BEST Tech Stories of 2018 (so far)

Hello!! The internet has so many best of 2017 articles right now…

At Hacker Noon, we’re forward thinking. Here are the best stories of the year 2018 (so far).

These top stories of January cover security, driverless hotel rooms, cryptocurrency, software development, data science, and more.

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Security

I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. by David Gilbertson. “In some wise words from Google: ‘If an attacker successfully injects any code at all, it’s pretty much game over.’ XSS is too small scale, and really well protected against. Chrome Extensions are too locked down. Lucky for me, we live in an age where people install npm packages like they’re popping pain killers.” It’s real, it’s scary, it’s funny, and it’s the internet’s most clapped story of the year so far. There’s some great discussion about it on twitter, hacker news, reddit, and here.

Meltdown and Spectre: what are they and what should I do? by Jonathon Grigg. “The good news is that updates to help mitigate the affects of these vulnerabilities are rolling out now and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. The bad news is that to a certain extent, these attacks exploit the fundamental architecture of modern processors and so are likely to require entirely new hardware to completely fix it.”

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Mandatory Read About Humanity’s Inevitable Sludge Toward Driverless Hotel Rooms

Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords by Nathan Waters. “In today’s reality we think of hotels as expensive accommodation intended for a few overnight stays. Hotels and Airbnb accommodations are able to charge expensive fees due to their fixed and high-demand locations within the city. By decoupling accommodation and the physical location, we decentralize housing and empower the individual to instantly switch to alternative locations.”

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Crypto Life

2018 Will Be The Year Blockchain Technology Goes Mainstream. Here’s Why by Nicolas Cole. “A decade from now we will call this “the blockchain boom…”

Good Alternatives for Bittrex & Binance by Vamshi Vangapally. “When big exchanges with lots of volume shuts the door on new users, what’s the best alternative available for them?”

How to Crush the Crypto Market, Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Do Whatever You Want the Rest of Your Life by Daniel Jeffries. “I don’t ask you to believe anything because belief is the death of intelligence. All you need to do is look, listen with an open mind, learn and then decide for yourself. Every single one of these people, four guys and one gal, stressed the need to transcend your limiting belief systems and believe it can be done before you do anything else.”

The Art Of Hodling Crypto: Can’t Make this Sh*t Up by Bruce Hunt. “If you took 5 of the cryptocurrencies that are still in the top 10 from Jan. 1, 2017 and compare them to Jan. 2, 2018 here is what you would have if you invested $1,000 in each on Jan 1st 2017…

• BTC — $963.00 to $16,460 — total $17,092
• ETH — $8.26 to $878 — total $106,295
• XRP — $0.0065 to $2.41 — total $370,769
• LTC — $4.37 to $255 — total $58,352
• DASH — $11.26 to $1,160 — total $103,019

…for a grand total of $655,527 for $5,000 invested.”

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Software Development

How I Coded Everyday for 365 Days by Emily Yu. “It’s easy to make excuses. I’ll do it later. I could do that if I tried. But the truth is, you’re not trying, and that “later” will never come. I knew that although I wasn’t the best at time management, if I was going to commit to a long-term resolution like this, I needed to scrap any excuses.”

I thought I understood Open Source. I was wrong by Lorenzo Sciandra. “And something clicked.I think I get it the right way, now: open source doesn’t mean “up for grabs”, but instead ‘Hey, look, I did this — if you want to use it too, here’s how. I did it in a way that would fit my needs, but use it as you like.’ And that’s it.”

Introducing Immer: Immutability the easy way by Michel Weststrate. “Immutable, structurally shared data structures are a great paradigm for storing state. Especially when combined with an event-sourcing architecture. However, there is a cost to pay. In a language like JavaScript where immutability is not built into the language, producing a new state from the previous one is a boring, boiler-platy task”

The constructor is dead, long live the constructor! by Donavon West. “We’ve seen that for setting our initial state, we no longer need a constructor (or any other instance property for that matter). We also don’t need it for binding methods to this. Same for setting initial state from props. And we would most definitely never fetch data in the constructor. Why then would we ever need the constructor in a React component? Well… you don’t.”

Top 66 Developer Resources of the Year by Mitch Pronschinske. “After 8+ years reading and curating developer content, I thought it was about time that I compile an end-of-year list with the scores of resource links that I share on Twitter and Reddit throughout the year.”

Web Scraping Tutorial with Python: Tips and Tricks by Jekaterina Kokatjuhha. “I tried to find out when the best time to buy tickets is, but there was nothing on the Web that helped. I built a small program to automatically collect the data from the web — a so-called scraper. It extracted information for my specific flight destination on predetermined dates and notified me when the price got lower.”

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Data Science

4 Must Have Skills Every Data Scientist Should Learn by SeattleDataGuy

1. Being Able To Simplify The Complex
2. Knowing How To Mesh Data Without Primary Keys
3. Being Able To Prioritize Projects
4. Being Able To Develop Robust And Optimal Systems

Aspiring Data Scientists! Start to learn Statistics with these 6 books! by Tomi Mester. “The first three are lighter reads. These books are really good for setting your mind to think more numerical, mathematical and statistical. They also present why statistics is exciting (it is!) really well. The second three books are more scientific — with formulas and Python or R codes. Don’t get intimidated though! Mathematics is like LEGO: if you build the small pieces up right, you won’t have trouble with the more complex parts either!

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And a Couple of Stories for the Adventurous

Seattle 3 Year Time-lapse Video from the Space Needle by Ricardo Martin Brualla. “Ever since the Seattle’s Space Needle installed an HD 360 webcam on the top of the needle, I have been fascinated by the footage captured. Over the past few months, I put together a time-lapse video of what the 360 webcam captured over the last 3 years. Check it out below, and continue reading for more details about it and to learn how it was made.”

How to be smart in North Korea by Christian Budde Christensen. “Last year, when the world seemed on the brink of a nuclear war, my brother and I went to North Korea. As so many others, we had been exposed to the country almost daily through the news, or documentaries. The stories about concentration camps, mass surveillance, and a crazy leader known to execute his opponents with heavy military equipment were far from anything we had ever experienced as 90’s kids growing up in Scandinavia.”

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We’re only 12 days into 2018, so there is a chance that these stories will not remain the top tech stories for the entirety of 2018… but nevertheless, these are — IMHO — some great reads. If you’re looking for some more definitive rankings based on a larger sample size, read our top stories of 2017. If you have a story to publish, lets talk.

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

Kind Regards,

David Smooke, @AMI