GET READY FOR THIS WEEK IN TECH

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Heyo Hacker,

Time to set up your week with some free thinking tech stories.

Want to improve the Hacker Noon experience? Take our reader survey. Want to contribute to Hacker Noon? We’re always reading story submissions.

And here are this week’s top Hacker Noon stories:

Algorithm of Note

Timsort — the fastest sorting algorithm you’ve never heard of by Brandon Skerritt. Timsort: A very fast , O(n log n), stable sorting algorithm built for the real world — not constructed in academia.

Battle of Reality and Desires

VR vs. AR by Blockchain DuDe. By 2021, the combined market size of augmented and virtual reality is expected to reach 215 billion U.S. dollars.

Blockchain Story

Trie, Merkle, Patricia by Daniel Kronovet. Hash tables, tries, merkle trees, and patricia trees are all do essentially the same thing: they let you map keys to values. While there are differences between them, this is essentially what they do.

Coding Practice in Question

Does Column Width of 80 Make Sense in 2018? by javinpaul. One of the oldest coding practice is to keep line width 80, and many of us follow it blindly but have you ever thought why we have this practice in first place?

Contracts

Random Number Generator in Contracts by Lior Yaffe. Fast forward to lightweight contracts. In the Ardor platform, we can use two properties unique to lightweight contracts.

Crypto Trading

Simulating a Prolonged Cryptocurrency Bear Market with the Monte Carlo Method by Anthony Xie. Rather than simply making a prediction based on a single average number, Monte Carlo simulations employ randomness to generate millions of different outcomes.

Decentralization

The State of Decentralized Exchanges by Gary Basin. By making trades that settle directly on-chain, you avoid moving your crypto into an exchange wallet and facing the risk of a hack or theft.

Developer Interview

Rise of Kotlin: The Programming Language for the Next Generation featuring zan. That exact idea of a highly interoperable and better Java was why this started to attract so many Android developers (including me, having done Android since the early days).

HTML

15 HTML element methods you’ve potentially never heard of by David Gilbertson. Always check browser support before use and never trim your eyebrows while you’re angry.

My Second App

Building Cathedrals — In Coding, And In Life by kunal shandilya. It taught me that delivering a good product at the expense of exceeding the deadline is always, always, always better than shoving a half-baked product down my beta testers’ throats.

Persuasion

How companies leverage psychology to steer our choices by Maarten Dalmijn. In the 70s, an American researcher called Robert Cialdini had a hunch. Cialdini believed there was a science to how people are persuaded. He decided to study the factors influencing people to respond with “Yes” to requests.

Product Management

Share Outcomes With Your Team by John Cutler. The challenge is that sharing ongoing outcomes is a muscle. You need to practice and make it a regular part of the team’s cadence of rituals

Proof of Burn

Migrating USD to the Ethereum blockchain by Denis Petrovcic. The need to bring fiat currency into the blockchain space is BIG and many have been making loads of money providing solutions that fail to fulfill blockchain’s fundamental vision — giving people control over wealth without central authority.

Python

7 features proposed so far in Python 3.8 by Anthony Shaw. Python 3.7 benefitted from both new functionality and optimizations. From what we know so far about 3.8, it’s going to be a similar story. This time, most of the new functionality is targeted at C extension and module development.

REST APIs

How to build powerful REST APIs blazingly fast with Node.js by Justin Headley. After nearly two years of hard work and development I’m excited to introduce rest-hapi v1 to the web development community.

State of Cryptocurrencies

Summer 2018 by Adam Taché. A comprehensive overview of the current state of the cryptocurrency ecosystem as of Summer 2018.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality with React 360 by Lily Barrett. As I ported my application over to React 360, I took note of some important differences between React VR and React 360.

Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted.

Kind Regards,

David Smooke

P.S. Want to improve the Hacker Noon experience? Take our reader survey. Want to contribute to Hacker Noon? We’re always reading story submissions.

P.P.S. Pusher, our weekly sponsor, provides collaboration and communication APIs that enable devs to add realtime features to their apps in minutes and scale massively. Get started.