist Millionaire’s Problem disguised as a crime thriller!
CRYPTO
Cryptocurrencies Need to Die for the Market to Live by Hodlbot Founder Anthony Xie [8 min read]. In the last two years, we have seen an explosion in the number of cryptocurrencies. But with so many coins in the market, only a handful have seen any real use. Most projects have not come close to delivering on their grandiose visions. A recent research report published in August 2018 showed that only 36 cryptos in the top 100 have a working product. With so many useless projects floating about, we have to wonder why they’re still around. Why have the bad ones not gone to zero? What’s taking the market so long to punish bad projects?
Cryptocurrency Trading Bible Four: Secrets of the Bitmex Masters by Author Daniel Jeffries [23 min read]. “Do you Mex?” I heard those words whispered to me on an elite crypto trader forum one fine evening as the sun sank in the late summer twilight. It sounded like the chant of the drug dealers who used to chase me through Washington Square park when I was a kid at NYU. “Smoke? Smoke? Hey. You smoke? You Mex?” I stared at the screen. Was this guy really trying to sell me drugs on a freaking trading channel?
16 Predictions for the Bitcoin Price from Industry Experts by ICO Advisor Andrey Sergeenkov [7 min read].
State of Bitcoin (Fall 2018) by Author Taylor Pearson & Algorithmic Trading Professional Gary Basin [24 min read]. It should be remembered that we are in the Stone Age for valuation tools for crypto assets and so all valuation models (or collection of models as we’ve presented here) should be taken with a large grain of salt and viewed skeptically. Having said that, nearly all our indicators suggest that the bear market of 2018 will continue for at least the next few months. Both the NVT and NVM are well into overbought territory and sentiment indicators are predominantly bearish.
Why Bitcoin & why sooner rather than later? by Distributed Global Partner Jonathan Cheesman [9 min read]. This article was inspired by an investor of ours who was looking to present the case for bitcoin to his firms investment committee. I thought this would be a helpful update to share with the broader finance community. The rabbit hole: I didn’t get into bitcoin because I am a libertarian or because I am a technologist or a cryptographer. I was first attracted to Bitcoin by the asymmetric investment opportunity it presented. The optics really were like nothing I‘d ever seen: this was the first investment open to everyone in the world and the fixed supply schedule presented a very clear route to mania should it grow in popularity.
DEV
C# Async API: The Missing Parts by Royal Cruise Line Sr. Software Engineer Nicolas A Perez [5 min read]. Many years ago, C# introduced a way to run asynchronous operations that truly changed how we write concurrent code. The C# async API used to push the frontier on many aspects of concurrent execution. The introduction of _async / await_, along with a monadic like API, made this beautiful language (C#) very desirable when coding multi-threading workloads. However, the time has passed, and other languages continue to update their APIs while .NET has kept unchanged. We explore some of the C# async API features while comparing them to what modern Java offers. This is not intended to criticize any of these features, but instead, to analyze them by writing some small pieces of codes that might actually improve these APIs.
Five Emerging Trends for the Future of the Software Development by Engineering Leader Isabel Nyo [6 min read]. Software development industry is one of the fastest growing industries today and software developers are in demand everywhere in the world. At the same time, the future of work is a hot topic — on one hand, there are hopes that future of work will mean more opportunities for anyone, anywhere, working fewer days and hours, access to better tools and so on. On the other hand, many concerning questions have been raised such as will robots replace humans, will artificial intelligence throw ethics and moral out the door, will we be more wired yet less connected to each other at work and home, and so on.
50 Popular Python open-source projects on GitHub in 2018 by open source enthusiast Kazz Yokomizo [11 min read].
Goodbye Redux by Jack Scott, who is rethinking the way we build products and run startups 🤔[11 min read]. For the last few years, internet technologies have been shifting towards front-end JavaScript frameworks as a method of building better user experiences for web and mobile applications. This is awesome 🔥 I personally love the flexibility that these frameworks give us. But has the amount of flexibility gone too far…
Lessons Learned: Code Splitting with Webpack and React by Software Engineer Alexander Kondov [11 min read]. It goes without question that performance on the web is important. Our apps and sites should load fast in order to keep the user’s attention, keep them engaged and deliver a positive experience. Development, however is usually done on above-average machines connected to a strong network. However, not all users access the web from a powerful device or a strong signal. What we want to achieve is to not let the user think that our app is loading. Even if we can’t serve him everything at once we want to give him the necessary feedback to keep him engaged. To make sure that our web app is performant we need to program for the worst, not the best case.
Personal Kanban Part 1 — Why Todo-Lists don‘t work by Orgavision CTO Sven Wiegand [9 min read]. As a CTO I have to handle dozens of tasks per week. Some of them are big, like digging into a new technology and others are tiny, like scanning through new candidate profiles or checking the latest bug reports. But all of these tasks have to be done. And to make things worse: Each conversation, each meeting and each mail can result in new tasks to be handled. So it’s crucial to have a task tracking system in place which works and ensures that I don‘t miss a thing and helps me to keep my deadlines. Being a development manager for more than 12 years, I‘ve tried out several solutions until I finally found the one which served me well for the last four years.
The 100% correct way to split your chunks with Webpack by Web Developer David Gilbertson [13 min read]. Working out the best way to serve up files to your users can be a tricky business. There’s so many different scenarios, different technologies, different terminology. In this post I hope to give you everything you need so that you can: (1) know what file-splitting strategy will work best for your site and your users, and (2) know how to do it.
The practical guide for Building REST API in Nodejs and MongoDB include Passport and JWT by Krissanawat Kaewsanmuang, whose bio is “achieve the goal then die” [36 min read]. When I started learning to program, I was searching for a solution to my problems and found it. But the problem was I didn’t know why something was working when it was and why it wasn’t. I had to copy other’s source code and use it without knowing why was something done. This tutorial will help you to go through all the boilerplate code you can use and still understand each part of it.
MACHINE LEARNING
Machine learning — Is the emperor wearing clothes? by Google Chief Decision Intelligence Engineer Cassie Kozyrkov [8 min read]. Machine learning uses patterns in data to label things. Sounds magical? The core concepts are actually embarrassingly simple. I say “embarrassingly” because if someone made you think it’s mystical, they should be embarrassed. Here, let me fix that for you. The core concepts are embarrassingly simple. Our thing-labeling example will involve classifying wine as yummy or not-so-yummy and we’ll keep all the ideas simple enough to enjoy alongside a glass of wine… or three.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP (via inc. magazine)
7 Rules Of Entrepreneurship They Don’t Teach You in School by Author Bill Green [6 min read]. Back when I was in college (for the short amount of time I attended), there was no major for entrepreneurship. In fact, I would argue it’s something you can’t fully learn in school, no matter how diligent the curriculum. There’s no class that walks you through how to stomach the ups and downs of the journey. I never finished college, but I went on to become a successful entrepreneur. It’s a story I tell in full in my book, All In: 101 Real Life Business Lessons for Emerging Entrepreneurs, but the shortened version is that in 1977 I was just a kid that had started a flea market business, with my dad as my business partner. My senior year of high school, we bought a hardware store to expand our business, and I told my dad I wanted to give college a shot. One day, I was in my Introduction to Business Management class, and the teacher stopped me and said, “You come to school in a suit?” I explained, “I have a business with my dad. After class, I leave school to go sell to clients.”
A.I.
How AI Could Destroy The Universe… With Paperclips!!! by Adrien Book [8 min read]. It took me 4 hours and 5 minutes to effectively annihilate the Universe by pretending to be an Artificial Intelligence tasked with making paper-clips. Put another way, it took me 4 hours and 5 minutes to have an existential crisis. This was done by playing the online game “Paperclip”, which was released in 2017. Though the clip-making goal of the game is in itself simple, there are so many contemporary lessons to be extracted from the playthrough that a deep dive seems necessary. Indeed, the game explores our past, present and future in the most interesting way, especially when it comes to the technological advances Silicon Valley is currently oh so proud of.
MARKETING
Building a brand should be part of your product roadmap by SchneiderElectricDMS Product Owner Momčilo Dakić [13 min read]. Coming from an engineering background, a good quality solution to a problem was the only thing that mattered. But then reality kicked in and smacked me in a forehead saying: “You moron, they don’t even know your product exists, let alone that they can benefit from it”. Some good old advertising could show some results very fast, but I want to talk about the long game — about building a brand. Building a brand often starts when the product is finished, as part of the marketing strategy. The idea here is to start building the brand as soon as you start building the product.
ICYMI
Hacker Noon Acquired Crypto Disrupted, the Podcast by Trent Lapinski **[**3 min read]. The cryptocurrency podcast will join Hacker Noon to make a more mainstream tech podcast — THE HACKER NOON PODCAST! Trent Lapinski will take over as the host for the upcoming weekly Hacker Noon Podcast. The first episodes will be released in late September. You can subscribe today by visiting https://Podcast.HackerNoon.com. Over the last calendar year (Aug 17 — Aug 18), Hacker Noon stories have generated 95,000,000+ pageviews. To date, this has been text stories, but in a recent Hacker Noon survey, 71% of readers said they would like to listen to a Hacker Noon podcast.
Until next time, don’t take the realities of this world for granted.
Kind Regards,
P.S. Check out the new Hacker Noon job board, where tech leaders hire and the brightest people in tech find jobs. Some great companies are already hiring on our job board, like Decent, LeafLink, Noson, the Nakamoto Terminal, the Gritti Fund and yours truly (front end developer & backend developer).