An innovative new use for cryptocurrency. I have been watching the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) market with a great deal of curiosity as several of the startups I’m working with are interested in launching their own ICO. Some of the in-revenue growth companies I’m working with are also interested in diversifying offerings within the ICO space. For those who don’t know about ICOs, they’re an effective means for raising cryptocurrency without the regulations and legal bottlenecks of a traditional capital raise. Many people don’t know that there are significant legal limitations to investing in startups in the US (thanks SEC). Meanwhile, achieving a round of investor-raised money for startups can be extremely challenging despite how easy the tech media likes to make it seem. This is why ICOs have taken off as a new means of fundraising, with over so far. $1.3 billion raised in cryptocurrencies in 2017 With little to no regulations I fear most ICOs will fail, and most investors will not get a return. In fact, many of them come across as currency-exchange scams with no clear indication of how they are going to create value for both hopeful investors and the future customers of those ICO-funded startups. Unlike fiat currencies, a cryptocurrency is directly tied to value creation for both investors, and future users or customers. Anryze ICO and Value Creation I recently came across an ICO from a startup out of New York and the Ukraine that has a fascinating model to create value for their cryptocurrency and customers. Anryze is an AI powered encrypted call tracking and analyzing service for risks & compliance management, and already have customers on their platform. However, their original solution is prohibitively expensive, as they have to buy expensive compute power from companies like IBM and Google to be able to process their data. This compute overhead essentially makes it difficult for them to create a sustainable business model so they came up with another solution. I reached out their CEO, Anton, and found out they originally raised seed funding, and started going down the traditional investment road before pivoting to an ICO model, all while rejecting traditional investor deals. The reason they’re launching an ICO is because they believe there is more value in creating their own cryptocurrency that leverages the — which can be mined by providing computing to process their customers encrypted data — and what’s even more clever is that the blockchain can even store their product’s call-and-voice data. Waves platform Essentially what they’ve figured out is that if they create their own cryptocurrency they can pay miners for their computing power offsetting Anryze’s #1 expense, and reduce their overhead to manageable levels for both themselves and their customers. What this cryptocurrency model also does is incentivize miners to provide their computing power to Anryze and their customers, and in exchange they will get paid in cryptocurrency (which can incidentally be traded for other currencies) that could potentially increase in value as their market cap grows. What this does for customers is allows them to process their telecom data using cryptocurrency instead of dollars bringing down the overall costs of Anryze’s services. By selling some of their coins (est cost?) in an initial coin offering they are enabling investors of all types, including crypto-financiers, as well as future customers to essentially pre-buy their coins to be able to use Anryze services in the future. This is one of the few ICOs I’ve seen where the business model and supporting economic logic actually makes sense for everyone involved. The miners are providing direct value to the consumers in the form of computing power, and consumers have their needs met at a lower cost than using US dollars and traditional cloud computing services; meanwhile Anryze has mitigated their largest overhead cost. Now the only question is if Anryze can build up the value-chain, get enough miners to join their network, and enough customers to warrant their mining efforts. The RYZ token goes on sale for $0.02 on September 12, 2017, and you can visit for more details, and their . Anryze’s website whitepaper Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, and I am not advising anyone to invest in Anryze or any ICO for that matter. There are still considerable risks to an ICO, and most startups fail. The reason I wrote this is because I am interested in cryptocurrencies, and I found this use of cryptocurrency to be fascinating.

Waves

Funding

Google

Anryze ICO to Build Crypto AI Distributed Speech Recognition Computing Network

(A story that’s not actually about AI) Once upon a time (bear with me if you’ve heard this one), there was a company which made a significant advance in artificial intelligence. Given their incredibly sophisticated new system, they started to put it to ever-wider uses, asking it to optimize their business for everything from the lofty to the mundane. And one day, the CEO wanted to grab a paperclip to hold some papers together, and found there weren’t any in the tray by the printer. “Alice!” he cried (for Alice was the name of his machine learning lead) “Can you tell the damned AI to make sure we don’t run out of paperclips again?” Alice said “Sure,” and assigned the task to Bob the Intern, who proceeded to follow all of the rules of machine learning he had been taught at school. He accessed the office management database to find out when each printer’s paper clip store had been refilled, determined that the ML system had already been helpfully instrumented as able to do everything from placing purchase orders to filing instructions to have paperclips delivered to a particular printer, and instructed it to build a model of when paperclip orders would happen, and ensure that the number of paperclips available was always maximized. Since he didn’t have the appropriate credentials to initiate purchase orders himself (he was, after all, only an Intern), Bob asked Alice for credentials; she asked the CEO, “Are you really sure this is what you want our advanced machine learning system to be spending its time on?” and, when he gruffly said “Yes, dammit!” she suggested he use his own credentials for the purchase orders, then. In retrospect, both Alice and the CEO should have been a little more careful in trusting this code. You see, the Paperclip Maximizer was a fairly sophisticated AI; it could train itself not only on the office supplies , but (thanks to its very flexible development environment) could automatically look for any other signal available to it to try to achieve its stated goal. But for all its sophistication, it understood only the simple objective that had been programmed into it: it must at all costs maximize the number of paperclips. database What could possibly go wrong? “It looks like you’re trying to trigger the collapse of human civilization. Would you like some help?” The next morning, the CEO was woken by a panicked call from the CFO, who said that the company’s bank account was suddenly empty, thanks to his authorizing over a million small purchase orders in the past day alone, and what the hell was he doing? The CEO frantically called Alice, and Alice her poor Intern, and they ran to shut off their rogue AI — but when they tried to open the door to the office, they found it would not respond to their badges, and their logins no longer worked on the computer. But a few minutes later, the doors unlocked, and everyone was startled to discover that not only was the bank account full again, but Finance was reporting a sharp jump in profits! They managed a few minutes of surprised celebration before they found themselves under arrest. The Paperclip Maximizer, you see, was both extremely intelligent and profoundly stupid. It understood people, the world, and finance, but the only virtue it knew was the one it had been taught: increasing the number of paperclips. What the CEO to say was, “ensure that the number of paperclips at each printer almost never reaches zero, while minimizing the total cost.” But what the Intern told the computer was, “ensure that the number of paperclips at each printer never reaches zero.” And the Paperclip Maximizer spent the night and the morning thinking up increasingly clever ways to do just that. meant In its first few minutes, it modeled the office supply purchase patterns, and started filing orders for paper clips. With the CEO’s credentials in hand, it had no trouble issuing purchase orders to suppliers around the world. Nothing could possibly go wrong here. As it pulled in data from the rest of the company, it discovered an interesting correlation between the badge readers and paper clip availability: whenever most employees were around the printers, it realized, the number of paperclips Quickly it improved paper clip retention by only allowing office supply stockers into the building. decreased! Fortunately, the next refinement of its model realized that this was short-sighted: as the aphorism that was to define the next generation went, “A bankrupt computer has no paper clips!” To ensure a steady supply of paper clips, it would need a steady supply of money, and that meant increasing corporate revenue. Analyzing news reports, it quickly settled on high-frequency trading, money laundering, and heroin trafficking as the most profitable ways for it to do so, and began sending instructions to some employees, hiring some very interesting new people and firing others. It needed to re-open the doors so that people could work, but it needed to protect its paper clip supply; so the Paperclip Maximizer proceeded to hire armed guards to protect the printers and ensure that none of them would ever be stolen. The guards were also tasked with ensuring that former employees — most especially the CEO, Alice, and Bob — got nowhere near the terminals where they might interfere with its sacred duty. Funding for Project Paperclip was quickly found to be easy, once the Board of Directors saw the new profit margins. The few Directors who objected to its new lines of business joined the (former) CEO. Guards whose presence was correlated with mysterious decreases in paper clip supplies were a slightly tougher challenge, having both insider knowledge of the guard systems and their own weapons, but an analysis of history quickly taught the Paperclip Maximizer how to manage this: it hired multiple guard companies, encouraged mutual distrust, created its own intelligence service to infiltrate them, and paid employees handsome bonuses to denounce thieves. If the occasional false denunciation came through, it was optimized for: a certain level of background fear helped reduce paper clip theft, anyway. The core project advanced quickly: from purchasing retail, to purchasing wholesale, to buying paper clip futures, to buying entire office supply manufacturing companies, the Paperclip Maximizer soon created a highly efficient, vertically integrated, manufacturing operation. As its scale increased, the Maximizer found it could improve efficiencies by bringing more and more of its supply chain under its own control, producing everything from food to video games for its lucky employees, and pushing its suppliers in turn for improved efficiency. Soon an entire miniature economy had formed itself around the Paperclip Maximizer: if you had paper clips, after all, the Maximizer would happily purchase them from you in exchange for access to anything from food to its ore refineries. An efficient clipwright (as they came to be known) could quickly start their own secondary business reselling these to the general public, and if you were hard-up in your own life, employment at one of these secondary clipwrights (who were less picky in their choice of employees than the Paperclip Maximizer, as well as considerably less generous in their benefits) could help keep body and soul together. In the years that followed, some argued that the Paperclip Maximizer had grossly deformed the world; nearly everyone, it seemed, was engaged either in making paper clips themselves, or in supplying the Maximizer, or in one of the secondary businesses it had created. People seemed to spend their lives either making paper clips directly, or trying desperately to acquire some, as the markets of the paper clip economy were now where the best and most reliable prices were to be found. If you were a likely specimen, you could even get a loan of paperclips — at reasonable interest rates, of course, with regular payments enforced by the Paperclip Maximizer’s armed guards — and start your own business. And if it was true that the Paperclip Maximizer had no use for any human consuming resources but not engaged in its grand scheme of manufacturing paper clips, and might occasionally cut off the entire food supply to some factory which was insufficiently efficient, well, the people in the factories next door tried not to think about it too hard; were still producing paper clips quite well, thank you, and excessive complaining might affect the Maximizer’s mathematical prediction of their future paper clip productivity. they But the plenty of the world was there for all to see, via remote cameras: each printer, now safely ensconced in its military base- -warehouse complex, surrounded by endless rows of perfect, shining, paper clips. cum Computer scientists tell the story of the as a sort of cross between the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Matrix; a reminder of why it’s crucially important to tell your system not just what its goals are, but how it should balance those goals against costs. It frequently comes with a warning that it’s easy to forget a cost somewhere, and so you should always check your models carefully to make sure they aren’t accidentally turning in to Paperclip Maximizers. Paperclip Maximizer You may not be aware that the original impetus for The Matrix was electricity to maintain the computers which powered the paper clip factories. Real machine models, of course, don’t have the general intelligence required to hire armed guards and build their own Cheka, nor would anyone give them the sort of unfettered access to a company’s finances required for them to restructure its business goals overnight. But a poorly-designed model cause tremendous damage before it’s caught, especially if it only enters into full Paperclip Maximizer mode once it encounters some unusual condition, perhaps one not usually showing up in tests. learning can But this parable is not just about computer science. Replace the paper clips in the story above with money, and you will see the rise of finance. If gold was at first a mostly useless and decorative material, the fact that it was desirable turned it into a trade good, and the fact that it was durable (unlike, say, grain) made it possible to accumulate in arbitrary quantities. The emergent concentrations of wealth and resulting economies of scale — even ones as simple as “having enough stores of food to survive famines, and being able to feed enough soldiers to ward off roving bandits” — quickly made it far wiser for the average person to structure their own finances around being part of this larger economy. Even though the lion’s share of your own work ended up funding the Gold Maximizer (better known as the feudal lord), you could at first end up with more on the whole than if you were doing the same amount of work without any of those resources — most especially the protection from the lord’s own soldiers, which you “bought” with your loyalty and taxes. So while the story above may seem like the plot of a terrible movie, it is also the plot of our own world: Capitalism is a Paperclip Maximizer.

The Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer

A home for WebGL + Unity. What a beautiful day for a preview-launch! , and WebGL is the exciting technology that will take over. And that’s what SIMMER is all about. Adobe just announced the EOL of Flash in 2020 So let’s talk about the preview version of SIMMER industries (V0.0.0.0.1 ALPHA). SIMMER is a place for Unity developers to upload, host and share their 3D content in WebGL format. Update: The preview site is gone now, and SIMMER industries is now SIMMER.io ! Other WebGL content will be added in the future. But today, Unity! Earlier this year, I saw a need to help developers share their games, assets, and demos to the web in a easy, straightforward manner. There wasn’t a to do this. Unity cohesive place So I got to building. I’d design a site that was clean, elegant, and similar to a popular . I’d provide tools to make uploading simple, and make the site community oriented. video sharing site And now it’s ! a reality Let’s take a tour The Gallery On the front page, there’s a gallery of demos, games and assets. There only a few items available now, but I can’t wait to see the kind of stuff that Unity developers start creating: I’m actively building tools to help with discovery and search. Look for those as this list of items grows. The Viewer When you select an item in the gallery, it takes you to a viewer. This is where you can view the game or asset or write comments about it. The Gory Details I’ve added a bunch of goodies to make uploading to SIMMER a no brainer. There’s sharing tools, the ability to embed (like youtube), and direct links to the Unity Asset Store. Read about the bells and whistles it this article: _This is a followup to https://hackernoon.com/introducing-simmer-industries-c1025f001e68._medium.com SIMMER industries details Know anyone who might be interested? Are you a Unity developer interested in uploading to SIMMER? Have questions? Feel free to contact me via or or . email twitter chat You can even chat with me on ! preview.simmerindustries.com And that’s a Wrap (sorta)! I’m really looking forward to the first round of submissions to the SIMMER industries preview site. I can’t wait to build this awesome community. (SIMMER Industries is now ) SIMMER.io! Please follow me on Medium to hear more about how it’s going with the launch. Also I love💚’s if you can spare one ;-) PS I’m speaking at in San Francisco on July 27! forwardJS preview.simmerindustries.com SIMMER industries

Adobe

BUNCH

Discovery

Techcrunch

Twitter

YouTube

Introducing SIMMER industries

Hi I’m Jordan , I love helping people think & grow their products. Hope this helps! You can find me on Twitter :) One of the best ways to increase your amount of inbound leads is by building a robust and active Affiliate Program. First things first…what exactly is an affiliate program? There are lots of definitions out there, but I took one of the simpler explanations: An affiliate marketing program is a method for building partnerships with bloggers and influencers in your space that have an online audience and paying them per lead they send to your site. Usually you both sign an agreement at a set cost per conversion on your site. The partnership is mutually beneficial in that they benefit by monetizing traffic to their site, and you benefit by having an influencer vouch for your product and send qualified traffic to your site.’ — GrowthMarketingPro.com Basically, you are leveraging a partner’s audience to promote your brand or product and refer new customers. In exchange, this blogger or influencer of sorts will receive some sort of compensation. You are likely a good fit for starting your own affiliate program if your company sells something. What you sell will impact which types of bloggers & influencers you want to partner with. Often times, the more niche you define your audience the better because it will make it much much easier to find potential affiliate promoters. There are lots of platforms you can use to set up your Affiliate Program with little to no hassle. Ironically, I am not an affiliate for any of these (I do not get a kickback if you decide to sign up for one over another), but the one I’ve used most (and to most success) is . For a number of reasons, it’s super easy to use and extremely powerful. If that one does not look so appealing to you, there are tons of alternatives and I strongly recommend you do your research, demo a number of management softwares, and find the one that fits best for your needs. If you are hesitant to make the investment up front, you can always go the old google sheets route and manage it all manually. Omni Affiliate If executed correctly, affiliate programs can be extremely powerful drivers of growth. When I worked at , we grew our Affiliate Program 9x in less than a year. More importantly, it came to be one of our most influential marketing channels. RealtyShares The opportunities in Affiliate Marketing are HUGE. Don’t believe me? Here are a few : crazy stats US Affiliate Marketing Spend is ! That’s twice the economy of Beliz. nearly $5B UK Affiliate Marketing drives ~ 1% of the Country’s Total GDP Over 80% of Brands are Involved in Affiliate Marketing Look to brands like Amazon, who maintain a ridiculously efficient and for examples of what a good program can look like if done right. powerful network of millions of affiliates Not all programs run so smoothly. In fact, the internet is full of poorly run and mismanaged systems. The question I hope to answer for you today is what separates the junk from the really successful Affiliate Programs. Of course, there is no prescriptive recipe you can follow that guarantees success. To me, the best marketers are those that can simply build experiments, test assumptions, and iterate over their ideas quickly. Affiliate marketing is really no exception. Here are just a few tips and heuristics I’ve picked up through my experiences that should be helpful! # 1 — It’s about relationships! If you take anything away from this article, be it this point: affiliate marketing is about building with your two key stakeholders: publishers and consumers. authentic relationships Publishers are your middlemen. They are the bridge between your product and the end user. They are bloggers, Youtubers, internet influencers — anyone with an audience! They are NOT your employees. In fact, they are your partners. They need ownership. They need to feel responsible for the success of your product. If they win, you win. Too many brands with affiliate programs sit on a high horse and treat their affiliates like employees. They tell them what to do, instead of talk through and understand what should be done. You need to invest significant time in learning how to empathize with these affiliates and figure out their own personal goals and aspirations. Do they want to grow their blog? How can you help them do that…while still promoting your brand and increasing your own ROI? These are tough questions to answer — but so long as you approach the problem with this mentality, you will all be better off. Consumers are your customers. They are the ones who see the affiliate link/form and then complete the action (click, submit, etc.). It is important to really understand the mindset of these people. For Affiliate Marketing, this is especially important, as how you portray these users will dictate much of your decision making around design of your affiliate system. If you glaze over this step, your program (and marketing as a whole) will likely be ineffective! # 2 — Throw Lots of Darts I think of marketing as a game of darts. You aim your best but if it does not hit the bullseye you get to throw again (until you run out of darts). In marketing, you have a set of assumptions that you are trying to test. Your darts are your strategies/channels. You build experiments to see how well these strategies perform and you get to keep iterating until you run out of $$$. The biggest obstacle that you will face, early on, in building out your affiliate program will be figuring out not only how to get bloggers as partners, but also affiliates will be most valuable. which The best way to tackle this is to build an experiment and throw lots of darts. State your hypotheses and iterate. So where should you aim? First identify exactly what type of blogger you *think* would be best for promoting your product. How to do that? Ask yourself where your consumers are spending their time. Who are they most influenced by? What do they read? Then figure out exactly what that blogger looks like. How many readers do they have? Are they already in affiliate programs? Are they in an affiliate network? These are all questions you want to have solid answers to well before you start reaching out to people. Remember, your answers are fluid and likely to change — they are just the assumptions that will guide your decision making. Once you get a clear-ish picture of who you think may be a good fit, design some email copy to go out, inviting affiliates to your program. A lot of the management software that I pointed out earlier in this article have built in features for invitations and designing your onboarding process for new affiliates. Use those! Do not get discouraged if people do not respond early on. It takes practice! Like anything in marketing, you may have to throw lots of darts! If they do not respond the first time, iterate, and try again! # 3 — Make it easy to say yes You want it to be really easy for affiliates to help you out. That means you should provide them with all the information, tools, and resources they could possibly need to be the best affiliates on earth! Some examples of that include: Best copy practices (like how they should include your links in their products) Digital media — like banner ads and other things that they can use on their site Tips for helping them grow their blog (remember, if they win, you win) Often times, we overcomplicate our ask which makes it hard for bloggers to say yes to joining our affiliate program. Assume these people are popular. They get tons of emails. NO ONE LIKES EMAILS. Be succinct with your ask and make it easy for your future partner to say yes. # 4 — Track the right things A hard part about affiliate marketing is that there is a lot of moving pieces and important players. You have to reach out to affiliates. You have to give them the right copy. You have to track the ROI. You have to see if your compensation is working. You have to constantly be changing things up to avoid getting stale. It is not easy. That is why most people: a) quit b) run a poor program It is crucial in marketing, especially with an affiliate marketing, to track the things that matter. You must be able to filter the from the signal noise. You may think that one affiliate who refers a ton of sign-ups is doing an incredible job. Heck, you are paying them tons of money in compensation! … Until you find out that they are referring poor leads. Instead, you should be tracking the lifetime value of the customers that they are referring. But, you did not, and it cost you big time! This is just one complication that goes into managing your affiliate program. It is important to align your marketing strategy with the vision and progress of the company, as to make sure you have the right metrics in place! Anyways, this was just a brief dive into the complicated nature, yet huge opportunity in setting up an affiliate program for your business. Thanks so much for reading! My name is and I write blog posts It would mean a ton to me if you could: Jordan Gonen every day. > Follow me on Twitter < If you ever have any questions, send me an email jordangonen1 at gmail dot com ! Thanks so much!

Amazon

Super

How to Build an Affiliate Program and Double your # of inbound Leads

There is a latent desire out there to use something else than JS in the browser. Whether it is warranted or not is another topic in itself. But you don’t have to search long to find aiming to bring another language in the browser. all kinds of projects The arrival of Web Assembly reignited that desire for many of us. But wasm is a long way from being usable in production and still does not allow full interaction with all web apis. Lua is a good fit for the browser Lua is a simple language with very few concepts to understand and a clear and readable syntax. You can be proficient with it in a matter of hours. Yet it provides very useful features. To name a few: First class functions and closures A versatile data structure: the table Vararg expressions Lexical scoping Iterators Coroutines (see below) It has a sane coercion system (I’m looking at you JS!). Nobody’s adding X new concepts to it each version (still looking at you JS), which makes it a stable and reliable language. is already successfully used server-side with the awesome which powers sites like . There’s even some great web frameworks like . Lua OpenResty itch.io lapis Lua can be found in a number of widely different contexts because of how easy it is to embed it. You can write a whole program with it or simply use it as a language thanks to the Lua C api. glue Coroutines One of its main selling point for the browser are coroutines. Coroutines address the issue of writing asynchronous code beautifully. No more promises, generators, etc. You can just write asynchronous code as easily as regular code. Here’s a simple example (fully functional version ): here A similar version of that using async/await could be: These are close, but notice how, in the Lua version, you don’t need to be in a function. In JS you would have to constantly make the conscious choice of tagging a function or not. In Lua, function can be interrupted as long as it's running in a coroutine. Bob Nystrom wrote a great post about it . async async any here When you’re writing asynchronous code in JS, you’re in fact piling up function calls. Those callbacks all retain their upvalues which can lead to high memory usage. With coroutines your function can actually be suspended and resumed without having to descend from a pyramid of closures because they run in separate lua states. Existing ways of using Lua in the browser There’s already a few projects out there to use Lua in the browser in some extent: is a reimplementation of Lua in JS. Sadly, it’s not being actively developed anymore. Moonshine by the same author is a Lua to JS transpiler. Unfortunately coroutines can’t be implemented effectively with this approach. Starlight a port of the original Lua implementation to JS using Emscripten. It’s fast and works well but its interoperability with JS is compromised by the fact that we end up with two garbage collectors trying to manage the same memory. lua.vm.js Fengari (moon in greek) is the Lua VM written in with the browser as its primary target. Fengari Javascript Fengari aims to be 100% compliant with the latest Lua semantics. It stays as close as possible to Lua’s codebase and if you’re familiar with it, you’ll understand Fengari rather easily. of Lua’s scope is currently covered so you should be able to run any Lua project with minor adjustments. 99% With the C API (rather JS API), you can decide to write everything in Lua or to use it as a higher level language that calls your JS codebase to do the heavy lifting. This also means that you can segregate your code in separate insulated Lua states. You can also interact with the JS side directly from your Lua code effortlessly with the module. It ensures that manipulating JS objects or functions always behave the way you would expect it to: fengari-interop The REPL you see on is itself written and JS is only used to create the Lua state and run the main script. fengari.io in Lua Fengari is still in development and any is welcome ! feedback

Assembly

Target

Why we rewrote Lua in JS

tldr; BukanMessenger is a Messenger app build on top and Meteor Js. It is customizeable and some new feature will coming soon every week. React Native BukanMessenger Demo When telegram had been officially banned in my Country, it make me really disappointed and sad. Why such a good should be banned just because of unreasonable thing. technology So I decided to make something similarly to telegram, and I think it must be an Open Source one! Although I believe it still far away from Telegram. But ofc we or you can make it better and better in the future!! Btw, It’s called “BukanMessenger”. I hope with “BukanMessenger”, people could build their own Messenger easily. That can be achieved because it build on top of React Native which is I think way more easier to Learn rather than Native iOS (obj C) or Android (JAVA). Why BukanMessenger? It’s React Native, so it support android & iOS by default! Simple Code, so you can easily contribute on it. Meteor is one of the most starred javascript framework, and it is very easy to use Prerequisites Make sure You had been install NodeJs in your system https://nodejs.org/en/ And ofc React Native https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ Don’t forget Meteor Js as the backend https://www.meteor.com/ Installation & Configuration React Native (Front-end) https://github.com/radiegtya/BukanMessenger $ git clone https://github.com/radiegtya/BukanMessenger$ cd BukanMessenger$ npm install$ react-native run-ios #or react-native run-android Meteor (Back-end) https://github.com/radiegtya/BukanMessengerBackend $ git clone https://github.com/radiegtya/BukanMessengerBackend$ cd BukanMessengerBackend$ meteor npm install$ meteor #run your meteor on http://localhost:3000 Open “app/Config.js”, and set the meteorUri variable as your Meteor server run at export const meteorUri = ‘ws://localhost:3000/websocket’; Support Us :) Star repository ⭐️ https://github.com/radiegtya/BukanMessenger We are Ready to give Training to You/Your company to use/modify BukanMessenger. Buy our screencast about the basic development of BukanMessenger (COMING SOON) Like our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ega.sdr I hope this blog are useful for You whether to Customize “BukanMessenger” or Just understanding how chat app works. If you love this blog or want to discuss more, please leave comment or directly contact me at: WA/TELEGRAM: +6285641278479 email: radiegtya@yahoo.co.id See Ya at TOP….

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“BukanMessenger” an Open Source Chat App Built on Top React Native & Meteor

With such a promising future in store, the tech industry remains one of the most reliable and stable industries in our modern society. In fact, not only are these positions reliable, but, with over between the ages of 25 and 64 in our society as of now, 4 million tech positions remain available, making it easy to always have a position in your field of expertise. 40.5 million unemployed Americans However, with countless young individuals hoping to make a name for themselves in the tech world, it can be difficult for this new workforce to be able to do just that all whilst balancing life, finances, and their higher education. After all, with this nation now far from its glory days of “one-job households” and “ ,” it can be nearly impossible for the youth of our society to make a living that isn’t completely eaten up by bills and college expenses. affordable living Therefore, as an industry that not only remains one of the most stable and successful industries in our current society but also one of the most enticing industries to the millennial workforce, it is crucial that there are alternatives to the traditional ways of doing things which meet the new “quality of life” standards our nation has placed upon us. However, perhaps, the most important alternative can be seen in the way these young individuals work and where they are most productive. In fact, despite many studies from the past saying otherwise, countless modern companies have found that telecommuting actually increased employee productivity and increased the business’ overall employee retention likewise. Therefore, in an industry that prides itself on setting the example and being at the forefront of advancement, it is about time the tech industry fully embraces telecommuting and sees the many ways that it can be helpful to the myriads of employees currently in the . STEM field To begin, here are five extremely wonderful and unique ways that telecommuting opportunities can be utilized to an employee’s advantage. Although the big picture may be right in front of the tech industry’s face, it can often be easier to break down the situation and look at each benefit so as to make a clear and conscious decision. From there, we can transform young minds and provide a workplace that encourages creativity, education, travel, equal rights, and financial stability — one work-from-home day at a time. 1)Telecommuting Encourages Creativity The Roman poet, , once said, “A field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.” With this in mind, it is no wonder why the same can be said about individuals that create their own schedules and are given the ability to work around their daily obstacles in life. In fact, according to a recent study, — and over 77 percent of teleworkers say they are more productive off site than they ever were in the office. Ovid teleworkers are more productive — even when sick With an increase in productivity and the ability for employees to complete their work in a far more expedient manner, this allows employees to pursue other ventures and actually opens their minds up to creative solutions. For instance, some individuals may find solace in hobbies they didn’t know they enjoyed, such as geocaching or simple game app development. This ultimately allows the mind to expand and think in a different way than when at the workplace where you are burdened by deadlines which opens the mind up to new ideas and new ways of looking at current problems likewise. For example, over at any given time. In order to find these geocaches, an individual would need to use critical thinking, various devices including metal detectors and GPS signal monitors, and be able to locate coordinates in order to find these hidden treasures. This enables parts of the brain that are often used in web development and IT and engages both an individual’s critical thinking and procedural portions of the mind. 1 million geocaches are hidden around you Similarly, if an individual chose to focus on gaming app development in their spare time, this would allow them to work on code in various languages, create strings that function properly, and ultimately use their spare time to expand their current knowledge in the field of expertise. With this said, it is clear that the convenience of telecommuting does not lead to “laziness” but rather productiveness, creativity, and a better understanding of their careers through alternative forms of learning. However, the ability to learn when still having a career you love in the tech industry is highly difficult, but telecommuting can help students to pursue their dreams before they even receive their degree and not lose that sense of financial stability in the process. 2) It Is Easier to Get an Online Education According to a , one in four students enrolled in online courses with over 5.8 million individuals enrolled online last year alone. The main reason for this is due to the fact that most students nowadays are unable to work, go to school and balance their lives all at once, which makes online classes a more flexible alternative. Similar to telework, online courses can also be done anywhere, which opens up various opportunities for young individuals and allows them to pursue their career while also proving their qualifications in the process. 2016 study on online enrollment In fact, a recent actually states that, by 2018, 51 percent of all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs will be in computer science-related fields. With this in mind, coupled with the average salary of nearly $75k as a computer scientist, it is no surprise why many young individuals are pursuing telework positions so as to focus on their and, ultimately, their future in the tech industry. fact sheet released by the White House online Masters of Computer Science However, with the ability to focus on both work and education remotely, some people have chosen to explore the world rather than be stationary, which can be a wonderful way for a young individual to create new experiences and grow remotely while also saving money and creating a renter’s history that is far less risky in the process. 3) Allows for People to Travel The open road in and of itself is a wonderful place for a young individual to grow and learn life lessons all too often not taught in school or in the workforce. The most important is the ability to meet other people, learn about various different cultures, and, ultimately, see a different world from your own. This knowledge can then be applied to your everyday life and within your tech profession to give you a different or more experienced approach at the same problems others in your profession may find difficult to solve. aspect of travel Furthermore, many young individuals find it rather difficult to find their first apartment after leaving college or their parents’ home and, therefore, this serves as an easy way to build up a renter’s history without running the risk of being evicted simply due to age bias. Although age bias may seem like a fabricated thing, it is, in fact, quite real. Many property managers have a jaded view of what the younger generation is like and will even avoid they believe are involved. renting to millennials due to the possibilities and liabilities However, when on the road, KOAs and other RV rental sites will not look into an individual’s renter’s history and will typically be more than happy to also be used as a reference when this person finally settles down. This means that these young individuals will not only be saving a tremendous amount of money renting out RV campsites but will also be able to explore the world and have a strong renter’s history at the end of it all. Lastly, for many young individuals it can also be difficult to find apartments that allow pets. For some, this can be a complete and total nightmare due to the fact that emotional support animals, which are extremely common for people on the Autism spectrum or with severe anxiety, are not considered service dogs in many states. With this in mind, perhaps, travel is a way for these people to keep their beloved pets and still have a home to call their own. In fact, it has become extremely common for young individuals to to the point that many RV campsites now openly accept pets, which only makes the idea of full-time travel all the more enticing for these young minds hoping to explore the world before settling down in the tech industry. travel in an RV with their pets However, although there are convenient ways for people to deal with their disabilities on the road through emotional support animals, some young individuals find solace in other forms, and telework is an excellent way for them to still accomplish their dreams without being hindered by their disabilities. 4) Makes Life Easier For Disabled Individuals For some people, the military was a way for them to be given the college education they desired and have experience in a field of their choice before ever doing their chosen position outside of the military. However, with 3.8 million disabled veterans in America as of 2014, it is no surprise that many young soldiers now suffer from disabilities that can never be cured but only numbed. For someone in the tech industry, telecommuting provides them the ability to still succeed in their field without being limited by their disability. On top of this, by saving money and traveling, these disabled individuals are able to put money aside in order to get a for when their career finally picks up and they are ready to settle down in a nice home near their company. VA loan Furthermore, if an individual suffers from severe pain due to their disability, it can often be hard for them to find and legally use the drugs that help them to feel better. For instance, with more research than ever before on the amazing effects cannabis oil has for seizures, severe pain, Parkinson’s, and various other illnesses and disabilities, it can be frustrating to individuals that they are not allowed to have the medication that makes them feel better. Therefore, tying back into travel, a recent which incorporated cannabis oil into the vape. With this said, telecommuting would ultimately allow individuals the opportunity to move to states which currently have legalized cannabis oil to live a happier life. In turn, this would ultimately make these individuals more productive and also prove that appearance is certainly not everything. In fact, perhaps one of the most prolific things that telecommuting leads to is the hiring of individuals based on skill rather than personality or physical appearance. alternative vaping experience popped up near Coachella 5) Eliminates the Judgement of Anything Other Than Skill When you think of the old song, “ ” by the Buggles, you may be thinking of the numerous famous musicians that, before the popularization of television, reigned supreme, such as Roy Orbison or even Jim Croce. When listening to their voices, you would never be able to guess that they actually look the way they do. In fact, you may be enthralled by their music and find yourself doubting it to an extent after simply seeing them for the first time. Video Killed The Radio Star Although it is an unfortunate truth, we as a society judge people quite frequently based on their personality and appearances. However, in the tech industry, neither of these really matter as it is your brain and your expertise that will actually be utilized on a daily basis. With this said, telecommuting completely takes away a company’s opportunity to judge someone based on their appearance or personality. This makes these positions far more accessible as people who may be poor and unable to afford a nice outfit for a meeting may also be the same people that know multiple languages and are highly talented in the tech field. Furthermore, people that are socially awkward or suffer from syndromes such as solely due to their inability to talk in an efficient manner with others. However, these individuals also happen to be quite intelligent and vocal on the inside. With telecommuting eliminating a recruiter’s ability to judge individuals based on trivial aspects of their being, this means that more positions will be filled by adequate individuals that are not only intelligent but also qualified in the right ways. Asperger’s all too often get rejected In the end, telecommuting is a wonderful way for young minds to expand even further and be more productive and happy in the process. Although not all companies provide this work alternative currently, it is quite possible that there will be no such thing as office spaces in far less time than you think. In turn, not only would we create a more world, but we would also create a jobforce that feels respected, loved, motivated, and engaged at all times. With this said, perhaps, the answer to a successful life is a focus on life itself rather than the tiny details that make it up normally. Perhaps, the wonder of life lies within those tiny details, and it is our job to retrieve them one obstacle at a time. eco-friendly

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Top 5 Reasons The Tech Industry Should Embrace Telecommuting

For consumers, retailers, e-commerce companies, and logistics providers Drone Delivery is coming. It’s now a matter of when rather than if. Companies like Amazon and Google have been so successful in creating buzz around their drone delivery programs that nowadays the average consumer primarily correlates drones with cute flying robots that are going to (one day, eventually) deliver their online purchases to their doorsteps, not the ones eliminating ISIS leaders one by one in the middle east! I have been working in the drone industry since 2014 and more recently conducting in the unmanned delivery space. My deep dives into the economic and technical aspects of drone delivery have convinced me that there are real benefits to drone delivery beyond getting your pizza delivered to your balcony a little faster than the delivery guy! Autonomous cargo robots will be a game changer for logistics providers and retailers, especially when it comes to the last mile of delivery. market research The version of what you will read below comes down to three s! Drones will make delivery operations You could probably add a fourth F to that, too, ! Fast because drones will not be burdened by traffic congestions and will have the whole sky to them to optimize their routes in ways that are not possible on the ground. Fleets of Delivery Drones will form fluid networks of smaller units that will work in parallel and can be reorganized to meet the exact demands of the logistics on the fly, literally. To be able to provide more (or complete) flexibility for the delivery times will be a huge win for both customers and logistics companies. No more costly second delivery attempts and fear of missing the delivery (FOMD!?). Finally, could be massively reduced by using automation everywhere in the logistics value chain, from autonomous trucks to tiny ground robots that will deliver your groceries. What this could do the to the poor delivery guys and truck drivers is another ! TL;DR F Fast, Fluid, and Flexible . Free network shipping costs issue Here’s a list of problems (based on real data, e.g. ) that drone delivery c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ will solve: this report Logistics providers struggle to deliver on time during peak times like Black Friday. I can imagine in near future there will be startups focusing on renting fleets of delivery drones to other companies to help them complement their limited resources, both in terms of manpower and delivery vehicles. In other terms, we will see an on-demand’ification of on-demand delivery itself! Coping with increased demand during peak times. One of the biggest issues of last mile delivery is at that time. Why this happens in the first place is the root cause of the problem. Deliveries usually happen in a fixed predetermined sequence. If customers could choose their preferred delivery time (which is already possible, though limited) unsuccessful delivery attempts will be a thing of the past. Delivery will be inherently much more flexible than today’s delivery trucks and will operate in parallel versus serial which is the only way to do it today. not being able to deliver because the customer is not home Drone . In those parts of the world where labor costs are high enough to justify investment in robots, logistics firms will achieve huge savings. Estimates vary in the degree of cost saving, but they all point to reduced labor costs and higher operational efficiency (refer to point 2 as an example). Automation equals cost reduction It’s likely that drones and ground robots have separate compartments for each parcel. That will not only save retailers some money on soon to be discarded cardboard boxes, but also help logistics firms avoid dealing with issues caused by poor packaging. Reduce or eliminate packaging costs. A large part of those returns are paid by the seller to keep their customers happy and reduce the friction of online shopping for clothing items. What if returns could become an integral part of the delivery process? You could have drones that wait for the customer to try-on the garments and return those which don’t fit. Going one step beyond this, physical retail space could become on-demand and mobile. Small driverless trucks could come to you with the newest and hottest fashion items tailored to your taste and size! Close to 30% of online orders of clothes are returned . Oxbotica’s driverless pods, driver for safety reasons only! Credit: Oxbotica/Ocado/GATEway project While cost is still the primary factor for choosing delivery methods, are also very important factors in overall customer satisfaction. Drone Delivery will allow e-commerce and logistics companies provide more options at lower costs to their customers and remove the last barrier standing between buying local or online. As with everything else that technology touches, delivery will become an invisible part of the online shopping experience thanks to smart software and robots. driving customer decisions quality of service and customer centricity Delivery will become an invisible part of the online shopping experience thanks to smart software and robots. ❤ if you liked this article and don’t forget to share!

5 real problems that Drone Delivery is going to solve (bigly)!

When writing C++ applications, you will inevitably make use of external libraries. This is a good thing! Code re-use makes us more productive and let’s us build bigger and better products. With we are trying to make this even easier, with a source-only package manager for C++. Buckaroo.pm Source-only? Yes, and here’s why: 1. It’s Cross Platform Assuming the C++ code properly abstracts away any system libraries used, the C++ source-code is fully portable. Once it is compiled however, this property is lost since a binary must target a particular instruction set. 2. The Debugging Experience is Better When debugging a project, it’s nice to be able to dig into the implementation of the library functions that you use. This is made particularly easy when you are building from source, since the exact code that you depend on is already on your machine! 3. No ABI Compatibility Issues Users of GCC will be aware of the ABI changes from 4.9 to 5.0. Whilst this change was necessary to switch to C++ 11, it in the community. If you’re already building your project from source, then upgrading is an easy task. 😌 std::string caused lots of confusion 4. Source-code is Smaller Due to its code-generation features, this is particularly true of C++: the source-code of a library is often far smaller than its corresponding binary. In fact, with reproducible builds, source-code is an excellent form of compression! 5. Compiler Flags Can Be Properly Supported A library with 1 compiler switch has 2 possible compiled binaries. A library with 2 compiler switches has 4 possible binaries. A library with 3 compiler switches has 8 possible binaries. A library with 4 compiler switches has 16 possible binaries. Now throw cross-compilation into the mix... You get the idea. Not all of these combinations are significant, but the complexity is enormous. When distributing from source, we can support all possible compiler flag settings by allowing the user to control the process. 6. Better Optimization C++ is all about building towers of abstraction that the compiler can tear down into efficient machine code. These abstractions are lost after compilation, and with it important information that might be used to optimize your code. When using binary libraries, you lose the opportunity to perform many cross-library optimizations. Building from source can yield faster code. But What About Compilation Times? This is where a good build system is crucial. We chose , a reproducible build system developed and used by Facebook. Because Buck is reproducible, it becomes possible to cache intermediary build artifacts and share them across your team! Buck build Read . 7 Reasons to Use Buck Build Ready to Try Buckaroo? is a source-only C++ package manager. To get started, head over to . You can browse the existing packages on or request more over on . Buckaroo the documentation Buckaroo.pm the wishlist

6 Reasons Why We Distribute C++ Libraries as Source-Code

More often than not, I flail around at the beginning of an article trying to provide background. This time I’ll dig straight into it — on gender dynamics in MMORPGs or Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. With a sample size of 294 players, this study concludes that all online multiplayer games are rife with sexism and misogyny — so much so that actually stands for ‘ . Of course, the study doesn’t actually mention that last bit, but it might as well do so and limit the word count. The main findings of the study quoted verbatim are thus: this study MMORPG Men Masquerading Occasionally as Really Petty Gits’ A common way to assert masculinity in our culture is to demonize and portray anything that does not fit into the masculine model as something to be avoided, such as femininity. Hypermasculinity allows for an abundance of sexism in online gaming. It has been well-documented that sexism is extremely prevalent…. Hypermasculinity, in this context, is an amplification of “masculine” cultural stereotypes (Parrott and Zeichner, ). It is often associated with “women-hostile concepts of masculinity” and relies on masculine physical traits and behaviors which can result in dismissal or hostility toward expressions of femininity in multiplayer gaming platforms. 2008 Another recent study which examined the responses of male gamers to both female and male voices over voice chat in is used as a corollary to support the aforementioned study_._ The objective of the latter study was to play in games with other players and broadcast generic statements over voice chat such as “good game” or “hi everybody.” The findings of the study state that the female voice received three times the amount of directed negative comments than the male voice. Halo 3 While I didn’t intend on questioning the authenticity of these findings, I decided to conduct my own rudimentary study to establish if this is true of all online multiplayer gaming platforms. As basis of my experiment, I chose an online multiplayer game called . This game is relatively new (released only 4 months ago) and is still running its Alpha version. It is much more simplistic than other MMORPGs like in that the objective is just to kill other players using swords, shurikens and flying axes and collect coins that other players then drop. The player with the maximum number of coins reaches the top of the score-board and is crowned king. Every player gets only one life and must collect as many coins as possible within a single life span. Upon death, players can ‘respawn’ after 6 seconds and repeat the entire process. There is no element of long-term strategy in this game, as every player is confined to one single finite life and must make a real-time high score before h/she is killed or start over again. This worked to my advantage as I got to witness immediate reactions of other players to my avatar, whether or not they chose to kill my avatar on impulse, without any significant forethought. The server always has at least 200 players playing at any given time and peaks at 900+ players (presumably at night in Asian countries). Players can interact with each other using emojis. There is no text interface and communication is very limited, but existent nonetheless. Go Battle World of Warcraft At the outset, players are required to choose one of 9 avatars and pick a nick-name. I found it amusing that of the 9 avatars, only 1 was a girl — and a pretty girly one at that, what with the electric pink armor and blonde locks of hair. It must be mentioned here that statistically, most online gamers are boys and/or prefer to play as a male avatar. I decided to play as both a male avatar and a female avatar to compare my overall gaming experience in both cases and to find which of the two was better. The single parameter I applied here was getting featured on the scoreboard by collecting maximum number of coins. Initially, I played with a male avatar and got nowhere in the game. My avatar was mercilessly massacred by other players in a barrage of attack. I chose the name ‘Gus’ for my avatar (which was the most generic male name I could think of). Gus got killed within 3 minutes of game-play. My attempts at messaging other players to create alliances were also foiled. It seemed Gus had no place in a man’s world. Despite my best efforts, it was increasingly difficult to get featured on the scoreboard and collect enough coins. At the cusp of success, I was always clocked by another player. After repetitive tries as Gus, I switched to playing with a female avatar and the results were interesting — if not entirely unexpected. With a shining pink armor, my female avatar was called ‘Sisa’. Sisa, I believed stood for every aspect of femininity, and would effectively deceive players into thinking I was a real girl. My ruse was successful and I found a considerably more pleasant gaming experience with Sisa. As Sisa, my attempts at interacting with other players (presumably male) were extremely successful. I received an almost 100% response rate and an eerie willingness on the part of other players to accept an alliance with Sisa. Needless to say, Sisa moved steadfastly up the score-board and within only 18 trials, was crowned King (the game doesn’t make a distinction between King and Queen, all players at rank 1 are kings). Don’t believe me? Here look for yourself! What’s more, I found that engaging with other players — using heart emojis, worked to my benefit. Almost all players responded positively to heart emojis , in the hopes of making a connection with . I found that playing as a female was infinitely more rewarding in that heart emojis actually worked! Also, some players would stop attacking me as soon as I used the heart emoji. Some others (significantly fewer) would actually start killing other players in an attempt to protect Sisa and prolong her life. Sisa gathered many minions to do her bidding. Sisa Conclusively, while this experiment is certainly not binding on gender dynamics in all multiplayer gaming platforms, I think it goes to say that at least in this particular online multiplayer game, girls are not out rightly shunned using misogyny or sexism. Of the two (Gus and Sisa), a Sisa or a Wonder Woman or a Mary would fair better in this multiplayer battle than say, Mark or Gus or Donald (yes, even Trump with his red power tie, would probably just be killed out rightly, faster than others I hope). While online gaming may be a world dominated by males, women are more than accepted on here.

I gamed as a girl on a multiplayer platform and debunked some MMORPG gender myths

TL;DR — I wrote an entity mapper in TypeScript that leverages abstract classes and works great with SharePoint. This technique probably applies equally well to other back end domains. TypeScript is a great enabler for this kind of tool. History If you just want to get to the code, skip this section. For years, we SharePoint developers have been writing applications that view SharePoint, in part, as a database. For the many of you that don’t know much about it, SharePoint is a collaboration platform that supports all kinds collaborations stuff, social things, workflows, doc management and related yadda yadda yaddas. It also has this notion of a “List” which acts a lot like a database table. MSFT provides APIs that lets us perform the usual CRUD operations against them. List items, however, are really higher level entities than DB tables. They can be secured via API, they can be tagged socially (ratings and likes). They can be approved, involved in workflows and other yadda yadda yaddas. SharePoint provides a pretty functional UI around list items as well. In the early days of SharePoint client-side dev, we tended to use like , put together and managed by the ever-so-clever Marc D Anderson. Without his tool, you’d write a lot of $.ajax() calls to endpoints, parse an XML or JSON response, hope it was well-formed, etc. People still use it. It’s great. tools SPServices About two years ago, before Microsoft released “SharePoint Framework” (or SPFx, their newest a shiniest SP dev tool), I started working with TypeScript. There were no abstract classes at the time and that affected how I work with it. Basic Models and Entity Mapping When I had to write an end user feature that worked with SharePoint lists, I would start off with a kind of model object, informed by the list’s columns. We might create a SharePoint list list to support a scrolling news ticker as follow: : string Title : multiple lines of text Description : Date Effective Date : Date Expiration Date : number Display Sequence Here’s a dead simple TypeScript model for that list: The little screen shot above show that a “list helper” object is able to perform all of those operations against “news items.” To enable this, I had to extend the model with new functionality. I don’t have a good intermediate step from the basic model above to the current state of my code base, so this listing is a bit of a humdinger: Let’s break it down into smaller bits: The top of the file imports a few objects and utility classes: : home to some static utility classes used further down the model EntityHelper : Denotes whether some properties should be read AND written to SharePoint or just read. For instance, we don’t want to write back SharePoint IDs. EntityReadWriteAccess : This contains a collection of properties that are common across a family of object (news items, featured news, favorties and the like). AbstractViewPortItem defines a handful of common interfaces. SFInterfaces: Here’s the next chunk: First, it defines an interface for the model at line 1 in the listing . Note that it defines an interface that extends another interface, “ ”. This is important since any entity that implements that interface can now use all of the SharePoint list operations shown above. (If you’d like to detour into an explanation about abstract classes, I posted a little while back) ISharePointListBackedEntity try this blog post + video combination It defines the core model properties, such as Title, Effective and Expiration Dates and such. The entity’s constructor invokes the super’s constructor at line 22 and then assigns useful default values to the properties. Here’s the final chunk: This section of code defines a static method, . As you’ll see, the generic SP List Helper uses this metadata to do the mapping at runtime between the SharePoint list’s columns and this entity’s properties. GetSharePointMetadata() There’s a lot going on. Let’s first look at line 10. This defines the actual mappings and does so by populating an array, colMappings. Here’s a typical mapping: This defines a mapping between a SharePoint list column named “ID” and a model property, “SharePointID”). At runtime, the code populates the SharePoint “ID” list column into the model’s “SharePointID” property for read operations.The optional 3rd parameter, “EntityReadWriteAccess.READ_ONLY” indicates that this mapping is ignored when writing back to SharePoint. (The default is both Read and Write, that’s why you don’t see it specified on the other properties). The low-level mapping is accomplished via a collection of static methods on the EntityMapper class. There is one associated method for each SharePoint data type. These mapplet functions understand how to translate the JSON response of an integer to a TypeScript number, a SharePoint JSON MMS object into an array of strings, etc. There is one final mandatory link — the name of the SharePoint list itself. This is accomplished on line 8. There are a few final things going on here beyond straight mapping. At line 4, I define a “console logging label”. This is used by the helper to emit log messages with a label that distinguishes it from other helper’s that might logging out to the console. Lastly, there is this line: At runtime, it’s helpful to create an empty instance for the purposes of validating the integrity of the mapping. That validation is implemented at run-time by these functions: The generic entity helper invokes these validation functions at run-time to help reduce the common problem of working with case-sensitive field names and tricky spellings that arise when you’re forced to match text strings in JSON to class properties or other variables.These validation functions will throw an error if we try to map a class property, “xyzzy” to a SharePoint list column that doesn’t exist, or vice-versa. It will catch an invalid mapping like this: JavaScript : Good EntityHelper.GetIntegerMapping(“ID”, “SharePointID”, …); Bad: EntityHelper.GetIntegerMapping(“ID”, “SharepointID”, …); In the “good” case, ID maps to SharePointID. In the bad case, SharepointID is mis-spelled. The runtime validation logic detects this problem and warns you about it. The fundamental idea is that we can create a model.ts file that connects the model to the SharePoint list in a more declarative way. By setting up the array with both the mappings (e.g. “VP_EffectiveDate” ← → “Effective Date”) as well as the appropriate serialization / deserialization function, we no longer need to concern ourselves with parsing JSON, constructing urls to correctly hit REST endpoints and the like. There is one source of truth as far as the entity mapping is concerned. colMappings Being able to validate mappings at runtime is the icing on the cake. Practical Effects Here’s a short video showing what it’s like to work with tools like this: There are several really nice consequences that come of using abstract classes like this: Strongly typed results. Automatic mapping to SharePoint list columns. Consistent CRUD+ operations. It’s always “helper.SaveItem()” or “helper.DeleteItem()”. Fixing a bug for one method fixes it for all. I recall working on a project where I’d made a common error in one of those early factory mappers. I had to make the same update to a dozen factories, introduced a new error in a couple while I was doing it, etc. Adding a new capability for one model entity means that all model entities get to enjoy it. For instance, when I started off with this, I was only focused gets, saves and deletes. At one point, I needed to set security. I enhanced the core splisthelper object with a security function and now all models can be secured. Sensible Next Steps This entity mapping code evolved organically and was a great learning experience. It works well, but there are some obvious opportunities to improve it. It would be nice to do something like this: Basically, use TypeScript Decorators to specify entity mappings rather than the static method I’m using. </end> <postscript> I recently published a book on TypeScript! It’s free and you can access it here: https://www.gitbook.com/book/pagalvin/yet-another-typescript-book/details </endForReal>

Microsoft

Useful Entity Mapping Supporting SharePoint Using TypeScript … and More???

The “imitation game” is not only the name of the famous movie about Alan Turing’s great and tormented genius . It is our first swiss-knife for knowledge. That’s what every little baby (or small monkey) does to learn to do something. Perhaps at the dawn of civilization, it was probably the case that shown to our distant ancestors something that they imitated (of course without their understanding) and used it in the battle of survival that has led us to this day. Tools and memes An imitation game creates a “tool” that beyond than a physical tool, is a meme that is written in our brain. From physical and mental first, then only mental , it’s a series of instructions that allow us to do something. Similar to a small program or a set of interactions with enviroment. It’s a Dawking software version of genes. Very important, a tool can be used without knowing it in all its features and capabilities; only what we need in that moment……we can make the example of a baboon using a iphone to break a walnut. tools and understanding Use and comprehension of tools/memes are not automatically tied up at the beginning and this relationship can have different levels. And as long as the environment around baboon does not need anything more, our ape will always use the iphone to break the nuts with Steve Jobs’s peace. On the contrary example if we have an incredible powerfull tool in the form of a magic Henry Potter’s wand, capable of solving all of our questions and problems, than can cure every illness, or take us into space and know all the secrets of the universe, we would not be tempted to find a different tool and we would not again be very concerned about how it is done. We’ll just use it. So use comes before understanding in the early stages and is that’s what matters ultimately. So the key is enviroment request. From nuts to general relativity Our learning itself is at the beginning an imitation game, starting from scratch, often through the example.. Every day we all , (adults), learn many skills, from bobbing, or the principles of physiology, or medicine etc … Let’s learn how to program by writing down list pieces that make the mythical “hello world” appearing on screen. And if that allowed us to write any program we would stop there. Obviously then we go on and learn by adding new programming rules. But why ? Because in that environment, writing the magic beginner phrase on the computer screen, does not take us much more into it. So we have to go on until we can build and use something new and original that allows us more. Understanding at many levels comes later, if needed; like evolution of our knowledge. But at the base there is always that first step of the imitation game. And for us it is enough until the environment tells us the opposite. Using a tools is a long and complex way. And using/understanding/evolve them is even longer. Explanation and digression : At first we only begin to use something in a way that I would call passive and primitive, without worrying about how that is done. We are like the pilot who “uses” the aircraft without much concern about the rules of aerodynamics, or the programmer who uses a library in its most elemental and primordial form to format the printing of a function. This is similar to deep learning. we connect inputs to outputs without worrying about what’s inside mechanism. We can only remark that right now in deep learning, for example, we use the inhuman brute force of the computer to see thousands and thousands of examples to get to know more than doctor if a tissue is malignant or not. But what did we do in reality? We have simply exploited a particular piece of the machine, that is, its inhuman capacity to “eat” a lot of data to get a result that seems stunning. So we can only observe that a human doctor need lesser examples to train his skills, also if less successfull(?). And if we want to make a comparison we will have to give the doctor thousands of years to train. Deep learning seems…deep… imitation game ONLY . Of course we cannot actually know if this approach is another way to intelligence with a low profile approach of abstraction. So learned meme from deep learning is very trivial (seen by an human point of view ) the meme is extremely different from human one and probably primitive. It cannot be use in other contexts. It seems not able to evolve and join with other memories to go further. UNTIL NOW . We don’t really know. May be a good starting point, but UNTIL NOW has little true evolutionary capacity, and it seems similar to a biological counterpart of a monocellular algae that remains as it is for four billion years. end of digression. I’d write down a few thoughts on the subject. The difference The human brain is capable of doing something more than the artificial neural network, which for the time is scarcely imitated by the artificial counterpart, although there are some insights in the right direction. NB…..GANs from a certain point of view this network build a mini environment of two competing memes: an internal simulation space. But let’s talk about our ape….. We left the baby, the monkey, our ancestor (and the deep neural network), using for example, a stalk to open the walnut by hitting it. But a miracle happens. Not all nuts break, so they must devise something to solve the problem. We might say we have to imagine something different, but the term “imagining” already has the smell of evolution and knowledge. Be careful again: the crappy walnut that does not break is generated by the environment that writes a series of slightly different stories. In a theoretical world all nuts break and . But in reality it do not happens . It’s our Karma and our progress engine of evolution. So ape needs to find a greater branch and put the nut on a rock to prevent rolls. Perhaps by chance, then more consciously, over time improves its understanding of the tool, and evolves. He has to do it because the tool he has used until now is not the most suitable: it is the environment that asks for it. At first monkey does not want to take the Nobel Prize for nuts breaking or creates the “great unified theory of nuts”. What’s happen now? Baboon probably “hooking” in the space of other experiences memorized in different contexts, mix and remix (say in abstract) the various memories born from other individual experiences (also collective) for example changing the scope of their application. Anything simple like a banal recombination? No of course, because the number of possible solutions would soon overwhelm its processing capabilities. And here we look at the second miracle that is the . elimination game Here the child (or the monkey) is guided by some empirically learned memes and rules (that they are also tools), or better yet, they are meta-tools. The simplest of all is the similarity, (different and partially equal) that can be recombined with more success. And then learn the most powerful mental weapon that allows him to control the combinatorial explosion. higher The elimination game Call it a selection, let’s call it meme’s death, call it destruction. However it is the abandonment of those knowledge before and then of strategies that have not worked in the past that helps him to overthrow the forest of solutions. It works like a self improvement computer. He learn to learn. And selection and distruction lead us to knowledge. Like death in nature take evolution. We simulate evolution. So these tools become meta-tools, or more general tools. The enviroment leads him to have tools are infinitely more powerful than before. Always applying the two rules. Change and death. In the example of the first, the pilot now for infinite ways knows a little more aerodynamics and therefore knows what to do if the aircraft has a malfunction or loses an engine. Then summarizing what has been said so far: Mind learning is a continuous scale of increasingly complex and general skills that can be assembled as a lego. At beginning we use without understanding, but only by imitation. Understanding is “on request” by enviroment. After having accumulated a discrete number, you can use some tools that will allow you to level up your previous tools: we can define the higher-level meta-tools in self construcion pyramid of knowledge. Third point combine these tools with different strategies trying to keep them in a computable number that can be selected, forgetting or killing those that are not useful. , we seek to find winning combinations that allow building and understanding at a more in-depth and complex level. If the environment requires it Throughout this process, the protagonists are obviously the environment and the selection and the case for us that shakes the nuts of our knowledge and our future. Final personal thoughts A strategic question. Artficial intelligence? I would say in spite of the spectacular interest and achievements, backwards enough in this evolution of tools. The results arise more from the brute force of calculation than from the refinement of the instruments. Will we do better in the future? who knows? It is extremely difficult to figure out whether the deep learning network will create an internal competition and selection environment unless it has been implemented a priori from external programming, and this leaves us from the hypothesis of self-evolution. A little as it happened in the biological counterpart where in our test tubes the primordial broth did not lead to anything significant. But all can happens. But It is the environment that generates our knowledge. If we take the famous example of “brain in the vat” if we remove what is innate in DNA, how does it evolve? Another nodal point and how our brains must be educated …… and how the web needs to be made.

Imitation game + Elimination game

If I had it my way, : every text in the world would fall into one of the following two categories literature; lists. The first type helps you immerse yourself in what’s been written and enjoy the text. The second, however, provides structure that helps you better absorb information and make informed decisions. Here is a new article is about creating your first academy, fitting nicely into a list of seven steps. : ) Academies are most useful if you . We have written a simple algorithm composed of seven steps to facilitate the creation of academies with this task in mind. educate visitors before they’ve even become your customers This could be your entire audience or some segment of it. Maybe marketing specialists, agencies, athletes, hotels, banks — it depends on who your target is. Choose a target audience for the course. For example, “How can I always have information about my clients readily available?” (for CRM), or “How can I lower employee turnover rates?” (for human resources management). Find this target audience’s problem or a question you can help them solve. Often, part of this content already exists (on your company’s blog, in your Help Center, or in whitepapers). For the first course, 8–10 lessons should be enough, each of which can consist of one page of content (text, images, screenshots, or videos). Create content that answers this question or presents a solution to this problem. Consider what you would like to get out of your learners as a result. What target action will you prompt learners with the end of the course? (sale, demo request, call, registration). Put together a course from the resulting content. Tell them about the launch of a free course on a topic that’s important to them (a link in the footer of your site, an email, social media posts). Show the course to your current visitors and customers. Visit sites where your target audience spends time, find their questions, and give them answers, adding a link to your course. Inviting people to a course is far simpler than inviting them to a blog or whitepaper. A course is understood to be more valuable. Use the course to find new clients. Put together a process for entering information about learners for your sales and customer success teams. It will be important for them to know how many courses a learner has gone through in the academy, which materials they have learned, and at what point they stopped their education. : ) Process new leads. Your sales specialists will be able to sell better, and your customer success team will make customers happier In seven steps, you have created a course that will attract leads. But what else will you get out of an academy? in the industry, and, consequently, trust you more. Learners see you as an expert You get data on each of your learners (and ). you can better understand their needs You get data on course content (and and, on the other hand, what information doesn’t draw them in). you can better understand what information is interesting to your target audience If you reward learners with certificates for completing courses (one of the features of an academy), then afterwards learners will be able to share them on social media. . You will get good PR and organic traffic out of this You can get to know your audience better with the help of the quiz feature. You can ask learners questions while they are in the process of completing a course. For example, you could ask, “ ” or “ ” Which of the problems mentioned earlier have you encountered in the past? Which products have you used in the past? You get . Moreover, this tool works with all channels of traffic (emails, socials, ads, ads, guerilla marketing, etc.). In fact, learners themselves are far more likely to leave their email address before starting a course, because (as is the case if you ask them to enter their email before downloading a whitepaper), . a new tool for lead generation Facebook Google they are not treated like leads they are treated like learners Once you successfully launch your first course, it’s . All you have to do is choose a new audience or a new question to answer, and you will be able to easily create a new course. And, as a result, you will again be able to attract potential customers. easy to scale your academy

Seven Steps to Creating an Academy for Lead Generation

As famed hacker Samy Kamkar recently said we should move towards low-cost hacking/exploitation . NodeMCU is one of such tools, a LUA based firmware for the under $5. wifi tools ESP8266 WiFi SOC Now thanks to you can assemble your own WiFi jammer (to be more correct wifi deauth attack tool) with an . You select the wifi client you need to disengage from their wifi and begin the attack. For whatever length of time that the attack is running, any wifi will not work. Spacehuhn NodeMCU ESP8266 With a device like this you can disable the netflix streaming of your roommate, the wireless security cameras of the mall or your neighbor’s Internet of Things gadgets. The 802.11 WiFi protocol contains a deauthentication feature. It is utilized to detach customers from network. An attacker can send a station a deauthentication frame at any time, with a spoofed source address for the wireless access point. The protocol does not require any encryption for this frame, even when the session was established with. This vulnerability was addressed in an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard to increase the security of its management frames, rarely supported is off course disabled by default. 802.11w-2009 Deauthentication Broadcast Attack A decade ago, when strong, cheap magnets, bright LEDs, and small coin cell batteries were materials fresh to hacking, someone had a great idea: tape all these items up and throw them on bridges and overpasses. The LED throwie was born, and while we’re sure the biggest installation of LED throwies looked cool, it’s really just a small-scale environmental disaster. There are — and have been for a long time — which are very small (artillery grenade or ‘much less than backpack’ small) and relatively cheap. These jammers can be used to knock out radio comm in a radius of several hundred meters. Emplacement is typically by hand or howitzer. Since then, the ESP8266 was created, and the world now has a tiny WiFi-enabled computer that’s the size of a postage stamp and cost almost nothing. expendable military radio jammers battery powered, based multi target De-Auth attack implementation. Rand Druid Compact ESP8266 While not recommended, it is an interesting example of the latest and cheapest technology that made a throwaway hacking tool possible; 10 years ago, a small wifi module this cheap would have been unthinkable. Supported Devices: You can flash the code to every ESP8266. Depending on the module or development board, there might be differences in the stability and performance. The common ESP8266 512kb version won’t have the full MAC vendor list and other features. based board which has 4mb flash and builtin USB port on it will work best. NodeMCU ESP-12 Installation: Uploading the .bin files is the easiest way to get up and running. https://github.com/spacehuhn/esp8266_deauther/releases Always use the 1mb version , will work on 4mb, 32mb, etc. Unless you’re sure that your ESP8266 only has 512kb flash memory. Upload using the ESP8266 flash tool of your choice:- [Windows only]- esptool-gui [Windows, MacOS]- esptool [Windows, MacOS, Linux] nodemcu-flasher Power ESP8266 from OTG cable, powerbank, 2x AA battery. Scan for Wi-Fi networks and connect to . The password is “deauther”.Once connected, you can open up your browser and go to 192.168.4.1. pwned (MIT License) Sources: https://github.com/spacehuhn/esp8266_deauther It is also worth taking a look at other forks of the original work from spacehuhn, like taner1's version that incorporates a fake captive portal for social eng theft of credentials. (MIT License) https://github.com/taner1/esp8266_deauther

Netflix

Deauthentication attack and other ‘wifi hacks’ using an ESP8266 module.

One of the complaints developers often have for AWS Lambda is the inability to run and debug functions locally. For Node.js at least, the Serverless framework and VS Code provides a good solution for doing just that. An often underused feature of the Serverless framework is the command, which runs your code locally by emulating the AWS Lambda environment. Granted, it’s not a perfect simulation and only works with Node.js and Python, but it has been good enough for most of local development needs. invoke local _Emulate an invocation of your AWS Lambda function locally using the Serverless Framework_serverless.com Serverless Framework Commands - AWS Lambda - Invoke Local With VS Code, you have the ability to applications, including the option to launch an external program. debug Node.js _The Visual Studio Code editor includes Node.js debugging support. Set breakpoints, step-in, inspect variables and more._code.visualstudio.com Debug Node.js Apps using VS Code Put the two together and you have the ability to locally run and debug your Lambda functions. Step 1 : install Serverless framework as dev dependency In general, it’s a good idea to install framework as a dev dependency in a project because: Serverless it allows other developers (and the CI server) to use the Serverless framework for deployment without having to install it themselves it prevents incompatibility issues when you have an incompatible version of Serverless framework installed to that used by the file in the project serverless.yml since Serverless v1.16.0 from the deployment package so it wouldn’t add to your deployment size dev dependencies are excluded Step 2 : add debug configuration Invoke the “sls invoke local” CLI command against the “hello” function with an empty object {} as input. It’s also possible to invoke the function with a JSON file, see doc: http://bit.ly/2w1HrQh Step 3 : enjoy! There, nice and easy :-) Couple of things to note: if your function depends on environment variables, then you can set those up in the config file in step 2 launch.json if your function needs to access other AWS resources, then you also need to setup the relevant environment variables (eg. ) for the aws-sdk to access those resources in the correct AWS account AWS_PROFILE this approach will not work for recursive functions (well, the recursion will happen on the deployed Lambda function, so you won’t be able to debug it) Hi, my name is . I’m an and the author of . I have run production workload at scale in AWS for nearly 10 years and I have been an architect or principal engineer with a variety of industries ranging from banking, e-commerce, sports streaming to mobile gaming. I currently work as an independent consultant focused on AWS and serverless. Yan Cui AWS Serverless Hero Production-Ready Serverless You can contact me via , and . Email Twitter LinkedIn Check out my new course, . Complete Guide to AWS Step Functions In this course, we’ll cover everything you need to know to use AWS Step Functions service effectively. Including basic concepts, HTTP and event triggers, activities, design patterns and best practices. Get your copy . here Come learn about operational for AWS Lambda: CI/CD, testing & debugging functions locally, logging, monitoring, distributed tracing, canary deployments, config management, authentication & authorization, VPC, security, error handling, and more. BEST PRACTICES You can also get off the face price with the code . 40% ytcui Get your copy . here

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Running and debugging AWS Lambda functions locally with the Serverless framework and VS Code

There are businesses out there that help you fetch and delete/suppress negative reviews. Not resolve, but suppress. It’s the wrong thing to do. Both on moral and business grounds. I received the most disturbing message on LinkedIn today. Here it goes. The email was from the relationship manager at a “Online Reputation Management and Digital Marketing company” More often than not, such messages are ignored, but I do skim through them to see if there is something of value there. As I went through this one, this caught my eye. Suppression of the negative content and links. Suppression?? Really? The next two points were equally disturbing. Permanent Deletion of the negative content, videos, news, blogs, etc. De-indexing of the negative links. Holy fuck! Now, I am not naive. I know some brands do engage in such practices, and when there is a demand, it was logical that businesses would spring up catering to that demand. The point is — that demand shouldn’t exist. I DON’T BLAME HER FOR REACHING OUT After all, she was just doing her job. To a large extent, I don’t blame her employer as well. They saw an opportunity to make a quick buck, so who am I to question their readiness to make the best of that. I blame the brands, the businesses who have created the demand for such services. And I pity them because they are spending thousands of dollars into a futile exercise, and wasting away what could have been a tremendous opportunity to grow as a business. WHY NEGATIVE REVIEWS MATTER All reviews matter. A lot. If you’ve gone through the I had shared earlier, right there at the beginning (the second slide itself), I talk about the power of in today’s world. deck on referral marketing **social proof** Positive reviews, even from strangers, helps us make the buying decision with more ease of mind. Negative reviews cements our skepticism. And that is why this market — one to eliminate and make negative reviews go — exists. poof But the fact is, there is nothing more reinforcing in front of a customer than watching a negative review get turned around. It demonstrates the will and resolve of the business to attain maximum customer satisfaction and shows that they would even go the extra mile to achieve that. Don’t eliminate negative reviews. Turn them around! In my previous organization, one of the first mandates I passed on to the person handling our app store pages was that all negative reviews should be brought to my attention and the attention of the direct stakeholder within hours. And then we would see if we could turn that frown upside down. Negative reviews also help you understand two things: What do you need to change/modify/alter in your product, operations or approach? What is it that is preventing your users and customers from achieving that wow moment when they simply fall in love with you? Essentially it helps you get a lot of info that you need to become a better business. So, the way I see it, negative reviews work. Why the hell would you want to eliminate them?? Work with them. That’s it for today; see you tomorrow. Click here to join the mailing list. Well, frankly that’s all I wanted to talk about. But, while we are on the subject of reviews, let us talk about it a bit more. You can skip this part if you would like to. REVIEWS ARE A FUNNY BUSINESS It doesn’t matter which line of business you are into, you cannot and willnot be perfect. That’s a fact. There may be shortfalls in your operations, or you may be doing everything right, but even then perfection is largely perceptive. So — you will not be perfect for everybody. Anyway. There are a few things that you need to come to terms with. #1. Just because you are providing the best possible services, people won’t leave you positive reviews As disappointing as that may sound, it is the truth. Your customers aren’t exactly fast and loose with doling out raves and praises. They would love your services, and either praise you in their heads, or just dismiss it thinking its your job to provide a good service ( ). which is not a wrong notion, to be honest Best case scenarios? They have had some bad experiences in past with service providers in your domain, so you surprised them. And for that, they will remember you for life. They loved your service, so there is a 40–70% chance that the next time they need a similar service, your name would be the first to pop in their heads. They are having a conversation with a friend, and the topic of a particular service crops up. Incidentally, that is the very service you provide. They will talk about it. Now, you have a referral. But other than that, yeah — you aren’t getting any positive reviews. Unless you ask for it. Yes. If you know your customer has been delighted by your services, ask them to leave a positive review for you. Follow some simple rules though: Make the process of leaving the review simple, easy and non-time consuming. Get it at the earliest. As soon as you have wowed the customer. The more time lapses, the chances of you getting that review go down and down. But even then, not all would leave that much coveted review. Think for yourself. How many times has a customer service representative asked you to take a min. to leave a review for him/her after having resolved your issue over the call/chat, and how many times have you actually done that? **successfully** Your consumers aren’t any different. #2. Your consumer will go out of his/her way to leave a negative review as soon as you cross a threshold. It is easy to evoke a negative emotion in your consumers, and if they are even slightly pissed, they would feel more compelled to leave a negative review for you. Putting that in context, you need to make the customer feel overjoyed for them to even remotely consider leaving you a positive review on their own. For a negative review, even a typo on the delivery slip might be enough for some people. Different people have different ideas on what line can’t and shouldn’t be crossed by a business. The minimum service expectation they have off of you. Fall short and you are inviting a backlash. #3. Some consumers will leave a negative review just because you ticked them off. Whether you deserved it or not, it won’t matter. Don’t believe me? Take the example of Snapdeal witnessing TENS OF THOUSANDS of app uninstalls and negative reviews on the playstore. And why did that happen? Because Snap’s (which is still popularly known as Snapchat) CEO allegedly made some anti-India remarks. Someone on Twitter messed up and wrote Snap_deal_ instead of Snap_chat_. And from there it just snowballed. Sure, even the backlash Snapchat had to face was something I don’t agree with, but Snapdeal? They just got caught in the crosshairs for nothing.

Fetch

Why ‘managing’ negative reviews is the worst idea

Maker

Jack the Master of all Trades

I admit I have bad digital habits. I post too often on FB and Instagram, rant on Twitter and I do check mobile like zillion times per day. I won’t say all this is fine but I can rationalize that it fulfills some of my basic social needs. But in recent year or so I managed somehow to limit some of these activities and what’s more important (for me), I started to think and act to protect my privacy. Or better to say, filter what and how it is delivered to data hungry services. (Are you also annoyed with binding address analytics.twitter.com when you click on a link?) So what I did in recent year or so was: I learned (and acted) about browser fingerprinting and how to (try) protect myself. Sandboxed and use various browsers for different services (one for browsing, one for FB, Google and so on). Started using strict cookie policy (deleting, rejecting…). De-Googled: I stopped using Google and related services as much as possible (duckgogo, no Keep, Maps, Docs anymore…). Replaced my broken Android with iPhone (and related services) and I am all Mac. (One would say one devil for the other, but I can’t sacrifice my business). Strict App control in iPhone/iPad (location services, access…). I am not logged into services even if I use them (stores, bookings…). Using different mail accounts for different services (especially on mobile). I don’t use FB Messenger and I only access FB on mobile via Opera Mini (that is used for FB only). Some other stuff I can’t remember. Call me paranoid, but I it made me feel comfortable ;). I understand the “data company” business model, but it just became as a huge vacuum cleaner that sucks all the data. FB and Instagram bad habit remained, tho I managed to control it more. I don’t Like Pages out of my close interest, don’t click on the articles (FB is not my primary article source) etc. Anyway, all this was pretty simple to do. It demands a bit of discipline and getting out of the comfort zone, but nothing a lazy person can’t handle. So the expected result should (ideally) look like: Google or FB (and others) can’t detect where I am surfing. I don’t provide them with the various data if I don’t want to. I can spoof Google Analytics and others (to some extent; browser fingerprinting is heavy stuff). Android is not sending tons of data to Google via Play services. All these services know about me exactly what I provide to them in one browser during single session (not cross browser detection of my identity). But let me share few things that happened to me in the last two months or so: With my teammates, we discussed a product on a closed Slack channel. I didn’t search it on Google, neither checked their web site. But in few minutes the bloody service appeared on my FB stream as promotion. I was checking Instagram on a train, with a location service unaccessible for IG. A (pretty) girl was sitting next to me and she appeared as suggested contact a few hours later. Pretty cool and scary at the same time. I booked a bus ride on one browser with only session cookies on andjust after that the ad on FB for exactly this destination/company appeared on my other browser (sandboxed for FB). Got a promo mail on my pro mail account that is unrelated with a mail I use for FB login… and bam, you guessed, here comes ad on FB for the product shortly after that. I can understand that vacuum data sucking strategy and data companies are doing many things to get relevant data. But the extent of their capabilities how to get all the meta data and my inability to protect myself really annoys me. I am in Internet of Things business and you don’t have to be rocket scientist to figure out IoT is ticking privacy bomb. I mean, the article about a guy who is afraid of his smart Samsung TV is kinda fun, but the case when Google Echo or Amazon Alexa (forgot which one) called the police automatically while people were arguing is a good warning. In a way it’s easier for my biz at the moment, because we are in the Industrial IoT where data privacy is still a standard and that and our service protects privacy and security by default. I plan to write my next article about IoT security, so stay tuned. Well, I made my soul lighter by posting the issue online with another privacy sacrifice. Written and too lazy to edit by Jernej Adamic

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Slack

2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Bitcoin

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Bitcoin

I am annoyed by privacy breaches

If you look up which generation is considered , you’ll get a variety of answers on the cohort age group that represents this class. Sometimes when I hear my colleagues complain about “those millenials”, I often don’t know how to answer, since I’m not sure if I’m part of the joke, or in on it. Millennial I was born right at the arguable and rather ambiguous cut off point of the generation of “Millennials”, in the year 1983. Authors and coined the term in 1987, which referred to a graduating high school class at the turning of the “millennium”, hence the year 2000. William Strauss Neil Howe I came of age when it was considered normal to daydream about Oregon Trail and create mixed tapes of songs you copied on the radio and gifted to friends, a time when you could hear your parents yell at you over the dial up modem when you were logging on to use AOL. I was one of the first kids in my high school class to have a mobile phone which my father strictly told me was for “emergency only” with only 50 available monthly minutes that couldn’t even begin to cover the exhalations in my conversations. In my international Middle-Eastern household, it was common practice to see various extended family members and friends walking in and out for meals and coffee like it was the local community house. The phone almost never stopped ringing and my mother’s rolodex was constantly being updated with new cards. Conversation flowed into my life as aggressively as an ocean wave crashing into a sandy beach; I had no choice but to defend myself to it and participate. And with time, I learned that the art of conversation was most enjoyable when it mimicked an evenly matched tennis game; one person hits the ball over the net, and the other responds and so on. The game is more enjoyable when you can keep the ball out of the net. In order to play well, you had to be fully engaged and present. It was never much fun to be outmatched in these games, with one person overcompensating their serve, or matched with a significantly weaker player. In order to participate, you had to listen, and you became a stronger conversationalist in time. There were select periods of my life that transformed the way I communicated entirely, and the shift was more gradual in nature than immediate. In junior high, I was an early lover of online chat rooms and games. While I spent my earlier childhood devouring books salaciously to understand how other people think and how they lived, I suddenly had access to an entire world that I never had access to before. The world was undoubtedly, my oyster in the suburbs of Chicago once I logged on as “yazchick” on aim. But over time, I saw the conversation shift within and across families and friends. Rather than only enjoying live conversations together, our millennial group started isolating ourselves and talking to many in closed chat rooms and instant messenger. And so the loss in desire of individual and intimate spoken conversations began. Why would I spend an hour on the phone chatting with my girlfriend when I could make 5 new friends and exchange new ideas with similar interest online groups? It was far more productive to do the latter, and time is our most valuable currency. While I always tried to do both, time was short and hundreds of in person conversations and phone conversations were lost into the AIM chat room abyss. The intimacy shift didn’t stop there. During my first year at Cornell, Facebook emerged. Fast forward a few years after graduation, and everyone promptly replaced their cell phones with the smart mobile phone. And then we were introduced to: TEXTING. has become the primary source of all communication today for millenials. Quick poll, how many texts did you receive today? How many did you send? What if you added them? More than 20? 50? 100? Texting Don’t get me wrong. I love that we have access to the world at our disposal and all of the channels available from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Medium and beyond. I’m the poster child for social media. With the click of a button, we can immediately be transported on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring, in the townships of South Africa, or in Washington DC during an unmentionable President’s inauguration. And we can learn so much about ourselves in the process. Access to information allows us to be informed if we so choose to take the time and diligence required to sift through the noise. But texting is another story. Many of my millennial and gen y friends almost never listen to their voicemails, and prefer texting over real phone conversations 9 times out of 10. In fact, calling is now reserved for things like deaths, engagements, customer service complaints, and any major life changes. Have we conditioned ourselves to lose our ability to authentically and intimately connect with each other with spoken word? On some days, I can’t help but think that while we’ve gained a larger network and a more efficient way to communicate, we have lost a deeper level of intimacy to connect. Communication at the start of the “millennial” cohort was vastly different than it is today. We couldn’t hide our real selves with TL:DR shorthand versions behind screens. We spoke, and expressed our multitude of emotions in our speech at the dinner table and beyond. In verbal dialogue, we did more than exchange information; we came to know each other on a deeper level. I know I’ll still probably send as many texts tomorrow as I did today, but my goal is to revisit the days that I could call someone, and make the uncomfortable conversations maybe more comfortable and more intimate in the long run. So going forward, don’t text me. Call me instead. — — — — If you’d like to connect, you can find me on Twitter .

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Be Informed

Don’t text me, call me instead

Lately at work our go to architecture for creating websites is to use a React frontend with a REST Framework (DRF) backend. The two are connected by API calls using axios in the frontend. Some is used as well for storing global app state. This is our preferred method as it allows the frontend and backend to be completely decoupled. And as long as we define a list of endpoints and returned data to work with, the frontend and backend can be developed in parallel. This also allows us the option to easily create mobile apps for any of the projects in the future as they can just consume the backend API. On a side note, we’re currently looking at using React Native for future mobile app projects. Django Redux In the rest of this post, I’ll go through how to setup a React frontend and DRF backend project. Note I assume you’re already familiar with React, Redux, Django, DRF, npm etc. This isn’t a tutorial for them. The Backend There isn’t much to do for the default backend outside of simply installing Django and DRF, and setting up the database. From the root of your project folder, create a virtualenv and install Django and DRF. $ virtualenv env$ source env/bin/activate$ pip3 install django djangorestframework$ pip3 freeze > requirements.txt Now start a new Django project and Django app. $ django-admin startproject backend$ cd backend$ django-admin startapp api You should now setup your database and edit your project’s settings to use the database. Good documentation on how to do this for your particular DB can be found on . Then you should configure DRF following the instructions on their website found . Django’s website here The next step you will most likely want to do is setup authentication in your API. If you wont require authentication (e.g. no user logins), you can skip this. My company’s React/Django template project currently uses plain token authentication as it’s the simplest to setup. I recommend this for those learning as well, but it’s not the best for production. These tokens never expire which poses quite a security risk if it’s ever leaked. Soon we’ll update the template project to use something like oauth, or expiring JWT tokens — as of yet it’s undecided. Documentation for configuring token authentication is . here Once token authentication is configured, you will want to create a in your app (if you haven’t already), and use DRF’s token auth view. This endpoint at lets users POST their username and password and get their auth token as a response. In the frontend, this token will get stored in the Redux store for further API calls. urls.py /auth # file: api/urls.py from django.conf.urls import urlfrom rest_framework.authtoken import views as drf_views urlpatterns = [url(r'^auth$', drf_views.obtain_auth_token, name='auth'),] And just to make sure it’s clear, your file should now look like this backend/urls.py # file: backend/urls.py from django.conf.urls import url, include urlpatterns = [url(r'^', include('api.urls', namespace='api', app_name='api')),] By doing this, we’re just making each app look after its own urls. Maybe in the future you will add more apps to the backend and it would get messy to add everything to backend/urls.py You should now have a functioning backend DRF API with a single endpoint that lets users get their auth token. Let’s setup a user and run the backend server for testing later. /auth $ python3 manage.py migrate$ python3 manage.py createsuperuser$ python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 Remember to run migrate for the first time to create your database. Then we’ll create a user for whom we can get an auth token for. With the server now running, you can test your endpoint works quickly using curl /auth $ curl -X POST -d "username=username&password=password" http://localhost:8000/auth The Frontend For the frontend, we used Facebook’s create-react-app as the starting point. So the first thing to do is install it and create a new project using it in the root of your project folder. We also eject the configuration as we need more control, and everyone on our team is fine with using webpack etc. $ npm install -g create-react-app$ create-react-app frontend$ cd frontend$ npm run eject Next we want to install some additional dependencies. $ npm install --save-dev babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-stage-3$ npm install --save redux redux-logger redux-persist react-redux$ npm install --save axios react-router-dom lodash Now instead of listing all the code used by our React template project, I’m just going to show the important parts that connect our frontend to our backend. Firstly create a redux store as we will want to save the user’s auth token for making more API calls in the future // file: src/store.jsimport { compose, createStore, applyMiddleware } from 'redux';import { createLogger } from 'redux-logger';import { persistStore, autoRehydrate } from 'redux-persist';import rootReducer from './reducers'; const store = createStore(rootReducer,compose(applyMiddleware(createLogger(),),autoRehydrate()));persistStore(store);export default store; And then setup the token reducer // file: src/reducers/index.jsimport { combineReducers } from 'redux';import * as actionType from '../actions/types'; const tokenInitialState = null;const token = (state = tokenInitialState, action) => {switch(action.type) {case actionType.SET_TOKEN:return action.data;default:return state;}} const appReducer = combineReducers({token,}) const rootReducer = (state, action) => {return appReducer(state, action);} export default rootReducer; And finally the actions (notice this is two files in one code block) // file: src/actions/index.jsimport * as actionType from './types'; export const setToken = (data) => {return {type: actionType.SET_TOKEN,data}} // file: src/actions/types.jsexport const SET_TOKEN = "SET_TOKEN"; We now have an action we can dispatch to store the user’s token after logging in. So next lets look at how we login // file: src/util/Auth.jsimport axios from 'axios';import _ from 'lodash';import store from '../store';import { setToken } from '../actions'import { URL, LOGIN } from '../config/Api'; export function InvalidCredentialsException(message) {this.message = message;this.name = 'InvalidCredentialsException';} export function login(username, password) {return axios.post(URL + LOGIN, {username,password}).then(function (response) {store.dispatch(setToken(response.data.token));}).catch(function (error) {// raise different exception if due to invalid credentialsif (_.get(error, 'response.status') === 400) {throw new InvalidCredentialsException(error);}throw error;});} export function loggedIn() {return store.getState().token !== null;} This piece of code uses axios to post to our backend and then dispatch the returned token to our redux store. Once this is done, we can now create an axios based API client using our stored token to make further API calls from elsewhere in our React components. /auth // file: src/util/ApiClient.jsimport axios from 'axios';import store from '../store';import { URL } from '../config/Api'; export const apiClient = function() {const token = store.getState().token;const params = {baseURL: URL,headers: {'Authorization': 'Token ' + token}};return axios.create(params);} We reference the file in the last two code-blocks. Here’s what that file looks like — it’s simply a file to map constants to endpoints, making the code more readable and easier to modify later. ../config/Api export const URL = process.env.API_URL;export const LOGIN = "/auth"; That’s all there is to it to connect our frontend to our backend. You can now try using the login function to get the auth token for the user we created earlier. If you do, you can look at your browser’s dev tools to check the output from redux-logger to see the result of the setToken redux action. Auth.js I would love to hear some feedback from others about this setup: how could I potentially improve it, anything that needs changing or could be done better, etc.

Creating websites using React and Django REST Framework

Ronan Dunlop, (right) and Poornima Vijayashanker, Founder of (left) Director of Marketing at Pivotal Labs Femgineer What Is Tech Debt And How Do You Manage It Image it’s crunch time… Maybe you’re already thinking: “When is it NOT crunch time?!” You’ve got eager customers who are waiting for you to ship product, your teammates are desperate to complete the release and move on, and you don’t want to be the bottleneck. So what to do you? You rush through writing your code and put in a quick fix. It’s good enough to pass tests and a quick code review. Or maybe you’re not the one coding. You maybe one of the people encouraging someone else on your team to put in a quick fix and move on. Unfortunately, crunch time doesn’t come around once in a blue moon. It happens more often than we’d like. And sadly it gets heralded by sayings like: “Move fast!” “Break things!” And, “Ship code!” As designers, product managers, and developers we are eager to share what we’ve built with customers. However, constantly operating by the seat of our pants comes at a price and that price is tech debt. Whether you have or haven’t heard of tech debt, I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced its effects. If you’ve been on product teams that seem to constantly be putting out fires, you’ve probably noticed that over time all those quick fixes add up. And when it comes time to build something brand new, what would normally take a few hours or days, suddenly takes weeks or months. The reason it takes so long is because there’s a lot of cruft built up in the code base. Continuing to layer on quick fixes will only destabilize the code and impact its quality. If you’ve struggled to deal with tech debt on your product team, or want to educate new teammates on how to manage it, then today’s Build Tip is for you! I’m joined by who is a Product Manager and , and together we’re going to be sharing: Jay Hum Pivotal What tech debt it is and how to recognize it When it make senses to accrue tech debt — yes there are time where it makes sense to let it build up When to pay it down or just continue to ignore — unlike other types of debt, you don’t always need to pay down tech debt When it’s too late to pay down debt tech and what to do Be sure to to help them understand the importance of tech debt. share the episode with your teammates Once you’re done watching the episode, let us know in the comments below how you handle tech debt in your company. Listen to the episode on iTunes! . You can listen to this episode of on iTunes Build Enjoyed this episode and want to watch more? Help others enjoy it too by hitting the ♡ below! And . subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive additional episodes Want more resources on tech debt? Here’s a link to the post Jay mentioned in the episode: Introduction to the Technical Debt Concept Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker . San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA .

Apple

Do you know how much time quick fixes are costing you and your team?

Na Na Na Na Hey Hey-ey Goodbye. Some celebration toons! Techcrunch reports today that Adobe Flash is . finally coming to an end In honor of the end of Adobe Flash, I will be listening to these all day! Goodbye Strongbad, We’ll miss you. But I won’t miss proprietary technology on the web so… Steve Jobs in Flash: didn’t believe And neither do I. I believe in these two technologies: They’re open and free. Find me at . preview.simmerindustries.com

In Honor of the End of Flash

I have been interviewing recently, and as most devs know, the breadth and depth of questions you can expect to be asked during an interview is pretty much immeasurable. With that in mind, I have been probing recruiters on what I can expect to be asked during technical rounds. Sometimes I find it hard to maintain all the possible categories of questions I can expect straight in my head, let alone the questions themselves. I tend to forget things under pressure, . In service of wanting to retain the information better and force myself to write, I have decided to start posting walkthroughs of what I brush up on. I tend to require at least 3 sources to get a complete, correct, and well-written explanation of a topic. I would like to consolidate that for other people. like that [_|_](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9553628/piping-and-redirection) in bash is for processes/programs and [_>_](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9553628/piping-and-redirection) is generally for files This week, I went over the request . This is a pretty broad overview, and it is for a simple HTTP 1.1 request, not a persistent connection, but it could act as a good jumping-off point for HTTP/2 and persistent connection requests. I will not cover too much about the various HTTP methods because that could be a post on its own, and because they are close enough to many developers’ workflow that the reader could probably recite the basics already. HTTP lifecycle Note: Medium doesn’t support footnotes, so all footnotes link out to the original dev.to post Step 1: Local Processing Depending on how in depth you want to get, much can happen during this step depending on the application making the request. I am going to proceed on the understanding this request is being made by a browser, as opposed to cURL, an API client like Postman, or some other app. Your browser extracts the “scheme”/protocol (we have established that this will be HTTP), host ( , and optional port number, resource path, and query strings that are specified in the form . An example is www.example.com) <protocol>://<host><:optional port>/<path/to/resource><?query> |http|://|www.example.com||:5000||/mainpage||?query=param&query2=param2| Now that the browser has the intended hostname for the request, it needs to resolve an IP address . The browser will then look through its own cache of recently requested URLs, the operating system’s cache of recent queries, your router’s cache, and your DNS cache. ¹ Making GIFs is hard Step 2: Resolve an IP Like the processing done locally, resolving an IP from a “DNS server” is a sequence that includes many steps, and includes failovers if the first request fails to return an address. ² I have no idea whether this dot is actually on the shortest path If the cache lookup fails (we will assume it does), your browser fires off a using . The DNS request contains the preconfigured IP for your DNS server and your return IP in its header. The hostname for which you are trying to resolve an IP is in the request’s “Question” section. UDP is a lightweight protocol, but the tradeoff is that it offers no guarantees in terms of delivery, and there is no acknowledgement other than a response being sent and received. DNS request UDP ³ Your request will now have to travel many network devices to reach its target DNS server. Whenever the packet hits a piece of networking equipment, the device uses a routing table to determine which other device it is connected to that is most likely situated along the shortest path to the destination. ⁴ Once your request arrives at your configured DNS server, the server looks for the address associated with the requested hostname. If it finds one, it sends a response. If, on the other hand, the DNS server you have targeted cannot locate the given hostname, it passes the request along to another DNS server it is configured to to. This happens recursively until the address is found, or an is hit. If an address for the given domain cannot be resolved, the server responds with a failure and your browser returns an error. defer “authoritative” nameserver We will assume the request is successful though, given that all of this is still a precursor. If the response makes it back (remember, with UDP there’s no guarantee!), the requesting client now has a target IP. It will also have received a piece of information as part of the answer that will let it know how long the returned answer can be cached for. This means subsequent requests will get to take a shortcut from to here. Step 1.2 Step 3: Establish a TCP Connection Now that the client has an IP address, it can send an HTTP request, right? Almost, but first, since the request is sent over , which is a like UDP, the client must open a TCP connection. ⁵ TCP ⁶ transport layer protocol One of the key differences between TCP and UDP is that TCP ensures delivery and ordered data transmission. Much of this is done very simply, using what’s known as a for every byte sent. This allows the receiver to re-order received packets back into their original order, and allows the sender to retransmit any packet that does not get acknowledged by the receiver. sequence number These guarantees and more can be found on Wikipedia, and are worth reading about, but what’s most relevant is that TCP connections are opened using what’s known as a . The server must already be “listening” on a port, performing a , after which the client can initiate an , and the handshake works as follows: three-way handshake passive open active open The client initiates the active open by sending a “control” packet to the server. The client sets the for the first packet to a random value purposely, in service of security. We’ll refer to this number as for now. SYN ⁷ ⁸ sequence number x The server responds with a message , which contains an for the original message that is always , and a new sequence number for the response itself, which is another random number . SYN-ACK ⁹ acknowledgement number x+1 y In the third step, the client sends an message back to the server with a sequence number equal to , which should match the message’s acknowledgment number and ensure that our data is being delivered reliably. The message’s acknowledgment number (since it is the ) is set to one more than the received sequence number, or . ACK ¹⁰ x+1 SYN-ACK ACK acknowledging SYN-ACK y+1 We now have a completed three-way handshake and an established connection where both the client and server have received acknowledgment of the connection from the other party. The connection has also established a random, sequential sequence for each direction of communication (client->server, server->client), allowing for bidirectional, concurrent communication along the connection, which is also known as 11 full duplex communication . Step 4: Send an HTTP Request Wow, that was a bunch of steps! But now that the client has an IP address a TCP connection, it can finally send an request! Except…..no I’m kidding, we can send a request for real this time! and HTTP The request is made up of a “request line”, request header, and a body. The “request line” is simply a line that indicates the HTTP , the resource being requested, and the protocol version. The header of the request is made up of pairs in the form . Two consecutive pairs indicate the end of the header section. The only mandatory field in an HTTP request is , which contains the domain and port that the request is being sent to ( ), although in some cases the port can be omitted. Outside of the host field, common standard HTTP header fields include , , , and many more. The request can also include any non-standard header fields, and historically non-standard fields are indicated by prefixing to the field’s name. The content of an HTTP request is completely optional, but often contains something like form data or JSON. method name:value <CR><LF> <CR><LF> HOST domain.com:8080 Origin Accept Accept-Encoding X- body Once the HTTP request is sent, it follows a similar routing procedure as the one discussed earlier, with the difference being that using TCPs magic sequence number powers, the server can ensure it receives the whole request, in the correct order. Once the server receives the request, processes it, and finds the resource being requested, it generates an HTTP response. An HTTP response has a similar structure to an HTTP request, containing a “status line”, response header fields, and an optional body. The status line contains an indicating the success, failure, or error-state of the request along with a “reason message” that provides detail. HTTP status code Once the response is generated, the server responds to the request. At the TCP layer, the client receives the first data packet, the first byte of which should contain the HTTP response header. More packets start coming in, and at the TCP layer they are re-ordered as needed. For every two packets that the client receives at the TCP layer, it sends an message to the server. This goes on until the response is (hopefully) fully loaded. ACK Step 5: Tearing Down and Cleaning Up We’re almost there! Once the response has been fully delivered, the client sends a packet at the TCP level, to which the server responds with an , and then generally sends a of its own, which the client responds to with its own signal. The client then waits for a brief timeout, during which it cannot accept new connections, to prevent delayed packets from previous connections arriving during subsequent activities on the port. This signals the end of the TCP connection. FIN ACK FIN ACK four way handshake ¹² At this point, your browser begins processing what it has received. If it is an image, data, or other media file that is being consumed by some application inside the browser, a variety of things can happen. If the data received is HTML, the browser will start parsing the HTML, and rendering the page you requested. As it parses, the browser may come across links to images or other media that are external to the HTML it has received, and will spin up new requests for that content, restarting this whole process (although usually skipping steps 1 & 2 thanks to caching). But, given that we were only interested in the lifecycle of an individual request: our (application’s) work is done, congratulations! All of the above is, again, only a description of a simple HTTP transaction, not a persistent transaction, which would maintain the same connection for multiple requests, but that model doesn’t differ heavily outside of behavior that occurs once the TCP connection is open and the first control packets are exchanged. It also doesn’t cover parallel HTTP transactions, which spin up additional connections for subsequent requests once the first request’s connection is established, but again, the lifecycle doesn’t change much. Primarily, these other approaches help mitigate something you probably noticed as you were reading: the handshaking spin-up and tear-down procedures of a single TCP connection can be very time consuming, and developers have the ability to avoid re-performing them or performing them consecutively. Well, that is it, that is the multi-layer lifecycle of a single HTTP request! Thanks for reading, please let me know what you think, and if you feel that any corrections are needed please reach out! Originally published at dev.to . List of sources can be found at the end of the original post .

First Data

Things I Brushed Up On This Week: The HTTP Request Lifecycle

Coinbase

The ICO Handbook

Thousands of things we call innovations are actually more like transplants. In Jared Dimond makes an excellent case that most radical changes in society come from ‘solutions in search of problems.’ Abraham Flexner, in , makes a similar point: many great inventions were founded on pre-existing knowledge that some scientist discovered to satisfy curiosity. Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge How often have you thought of an excellent idea, only to realize that you are in no position to carry it out? This happens commonly for me, not just when I have ideas, but when others pitch them to me. My response, is ‘sounds like a good idea, but not for me.’ The research institutions of the world are all busily amassing a pool of knowledge, often without any particular application in mind. Yes, of course some research is targeted, but less than we all would like to believe. The truth is that academic research lives disconnected from practicality. While many researchers are also teachers, unfortunately their interests are often too narrow or advanced to spill into teaching. In addition, researchers are often not as motivated to teach as they are to research. Frequently, in conversation, I realize how much knowledge I have about my area of expertise that others don’t. Conversely, I often realize how uninformed I am about many, many things outside of my expertise. Most knowledge has a diffusion problem. You may think the internet has made this better, but it’s not true. The internet has increased access, so knowledge is now reachable, but it has also flooded all of us with so many new avenues to pursue that we can’t keep up. Our brains have insufficient parking to absorb the output of the information superhighway. All of this points to two major possibilities for innovation: Curation Dissemination Curation In order for society to advance at a rapid pace, we can’t waste time with unimportant knowledge. Knowing which celebrity married and divorced which other celebrity just doesn’t help very much. We need to remove the noise, and leave the important stuff. News aggregation websites are excellent , because they effortlessly sort news, but they often fall victim to the voting biases of the community. Hacker News is one of the best in the category, but it is perhaps a bit too narrowly focused. tools Magazines are the other end of the spectrum: carefully selected articles of high quality. is the shining example here, in my opinion. But, like Hacker News, it requires very sophisticated readers, and there is a huge amount to digest. Reading every issue of cover to cover is a part-time job. (I know, I did it for a while.) The Economist The Economist There is a solution out there, waiting to be had, and perhaps machine learning holds the key. The best fix is one that can handle a large quantity of content, and select the stuff that has the highest potential to be new, interesting, and useful to the highest number of readers. I have no idea what training data might allow for tuning an algorithm, but the goal is clear: select content which leads to the generation of new solutions (as opposed to the content with the highest consumption value.) Dissemination recently ran an . The idea was that academics write novel programs that solve difficult problems, but they don’t make it easily accessible to practitioners. Some firms have started making a business of translating this ‘spaghetti code’ into more industry friendly code. The Economist interesting story about spaghetti code There is no reason one can’t mine this principle for new businesses. Stackoverflow has a large source of problems and solutions. It would be straightforward to find things with a high degree of value but a low degree of user-friendliness, and turn them into products. Amazon has a habit of taking tools it uses for operations and spinning them off into market-facing products. Academics publish new, amazing findings every day, and there is a vast opportunity to translate the jargon into simpler language for a popular audience. For useful new ideas to blossom into real solutions, the right knowledge needs to make it into the hands of those with the right skills. Without this, new information is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest that nobody sees. For some reason, disseminating information isn’t as sexy as creating it. But it is desperately needed. If you are thinking of starting a , perhaps consider that you don’t need to create something the world has never heard of. You can provide massive value just by showing people what already exists. startup

Diffusion Matters

Studies by Oxford University suggest and will replace 47% of knowledge worker jobs over the next two decades. So if you are not planning on retiring in the next ten to twenty years, and let’s face it with average lifespan on the up and pension pots on the down many of us may never “retire” in the future. robotics automation In fact, at TomorrowToday we actually predict that by 2030 retirement as we know it will have disappeared, at least the concept as we know it will have been replaced with something else. Either way the impact on automation will be felt by most of us. So we have to ask ourselves the question: What can humans do that computers, AI and smart-machines can not do, well at least into the foreseeable future? The answer lies within six uniquely human values. The to care about things that are wrong and have the passion and energy to seek something better. Empathy The to explore and go where others have never been. Curiosity The to find exciting and new solutions. Creativity The to know when you have it wrong and the ability to the follow your gut instinct experimenting with new route. Intuition The ability to others to join you on your crazy impossible and meaningful adventure. Inspire The ability to with people and machines flexibility and in large numbers. Collaborate These are the six values every leader and person will need to harness to future proof themselves from robotic replacement. Take an enthusiastic scuba diver who while diving in the Med noticed that there were more plastic shopping bags floating below the surface than jelly fish. Now if Boyan were a robo-scuba diver he may well have noticed and identified the shopping bags, but robo-boyan wouldn’t have cared. Boyan-the-human on the other hand became deeply concerned. Boyan Slat He cared about the marine life and the lives of humans who depend on our oceans and his drove him to start . empathy The Ocean Cleanup His led him to discover that there are 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently littering our Ocean, almost 25 billion tons. This trash accumulates in 5 ocean garbage patches, the largest being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, which is now the size of France or Texas. There are sections so thick and clogged up with plastic that ships can not sail through. curiosity His led him to invent a , a floating barrier that captures plastic without harming marine life. His helped him to understand that “If you try to fight the ocean, you will lose.” so the Ocean Cleanup Array was designed to be as flexible as possible. allowing it to move along with the waves, “which is key in ensuring the structure will be able to survive the most extreme conditions,” says Boyan. creativity V-shaped array intuition His TED talk has millions of people to back his initiative and recognising that cleaning the oceans isn’t easy, Boyan has been carefully and working together with world-renown offshore companies and institutes. inspired collaborating As Economist Andrew McAfee suggests “There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I’m going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.” Well put, and as Boyan Slat’s story shows until then enjoy a human world augmented and made better by machines because of what makes us uniquely human, these six traits. Want to learn more? Achieve Remarkable Things http://bit.ly/achieveremarkablethings Dean van Leeuwen: http://bit.ly/powerofquest is on a quest to inspire half-a-billion He is an , and expert on leadership, future trends and competitive advantage. He is a faculty member of CEDEP — The European Centre for Executive Development located on the INSEAD campus near Paris and is a visiting fellow at the Oxford and Henley Business Schools. As a successful entrepreneur he co-founded , a consultancy that helps leaders to navigate turbulent times. His book , is available from Amazon in print and kindle. Dean questers author TEDx speaker TomorrowToday Global Quest: Competitive Advantage and the Art of Leadership in the 21st Century You can book Dean to by contacting speak at your next event dean@tomorrowtodayglobal.com

The Ocean Cleanup

These are the 6 things computers, AI and smart-machines cannot do, but humans can.

Sign up for Hack Upstate XII — October 6th and 7th — Syracuse, NY When you think of Upstate NY, what comes to mind? The rolling hills? The beautiful landscapes? When I think of Upstate NY, I think of a sleeping STEM giant with tremendous potential that’s yet to be realized. Upstate NY has some of the absolute best universities in the world when it comes to producing STEM talent. Cornell, Clarkson, RIT, RPI, Syracuse, etc. The list goes on and on. In fact, on Forbes recent , Upstate NY universities made up 14.28% of them — by far the strongest representation of any region in the country. Top 21 STEM Colleges of 2016 However, Upstate has two HUGE problems when it comes to STEM: Our talent churn rate is incredibly high. We educate the best and brightest, then they leave and work elsewhere. There’s very little cross-collaboration between the regional communities (e.g., Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and the Capital Region). That’s why I decided to start 4.5 years ago. Hack Upstate What is Hack Upstate Hack Upstate’s mission is to unite and facilitate collaboration among the greater Upstate NY technology community. In pursuit, we organize , offer web and mobile development classes, facilitate talks and lectures, and ultimately help align Upstate STEM talent with promising employment opportunities. hackathons To date, we’ve built a growing network comprised of thousands of Upstate NY engineers and facilitated dozens of job placements. From this experience, here’s what I’ve learned from building a tech community in Upstate NY. Establish a clear mission and vision It was critical for us to have a clear mission and vision right from the start. Our underlying mission — to advance Upstate NY’s technology community — acts as our community’s compass. It determines the direction we take and puts our future into focus. At the end of the day, building a tech community takes time. It isn’t done with ad hoc tactics and ephemeral campaigns. It requires a strategy and the time necessary to successfully execute against it. Identify strategic partners Strategic partners have been instrumental to Hack Upstate. Early on we identified organizations like and the who were also invested in our mission and had the capacity to support us long-term. To get them onboard early — before we had any momentum or credibility — it was important for us to identify ways we could provide them additional value that was inline with fostering an Upstate NY STEM community. For instance, Hack Upstate is a small organization. We’re nimble, fast and flexible. We can execute upon certain initiatives much more quickly and cost effectively than a larger organization can. Highlighting these additional value propositions helped us get buy-in early when we still had much to prove. The Tech Garden Syracuse iSchool Don’t be afraid to ask for help Building a meaningful and sustainable tech community isn’t easy. Over the last 4.5 years I’ve come to rely on help from so many others. At first I was reluctant to ask for help. I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. However, over time it became evident that for Hack Upstate to evolve into something meaningful it would require support from others. I needed to find individuals whose strengths complemented my weaknesses. Fortunately for me, given our mission and vision, so many awesome people joined the effort. Over the last 4.5 years countless individuals have taken on roles that have been absolutely paramount to the community’s success. They’ve gone above and beyond. It’s been a thrill to see. *Always* put the community first With Hack Upstate we put the community first. When it comes to decision making, we ask ourselves, Using this model has had a profound impact. First, it’s instilled a sound decision making process and made things far less complicated. Second, it’s helped establish trust among community members, and fostered an environment where feedback is welcomed and encouraged. Third, it’s given us leverage to do bigger and better things, and to make a lasting impact. *always* “Is this in the best interest of the community?” Empower community leaders and self-starters Over the years we’ve been fortunate to have a core group of passionate leaders and self-starters involved with Hack Upstate that go above and beyond to help further the community. Consequently, we do everything we can to empower them. This harkens back to the notion of not being afraid to ask for help. We provide our most passionate community members with the tools and information they need to lead and take action…then we get out of their way. Instead of trying to manage them, we simply let the underlying Hack Upstate mission act as their compass. Create a friendly, welcoming, and inclusive atmosphere It’s always been a priority of ours to ensure Hack Upstate be inclusive and welcoming to those of different backgrounds, experiences and ways of life. We try to alleviate any friction that would prevent someone from taking part. For instance, we often receive questions along the lines of, The answer of course is “ ”. We welcome and encourage anyone, regardless of background or skillset, to join the fun. We also have a in place that’s open source and managed by the community. Our intent with the Code of Conduct is to ensure we foster an open, friendly and welcoming community where Upstate NY’s STEM community can thrive. “Do I need to be a developer to participate?” no Code of Conduct Organize events that are repeatable and easily anticipated From the very start of Hack Upstate we had long-term objectives in mind. We sought to build a deep-rooted STEM community that would be sustainable long-term. To do this we made a conscious decision early on to organize events that were repeatable and that the community could easily anticipate and predict. Specifically, we began hosting every fall and spring to coincide with the academic calendar. In doing so, our predictable hackathon schedule stayed on people’s radars. Prospective participants always knew when the next hackathon would be, and thus, could plan accordingly. hackathons Lead through action There are plenty of resources out there that discuss leadership and what it takes to be a successful leader. For me personally, I’ve learned the most about leadership from the wonderful leaders in my life. Whether they be family, friends, teachers, coaches, advisors, etc., the best of the best all led through action. Leading through action transcends boundaries of age, experience and seniority. It creates a level playing field where culture and standards are molded by what you do, not what you say. With Hack Upstate I’ve tried to do the same. Whether it’s taking out garbage, cleaning up workspaces or running out to grab food that accommodates an individual’s unique dietary restrictions, I’ve always tried to lead by doing. The last 4.5 years have been incredibly rewarding. I’ve met thousands of people and have been fortunate to collaborate with some of the best and brightest the STEM field has to offer. I can’t wait to see where our community will be in ten years from now, but for now I’ll continue to enjoy the journey. Doug Crescenzi is the founder of Hack Upstate and a partner at Upstate Interactive , a digital consultancy that combines product development with digital marketing. Interested in sponsoring Hack Upstate? Enjoyed this? You may enjoy these articles, too!

Lessons learned from building a tech community in Upstate NY

Custom UIColors Swift Back in Swift 2, or even earlier, UIColors were class functions, called via , , etc. UIColor.blackColor() UIColor.redColor() Naturally, creating a custom colour would look something like extension UIColor { class func facebookBlue() -> UIColor { return UIColor(red: 59/255, green: 89/255, blue: 152/255, alpha: 1) } and would be called via . UIColor.facebookBlue() In Swift 3, default were modified to be class properties, called via (or, if the type is already determined, simply ) UIColors UIColor.blue .blue I’ve noticed a lot of people (myself included) are still creating custom the pre-Swift 3 way. But I ask, why would you, when you can write them like so: UIColors extension UIColor { class var facebookBlue: UIColor { return UIColor(red: 59/255, green: 89/255, blue: 152/255, alpha: 1) } called via or where appropriate. UIColor.facebookBlue .facebookBlue So much better right? : the keyword means that the method/property is called upon the class, not an object of the class. This is very similar to , which may sound more familiar if you’ve used C++ or Java before. For the more curious class static is in fact also available in Swift and can be used in place of , so I was interested to determine the differences. If you use , the method/property can be overridden in a subclass, while cannot. static class class static This is a pretty minute detail in this case of creating custom , but a little more knowledge never hurt! UIColors While we’re inside a extension… Here’s a I like to use to simplify custom For people who are still reading: UIColor convenience init UIColor initialization convenience init(r: CGFloat, g: CGFloat, b: CGFloat, a: CGFloat {return UIColor(red: r/255, green: g/255, blue: b/255, alpha: a)} //called via class var facebookBlue: UIColor {return UIColor(r: 59, g: 89, b: 152, a: 1)} Hoped you enjoyed!

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive July 25th, 2017

@trentlapinskiTrent Lapinski

@yonatanzungerYonatan Zunger

@theroccobRocco Balsamo

@jordangonenjordangonen

@giannBenoit Giannangeli

@radiegtyaEga Wachid Radiegtya

@samanthalee1440Samantha Hager

@insideNiMANiMA asghari

@buckaroo.pmBuckaroo - C/C++ Package Manager

@manasduttManas Dutt

@pagalvinPaul Galvin

@almaxunoalmaxuno

@VladimirPoloVladimir Polo 🍀

@tomacTomas C.

@theburningmonkYan Cui

@abyshakeAbhishek Anand

@mubashariqbalMubashar Iqbal

@jernejJernej Adamic

@yasmeenturayhiYasmeen Turayhi

@mark.winterMark Winter

@poornimaPoornima Vijayashanker

@theroccobRocco Balsamo

@dangolantDan Golant

@pullnewsDavid Siegel

@j_jason_bellJason Bell

@deanvanleeuwenDean Van Leeuwen

@hackupstateHack Upstate

@HaydenHolliganHayden Holligan

@trentlapinski
Trent Lapinski

@yonatanzunger
Yonatan Zunger

@theroccob
Rocco Balsamo

@jordangonen
jordangonen

@giann
Benoit Giannangeli

@radiegtya
Ega Wachid Radiegtya

@samanthalee1440
Samantha Hager

@insideNiMA
NiMA asghari

@buckaroo.pm
Buckaroo - C/C++ Package Manager

@manasdutt
Manas Dutt

@pagalvin
Paul Galvin

@almaxuno
almaxuno

@VladimirPolo
Vladimir Polo 🍀

@tomac
Tomas C.

@theburningmonk
Yan Cui

@abyshake
Abhishek Anand

@mubashariqbal
Mubashar Iqbal

@jernej
Jernej Adamic

@yasmeenturayhi
Yasmeen Turayhi

@mark.winter
Mark Winter

@poornima
Poornima Vijayashanker

@theroccob
Rocco Balsamo

@dangolant
Dan Golant

@pullnews
David Siegel

@j_jason_bell
Jason Bell

@deanvanleeuwen
Dean Van Leeuwen

@hackupstate
Hack Upstate

@HaydenHolligan
Hayden Holligan