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Money serves three purpose - unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentation platform for iterations and improvement. Bitcoin seems to have won the “store of value” battle. Ethereum has the developer mindshare and is the preferred experimentation platform. Multiple cryptocurrencies are still fighting the battle to be the medium of exchange. The amusing part is that every cryptocurrency startup envies Ethereum’s developer ecosystem and is trying to attract developers. But there isn’t any real value capture being the experimentation platform. A successful product has a high chance of leaving Ethereum and migrating users to its chain. The real battle, I believe, remains in becoming the medium of exchange, being the programmable Visa & Mastercard equivalent. ...

Compared to Prague, Rome, Vienna, and Split, Venice is a tourist trap. The city is made up of a collection of 100+ islands. Bridges connect most of them, and you can walk throughout the city. All the public transport is using water buses called Vaporetto. A single trip costs 8 Euros. If you are planning to use Vaporetto, buy a 24-hour pass worth 20 Euro which covers unlimited trips on Vaporetto. Start your day with a walking tour which will give you a good understanding of the history of the city. After the walking tour, visit St. Marks’s Basilica and the square next to it. St. Marks is the patron saint of Venice. There is no entrance fee for the basilica; there is a fee for its treasury and the top floor though. ...

Update: As of Mar 2022, I recommend everyone to use GitHub Actions I maintain a somewhat popular Android developer tool ( adb-enhanced). The tool is written in Python, supporting both Python 2 and 3. Testing the tool requires both Python runtime as well a running Android emulator. I, initially, used Travis CI for setting up continuous testing of this tool. Later, I felt that Travis CI was too slow and when I came across Circle CI, I decided to give it a try. As of now, both Travis and Circle CI are used for testing. Here is what I learned from my experience.

Croatia is a Balkan country south of Austria. It’s a small country of 4 million inhabitants and cities with medieval architecture. Games of Thrones was shot here. Basics The currency is Croatian Kuna (HRK), which is about 1/7th of a US Dollar. One can use a Schengen visa to enter Croatia. Public toilets are expensive. Almost all restaurants provide free access. Tap water is drinkable. Public transports between cities and even to the islands are pretty good. Use www.azk.hr for finding and booking local buses. Most people speak English in tourist cities. Useful phrases The language seems to be harder than the German language ...

Software Engineers peak early in their career and especially in places in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, and Seattle attain accredited investor status early on in their career. Hearing stories of Jason Calacanis and Chris Sacca, many consider trying their hands-on angel investing in startups. If you are considering it, here are my few suggestions for that. Should you do it Angel investing, just like many other exotic ventures such as buying arts and vintage coins, is optional. It is much more safe to make money by investing in publicly listed companies. So, don’t do it for money. Find a better reason to do it. For me, the opportunity to connect with other entrepreneurs makes it worthwhile. ...

WebView debugging can be enabled via “WebView.setWebContentsDebuggingEnabled(true)”. Leaving WebView debugging enabled in production Android apps is a bad idea. Anyone who gets hold of the unlocked phone can access the app’s data forever.

Budapest, pronounced Budapescht, consists of two cities, hilly Buda in the west, and flat Pest in the south. The city structure is similar to Prague. Day 1 Start your day with a walking tour. While there are many specific ones like focusing on Jewish quarters etc. I chose the generic one which covers the history and the culture of the city. After the tour, spend time checking out the castle before heading down to the Hospital in the rock. It was a hospital built during the cold war to survive a nuclear attack. The guided tour at this place is subpar though. ...

Why Tech In the past decade, interest among MBA grads towards tech companies has drastically gone up. If you are one of those, take a pause and ask yourself “why”. Of course, there are upsides; the tech sector is growing faster, pays well, has a much better work-life balance than finance, private equity, or consulting. But at the same time, do remember that you spend almost 50% of your waking hours at your workplace, so you must as well enjoy it. If you enjoy flashy presentations, regular travel, or an opportunity to think about big M&A deals, then these things come much earlier in your career on the east coast than that on the west. ...

Vienna is a historic city. First, a pivotal battle between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe was fought in 1683, and then, during the second world war, significant support to Hitler came from Vienna. Some tips for the first-timers The dominant spoken language is German, but it is not hard to find English speakers. Public transport is great and a 24-hour pass costs 8 Euros. Most of the good spots are near the city center, so don’t stay too far away. Toilets inside shopping malls, big grocery stores, and restaurants are usually free. Outside ones charge 0.5 Euro. Which museum to see Vienna is full of museums, and one can spend a week just checking out the museums. Entry cost varies from 4 Euros to 20 Euros. I would recommend deciding what you want to see and make a decision based on that. I was not interested in checking out natural history or art museums since they are similar to the museums I have seen before. Therefore, I picked “Museum of Art Fakes” and “Museum of Abortion and Contraception.” Both unusual and unique to Vienna. ...

Background There are three major types of financial exchanges Stocks and bonds Commodity exchange Foreign exchange (Forex)