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Greetings, dear readers! In this article, I’m going to share how I counted drops. Yes, you read that right. DROPS It all began when our team started studying machine learning, or to be more precise, we studied Python and OpenCV. During the practice task, I had a chance to implement the algorithm that would count the falling drops in the given video or in real time. And now I’ll tell you how it all went. Here it goes! First of all, to count the drops, you need to have them coming from somewhere. For this, our team consisting of the customer care manager and architect provided me with videos I could start working with. At the next step, it was necessary to think over the means by which it would be possible to implement the necessary algorithm for us. There wasn’t much choice and it fell on OpenCV, namely, the section , subsection Video Analysis Optical Flow. To implement the drops counting algorithm I used Dense Optical Flow, found the shift between the previous and next shots and… that’s it. What to do with this offset, how to process it was not quite clear. Actually, to catch a moving object in the video, you have to leave this single object on all the shots, that is, you need to remove the background, foreign objects, etc. Dense Optical Flow did all that perfectly well, but I could not decide what to do with the final result. But you can never be satisfied with what has already been achieved, especially when your achievement doesn’t solve anything. Excellent. Let’s work on. Recalling that during our machine learning classes we did a lot of image processing, I decided to start working on images specifically. You all know very well that a video is a number of shots, which are images themselves. Then we go to the section and start processing our personnel. Image Processing in OpenCV We can read cap = cv.VideoCapture("videoFiles/drop8.mov") or we can use the camera of our device cap = cv.VideoCapture(0) . Then, I take the first shot and convert it to grayscale. Next, I run through all the shots of the video while it plays and every next shot converts to grayscale: cap = cv.VideoCapture("videoFiles/drop8.mov") ret, frame1 = cap.read() gray1 = cv.cvtColor(frame1, cv.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) tmp_count = 0 prev_has_col = False while cap.isOpened: gray2 = gray1 ret, frame2 = cap.read()     if ret:     gray1 = cv.cvtColor(frame2, cv.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) You can then find the difference between the two shots and start processing the image obtained: difImage = cv.absdiff(gray1, gray2) I applied the median blur to the difference between shots to cut off the background. That is to say, to single out a moving object among others: difImage = cv.absdiff(gray1, gray2) blur = cv.medianBlur(difImage, 15) Further, for the obtained and processed difference, I can find a “column” (stretched drop) and every time I find a “column”, I increase the counter by one: d = blur.sum(axis=0) has_col = np.max(d) > np.median(d) + 1000 if has_col & ~prev_has_col: tmp_cout += 1 prev_has_col = has_col To demonstrate that the drop has been actually detected and counted, I have added contours around the drop and the counter of the drops: blur_contours = cv.blur(difImage, (31, 31)) res, treshold = cv.threshold(blur_contours, 10, 255, cv.THRESH_BINARY) _, cnts, _ = cv.findContours(treshold.copy(), cv.RETR_EXTERNAL, cv.CHAIN_APPROX_SIMPLE) frame = searchForMovement(cnts, frame2, 100) cv.putText(frame, str(tmp_count), (50, frame_height - 50), cv.FONT_HERSHEY_COMPLEX, 1.8, (0, 0, 255)) The final result can be viewed in the video below: At the moment, the algorithm works with conditions close to ideal. Further on, the background should be more or less homogeneous, the source of the drops and the camera should be static. In the future, the algorithm will be improved and can be applied in various household and industrial environments. Also, I plan to develop a simple mobile application using this algorithm, which you can learn about in the following article. Thank you for your attention! Originally published at issart.com on November 19, 2018.

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Drops Counting

How college makes students reconsider their love of programming I’ve heard this phrase too many times since coming into college, and I can’t help but feel as though there is a great deal of stigma towards people trying to discover their passion. I am currently in my first semester as a college freshman at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, and I am an Asian person studying computer science. I enjoy attending hackathons — not for the Soylent, not for the free food, but simply to learn. My computer desktop is littered with cloned GitHub repositories, and my CPU constantly jacked by unclosed Terminal windows, Sublime Text files, and StackOverFlow tabs. My laptop case is plastered by stickers, all of which I have acquired from hackathons. The classic, bon fide textbook example of computer science student. Or, as non-STEM majors might think, “Ew, what a nerrrrrrrd.” But there is more to me than just a Silicon Valley student. I care deeply badminton, I enjoy traveling, and I enjoy photography. I’m somewhat up to date with fashion trends, and spend considerable amounts of time salivating over the newest food craze. I might prefer to spend nights out, enjoying my time with my friends, but also appreciate a night in, just having time to myself or to work on that one project I’ve been meaning to complete. Photo by ESB Professional on Shutterstock photo by Stocksy by Lumin That’s why when people look at me and immediately make assumptions — whether it be about my lifestyle, or my behavioral tendencies — it makes me wonder. What if my lifestyle is not cut out for computer science? For people who have known or followed me, they know that I do, in fact, very much enjoy . Quite often, I sum up the past two years in two words: programming and hackathons. Looking back on those years, many of the moments that are most prevalent primarily relate to the before mentioned words: watching my very own rise from the ground and become internationally involved, attending roughly many hackathons with one of my now most-valued friends, and learning to tune into my inner thoughts, here on Medium. programming hackathon For yourself, as for many others, your experiences may be similar. Life might revolve around programming, but after reaching a certain point, I’ve found that many people reach a period of uncertainty. While this crisis exists for people of all different crafts, I’ve found it particularly bad for people like me, who’ve devoted a large part of time to their craft and have experience in their chosen fields. For them, they’ve already reached an equivalent of a pre-midlife crisis. And yet, while these “advanced” students struggle with these newfound thoughts, their lives are suddenly interrupted by the changes in lifestyle that college brings. New responsibilities are suddenly revealed, eating away the time that they used to spend pursuing their craft. FOMO, or fear of missing out creeps up, and suddenly, taking a nap post-hangout seems more enticing than spending more time pursuing their passion. me.irl — photo by SimpleProgrammer Life, in which each day used to be filled with new expectations, begins to feel monotonous. The fiery passion that used to make life exciting, has dulled into nothing but ashes, untouched and undisturbed. For myself, perhaps my old lifestyle may have fit society’s image of a programmer better than I do now. But now, I’ve found more sources of enjoyment in life, other than the addictive satisfaction that comes from programming. Is this wrong? . There may not be a singular, concrete answer to this question. I have many interests, many unfinished tasks that have yet to be checked off my bucket list. But, I feel that upon entering college, something about my perspective has changed. I am no longer the person I used to be, and whether this has made me a well-rounded person or not, I’ll leave it to nobody but myself to judge. I don’t know However, I know that when I voice my opinions about my uncertainty or difficulties related to classes in my major, I often get varying reactions. Some are indifferent, but others, who only see me as a programmer, are confused. “Aren’t you a programmer? Don’t you know all this already?” I’m often taken aback by these comments. Am I expected to breeze through everything related to computer science, just because I have some previous experience with programming? I can’t help but look around and see other people, without an “experienced” background, appearing to complete tasks without difficulty. As a result, imposter syndrome is quick to appear, breeding uncertainty and leading to frequent thoughts of switching majors. Many enter college with little to no previous experience in their major, and some choose simply because of job prospects or because “it sounded cool.” Because of the spontaneity associated with this decision, the practice of switching majors once, or even twice, is not unheard of. However, among the plethora of confusion, because I’ve invested my past two years in programming, I oftentimes feel as if the option of switching majors is unheard of. photo by h3x0m4nia on devRant But no, given the choice, I would not want to switch majors. For me, the process of learning itself is like a puzzle in itself, and I feel that you’re only learning if you do come across these roadblocks. Whether it’s from smashing my keyboard wondering why pip won’t install properly, or realizing that I completely messed up an implementation, the rush of dopamine when finding the solution is greater than anything else that I know. My specific case, while not applicable to many people, causes me to gaze upon the expectations that are placed among programmers sourly. While many may easily fit society’s mold of the image of a programmer, I find that for those who share other interests, and those who are still finding themselves, it is important to know that just because we may not fit society’s mold doesn’t mean that we are any less than those who do. “Just because I am a programmer, it does not mean I can fix your computer.” But while we may not be able to fix your keyboards , with some struggle, anything is possible. And precisely because I encounter resistance while learning in my preferred area of study, I am more than content to know that I am a better version of myself than I was yesterday. at the moment So, a word to the people who make said assumptions: keep your expectations to yourself. Live your own life, and I’ll live mine. Whether I spend it geeking out or exploring the world, I know that I’ll be living my best life, as you should with yours.

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“But It’s Your Major.” So what?

One of the questions my readers often ask me is, Why should Java developers learn Scala,” and so on? “Should Java developers learn Scala ? Does Scala have a better future than Java ? Well, there can be many reasons for learning Scala, like you are forced to learn it because it has been used in the new company you have just joined, or your solution architect decided to use it for the new project you are going to work, but that’s a different story. Here, we’ll talk about the that encourages Java developers to learn Scala. reasons Scala has emerged as one the most powerful Java alternatives in recent times. It’s been the of choice, leaving and way behind, and is preferred as the language people want to write the most code in. JVM language Groovy Kotlin Scala has many strong points, the strongest being that it’s a . multi-paradigm language Along with the superiority of functional programming idioms available to take advantage of multi-core CPU architectures, Scala has the right mix of popular paradigm. object-oriented It not only solves many of Java’s issues, e.g. less to no boilerplate, but it also provides several best practices and patterns right in the language, e.g. immutability with the keyword and case classes. val Despite providing the fluency and flexibility of dynamic languages like , it’s still a strongly statically typed language to prevent you from doing bad things, which just happen at runtime in dynamic languages. Python I am sure Scala developers will add many more reasons into this list, but being from a Java background and ardent supporter of Java, I think Scala definitely has something to offer, and the following reasons make a lot of sense for to learn Scala. Java developers Without any further ado, here is my list of 10 reasons why a programmer should learn Scala: 1. Multi-Paradigm Language Scala is a bit different than Java, as it supports two programming paradigms: object-oriented programming ( ) and functional programming ( ). OOP FP To advance your programming skills, it’s good to learn at least one language from different paradigms, e.g. imperative, logical, functional, and OOP, and Scala gives you a chance to explore both functional and OOP together. The book also advises you to learn a new programming language every year. Pragmatic Programmer The Pragmatic book for Programmers Scala allows you to define types associated with both data attributes (with classes behaving like / classes) and behavior attributes (with traits corresponding to Java interfaces). C++ Java Just like in other functional programming languages, In Scala, (which means you can pass them around as values) and Scala also supports anonymous functions and currying (partial application of multi-argument functions). functions are first-class citizens This combination of features makes it possible to write Scala programs that are quite concise and elegant. Being multi-paradigm is one of the strongest selling points of Scala, which Java 8 has also attempted by introducing lambda expressions (see ), but it is still a couple of steps behind. I think, Scala will always be more functional than Java, but that’s topic of another debate. Java SE 8 New Features 2. Interoperability With Java In my opinion, Scala’s choice of being inter-operable with Java is the best thing happen to Scala. runs on the Java Virtual Machine ( ) and can interoperate nicely with Java code. Scala JVM This also means Scala developers can use Java libraries directly from Scala code. Given, many Java developers are turning to Scala, this is the perfect way of leveraging their years of experience in real-world Java programming. It is also possible to call Scala code from Java, and you can easily write part of your program in Scala and the rest in Java. In short, interoperability with gives Scala huge potential to become mainstream, enterprise programming language, as so much of the world’s code is written in Java and so many developers are working in Java around the world. Java 3. Best Practices and Patterns Built-In Language One thing you might not know about Scala is that it was originally developed at the Swiss university EPFL in an attempt to apply recent innovations in programming language research to a language that can gain mainstream traction, much like Java. Several best practices and patterns are built into the language itself, e.g. val declares top-level , which is much better than the overloaded keyword in Java, or const/read-only in C# with the weird rules associated with it. immutability final It also got , which makes it easy to create immutable Classes in Scala. case classes Scala also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like and have adopted from the functional programming paradigm. Python Ruby 4. Expressiveness When you compare Scala with Java as I did in my previous post about the , Scala certainly scores big over Java. differences between Scala and Java Scala is inherently very expressive. There’s also tons and tons of really beautiful and useful code written in Scala. This is attracting more and more Java developers to learn Scala, who like to write beautiful and . clean code To give you an idea, here is the written in both Java and Scala, you can see the difference in the expressiveness of language by yourself. word count program Scala has achieved in just one line what Java has taken more than 10 lines to achieve. Scala code is more clear and concise By the way, things can be improved on the Java side by using like and , which is not used in this example, but still, Scala scores big over Java when it comes to concise and clean code. Java 8 features lambdas stream 5. Marketable What programmer doesn’t want to be marketable? One reason for learning a or framework is always a better job and career growth. new technology Learning Scala will certainly make you more marketable. Many companies are using or migrating to Scala these days, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Quora. Given Scala’s marketing as Scalable language, the days are not far when the big investment banks and financial organizations will start looking Scala for their low-latency solutions. Similar to the advice given in Twitter has already shared best practices to develop programs in Scala as Effective Scala. Effective Java , The founders of Quora spent a couple of months building a in order to use Scala. Scala web framework , the man behind Scala, is now behind the start-up , formally known as Typesafe for supporting commercial Scala development. Martin Odersky Lightbend Everything is going in the right direction for Scala to grow as the prime alternative to Java. 6. Statically Typed In general, a statically typed language like Java prevents programmers from doing bad things, while, with a dynamic language like , you only know about a bad thing when you run the program. Python Scala has the best of both worlds. It feels dynamic, but it’s strongly statically typed. The Scala compiler is really smart and uses type-inference to its fullest extent. Scala provides type inference for variables and functions, much better than the limited type inference in and . Java C# 7. Growing Frameworks One thing you might know about the ecosystem is that Scala is growing. There are lots of good libraries and frameworks coming around. Companies that have started using Scala are also contributing to the recent growth of Scala as a mainstream language. There are some nice Scala web frameworks out there, including Lift and Play. Akka, another Scala-based concurrent framework has already established itself as toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM. Scala is also been used in along with , which has further fuelled its adoption by many Java developers interested in Big Data. Big Data space Apache Spark Btw, If you are interested in Spark, then you can also take a look at the course on Udemy. Learn Apache Spark from Scratch 8. Growing Community Along with the language and associated frameworks, the Scala community is also growing. Lots of programmers, including , are joining the Scala bandwagon. Java developers More and more IDEs have started to support Scala syntax, and there’s much better support in and . There’s also great build tool support in SBT, Maven, and Ant. Eclipse IntelliJ In recent surveys, Scala has also been touted as the number one alternative to Java. In my opinion, to grow Scala as the real alternative of Java, given also has support, it has to attract more and more Java developers. Java 8 functional programming Getting big organizations like Twitter to adopt Scala certainly helps the community, as they have more resources and influence. 9. Concise Syntax Java has long been criticized for his verbose and boilerplate-heavy syntax. Though it makes Java more readable, much like English, Scala has set a new benchmark in being concise and readable at the same time. The Scala compiler, known as scalac (remember ) does more than you expect. It can generate , , and other things for you. Consider two code snippets of the same class written in Java and Scala to help you make your choice: javac toString() equals() hasCode() public class Book {
private final String name;
private final double price;

public Star(String name, double price) {
this.name = name;
this.price = price;
}

@Override
public int hashCode() {
int hash = 7;
hash = 23 * hash + Objects.hashCode(this.name);
return hash;
}

@Override
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
if (obj == null) {
return false;
}

if (getClass() != obj.getClass()) {
return false;
}

final Test other = (Test) obj;

if (!Objects.equals(this.name, other.name)) {
   return false;
}

if (Double.doubleToLongBits(this.price) != Double.doubleToLongBits(other.price)) {
  return false;
}
return true;
}

@Override
public String toString() {
 return "Test{" + "name=" + name + ", price=" + price + '}';
}

} You can write the same thing, using Scala’s case class: case class Book(name: String, price: double) By the way, you can also use the Lombok library, one of the , to remove the boilerplate code related to getters, setters, equals, hashCode, and toString. It can automatically generate those for you. essential libraries for Java developers 10. Easier to Learn compared to Haskell, other Functional Programming languages For a Java developer, learning a classical functional programming language like Haskell or OCaml is rather more difficult than Scala. In other words, Scala is relatively easy to learn because of its OOP functionality. While taking their time to learn functional programming, Java developers can still be productive in Scala by leveraging their existing knowledge of . Like , Scala has clean syntax, nice libraries, good online documentation, and lots of people in the industry using it. OOP Java With a growing community of Scala on forums, it’s not difficult to find an answer to any Scala questions, which adds to your learning experience. Conclusion Once you start learning Scala, I am sure you will LOVE IT. It’s not only got a cleaner OO code but also functional capabilities, it feels dynamic (like Python) but it also has a static type system that can prevent you from doing bad things. If you decide to learn Scala in 2018 or 2019, here are some useful resources for further learning. Beginning Scala Programming Scala: Getting Started By Justin Pihony Scala for Java Developers By Toby Weston Scala for the Impatient Functional Programming in Scala All the best with your journey into the beautiful world of Scala and functional programming. If you have any questions or feedback, please drop a note. If you like this article, then please share with your friends and colleagues, and don’t forget to follow javinpaul on Twitter and in Medium! javinpaul P.S. — If you need some FREE resources, you can check out For Beginner — A #FREE Course to start your Scala journey. Scala Programming Mini Boot camp Scala - Hacker Noon

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10 Reasons to Learn Scala and Functional Programming

Why we use unmock for our full stack Let’s face it, mocking sucks. Every programming language and platform has different tools to help you mock API calls, but all of them share some common fragilities: No clean way to verify if the mocks are correct representations of the API. No way to avoid reverse engineering the API you’re mocking. No way to quickly mock internal APIs. No way to monitor in production if the mocks from your tests resemble the data that you’re getting back in the wild. As a result, teams lose tons of time and energy writing mocks for their unit and integration tests, which leads to buggy tests, less test coverage, and ultimately a less reliable production environment. unmock Enter . Unmock is great because it basically takes care of all of this stuff for you. There is a good YouTube overview of the service (currently in closed beta), but I thought I’d walk you through how unmock speeds our team up at Meeshkan. unmock

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A couple of years ago (probably five to six years) I was reading an article and came across an image. The image was very interesting and caught my attention immediately. It was an original picture of group of people who were waiting in a queue to get to the sales counter. They had self organised themselves in a such way so that the the sales counter was visible each and every person in the group. I have made rough sketch of the original image(top view). I am bad at creative pursuits, so bear with me and here is the image. I have sketched the table and chair near the counter, people standing in queue near the sales counter. Circle represent the head of the person standing and the shape around circle represents shoulders as visible from the top view. If you were able figure these out from the image on your own, either you are very smart or I am getting better at sketching :P Back to our interesting article. The article that I had read was about how crowds can self organise themselves for the optimum outcome when there is minimum trust between the participating individuals. Though I was aware of the concept, the image put many things in perspective. It was a simple and concise illustration of the concept. Both the image and the concept stuck in my mind. After a couple of months I was trying to explain this concept to a friend and tried searching for the image and article. I was not able to find it. I tried my chrome history, google search, google image reverse search et al but without any luck. I think five to six years must have passed since that day. Yesterday I had to give the same reference to somebody in my office when explaining the product that we are working on ( ). I tried searching for it again hoping that search and algorithms have improved and hence I might get lucky. But Alas, no luck again. Learning Paths So I thought of crowdsourcing the Image Search. Hence this post. I think I have given enough details so that anybody interested can join me in my search. It would be awesome if we can find out that article and the image. If you think you can add any details/insights that can help me find the image, do leave a comment. If you have made it till here and think it is worth finding out about the image but do-not have any insights, do clap and share the post, so that more people can join our search. The maximum you can clap is 50 times. Just click and drag for clapping multiple times. The should make sure that I and you don’t miss such important insights but that is the material for another blog :) Note : product that we are building

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Crowdsourcing The Image Search

What most of you might know is that the Google Search that you currently know and use began as a Master’s thesis that Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on back in 1996, that revolutionized the way people looked at search engines. However, what most do not know is that their initial idea was not to rank websites, rather to rank annotations on websites. “ One idea Page presented to Winograd, a collaboration with Brin, seemed more promising than the others: creating a system where people could make annotations and comments on websites. But the more Page thought about annotation, the messier it got. How would you figure out who gets to comment or whose comment would be the one you’d see first? For that, he says, “We needed a rating system.” Having a human being determine the ratings was out of the question. First, it was inherently impractical. Further, humans were unreliable. Only algorithms — well drawn, efficiently executed, and based on sound data — could deliver unbiased results. Page realized that such data already existed and no one else was really using it. He asked Brin, “Why don’t we use the links on the web to do that?” — In The Plex by Steven Levy Note: All the following quotes, unless otherwise mentioned, are also from ‘In The Plex’. And that’s how the was born! mispronounced name of Googol They worked on this idea for a year before giving it a name , in a way that every web page was given a ‘rank’. Brin, acting as the mathematical counterpart, produced the data mining system that scans web pages, and Page produced the algorithm that uses that information to rank the pages ( and not a web “page”, a slight but much deserved vanity). The original search engine wouldn’t have worked had either one of those components been missing. “BackRub”, a search engine that took advantage of the links that was incoming to a website named PageRank — the “Page” coming from his name And now, almost 20 years later, Google still uses PageRank as one of its . Some of the other ones being 200 components across which it evaluates a web page to give it a score keyword usage, domain age, domain history, country TLD extension, TF-IDF and so on. How Google Went From The Picture On Left To The Picture On Right Evolution of Google from 1998 to 2018 Below is the timeline of how Google went from a search engine with 25 million pages that lists the top 10 links to a search engine that with listing over billion results filled with text, image, video and a melange of other content. indexes over 1.8 billion pages Timeline of Google Search — Could find only till 2013 However, the journey was neither easy nor quick. After I began reading ‘In the Plex’ by Steven Levy, I understood just how massive a problem Google tackled — and made lives of over 2 billion people easier. Right now, if you type in ‘Houston Baker’ in Google, you get the links of an American Scholar who goes by that name ( ). However, about 18 years back that was not the case. The nascent algorithm did not understand the differences between names and keywords. I’m outlining below go ahead, try i t just 3 out of over 1000+ problems that Google overcame. 1. Index Faster, Damn It! How Crawling and Indexing Works Let’s assume, god forbid, there was a massive earthquake in Chennai, India today. The first instinct is to go on Google and learn about what happened and the casualties. However, instead of displaying the news, what if Google showed the best places to visit? What a sacrilege. “ But as the web kept growing, Google added more machines — by the end of 1999, there were eighty machines involved in the crawl (out of a total of almost three thousand Google computers at that time) — and the likelihood that something would break increased dramatically. Especially since Google made a point of buying what its engineers referred to as “el cheapo” equipment”. By 2000, the web was growing like a weed. Billions of new pages were added every year to the corpus. But what good is that if the engine cannot crawl them? Understanding the severity, the engineers built a system that a way for the index to hold its place if a calamity befell a server or hard disk. But the new system went further — it used a different way to handle a cluster of disks, more akin to the parallel-processing style of computing than the “sharding” technique Google had used. implemented “checkpointing,” Sanjay Ghemwat, with his team, rebuilt the entire file system. 2. Audrey Fino — Why Can’t I See My Name? We’ve all been there. We love typing our names into the search engines with the curiosity of a kid opening the Christmas gift. But how can an algorithm that is based on back links and keywords differentiate between a name and anything else? Haven’t we all been there? “ One unsuccessful search became a legend: Sometime in 2001, Amit Singhal learned of poor results when people typed the name “audrey fino” into the search box. Google kept returning Italian sites praising Audrey Hepburn. (Fino means fine in Italian.) “We realized that this is actually a person’s name,” Singhal says. “But we didn’t have the smarts in the system.” Even back then, over So how would you devise new signals to more skillfully identify names from queries and dig them out of the web corpus? Singhal and his colleagues began where they almost always did: with data. To improve search, Google licensed the White Pages, allowing it to use all the information contained in hundreds of thick newsprint-based tomes where the content consisted of nothing but names (and addresses and phone numbers). 8% of all searches were a name. Google’s search engine sucked up the names and analyzed them until it had an understanding of what a name was and how to recognize it in the system. 3. Hot dogs — Boiling Puppies or Sausage Sandwich? I couldn’t resist! Does a hot dog dignify a boiling puppy or a sausage sandwich? Even a (non-psychopathic) 5 year old would know the meaning. Google was smart enough to understand that ‘hot’ meant ‘boiling’ and ‘dog’ meant ‘puppy’. But it didn’t do well with context and combinations. That’s a stupid question. “ Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context.” This meant, by crawling and indexing billions of pages, Google could understand which two words appeared closer to each other. ‘Hot dog’ appeared often with ‘bread’, ‘sausage’ and ‘baseball’. After millions of trials and clicks, it finally understood what to do with such queries. To make the engine smarter, Singhal realized he had to learn to master the art of ‘bigram breakage’. A or is a sequence of two adjacent elements from a of , which are typically letters, syllables, or words. He had to teach the system that ‘New York’ is in fact one entity, but that is different from ‘New York Times’ which is an entity on its own. bigram digram string tokens How Google Search Will Look In Future — My Idea Google has seen a tremendous shift in the way it indexes websites, ranks them and displays information. Here are my three ideas for the search engine: 1. One Stop Destination My two-cents is that Google Search has shifted from being a search engine to becoming a one-stop-destination to find answers. Here are some from the search results. stats on % of people who click on the various links Stats on % of people who visit different pages on Google It is said that 67% of people click on the top 5 links. And 95% click on the top 10 links. This gives a mere 5% chance that the links on the other millions of pages get clicked. This proves that people want immediate gratification — and they can get that from the main Search Engine Results Page (SERP) on Google. Knowing this, I would envision a future where people don’t need to click on any link, rather expand each result and perform actions on the main page. Simple prototype of how it could look like — with an ‘expand’ option present Simple (and shabby) prototype of what happens after clicking on ‘expand’ 2. Contextual Excellence People have begun searching for complex queries, and they expect Google to provide them the answers. With its resources and talent surrounding , I envision a future where Google can answer even queries such as the following. Natural Language Processing Currently the results from Google Search How it could look like in the future 3. Just Think, Don’t Type Imagine a world where you do not need to type anymore. All you have to do is , and the device in front of you understands that. Sounds too far-fetched? I fear not. Researchers have been working on this technology for more than 5 years now, and there are some very convincing prototypes like and to show that they are making progress. What a relief. think this this How AlterEgo works (like magic) I would envision a future where Google commercializes these devices, converting them into a non-intrusive (and not ridiculously looking) one so that people can buy them and control their Google Search, or with it. even their phone, ******************************************************************* Google might have begun as a search engine that displays links. However, 20 years has seen it grow tremendously, expand its reach into other fields such as autonomous cars , disease prevention , cyber-security , smart home devices and more. And I only see it growing further, and making our lives easier than we could ever imagine. ****************************************************************** 👏 💓_I love writing about social issues, products, the technology sector and my graduate school experience in the US. Here is my_ If you found this to be useful, do Follow me for more articles. Did you know you can more than once? Try it out! personal blog . The best way to get in touch with me is via Instagram and Facebook . I share some interesting content there. To know more about my professional life, check out my LinkedIn . Happy reading!

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Google Search — How A Master’s Thesis Became An Idea Worth $70 Billion

Data Mastery: SQL — Order By There are so many exciting projects out there in the Data World. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Nets, Blockchain, and more are sweeping the technology industry. In order to get to the cutting-edge stuff, first and foremost, data needs to be stored, evaluated, and tested. The best place to do that is SQL (or a library that operates with SQL-like commands, ). see my article on Python’s Pandas library This series , will teach you the essential subjects. These are not exhaustive tutorials. Instead they are focused preparation guides — with brevity and efficiency in mind. It is meant for: Data Mastery: SQL Software Engineers who want to analyze their creation’s data Product Managers, Marketers, and others who want to be data-driven Beginning Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Data Analysts, or Business Intelligence Developers preparing for interviews See my resource list of the books I used to prepare for my big interview Each article will contain a brief technical explanation of the subject, an example question, and an answer. Follow up articles will contain challenging questions so you can evaluate your learning. This series does not come with accompanying data sets. The advantage to this is when you are on the drawing board, whether in an interview or project design, you do not have test data to play with. You have to think abstract. Order By The ORDER BY statement is a very simple SQL concept. It goes at the end of the SQL query. Following the ORDER BY keywords, you write a list of columns which will inform the engine how to sort the results. You can specify if you want each column to be sorted ascending or descending with the keywords ASC and DESC. Recall our daily_user_score table from earlier in the series: date       | userid    | sessionid | score
------------------------------------------
2018–09–01 | 983489272 | 125       | 112
2018–09–01 | 234342423 | 34        | 112
2018–09–01 | 567584329 | 207       | 618
2018–09–02 | 983489272 | 126       | 410
2018–09–02 | 983489272 | 127       | 339 If we wanted to view scores top to bottom and the users who earned the score in descending order as well, the SQL query would look like this: SELECT score, 
       userid
FROM daily_user_score
ORDER BY score DESC, userid DESC; These are the results of the above query: score | userid 
--------------------
618   | 567584329
410   | 983489272
339   | 983489272
112   | 983489272
112   | 234342423 Notice the score 112 has two users. Since the score is the same, the SQL engine goes on to sort the userids in this set in descending order as well. Try it yourself Write a SQL query that lists the userids from smallest to largest and their total score. Answer SELECT userid,
       SUM(score) AS total_score
FROM daily_user_score
GROUP BY userid
ORDER BY userid ASC; This query returns: userid    | total_score
-----------------------
234342423 | 112
567584329 | 618
983489272 | 861 Notice that both columns are in ascending order, that is just a coincidence. The engine focused on only sorting the results in the userid column in ascending order. Thanks for reading! If you have questions feel free to comment & I will try to get back to you. Connect with me on Instagram @lauren__glass Connect with me on LinkedIn Check out my essentials list on Amazon Search for me using my nametag on Instagram!

Data Mastery: SQL — Order By

When glamour meets tech, the corollary is very widely accepted by people over the world even though tech-enabled fabric would cost a little extra. Most of the big brands today are changing the course of conventional (less blinkered) fashion towards a more outré fashion. Recently Levis launched a SUPER DOPE smart jacket in collaboration with Google specially for people who commute on a bike. It costs $350 (certainly more than an average person would spend on jacket) yet it is gaining a lot of popularity. You can listen to music, enable google maps, answer phone calls and enable text on your jacket while on-go. Do check out this awesome video to get more insights into the jacket. Keeping the tech aside, I must admit that the jacket looks hot! As I see it, the entire culture is shifting its pace and methods to infuse and related trends with it. The new way to survive is to adopt technology. Probably this is why most sports gear brand (like Nike) endorse themselves as more of a tech company than an apparel company. Nike is constantly coming up with radical solutions with state-of-the-art sensors to measure heart rate, speed, calories burnt, distance run while performing any activity. technology The above case study was a typical example of Internet of Things (IoT) in fashion. Let’s see how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can revolutionise fashion. When I walk into Marks & Spencer, I see a myriad of options not knowing where to go. Also, FOMO clouds my judgment. What would it be like if M&S installs a kiosk in every section where customer can choose the type of fabric they want, the colour, the size et al — and the kiosk tells the customer what the store currently holds! It is like shopping on a mobile app but being physically in the store. Such a solution would certainly change my life and definitely save heck lot of time! Source: http://westhartfordyoga.com/ That’s because is now the most desirable business model. And the companies that will thrive in the coming years are those that can reinvent themselves to keep up with changes in technology and society. data In both the examples mentioned above, the company making use of the technology is collecting tons and tons of data on which big data tech can be applied to know what customers like at what point of time. Such a solution can also help the brand with inventory management. I haven’t mentioned about blockchain example because the next section will be all about that! So now we how truly revolutionising tech can be in the fashion industry. Let’s concretise this idea more by diving deep into use-cases. blockchain Where Fashion meets Blockchain… Source: https://fashnerd.com/ Why Blockchain, why not a regular database? Blockchain critics love to replace blockchain with a regular database even in the most perfect of usecases. What makes blockchain unique is that the data once written onto the ledger can’t ever be changed. It won’t change even if God wants it to change. Secondly, it is truly decentralised and distributed in nature so everyone can see what exactly is going on. There is NO centralised authority responsible to share the data. This means nobody owns the data. This concept is super powerful when people with dirty hands try to change “facts” just because they can. This means, nobody is more powerful than the other in a blockchain world. Only truth will triumph. Rationale of 1st use case: Blockchain’s novelty engenders from its unique ability to bridge the gap between physical world and digital world (tokenisation) to create a REAL digital identity on the blockchain. Often, a cryptographic hash or “serial number” is the primary physical identifier which can be traced back to the product. This concept precludes manufacturing of counterfeit items because a “fake” hash can’t be generated. This gives rise to another use-case which we will discuss soon. Rationale of 2nd use case: Consider the most famous tag in the fashion world: MADE IN _______. Who knows if the place mentioned on the tag is actually the place where it was made? Who knows if they just print any amazeballs place just to sell more? Let’s see how blockchain can prevent this from happening! Source: https://www.finder.com/ Rationale of 3rd use case: There are so many social activist groups lambasting big fashion brands for harming animals, environment, or for unethical practices. A lot of consumers are also chary of buying anything that is made of animal skin. So, how about a concept where users know where exactly is the product they are purchasing coming from? Imagine the information about history of provenance is just a QR code scan away? We will explore this use-case too. Rationale of 4th use case: Source: https://www.scmp.com/ _In a suite of offices lined with racks of clothes on the seventh floor of an industrial building in the back streets of…_www.scmp.com The true cost of your cheap clothes: slave wages for Bangladesh factory workers So many talented people dwell in remote places making intricate fabrics of great value. Most of the times, large fashion brands hire these poor people at a very low wage. This is practically exploiting people in an oppressive way. What if blockchain can empower people in fashion? How about clothing production moves back to the local, distributed hubs? Let’s see the philanthropic side of blockchain too. #1, #2, #3 solution: In 2017, London designer Martine Jarlgaard, in collaboration with the blockchain company Provenance, took the initiative to produce the unprecedented “smart labels”. The consumer can scan the clothing item to see every step in the production process ranging from raw material to final product. This kind of transparency will likely be a selling point for consumers who increasingly want to know how and where their clothes are made. What is seen upon scanning the QR code can be found here: _Knitted jumper with grey marl and camel alpaca yarn sourced from Two Rivers Mill_www.provenance.org Martine Jarlgaard Alpaca Mirror Jumper | Provenance The entire history of all the owners of the product can be seen . This is running on Ethereum’s Kovan Test net. On etherscan, it can be seen here on link. here this https://kovan.etherscan.io/address/0x2fb1d92d6891d7bcfeb88cd9558b86ee14703f69#internaltx Check out Martine Jarlgaard . here _Martine Jarlgaard works in the intersection of technology, business, fashion and art. Her drive towards positive change…_martinejarlgaard.com ABOUT MARTINE JARLGAARD This proves that the product is authentic, it proves where it is coming from, it puts forward the whole lifecycle of the clothing item rendering 100% transparency which is currently 100% opaque. Some other related niche industries which use the same concept are: De Beers, the world’s biggest diamond producer blockchain-based technology to track source and verify authenticity of the diamonds at each point of distribution. utilizes Everledger A London-based blockchain start up claims to be potentially applied in such diverse areas as pharmaceuticals, luxury items, diamonds and electronics. Their technology is trained to identify counterfeit products, track diverted goods, stolen merchandise and fraudulent transactions. Block Verify Alibaba is preventing counterfeiting by developing a blockchain application to track its products. Every time a product moves from one place to another, its code or tag will be scanned, recording its location with a time stamp. Purchasers will be able to scan the product and trace its journey from the factory to their front door — and to verify whether a branded watch or handbag is the real thing or a counterfeit. #4 solution: At the end of the tunnel, there’s light. Likewise, the end result of blockchain is to integrate and include people in the economy who have been neglected till now. A dApp can be created for the people who are living in a deplorable condition to give them a livelihood. Since blockchain enables P2P trade inherently, there is no need for middlemen in the middle. People can directly buy from people rather than the brands. This would certainly take production back to the local, distributed hubs. Source: http://www.malindikenya.net With this, I sum up my insights into the blockchain and fashion world. If you have any suggestions, please mention in the comments below or mail me at niharika.3297@gmail.com

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Blockchain and Fashion Industry

ICOs in the Healthcare industry: Efficiency statistics Healthcare industry appears to be taking slow but robust steps in the crowdfunding-based ICOs. As the ICO landscape evolves, mindful investors are expected to try and pick winners. One of the emerging sectors in the race to Crypto-glory appears to be Healthcare. Healthcare ICOs have thrived in the already depressed Q3, 2018 , jumping from rank 17th in Q2, 2018 to rank 8th in Q3, 2018. The growth albeit slow is steady and solid. Healthcare among the Top 10 sectors of ICOs in 2018 (Source: InWara Q3 report_)_ Download Report Geographical Outlook USA: Healthcare ICOs have seen significant traction in the USA where the country contribution of 29% in Healthcare, is in line with the aggregate contribution also at 29%. Russia: Interestingly, Russia has seen the significant emergence in the Healthcare space with 6 ICOs being based out of erstwhile Soviet Union with projects like Cryogen raising over $10M. UK: UK has also emerged as one of the leading geographies with 5 ICOs based here raising over $65M. Source: InWara’s database Venture Capital Activity While the overall public interest in Healthcare has piqued, VCs are taking it slow. Despite the momentum of investments by VCs in Q3 2018, across most of the sectors, Healthcare has seen limited VC action. raised four rounds of funding while Burst IQ raised three. It is interesting to note that a majority of these rounds are from healthcare specific VCs and not generic blockchain/digital asset accumulators. This makes the average investor wonder if blockchain is being used as a force-fit and not something that’s natural in the Healthcare space? Patientory Source: InWara’s Private funding database Active VCs in Healthcare industry MedTech Innovator MedTech industry’s Accelerator and Venture Competition for transformative innovations that benefit patients and deliver improved healthcare value. Millennium Blockchain Millennium Blockchain is an international holding company focused on actively investing and co-managing blockchain companies, technologies. StartUp Health Organizing, supporting, and investing in a global army of Health Transformers to achieve 10 HealthMoonshots to improve the health & wellbeing of everyone. 500 Startups 500 Startups is a venture capital firm with a mission to discover and back talented entrepreneurs, help them create successful companies at scale, and build thriving global ecosystems. PV Ventures PV Ventures is a venture capital firm located in Colorado that makes investments in seed stage technology companies. Luke warm reception on ICOs listing in Healthcare Source: InWara’s database Only 17% of Healthcare ICOs are listed on exchanges which potentially creates liquidity issues for investors. Surprisingly, with the number of exchanges up by almost 25% in 2018 vs 2017, listing or otherwise is probably a choice ICOs as opposed to a lack of exchanges. Download Report Returns on Investment (RoI) a concern in Healthcare ICOs? The sector is probably expecting teething problems with only 17% ICOs listed. This is coupled with gains — an indexed investment in the Healthcare sector has provided relatively low returns compared with other industries and only 4 ICOs have generated positive returns. Source: InWara’s database No “Blockbuster” Fundraisers in Healthcare Source: InWara’s database Fund raising has been skewed with Top 5 ICOs raising 60+% of total funds raised in the sector. Also none of the ICOs have raised over $100M. Shivom Shivom: Founded in 2017 Shivom, a German ICO, uses blockchain to secure patient data. Shivom will enable DNA data donors to collaborate with change makers in biotechnology, healthcare industry, and government. Project Shivom is the next evolutionary step in this development by creating a medical genomics ecosystem on the blockchain. The company is led by Axel Schumacher who has 24 years of experience in the Medical industry and holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Cologne (1998) Solve Care SolveCare: Founded in 2017 Solve Care is an online-platform consisting of Care. Wallet, Care.Protocol, Care.Coin, Care.Card and other components through which the community connects with the clients. This platform empowers the consumer to effectively manage their health care decisions. Pradeep Goel is the CEO and has 28 years of experience in the healthcare industry. MedicalChain MedicalChain: Founded in 2016 Medicalchain uses blockchain to store health records in a single version. Industry participants such as doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists and health insurers can request permission to access a patient’s record to serve their purpose and record transactions on the distributed ledger. The company is led by CEO & Co-founder Mr. Abdullah Albeyatti Medibloc MediBloc: Founded in 2017 MediBloc is an open-source healthcare data platform built on the blockchain. It compiles a complete indexed history of all patient medical information, validating and securing every change along the day. It can safely secure and integrate scattered data from various institutions, and also collect data from devices like the smartphone. The company is led by Wookyun Kho who has 10 years of experience in software engineering. Lympo Lympo: Founded in 2016 Lympo is a blockchain based mobile application that is aimed at the mobile health (mHealth) industry. The ecosystem would allow one to harness, control, and sell personal health data in a P2P fashion, eliminating third-party control of personal health data and lack of compensation for the resale of such data. Company’s CEO & Founder is Ada Jonuse, who has 10 years of experience in the IT field. To get a detailed investment analysis on all ICOs and Private funding rounds, visit InWara’s and ICO database Private funding database. Download Report Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. InWara does not promote/demote any company/ICO. Opinions, statements, estimates and projections in this message or other media are solely those of the individual author(s). They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Inwara or any of its affiliates (“Inwara”). Inwara has no obligation to update, modify or amend this message or other media, or to otherwise notify a recipient thereof, in the event that any matter stated herein, or any opinion, projection, forecast or estimate set forth herein, changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate. Any content, information and any materials provided in this message or other media is on an “as is” basis. Inwara makes no warranty, expressed or implied, as to its accuracy, completeness or timeliness, or as to the results to be obtained by recipients, and shall not in any way be liable to any recipient for any inaccuracies, errors or omissions herein. Without limiting the foregoing, Inwara shall have no liability whatsoever to a recipient of any message or media, whether in contract, in tort (including negligence), under a warranty, under statute or otherwise, in respect of any loss or damage suffered by such recipient as a result of or in connection with any actions, opinions, recommendations, forecasts, judgments, or any other conclusions, or any course of action determined, by it or any third party, whether or not based on the content, information or materials contained herein.**

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ICOs in Healthcare industry | Detailed Healthcare ICO sector analysis

Image Recognition With the e-commerce boom, entrepreneurs have learned that conventional strategies of visual merchandising or sales promotions won’t be able to sustain profits in the cutthroat CPG industry. Many retailers are already implementing AI and image recognition to deliver the next level of customer experience, bringing the dawn of a new era for the retail industry. According to Gartner, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions in the retail industry will be managed by AI. Product discovery, product recommendations & trend analysis are some areas for implementation of computer vision and image recognition. This article elaborates on how image recognition can be implemented by retail & CPG companies. 1. Auditing Product Placement: Customers are making key buying decisions at store shelves and companies have to use technology to stay ahead of the fierce competition or face extinction. Gathering key consumer information helps companies understand their needs better. Shelf recognition using computer vision digitizes store checks and is important in gathering key consumer information through AI. Computer vision using deep neural network detects objects within images of shelves and classifies them based on category, brand, and item. This is helpful in streamlining manual, time-consuming and error-prone store audits of SKUs so that the manual effort is directed to the actual task of selling the products. 2. Detecting trends in product placement: The placement of a product in a store can either make the product sell like a hot cake or stay forever on the shelf. Companies like Tesco have already initiated the use of image recognition software to improve product placement in its stores. Image recognition uses photographs of shelves or hotspots and quickly gives insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and placements of products on display. With AI being able to interpret humungous amounts of data & provide valuable insights, something that is impossible for humans to accomplish with accuracy, strategists can learn the movement of products, how they are consumed or how well product placement works work towards getting maximum ROI from the placements and advertising messages. The AI engines also generate insights on how a brand’s product is being used across social media and accordingly enable marketers in their efforts. 3. Assessing compliance and competition: Most companies depend on sales reps to audit the company product placements, brand presence and compliance at outlets. This can be a tedious process. Image recognition can be used to track compliance with the merchandising standards for each outlet & have better trade program adaptations. Machine vision is also used to track the competitor brands, their placements, brand presence, and strategies through competitor’s distribution, channels, & shelf strategies and provide important business suggestions. For example: if a product is not performing against a competitor product, it may suggest a different product placement or generate discounts. 4. Category analysis: When you walk into a supermarket, you are most likely to find a product from P & G, if you are looking for something in beauty and pharmacy categories. This is a result of the company staying vigilant with consumer trends & competitor behavior regarding the product and categories. Using Vision APIs that quickly classify images into categories, identify the stocking of the competitors in that categories, & the competitor offers, enables P&G to devise new marketing scenarios leading to higher shelf share. In short, image recognition technology is helping retailers and manufacturers understand their marketplace and react in real-time. The trend is moving from online to offline use of image recognition in the CPG industry. Aspects such as compliance or calculation of a product’s performance compared to its competitor can be projected in a better way than with manual processes where there’s a chance of human error and problems in process scalability. And that’s not the end, image recognition is further evolving allowing the consumers to directly engage with the manufacturers via wearable devices. So why not embrace this new trend and automate? Free Demo of our Vision API Originally published at infrrd.ai

Discovery

Image Recognition for Product and Shelf Monitoring and Analysis

5 Easy Ways to Revamp Your Seller Ratings on Amazon And as they say, are only good as their reputation… The reviews on a particular product are as important as the product itself. You, being a seller might think that delivering a quality product is everything, keeping your fingers crossed when it comes to the feedbacks, wrong move! You need to act accordingly. The very first rule of selling on marketplaces is — never ask for a positive review directly, never! You’re winning here, because the marketplace giant, Amazon, has actively encouraged you to do so. Rather, your product might outperform for three reasons: (i) , (ii) , and (iii) . Not enough reviews Too many negative reviews Less positive reviews There is a . One such review can become a highlight amongst ten other positive reviews; not necessary that you deserved it. So, Amazon has options to help you remove such reviews as well. difference between a negative review and a brutally negative review Now, just to make it clear, we are not talking about the product reviews here, but the . Seller reviews throw a spotlight on your , , , etc. seller reviews shipping mode fulfillment customer support Some amazing strategies that can help you get the best reviews and tackle the bad ones… #1 Become an Amazon FBA Seller! If you are by becoming an , there are plenty and tons of advantages that automatically fall into your bag. The biggest benefit, if the , the . getting associated with Amazon FBA seller fulfillment is done by Amazon customer reviews are also somewhere or another impacting Amazon In this case, Amazon automatically from the customer and thus helps you . removes the negative reviews maintain a good reputation Some other benefits that can help you catch better reviews with Amazon’s FBA services. — If you are an FBA seller, your listed product will automatically get a . Once your product gets this tag, your product becomes eligible to be shipped within 2 days. As your products are , they will be accordingly taken care of, without you being a part of it. Fast 2-day shipping ‘ prime tag ’ stocked in Amazon’s fulfillment center — When you are an FBA seller and also have a ‘prime tag’, you are on the top as of that particular product. The customers always give a ; in rare cases like or do they opt for different sellers listed below. Buy box will boost sales automatically boosted the first seller priority to the seller with a buy-box late shipping payable shipping — As an FBA seller, you grab a complete access to the and limited access to other geographics ( ). Amazon FBA is the easiest and the to list your , although there is a bit of effort required to be put in during listing. Sell globally Pan-European FBA such as India, Australia, and Japan most cost-effective way products on a global level — Being an FBA seller has its own perks when it comes to advertising. FBA sellers pay compared to normal sellers on Amazon. Also, at the time of lightning . Advertise on Amazon 20% less advertising cost Amazon favors the FBA sellers flash sales Image Source: Amazon Sellers Lawyer #2 Always Request Customer Feedbacks Proactively. It’s always recommended that you make the first move and request your customer to bless you with an honest and positive feedback. Because… Your reputation will be made by how well you sculpt it! ~ Anonymous Your review section should always remain flooded with customer feedbacks, making sure that they are positive. But how? One way is to request your customer directly for a feedback. This can be done via the ‘ ’ feature from . Draft an , and do not forget to . contact buyer Amazon Seller Central enticing email subject line personalize every email The second way is to include a . This, again, is a very but way of asking for a feedback compared to directly contacting. But yes, worth giving a shot! reminder requesting for a feedback on the package slip cost-friendly ineffective Another way to ask for a feedback or review is most likely to be a marketing scheme. Here, you can lure your customer by ‘if and ’. This can be done with a well-designed email. providing them some discounts only if they submit their feedback Image Source: Sellbrite #3 Offer Solutions, Not Apologies! Responding to a negative customer feedback has always been a common practice by many sellers on Amazon. Required are the efforts you put in to sort out the queries mentioned in the feedback. Do not emphasize more on returns, refund or concession, it will eventually happen. On Amazon, once the customer posts a review, they have . Enough time for a seller to . 60 days to either delete it or make it stay come on a common ground with the customer If after 60 days the customer still wants to vent away, let them do so. Holding on to a particular customer might sometimes waste your time. They would really don’t care about how much efforts you are putting in to bring them back. Rather, take a deep breath and move on! Your deep apologies would work, but might sometimes simply echo in the remains… Try them out! #4 Negative Reviews — Removable* Negative reviews can indeed prove out to be a to your retail business. But can they be ! Although it’s not at all a good practice, rather focus on not getting them in the future. critical hit controlled or removed, certainly Well, a seller doesn’t have an authority to remove a customer review, so need to inform Amazon to do so. Now, a negative review can be removed only if… the customer uses , can be removed using the offensive or abusive language profanity filter you are an FBA seller and the review is directly hampering Amazon’s reputation the review reveals much of customer’s or seller’s personal details the review is and not the seller inclined towards a product Certainly, , but you can always try the classic way of either or and get the . Amazon has it’s own terms and conditions to get the reviews removed apologizing to the customer providing the right product or refund review removed But, never let the negative reviews obstruct your selling on Amazon. Consider them to be a stepping-stone and improvise your services for future customers. Image Source: The Daily Dot #5 Always Consider Customer’s Advice You need to take into consideration the feedback given by the customer, or at least pretend that you have. Well, do this publically and let the future customers also see how well you have tackled the queries and implemented the customer feedbacks. Taking advice from a customer will and help you get . This will establish a . elevate their esteem more sales from word of mouth stronger relationship between you and your customer To Conclude… When your presence is on such a huge marketplace, Amazon, . Do let us know if we missed anything that could be mentioned in the article. Suggestions are welcome in the comments section below! if one customer is not satisfied, just assume that they are all unsatisfied

How to Revamp Your Seller Ratings on Amazon

After recent of SEC taking on EtherDelta, one might expect would be next in the list. We have to ask ourselves — how truly decentralized and safe IDEX is? news IDEX IDEX is present on Etherscan. Let’s dive into it. smart contract Why so small one might ask? The entire smart contract is only 184 lines. The reason behind this is that IDEX is not full capacity exchange on the blockchain. It doesn’t store its order book on the blockchain, neither it uses smart contract for order matching. That all is delegated to their private servers. Then their code has to be open-source in case something happens to them, right? Their source code is private. In other words, if their website is taken down by hacker/regulators, the entire exchange would be stopped for sure with no easy way to make it operational. Nope. At least I can get my ether/tokens back anytime, right? They have lock time on ether/token withdraw called . At that moment it is set to 17 days, but it can be increased by admin to roughly 6 months.Proof. Nope. inactivityReleasePeriod Your funds are locked You would think. In absolute worst case, I’ll get my funds back in 6 months, right? In the worst case, you would get your money almost never. Inactivity period updated on every traded line 182. That means if hacker gets IDEX and you have at least one open order, the hacker can fill your order with just one token to block your funds for yet another 6 months. Essentially that can last almost forever. Nope. lastActiveTransaction[tradeAddresses[3]] = block.number; Conclusion I am disappointed by IDEX on many levels. First of all, it is a gigantic stretch for IDEX to call themselves a decentralized exchange. They could claim to be a decentralized custodian, but even here they failed with implementing locking properly as it allows to lock user funds somewhere between 6 months and many years. They are vulnerable on both levels blockchain and private servers. Whatever gets hacked exchange would halt. And even worse if the smart contract is hacked, then users funds can be locked. It is especially upsetting taking into account an amazing smart contract developed by . EtherDelta TL;DR IDEX is not decentralized exchange at all. IDEX is the decentralized custodian of ether/tokens, but due to poor smart contract implementation funds can be locked for minimum 6 months up to many years. If this post was helpful, please click the clap 👏button below a few times to show your support! ⬇⬇ Social Connect with me on . LinkedIn Follow me on . twitter Read More _We are going to figure out what is EOS token and how you can create and deploy one yourself._hackernoon.com How to Create and Deploy Your Own EOS Token _You think your AWS or Digital Ocean bill for your website is killing you?_hackernoon.com How Much Does It Cost to Run DApp in 2018 Originally published at ylv.io on November 21, 2018.

Your Funds Are Probably Not Safe on IDEX

The ‘ ’ word has been in popular use since 2017 and it has come to mean anything from the technology that will change to world to a digital form of snake oil. It was also going to make every investor in it very rich. blockchain Part of the blockchain legend has been based on all the hype around , and it is fair to say that its powers have been inflated to the point where some people have come to believe it is capable of delivering things that it most likely can’t. After all, it is just a database with new features. cryptocurrencies writes at Hackernoon defines it thus: “It allows multiple parties to record and share information on a database in real time, and not need to trust each other, as they are incentivised to do the right thing through tokens/coins.” Jack Dossman As he says, blockchain has a certain specificity that only makes it useful in certain circumstances. It’s great for cryptocurrencies and for faster, cheaper cross-border payments services, but it isn’t a solution for absolutely everything. It has some flaws: for example, the proof-of-work mechanism uses extraordinary amounts of electricity. But, we must also remember that we are still in the early days of blockchain and to dismiss it now would be the equivalent of saying in 1995 that the Internet would never work. It isn’t a ponzi scheme and it isn’t a way of making a company’s share price rocket simply by adding ‘blockcian’ to a company name; especially when there is no blockchain involved. Neither is it a tool exclusively used by scammers as some would like you to think. That’s just a side effect of the technology, not its ultimate purpose. Plenty of scammers use email and social media channels, but that doesn’t stop us from using the Internet. It won’t revolutionise you business, unless your company really needs blockchain technology to grow — so don’t add it in just for the sake of it. Plus, you’ve probably heard that it’s a ‘disruptor’; well, it probably won’t disrupt every industry sector, because it isn’t needed everywhere. So what is blockchain? It is technology that provides: · A shared, add-only database · Removes need for intermediaries · It’s trustless · It offers consensus and validation This makes it perfect for cryptocurrencies and the finance world. There may be other mass-market cases for blockchain use that will come to light in the future, but just don’t believe absolutely everything you hear about what blockchain can do.

What blockchain is and what it isn’t

just launched its decentralized exchange platform (DEX) with one of the worst I’ve ever seen. This is a textbook case of shady & bad practices, astroturfing and paid bots, let me explain: MetaMorph.pro guerrilla web marketing Everything began with a post on Reddit that attracted my attention, because I’ve never heard of MetaMorph.pro before, and because the user /u/ seemed to be correct /r/0xProject Flucboii The post “Binance vs MetaMorph.pro” has 6.2k claps on Medium, which is insane for a random post about a recently-launched DEX (for scale, , ) my post with 100k reads has 1.6k claps and most Medium posts by IDEX, the most used and popular DEX, have less than 1k claps Furthermore, every post by MetaMorph.pro on Medium has approximately the same amount of claps, around 6.2k: 6.3K for “Exodus vs MetaMorph.pro” 6.4K for “IDEX vs MetaMorph.pro”, can you notice the pattern ? ;) Now let’s dig into the people that clapped the posts: The users are all Medium non-members, and all names share the same pattern: 2 letters for the first name and then a random last name, let’s check their profile: It seems like “Da niel”, “En Riequ”, “Jo Shua” and “Ja Mesre” really love MetaMorph.pro, they are clapping every Medium post by MetaMorph.pro, and of course they haven’t ever clapped anything else. Every single clap out of the ones I’ve checked are from this kind of user account So, we can see some obvious usage of bots on Medium, let’s now check how they promoted the DEX on Reddit: Of course, people on /r/ExodusWallet are rooting against Exodus… LOL at the most upvoted comment, seems so legit Everybody seems to be rooting for the unknown DEX rather then IDEX, it seems so legit again If you’ve ever used Reddit, you know that those comments are not natural, they are either generated by bots, or written by paid users that have no idea what they are talking about, good ol’ . astroturfing Now the best thing is that the marketing department of MetaMorph.pro doesn’t even understand the market, Exodus it does not compete at all with a DEX, it’s just 2 completely different things, the same thing applies for Shapeshift. is a wallet, The whole “Exodus vs MetaMorph.pro” or “Shapeshift vs MetaMorph.pro” doesn’t make any sense. At least IDEX is a DEX, and Binance is an exchange, so “IDEX vs MetaMorph.Pro” or “Binance vs MetaMorph.Pro” isn’t totally absurd. - If you want to promote your recently launched DEX, don’t use bots to promote your posts, or any shady technique- If you do use bots, at least don’t use the same pattern for the name generation of every users- As a conclusion: If I can’t trust you on your marketing techniques, I won’t trust you to handle my (crypto-)money Feel free to reach out on if you have comments or questions. You can also check my small game Twitter cryptoguessinggame.com

Binance

How not to promote your DEX launch

The State of The Market — November 21, 2018 : $4,595.57 (+2.69%) : $0.446765 (-0.33%) : $137.93 (+3.25%) BTC XRP ETH The market took a breather today, after yesterday’s bloodbath. However, the rebound is not convincing enough yet. Bitcoin’s free-fall finally ended at $4,300, indicating a support at that point. The reversal was met with a new resistance at $4,800. Meanwhile, XRP has managed to hold its price, making it one of the best performing coins in recent times. Ethereum, on the other hand, has been slow to recover and Bitcoin Cash went up by 20% to $250. In other news, cryptocurrency exchange . Coinbase has made this decision based on a number of factors including the fact that ABC has a higher hash-rate and a longer proof-of-work chain. Trading in BCH will resume on Coinbase Pro and Prime first followed by Coinbase.com and the mobile apps most likely in the next week. Also, . It has been accused of impersonating Union Bank, including copying elements from its website, wording, leadership information, and images. UBPC claims to be the world’s first security token backed by a fully licensed bank and offers a stablecoin backed by the Swiss franc. Coinbase has announced that BCH ABC will be listed under its BCH ticker Russia-based initial coin offering (ICO), Union Bank Payment Coin (UBPC) has been hit with cease-and-desist by North Dakota’s securities watchdog Bryant has become a familiar face in the startup industry as his venture fund Bryant Stibel has invested in 15 initiatives mostly in tech, data, and the media. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron said “Kobe Bryant is a basketball genius. I have been a huge fan of Kobe and deeply inspired by his journey. It’s my great honor to have Kobe as our special guest for the niTRON Summit.” NiTRON Summit will be held in San Francisco in mid-January 2019. ( ) 1) Tron has announced NiTRON Summit, its platform-specific conference, and former American basketball player Kobe Bryant will appear as a guest speaker. Read More It is set to replace two existing pieces of legislation, the Payment Systems (Oversight) Act (PS(O)A) and the Money-Changing and Remittance Businesses Act (MCRBA). The new bill was written to prevent terrorism financing and protect consumer funds. Crypto payment service providers will have to apply for one of three licenses based on the nature and scope of their activities within six months after the PSB comes into force. ( ) 2) Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has decided to regulate crypto payments under the new Payment Services Bill (PSB). Read More Koi Trading has its headquarters located in San Francisco, CA, and they are seeking to become a compliant global option for private cryptocurrency liquidity while also offering services related to data science, quantitative research, and compliance consulting work. As the OTC market continues to grow on a global scale, compliant exchanges such as Koi Trading are a key to the continued growth of the space. ( ) 3) The venture wing of the Binance has invested $3 million in the US-based over-the-counter (OTC) crypto trading desk Koi Trading. Read More Subscribe to the Berminal Brief Newsletter Download Berminal App for Free The Berminal Website Berminal Official Telegram Berminal Twitter

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What will you do in product if you can not deal with strategic planning? How will you succeed if you are not able to prioritize correctly? management No kidding — a clear strategy and powerful prioritization really matter in product management. Any ambitious product manager should strive to skills and abilities that will help him/her to build a great strategy like famous far-sighted commanders. develop These thoughts pushed our team to compile the best ideas for creating . the Ultimate Guide to Product Strategy Planning and Prioritizing In this guide, we share the insights for product and project managers and everyone who wants to learn more about product strategy and the power of prioritization. Why is it worth to be read? The Guide will be useful for product managers, project managers, marketers, and team leads if they want to know: How to define, describe and manage product strategy like a Pro? How to apply a GIST planning system, created by Itamar Gilad? How to simplify GIST for small projects and small teams? How to choose the best way for ideas and features prioritization? How to score features using appropriate methods? Here’re the most important extracts: Part 1. Product Strategy Any product strategy is a basis for the entire product lifecycle. It is aimed to achieve a specific objective. Let’s say, it’s like a route getting you from point A to point B. A product strategy consists of 4 parts: vision, goals, metrics and actionable plan. that includes details on the market opportunity, target customers, product positioning, a competitive analysis, and a market plan. It also describes who the customers are and what they need. Product vision that should be measurable and time-bound objectives that have clearly defined metrics associated with them. Product goals help you to set what you want to achieve in the next quarter or another period of time (to increase revenue, expand into new countries, increase mobile adoption, and so on). Product goals allow you to measure the progress of goals achievement. They should be specific and measurable. Product metrics that Actionable plan Part 2. All about GIST The concept of GIST planning is clearly described in Itamar Gilad’s article . In fact, plans quickly go out of sync with reality — the longer they are the more they are wrong. Roadmaps and Gantt charts are helpful, however, there is no room for agility — changes at the top cause huge ripple effects of replanning and project cancellations at the bottom. The usage of GIST planning system assists to solve such problem: you get the lightweight plans that are built for change. They reduce management overhead, improve team velocity and autonomy, set a proper cross-company alignment and ultimately products and solutions. The author’s version of the GIST planning system as the abbreviation consists of the following blocks: describe the company strategy in terms of desired outcomes: where we want to be, by when, and how will we know that we got there. Goals describe hypothetical ways to achieve the goals. They are hypothetical because there can be many ideas on how to achieve a given objective, but at most 1 in 3 ideas will deliver a positive result. Product managers collect all ideas in an Idea Bank, prioritize them using appropriate prioritization methods and frameworks and put as many ideas as possible to the test in order of priority. Ideas occur when the bigger project behind the idea should be broken into small parts, each no more than 10 weeks long (according to GIST). Each step-project is like an experiment that tests the idea. Step Projects are the parts of every step-project. This part of the system is well covered by Agile planning tools, Kanban boards, and other modern development project management techniques. There is nothing to change at this level. Tasks The process of GIST planning may seem too complicated, that’s why we offer a simplified version of the system. Part 3. How to simplify GIST? This planning approach may look redundant for small projects. The Step Projects Itamar Gilad writes about what is needed for large projects when the cost of developing a single feature can reach hundreds of thousands dollars. Step Projects are really useful for large projects because they help to validate ideas as soon as possible in order not to spend huge sums on the full development of the idea. However, for example, in mobile apps development, you can act without Step Projects. So after we’ve chosen the best ideas with the help of prioritization, we write the tasks for their implementation, collect the requirements, write specifications and push them to development. At the end of the sprint, we put them to production and can collect data and feedback of users. The simplified process looks easy: we set goals, choose appropriate metrics for control and collect the ideas that can improve these metrics. Then we conduct a Lean prioritization of ideas, apply features scoring, and finally write the task for the features that have won. Then the features get broken into tasks and they are pushed to development. And that’s it. Part 4. Lean Prioritization is the way to success There are many prioritization techniques, frameworks, and methods. In the Ultimate Guide, we describe in details the following: as the classic approach based on the initial with two axes. Choosing the framework, you may set your own criteria and score product ideas, features and tasks. For example, such prioritization methods as Value vs Effort, Value vs Risk, Value vs Cost can be easily visualized with the help of this framework. Here’s the explanation of Value vs Effort system: 2x2 matrix for prioritization Eisenhower matrix — the simple way to get things done and prioritize product features without extra requirements. All you need is to calculate the score per idea, according to the formula: where: ICE Scoring Impact*Confidence*Ease=ICE Score, demonstrates how much your idea will positively affect the key metric you’re trying to improve; shows how I’m sure about all my estimates — both about impact and effort (how my estimations look like a truth); is about the easiness of implementation. It is an estimation of how much effort and resources are required to implement this idea. Impact Confidence Ease These values are rated on a relative scale of 1–10 so not to over-weigh any of them. You can choose what 1–10 means, as long the rating stays consistent. that includes 4 components: rates how many people each feature will effect within a certain period of time and how many of them will notice the changes; demonstrates how the feature will contribute to the product and how will the project impact your customers; shows how I’m sure about all my estimation — both about impact and effort (how much my estimations look like a truth); is estimated as a number of “person-months”, weeks or hours, depending on needs. It is the work that one team member can do in a specific month. RICE Scoring Reach Impact Confidence Effort You need to rank proposed features with a Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, and use the final score you’ve come up with to decide what should be implemented at first. Part 5. Features Scoring Weighted Scoring allows evaluating features by your own criteria. Each criterion can have its own weight and scale (from 0…to 10). Using this prioritization approach, you can take your features or initiatives, rank them with the help of a benefit-versus-cost framework on a number of criteria, and then use the scores you’ve come up with to decide which initiatives make the cut. This method of scoring can be useful for companies to evaluate what they think is the relative impact on strategic objectives for a group of possible new features. Other prioritization techniques and methodologies Nowadays product managers may find dozens of classic and innovative prioritization techniques and approaches. We combine the most interesting of them in section. Here’re top-6 according to their popularity among our users: Hygger University Value vs Cost Kano model MoSCoW prioritization method Buy a Feature Feature buckets KJ Method What’s next? If the process of prioritization was successful, then everything is rather simple: all tasks go to development according to Scrum or Kanban and the product manager will have to track their progress. Here I’ve tried to combine the most important points from the guide that is posted on Hygger blog. Of course, many of its parts are written here in brief. If you are interested in details and more insights, feel free to dive into the . original article Have a nice read!

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How to Manage Product Strategy and Prioritize Like a Pro? Guide for Product Managers

So, my story goes, one day I decided that enough is enough and it’s about time for me to part ways with Upwork. Once my beloved platform has rubbed me the wrong way more than once. I was free to opt in. So, I’m free to opt out. Right? You are free to join and you are free to say goodbye. This is what freelancing is supposed to be all about — freedom. Right again? Well, it turns out that there’s a catch — an Upwork legal catch. The Legal Catch 22 — Section 7 of Upwork’s Terms I honestly thought it would be as simple as that. It didn’t take too much time to create an account on Upwork. It would take even less to terminate one. Oh boy, I was in for a nasty legal surprise. It all started with one message I stumble upon an official Upwork’s Facebook page. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who wanted to leave. Screenshot Upwork Facebook Is Upwork for real? I had to check out this Section 7 with my own eyes. Screenshot Upwork Terms There it was in all of its beauty. I had to read it twice. What if I don’t want to wait for two years? I want to leave now. If my clients want to follow me that’s their decision. What’s that got to do with me? Screenshot Upwork Terms So, I’m free to leave, but without my clients and contracts. In an ideal freelance world, my client or clients can be generous and offer to pay this opt-out-fee. But, this isn’t going to be a gift, but rather an investment or better to say a loan. After my clients pay this money to Upwork, I will have to compensate them, this way or another. With my work, of course. Upwork made it sure that I have a great working relationship with my clients in the future. And, that’s not all my dear freelance folks. Screenshot Upwork Terms Now, Upwork wants my clients to rat on me if I’m even to think out loud about leaving. As I said, I wasn’t the only one thinking about the great escape. I shared my findings and concerns with some of my freelance buddies. What do you know, it turns out that Upwork isn’t just being hard on its freelancers and clients, but the competitors, as well. If You Can’t Beat Them — Sue Them One of my freelance friends wanted a fresh start. He thought he would be out of long Upwork legal arm’s reach on some other platform. So, he started working on a relatively new freelance website goLance. He shared his shocking discovery that Upwork hit his new online working place with all of its legal and financial might. Even David vs Goliath comparison isn’t a match for this awkward situation. I dig deeper with my research. Even the smallest potential competitors are treated as a serious threat to Upwork’s dominance. What could be a reason for a lawsuit between two companies competing in the same industry? You don’t have to have a legal degree to know that the most common accusation is that you’re “stealing” someone’s clients. It’s understandable that you want to protect your business. However, it’s a completely different thing to defend your clients as if they’re your property. So, from an Upwork’s point of view, both goLance and I were the “legit” legal targets because their clients wanted to work with us. If a client follows me wherever I go, is it my fault? If a client wants to work on goLance or some other platform instead of Upwork, are we going to have an “open legal season” in each individual case? “F” in Freelance Stands for Freedom, NOT Fear I can’t afford to go through legal trouble with Upwork both financially and emotionally. What I can do is to write an article about and move on to some other freelance platform. I’m a helpless believer in Good Karma. This hegemonic Upwork’s behavior won’t go unpunished. Upwork went public because it needed money despite the fact this may sound a bit strange to you. Yes, the biggest platform for freelancers in the world is in a desperate need of cash. What does that tell you? The price of Upwork’s shares just hit the record low since its NASDAQ debut. Karma is a bitch, ain’t that right Upwork?

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With the bullies from school hot on his trail, a terrified 12 year-old dashed into a silent Detroit Public Library. Walter Pitts 18 years later, a grown-up would co-author a shocking paper with some of the the Mount Rushmore of Computer Science. His paper in 1942 with Warren McCulloch and Jerome Lettvin — — would forever change the landscape of Computing, AI, and human thought, although not in the way they could have ever have imagined…or intended. Walter Pitts What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity. By the time stumbled upon the (“PM”), he was already a self-taught child prodigy. Having absorbed Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, had prepared himself for the biggest challenge of his life. From the instant he began reading, Walter was hooked, and he finished the massive, 2,000 page PM in just two weeks. Walter Principia Mathematica Walter The Principia Mathematica attempted to create a ‘bible of mathematics and logic, from which all mathematical and logical ideas could be derived.’ The Value of Good Sources The Principia Mathematica by and is the most influential mathematical and logical treatise of the 20th century. Think of a Bible written without the assumption of an alphabet. It was the biggest challenge of the early 20th century, and set out to do the impossible. Alfred North Whitehead Bertrand Russell Whitehead and Russell In writing Principia Mathematica, one of Russell’s principal objectives was to give evidence that all of mathematics really could be derived from logic. — Steven Wolfram Following , global academia was convinced that they could uncover all of Nature’s Secrets by reducing the world to the orderliness of mathematics, logic, equations of absolute truth. The Principia Mathematica set out to be THE symbolic, mathematical, logical theory of everything upon which all other truths about Nature could be built. Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Whitehead & Russell Keep It Thorough took the challenge so seriously that they famously filled 360 pages to prove that — once and for all — 1 + 1 = 2. Their exhaustive treatise on logic would form the basis of all Artificial Intelligence and Computing Innovation for the next 100 years, although not in the way they could have ever have imagined…or intended. Whitehead & Russell Young Walter, all alone in the library but safe from the interference of the bullies from school, began making notes as he read. Two weeks later, Walter sent a letter to Bertrand Russell…with corrections. Russell received the letter, and was so impressed that he responded to Pitts as if he was a fellow academic. In the letter, he offered Russell a chance to study with him — Walter turned him down. Russell didn’t even know that Walter was 12. Photo by on Rye Jessen Unsplash Chicago — The Birthplace of more than Just Kanye West Three years later, at just 15 years old, Walter ran away from home and escaped to Chicago. He’d never see his parents again. Walter learned that Bertrand Russell had traveled from University of Cambridge in England and had begun teaching at the University of Chicago. Walter wanted to study directly under Bertrand Russell, live and direct. There was just one problem: Walter Pitts was broke and homeless. There was no way he was going to be able to afford the hefty tuition at the lead University in America’s third-busiest mega-city. So, Walter did what any would-be student would do: he showed up to one of the University Professors’ office and did the same thing he did to Russell — show him where he messed up. Rudolph Carnap — still a legendary logician today — had recently published “The Logical Syntax of Language.” Walter showed up to Carnap’s office — without permission — and proceeded to explain to Carnap where his logical syntax didn’t make any sense. Once he was finished showing Carnap where he messed up, in typical Pitts fashion, left the building, leaving Carnap to light a piece of his thesis on fire. Walter had run away from home in Detroit the previous year and become a nonstudent at the University of Chicago. The school was well aware of him and turned a blind eye to his presence in classes. Before we met, he had wandered into the office of Carnap, the logician, with a marked and annotated copy of Carnap’s recently published book on logic. Without introducing himself he went into a careful analysis of weaknesses and even outright errors in the text, and after a long colloquy, he left without ever giving his name. Carnap spent half a year searching for “that newsboy who understood logic,” and when he found Walter, arranged to get him a job (for Walter was penniless). In any case, nobody threw him out of the graduate school classes he attended. — The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography In 1935, when a 15 year-old janitor began sneaking into Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy, Math and Logic lectures at the University of Chicago, nobody chased him away. After all, the young Walter had a ring of protection around him called Professor Carnap and Professor Russell, two of the most celebrated thinkers of the 20th century. Now, as opposed to life in Detroit hunted by high-school bullies, Walter began swimming in a school of his intellectual peers. He was soon discovered by Warren McCulloch and Jerome Lettvin, Researchers and Inventors who would call on Walter’s mathematical genius to test and publish the one of the most shocking and least understood paper’s in the history of science: What The Frog’s Eye Tells The Frog’s Brain. Photo by on Trevor Cole Unsplash Thesis Meets AntiThesis If the Principia Mathematica was a Thesis, Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem was it’s AntiThesis. As it turns out, Pitts wasn’t the only person pouring over the Principia Mathematica. In fact, none of the work by Levitt, McCullogh, or Minsky would have been possible with PM. The Principia Mathematica attempted to create a ‘ .’ bible of mathematics and logic, from which all mathematical and logical ideas could be derived 20 years later, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, showed that the Principia Mathematica — or any such attempt at creating a bible of math and logic from which all mathematical and logical ideas — was impossible. There would always be inconsistencies, no matter how true the individual statements were. The resolution, or SynThesis/Aufhebung between the Whitehead & Russell’s Principia Mathematica and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem lead to the revolutionary and radically emergent and the Church-Turing Thesis. Turing Computer Many people think that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem washed away all relevance of the . If that were true, Godel would have never continued contributing to the eternal study of Russell’s work. In fact, Godel himself attempted a mathematical proof for the existence of God. Principia Mathematica From 1943 onward, Godel became increasingly interested in philosophy and relativity theory. In 1944, he contributed a study of (see §X– Principia) to the Russell volume in the Library of Living Philosophers. Russell’s mathematical logic Inducting The Foundations Of Math Into The Sky In 1942, while Godel, Russell, and Whitehead had moved onto Philosophy, a grown-up Walter Pitts and the elder Warren McCulloch published their groundbreaking, “On the Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity” which served as the basis for AI research. The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was done by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943). They drew on three sources: knowledge of the basic physiology and function of neurons in the brain; the formal analysis of propositional logic due to Russell and Whitehead; and Turing’s theory of computation. — Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, AI, a Modern Approach At the end of the paper, McCulloch-Pitts cited just three sources, all which are inextricably linked to Whitehead & Russell’s Principia Mathematica: This paper by McCulloch-Pitts became a key foundation for Artificial Intelligence. It was there, late in that year (1942), that Warren and Walter conceived and wrote their famous paper, “On the Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity,” and its sequel, “How We Perceive Universals.” These papers are at the root of what later became AI, artificial intelligence. They were published in Rashevsky’s Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. It is hard to describe the ferment in those long evenings, but for the first time I began to perceive what was at issue in the study of the brain. — Lettvin, The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, Vol. 2, Larry Squire Inducting the Foundations of Math into the Eyes and the Brain Four years after McCulloch Pitts published ‘On the Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity’, Lettvin wanted to test an assumption. “The assumption has always been that the eye mainly senses light, whose local distribution is transmitted to the brain in a kind of copy by a mosaic of impulse….” — Lettvin The assumption at the time — and the assumption that is largely believed today — is that the brain is the sole information processor in the human body. By attaching electrodes to a frog’s optic nerve, the team of Lettvin, McCulloch-Pitts, and Maturana discovered something shocking: the frog’s eye doesn’t simply send information to the frog’s brain for processing. Lettvin’s research showed that the frog’s eye was playing a huge role in the interpretation of information. The brain wasn’t the only calculator helping the frog catch flies. Quote In short, Lettvin’s group discovered that a lot of what was thought to happen in the brain actually happened in the eye itself. “ The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors,” . he concluded What a Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain shocked everyone. Well, humored is a more accurate description. We were laughed off the stage, literally, at the American Physiology Society in Atlantic City, where we tried to present it,” ­Lettvin told his collaborator Luis ­Amador in 1986. Even after the paper was published in 1959, the findings met with considerable skepticism. One disgruntled scientist — fellow MIT researcher Walter Rosenblith — ”felt we were … liars, held a meeting on perception, visual perception, and didn’t invite us,” Lettvin told ­Amador. Another colleague circumvented the snub by taking conference attendees on an unannounced visit to his lab so they could see for themselves how the experiment was done. The visiting audience was convinced, and Rosenblith soon apologized. “And that,” Lettvin concluded, “was the time that we began to be .” taken seriously The paper was so shocking that it made Danny Hillis QUIT neurobiology before he even began. Phew! Danny Hillis now holds over 300 patents in computer science and is another head on the Mount Rushmore of Computer Science forever indebted to McCullough-Pitts and Lettvin. DID YOU KNOW: Jerome Lettvin once ghost-wrote pamphlets for the YCL, the Young Communist League, to practice ‘putting forth vehemently what I don’t believe, but he [Warren McCulloch] and Walter persuaded .’ me to stop The Triumph of AI The Synthesis between the Principia Mathematica and Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem provided the . Foundation for all of Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Research & Development With the limits of logical reasoning now on full display, the following inventions burst forth: Turing’s Machine Church’s Lambda Calculus McCullogh-Pitts’ On the Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity Whitehead’s Theory of Relativity in opposition to Einstein Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and the Philosophy of the Organism The Synthesis between the information processing in the Frog’s Eye vis a vis the information processing in the Frog’s Brain was shocking. The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors,” . he concluded It meant that studying the brain would only give you a partial ideas of what the human was thinking and feeling. What The Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain is a critical idea in computer science. It shows that information processing happens at the edge of the human body — in the eye (and the hands, tongue, nose…?) — not just in the brain. In fact, the most prolific Venture Capital firm in the world, Andreessen Horowitz, is leveraging these ideas in conjunction with OODA Loops to create an entire new industry in computing that could be more valuable than Cloud Computing — Edge Computing. The Tragedy of AI And young master Pitts? The master mathematician and logician that escaped high-school bullies to invent with the geniuses of geniuses at the University of Chicago, Kellex, and MIT? “Would I had him with me always.” — McCulloch Pitts has a short, prolific career. Too short, too prolific. Having abandoned his parents in Detroit, his new colleagues became his family After his landmark publication in 1942 with McCullough, Pitts was snapped up for two years as a Mathematician for the Manhattan arm of the atomic bomb project. “I now understand at once some seven-eighths of what Wiener says, which I am told is something of an achievement,” Pitts wrote in a letter to McCulloch in December of 1943, some three months after he’d arrived. His work with Wiener was “to constitute the first adequate discussion of statistical mechanics, understood in the most general possible sense, so that it includes for example the problem of deriving the psychological, or statistical, laws of behavior from the microscopic laws of neurophysiology … Doesn’t it sound fine?” — Pitts In this new family, his father figure was Norbert Wiener, a Scientist who was heavily influenced by the writings of Whitehead & Russell. His [Norbert’s] PhD thesis was in mathematical logic….Schmidt [his academic supervisor] suggested for his topic a comparison between the algebra of relatives of Schroeder and that of Whitehead and Russell (see Norbert, On Ordered Pairs, 1914). Wiener found the work easy although later, under Russell, “I learned that I had missed almost every issue of true philosophical significance”. During [Norbert’s] last year at Harvard he applied for and was awarded a travelling fellowship which he decided to use by studying with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University. [Norbert] was soon to be . 19-years old Lettvin introduced Pitts to Wiener as his new right-hand scientist when Wiener’s previous student died suddenly in a skiing accident. [Walter Pitts is] without question the strongest young scientist whom I have ever met … I should be extremely astonished if he does not prove to be one of the two or three most important scientists of his generation, not merely in America but in the world at large.” — Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of … After World War II, Pitts was happy to reunite with his father figure Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch, his partner in crime. The three planned on finalizing deciphering the mysteries of the brain and of knowledge itself. Alas, God laughs at man’s plans. There was just one person who wasn’t happy about the reunion: Wiener’s wife. Margaret Wiener was, by all accounts, a controlling, conservative prude — and she despised McCulloch’s influence on her husband. McCulloch hosted wild get-togethers at his family farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where ideas roamed free and everyone went skinny-dipping. It had been one thing when McCulloch was in Chicago, but now he was coming to Cambridge and Margaret wouldn’t have it. And so she invented a story. She sat Wiener down and informed him that when their daughter, Barbara, had stayed at McCulloch’s house in Chicago, several of “his boys” had seduced her. Wiener immediately sent an angry telegram to Wiesner: “Please inform [Pitts and Lettvin] that all connection between me and your projects is permanently abolished. They are your problem. Wiener.” . He never spoke to Pitts again Returning to the conditions at MIT Walter, as I said, fled his home in his early times because of his father. Warren and I were his close friends but Wiener became the father he never had. One day, in 1952, Wiener sent from Mexico City a registered letter to Jerry Wiesner severing forever all relations with Warren, Walter, and me. Years later, Arturo Rosenblith, at whose house the Wieners had stayed at the time, gave an account of what happened. It is a shameful story; Wiener himself was as much a victim as we. The tale is not worth telling here. But the anathema destroyed Walter. He gradually and politely bowed out of being, lost interest in pretty much everything, and became inaccessible. After the few years that Warren and Rook, then Maggie and I, took him in, he did what he could to disappear in a small rented room where he died after years of unrelieved despair. He had burnt everything he ever wrote. I have often wondered whether I could have done anything. After all, as psychiatrist I could have a found a colleague to take him on. But the problem was that Walter would not go, and in any case was dead of despair long before he died. Wiener was unapproachable on the matter by any of our many mutual friends. — Lettvin On Saturday, April 21, 1969, his hand shaking with an alcoholic’s delirium tremens, Pitts sent a letter from his room at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston to McCulloch’s room down the road at the Cardiac Intensive Care Ward at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. “I understand you had a light coronary; … that you are attached to many sensors connected to panels and alarms continuously monitored by a nurse, and cannot in consequence turn over in bed. No doubt this is cybernetical. But it all makes me most abominably sad.” Pitts himself had been in the hospital for three weeks, having been admitted with liver problems and jaundice. On May 14, 1969 Walter Pitts died alone in a boarding house in Cambridge, of bleeding esophageal varices, a condition associated with cirrhosis of the liver. Four months later, McCulloch passed away, as if the existence of one without the other were simply illogical, a reverberating . loop wrenched open

Andreessen Horowitz

Alphabet

Mosaic

The Tragedy of Artificial Intelligence

Serverless Computing has emerged in the past year as a compelling architectural alternative for building and running modern applications and services. Serverless applications allow developers to focus on their code, instead of on the infrastructure configuration and management. This speeds up development and release cycles, as well as allows for better, more efficient, scaling. Serverless computing is closely tied to new architecture patterns and technologies such as Microservices and Containers. Greenfield, cloud-native applications are often microservices-based, which makes them ideal for running on containers (Docker). The further decoupling — and abstraction — that Serverless functions allow between the application and the infrastructure make them an ideal pattern for developing modern microservices that can run across different environments. As Serverless applications become more used (with Lambda being the most popular cloud service offered by AWS), we increasingly see enterprises who want to enable a Serverless experience for their engineers on on-premises infrastructure as well-meaning Serverless are getting into hybrid cloud environments next! While Serverless offers a lot of benefits, implementing it successfully, alongside containers, comes with quite a few challenges — particularly for IT Ops. While Serverless speeds up development, it needs a Kubernetes cluster in order to run, and Kubernetes is notoriously difficult to deploy and manage. Furthermore, these new technologies increase the complexity, scale, and sprawl of the IT environment, tooling, and applications that today’s enterprises need to support. Add the new Serverless to the mixed environments that already exist — of Cloud resources, traditional VMs and even bare metal — and things get even more complicated for IT. , I will cover some best practices and patterns to enable both developers and Ops teams to take advantage of Serverless computing in a way that supports their overall IT operations — and takes them to the next level! In this series I will discuss: What are Serverless architectures and what it means for you Challenges and “gotchas” with current Serverless implementations and how they hinder enterprise adoption The impact of Kubernetes on Serverless How open source Serverless frameworks help Reference architectures for different types of business applications using Serverless functions Introduction to Serverless Architectures First, some definitions. Cloud Native: The most critical characteristic of a Cloud Native (CN) architecture is the ability to dynamically scale to support massive numbers of users, and large, distributed development and operations teams. This requirement is even more critical when we consider that cloud computing is inherently multi-tenant in nature. Within this area, the typical requirements we need to address are: the ability to grow the deployment footprint dynamically (scale-up) as well as to decrease the footprint (scale-down) the ability to automatically handle failures across tiers that can disrupt application availability the ability to accommodate large development teams by ensuring that components themselves provide loose coupling the ability to work with virtually any kind of infrastructure (compute, storage and network) implementation Mono, Micro and Serverless: the evolution of modern application architecture Most enterprise (legacy) applications are Monolithic in nature, with tight coupling and interdependencies between application components, infrastructure, development teams, technologies, tooling, etc. This tight coupling poses challenges to the speed and agility of development, the adoption of new technologies or DevOps practices, as well as to the ease of scaling and operating these applications. Microservices are a natural evolution of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. In this approach, the application is decomposed into loosely coupled business functions, each mapped to one or more microservices. Each microservice is built for a specific, granular business function and can be worked on by an independent developer or team. By being a separate code artifact it is loosely coupled not just from a tooling or communication standpoint (typically communication using a RESTful API with data being passed around using a JSON/XML representation) but also from a build, deployment, upgrade and maintenance process perspective. Each microservice can optionally have its localized datastore. An important advantage of adopting this approach is that each microservice can be created using a separate technology stack from the other parts of the application. Containers are an efficient, most optimal, way to run microservices, with Container orchestration solutions, such as the open source Kubernetes, required to handle the runtime operations of Container clusters. Microservices and containers are now an integral component of any digital transformation strategy, as they allow for easier build, independent development and deployment and better scaling. Serverless is the next step in this evolution. Serverless Computing is a new paradigm in software development where the application developer is focused on coding the application functions and is freed from having to invest time and effort in configuring and managing the resources required to deploy and run these applications. In this paradigm, the cloud or infrastructure provider needs to do all the required plumbing for the application to be instantiated once a request has been received for it. The developer focuses on the code of the application, and it is the responsibility of the underlying data center provider to manage all associated resources required to run it, reliably. is the most common type of serverless computing where the application is developed as a pure software function aimed at a granular use case (an extremely fine-grained microservice, if you will.) Multiple functions can then be composed together and optionally used in conjunction with a microservices application to perform business functionality. For the rest of this article series, I will use both terms — Serverless and FaaS — interchangeably. Functions as a Service (FaaS) Serverless and FaaS allow for fine-grained billing. Since FaaS gets idle functions to consume much lower CPU/memory, cluster resource usage becomes more proportional to real usage than deployment size. When the functions are idle, the server resources are not instantiated, and so cost is reduced. Keep in mind, however, that billing advantages depend, quite sensitively, on actual usage patterns. A function that runs for one second every 10 seconds is cheaper on Lambda, but if it runs for 2 seconds every 10 sec it’s cheaper on EC2. You have to model your usage accurately and evaluate whether Serverless will actually save you money. The Characteristics of Serverless Architectures Serverless Architectures, or Functions as a Service (FaaS), conform to the following broad principles: They’re at the extreme end of loosely coupled architectures. While the applications using them are typical web apps or rich client applications, they also support a great degree of usage from ‘headless’ apps such as IoT, Streaming data, etc. These applications natively leverage cloud-based 3rd party services such as events/messaging, authentication services, etc. They support a variety of data models — NoSQL being dominant. The reason is that the functions in a Serverless architecture are lightweight and need to package all their dependencies into a nimble database, making NoSQL a great fit. They demand horizontal scaling as a fundamental tenet. The application should automatically scale up or down depending on throughput. From a developer standpoint, the flexibility afforded by serverless frameworks makes them a fast and cost-effective way for developing digital applications The FaaS application needs to be abstracted completely from the underlying infrastructure stack. This is key as development teams can focus solely on the application code and do not need to worry about the maintenance of the underlying OS/Storage/Network. The provision-deploy-scale cycle of cloud-native Serverless applications is managed automatically — both from a scaling and failover perspectives — to support 24/7 operations at any load. Thus, the overall flow of a FaaS architecture is fairly straightforward: An event (e.g. an online order at a retailer) is received by an API Manager. The Manager creates an http request that results in a function being launched The function is first instantiated in a container. The container has all the configuration the function needs to run, including its dependencies The function processes the request The container is then automatically destroyed The user only pays for the resources consumed (RAM, CPU, Disk etc.) during the time the function ran. Serverless computing solves the biggest challenge that developers face (even with a PaaS or a container orchestration platform such as Kubernetes) — the need to own, scale & manage infrastructure. The containers running these Serverless workloads are neither provisioned nor monitored or otherwise managed by the developer. They get to build applications that just run, without having to worry about servers. A note on Serverless vs. PaaS Serverless frameworks are different from PaaS technology in four different ways: If one thinks of a monolith being composed of hundreds of microservices, the microservice itself can be decomposed into hundreds of functions. Unlike with PaaS, while using Serverless frameworks DevOps teams are free from worrying about updates, application scale up/down events, idle costs, complex build/deploy operations, etc. Everything underlying the core function and its logic is handled by the infrastructure provider. Serverless technologies are not opinionated about the DevOps methodology used to develop, test and deploy them — unlike a PaaS which is typically stringent about the developer workflow. Serverless functions have very low startup latency unlike applications deployed on a PaaS. Serverless frameworks, however, are feature limited compared to PaaS. The increased simplicity does come with feature disparity. Serverless frameworks run best on Kubernetes compared to running on PaaS. Most PaaS technologies have earned a reputation for being too rigid across several areas — developer workflow, architecture and pricing — that make them a bad fit to run serverless workloads. In the words of Brendan Burns, “the first generation of Platforms as a Service (PaaS) was squarely aimed at enabling developers to adopt “serverless” architectures. The trouble was, that as is the case in many first wave products, too many overlapping concepts were mixed into a single monolithic product. In the case of most first-generation PaaS, developer experience, serverless and pricing model (request-based) were all mixed together in an inseparable monolith. Thus, a user who might have wanted to adopt serverless, but perhaps not the developer experience (e.g. a specific programming language) or who wanted a more cost-efficient pricing model for large applications, was forced to give up serverless computing also.” In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss some of the challenges and key considerations for choosing the right Serverless solution.

Alongside

What is Serverless and What it Means for You — Part 1

See the first part, of this 5-part blog series, . here AWS Lambda? Azure functions? Openwhisk? Fission? As you’re considering Serverless and looking for ways to get started (with shedding all your infrastructure-worries :-)), and ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when choosing the right Serverless solution to support the needs of large scale enterprises today. here are some considerations 1. Lock-in to a particular cloud provider This is an obvious one. All the leading cloud providers lock customers into the unique implementation of their Serverless framework. For instance, AWS Lambda relies on a panoply of AWS offerings across DNS (Route53), API Gateway, S3, Database, Networking (VPCs), etc. These proprietary components are needed to compose complex serverless applications. This means that Lambda functions, for example, are not portable across other cloud providers. Once written, portability or re-use of these functions on other environments are next to impossible since it is not just the application logic and functionality that needs to be re-written, but also all the essential services provided by the cloud provider. Essentially, you could be swapping the tight coupling between the app components and the infrastructure with another type of dependency. This is a problem, particularly since the world of modern software delivery has consistently demonstrated that striving towards as much de-coupling as possible, object re-use and portability — are all critical to ensuring business agility and ease of operations. In addition to this dependency, the specific cloud providers introduce additional limitations that developers need to be aware of when choosing their preferred service. For example, AWS Lambda limits the artifact sizes (50 MB at the time of writing), the number of concurrent executions and amount of memory allocated per invocation. 2. Cost (and hidden costs.) As we touched on in the previous part of this series, the billing advantages of Serverless depend, quite sensitively, on actual usage patterns. In addition, the cost of using a given FaaS framework should not be viewed in isolation from the cost of the surrounding ecosystem services required to run the functions. For example, the financial implications of using Lambda in a large enterprise is not limited to just vanilla CPU/RAM/Network cost but consists also of the associated charges of API Gateway, S3, Dynamo, costs of sending data across VPCs, etc. Most users find that the charges quickly add up with the public cloud providers. If your transaction volumes remain high (and scales-up higher,) solutions such as Lambda functions can potentially cost more of your budget than anticipated. Possible fixes include designing the application in such a way that a larger batch size of data can be ingested into the function, keeping the execution time lower by writing more efficient code, data transfer costs across VPCs and Availability Zones (AZs,) etc. Cross VPC transfers require Lambda functions to open Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI) which causes longer execution times and a higher charge for the transfers themselves. Whatever be the fix, it stands to reason that Functions should also be offered on the Private cloud and on-premises infrastructure as well. 3. Startup Latency One issue pointed out by various users of the public clouds has been the cold start challenge associated with using FaaS frameworks. Once a (Lambda) function has not been used for a certain length of time, the system reclaims the resources that it held, meaning additional spin-up time is required to restart the function — instantiating another container, loading up its dependencies and then making it available. For certain real-time or near real-time applications in IoT or Cognitive applications serving live end-users, 100ms latency is too high. In contrast, the open source Serverless framework Fission allows you to pre-tune some reserved resources across a spectrum, to ensure your application is ready with minimum latency. 4. Serverless Applications on Private Cloud/On-prem Sometimes, you want to own and have full control over your infrastructure and ensure easy portability between environments. Maybe your workload is too business critical, maybe your business organization is not super comfortable adding dependencies to new cloud services. Maybe you want more visibility into the development of the systems you use. And, most commonly, you may want to save on IT costs by leveraging your existing infrastructure, rather than increasing your public cloud footprint. Still, even when using on-prem infrastructure, you still want to be able to enable your developers to modernize their applications and take advantage of new patterns such as Serverless. In the private cloud, most serverless implementations are based on a PaaS platform. The limiting model of a PaaS essentially calls into question the usage of a serverless framework on it. In that sense, serverless frameworks have been added to commercial PaaS’s as an afterthought. The lock-in around such integration makes this one a very difficult proposition as it adds another layer of complexity to an already complex architecture. The net result is that technical debt can get compounded in the case of inefficiently designed applications. 5. Complex CI/CD toolchains FaaS frameworks are still evolving and their place in the complex CI/CD toolchain is still being formed. It will take a lot of upfront investment & diligence by development teams to integrate Serverless frameworks into their Continuous Delivery pipelines. For instance, A newly developed or modified function needs to be passed through a chain of checks — from unit testing to UAT — before being promoted to Production. This can make the process more cumbersome. For FaaS, additional load and performance testing needs to be in place for each individual function. This is critical before deploying these to Production. Rollback and rollforward capabilities need to be put in place for each function. The Ops team needs to get involved much earlier compared to microservices-based development. 7. Silo’ing of Serverless Operations from Other IT Ops Developers may be exempt from worrying about servers. Ops teams, however — particularly in large enterprises that operate in complex hybrid environments — still need to have visibility and to be able to manage Serverless applications and their footprint. This is doubly-true if you’re trying to enable Serverless on a Private Cloud. While Serverless, like other technologies, may involve specific tools or services, IT still needs to be able to have a single pane of glass and granular visibility and control over ALL types of applications (legacy, microservices, serverless) — across ALL environments — be it on-premises, public clouds, private cloud, containers, and more. You need a solution that allows Ops to incorporate Serverless-based applications into their overall IT strategy, processes and tools — like they would any other type of application. 8. Visibility and Monitoring On Lambda, for example, the biggest complaint from users is that they do not know what’s going on. In contrast, the open source Serverless framework provides built-in integration with native Kubernetes monitoring tools that give you as good visibility and troubleshooting over your Serverless functions as you’re accustomed to for other containerized applications. Fission To be sure, serverless architectures demand a higher level of technology & cultural maturity from enterprises adopting them. The next post in this series will discuss what can be done about this critical enterprise architecture challenge leveraging Kubernetes.

What is Serverless — Part 2: Challenges and Considerations for Choosing the Right Serverless…

What Clojure is? Clojure is modern dialect of old school programming language named as LISP. Clojure strongly believes in Code as Data and Data as Code philosophy just like LISP. Clojure is a dynamic, general purpose programming language that runs in the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure emphasizes Get Clojure set up Clojure needs JVM as its runs on top of JVM. Make sure you have min Java 1.7 installed on your system mkdir -p ~/bin && cd ~/bin 

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein 

chmod a+x lein

export PATH="$PATH":~/bin or curl -O https://download.clojure.org/install/linux-install-1.10.0.403.shchmod +x linux-install-1.10.0.403.shsudo ./linux-install-1.10.0.403.sh Data Structures 4 fundamental Data Structure of Clojure. List () Vector [] Sets #{}images Maps {} By Immutable means value of the collections will not change at any point of time, while adding, updating, removing elements from the collections, rather the output will be the new version of structure. List in Clojure are the fundamentals. List in Clojure are linked list and first element in list is always evaluated as function call. Everything in between two braces in Clojure is list. List is useful when we want to get items from the top of the list. Vectors [] are the default way to make sequences in Clojure. Vectors are heterogeneous. We can retrieve the items from them and also add them at the end and at the beginning. When we want to add new element in to the list the newest element will always get added at the end of the vector. Retrieval in Clojure vectors is very fast. Maps {} are extremely useful and widely used in Clojure to store the structured data in {:key value} format. To retrieve the value from the maps we can use and also we can use as a function to retrieve the values from the maps which is more idiomatic way to retrieve from the maps. get keys Some useful functions can be used for maps operations are get — To retrieve the values from the maps assoc — To update the maps dissoc — To remove the key/values from the maps keys — To get all the keys in the map vals — To get all the keys in the map merge — To merge the multiple maps into one single map Sets #{} are collections of unique values. No repetitions allowed.

Clojure Immutable and Persistent Data Structures

Every developer needs to know a bunch of tools to be effective. cURL in one such tool 😄 In this article I will explain how . curl can be used to make HTTP requests What is cURL cURL is basically used to transfer data using Internet Protocols for the given URL. Curl is a Client side program. In the name , stands for Client and indicates curl works with URL’s. cURL c URL The curl project has a curl command line and also a libcurl library. In this article we will be focussing on the curl command line. Curl deals with a bunch of Internet Protocols like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, TELNET and so on. In this article we will deal only with making HTTP requests from Curl. Pre-requisite You can check if you have Curl Installed in your System using the command. curl --version If Curl is not there in your system you can install it from this URL . https://curl.haxx.se/dlwiz/ How to Use Curl for HTTP Requests I have built 2 REST Endpoints using . One endpoint supports GET request and the other endpoint supports POST request. API NodeJS In this article, we will be calling the GET and POST endpoints using Curl. Please clone the NodeJS code into your local from this github repo The repo has instructions on how to clone and run the NodeJS code. After cloning the code, go into the project folder and start the application using the following command. node server.js The application runs on localhost port 3000. GET Request with cURL The application has a GET endpoint . This endpoint accepts a query parameter called . /sample name Let’s call this API endpoint using curl. Go to a new command prompt and type the following command curl http://localhost:3000/sample?name=aditya This will give the following output {"text":"Hello aditya"} You can also get a verbose result using Curl. Run the following command curl -v http://localhost:3000/sample?name=aditya is used to get verbose output. -v This will give the following output. *   Trying ::1...* TCP_NODELAY set*   Trying 127.0.0.1...* TCP_NODELAY set* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 3000 (#0)> GET /sample?name=aditya HTTP/1.1> Host: localhost:3000> User-Agent: curl/7.55.1> Accept: */*>< HTTP/1.1 200 OK< Content-Type: application/json< Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 12:36:21 GMT< Connection: keep-alive< Content-Length: 23<{"text":"Hello aditya"}* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact The verbose result has details like status code, Content Type, Content Length and so on. It can be used to get a better idea of what happened during the HTTP request. The status code is 200 which indicates the HTTP request was successful. The Content-type of the response is JSON. The Content-Length indicates the size of the response. Here the response size is 23 bytes. POST request with cURL The application has a POST endpoint . This endpoint accepts a post body of the following format. /test {    "value":"nodejs"} In order to make the POST call, type the following command. curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"value\":\"node JS\"}" http://localhost:3000/test indicates the content type of the post body. Here it is JSON. –header is used to send the post body content. -d The output of this command is shown below. {"text":"Post Request Value is node JS"} To get Verbose result use the following command curl -v --header "Content-Type: application/json" -d "{\"value\":\"node JS\"}" http://localhost:3000/test The output is shown below. *   Trying ::1...* TCP_NODELAY set*   Trying 127.0.0.1...* TCP_NODELAY set* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 3000 (#0)> POST /test HTTP/1.1> Host: localhost:3000> User-Agent: curl/7.55.1> Accept: */*> Content-Type: application/json> Content-Length: 19>* upload completely sent off: 19 out of 19 bytes< HTTP/1.1 200 OK< Content-Type: application/json< Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:03:37 GMT< Connection: keep-alive< Content-Length: 41 Additional Options provided by command line The existing headers can be modified using option. -H Run the following Command to modify the header to User-Agent Dummy Agent curl -v -H "User-Agent:Dummy Agent" http://localhost:3000/sample?name=adi The output for the above command is shown below *   Trying ::1...* TCP_NODELAY set*   Trying 127.0.0.1...* TCP_NODELAY set* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 3000 (#0)> GET /sample?name=adi HTTP/1.1> Host: localhost:3000> Accept: */*> User-Agent:Dummy Agent>< HTTP/1.1 200 OK< Content-Type: application/json< Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:33:27 GMT< Connection: keep-alive< Content-Length: 20<{"text":"Hello adi"}* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact In the above output it can be seen that has become . User-Agent Dummy Agent Now Let’s say you want to remove the Header. This can be done by running the following command. Host curl -v -H "Host:" http://localhost:3000/sample?name=adi The output for the above command is given below and it can be seen that is not there anymore Host *   Trying ::1...* TCP_NODELAY set* connect to ::1 port 3000 failed: Connection refused*   Trying 127.0.0.1...* TCP_NODELAY set* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 3000 (#0)> GET /sample?name=adi HTTP/1.1> User-Agent: curl/7.55.1> Accept: */*>< HTTP/1.1 200 OK< Content-Type: application/json< Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:38:37 GMT< Connection: keep-alive< Content-Length: 20<{"text":"Hello adi"}* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact can be used to add new headers as well. This can be done using the syntax -H curl -v -H "newheader: headervalue" References cURL’s Documenation: https://ec.haxx.se/ More Info on Using Curl for HTTP requests https://ec.haxx.se/http.html Congrats 😄 You now know how to use cURL for basic HTTP requests. This article covers a very small portion of what curl can actually do. To know more about curl you can check the documentation links I have provided above. About the author I love technology and follow the advancements in the field. Feel free to connect with me on my LinkedIn account https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya1811/ You can also follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/adityasridhar18 My Website: https://adityasridhar.com/ Originally published at adityasridhar.com .

STEPN

BUNCH

How to Easily use cURL for HTTP Requests

I’ll give you a hint: (Okay, so that wasn’t much of a clue — more the answer. Let me explain.) to solve a capacity problem. More often than not, we’re approached by team leaders with an identifiable struggle to deliver. The telling of the tale goes something like this… We have a big project due in a few months. We have three developers — two juniors and one senior. We’ve been trying to hire another “Senior developer” for a long while, but we can’t seem to find anyone. We need someone who knows [technology ABCD] and we hear you do that. Are you available to start next week?! Answer: Yes, and no. Our team writes a lot of code. We use technology that many other people around the world are experts in. While our team at is genuine, generous, and more than proficient, there are plenty of people who can create software that fits a design spec as well as our team — some will charge more; some will charge less. ZEAL Our value as “consultants” is not exclusive to the code we write. It’s in the insight, experience, and, more importantly, the process we develop and follow. Don’t get me wrong Hiring part-time to buffer team growth, tackling a termed project initiative, or adding unique technical expertise to help level up an internal team is a substantial operational strategy. Too often, the classification “consultant” is treated synonymously with “contractor.” contractors Process is the core product Sure, there are times when a struggle to deliver is technical; where the work is time-consuming and laborious to produce. Writing software is an abstract art form, and the complexity of writing code will continue as technology evolves. Of all the great consultancies, there are two qualities they all share: a diverse body of work and a consistent approach to uncertainty. I’ve interviewed many successful consultancy operators and time and time again they recognize that uncertainty is not a problem to avoid, but a component of the work to manage. Regardless of the flavor of project management they chose, you’ll find that their process of collaboration with each other, how they manage the list of features to build, their means of delivering code to a production server, and how they handle QA is methodologically consistent. In other words… They have a process. So… What’s the best reason to hire a software “consultancy?” The easy answer is: But let’s assume for a minute that you’d never hire a person or company (full time or contract) with the gut-level feeling that they won’t support that goal. Let’s assume your chosen people/team can write code well. Then, to deliver a great product that serves the business. what’s left? What happens when they leave? The best reason to hire a software consultancy is to develop a procedural recipe that’s unique to business, fosters certainty, manages uncertainty, protects the integrity of the product, delivers quality features continuously, and with as little friction, as possible. A process that your team can maintain and build upon when the consultancy leaves. your Components of this would include: A conceptual approach to new technologies Internal communication plan Team meeting structure and schedule Hiring and training schedule Quality assurance process Review and deployment methodology For , we develop this recipe while doing the work. It’s a practical exploration based on working the client’s team (product managers, developers, stakeholders). Every new recipe starts with diverse prior experiences and evolves from there. ZEAL with In short: the value of consulting is in the process they help develop with you and leave with you when they’re gone.

The worst reason to hire a software “consultancy”

Fiber optics play a big part in the infrastructure that runs a lot of the world’s connectivity. We all need the internet, and fiber optics is one of the fastest modes of transport for information and telecommunications. Therefore, fiber optic technicians and engineers are in high demand right now and careers in all kinds of industries are just waiting for you. If you have been dreaming of a career in fiber optics, now is the time to get your foot in the door. Right now, fiber optics offers many rewarding opportunities with different types of companies from internet providers serving broadband communications, to medical device manufacturers and military operations. Fiber optic cable is used in hundreds of industries around the globe. Depending on the industry and the company, earn a good, stable salary with the median being around $55,000 a year. If you get in with a good company and the work is more complex and detailed, that figure will increase. There are tons of great benefits working with fiber. A standout is that you don’t need a high-level college degree, just specialized skill experience. You can gain a lot of experience as an apprentice to a master engineer for 3–5 years before beginning your career. This experience looks great on your resume and shows your commitment to the industry and career path. fiber optic engineers Finding the Perfect Job in Fiber Optics Fiber optic technicians are critical to the operations of broadband communications by installing the cables that transmit the information over long distances. Fiber optics work by information being turned into light which travels very fast until it reaches its destination when it is then transformed back into data when it reaches its destination. A lot of the work performed by a fiber optics engineer is maintenance and troubleshooting. If you have an aptitude for finding and fixing problems, networking, IT, or working with tools, those skills will come in handy when you apply. Sometimes technicians have to work in foul weather, up high on poles or under houses and in crawl spaces. If none of this bothers you, you might find being a fiber optics technician to be the perfect job. Fiber optic technicians have to be comfortable working in tight spaces, using ladders, and handling heavy tools. Often, technicians get to know the communities they work in very well and make some great connections and friendships. Seeing the same close-knit group of customers frequently makes for a pleasant working environment and a rewarding experience. If you like friendly encounters with customers, a fiber job might be right for you. How Fiber Optics Affect Our Lives Optical fibers are thin strands of glass that are bundled together to form a cable. Data is transmitted through these cables inside light, which travels very fast. Fiber optic cable is one of the fastest mediums for communicating data over the internet. were initially invented for the medical industry and endoscopy. There are various types of fiber, and it is used in a variety of industries around the world. The military uses fiber optics, as does the medical industry. It is also used in broadcasting and computer networking. Fiber optics Due to the versatility of fiber optics, the career opportunities are endless. If you are interested in medicine and the development of new devices, and you have a background in fiber optics, there will be a job for you. If instead you are into networking and IT services, broadband might be the best fit for your fiber optic skills to shine. How to Structure Your Resume for a Career in Fiber Optics If your goal is to work in fiber optics, a good resume is vital. First, you will want to make sure you . You may be interested in a few different areas, so spend time customizing each copy of your resume to fit the job description. tailor your resume specifically to the industry in which you are applying is the first impression you will make. Take the time to make it great. Right from the first sentence, highlight the ways you can serve your new employer with your skill sets. Be concise but also clear, and focus on your strongest experience and abilities. Your resume introduction Instead of starting with a broad and generic career objective, instead, list your unique skills and how they will serve you well in this new position. Don’t be shy, include any personal skills or hobbies that will aid you in doing your job and fit nicely with a fiber optics career path. Electrical Engineering and Fiber Optics has been shaping our modern world for decades. From its humble beginnings in 1830 when Michael Faraday invented a crude, electric generator to light bulbs in 1878 and then TV and satellites, electrical engineers have blazed a trail for the future. Electrical engineering The 1980s and the explosion of the internet and mobile devices opened up a lot of exciting opportunities in engineering. 3D imaging, flexible smartphones with holographic displays and other significant advances being invented right now are paving the way for even more careers in technology. Fiber optics play a big part in so many areas of our lives and the need for skilled, qualified technicians is expanding right along with it. Right now is the perfect time for a career in fiber optics. If you are unsure about how to start, find someone working in the fiber optic field and ask them to you so you can learn the ins and outs before hitting any . Ask questions and gain as much knowledge as you can before you start on this career path. mentor interviews If you are in good physical shape, and enjoy hard work and learning new things, fiber optics is a fantastic career that will take you to new heights of expertise. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and along with it you will get to learn more about the ways fiber is changing the world in which we live.

Different

Want a Career in Fiber Optics? Here’s Where to Start!

​If you’ve ever wondered how to make a great first impression you’re not alone. Here are a few messages from my readers who want to master first impressions. It’s okay if you’ve made some cringe worthy first impressions. Take this gem from my wife: A few years ago she was at her boss’ house for a party. ​ She was joking around with some of her coworkers, who were on the other side of the room. She playfully extends her middle finger. At that PRECISE MOMENT her boss’ father turns around and intercepts the middle finger. ​ I imagine that space and time slowed down while my wife watched him go through different emotions: Confusion, disbelief, denial, shock, sadness, and finally disdain. After the fabric of reality had stabilized, he looked away while saying “How RUDE.” This story makes me laugh every time. First impressions are crucial: When you walk into an interview for your dream job. When you meet your significant other’s family. When you meet a potential business partner for your company. Here’s the deal with first impressions: after people make up their mind about you, ( ) they use confirmation bias to only look for evidence to back up their initial impression. I’m not here to sugar coat things. I’m here to supercharge your people skills. Some studies say in as little as 1/10th of a second So what can you do to reliably create great first impressions with almost everyone you meet? ​It all starts with your mindset because 80% of the work is done before you ever shake hands… 1. Expect Great Things To Happen. Cultivate Pronoia. There’s a little known concept called Pronoia that I like to recommend to . my private coaching clients Simply put, it’s the notion that the world is conspiring to do good things to you. Most of us, , assume the worst possible outcome when it comes to most social situations. due to the negativity bias When we’re heading into a “meeting new people” situation, we absolutely want to assume that good things will happen. We tend to find what we look for. All things considered, I’d rather look for the positive, not the negative. How to cultivate pronoia: AJ Jacobs, author of said in his recent guest-host episode of the Tim Ferriss show that the best way to overcome the negativity bias is to take a few moments out of your day and be grateful and focus on all the things going RIGHT. Thanks A Thousand to learn how Jacobs wages war on the negativity bias. Click here and skip to the 14:19 mark ​take one minute and note five things you’re currently grateful for. These things could be as simple as: “I’m grateful that my phone loaded up Medium.” When we take a second to notice the often overlooked many things that are going in our lives, it subtly nudges our perspective. Jacobs says that there are two halves of himself that he tries to balance: the pessimistic Larry David side, and the optimistic Mr. Rodgers side. Balance is a good thing. right I take 30 seconds before I go to bed, and I pick three things I’m grateful for. What I do: The negativity bias is strong. When we meet new people, it’s crucial to expect good things. When we expect good things, it’s easier to make great first impressions. 2. Choose Who You Want To Be I can hear you out there. Scoffing and shaking your head. “Jeff, I don’t want to be fake!” Good news, I don’t want you to be fake either! Consider this…you might act differently around your old college buddies than you would at a board meeting. Does this mean you’re inauthentic because you aren’t discussing quarterly goals around your friends and using words like synergy and transparency? Nope. You’re simply adapting to the current social situation. When it comes to meeting new people, you can showcase any part of yourself that you want. Be thoughtful and focused. Or be gregarious and funny. While there aren’t any wrong answers, it’s useful to consider the following question: “What part of myself would be most effective in this situation?” At a pitch meeting with potential investors, you may need to showcase parts of yourself that communicate. “I can get shit done.” Meeting someone for a first date? You might want to turn up the “playful and fun-loving” vibe. It’s also helpful to tune your message to the audience you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a baseball fan, “hitting a home-run” will make sense when you’re talking about a recent win. This quote from Amy Cuddy sums this up well: _“The self can presumably be anything you want it to be. It can even be new, but that doesn’t make it insincere or inauthentic.”_-Amy Cuddy, Presence Action step: Write down the last three settings where you met someone new. Example: Met a new client at work. Met someone for a first date at a bar. Met a friend of a friend at a wedding. Answer these questions: What parts of my personality did I showcase? If I had it to do over, what — if anything would I change? What is one thing I could do differently next time I meet someone in one of these settings? 3. Be Proactive I’ve talked in the past about the , and first impressions are a great place for boldness, even if you’re naturally reserved or shy. benefits of being bold Picture this: you’re at a conference and in between speakers there’s a break. ​ You see a speaker and a group of people you could walk up to. What do most timid people do? Check Instagram Go to the bathroom even though they don’t need to. Read the fire escape sign. Again. What does a bold person do? They walk up and . join the group conversation They may say something like: “Hey, you guys seem fun, mind if I hang out for a moment? I’m NAME” Often, being bold doesn’t mean swinging from the chandeliers, it simply means squeezing out that 10% extra that most people assume they don’t have. You have it. When we stack being proactive and pronoia together, it becomes a wonderful cocktail of social awesomeness. That is… If you have the following skills… 4. Positive & Open Nonverbals What you don’t say says a lot. When we’re meeting someone for the first time, the other person is trying to “thin-slice” a lot of information in a short amount of time: -Is this person a threat? -Can they be trusted? -Do they have a bug collection that they want to tell me about in excruciating detail? before someone makes up their mind about us. Studies suggest that we have as little as 1/10th of a second After that, they punch their ticket to confirmation bias town, population: them. What should your body language be while approaching a new person? Smile! ​This will make you feel great, and the other person feel great. It will also let people know you’re probably not a murderer. It’s important to project a vibe that says “I’m happy to be here.” This video will help with this: Arms, (and by extension) hands should be relaxed and open. I love fidgeting… but during a conversation, the calmer your body language, the better. If you’re wearing shoes, Try rubbing your toes together instead of fidgeting with your hands. Seriously. Olivia Fox, the author of The Charisma Myth says toe-rubbing can make you feel more present in conversations. Feet should be uncrossed and supportive. No shifting from foot to foot. Avoid collapsed body language, it’s fine to take up space! ​ Resist the urge to cross your arms and collapse your shoulders. Here’s a handy picture I made for you, feel free to save it as your iPhone wallpaper: 5. Build Rapport Quickly You’ve made a great first impression so far. Your job is over now, right? WRONG. Your job now is to not to mess it up! This is where most people fumble on the 1-yard line. (Maybe it’s because most articles about first impressions stop here) Not this one. We’re going to talk about how to build rapport rapidly by asking great questions and keeping the spotlight (mostly) on your conversational partner. Open questions are your friends. Say you shake someone’s hand, and you notice that they have an interesting watch. You could ask: “That’s an interesting watch. What’s the story behind it?” Now you’re off to the races. You prompted them for a story, now the’ll give you one. Asking open questions is a great strategy because open questions can’t be answered in simple “Yes” or “no”. “Oh, this is a Cartier that was passed down to me by my Father…” Three other mad-libs style examples for you to steal: “What is your favorite ______________?” “How did you _________________?” “What was it like doing ________________?” Follow up questions are your other best friends. On my podcast, I’m always trying to dig for better, more thorough answers. Follow up questions are a great way to do that. Here are five examples of follow up questions you can steal: “Why _________?” “What was that like for you?” “When did you realize that _____________” “What was going through your mind at that moment?” “How did you know that _____________? Like a good interviewer, you’re digging for deeper emotions and a clearer picture of their experience. You can use follow up questions in a group, one-on-one, or even as a follow up to a question someone else has asked. They’re engineered to make people think and go beyond auto-pilot responses. 6. Avoid The Interrogation Trap Have you ever asked insightful questions only to watch as your conversational partner’s eyes glaze over and they lustfully eye the open window as an escape hatch? The issue could be that you’ve fallen into the “interrogation trap”. It’s crucial to balance questions and observations. Here’s what that might look like in practice: Ted: “This week has been crazy. I worked 42 hours on one project. When I close my eyes, I see spreadsheets!” You: “Wow! You must be really dedicated to getting stuff done!” Here, you were able to pay Ted a compliment while making an observation about his statement. With people skills, there are very few hard and fast rules. However, you should try to 50/50 balance questions you ask and observations you give. ​This will help you avoid the “interrogation trap” 7. Keep Them Talking With This Hack From A FBI Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss, the former lead hostage negotiator for the FBI has a method for keeping people talking that is that he didn’t even realize that it was being used on during an employee review. so subtle him What is it? Repeat 2–4 words someone says with an upward question-like intonation. Let’s take our example from earlier: Ted: “This week has been crazy. I worked 42 hours on one project. When I close my eyes, I see spreadsheets!” You: “On one project?” Ted: “Yeah, we brought on a big new client and I was in charge of getting everything set up.” You: “A big new client?” This method came about because, in a negotiation, typically more information equals more leverage. A kidnapper doesn’t want to share his life story. probably By repeating 2–4 words with an upward inflection, the person will (often unknowingly) give you more information. At this point in your conversation, you should be in rapport with your conversational partner. But how can you be sure? If only there were some sort of test… 8. The Mirror Test If you’ve ever been talking to someone and thought: “I wonder if this person is enjoying our conversation?” You have three options: Ask them “Hey, are you enjoying our conversation?” “Also: Can we be best friends? Please don’t leave me!” 2. Try to read their mind like Professor Charles Xavier. If it turns out you CAN read minds, then you’ll know what I just mind-texted you. 3. Use the Mirror Test. When we are “in rapport” with someone, we naturally mirror our body language, and even our breathing. The science-y term for this is . limbic resonance Humans are weird. How can you use this to tell if you’re connecting with your conversational partner? When you’re asking those questions and making those observations, take a quick beat and see if you two are mirroring yet. Here are some examples: When one person takes a drink, the other one does too. When one person leans against the bar, the other one does too. When one person smiles, the other one does too. If you two aren’t naturally mirroring yet, start the mirroring: When they take a drink, you do too. When they lean against the bar, you do too. When they smile, you do too. Then, after mirroring them for a bit, notice how they start to mirror you when you drink, lean, or smile. It’s widely known that we like and trust people who are similar to us, and mirroring body language is a great way to trigger liking and trust. With these hacks you’ll know how to make a good first impression. Next Step? I’ll send you my free 56-minute audio training on how to join and enjoy group conversations. It even has tasty word-for-word scripts you can use next time your mind goes blank! Get your free audio training on group conversations here. Originally published at www.becomemorecompelling.com .

Resonance

8 Uncommon Hacks To Make A Great First Impression

by (@5harath) from Tools for Makers Sharath Kuruganty Chicago _a hand curated directory of tools for makers to work on their dream projects._toolsformakers.com Curated list of tools to help you build your product. Tools for Makers is a hand-curated database of tools to help you build and ship ideas faster. It currently features 200+ products in 30 categories to accommodate every possible stage from idea to launch. Each category consists of carefully selected tools, all verified by Product Hunt community. The cards come with pricing, trial info and a brief description of the product. What’s your motivation for creating your product? I’m a designer turned Indie Maker. Last week I challenged myself to build a product without writing code. Thanks to the community I found many tools. Inspired by @bramk’s Startup Stash 🙏I built a simple platform that features tools made by indie makers which are verified by Product Hunt community. Meaning almost all the tools are named as either Product of the Day or Product of the Week. My motive behind this idea is to support the indie maker community by curating the best tools in the market all at one place. Not to discard some of the best products that give us inspiration I’ve also featured many famous well-known tools. What are your product features? The unique card design layout comes with pricing, free trial info and a brief description of the product which gives users visibility to browse and power to explore multiple categories. When did you launch? 21st Nov 2018 Where did you launch? Product Hunt How did your launch go? - Google Analytics: 1.1K users with 1.2K sessions and 1,361 page views. - Averaging 20 active users at any given point of time. - PH Upvotes: 223 — Standing #4 product of the day. - Typeform: Collected 26 tools from community Any specific launch tips? Or things you would do differently? Launch day is so important. It’s purely strategy based execution. I completely hustled my way from the launch time. First and foremost thing is to GIVE first. Genuinely give to the community and then ask. Maintain a set of people who are influencers. For the launch, I personally approached to people who are in the community who cares. I gave a 1–1 response to everyone who supported me, upvoted me, liked/commented me in twitter. Like Jony Ive said “People sense care.” So try to be authentic and do your thing. Never ever expect anything and don’t rely on the outcome.

Maker

Tools for Makers: A hand-curated directory of tools for indie makers

The current massive downturn in cryptocurrency markets feels strikingly different than previous ones. Amidst the all too familiar and assertions that , I’m starting to see clear signs of meaningful adoption beyond speculation. proclamations of Bitcoin’s death cryptocurrency is a scam These are some of the forces that I believe will gradually propel cryptocurrency that separates starry-eyed early adopters from the pragmatic members of the early majority whose support is required for mainstream adoption. across the chasm Institutional Adoption Some of the world’s largest and most influential institutions are embracing cryptocurrency with open arms. is a startup owned by the operator of the New York Stock Exchange. With help from Microsoft, Starbucks, and the Boston Consulting Group, Bakkt is that will help institutions and consumers easily store and spend digital currencies. Bakkt’s CEO that Starbucks intends to give customers the ability to pay with Bitcoin. Bakkt launching a suite a products recently stated Fidelity Investments (responsible for over $2 trillion in assets), has launched a to provide enterprise-grade custody and execution services for institutional investors. Digital Assets Platform Nasdaq’s CEO has to becoming a platform for trading cryptocurrencies. Nasdaq is for cryptocurrency exchange Gemini and is planning to next year. stated the exchange is open providing its market surveillance technology list Bitcoin futures The , , Nasdaq, and Fidelity have all . Chicago Board Options Exchange TD Ameritrade invested in cryptocurrency exchange ErisX Yale’s endowment manager , and Stanford University is one of many prominent schools that has launched an and focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. recently invested in two crypto funds academic research center courses The state of Ohio is allowing businesses and individuals to . pay taxes with Bitcoin Square has since adding it to its in January. Robinhood, one of the most popular investment apps for millennials, this year. made small profits on Bitcoin sales Cash App added support for cryptocurrencies Continued adoption of cryptocurrency by respected institutions will gradually increase trust in the technology. Decentralized Applications Ethereum was designed to serve as a decentralized world computer, powered by a cryptocurrency (Ether), on which anyone could build and access unstoppable applications. After years of development, we’re finally starting to see some of these applications go live. is a decentralized prediction market where users can bet on the . The platform has a , but saw a surge of activity during the . There is an demonstrating the societal beyond making it easy for people to bet. Augur launched on Ethereum’s Mainnet in July 2018 and Guesser recently published a . Augur outcome of any event small user base 2018 U.S. midterm elections abundance of literature value of prediction markets great overview of the state of the project is a distributed supercomputing network. Users can to a global network of computers, and earn money for renting out their computer’s processing power to the network. The platform should provide an environment where computing tasks can be completed more quickly, and at a lower cost than when relying on a single computer. Golem is currently in public beta. Golem outsource computational tasks is a decentralized file storage system. Instead of hosting files in “the cloud” (server farms managed by large corporations) files are spliced up, spread across a peer-to-peer , and can only be re-assembled by the owner. Users could benefit from , increased privacy, and the ability to earn money by renting out idle hard drive space. Former Docker CEO Ben Golub is the current Executive Chairman and interim CEO of StorJ. StorJ is currently in public alpha. StorJ global network of computers cheaper costs Current usage of Dapps is negligible, but these are still early days. Economic Crises Venezuelan citizens have been as the government has destroyed the value of their national currency through hyperinflation. using cryptocurrency to survive Cryptocurrency trading activity has surged in and as both countries have been plagued with economic and political crises. Turkey Zimbabwe , founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, is one of the more prominent voices warning that the . He believes Federal Reserve policies could lead to a 30% depreciation of the dollar. Ray Dalio U.S. dollar’s status as world reserve currency is in danger If one of the world’s major currencies suffers from a loss of confidence, some people are likely to start taking a closer look at cryptocurrencies. Social Media Networks , , , , , and are cryptocurrency-powered social networks that have achieved varying levels of usage. Steemit Cent Y’alls Minds Bitchute Peepeth These sites allow users to earn money for sharing and curating content, and Cent makes it incredibly easy for users to earn crypto without having to purchase it, eliminating one of the major barriers to entry. If these platforms users allow users to easily earn money while creating and sharing valuable content, they will grow. Entertainment/Media Platforms and Applications is an entertainment studio that has launched a crowdfunding portal for artists called and is building a peer-to-peer content distribution platform powered by an . SingularDTV Tokit Ethereum-based cryptoasset DJ and electronic music producer Gramatik raised using Tokit. The studio’s first film, a documentary called premiered in October. indie science fiction film premiered in theaters in November, has received from critics so far, and will make its . $2.25 million in less than a day Trust Machine SXSW award-winning Prospect positive reviews digital debut on SingularDTV is a platform for audio distribution, attestation, and monetization that uses two as the foundation for an . The team has backing from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and employees and advisors that have worked at Twitch, EA Games, Google, Microsoft, and Bittorrent. Audius Ethereum-based cryptoassets open-source alternative to Spotify and SoundCloud Video games like , , and are demonstrating how cryptocurrency-powered open blockchains could enable true ownership of game assets for players and the creation of assets that can be carried across different game worlds. Zombie BattleGround God’s Unchained Crypto Space Commander, Project Genesis Quality content, enjoyable user experiences, and increased control and revenues from successfully cutting out middlemen will attract content creators and consumers. Supply Chain Management Solutions is building a platform that uses Ethereum’s blockchain to keep all parties involved in a transaction in sync and removes the friction and obstacles of traditional commerce. Their system makes use of . Sweetbridge two Ethereum-based cryptoassets They are one of the first companies to be , and a winner of Lufthansa’s . Former director of the U.S. Mint . accepted into the state of Arizona’s FinTech sandbox program Aviation Blockchain challenge Ed Moy recently joined Sweetbridge as an advisor is working with Ethereum-based decentralized organization to into their . Their CEO is a former CIO at Maersk (the world’s largest shipping company) and the team includes several other former employees of the shipping giant. Blockshipping MakerDAO integrate the stable cryptocurrency DAI operations is a cloud-based business platform focused on supply chain payments, marketplaces, and applications. Their platform currently serves 1.5 million companies across the globe, have customers such as HSBC, Siemens and Volvo, and annually. They are also working with MakerDAO, leveraging DAI in order to . Tradeshift process over half a trillion dollars in transaction value democratize access to to financing for the world’s small businesses Cryptocurrencies hold enormous potential to increase the efficiency of supply chain operations by decreasing transaction fees, time to complete payments, and reliance on central intermediaries to facilitate transactions. Energy Production and Distribution Systems has developed a that aim to lower costs, increase efficiency, and drive green energy usage by helping consumers access wholesale energy markets. Their platform makes use of to facilitate access to their network. Grid+ suite of products two Ethereum-based cryptoassets They’ve , a in the state of Texas, and have already started in Texas who . received a grant from the United States Department of Energy license to sell retail energy supplying energy to customers prefer the service to traditional energy providers The allows investors across the globe to buy and lease solar cells and receive rental income from their holdings (in Bitcoin or national currencies) through a blockchain-based payment system. Sun Exchange If these types of services are able to provide increased access to energy and lower costs of obtaining energy, consumers will adopt them. Conclusion A recently published conducted by researchers at The University of Cambridge estimates that there are over 139 million cryptocurrency users (38% of which are “active”), up from less than 10 million that were measured in the 2017 version of the study. global benchmarking study I’ve only highlighted a sample of the areas where cryptocurrencies are starting to provide some value beyond speculation to a small group of users. So long as entrepreneurs and technologists continue making steady progress towards addressing scaling limitations and improving user experiences, and regulators don’t take extreme measures to stifle the technology’s adoption, there’s no reason not to expect continued growth. For me, the question isn’t if mass adoption will take place but rather when, and in what form?

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive November 21st, 2018

@shannonshannon

@issartISS Art

@emilyyu_17465Emily Yu

@javinpaulJavin Paul

@meeshkanMeeshkan ML

@nkgokulGokul N K

@soundaryaSoundarya Balasubramani

@laurenjglass9Lauren Glass

@Niharika3297Niharika Singh

@syedshoebSyed Shoeb

@marcom_62042Infrrd

@hackernoon-archivesOrderhive

@ylvIgor Yalovoy

@m_muslimiMehran Muslimi

@MaxenceCornetMaxence Cornet

@BerminalAppBerminal - The Crypto News Platform

@humanoitAlexander Sergeev

@unicornlaunchingUnicornLaunching

@vamsi.chemitigantiVamsi Chemitiganti

@vamsi.chemitigantiVamsi Chemitiganti

@aamralkarAbhishek Amralkar

@adityasridharAditya Sridhar

@AdamCuppyAdam + Cuppy

@alorphillipsAvery Phillips

@thejeffcallahanJeff Callahan

@joey_tawadrousJoey Tawadrous

@shingaithorntonShingai Thornton

@shannon
shannon

@issart
ISS Art

@emilyyu_17465
Emily Yu

@javinpaul
Javin Paul

@meeshkan
Meeshkan ML

@nkgokul
Gokul N K

@soundarya
Soundarya Balasubramani

@laurenjglass9
Lauren Glass

@Niharika3297
Niharika Singh

@syedshoeb
Syed Shoeb

@marcom_62042
Infrrd

@hackernoon-archives
Orderhive

@ylv
Igor Yalovoy

@m_muslimi
Mehran Muslimi

@MaxenceCornet
Maxence Cornet

@BerminalApp
Berminal - The Crypto News Platform

@humanoit
Alexander Sergeev

@unicornlaunching
UnicornLaunching

@vamsi.chemitiganti
Vamsi Chemitiganti

@vamsi.chemitiganti
Vamsi Chemitiganti

@aamralkar
Abhishek Amralkar

@adityasridhar
Aditya Sridhar

@AdamCuppy
Adam + Cuppy

@alorphillips
Avery Phillips

@thejeffcallahan
Jeff Callahan

@joey_tawadrous
Joey Tawadrous

@shingaithornton
Shingai Thornton