What are moving averages?

Moving averages allow you to visualise the price action for a financial instrument over a period of time. It’s widely used in technical analysis and referred to as a “lagging” indicator as it’s based on historical prices.

The two commonly used averages are simple moving average (SMA) and exponential moving average (EMA). The SMA is the simple average of a security over a specific period. The EMA is similar, but attributes greater weight to more recent prices.

Examples of SMA and EMA

The easiest way to understand SMA and EMA is looking at an example.

We’ll take the closing prices of a fictional security over…

You’ve probably seen facial detection before. As soon as you upload that family photo to Facebook, you’ll notice the boxes around all detected faces. And with facial recognition, it sometimes even auto-tags the correct friend too. It’s not always 100% accurate, but it’s still some great engineering!

Applications for facial detection

In this article, we’ll get up and running using the Google Cloud Vision API to detect faces. We’ll be using an existing image and we’ll draw a box around each detected face.

There are several real-world use cases for facial detection. Some of these include:

• detecting whether an uploaded image has any faces…

Many people stumble through life unhappy. Whether it’s a failing relationship, troubles with your job, or a simple lack of interest in anything.

There are several small things you can do to change this. I’ve shared a few steps below that I’ve experienced first-hand.

1. Material things won’t make you happy

“It is not the man who has too little that is poor, but the one who hankers after more.” — Seneca

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law told me that her one-year old son became bored of a toy we gave him for Christmas. He simply lost interest in it after playing with it for weeks…

Sentiment Analysis is the process of determining whether a piece of text is positive, negative, or neutral.

Real world applications for Sentiment Analysis

The goal of this article is to get you up and running using the Google Natural Language API with Laravel. You’ll be using this API to perform sentiment analysis on text.

Using these techniques, you can build some great functionality into existing applications. Some ideas include:

• detecting sentiment in comments or reviews
• forecasting market movements based on social media activity
• ascertaining the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by observing sentiment before and after

Interpreting Sentiment Analysis values

The Google API takes the provided text, analyzes it, and…

I’ve written about consensus algorithms in cryptocurrencies before. If any of the concepts below seem unfamiliar, I recommend a quick read of that article.

What is a 51% attack?

A 51% attack occurs when an attacker (or group) controls more than half of the network. 51% attacks are also referred to as majority attacks. With Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies, controlling the network means controlling the hash rate or computing power.

Hash rate is the rate at which a computer calculates hashes and is presented as hashes per second. For Bitcoin, each hash is a double SHA-256 hash calculation. …

Consensus algorithms are paramount to the blockchain. Let’s look at an example to illustrate this.

Chuck is a nefarious buyer looking to spend some of his cryptocurrency. We’ll call the currency BadCoin. He finds two merchants that accept BadCoin: Alice and Bob. Chuck goes ahead and purchases a pineapple from Alice. He then purchases a rubber duck from Bob using the same coin. Both transactions enter a pool of unconfirmed transactions.

Both Alice and Bob, excited for the sale, ship their products immediately. Unfortunately, the system will only confirm one of the transactions (Chuck only had enough to spend on…