fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Life Is Good, and I Am Happy
Tags: Positive Thinking, Life Lessons, Happiness, Self Improvement, Self Help

A few nights before today, I heard an unpleasant piece of news. But what could I do? I could not un-hear it, I could not un-know, or had the power to undo it. The situation was out of my control, and the incident had already happened. What I could do, as many wise people say, was take control of how I respond to the news: internally, as well as, externally. I did not want to wake up depressed and gloomy the next morning. And I knew the power lay inside me, to make my new day better than what it was the night before.

So, as I readied myself for bed, I repeated this mantra to myself, “Life Is Good, And I Am Happy.” I could not let the news of one day control the rest of my next day. I taught this mantra (or phrase) myself to train my mind to believe, everything is well. The constant repetition of the phrase motivated me to wake up calmer the next day. It forced me to let go of the news of the last night and pushed me to go about the day as peacefully as possible. Although it did not put me in a 100% better emotional state, it worked its magic slowly, spread over a few days.

I often record similar positive assertions and let them play on repeat as I sleep. This concept is not new; it is very similar to what we call, self-hypnotherapy. The process assists in training your subconscious mind by repeating the positive words while you sleep.

Research suggests, positive self-affirmations help lower stress, and we become less vulnerable to any tumultuous situations. Phrases like, “Life Is Good, And I Am Happy” encourage positivity and optimism. Positive self-affirmations reduce the lingering effect of negative experiences in our minds. Repeating these positive phrases or mantras while sleeping, restrains your conscious mind’s tendency to contradict the affirmations, and quietly instill the positive self-belief in your subconscious mind.

So when the night is dark, and life seems out of control, repeat to yourself, I am calm.

Include self-help therapy in your list of 2021 resolutions, and you’ll feel stronger to face any challenges that the coming year throws at you.

Pick up your favorite phrase, your most needed affirmation:

I am strong

I am confident

I am happy

I am disciplined

I am at peace

Repeat these phrases to yourself every night before you sleep and every time you see yourself on the opposite side of your affirmation. It will work its secret magic, and though the situation would not change, you’ll be able to look at it from a different angle, and that is what matters the most.
Sanal Para Dijital Para ve Kripto Para
Tags: Blockchain, Kripto Para Birimi, Bitcoin, Sanal Para, Dijital Para

in In Fitness And In Health
2020 Queensland Election
By: Policy Innovation Hub
Tags: Elections, Politics, Queensland, Policy, Australian Politics

ASPLEY

Held by Labor by a margin of 1.2%.

Sitting MP

Bart Mellish since 2017. Swinging seat.

The electorate of Aspley covers outer northern parts of Brisbane and includes the suburbs of Aspley, Bridgeman Downs, Carseldine and parts of Bald Hills, McDowall, Zillmere and Geebung. The seat includes some strong Liberal voting areas and has been won by the Liberal National Party (LNP) in 6 of 10 elections.

The seat was won by Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) Bart Mellish in 2017 after the Liberal National Party of Queensland (LNP) received a -10.3% swing against them. With five candidates running — Bart Mellish (ALP), Amanda Cooper (LNP) a former Brisbane City Councilor from 2007–2019 — are frontrunners. Cooper is campaigning on for an electorate that, she says, has been ‘starved of infrastructure projects, lack of investments in the local community’. Cooper and the LNP are campaigning for an Beams Road/Gympie Road overpass which they claim will cut traffic time and help local business.

Though marginal, this seat is a must hold for Labor to return to the government benches.
6 Best Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets 2021 | Top Bitcoin Hardware Wallet
By: Earnest Knot
Tags: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Custody, Cryptocurrency, Security

A good cryptocurrency hardware wallet is an absolute essential for many of us. Aside from helping us feel more connected to our funds, hardware wallets keep us safe and give us peace of mind when using digital currencies.

It’s been my mission for the past few years to help people understand cryptocurrencies and keep safe when using them. Having a hardware wallet is one of the most important components in keeping your cryptocurrency secure.

If you’re looking for one, you’re going to want the best hardware wallet you can find.

Read through this guide if you want to understand the difference between the different wallet providers. If you are in a hurry to find the best your money can buy, you’ve also come to the right place.

What are hardware wallets?

The short of it is that hardware wallets are portable devices that give us secure access to our crypto. They function by generating a user’s private keys in a secure, offline environment while featuring an easy to use display. They usually connect via USB or Bluetooth to internet-connected devices like your computer. A separate screen on the wallet is used to verify and approve transactions to help prevent disclosure of sensitive information to the internet-connected device. This all combines to be very handy as you don’t have to worry about a computer being compromised.

Aside from security advantages, a hardware wallet also gives users tactile control over their funds. To many, having their funds in their hands is a familiar feeling that is paramount for adoption.

The List:

Top 6 Cryptocurrency Wallets of 2021

There are just a few hardware wallets on the market, yet still, it may be difficult to choose the right one for you. I have put together these top four hardware wallets to help you save your time and money experimenting.

The six hardware wallets we chose to highlight are NGRAVE ZERO, BitBox, Ledger Nano X, Trezor Model T, and KeepKey. They all have different features and attributes that may make one more suitable for your objectives.

You might also be interested in:

Below are the best cryptocurrency hardware wallets going into 2021.
A turning point.
By: Charles Davies
Tags: Fiction, Auto

I am writing to you from the desert

Where I have wrung myself out

Like a damp flannel on an airless day.

There is nothing left here to offer.

No deep well of intuition. No gleeful spark.

The dusty casing discarded by an insect.

I turn inside to drink from my creative source

And, head back-tilted, feel my teeth meet

The lip of an empty metal water bottle.

I call deeper. Still nothing. My own self

Is an empty cave and my longing

A hollow echo coming back unmet.

Not even rising panic. Not even deep despair.

No jittery nerves to light the fuse of nervous action.

A void. A loss. An inconsequent emptiness.

There is nothing to do. Nothing to do

But listen to the low static hum of

Some future agitation waiting to make itself heard.

I let go of the flannel. Let go of the desert.

Let go of water bottle insect cave.

I let go of longing for a longing to call me.

A still point. The brow of the hill.

The tide not in, not out.

A dial turned to zero with a click.

When I stop. When I stop and stand still.

When I drop to the floor and lie looking

At the world going by. Then the world goes by.

Two birds cross my path. Three. Four.

The wind runs through wasteland grass

And through the treetops that mark the horizon.

Soft breathing. A whistle song from this tree

To that. A crow. A car. A train. A dog.

The low static hum of distant traffic.

I am an empty page. I flip the switch

From output to receive and let the world write me.

I am the bud of the bud of an early flower

And the weight of one sunlit drop breaks

And floods me with the brilliance of rain.

I am a river weed pulled by the current in deep water

Well-rooted and dancing, flung by the life

Of mountain water’s path to the sea.

I am the ocean abiding in effortless expanse

Accepting the intrusion of a million streams

The endless embodiment of taking and giving.

I am the path compacted by pilgrim’s feet

Offering them the metaphor of the certainty they seek

By staying where I am and going nowhere.

I am a spacecraft refuelling in weightless emptiness.

I rest and wait. And rest. And wait.

Without intent or goal or mission.

And time will take its time. And I,

An abundant and vital oasis,

Will see the fruits of its labours.

Somewhere, on the far side of that tree-lined horizon

There are the makings of a dream -

Colour and movement and people and song.

And they will come. Or maybe this track will carry me there.

But this morning, with the promise of nothing

But a slow walk home, they may stay where they are.

I am on hold. This is a holy day.

I am letting everything go its own way.

And when it is time, life will start again.
Honey Bear
By: Linda Laino
Tags: Childhood, Literature, Narrative, Sadness, Poetry

Honey Bear

A poem

Photo, Linda Laino

I am told

I have a sad face.

It is a fact

even when I don’t feel

particularly so,

everyone used to say it

why do you look so sad?

the constant query as a child.

Once I was given a bear

I called “Honey”

with the same eyes

the same expression

he is sad like you

said the gifter.

I loved the bear and so

I was glad for the likeness

our twin frowns

wrapped up

together in sleep.

Did I feel more loved then?

All the attention to my mood,

invisible middle child —

look at me! look at me!

I began to own it,

worked hard at being sad

like a reluctant grave digger

feeling every aching muscle of it.

But even then I understood

no one understands.

It wasn’t sinister

or splintery it was

making a home in the dark

like a childhood closet

accompanied by the melodious moan of a solo cello

that sadness, blessed melancholy

became as soft and dependable

as the curly warmth

of the bear.

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Why Every Git Commit Message Must Include Its Commit Context
By: Thilina Ashen Gamage
Tags: Software Development, Github, Git, Developer Tools, Programming

Problem

Git does not define official standards/developer guidelines for commit messages, so the commit message formats usually depend on the discretion of developers. Sometimes, this arrangement can turn your Git commit log into a total mess (especially when developers from multiple backgrounds and teams contribute to the same source code and do not follow a common convention).

$ git log --oneline -10 xxxxxxx unit tests updated - good to go

xxxxxxx New customers added

xxxxxxx renew certificates - fullchain.pem & privkey.pem

xxxxxxx Merge branch 'xxxx' of bitbucket.org:xxxxx/xxx-xx into xxxx

xxxxxxx sample response added to swagger spec

xxxxxxx Syntax error corrected

xxxxxxx division by 100 change added to loans

xxxxxxx Updated Units

xxxxxxx Updated Users

xxxxxxx collateral details no account handling changed temporarily

To overcome this issue, most teams maintain a set of guidelines for Git. This article suggests such a convention for your next project.
If you really want to win friends, forget Dale Carnegie
By: Shefali O'Hara
Tags: Making Friends, Dogs, Cute, Dale Carnegie, Human Interaction

If you really want to win friends, forget Dale Carnegie

Instead, get a dog

Me with a collie in Indiana — picture courtesy of Sam Mahmoud

Last night I was walking my dog Snowy. As we passed a neighbor’s house, their door opened. He ran towards them, fully intent on entering their house. When I apologized, they just laughed.

“We like dogs,” they told me. They then proceeded to coo over him as he did the puppy bow on their lawn, rump raised and tail wagging.

It reminded me of the time I was hiking with my dogs Daisy and Red on an off leash trail years back. Red freaked out for some reason as we approached the parking lot and ran full tilt… into someone else’s vehicle! But the owners, a nice black couple, just smiled at me.

“That’s OK,” they said. “She’s just being friendly.” We chatted for a while before I escorted her to my vehicle.

Small children and dogs can get away with things the rest of us can’t. People excuse their bad behavior. They break the ice in unconventional ways. They create entrees for human interaction the rest of us miss.

When you walk down the street dog-less, unless you are in a small Southern town, no one waves at you or smiles. Most people avoid eye contact.

When you walk down the street with a dog on a leash… it’s different.

Children want to pet the dog. Adults smile and tell you what a beauty he or she is. Sometimes people who are walking their dogs stop and have a chat.

Snowy in a Chewy Box — picture by the author

This morning, as I was walking Snowy, a young woman smiled at me from across the street. She called and asked if she could meet my dog.

“Sure,” I called back.

She ran across the street just to pet him.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“He’s 10 months,” I told her.

Astonished because of his size, she called to another young woman across the road in her native tongue.

“What language is that?” I asked her.

“It’s Vietnamese,” she said, shyly. Then she taught me to say “10 months” in Vietnamese, making me repeat it until I got the intonation right.

After a few more minutes of conversation, we exchanged names and walked away. I’d made another new friend thanks to Snowy.

Forget Dale Carnegie. If you want to make friends, just get a dog!
Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency with scikit-learn
By: Rohan Paul
Tags: Machine Learning, Scikit Learn, Mathematics, NLP, Data Science

Kaggle Notebook link with all the running code in this blog.

In this post, I shall go over TF-IDF Model and its implementation with Scikit-learn.

Traditional Feature Engineering Models

Traditional (count-based) feature engineering strategies for textual data belong to a family of models popularly known as the Bag of Words model. This includes term frequencies, TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency), N-grams, topic models, and so on. While they are effective methods for extracting features from text, due to the inherent nature of the model being just a bag of unstructured words, we lose additional information like the semantics, structure, sequence, and context around nearby words in each text document.

Bag of Words Model

This is perhaps the most simple vector space representational model for unstructured text. A vector space model is simply a mathematical model to represent unstructured text (or any other data) as numeric vectors, such that each dimension of the vector is a specific feature/attribute. The Bag of Words model represents each text document as a numeric vector where each dimension is a specific word from the corpus and the value could be its frequency in the document, occurrence (denoted by 1 or 0), or even weighted values. The model’s name is such because each document is represented literally as a bag of its own words, disregarding word order, sequences, and grammar.
My first post about R packages
By: Kevin Chang
Tags: Rstudio, R Programming, Tidyverse, R Package, R Programming Language

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

An R package, or Library, contains a set of user-defined functions that bundled together to provide more functionality to base R, i.e. a collection R packages that came with the installation of R program. The reason that I built my very first R package, infoDecompuTE , was that I have a collection of R functions which I can constantly reuse and I would also like to share it to the public, via the Comprehensive R Archive Network, or CRAN. But more importantly, that was for my PhD study.

I want to use my first post to share my knowledge on the loading R packages and the complexity of loading many R packages at the same time in an R script or Rmarkdown document.

Note that R program is not the same as Rstudio, Rstudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) to the R program. Very simply, Rstudio is like notpad++ (which was what I used before Rstudio) for you to write R code more efficiently and also enable you to do much more, e.g. building R packages, developing an R Shiny applications and generating Rmarkdown documents, to name a few.

This post is not about how to build an R package, but you can find a very comprehensive book in this link, https://r-pkgs.org/.
I Went to the Movies
By: Anna Moriartylev
Tags: Movies, Grief And Loss, Motherhood, Little Women, Comics

Spiralbound

Comics for life, brought to life by Edith Zimmerman.
Složení kolegia kurfiřtů
By: Martin Pánek
Tags: Politika

in In Fitness And In Health
Use Visual Studio Code on Any Device, Anywhere
Tags: Vscode, Remote Work, Software Development, Google Cloud Platform, Programming

Steps to Get It to Work

1. Create (or Login Into) an Account on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Currently, there is a promotion for a 12 month free trial with $300 USD credit to pay for your virtual machines.

How to navigate to virtual machine compute

2. Create a Virtual Machine(VM) on GCP by going to Compute Engine>VM instances>Create, this will create a computer virtually on the cloud.

Virtual Machine configuration

3. Configure your Virtual machine. Your configuration needs to have at least two CPU’s, 7.5GB of memory, and running the latest version of Ubuntu (for me it’s 16.04 LTS).

SSH navigation

4. Connect to the Virtual Machine by clicking the SSH button to the right of your External IP.

5. Download Visual Studio Code 3.3.1-Linux from Coders Github. Coder is a company that helps people save time configuring, securing developer environments. This is what we will be doing to setup Visual Studio Code. Copy this link and paste it in your terminal to start downloading Coder (this link is not the newest version of Visual Studio Code but it should still work perfectly for what we will need it for).

wget https://github.com/cdr/codeserver/releases/download/v3.3.1/code-server-3.3.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

6. Extract the files with this tar command:

– tar -vzfx code-server-3.3.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

7. To access Coder remember to change the directory by typing in the following:

cd code-server-3.3.1-linux-x86_64

8. Start Visual Studio Code by typing in the following.

sudo ./code-server

Once you’ve entered this command it should output a port and a password

Tip: you can disable the password by adding: – – auth none .

To change the port you could add: – – port {any port number} .

9. Access Visual Studio Code. To access Visual Studio Code you need to first find your external IP. To find it, go to the GCP website and navigate to the Compute Engine>VM instances, there you will find your external IP address. After that go to any locally hosted browsers and type this command in the browser:

http://{external IP}:{port number}

Tip: If you want to rerun Visual Studio Code (if you’ve closed the application) and you’ve already finished the installation of Coder, just open your terminal and skip to step seven.

Now you can program in Visual Studio Code at a beach, a park, or even a plane, you can program anywhere with access to the internet.
Sacrificing Lives for a Weak Economy
By: Taylor White
Tags: Covid 19, Economics, Politics, Data Science

Instead of stopping the spread of the virus, many U.S. states chose to keep their economies open. Political leaders downplayed the risks of the virus and encouraged people to live life uninterrupted. The result is that mortality in the U.S. stayed much higher than in other wealthy countries, with a curve that resembles the poorer Latin American region. The U.S. GDP per capita is four times higher than even the wealthiest Latin American country — we should have had the resources to fight this virus.

COVID skeptics saw efforts to slow the spread of the virus as fundamentally misguided. They said the virus is just like the flu (it’s not), and even if it is deadly, the economy is more important than saving lives. Critics of governors that chose to fight the virus loved to point out how Sweden was a shining example of a country that did little to combat the virus, and yet people still seemed to be enjoying themselves. The numbers show that lax approaches have not worked.

The chart below illustrates COVID-19 mortality rates, along with the economic impact of COVID for thirty of the wealthiest countries. The economic impact is the difference between the projected economic growth for 2020 and what would have likely occurred without COVID. The International Monetary Fund projects that the U.S. economy will suffer 22% less than the median country, but our mortality rate is 457% higher than the median. This mortality/growth trade-off is unfavorable to say the least, especially since a quarter of these countries have both lower mortality and better economic outcomes. The U.S. could have saved over 170,000 lives by achieving just the median mortality rate, which would have required earlier action and better coordination.
ICOVO’s Airdrop, when can you receive “OVO” tokens?
By: Icovo Ag
Tags: Bounty Program, Telegram, Airdrop, English

Hello everyone.

Among many questions asked in Telegram, let us answer to your question regarding ICOVO’s Airdrop ‘’When can we receive “OVO” tokens?’’

OVO distributed at ICOVO’s Airdrop will be distributed to registrants as soon as ICOVO ‘s token sale is over.

Check our latest notification of the start and end of the token sale in real time via ICOVO’s Facebook · Twitter · Telegram, please follow / join us by all means!

You may also find great exclusive campaign information in our Facebook · Twitter · Telegram.

Please hurry and follow / join us.
Being Being Not Labeling
By: David Breeden
Tags: Poetry, Being Yourself, Art, Artist, Humanism

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

In my younger days I kept two sayings tacked up on my office wall: The composer Igor Stravinsky’s “A masterpiece is all that counts” and the Roman writer Pliny the Elder’s saying, Nulla Dies Sine Linea, “Never a day without a line.”

I’ve always been fond of quotes, the sort of thing that nowadays appears as memes all over social media.

Pliny would have been a master of Twitter. He wrote some serious lines. In addition to “never a day without a line,” he wrote some phrases that are the backbone of Latin 101: Cum grano salis, “with a grain of salt.” In vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.” Fortes Fortuna iuvat, “fortunę favors the brave.” And the slightly longer phrase, Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono. “There is no bad that will not come some good.” He may or may not have written ubi domus, ibi cor — “Home is where the heart is.”

I still practice Nulla Dies Sine Linea. I’ve managed to write something every day for over forty years, excepting those days I’ve been flat on my back in a hospital.

But I no longer agree with Stravinsky that a masterpiece is all that counts. As a matter of fact, I positively and totally disagree with that idea. I don’t think a masterpiece matters much at all in terms of a life. Nowadays I agree with the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.”

Photo by Light of Genius on Unsplash

Following Stravinsky’s very serious insistence upon high art as the very essence of life made me a bit of a jerk. (OK: a lot of a jerk.) I didn’t like that guy. Lots of things matter more than creating a masterpiece.

All those years ago, I was focused on how to be a poet rather than focusing on the attempt to write a poem. And that’s just foolish. Because what poets are are people who write poems. It’s foolish to attempt to live up so some sort of label. My advice: cease to be that very serious person who wants to achieve “poet,” “prophet” or any other label.

Now, I don’t mean to fall off on the other side of the rail here. This is not about that “being not doing” thing. Again, it’s not about product, masterpiece or otherwise. It’s about living and enjoying being alive in its fullness, not in the tiny stuffy rooms of heady achievement.

Here’s another little line that might look good on an office wall: Anton Chekhov said,

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

Yep. That about sums it up.

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The rules of business are shifting
By: Colin Newlyn
Tags: Future Of Work, Leadership, Business, Purpose, Ethics

Did you notice the shift beginning?

It’s like the first crack in the ice-shelf that begins the process that leads eventually to the collapse into the sea. A loud noise rents the air but nothings seems to have happened. The only trace is a small fissure. You wondered if anything happened at all.

On August 19th, the Business Roundtable announced a new statement of purpose, dumping its old singular focus on shareholders and embracing a broader role serving multiple stakeholders. Now it also refers to

creating “value for customers”

“investing in employees”

fostering “diversity and inclusion”

“dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers”

“supporting the communities in which we work”

“protect[ing] the environment”

“Creating long-term returns for shareholders” is at the bottom of the list.

It would be easy to be cynical about this. The Business Roundtable consists of many of the CEOs of top US corporations and is a pressure group for their interests. They are hardly paragons of virtue, including the likes of JP Morgan, General Motors, Apple, Boeing & Walmart and covering every industry that has polluted, exploited and mis-sold in recent times. They have only made a statement, they haven’t actually taken any action yet. Leopards don’t change their spots, and all that.

Easy but wrong. This is huge. Shareholder primacy, as advocated by Milton Friedmann in 1970, was taken on fully by US corporations, a maxim that they applied with almost religious zeal and defended ferociously, claiming it was inalienable and supported in law. It has driven corporate behaviour for almost half a century.

Whilst it was most rigorously followed by US corporations, its influence spread much wider. It was taught in business schools, it was applied throughout all businesses. “Profit above all else” became the creed by which business operated around the world.

This led directly to what I call ‘the crapification of work’, because if the interests if shareholders are supreme then all other stakeholders interests will suffer and none more so than the workers.

Shareholder primacy is the single idea that has impoverished, disempowered and actually killed employees around the world for most of our recent history. And now it is gone.

Of course, this wasn’t the first crack, just the first big crack. Just after the announcement, the B Corps community took out full-page ads welcoming the announcement and pointed out that they already had a new model that could be adopted to deliver this purpose statement. B Corp is an earlier crack, much smaller but growing and widening all the time.

And there are lots of other cracks in the ice sheet, if you look carefully enough, all getting a little bit wider every day and starting to run into each other.

The shift has started. It’s not a question of if part of the ice sheet will break off but when and what size.

And how big a wave it will create.
Sky, Fall Apart
By: Veronica Georgieva
Tags: Poem, Growth, Self, Poems On Medium, Poetry

I open all the windows,

all the doors,

then break down

the ceiling

and the walls;

I let the whole sky

fall apart on me,

liquid, fiery;

rain, that’s been

held too long inside

the eyes of an angel

with only one wing;

lightning,

that was used to carve

the path of a nobody's destiny;

clouds,

that used to contain chaos

just seconds ago;

I open my eyes,

I let

my tears and the storm mix,

I let

my fears and skies’ hell kiss;

I let me forget the future

that I saw by mistake;

I let me forgive the past

that was building a staircase

to emptiness;

and then I stay here

in the present

that I feel for the first time

and I wish for it to cleanse me;

so I’m waiting in the storm,

begging for forgiveness;
Hotbox
By: Rob Eggers
Tags: Drugs, Police, Flash Fiction, 50 Word Stories, Pentina

Thick clouds of heavy sweet smoke filled the car. In no time the intoxicating fog had obscured everything.

With the windows rolled up and the music cranked, they were having the time of their lives, until they realised that knocking sound they could hear was a cop at the window.
Deploy a Node API to Cloud Run
By: Dirk Hoekstra
Tags: JavaScript, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Nodejs, Programming

Deploy a Node API to Cloud Run

Run custom Docker images on Google’s Cloud Run infrastructure

Photo by Henry Dick on Unsplash.

Cloud Run is very similar to Google’s App Engine and Cloud Functions. The main difference is that with Cloud Run, you can create custom Docker images.

This means you have way more control over how your application should be built and you can go crazy with complicated custom Docker builds. The downside is that it’s a bit harder to set up compared to Google’s App Engine.

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up a custom Docker image on Cloud Run.
iPad 3 as a Second Display
Tags: iPad, Monitor, Vnc, Tablet

If you have an older generation iPad or any other tablet, you can use it as an extension to your current monitor. In this setup I have used an iPad 3 — which has a great screen with 1536x2048 resolution and an older generation Lenovo T530i. To use iPad as a second monitor, I will use an old VGA trick, which tricks OS into having second monitor connected. After OS detects second monitor, set that monitor to be an extension to the main monitor, run VNC server and connect to the VNC server from an iPad.

Required parts:

Laptop or PC with VGA port. iPad 3 (or any other tablet) Set of resistors. I’ve used 3 of: 100 Ω. Amazon link

Required software:

Windows. On Linux you can create dummy displays easily with X server, no need to trick VGA, though still possible using the same setup. VNC viewer on tablet. I use RealVNC viewer on iPad 3, which is still available to download in App Store for iOS 9.3.5 VNC server on computer. I use TightVNC server, which is free to download.

Setup:

First connect 3 resistors of 50–150 Ω as shown in this diagram. In my case pins 3 and 8 were required, but it depends on the VGA setup which ones will work.

VGA pins

This is how it looks when connected:

Once connected correctly go to display settings and you should see 2 displays. Arrange them as you need and near “Multiple displays” option select “Extend these displays”. Then, using an iPad’s VNC viewer connect to the VNC server running on your computer. You can now place applications on both displays.

View of the setup:

Article first appeared at: https://blog.zenlot.xyz/post/ipad_second_display/
#33: What Happened at Munchee
By: Kelly Mcquade-W.
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Education, Finance

Featuring Andrew J. Chapin

Listen Now

Show Notes

Back in Episode #6, our guest was the founder of Munchee to promote their ICO. Within 2 months they had been subpoenaed by the SEC and on the all the investors had to be refunded. Here’s one of their advisors from Chapin Labs to tell us the mistakes they made and what we can learn about the SEC and launching an ICO today.

Transcript

Coming Soon.
Waves Launches Explorer 2.0
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Blockchain, Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrency, Waves, Crypto

The new version is optimised for mobile devices and fits perfectly within Waves’ unified design concept.

With the Christmas holidays in full swing for much of the world, the Waves team is still working hard and is pleased to announce another important launch before the end of the year. The new release of the Waves Explorer 2.0 is a major update, bringing the UI into line with the design of othxer Waves products. We have included several stability patches and — most importantly — improved the experience for mobile devices.

New UI

Our frontend team has created a much clearer and more user-friendly interface, and the overall experience for the application is now similar to other apps in the Waves ecosystem.
WhiteWall — Best protection for your personal information
Tags: Bitcoin, Privacy, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Security

link on bitcointalk: [ANN] WhiteWall — Best protection for your personal information
Non-Parametric Regression vs Parametric Regression
By: Suraj Ghimire
Tags: Machine Learning, Regression, Technology, Data Science, Statistics

In any statistical observations, a set of measured variables might be call inputs. These inputs have some influence on one or more other variables, called outputs. The goal of supervised learning is to use the inputs to predict the values of the outputs. In the statistical literature of machine learning, we have

Inputs are often called the predictors, also known as independent variables. The outputs are called the responses, or classically the dependent variables. A function that maps or explains the relation between input and output. in supervised learning, they are well known as regression functions. They correspond to the case where the outputs are quantitative.

An example of a statistical model. Figure by author

In the above model, we need to predict the amount of glucose of ith person using the infrared absorption spectrum of his/her blood. This prediction can be done in two different ways, mainly.

If we have a pre-defined model, we can use a parametric approach. If we do not have any model, we use a non-Parametric approach

A parametric model presumes that the form of a function is known. When an experimenter chooses one family of curves and inputs the choices into the inferential process, the information that data can supply concerning the model development is then restricted from the data under this assumed parametric form. The experimenter relies less on the data for information about the model.

An example of a parametric approach: fig by author

The assumption of the model without the knowledge of the accuracy of his or her assumptions can be dangerous in the sense of producing misleading inferences about the regression curve.

If we infer the above-given equation with unknown function while making few assumptions as possible, basically as a non-parametric model, it can be as

a non-parametric approach

Why the non-parametric model?

It allows great flexibility in the possible form of the regression curve and makes no assumption about a parametric form. It only assumes that the regression curve belongs to them some infinite-dimensional collection of functions. It heavily relies on the experimenter to supply only qualitative information about the function and let the data speak for itself concerning the actual form of a regression curve. It is best suited for inference in a situation where there is very little or no prior information about the regression curve.

Conclusion

The parametric form of regression is used based on historical data; non-parametric can be used at any stage as it doesn’t take any presumption. However, parametric and non-parametric regression is not a contradiction of each other. While the subsequent computation of non-parametric form, based on the first result can be used as a parametric form, any type of parametric regression can be used as non-parametric to test the accuracy of the model that we are using for parametric regression.
Disappearing Fingerprints
By: Paroma Sen
Tags: Poetry, Poetry On Medium, Change, Self, Time

Change is in the air

like a spiral of mosquitoes

because her blood is sweet,

her smell is sweet

but not her disposition, no

Change is in the air

like a small dust storm

whipping up a frenzy of fall leaves,

yellow, gold, yellow-gold and brown

cold happiness, cold and in a cup

Change is in the air

you breathe different sometimes

you are plagued with memories,

some of which have not happened yet

history stretches until it occupies more time than it should

Change is in the air

like change never could

time slips by,

the knot in your chest

still surprises you

Change is in the air

goodbye is a word flatter than it should be

let’s replace tears with wine,

and pretend we are grown-ups now, shall we

because my fingerprints, they won’t last till tomorrow.
Bitcoin Private vs. Pirate
Tags: International, Bitcoin Private, Piratechain, Pirates, Zksnark

Pirate Chain (ARRR) is an independent blockchain using the mining algorithm Equihash, dPoW. Pirate Chain (ARRR) is by general admission the most anonymous cryptocurrency with privacy by default. The Tor network is supported.

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Better ga and Characterize.vim
By: Alex R. Young
Tags: Plugins, Characters, Scripts, Ascii

betterga (GitHub: manicmaniac/betterga) by Ryosuke Ito is an extended version of the :ascii command. This command is typically invoked with ga , and shows the ASCII value of the character under the cursor in decimal, hexidecimal, and octal.

Ryosuke’s version of ga adds some useful extra information, including unicode details. For example:

<a> [LATIN SMALL LETTER A] 97, Hex 0x61, Octal 0141

<®> [REGISTERED SIGN] 174, Hex 0xae, Octal 0256

<∆> [INCREMENT] 8710, Hex 0x2206, Octal 021006

The template is defined with g:betterga_template , so you can change what values get displayed.

If you want even more character representations, then try tpope/vim-characterize by Tim Pope. This one returns emoji and HTML entities:

<©> 169, \251, U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN, ^KCo, ^KcO, :copyright:, ©
Choosing a North Star
By: Daniel Morales
Tags: Hacking Growth, Sean Ellis, Daily Challenges, Bookcademy

Choosing a North Star

Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown

Solve challenge here: https://www.bookcademy.com/home/show_daily_challenges/choosing-a-north-star

To hone your growth equation and narrow your focus, it’s best to choose one, key metric of ultimate success that all growth activity is geared toward. This is hugely helpful in keeping teams focused on the most productive use of their time and avoiding the wasting of resources that generally results from haphazard, scattershot approaches to growth experiments.

Some in the growth community refer to this one key metric as the One Metric That Matters, while others call it the North Star. We prefer the latter because it emphasizes that this metric becomes a guiding light to keep the team’s eyes on the ultimate goal of the growth hacking process, rather than becoming too fixated on a short-term growth hack they’re overly enamored of; one that may be wonderfully clever, or even create a temporary illusory growth boost, but doesn’t actually contribute to long-term sustainable growth.

The North Star should be the metric that most accurately captures the core value you create for your customers. To determine what is you must ask yourself: Which of the variables in your growth equation best represents the delivery of that must-have experience you identified for your product?
UI/UX Design: You’re Better Than You Think
By: Nick Lawrence
Tags: Ui Ux Design

Overview

Many times as professional designers, we discount and downplay our own skills and abilities. This is due in large part to our 21st-century globalized economy, vast library of portfolios, and perceived competition coming from virtually every direction.

It may be a relief to you then to know that after reviewing 100’s of UI/UX designer profiles over the course of the last year, I can say with reasonable certainty that you are a far better designer than you give yourself credit for.

Let’s go over why.
Crochet Affirmation №35
By: Leslie Stahlhut
Tags: Life Lessons, Crochet, DIY, Affirmations, Jane Goodall

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.― Jane Goodall

We often don’t think the things we do have any impact, that we are working in some kind of void where nothing is acknowledged.

But the truth is everything we do does have an impact and (for good or for ill) it does make a difference.

I like crochet because it is eminently sharable and allows me to make a positive difference in the world, be it an object like a hat or a purse or a blanket given as a gift, or something like a yarn bomb installed in an unexpected place that helps to reset someone’s bad day or add a small measure of joy to someone’s good day.
How do I get over people hating me?
By: Eden Rohatensky
Tags: Relationships, Advice, Ronresponds, Life Lessons, Dating

How do I get over people hating me?

Ron Responds #3

QFive years ago, I abruptly blew up my life and moved across the country, which involved breaking up my long-term relationship. She kept all our friends, and also started up a new relationship immediately afterwards, so I was like “great, fair game.” Recently, I was on tour and played in that city and I found out that not only does that group still actively hate me, but I’m referred to as Voldemort. Seems a bit extreme! I know groups need a common enemy, but my leaving lead to a lot of good things for myself and for all those people. I just can’t stop thinking about all these people who I love now, five years later, grinding out a hatred of me. I’m not that hateable! How do I get over it?

— Left and Leaving

AYou can’t make people like you. If people have it in their head that you’re Voldemort, it’s going to be a tough sell to get them to feel differently. Especially from a distance.

It’s probable that your ex was hurt when you left, and had a lot to say about that. Given that you weren’t there to provide the other perspective, your friends likely empathized with her and became closer to her.

I’m sure you left for a reason, but as you said, it was abrupt. Changes like this can make other people feel chaotic and unsettled. They have every right to feel upset, and you have to accept that. If you’d like to repair these friendships, you have to acknowledge how your actions made them feel, and talk to them about it. They might not be responsive, which is also their right.

You can’t control other people’s emotions or how they respond to you. The best thing you can do is make sure that you like you. Take a look at the relationship, and the friendships that you’ve had with these groups of people. Were there common things that you might have done that could have upset them? Don’t be too hard on yourself, but in these situations it’s always a good opportunity to spend some time reflecting on what you can do to better yourself.

These friendships might be repaired, or they might not. Either way, using this situation as a way to grow and understand yourself better will be the best way to move past it. You’ll have make new friendships in your new city, and those relationships will be stronger for it.

Best of luck!

Ron
Are You Really Ready for CI/CD?
By: Allen Helton
Tags: Programming, Software Development, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash.

Set the Expectation

When moving from a traditional software release cycle to CI/CD, you might be surprised to find just as much pushback from people internally as you find externally from your customers.

People don’t like change. It’s human nature. Give someone a routine and they will be happy. Moving to continuous deployment is like telling somebody, “Everything you’ve done up to now is wrong. Please relearn all of it.”

Internal struggle

Inside your company, you’re going to get pushback from all sides of the org. They have to rework customer contracts. They don’t understand how something could make it to production without a full regression testing cycle. They don’t trust the developers to not break everything.

There are going to be hiccups. You have approximately a 0% chance of pulling it off without a hitch on your first try. That is OK. Set the expectation that processes are changing and you’re ironing out some of the details.

Client expectations

Your existing customer base is accustomed to you behaving a certain way, but you’re now going to change the way you operate to something “better.” You are going to have to prove to your customers that this new model is better than what you’re doing right now.

You must convince them this is going to be worth changing their process for. This is your chance to prove that defect turnaround gets exponentially quicker. There’s no more waiting for a specific date to see a fix. Once the change has been made, it’s in their hands.
「AllenAct」で深層強化学習を試す
By: 小川 雄太郎 電通国際情報サービスIsid
Tags: Tutorial, Deep Learning, 日本語, Reinforcement Learning, Pytorch

An open source machine learning framework that accelerates the path from research prototyping to production deployment

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New chapter
By: Alok Tyagi
Tags: Personal

Friends,

I am starting a new chapter in my professional life. I will be joining CA Technologies as Sr. Vice President of Business Unit Executive this coming Monday. Some of you may already know CA Technologies as it has been in the Technology business for some time now. CA specializes in IT solutions that help customers manage and secure their complex IT environments. If you are a big business — financial institution, government or any other sector that has IT department — chances are you are using CA technologies in the IT organization

This is an exciting time for businesses like CA. CA already has a strong foothold in the IT environments that do large-scale business critical transactions across huge set of data. CA Customers have been relying on its proven solutions for decades as they perform millions of mission critical transactions everyday in a secure and reliable way. We know it as we rely on our financial institution to ensure every transaction happen in a secured and reliable way. And these institutions are doing millions of these transactions everyday across a large dataset that is accessible via multitude of devices.

Technology landscape continue to change and we are now witnessing significant business transformation happening in the enterprise world due to technologies like BigData/Social/Cloud/Mobile/etc. All this leading to data centers getting modernized and hybrid infrastructure getting in place. Datacenters are becoming the platform of business growth that foster agile innovation, build renewed customer intimacy expected of the social world while improving on organization collaboration/productivity without loosing on security and reliability. So net-net this is an exciting time to be in the technology business and I am excited to be joining CA to become part of this industry transformation.

I deeply appreciate all of your support and cherish our relationship. THANK YOU for giving me such a good journey.
LEDU Token Brand Awareness Ambassador Campaign
By: Dr. Michael J. Garbade
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Token, Education

Education Ecosystem will launch an ambassador campaign for LEDU token brand awareness. The participants will be required to post about the Education Ecosystem project and LEDU tokens in five (5) to ten (10) different crypto groups and submit those links through a google form once per week on Fridays. Each ambassador will get 5 LEDU tokens for 5 valid posts and 10 LEDU tokens for 10 valid posts. The number of rewarded tokens is not fixed, this may increase or decrease depending on the quality of the comment made in the group.

In order to participate, interested persons will need to:

1) Change their profile picture to the LEDU token logo.

2) Change their username ex: Ron-LEDU ambassador.

3) Post in five (5) to ten (10) crypto groups

4) Submit the links here every Friday to be verified by an ambassador manager.

Once participants have submitted their post links, LEDU token telegram admins and the ambassador manager will check the posts and approve or reject them. Spam posts will be rejected and participants will not receive any reward.

Participants will receive their rewarded tokens through their submitted ERC20 compatible wallet addresses at the end of the month.

Get LEDU Token

Get LEDU coins now on Exrates, BitForex, Livecoin, Mercatox and IDEX or join the LEDU OTC Trading program for large purchases. Read more about LEDU coins on our project page and ask any questions you might have in our Telegram group chat.