John Cox

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Interesting

www.kdnuggets.com

Top SQL Queries for Data Scientists

This article surveys nine essential SQL concepts for data scientists—querying and filtering, handling NULLs, type conversion, aggregation, date manipulation, text processing, ranking, window functions, and subqueries/CTEs—with practical examples of each. It then demonstrates how these concepts combine in real business scenarios, specifically finding best-selling products by month and calculating moving averages, to show that SQL is indispensable for data extraction, manipulation, and reporting even though it's often overshadowed by Python in discussions about data science. The piece emphasizes that SQL proficiency alongside Python and R forms the core toolkit for practical data science work.

Permalink programmingtutorialsql

frequentmiler.com

Amex Platinum: The card most frequent flyers should have, but rarely use

The American Express Platinum Card charges $895 annually but can become "free after rebate" if you utilize its various credits strategically—the author identifies $1,100 in credits he uses each year through the airline fee credit, Resy dining credit, Uber credits, and digital entertainment subscriptions. Beyond covering the annual fee with credits, the card offers valuable travel perks like airport lounge access, hotel credits, and emergency medical transportation that can be viewed as bonus benefits, making it worthwhile for frequent flyers who can easily tap into at least some of the card's credit offerings.

Permalink travelcredit cardsrewardsamerican express

frequentmiler.com

Maximizing American Express credit card rebates & credits

A comprehensive field guide to Amex's growing pile of "coupon book" statement credits (Dell, lululemon, airline fees, Uber Cash, dining, Hilton resort credits, Fine Hotels + Resorts, and more), aimed at cardholders who don't naturally spend on these specific merchants but still want to extract full value from their annual fees. It goes credit-by-credit with concrete workarounds—buying gift cards in-store versus online, splitting purchases, using shopping portals, exploiting cancellable Southwest fares, stacking Amex Offers—to show how to convert each rebate into cash-equivalent value even when the underlying purchase category is irrelevant to your life. Worth keeping as a reference to revisit before each credit's expiration window rather than a one-time read.

Permalink travelcredit cardspersonal financetips

frequentmiler.com

American Express Membership Rewards Complete Guide (2026)

A comprehensive reference guide to American Express Membership Rewards, covering every earning method (welcome offers, upgrade bonuses, category spend, checking accounts, Pay Over Time enrollment) alongside Amex's often-confusing eligibility rules like "once in a lifetime" language and card family restrictions. It also breaks down redemption strategy, arguing that transferring points to airline/hotel partners generally beats cash-out options like Schwab's 1.1 cents-per-point Invest with Rewards, and includes a full transfer partner chart with current bonus promotions. Worth keeping as a go-to lookup for both maximizing earning and avoiding costly redemption mistakes.

Permalink travelcredit cardspersonal financeamerican express

thepointsguy.com

500-plus benefits for $595 a year — is FoundersCard worth it?

A TPG writer makes the case for FoundersCard, a paid membership (not a credit card) offering 500+ discounts and elite-status perks across travel, shopping, and business services, priced at $595-$995/year (though discounted rates as low as $295 are attainable). The piece walks through favorite benefits—airline fare discounts, TripIt Pro, Equinox and Dell pricing, hotel elite status—and weighs them against overlapping perks already bundled into premium cards like the Amex Platinum, concluding it's worthwhile mainly for frequent travelers or business owners who can actually use the niche discounts.

Permalink travelhotelsbusinesscredit cards

The Points Guy

The best premium credit cards: A side-by-side comparison - The Points Guy

This comprehensive guide compares nine premium credit cards across seven categories—annual fees, welcome offers, rewards potential, redemption options, statement credits, lounge access, and travel protections—to help travelers determine which card offers the best value for their specific needs. The article explains that premium cards make sense only for frequent travelers who can maximize their benefits to justify fees ranging from $395 to $895 annually, and recommends pairing cards by type (a transferable rewards card plus airline and hotel cards) for optimal value. The analysis reveals that cards like the Capital One Venture X offer the most affordable entry point, the Chase Sapphire Reserve provides the broadest everyday earning categories, and airline and hotel cards should be chosen based on which brands you actually use most frequently.

Permalink moneytravelcredit cardspersonal finance

dariusforoux.com

Six Spokes Theory: Strategy For An Optimal Life

Proposes a "Six Spokes Theory" of life as a wheel with body, mind, love, work, money, and play as equally important spokes. Neglecting one is survivable for a while, but several loose ones eventually make the wheel collapse, as the author learned cycling in the Netherlands. The central twist is to balance energy rather than time, since work inevitably eats the hours: pace yourself like heart-rate training at 70–80% so you have energy left for the other spokes. The goal is an optimal, balanced life rather than becoming the best at anything, illustrated with the author's own habits around love, money, and play.

Permalink productivityphilosophywellnessmental health

www.thepennyhoarder.com

Broke? Busy? Bored? Presenting 31 Side Hustles (With Resources to Help You Get Started)

This comprehensive guide catalogs dozens of side hustle options across categories like freelancing, gig work, creative pursuits, and passive income streams, helping readers match opportunities to their available time, skills, budget, and income goals. The article emphasizes that the best side hustle depends on whether someone needs quick cash or long-term income, wants remote work, and what expertise they already possess. It provides practical advice on choosing and starting a side hustle, from identifying income goals to tracking expenses, plus explanations of earning potential and time requirements for each type of work.

Permalink aimoneyremote workpersonal finance

www.vice.com

I Wrote an Ebook to See How Much Easy Money I Could Make Online

The author self-published a short ebook about making money online and tracked whether it could generate genuine profits without existing fame or marketing resources. Despite reaching the top of Amazon's niche categories during a free promotional period and securing a blog post feature that temporarily tripled daily sales, the book averaged only a few paid sales per day at £2.99, making it marginally profitable only because the author had existing writing experience and access to professional design. The piece reveals that self-publishing success depends far less on writing quality than on marketing expertise, paid advertising budgets, and existing audience size—advantages the author lacked and most hopeful self-publishers won't have either.

Permalink booksmoneybusinesspersonal finance

Eater Nola

Where to Get a Great Muffuletta in and Around New Orleans

The muffuletta, a plate-sized Italian American sandwich layered with cured meats, cheese, and olive salad on a seeded loaf, originated in 1906 when Salvatore Lupo at Central Grocery created it as a convenient lunch for Sicilian workers in New Orleans's heavily Italian immigrant neighborhood. The piece traces the sandwich's history and cultural significance while providing a curated guide to where to find the best versions throughout the New Orleans area, from the original Central Grocery to modern variations at spots like Porgy's and Napoleon House.

Permalink foodhistoryrestaurantssandwiches

The Points Guy

You can travel around Spain for free by train this summer

Spain extended its free train travel program through December 2023, allowing summer visitors to ride commuter and medium-distance Renfe trains for free by purchasing multi-journey tickets (minimum 10 return trips) with a small deposit of €10–€20 that must be earned back through 16 completed journeys. High-speed routes like Madrid-Barcelona are excluded from the scheme, which has proven popular among locals and may be made permanent due to its environmental benefits and €764 million cost funded by a windfall tax on banks and energy companies.

Permalink travelbudgettransportation

Business Insider

A stock trader who made $8 million in 2 years shares how he's betting on AI stocks and the strategy he's using to trade hot themes this year

Stock trader Jack Kellogg applies a thematic trading strategy to capitalize on sector-wide momentum, identifying a "head" stock (like C3.ai for AI) and then trading related "sympathy plays" that tend to follow its price movements. He combines crowd-sourced research from Twitter and Google with technical analysis using support/resistance levels and volume indicators, entering positions gradually when stocks decline and exiting when they break support or the lead stock falters. Despite trading AI stocks successfully in early 2023 with estimated $1.4 million in gains by February, he remains cautious about shorting the sector, waiting for signs of irrational euphoria—like mainstream adoption—before betting against it.

Permalink strategypersonal finance

sharingbuttons.io

PopSQL

PopSQL - Modern, collaborative SQL editor for your team

PopSQL is a collaborative SQL development platform that centralizes data queries, documentation, and visualization in a single workspace to reduce inefficiencies like scattered knowledge and repetitive Slack questions. It emphasizes real-time team collaboration, interactive visual dashboards, easy query sharing, and integration with existing data infrastructure while prioritizing security and ease of use for both technical and non-technical users. The tool is designed to help data teams work more efficiently by providing a shared environment that democratizes data access and frees up analysts to focus on strategic work rather than answering basic data questions.

Permalink productivitycollaborationtoolsdatabase

Medium

Want to see something crazy? Open this link on your phone with WiFi turned off.

US telecommunications companies grant third-party services like Danal and Payfone direct access to sensitive customer data—including home addresses, phone numbers, and real-time cell tower location data—through enterprise APIs ostensibly designed for fraud detection. These services can look up this information using only a mobile phone's IP address, with minimal consent requirements and likely inadequate oversight, enabling potential tracking or de-anonymization of nearly any American cell phone user without meaningful safeguards or warrant requirements. The article demonstrates working demos of these capabilities and notes that major carriers' opt-out mechanisms appear ineffective at preventing such access.

Permalink privacysecuritymobileinvestigation

RapidAPI for Mac – The most advanced API tool for Mac

Paw – A full-featured visual HTTP client

RapidAPI for Mac is a native macOS HTTP client designed for testing and debugging APIs with features including visual request building, multiple authentication schemes (OAuth, Basic Auth, AWS Signature), code generation in various languages, and dynamic values that can extract data from previous responses for complex workflows. The tool emphasizes accuracy through its own HTTP library, performance via multithreading, and usability through environment switching, request organization, and support for importing API definitions from Swagger, RAML, and other formats, plus easy migration from tools like Postman and cURL.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentmactools

insomnia.rest

Insomnia REST Client

This is a marketing page for Insomnia, an API development platform that combines design, testing, and debugging tools with AI capabilities and tight integration with Kong's API management suite. It emphasizes features like API mocking, automated testing, MCP (Model Context Protocol) server support, and flexible data storage options (local, Git, or cloud) to appeal to both individual developers and enterprises managing governance and compliance requirements. The platform positions itself as an alternative to similar tools by highlighting native Kong Konnect integration, AI-powered workflows, and collaboration features that work across all pricing tiers including a free tier.

Permalink developmentmactoolsopensource

Futurism

AI Is Creating "Doom Loops" All Over the Economy

Unredacted legal documents from the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal internal company admissions that AI creates "doom loops"—systems where AI monetizes human-created content while simultaneously destroying the economic incentives and conditions needed to produce that content in the first place. The article catalogs these doom loops across journalism, music, film, education, and recruitment, showing how AI companies knowingly built business models that cannibalize their own supply chains and harm workers across creative industries. Microsoft's own internal documents acknowledged this paradox explicitly: the technology relies on fresh cultural content to function while the products themselves undermine creators' ability to earn livelihoods, ultimately threatening the open web and broader economy.

Permalink aibusinesseconomicsjournalism