fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
This One Simple Exercise Will Help Counter Negative Thoughts
By: Michelle Middleton
Tags: Mindset Shift, Self-awareness, Personal Growth, Mindset, Self Love

I’m going to be the first to admit that, at least since my teens (and probably before), I’ve developed some unhealthy thinking patterns borne out of the desire to succeed or get ahead in life.

Did it make me happy? Of course not.

I was an idiot thinking being harsh on myself and supposedly being disciplined with myself would be helpful. But that’s what most of us do, right?

We associate drive, ambition, and ticking off boxes on our goal list with happiness. Yet these mindsets cultivate the very negative thinking patterns we try to undo when we realize what actual happiness is.

It’s easy to get carried away with the zeal of ambition and end up taking a downward spiral into negative thoughts and self-talk.

Albert Ellis identified that most people habitually think in ways that are self-defeating and irrational — irrational in the sense of going against our basic desire for happiness — and identified several faulty thinking patterns that we fall into on a daily basis. These insights spawned other researchers such as Aaron Beck to identify more examples of faulty thinking.

Before being able to change the way we think, we must first identify which type of faulty thinking patterns we’re most prone to.
Huawei Cares or Applecare?
By: Kemal Karataş
Tags: P30pro, Applecare, P30, Apple, Huawei

Almost everyone knows about Applecare service but, Huawei cares service a new tryout. I want to compare both services; Apple has an excellent performance about customer service: especially after-sales period. The company has a unique service quality for every region. iPhone has a balance between hardware and software.

Huawei has been using all the advantages since Apple’s a big tech company. There’s a sub-brand named Honor. The sales have almost got a peak for the company. Trump administration’s decisions made the situation harder for a short period. The latest explanations of the administration were positive. ‘’American companies may work with China.’’ statement was a big success for the patience of China. There won’t be any peace all around the world, though.

HUAWEİ CARES VS. APPLECARE

Huawei banned by Trump administration. Most of the American tech companies supported this decision. Every news made the situation worse than yesterday: this period ended with the G20 Trump administration’s official statement. Huawei cares can be the answer to the current situation. Let me give more info about the service:

- Every customer who buys P30 and p30 pro model between 10–27 July period in the Eurozone.

- The company searched what the costumers afraid of when they purchased the product are. Physical damage is the main reason.

- The product has 1–2 years of support that includes the scratched screen, liquid damage.

- Technical service process minimized to one hour in standard situations. İn an exceptional case, the period may change.

- There should be a standard service whether you go to official repair service or third-party service.

Applecare has been a good model for after-sales. The company may add additional features against Huawei. I should give a few details about Applecare also:

- If you visit the Apple store for a reason, genius starts to talk to you with a kind, sincere attitude. Whatever your situation or how bad it is can change: this may change your mind.

- You can see the device’s current status with iOS specific tools like battery performance.

- Since there are third-party technical services, technical service quality may change: it depends on the service.

When there’s a significant recession in the economy, the perfect smartphone won’t be enough any time. Technical service support makes the big tech company better than the opponent. Let the consumers decide about it.
God is a memetic organism.
By: Grant Talkington
Tags: Memes, Relationships, Christianity, Science, Racism

What is a memetic organism?

Well, first let’s consider its analogue and inspiration, the genetic organism. I am a genetic organism. My body and brain are encoded into little packets of information that “want” to reproduce, but they do so better together as an intelligent multicellular organism.

Memetic organisms are very similar, only the packets of information that encode them don’t take the form of DNA. Instead, their code manifests as ideas. Like genes, memes often do better together as complex organisms. For example: Wal-Mart is a pretty ideal memetic organism. It’s lasted a long time and reproduced itself many times.

It’s worth noting that memetic organisms often live for tens of thousands of years and command armies.

What makes religion such a special memetic organism? At its core, each memetic organism is founded on some measure of philosophy, whether it’s “Buncha stuff cheap” like Wal-Mart or “Good stuff expensive” like Apple. The nature of the metaphysical beast changes when the core of a philosophy isn’t a three-word axiom, but rather an archetype.

An archetype-powered memetic organism isn’t just founded on the universal principles of game theory or design: it’s founded on the universal principles governing the function and very nature of the human mind.
31events.com Re-Launched on AWS
By: Greg Hanchin
Tags: Calendar Invites, Mailchimp Integration, Mailchimp And Rsvp, Calendar Integration, Marketing

Counting RSVP’s on Calendar Clients

March 2018 — We have updated all of our content on 31events.com and calendarsnack.com to reflect the new product — kudos to Arnie and Jonn.

Our product is now fully functional using AWS and can be provisioned for OEM use in a few minutes. You can see our latest posts from Arnie and I on how the product works — https://31events.com/rsvp-for-5-billion-calendar-clients/.

If your an OEM and want to serve up your own RSVP service for Web and Email integration, please reach out to me at greghanchin@31events.com or one of site chatbots.

Another example here of one of our customers using the product in a MailChimp Campaign to track users.

In this use case, the customer used MailChimp to embed a RSVP request from a CalendarSnack. The Yes, No and Maybe are the actual interactions with the Calendar Clients.

You can use our product for free here.

Arnie on Medium:

Greg On Medium:

YouTube:
Code Sponsor Weekly Update
By: Eric Berry
Tags: Open Source, Foss, Open Source Software, Sustainability, Sustainable Development

January 29, 2018

When we started Code Sponsor last year, the goal was simple: help sustain open source. This year with the help of Gitcoin and ConsenSys, we are taking what we’ve learned last year and rebuilding tools around funding open source.

OSS FTW

In the spirit of openness and eating our own dog food, we decided to build Code Sponsor completely open source. We hope that by doing so, developers can trust and contribute to a platform that will be built to help them sustain their projects of passion.

The new platform is written in Python / Django. The source code can be found below.

During development, we will be using Gitcoin to help fund contributions. If you are interested in helping and would like to make some money doing so, please visit Gitcoin and learn how it works. Once you are up to speed, you can work on funded issues on the codesponsor project.

Q1 Goal

The primary goal of this quarter is to ship a fully functional platform that allows for developers to receive funding for placing ethical advertisements in their documentation websites.

This is already working for websites such as JS Bin, Devhints.io and CodeSandbox.io. It’s our goal to provide this type of scalable funding to as many projects as possible.

If you are a company that wishes to advertise to software developers, please reach out to us (team@codesponsor.io).

If you are an open source maintainer and want to find out if you are eligible to participate with the early release of Code Sponsor, please fill out this form.

Finally, if you’d like to participate in the development of Code Sponsor, join our Slack!
A Diverse Group of Friends, Self-Discovery, and a Queer Hero
By: Presley Thomas
Tags: Reading, You Brought Me The Ocean, Comics, Queer, Books

Jake and Kenny hike in the dry heat of the desert. In a small cameo, Superman flies by in a soft silhouette above them. It leads to a conversational trope of the genre about being a hero and what it might mean, how cool it would be to have superpowers and help people.

There is something endearing in this exchange that feels new. Two young gay men are confiding in one another, Jake coming out for the first time, not wallowing in shame about it but pondering something more. Jake was with Kenny, his people, and it wasn’t about who he was, but what the future might be — and how he might break the news to his best friend Maria, who they both suspect might be in love with him.

Alex Sanchez does a great job of not making it too easy for Jake. The tunnel vision he has for his burgeoning feelings for Kenny and the emotional rollercoaster that puts his friendship with Maria on feels real. Just as he gets a sense of how unusual he is outside of his relationships — yes, it has to do with water and, no, Kenny’s swim team captain sensibilities about water safety don’t help.
React Firebase Authentication
By: Ganapathy P T
Tags: React, Authentication, Firebase, React Hook

Creating a React app:

make sure you have node installed by typing the command else install it here

I am using create-react-app (recommended for beginners) to create my react boilerplate app. Feel free to use Next.js or Gatsby.js

npx create-react-app [your-app-name]

Configuring Firebase:

now change the directory and install firebase npm module by

cd [your-app-name] npm i firebase react-router-dom

start the development server by running the command

npm start

create a .env file in your project root directory and paste the code like below

this will save all these config strings to the environment as variables which can loaded to any of your project files at any time

the static site generator create-react-app which we are using has an unique way of storing the custom environment variables. We need to start the variable name as REACT_APP_ only then you can load that variables in your app. This is done for some security purpose so that you don’t actually overwrite the old variables which is already there. For more details refer the Official Documentation

Environment Variables are the way usually used by many developers to hide their API keys or any App Secrets while making open source projects so that we can hide our config and still use it. If you are pushing it to your repo in github or any other git clients, you can just include that .env file in your .gitignore file to ignore the file

create a new file base.js in your src folder and paste the config object you copied from the Firebase website

the environment variables can be accessed by process.env as mentioned above

Creating the UI:

here I have made the more simplest way to create the functional component without any styling and using the useState react hook to store the state

create a Login Component and write the code as below

create another component SignUp and paste the following code

alternatively to redirect if there is a user like this, you can make the routes for Login and Sign Up components as Private Routes which you can learn this from this blog post

make the Dashboard Component as per your requirements. You can get the current user details from the auth object as auth.currentUser exported from the base.js file

you can get the user’s name as auth.currentUser.displayName and profile image as auth.currentUser.photoURL. It is recommended to save the user in a context and use the Firebase real-time update on the auth state changes as follows

You can also use Social Logins like Google, Facebook, GitHub, Twitter, and many more… you can see all those options in the authentication tab in the Firebase console.
Building a Rotating IP and User-Agent Web Scraping Script in PHP
By: Antonello Zanini
Tags: Programming, PHP, Cybersecurity, Web Scraping, Startup

Rotating the Exit IP

To implement the IP rotation, we are going to use a proxy server.

“A proxy server is basically another computer which serves as a hub through which internet requests are processed. By connecting through one of these servers, your computer sends your requests to the server which then processes your request and returns what you were wanting. Moreover, in this way it serves as an intermediary between your home machine and the rest of the computers on the internet.” ―What Is My IP?

When using a proxy, the website we are making the request to sees the IP address of the proxy server — not ours. This enables us to scrape the target website anonymously without the risk of being banned or blocked.

Using a single proxy means that the IP server can be banned, interrupting our script. To avoid this, we would need to build a pool of proxies to route our requests through. Instead, we are going to use the Tor proxy. If you are not familiar with Tor, reading the following article is greatly recommended: How Does Tor Really Work?

“Tor passes your traffic through at least 3 different servers before sending it on to the destination. Because there’s a separate layer of encryption for each of the three relays, somebody watching your Internet connection can’t modify, or read, what you are sending into the Tor network. Your traffic is encrypted between the Tor client (on your computer) and where it pops out somewhere else in the world.” — Tor’s official documentation

First of all, we need to set up the Tor proxy. Following these OS-based guides is highly recommend:

Now, we have a Tor service listening for SOCKS4 or SOCKS5 connections on port 9050. This service creates a circuit on start-up and whenever Tor thinks it might need more in the future or right now.
HTML5 Canvas API ile Fotoğraf Manipülasyonu
By: Emre Yasin Çolakoğlu
Tags: Html5 Canvas, Image Processing, Html5, Frontend

Picozu the HTML5 Image Editor | the HTML5 Image Editor - Sharing Creativity

Open a new document and draw something using Picozu's various funky brushes or just upload a previous sketch from your…
4 Web Design Trends That Could Help Improve Your Site
By: Tom Alexander
Tags: Website, Design Thinking, Design, Web Design, UX

It doesn’t look like this whole website thing is a fad. In fact, I think it might be here to stay! So with that in mind, I’d like to explore how you can get a little extra value out of your website in 2020.

I’m always a little bit at pain to create some sort of “OMG, YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THE WEB TRENDS FOR 2020 ARE!” article, so I thought I’d approach the subject a little differently. I want to present the things you should consider for your website with one eye on the trends and how they could help add value to your brand or product. Let’s delve in, shall we?

The Trend: Dark Mode.

We’ve seen it steadily popping up in apps, UI and now the web for a little while; the infamous “Dark Mode”. The concept is simple: a little toggle or some such button that allows you to switch between your standard site and a “dark” (i.e. black version) of the site.

A common response to this is “but why?” Well, there are actually some pretty big benefits.

First and foremost, it’s excellent for saving battery life on OLED screens. On an OLED device (which encompasses most of the recent smartphones), the black pixel draws no power, so the potential battery saving by using a dark theme is massive.

Alongside this, the darkness of the site will cause the screen to adjust its brightness to the users current lighting conditions and really help to reduce eye strain. Offering someone a break from the retina-burning whiteness could be a very welcome sight/site indeed.

It also provides improved contrast, which is awesome news for universal accessibility. Any users with impaired vision or colour blindness will immediately receive a huge boost to the usability of your site. This will increase the chances of achieving an AA rating with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is no joke for the public sector and educational services.

Outside of that purely from a branding perspective, this extra contrast can also benefit by strengthening your brand. Your accent colours are likely to pop more and potentially create more impact on your page.
I Respect Gary Vee for a Different Reason
By: Tim Denning
Tags: Social Media, Self Improvement, Entrepreneurship, Empathy, Life

Connecting on a different level

Gary has spent a lot of his career being interviewed, talking on stage and having conversations with strangers in the street. Right from the start, what I watched Gary do was have empathy.

He tried to understand how other people were feeling and get inside their head with every conversation. You could see it in his reactions and the way he asked questions.

From the outside, it’s as if he discovered that to solve problems, he had to be more empathetic. Looking at his early Youtube Channel called “Wine Library,” I am not sure he had discovered this yet. His early work from my inexperienced perspective felt somewhat self-promotional.

As I have watched Gary grow in front of the eyes of the internet, rather than be torn down like the tall poppy he is, he seems to have become more empathetic which is not the natural by-product of influence or notoriety.

The louder his voice has got, the softer his heart has become towards others and the daily struggles they go through.

He has shown me how to connect with human beings on a completely different level. It is for this reason that I respect him as a person. It’s not his number of followers but his empathy which has made me rethink my own life.

Could we not all have a bit more empathy?
Submit your Truth
By: Nicole Bedford
Tags: Writers On Medium, Writing, Publication Spotlight, Publication, Stories

Submit your Truth

We want raw and gritty stories about life, love, sex, death, and regeneration, to name a few.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk. -Peggy Noo

Honest Writers wanted!

If you’re a writer and would like to share your story on a platform solely about the cathartic release of truth-telling, then Candour is for you.

Candour is a publication dedicated to sharing stories that celebrate the openness about the joys, victories, milestones, and pitfalls of life. This is not a place to sugarcoat things.

We want raw and gritty stories that fall under Life, life lessons, sex & sexuality, women, issues, mental illness, spirituality, self (including self-awareness, improvement, help, and mastery) and stories about your failures.

Dig deep. Only when we tunnel through to the depths of ourselves, do we successfully unfuck the self and emerge stronger, wiser, and closer to self-mastery.

Submission Process

The first step is to get you added as a writer.

Email me your Medium handle, and I’ll check out your current work, along with the piece you wish to publish or a similar article. If I love your style and storytelling muscles, I’ll respond and add you to the publication.

Email me here: candoureditorial@gmail.com with the subject:

‘Story Submission for Candour.’

Please be sure to include your Medium handle, or your approval won’t be processed.

Write a unique story (unpublished elsewhere) and select ‘add to publication’ from the (…) drop-down menu.

Candour will show up once you’ve been added as a writer.

I’ll read the story and run it through a plagiarism checker to be sure, do any small editing, and punctuation fixes — if necessary. Make sure you use Grammarly!

Check your stats. If accepted, your story will be published in 1–3 days.

Not all stories will be accepted, but if yours isn’t, do try again. I want to build a valuable place for writers to share their Candour with readers. Let’s learn from each other’s experiences.
Exploring Vercel Analytics Using Next.js 10 and GTMetrix
By: Dennis O'Keeffe
Tags: Vercel, React, Programming, Nextjs

Exploring Vercel Analytics Using Next.js 10 and GTMetrix

Add some datapoints to your new Vercel Analytics setup with GTMetrix and explore an overview of the results

Image credit: National Cancer Institute

Vercel announced their new analytics feature at their recent Next.js conference and, great news— it’s now live to try out!

In my most recent post, I deployed a simple Next.js 10 application to Vercel. Now it’s time to test out some of the new features!

In this post, we’ll cover how to enable Vercel Analytics on a Vercel hosted Next.js 10 project, then use GTMetrix to help send some request from around the globe (using throttling for various speeds) that our analytics can collect (on top of any other potential visits to the site).
AI auto-generates M&A candidates
By: Harsha Angeri
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mergers And Acquisitions, Technology, Data Science

Traditional approach: Company X wants to expand in a particular technology area and wants to prepare a list of potential acquisition candidates. How does one identify these companies? How does one rank them? One hires an expensive investment banker to prepare a shortlist. Bankers love buy-side mandates.

New approach: Hire a machine.

Acknowledged that M&A is a lot more than shortlisting candidates but let’s peel the M&A onion bit by bit, shall we? Target list generation is a key activity and most conglomerates maintain an active list and spend hours of CXO time on it.

Here is how a machine can help - illustrated via an example… Let’s take the Electric Vehicle sector. The “biggest electric car maker” (acquirer) wants to identify companies (targets) that have the closest matching technology portfolio to buy.

A 2-dimensional representation of patent landscape

Vectorize: 12,571 electric vehicle patents (recent ones) are accessed. This covers 1809 companies (patent assignee). The machine vectorizes patents (see vector cloud figure).

In this process, the machine understands what each word means (See Inset: Machine understands text via vectors).

Interpret: The machine next understands what areas is the acquirer owning technologies in. Below is a plot of the focus areas which span from battery packs to torque control to thermal charging etc. 8 areas are identified by the machine.

A 2-dimensional representation of focus areas in vector space

Shortlist: For each area, the machine maps every patent of the acquirer with every patent of the potential target (1808 companies) and given our definition of finding closest technology targets it uses “relatedness”/ “closeness” metric to shortlist candidates. The figure below has 8 diagrams for the 8 areas plotting every company (1808) basis the patent vector analysis. The shortlist is in front of us. A shortlist for every area.

We defined the closest technology as criteria… we could as well define it as complementing/ most core/ most cross-connected/ etc… a metric change would change the shortlist.

Acquisitive companies maintain an active target list. The machine can repeat this analysis in hours. Compare this with going through a procurement process to hire a banker and the costs associated with this.

In the “digital” era where increasingly everything is a vector do we peel the onion or push the boundaries of what is possible with a different form of intelligence?

If competitor 1 acquires competitor 2… what happens, what technology vanishes… 1809 companies are a network where anyone can buy anyone else… should we acquire someone today given potential changes in the technology landscape? Should an organic technology research project become inorganic (acquisition)? How do we model this?

Existing human forms of intelligence will struggle to simulate such complexities… machines can… albeit artificially.
Our World Needs a Reset Button or Maybe a Rewrite
By: Brenda Mahler
Tags: Poetry, Faces Of Covid, Covid 19, Reflections, Coronavirus

With a desire to connect faces to this insidious disease, people where asked to participate in a project. Everyone who participated were asked the same questions and their responses developed into poems sharing their experiences.

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Can LSD Cure Mental Illnesses?
By: Viktor Marchev
Tags: Therapy, Mental Health, Psychedelics, Lifestyle, Drugs

Can LSD Cure Mental Illnesses?

The psychedelic-assisted treatment explained.

For a guy who suffers from anxiety, LSD has crossed my mind multiple times so far for an alternative treatment. I assume many of you have considered it, as well. Psychedelics, such as DMT, LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca are slowly, but steadily being introduced into the psychotherapy-treatment world.

For some, it may seem drastic and certainly illegal, but for others, it may be the only way through. Sometimes we are ready to do what it takes to cure mental illness. Many of you would relate.

In the past years, micro-dosing on psychedelics has become more or less like a trend. Due to the substances’ properties and effects, their usage greatly enhances the effects of ordinary psychotherapy as we know it.

What exactly is psychedelic-assisted therapy?

As you may have already guessed, in simple terms, it’s therapy practices that involve the small doze usage of psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, LSD, MDMA, psilocybin (the active compound produced by mushrooms), and mescaline ( hallucinogen obtained from the cactus Peyote). This kind of research, although more widely known today, has been used as back as the 50s and 60s.

In the late 60s, however, such drugs were widely restricted. The usage of psychedelics was prohibited when it concerned medical and psychiatric research.

However, since the late 90s and early 2000s, the interest and practice of such therapies has renewed. Due to the advances in technology and ultimately health-care, professionals were able to collect and interpret more data regarding the topic. This all led to a better understanding of the drugs’ implications. In 2014, LSD and psilocybin were listed as Schedule I controlled drugs, thus researches could find out more about them.

Although huge effort has been put on the better understanding of the psychedelic-assisted therapies, their effects are still considered to be strongly dependent on each individual and the environment the drug was used in. Nevertheless, numerous studies argue that it may have positive effects, rather than none.
Meet the Seven HAX Founders Named in This Year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 List
Tags: Manufacturing, Agtech, Apparel, Venture Capital, Startup

Meet the Seven HAX Founders Named in This Year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 List

Forbes released its annual 30 under 30 list, detailing innovators making waves across the globe. Seven HAX founders made the cut this year, working on everything from making mines safer, to making fashion more sustainable.

Lucas Frye, 28, and Joseph Varikooty, 24 | Cofounders of Amber Agriculture

Lucas Frye, who received a bachelor’s in agricultural economics and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Joey Varikooty, a 2018 Thiel Fellow who dropped out of the same school, founded Amber Agriculture to help farmers monitor and manage their crops with sensors. Its core technology is a wireless, kernel-like sensor that can flow with grain throughout the supply chain. By detecting moisture or incorrect temperatures, Chicago-based Amber (which has raised $2 million in funding) helps farmers protect grain from spoilage and capture high prices.

HAX first invested in Amber Agriculture in 2017.

Kevin Martin, 26 | Cofounder of Unspun

Kevin Martin, who has a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, is cofounder of unspun, a tech-enabled apparel company that uses 3D scans to manufacture perfect-fitting 3D woven jeans for consumers on-demand, eliminating pattern-cutting waste and unsold inventory. He and his cofounders, who are over 30, took unspun through the HAX accelerator and have raised nearly $5 million from groups including The National Science Foundation, Fifty Years, and The Mills Fabrica.

HAX first invested in Unspun in 2018.

Noah Hill, 23 and Daniel Weinstein, 25 | Cofounders of Lura Health

More than 1,000 health conditions are tracked by saliva tests. With Lura Health, Daniel Weinstein and Noah Hill have developed wireless, intra-oral, tooth-mounted sensors to enable users to track key diagnostics in oral health with saliva. Its first products focus on tracking acid to monitor tooth decay, while future sensors may be able to monitor allergens, electrolytes, hormones and disease markers.

HAX first invested in Lura Health in 2019.

Matthew Gubasta, 25 and Shelby Yee, 26 | Cofounders of Rockmass Technologies

RockMass CEO Shelby Yee, a geological engineer, founded RockMass with Matthew Gubasta, a fellow student at Canada’s Queens University, in 2016 to digitize the industry. They’re streamlining and improving data collected at underground mines, starting with rock mechanics and making historically dangerous mine work safer and more efficient. Some of the largest global mining companies have adopted the Toronto-based startup’s flagship platform, called the Axis Mapper, and they’ve raised $3.1 million from SOSV, the Canadian government and others.

HAX first invested in Rockmass Technologies in 2017.
cfgmgmtcamp 2020: Kapitan presentation by Ricardo Amaro
By: Alessandro De Maria
Tags: Kubernetes, Cfgmgmtcamp, Kapitan, Helm

#father #kapitan #devops. Head of SRE at Synthace. Ex DeepMind. Ex Google. Opinions are my own

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Welcoming Our First Engineer in Europe — Domen Grabec!
By: Franck Chastagnol
Tags: Team, Ethereum, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Startup

We are excited to announce that Domen Grabec has joined the Origin Protocol engineering team!

Domen is based in Slovenia and will be joining our growing team of engineers that are contributing to Origin Protocol around the world. Having a truly distributed team comes with collaboration challenges. The culture of “public by default” and open-collaboration helps tremendously. At Origin, we have all our discussions in public in Discord, publish our engineering meeting notes to the world, track our progress on a public project board, and invite anyone to join our weekly engineering calls.

Domen started as an extended team member last year and since then has had an impressive impact on several different projects. His first project was to build search capabilities for our DApp. Then Domen took on an initiative to improve our DApp’s mobile user experience. Currently, he is busy implementing growth initiatives that we’ll be announcing soon. These contributions clearly demonstrated his abilities to move fast and operate at any level in our stack.

Domen has solid and diverse industry experience under his belt. Prior to Origin, he worked at Celtra, an advertising IT company, where he was part of the team responsible for a Big Data pipeline using Scala and Spark clusters to process hundreds of GB of data daily. Prior to that, he partnered with two Slovenian Chess Grandmasters to create an iOS and Android app where users can play simultaneous chess with Grandmasters. He is also famous for contributing to a significant number of people’s loss of productivity when he implemented and released an iOS game called Pigs!

During his free time, Domen enjoys dancing Salsa. He is part of an amateur group that performs a few times a year on stage. Rumor is that once, during warmup before a performance, Domen managed to pull off doing five consecutive perfect pirouettes!…but alas nobody was there to witness his prowess.

Domen is an avid hiker; his home country of Slovenia provides an abundance of mountain trails. In the summertime, he wakeboards, practicing 720 degree jumps.

In his own words, here is why Domen is excited to join our team: “Origin Protocol ticks a lot of the boxes for me when it comes to what is important in a company. It is an open source codebase and has a transparent collaboration process. The team is highly skilled and enjoys working on tough challenges.”

We’re looking forward to working with Domen on building amazing products at Origin Protocol. Please join me in welcoming him to our team!

Learn more about Origin:
We Watch the Coronavirus Wreak Havoc…
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Pandemic, Illness, Virus, Coronavirus, Vaccines

Pandemics are horrible and scary. They spread chaos and wreak havoc, forcing entire cities down on their knees; they spread across continents and soon engulf the world. This is true, and I’m not here to downplay their obvious importance. But like all villains, they also have another devious super-power:

Hogging the spotlight.

Let me turn off that light switch for just a minute, and start with a statistic you may or may not be aware of.

This is current information taken directly from the CDC, regarding the 2019–2020 flu season. You read that right; 8,200 reported deaths so far, this season alone. What’s more, these statistics only include the United States and Puerto Rico. I shudder to think of what those numbers might look like if they comprised the entire world. And what about this report from CBC News:

Shouldn’t numbers like that be considered an epidemic as well? Or does the virus have to be ‘new’ to get that title? It kind of makes you wonder. Well, it makes me wonder.

Now, I’m not by any means attempting to downplay this situation; I myself have friends who are being directly affected by this outbreak in China. I feel sincere sorrow for anyone who’s lost a loved one to this virus, and I hope and pray that anyone currently infected will be able to pull through and fully recover.

I’m simply trying to bring attention to the fact that as bad as the Coronavirus is, it isn’t the only virus killing people. But I guess that just like a new starlet on the silver screen, these things stop being news-worthy and tend to fade in importance as the years pass, and we begin to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in our own backyards. H1N1 and his little friends are no longer the new kids in town, so even though they’re still taking thousands of lives every year, they’re relegated to the back of the classroom.

It saddens me to know that in this age of modern medicine where we’re blessed to have a cure for nearly every disease, so many people are still dying of complications from viruses we consider ‘common’, such as influenza. Should something really be considered common if it has the power to take so many lives year after year?
New Book Releases: December 1, 2020
By: Angela Lashbrook
Tags: Literature, Culture, Reading, Fiction, Books

I’M STAYING HERE, Marco Balzano, Jill Foulston (Translator). As fascism overtakes Europe in the early 20th century, a German woman in Italy must make impossible decisions when her young daughter goes missing. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “quietly devastating.” Bookshop.

ORDESA, Manuel Vilas, Andrea Rosenberg (Translator). From the acclaimed Spanish novelist and poet, a work of autofiction about a man looking back at the shattered pieces of his life. Bookshop.

REST AND BE THANKFUL, Emma Glass. A pediatric nurse approaches burnout in a novel the Star Tribune calls “a pungent piece of writing, tactile and sensory to the extreme.” Bookshop.

PERESTROIKA IN PARIS, Jane Smiley. A horse wanders out of her stable and discovers Paris, becoming friends with an elegant dog and a young boy who lives with his 100-year-old great-grandmother. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. Bookshop.

THE ARCTIC FURY, Greer Macallister. After several search and rescue groups have failed to find Lady Jane Franklin’s husband and his expedition, Franklin decides to send twelve women to search for him instead. But one year later, the leader of the all-female search and rescue group is on trial for murder, and only five of the women she traveled with will stand behind her. What happened out there on the ice? Bookshop.

I use affiliate links for the wonderful Bookshop.org. If you click and buy through my link, I get a small commission, but it would be equally wonderful if you ordered these books through your local bookstore. :)
Improving how we calculate writer earnings
By: Emma Smith
Tags: Partner Program, Media, Product News, Writing

How we calculate your story’s earnings

From the start, our goal with the Medium Partner Program has been to reward the quality stories that resonate with readers.

We recognized a broken status quo in traditional media, where advertisers were the ones indirectly paying for writing. Ultimately, this system rewarded the lowest common denominator, rather than encouraging creative autonomy and truly serving readers.

At Medium, we’ve created a different path. Your stories are directly supported by readers’ membership fees, meaning everyone’s incentives are aligned. And you can focus on what matters: writing.

In our new calculation, we’ll include two parts to your earnings. As always, we plan to continuously improve our model as we learn — and we’ll keep you informed along the way.

1. How long members spend reading your story.

As Medium members spend more time reading your story (“member reading time”), you will earn more.

We’ve improved our story stats page to show both your story’s daily total member reading time and its daily earnings, so that you can understand how much you are earning over time and where your earnings come from. Note that you will still be paid once per month.

When we calculate your story’s earnings, we’ll also include reading time from non-members if they become members within 30 days of reading your story. So we encourage you to share your stories widely!

2. How much of their monthly reading time members spend on your story.

By calculating a share of member reading time, we support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers. For example, if last month a member spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your story, you will receive 10% of their share (a portion of their subscription fee).

Imagine an author writes about fly fishing. She finds an audience of fly fishing enthusiasts who subscribe to Medium primarily to read her stories, meaning she receives a strong share of reading time from each of her readers. In contrast, an author who writes about a wide variety of topics might receive smaller shares from a broader audience of readers, who also read a variety of other authors. While the generalist will often earn a lot through the first total reading time part, the fly fisher is well equipped to earn through this share part — even with a smaller audience.

Reading time

Reading time is the time that someone spends actively reading your story. As a user reads, we measure their scrolls and take care to differentiate between short pauses (like lingering over a particularly great passage) and longer breaks (like stepping away to grab a cup of coffee). Reading time incorporates signal from your readers without hurdles. You don’t need to ask your readers to remember to clap, or click, or do anything other than read.

We believe in reading time because it represents the core value that our readers receive from Medium. It may not be a perfect measure of value, but we find that it’s a powerful proxy.
From the Beginning
By: Susannah Mackinnie
Tags: Poetry, Storytelling, Childhood, Fantasy, Life

Suntonu Bhadra began this ‘Multiplier of Five’ Poetry Series challenge.

5 (five) poetries in 5 (five) days, each in precisely 25 (twenty-five) words (spaces not counted)

Anyone can join in the challenge, and the theme is up to the writer, or it can be different for different days. If you are up for it, I’ll request to tag me at the endnote of the first poem you write so that I can follow your series too. Best regards.
Step up your microservices architecture with Netflix Eureka
By: Rafael Martins
Tags: Programming, Java, Design Thinking, Spring Boot, Netflix

Introduction

The search for physical addresses around services within our microservices is a well-known concept since the beginning of distributed computing. It’s a key piece of our architecture since it directly affects our distributed architecture, starting with the following three key reasons:

Horizontal Scalability : It offers the application the ability to quickly scale services down and up the without disrupting the service consumers;

: It offers the application the ability to quickly scale services down and up the without disrupting the service consumers; Abstraction : As physical locations are not known by the service consumers, new instances can be removed and added at any time to the available services pool;

: As physical locations are not known by the service consumers, new instances can be removed and added at any time to the available services pool; Resiliency: If for some reason a microservice becames unavailable, it will automatically be removed from the available services list, routing other service consumers around them.

The big difference between service discovery (SD) and DNS is, while SD may have an N application server running, DNS will always have a static number that will not go up or down. Another difference is the persistence state, meaning that, while on SD we can restart any service at any time and get their original state, with DNS we will always get the same state as it was at the time of the crash. With these main differences, we can already see some of our horizontal scalability getting limited.

In this article, I will explain you how this cloud-based solution will work together with client-side caching and load-balancing (for when the SD is unavailable).

A stub project will be created with the goal of showing you how easy it is to empower your microservice architecture with few steps just by using Spring Cloud and Netflix’s Eureka service discovery agent.
The Write Plan. Plan on writing a novel in one month…
By: Chad Schimke
Tags: Fiction, NaNoWriMo, Writing, Nonprofit

The Write Plan

To Draft Your Novel, in One Month

Plan on writing a novel in one month? It’s easy to dream, and much harder to achieve. My suggestion: go into this with a goal and a plan. Maybe you want to participate in NaNoWriMo. Or maybe you have a vacation, a chunk of free time, and want to finally write that book. Fine, but how? Before I wrote my first novel, I had no clue where to start, and had only ever written short stories up until then. I dreamed about writing a book. There was a goal, but no plan. Need structure? No matter where you’re starting today, follow these tips. Your writing will be the better for it.

I recommend considering 2 important factors, before jumping into a fiction project: 1. Set an end goal, and 2. Develop a plan.

Set an end goal

NaNoWriMo begins on November 1st, with a target of 50,000 words. This can be a good approach, but can also be scaled up, or scaled down. Only have one week? Shoot for an average length short story of 7,000 words. Don’t have a lot of writing experience? Start with smaller incremental goals, and build up stamina over time.

Develop a plan

In a “pantser” approach, writers draft freely, without a clear goal where the story is headed. But if your time is limited, consider not wasting that valuable asset. Have a system, and there is no need to invent one. Years ago I stumbled on Book in a Month by Victoria Schmidt quite by accident. I go back to it time and time again. Start with the section on creating an outline. Create scenes, character maps, turning points, generate backstory and identify potholes. Write the whole damn first draft, or as much as you can muster, straight through from the opening sentence to the last line. Don’t write and edit at the same time! If you aim to reach the full 50K word count goal, I recommend setting up the outlines, characters and plot points in October — ahead of time.

The limitations

No, you won’t end the month with a complete novel. It won’t be ready to “hit send” to agents or publishers. You might pull that off with a short story, but probably not if it’s your first time.

What will you have? A first draft; which must be shared with critique partners, and rewritten based on their feedback. Perhaps by that point it will be ready to self-publish or submit to publishers. Don’t skip professional editing if you’re going to independently publish.

It’s not easy to write a fully complete novel, but it can be done. Who knows? If you have a good hook, well-paced plot, and put in the work, it might even be a great novel. You’ll never know until you try.
How Doing Stand-Up Comedy Can Help Your Writing
By: Anthony Aycock
Tags: Comedy, Humor, Education, Writing

January 28, 2015. A hundred pairs of eyes were on me as I stood on stage at Goodnights Comedy Club, blinking into the miniature sun of a spotlight. Me, a 42-year-old librarian and English professor. Father of two. Owner of seven cats and a corn snake. Plus my wife had crabs — hermit crabs, in an aquarium.

Jerry Seinfeld. Ellen DeGeneres. Robin Williams. Lewis Black. Jay Leno. Chris Rock. These are people who had stood where I was standing.

How did this happen?

I have loved stand-up comedy since I was a teenager staying up late on weekends to watch A&E’s An Evening at the Improv. I often imagined myself up there, cool as iced tea, my eyes sweeping the crowd, my hands on the mic or spreading wide to welcome laughter.

In my youth, I might have made it happen. But now? Not with a wife and crabs to support.

Then I learned about Goodnights Comedy Academy, a course for beginning comics meeting one night a week for four weeks and culminating in a “graduation” performance in front of a real audience. I paid $300 and got a slot in the next class. There were three other students: a twentyish IT guy named Justin; a thirtysomething waitress named Brandy; and a mid-fifties folk singer named Jonathan.

And there was the instructor, Charlie Viracola. He was also in his fifties, maybe 5’6”, and wore the uniform of urban smartasses: long sweater, cargo pants, and a beanie. He lived in Los Angeles but grew up in Raleigh and had a history with Goodnights: he was the club’s first act when it opened in 1983.

He also had serious comedy cred, with appearances on Craig Ferguson, Dennis Miller, and Conan, plus half-hour specials on Comedy Central and Showtime. He has performed internationally, and he did the largest USO show in history at Fort Hood, Texas.

On the first night, Charlie had us stand at the microphone and talk about ourselves, including our favorite comedians. Mine were Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Wright, Dennis Miller, and Woody Allen.

Charlie nodded. He knew most of them personally.

We spent the rest of that night coming up with an opening joke. All night. On one joke. That may seem like over-preparation, but I quickly learned that, in stand-up, there’s no such thing. “The good comedians,” Charlie said, “recreate spontaneity. That’s what comedy is. You write everything down and prepare like hell so that, when you’re on stage, it sounds like you’re making it up right then.”

My classmates had no trouble coming up with their first joke. Then it was my turn. I got up, stood at the mic, and said . . . nothing. My brain had no information. Everyone looked at me, waiting for some sound to emerge.

Seeing that I was, in stand-up parlance, “eating shit,” Charlie stepped in. “So you’re a librarian,” he mused, walking around the room. “How about this? ‘My name is Anthony, I’m a librarian, and I’m probably the only comic you’ll ever see who would prefer you to keep quiet.’”

Perfect. And it just came to him, like the smell of rain on the morning breeze.

Man, I was going to suck at this.
15 Mistakes Every Developer Has Made in Their Life
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Web Development, JavaScript, Startup

15 Mistakes Every Developer Has Made in Their Life

You can probably relate to these mistakes

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash.

Making mistakes is human and is actually what makes us grow. You shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. Chances are that you’ve made a lot of mistakes that are on this list. If not, that’s great. Try to learn from the mistakes other developers have made so you don’t have to make them yourself.