Heyo Hackers: This Week in Tech

Heyo Hackers,

Been a busy start to the year over at Hacker Noon. We’re north of 180k average daily readers over the last 90 days, and peaked with 1,715,680 minutes read in one day (1/7). That’s 3 years, 3 months, and 5 days worth of time reading. Around the web over the last month, our stories have been written about by Investopedia, The Ringer, Nasdaq, Gizmodo, Android Authority, Trusted Reviews, Salon, Houston Chronicle, CNET, SlashGear, TechSpot, BizJournals, The Verge, Destrutoid, Sify, The Motley Fool, Profit Confidential, Express, and others. To continue accelerating this growth path, we need to work with more badass tech companies. If you work at a badass tech company and are reading this, consider becoming a weekly sponsor. You’ll get millions of quality brand impressions, thousands of great website visitors… and you’ll get to work with me 😜

Without further ado, here are this week’s top 20 tech stories:

Architecture

Monolith Vs Microservice Vs Serverless — The Real Winner? The Developer by Elliot Forbes. The one underlying theme that seems to come across from evangelicals of these newer architecture styles is that the world is black and white.

APIs

Avoiding Memory Leak in Golang API by Iman Tumorang. Based on our true story at Kurio, how we struggling for every release because we are not doing it in the right ways.

Pictured left, the actual government ballistic missile alert system user interface.(@CivilBeat). Pictured right, a Hacker Noon contributor’s take on redesigning it (Fairpixels).

Avoiding Hawaii’s Accidental Emergency Alert

Redesigning Hawaii’s Emergency Alert System’s Interface In The Open by Fairpixels. It’s an absolute mystery why such an important task has an absolutely horrible interface.

BLOCKCHAIN will…

Building a Blockchain: The Grey Paper by Omer Goldberg. (It’s) a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a hashpointer as a link to a previous block, a timestamp and transaction data.

5 Notable Women in the Blockchain and Crypto Industry! by FundYourselfNow. Some of the biggest ICOs, digital currency payment platforms, and even blockchain tech development firms have been founded by women.

Browser Battles

Is Firefox Quantum Worth It? by Jordan Bowman. I’m in favor of giving new apps a shot. Maybe it’s because I like it when others do the same for my work. So, I decided I’d run a simple experiment. I’d use Firefox Quantum for a few weeks and see if it was worth the minor hassle of a browser switch.

Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of this web form by David Okwii. I have attended several Tech events where they invite so-called gurus and experts to explain the digital landscape in Africa, but I have never been satisfied with any of their answers as to why e-commerce has not caught on.It turns out the reason why a click on a user’s web browser doesn’t exactly translate into an actual sale is really simple — the shipping and billing information form.

Crypto Boom!

Crypto High Flyers by Josh Quittner The trick now is to pay attention, learn as much as you can about what’s going on, and never invest more than you can comfortably lose.

My Most Valuable Crypto Market Insights For 2018 and Beyond by Pierre Rognion. Bitcoin is a trojan horse. The lure of overnight riches has its purpose: it serves as a trojan horse for a decentralized future and people who would otherwise be leery of societal upheaval.

Why, what and how to invest in cryptocurrencies by Assaf Elovic. The launching of bitcoin futures on CBOE and CME (and Nasdaq later this year) has been considered as a major achievement in bringing cryptocurrency to the mainstream. This will allow investors to have plenty of options to bet on bitcoin using more traditional financial vehicles.

Deep Learning

The 3 Tricks That Made AlphaGo Zero Work by Seth Weidman. “There were many advances in Deep Learning and AI in 2017, but few generated as much publicity and interest as DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero. This program was truly a shocking breakthrough: not only did it beat the prior version of AlphaGo — the program that beat 17 time world champion Lee Sedol.

Inside AWS

10 Lessons from 10 Years of AWS (and Part 2) by Adrian Hornsby. For the last 10 years, I have had the chance to work in companies that embraced the cloud, and in particular AWS.

I’m afraid you’re thinking about AWS Lambda cold starts all wrong by Yan Cui. When I discuss AWS Lambda cold starts with folks in the context of API Gateway, I often get responses along the line of: ‘Meh, it’s only the first request right? So what if one request is slow, the next million requests would be fast.’ Unfortunately that is an oversimplification of what happens.

The Product Management Life

Agile (Done Right) Is Continuous Design by John Cutler. Value isn’t “shipped”…rather a value network is continuously enhanced and expanded. “Products” are the ephemeral delivery mechanism…a person a decade ago, a mobile app today, Alexa tomorrow, and AI in a decade.

Shit Product Managers Say, Translated by Stephen Cognetta. Hey, let’s close the loop offline. I’ll block some biweekly time for us to sync. Gentle ping to submit your AI.

SaaS Marketing

Freemium vs Free Trial vs Hybrid Customer Acquisition Model in SaaS by Myk Pono. We spent countless hours researching customer acquisition strategies and pricing models. As part of that, we interviewed SaaS industry leaders. What we found is that just about every SaaS company goes through a heated debate about whether or not to offer a free trial or freemium.

Startup Hustle

Startup Assumptions are Like Assholes — Everyone Has One and Most are Full of Shit by Matt Ward. We have assumptions. We have ideas. These are meaningless. Knowing that is the key to success. Entrepreneurs that know they don’t know and are willing to learn and adapt to what the market wants, are the ones that succeed.

Do NOT raise VC funding — The 3 main reasons against it. by Carl Fritjofsson. The only path of entrepreneurship is not what you read about on Techcrunch. Building your company independent gives you unlimited options. Don’t rush into the path of VC funding too soon, if you treasure your entrepreneurial freedom.

We All May Be In A Video Game…

The Simulation Hypothesis — Why Quantum Physics, AI, and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are In A Video Game by Riz Virk. Recently, the idea that we may be living in a giant video game, or as it’s sometimes called, the Simulation Hypothesis, has gotten a lot of attention because of prominent figures like Elon Musk who have openly discussed the idea. As Virtual Reality technology has gotten more sophisticated, we are starting to contemplate virtual worlds like that of the omni-present Oasis in Ready Player One, soon to be a blockbuster movie directed by Stephen Spielberg.

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

Kind Regards,

David Smooke, @AMI