Notes from 28/10–4/11

An Algorithm for Karma’s Product-Market Fit

4 min readNov 4, 2019

Wonder if it’s possible to expressing everything as an algorithm. It’s just a formal expression of logic and can be tested at this point.

Blockchain

Peer Review: CBC Casper

That was very harsh. Basically.

TLDR: Liveness and safety are two inseparable properties of consensus protocols. Liveness is a guarantee that a protocol will do something useful even in the face of failures. CBC Casper, a family of consensus protocols, leaves out liveness from their analysis. Treating 1 out of 2 doesn’t get you 50% of the way to a full protocol; it leaves you with almost nothing.

Malleability-Attack: Why It Matters

Interesting way of explaining the attack.

Malleability is the ability to change the identifier of a transaction (the TXID) but without invalidating that transaction
Since Alice knows Bob doesn’t know, she tricks Bob into re-issuing the payment again. She repeats this until Bob eventually realizes what’s going on, but it could be too late.

Privacy in Cryptocurrencies: An Overview

Pretty accurate.

Three types of privacy: identity, transaction data (payload), state

Different approachs: 2nd layer protocols, mixers, ZK-based

Career

The Most Important Question in a Job Interview, and How to Answer It

The invitation to ask questions is a great moment to demonstrate you’re a team player and that you’re interested in the company dynamics, says Liu. “I rarely get asked about the working relationship between your team and other teams in the company,” she said. With so much technical work being cross-functional, she’s surprised by this, and it makes her wonder, don’t they want to understand how they’d fit into that puzzle?

It’s the best chance to find out whether you want to work there or not. In a nice way of course.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Training 2019 — A Free 4-hour Video Course

If for some reason I ever need to do this

Data

India had its first ‘WhatsApp election.’ We have a million messages from it

Dev

Build a Text Generator Web App in under 50 Lines of Python

Combining GPT2 with some simple web app making

Product

How Google measures and improves UX with the HEART framework

Strategy

A Strategy Map

Roger Martin’s business strategy approach for business strategy decisions;
Product Portfolio Matrix and Innovation-Ambition Matrix for making portfolio decisions;
Product Vision Board to capture product vision and strategy;
GO Product Roadmap to describe the product roadmap;
Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas to state the business model as a stand-alone artefact to complement the product strategy or the Extended Product Vision Board to capture the relevant business model elements together with the product strategy and vision.
Balanced Product Scorecard for the KPIs (possibly using Dave McClure’s pirate metrics).

Tools

Netflix Open Sources Polynote to Make Data Science Notebooks Better

Polynote is available in Github and you can also follow the project’s website.

Interesting but not sure how to use this

It’s Time for Fullstack Dev Tools

Mostly for cloud monitoring.

free-for.dev

amazingly comprehensive

hyperlink

TL;DR

- Real time push notifications on click

- Custom URL slugs

- Custom domain support

- Editable destination urls

- Support for QR codes that notify on scan

- Slack message support with API

not sure why someone would like to get spammed. Okay someone said using this to check your AMA will be useful.

Other use cases I’ve seen: — Getting notified when someone clicks on the link in your Instagram bio — Seeing if a co-worker actually clicked on the link you sent them — Getting an idea of where your users are located geographically — Seeing if your referral links are being shared through iMessage (we do some user agent parsing to detect this) — Sending yourself custom push notifications with the API