fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Mutual Violence of a Female Body & Her Genderqueer Mind
Tags: Life, Gender, Body, LGBTQ, Women

The Mutual Violence of a Female Body & Her Genderqueer Mind

My dysfunctional relationship with my body

Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

I don’t mind being within this female body

I just wish she would stay silent.

I don’t want to be reminded that she’s here.

She can sit at the table

but don’t let her speak.

My body and I have a dysfunctional relationship.

I need her in my life. She takes me places. She helps me get what I want. She blends me in.

I’m nothing without her.

But I don’t like how she behaves. How she tries to control me.

She tries to make me to do things I don’t want to do.

I have never wanted to hold a baby. They do not stir me. I am not maternal & I don’t know why but I feel I must apologise for that.

(I am sorry.)

I don’t want my insides to come out and get up and start walking around and talking and living a life of their own.

All I see is me lurching bovine-like across a sterile room, braying and lowing with pain, udders juddering beneath me. Too much biology. Too much animal to bear.

I won’t do it.

Sometimes I control her.

I don’t like all these hormones going party-crazy, getting tanked up, losing their minds in here. Wrecking the joint and doing things they’ll wake up to regret. They’re nothing to do with me. They are her friends, not mine. I have not agreed to them being in my house.
Listing on Ignite RATINGS
By: Damon Barnard
Tags: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ratings

List your project on the Ignite RATINGS platform

Thank you for your interest in listing your project on the Ignite RATINGS platform — what an excellent idea! The benefits your project will receive by listing with us include:

A FREE interactive asset listing page on the Ignite RATINGS platform that you control. Yes, you read that right, no catch here, it is completely free to publish a listing for your asset on Ignite;

A dynamic, real-time rating that you have not had to pay for — generated, not by Ignite, but by the “HIVE”, Ignite’s savvy community of crypto investors. We believe that Ignite’s conflict-free, incorruptible, crowd-sourced ratings are the most relevant and most impartial that any project can receive;

Exposure to a pool of potential investors for your project. Every member of the HIVE is a potential investor;

Exposure to the Ignite INDEX. If your project generates a sufficiently high rating, not only will it attract the interest of our community, but it will also receive an investment from the Ignite INDEX, Ignite’s own investment vehicle; and

Awareness. Those projects joining the Ignite platform are offered the opportunity to airdrop tokens to IGNT holders to help grow awareness for their project, as well as create pools for contributions from IGNT holders.

Listing Requirements

You can register for an account and create your asset listing as soon as you have finished reading this article but, in order to publish your listing, you will need to register and verify an Ethereum wallet that holds 150,000 IGNX tokens. These tokens are yours and you may do with them as you please, but in order to maintain your listing you must maintain your IGNX holding — it’s that simple. You may purchase IGNX on either Liquid (ETH, BTC or QASH) or IDEX (ETH), but be sure to hold them in a wallet you control, as you will be required to verify ownership of the wallet via an instantly refunded ETH micro-transaction. For help with verifying your wallet, please watch the below video:

Generating a Rating

Generating ratings is entirely in the hands of our community, so you should endeavour to make sure that your project and listing attract attention and stand out — we do not tell our community which projects they should, or should not, be reviewing. That being said, we are able to offer projects prominence boosts which encourage our community to rate and review boosted projects, thus accelerating how quickly a rating is generated. Should you wish to boost your project’s listing on the Ignite RATINGS platform, simply hit the big blue “PROMOTE MY LISTING” button from within your Account section, and we will take it from there:

To create your listing, visit the Ignite RATINGS platform and register an account as a product owner. We hope to see you on there!
Question
By: Sean Zhai
Tags: Literatura, Poetry, Nature, Art, Questions

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By Queen’s Children

This is the Queen's Children Publication weekly Newsletter. We publish stories under any form about the Sacred Feminine and the feminine side of women and men. Celebrating Life and diversity. Take a look
React Performance Optimisations
By: Nick O'Ferrall
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Reactjs, React Profiler, React

Resolving Unnecessary Re-Rendering with useMemo

We display a reusable table component to the user in several parts of our application. While it renders relatively quickly, there’s a slight delay when it loads, particularly in one section where it displays all the files that belong to a user.

Using the React Profiler , I recorded the process of landing on the page and clicking on the upload file button. The Profiler showed that the table component took 38 ms to commit.

The table component is mapping through the data to create table rows and then mapping through each row to create individual cells. This means that its performance is O(n^2) . If it's looping through many files, the commit is inevitably slow.

While the table will need to loop through lots of data, we can check to see if it is being re-rendered unnecessarily. To get a better understanding of the rendering process, we can use the WhyDidYouRender npm package and keep track of the renders with useRef . In the Table component, let’s add the following:

The console logs show that the table component is rendering four times —three times unnecessarily. Re-rendering is triggered by updating state, the parent component rendering, or the props changing. The WhyDidYouRender package states that the Table is being re-rendered because the props are changing — but inputs are the same, so why is it re-rendering?

The reason is that, in JavaScript, integers, strings and booleans have referential equality:

true === true // true

false === false // true

1 === 1 // true

'a' === 'a' // true

However, objects, arrays (which are objects under the hood in JavaScript), and functions point to a space in memory and do not have referential equality:

{} === {} // false

[] === [] // false

() => {} === () => {} // false

The Table component is re-rendering because we’re passing in columns and data as props which are arrays/objects. This is why the props are technically changing even though the values of columns and data remain the same.

To resolve the unnecessary re-renders, we can memoize the Table component, i.e. store data in the cache. Memoization is used to resolve referential equality issues and to cache computationally expensive functions.

In React, we have a few memoization options available to us. useCallback will cache a callback function. This is helpful when we’re passing functions as props which don’t have referential equality. With useMemo we can memoize values so that they don’t need to be recalculated or we can wrap the component in React.memo() which is similar to Pure Component.

On this occasion, we want to memoize a value: the Table component with the mapped data:

By extracting the logic into a separate component and calling it with useMemo , the table component is only created when data is updated.

We could include the CreateTableData function within the Files component but the function would still be created on every render. Creating functions is expensive in JavaScript, so it’s best to extract this so that it’s only created when needed.
Letting go of the little things
By: Amanda Chong
Tags: Relationships, Love

That empty bowl that’s left next to the TV that was used for ice cream.

The pile of clothes in the bathroom that sits there for weeks.

When you live with someone, be it a significant other or a friend, you learn a lot about them and witness a lot of their little habits — be it good or bad. Especially after you’ve come home from work or school and you’re dead tired, it can be really hard to let these little annoyances go without letting off some steam first.

I’ve lived with my boyfriend for just about two years, and there are a lot of little things that make me curl my nose with annoyance. There is always room for improvement — but really, would it make a difference? Is the fact that he squeezes the middle of the toothpaste tube that big of a deal?

Probably not.

When you look at things as a whole, we’re doing okay — we have dinner on the table every night and talk about our day (technology free!), we play video games together, have a glass of wine, and still snuggle in bed together before drifting off to sleep. I think things are alright.

In those moments of happiness and relief, I’m more grateful to have him by my side with his flaws and all than I would be without him. Those small things are just small indeed — and probably even out the many small annoyances he has with me. We’re all different people, and that’s okay! Our differences are what makes us love each other. Things wouldn’t be interesting if we were carbon copies of each other.

Things will never be 100% smooth sailing. It’s just important to remember what your ultimate goal is — the bigger picture — and stay on track for that. If there’s a small blip in between, it’ll be okay — just let go of the little things.
Gobaba Ocak Ayı Haberleri
Tags: Ripple, Altcoins, Kripto Para Birimi, Bitcoin, Kripto

Buy, sell, exchange, transfer and store Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies intantly & easily with 24/7 customer support. https://www.gobaba.com

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grow up so I can have a childhood
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Glass House Poems, Childhood, Poetry, Poem, Mental Health

grow up so I can have a childhood

Glass House Poem #4

Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

i can’t wait to grow up

so i can have a childhood. my sister

feels the same. you know what we are going to do?

we are going to get simple jobs.

somewhere fun. in a bar, in a coffee shop, in a bookstore.

we are going to relax.

we are going to play.

we are going to read a book

without being asked

what we are doing with our lives.

we won’t tell anyone that we were gifted.

we won’t have this pressure anymore.

i can’t

can’t

wait.

i will give myself trips

and years where

i don’t have any plans at all.

i will swim and talk to new people and

i won’t have to be afraid just because

my mom is afraid.

and i won’t have to feel like

i have to achieve the things she did not achieve.

it will be my life, my childhood.

ill make it so nice for myself.

am i building a career? no

a family? no

what am i doing, people will ask.

im having my childhood right now.

please ask again

later, later

much, much later.

call it what you want — some people have a

gap year

i will have a gap decade

where i let myself relax

take deep breaths

and think before i

make my next move.

i will be carefree, i will be…

bouncy, happy.

i can’t wait

i can’t wait

to have my childhood.

to give myself the gift of one.
TKX ICO Updates!
By: Alson Chia
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin, ICO

Stay tune for our next phase of the Token Sale via our IEO platform!

We invite you to follow our media so you will never miss our stories again:

Website|ICO|Whitepaper|Telegram|Twitter|Facebook|Medium|Linkedin
Boost Your Productivity With These 6 Awesome webpack Plugins
By: Indrek Lasn
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Webpack, Programming, Web Development

prerender-spa-plugin

prerender-spa-plugin prerenders static HTML into a single-page application.

The goal of this plugin is to provide a simple prerendering solution that’s easily extensible and usable for any site or single-page app built with webpack.

What is prerendering?

Recently, server-side rendering (SSR) has taken the JavaScript front-end world by storm. The fact that you can now render your sites and apps on the server before sending them to your clients is an absolutely revolutionary idea (and totally not what everyone was doing before JS client-side apps got popular in the first place).

However, the same criticisms that were valid for PHP, ASP, JSP, (and such) sites are valid for server-side rendering today. It’s slow, breaks fairly easily, and is difficult to implement properly.

Thing is, despite what everyone might be telling you, you probably don’t need SSR. You can get almost all the advantages of it (without the disadvantages) by using prerendering. Prerendering is basically firing up a headless browser, loading your app’s routes, and saving the results to a static HTML file. You can then serve it with whatever static-file-serving solution you were using previously. It just works with HTML5 navigation and the like. No need to change your code or add server-side rendering workarounds.

Install

yarn add -D prerender-spa-plugin

Basic usage
Let’s Learn About Graph Databases
By: Navdeep Singh
Tags: Development, Technology, GraphQL, Database, Programming

From Punchcards to Relational Databases

In preliminary days, data was stored on punchcards and was really hard to read or interpret. It was impossible to index data to cross-reference and eliminate inconsistencies.

Punched card from Fortran program — Wikipedia

But soon, the industry evolved and RDBMS came into picture where data was stored in relational databases.

This format is somewhat human-readable but to store a considerable amount of data, relational databases require normalization to remove duplications and inconsistencies.

It also requires foreign key relationships to related data which makes it hard to understand and maintain without complicated JOIN queries.

ER diagram of a Car Rental System

ACID: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability

Relational databases support ACID out of the box and that is a big advantage.

It means that if the data is committed once, it will be available for subsequent queries to use but it is expensive to find data and the cost keeps creeping up as the size of data keeps growing.

To fix this issue, we add indexes to data which make lookup faster.

Adding indexes solves the issue to a certain extent but if we have to do a number of JOINs then we have to perform query time index lookups for each and every JOIN — this approach starts falling apart and starts becoming expensive as the number of tables grows.
How to Cheat — Field Notes from an Adulteress
By: Teresa J Conway
Tags: Sex, Sexuality, Marriage, Relationships, Dating

How to Cheat

How to Cheat — Field Notes from an Adulteress

Why I wrote a book on cheating.

A guide to the dart arts (Photo:Author)

Sex is the easiest part of an affair. Getting there safely, in the most discreet manner possible, and getting home again, without giving away clues is much harder. While we can all see the scene in our mind of the spouse coming home from work early and walking in on a heart breaking scene, that isn’t how most affairs are discovered.

Affairs are discovered in the little clues the cheater leaves behind. Things like a receipt in a jacket pocket, an unfamiliar scent, a reply to the wrong text, or a cover story that doesn’t add up, are what will burn you. It may take time for all these things to add up, but once you leave enough clues behind, the picture will come into focus.

And when that happens, you’re done.

When I decided to have an affair, I turned to the internet. I knew the sorts of things I should avoid, but I needed the details. I wanted examples and best practices from the experts, advice, and the rules of the game. But there was next to nothing in any one single place I could find.

This book is the product of the research I did before I stepped out, and includes what I learned afterward. I spent hours chatting online with cheaters, reading of their failures and successes, and learned why people cheat.

In that, I discovered the why really didn’t matter. No matter why a person cheated, they all faced the same challenges, so that’s what I focused on. The challenges of getting out the door and returning home safely.

Why? There’s only one strike in this game.

When I started, I quickly discovered there were no ‘ how-to’ resources available, so I painstakingly built my own. My collection of notes turned into a series of tips and tricks, and as I dove deeper into things I realized there were many key steps in conducting an affair, and each had their own dangers. As I defined the steps and organized my notes, I realized I’d written the ‘ how to’ book I went looking for.

Having written this book and learned so much about cheating along the way, I find I still can’t call myself an expert. There are no experts in this field. The best I can ever say is —

I haven’t been caught yet, because I’ll only ever be as good as my last lie.

Here’s link to my book on Amazon, where it is available in paperback, or as an ebook on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited —
TLDR Exploring Message Brokers: RabbitMQ, Kafka, ActiveMQ by Peter Zaitsev on DZONE
By: Pavel Trukhanov
Tags: Distributed Systems, Software Development, Message Queue, Rabbitmq, Kafka

TLDR Exploring Message Brokers: RabbitMQ, Kafka, ActiveMQ by Peter Zaitsev on DZONE

As of 2014 — “Take Kafka and be happy”. But it’s almost 2018 already. Stay tuned for our next episode.

Peter’s disclaimer:

I don’t consider myself a message broker specialist and I spent only about a day or two on each so.

RabbitMQ

Well known and popular = documentation and even books available

Written in Erlang, not a widely used programming language

With 4 queues Peter got a publishing rate of 20k/s on 8 cores machine

Cluster disaster recovery — not so very good: with a replicated queue a restart of the node and a resync takes forever! At 58% done, it has been running for 17h and were slowing down.

Summary:

Decent performance but behavior not compatible with the requirements (expectations?).

Kafka

Stores the messages in flat files and consumers ask messages based on an offset.

Old messages can be retained on a time base and/or on a storage usage.

The Kafka server uses Zookeeper for cluster membership and routing. One more component = one more thing to break.

Performance!!! published 165k messages/s over a single thread. And consuming — 3M messages/s… amazing!

Cluster disaster recovery — awesome: it took only a few seconds to resync a few millions messages.

Summary — simple and performant.

ActiveMQ

HA can be provided by the storage backend, i.e. levelDB supports replication but Peter got some issues with it.

With the mesh of brokers setup, I got an insert rate of about 5000 msg/s over 15 threads and a single consumer was able to read 2000 msg/s. I let it run for a while and got 150M messages. At this point though, I lost the web interface and the publishing rate was much slower.

Summary — lot of features, decent performance, on the edge with the requirements.

Kestrel (deprecated)

Memcached protocol — the key becomes the queue name and the object is the message.

Per queue storage limits, expiration and behavior when limits are reached.

Clustering — very basic: can publish self availability to ZooK and that’s it.

Easily reached 10k published messages/s

Conclusion
The Top story from each month on Making of a Millionaire in 2020
By: Ben Le Fort
Tags: Money, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Business, Personal Finance

The Top story from each month on Making of a Millionaire in 2020

The most popular stories from a banner year

We are getting set to wrap up what has been an incredible year at Making of a Millionaire that saw this publication turn into one of the fastest-growing on Medium.

I can’t begin to express how excited I am for all of the content we have planned for 2021, but before we turn the calendar let’s look back on the most impactful stories published on Making of a Millionaire in 2020.

This is a list of the most popular story in each month of what has been a banner year.
You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide overthinking it.
By: Samantha Oosterling
Tags: Productivity, Goal Setting, Goals, Purpose, Overthinking

In life, we also have these situations. These situations can be in your personal life or in your business department.

Luckily there are some things you can do to overcome this fear or overthinking things. One of them is the 5-second rule by Mel Robbins.

How does this method work?

It starts with an impulse to act on something. As Mel Robbins explains this is not an urge to buy everyone in the bar a round of shots. So please don't go do illegal things or things that could be harmful to you or to others.

The hesitation kicks in. It all happens to us sometimes, we want to do something and then our mind comes up with thoughts and excuses why we should not do this. This is the part where you count backward from 5–4–3–2–1 and then GO do the thing you wanted to do before you hesitated.

According to Mel Robbins there is a 5 second window that exists for everyone that starts between the moment you have an impulse to change and your mind killing it.
Investing Jargon That Complicates Everything
By: Jovany Canchola
Tags: Money, Personal Growth, Retirement, Education, Personal Finance

Investing Jargon

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the terminology investment brokers use in their reports and websites. Some of terms I’ve explained to colleagues and friends include mutual funds, ETF’s, expense ratios, securities, and several others.

Though they are frequently used terms within the personal finance community, many people still don’t know what they are. For starters, mutual funds and ETF’s are types of securities, just like individual stocks and bonds.

Think of mutual funds and ETF’s as one basket that contains many different companies. They are typically thought of as “less risky” when compared to individual stocks, because of the diversification (many companies) within the fund.

There are two types of mutual funds, which are actively managed and passively managed. On many instances, actively managed mutual funds have higher expense ratios (costs that are usually paid through a percentage of the investment) when compared to passively managed mutual funds. This is because there is a physical person (portfolio manager) who manages the fund. Thus, trading fees and commissions for the portfolio manager equal higher fees.

Passively managed mutual funds are also referred to as index funds. Index funds are funds that try to match a benchmark index such as the S&P 500 and they don’t typically have anyone managing the portfolio. For this reason, index funds generally have lower expense ratios.

Actively managed and passively managed mutual funds are often used interchangeably, however it is to your benefit to know the subtle differences that can save you some money in the long-term.

ETF stands for exchange traded fund. ETF’s are very similar to mutual funds except for a few differences. ETF’s trade likes stocks and they typically have lower investment minimums.
10 usability heuristics every designer should know
By: Michal Langmajer
Tags: Usability, UX, Product Management, Design Process, User Experience

Aesthetic And Minimalististic Design

A minimalism is not only a fashion of last few years, but it certainly is a lasting trend with the aim to reduce the description of a subject just to its necessary elements. It has many applications in art, music, and literature. Minimalism helps users to quickly access important information and come to the result quickly.

”Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To let the remaining content stand out, you can use nothing but whitespace. It helps to increase content legibility, it highlights call to actions, and creates a balanced and pleasant look [8]. A minimal design uses only the necessary colours to support the visual hierarchy. Think about the purpose and meaning of each color. Use it consistently.

Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, And Recover From Errors

Errors and issues of any kind can be frustrating for the user. Especially when they’re poorly designed and communicated. Whether we want it or not, users always tend to get themselves into situations that they need to find a way out of. To minimize the frustration, we should put as much effort into designing error experience as we put into the rest of system.

Bad example of the error message which is neither clear or useful for the user.

Every error message should be as explicit and precise as possible. Nobody wants to read vague messages like “something went wrong.” State what happened in a readable human language. Messages like “Class error 372,” are just as absurd. Give the user some constructive advice on what to do next. Propose the solution or direct the user to a customer support employee who can handle the situation. The last rule of good error messages is politeness. Never blame the user or imply that they’re stupid.

Great example of the error message which immediately suggests the next steps.

Help And Documentation

Every app should strive to be perfectly usable without any documentation, but as we mentioned before, every user has different skills and different levels of knowledge, and what is easy for 90% of your users might be difficult for the remaining 10%. Well written documentation, FAQs, and tutorials might be crucial for retaining the stunned user.

Documentation should be well structured, written in a human language, and minimalist. Sometimes, users don‘t need a whole lot of documentation; a simple coachmark showing how the new feature works or a brief onboarding guide that explains the basics is enough. Apps like Trello, Slack, and Duolingo are doing a great job at onboarding their users.

Resources
Time for Federal Sick Leave Law
By: Stowe Boyd
Tags: Economics, Paid Sick Leave, Social Justice, Covid 19, Coronavirus

Time for Federal Sick Leave Law

The Covid-19 crisis underscores why American workers need paid sick time.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

So many companies are starting to make provision for their employees to work at work if the Covid-19 epidemic gets worse… which is most likely will. That’s great. It’s a good time to make sure employees have adequate internet connectivity, and that the company will set up to install Zoom or Hangouts on everyone’s devices. Cool.

But the stark reality is that many workers — the frontline workers in restaurants, hotels, and construction, and the gig workers driving for Uber or toiling in Amazon warehouses — do not have access to any paid leave. And these are exactly the people who will be most likely to get sick since they cannot work at home, and naturally come in contact with others who may be sick.

And when they get sick, they are likely to come to work and infect others. Why is that? Two reasons:

Their employers are cheap, and only want to pay for the minutes they spend at work. No sick pay, no vacation pay, no paid medical furloughs. The United States government has not passed legislation to make paid sick leave the law of the land.

Note that we are the only developed economy in the world to require zero sick leave for workers.

Developed Counties Paid Sick Leave and Paid Medical Furlough laws (via ResearchGate)

In the chart above, you can see the US at the absolute bottom of the heap.

This is a perfect time for Congress to pass legislation providing as least 5 paid sick days and some reasonable amount of paid medical furlough, like 10 days.

Yes, I know the Republicans and the businesses that would have to make these payments will drag their feet. Let them look like they are happy to help spread coronavirus and increase the transmission rate by forcing sick waiters and retail clerks to come to work when sick. But the trajectory of social justice is pointing in this direction and now would be a good time to jump on board.
My Beautiful Woman. Love Forever
By: Ulrich Djowamon
Tags: Sex, Poetry, Relationships, Love, Passion

credit artisticfilms on Pixabay

Love, tenderness, goodness of heart,

divine beauty, supreme beauty,

sweet thoughts of a better life,

my sweetheart, my beautiful love.

I dream so much, I love so much,

your sweet lips have landed,

kisses offered, kisses from hell,

have struck me with sincere love.

Your long hair delivered by the wind,

your azure eyes as charming,

your cries of love I can still hear,

pleasures sigh so overwhelmingly.

I love what you’ve done,

and I love what you do,

from this love, this paradise,

these few words reveal it more.

I dare not tell you, yet,

how this love has delighted me,

Sweetness so sweet, what sorrow me,

oh, my beautiful woman.
6 Quick Breads That Can Double as Doughnuts
By: Mark Bittman
Tags: Doughnuts, Food, Mark Bittman, Cooking, Recipe

6 Quick Breads That Can Double as Doughnuts

Yes, you can have one made of banana bread

Chocolate-glazed banana bread doughnuts. Photo: The Picture Pantry/Alloy/Getty Images

These are the days that call for stress baking. And if you’re still staying at home, perhaps you should make a few extra of these to have on hand.

The only difference between most quick breads and baked doughnuts is the shape. With a doughnut pan, you can turn any batter that you’d bake as a loaf or a muffin into a crazy-simple, tender, and somewhat wholesome breakfast. No substitutions needed, but if the original recipe calls for juice, replace it, cup-for-cup with milk. Eat them plain or give them the full doughnut treatment with crushed toasted nuts, citrus zest, powdered sugar, sprinkles, coconut, chocolate sauce, or drizzled honey.

Banana Bread

Ingredients

1 stick butter, melted, plus softened butter for greasing

2 cups flour

½ teaspoon salt

1½ teaspoons baking powder

1 cup sugar

3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup chopped walnuts (optional)

½ cup shredded unsweetened coconut (optional)

Instructions
Kim Fince Öğrenmek İster?
By: Özlem Özmen
Tags: Online Eğitim, Türkçe, Fince, Yabancı Dil, Finlandiya

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The Accidental Death
By: The Maverick Files
Tags: Short Story, Storytelling, Fiction, Microfiction, Thriller

MICRO-FICTION

The Accidental Death

A 300-Word Story

Photo by Bianca Berg on Unsplash

She hadn’t intended for it to happen. She was only trying to playfully wrestle with him as they often did. But she didn’t realize that she’d strangled his neck a little too long and a little too hard, for it to snap.

He lay on the floor, lifeless.

Amelia was frantic and panicking and didn’t know what to do. Could she cover-up? Could she come up with a good enough explanation for them to believe this was an accident? She was the only one with him in the room, would they believe her?

She thought if she should call her mother and tell her what had happened. But she was at her big conference today and she couldn’t bother her. Should she just hide the body and hope no one finds out for long enough for her to escape suspicion?

As her heart started to beat faster, she started to cry with both fear and pain. She’d loved him — he’d been with her for the past one year and she liked nothing more than the time she spent with him. What had she done? How could she?

Just as she was gathering her thoughts she heard the doorknob turn.

Oh, God! It was over — she couldn’t hide it anymore. As a big, burly man in a sharp police uniform entered the room, she ran towards him and started frantically crying “I am sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt him, it was an accident, I swear!”

The man hugged and comforted her and wiped the tears off her eyes and said, “It’s ok my baby, he’s just a doll — I know you didn't mean to hurt him. We will get you a new one!” 6-yr old Amelia slowly calmed down in her father’s comforting embrace.
Between the Darkness and the Dawn
By: Dewain Belgard
Tags: Mindfulness, Meditation, Poetry, Poets Unlimited, Zen

“In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. . . Wherefore the absolute tranquility (of nirvana) is this present moment.” — the T’an-Ching, Tr. by Alan Watts (Image by dbelgard)

In those moments of the morning

between the darkness and the dawn

before the first clear-whistled tune of white-throated sparrows

and cascading melody of wrens

announce a symphony of harsher songs

after owls and whippoorwills have flown to roost

and all the creatures of the night

have taken shelter in their dens

from the coming storm of light

the world is so quiet

and the air so still

I feel as though the earth has stopped in space

as though the world were weary of its never-ending race around the sun.

I know of course

that I’m the one

grown weary of the pace of life.

Always on the run

to be some other place.

Always running late.

Never time enough

to be completely here

here in this holy place

this place of power

to be completely now

now in this sacred time

this time of peace.

But listen!

A sparrow’s song!

Soon the wrens will be along.

And after that the noise

of traffic on the road beyond the gate.

And I must run! Or I’ll be late!

Run! Run! Run!

Or I’ll be late. . .
Mornings to Savor
By: Feather Tales
Tags: Coffee, Poetry, Morning Routines, Guilty Pleasure, Morning

Mornings to Savor

If I could stop, I would have.

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

Warm touch, fingers glide on that smooth exterior.

My lips, lurking too close.

I feel your presence like a lasting sin.

Want and need-

those confusing lines we’ve crossed,

In this heated embrace,

my acid sparked nerves

remind me, this is a war I’ve lost.

Irresistible, I melt at the sight

like liquid to your chocolate,

my senses filled with that rich aroma

of your essence-

Should I try again, to quit this fight?

I’m not sure,

but to lose you in this moment,

would tear my heart at its core.

To set your ceramic cradle down,

to deny your awakening trickle on my tongue,

to push you away,

before the lids of my eyes fully parted,

before the wheels in my mind fully started-

No, I could not.

So, my love, continue pouring

from my coffee pot.

~~Feathertales~~
Spatial partitioning based on homogenous features
By: Paolo Lucchino
Tags: Heatmap, Machine Learning, Work, Spatial Analysis

Working for Sonder Inc, developed a bespoke clustering algorithm to partition geographic space into homogenous neighborhoods based on arbitrary input features. Can’t really say much more than that… =)

Data-driven partitioning of San Francisco
步步驚心：從頭部署服務到 Kubernetes（ㄧ）
By: Duan Li
Tags: Deployment, Containers, Docker, Kubernetes

All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see, dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind

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The One Thing I Will Always Regret
By: James Altucher
Tags: Short Story, Entrepreneurship, Love

I regret passing the crying woman on the staircase inside the Chelsea Hotel.

For three floors, as I was walking up, I kept thinking of things to say to her but then I just walked right by her and heard her weeping.

I used to regret starting Vaultus, my wireless software company. I lost everything there.

I regretted say “no” to all the investments that would have made a lot of money (Google, for instance).

I used to regret buying a house, or going to college because they were huge wastes of money and time and life. I was so anxious over them for so long.

I used to regret not going to IBM when they offered me a job to work on the chess computer, Deep Blue. It would have been a fun experience.

I regretted peeing in my pants at school when I was seven. I tried to run to the bathroom but, as I said to Matthew, the boy standing at the urinal next to mine, “too late.”

That’s also the last time I ever used a urinal instead of a stall. Maybe I regretted that also.

I used to regret starting a business instead of pursuing something more creative.

Business is really hard and there is a special floor in mental institutions for people who start businesses and it’s not pleasant what they inject into the poor patients there.

But I don’t regret these things anymore. None of them.

Instead, I regret the time I didn’t spend with my children when they were younger.

I think about it every day. They had a fun laugh then that is now drowned out by the more mature, skeptical laughs that they have been given, in part, by me.

I regret not spending more time with my dad even when he was in a coma or only capable of staring at a ceiling.

And that crying girl in the Chelsea Hotel? I regret at least not opening an umbrella over her head. Even as a joke to try and cheer her up.

I regret losing touch with various family members and friends through the years, for no real reason. I tend to do that and I don’t know why.

I stop calling them and then I feel bad about it and I don’t want confrontation so I never call them again.

I regret not curling up in a ball and letting my grandmother hug me one more time before I was too old to be a little boy anymore.

Everything I no longer regret is about something I didn’t get.

Everything I really regret to this day is about the people I didn’t touch just one more time. Didn’t reach out to. Didn’t care for. Didn’t spend time with. Didn’t help. I’m sorry.

Objects and experiences are never worth regret. Lack of kindness and connection are the only wasted moments.

If I could take anything back, I’d unravel all of time just to be nicer to you for one more second.

You never knew me, but I regret not licking the horrific scar right off of your face.
Infinite Space
By: Randy Shingler
Tags: Poetry, Space, Moon, Universe, Stars

Staring at dark night sky stars

Watching halo like full moon

Awareness of an infinite space,

Far reaches of visible universe

Beyond our sight and imagination.

Infinite space, so dark and black

Illuminated by only moon and stars

Planets rhythmically in daily orbits,

Universe shrouded in infinite space,

But well-ordered in daily movements.

Thoughts now come back to Earth

Continents, countries, ethnic origins

How dispersed our perceptions are,

Wars and conflicts seem without end

Discordant notes continually played.

Looking up into infinite space

Seeing harmony in its rotations

In haloed moon and starry skies.
GPT-3: Creative Potential of NLP
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Published Tds, Art, AI, Merznlp

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The Writer
By: Tanya Nottonya
Tags: Life, Art, Poet, Writing, Science Fiction

Photo by Daryl Jumelya on Unsplash

The Writer

MicroFiction Prompt|Forget & Remember

She needed to find out what was happening to her and fast. She awoke from a dream missing a finger. No pain no blood, just soldered nubs. She fell asleep again with eight left. If she could remember her dreams, therein might solve this mystery. She scribbled away frenetically, illegibly.
The Future Of Superannuation — A Conversation With Spaceship’s CEO Paul Bennetts
By: Fintech Victoria
Tags: Startup, Fintech

Spaceship And The Future Of Superannuation

It’s fair to say that Spaceship is one of the hottest fintech startups in Australia. In fact, they’ve been able to build a waiting list of over 30,000 ‘astronauts’ and they’ve also been able to attract investment from some of the biggest names in tech -including Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founder of Atlassian).

For this event, we’ll hear from the Spaceship’s CEO, Paul Bennetts, on what the future holds for the superannuation industry and how Spaceship is approaching it.

On the night we’ll discuss:

why Paul and his team decided to build a company in the superannuation space;

what the opportunities are in the sector;

what the major challenges have been so far in building a superannuation fund; and

what the future holds for the industry.

RSVP FOR THE EVENT => https://www.meetup.com/NextMoneyMEL/events/239686626/

Schedule For the Night

6.00pm — 6.30pm: Kick off and networking

6.30pm — 7.00pm: Q&A with Paul Bennetts

7.00pm — 7.30pm: Audience questions

7.30pm — 9.00pm: Networking and drinks

Partners For This Event

Events like this can only happen with the support of our amazing partners. For this event they are:

We look forward to seeing you at the event.

RSVP HERE => https://www.meetup.com/NextMoneyMEL/events/239686626/
Universal decimal calendar and time system
By: Kim T
Tags: International, Conversion, Clock, Decimal, Calendar

Our calendar and time system has been around for a very long time, it works well but there are still many painpoints especially timezones, converting minutes into hours and more.



Here we are going to look at creating a new date/time system which is decimalised and can be used worldwide.



A long time ago French Republican Calendar system was an attempt to decimalise time, along with currency and metrication. It was used between 1793 and 1805 but ultimately failed because of adoption and confusion between the multiple calendar systems. However it was a great idea, and I would like to continue/improve it.

Some things can’t change, for example:

the length of a year (spring/summer/autumn/winter)

the length of a day (daylight/nighttime cycle)

But some things are flexible:

length of a month

length of a week

length of an hour

length of a minute

length of a second

Some of the changes i’d like to make:

12 months > 10 months

52 weeks > 36.5 weeks

28/31 days per month > 36/37 days per month

24 hours > 20 hours

60 minutes > 100 minutes

60 seconds > 100 seconds

How can we achieve this? We can add new methods to the JavaScript Date object to support decimal time. Check out my example below:

https://jsfiddle.net/7mrwc3x3/25/
How to Add SCREW on Roku.
By: Phil Autelitano
Tags: Roku, Pornography, Television, Advertising, Streaming

To be more “family-friendly,” Roku recently removed adult channels from it’s web-based channel store making it a little more difficult to find and add channels like SCREW TV. No worries, I’ll show you how quickly and easily you can add SCREW.

Ready?

Just click here: https://my.roku.com/add/SCREW

That’s all.

What is SCREW TV? SCREW TV is an adults only, subscription streaming service that brings you a wide variety of adult entertainment from cam girls to sexy porn clips to full-length adult films. Subscription starts at just $1.99/month making it much less expensive than other adult channels including Playboy and Hustler. You can also upgrade to SCREW Premium for more hardcore entertainment, subscribe to individual cam girls (a/k/a “SCREW Girls”), or browse and rent a variety of adult films a la carte.

SCREW is a tribute to the notorious SCREW Magazine founded in 1968 by porn pioneer Al Goldstein. You can visit the SCREW TV website at www.screwtv.live or again, add SCREW TV here: https://my.roku.com/add/SCREW.

Looking for one of those cool SCREW T-shirts?

The iconic SCREW T-shirt returns, March 4, 2020 at www.screwtees.com.
iOS Deep Linking; Lebih Baik URL Schemes atau Universal Links? (Part II)
By: Irfan Tri Handoko
Tags: Url Schemes, iOS, Developer Stories, Universal Links, Deep Link

Journal about apps development for business and eCommerce from GITS Indonesia, a Google Certified Agency and Google Cloud Partner. | Website: gits.id

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The Hidden Light
By: Priyanka Srivastava
Tags: Writers On Writing, Poetry, Reflections, Awakening, Writing

The Hidden Light

Micropoetry

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

your light may be hidden

like that moon behind the clouds.

one day you will find that sky

which will hold your love,

for now bloom for the world.
Woman of Color
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Poetry, Self, Women, Feminism, Equality

I am deeply uninterested in being a “goddess”

I don’t want you to elevate me in some mythological way

that has no actual bearing on our day-to-day lives

the truth is

sun salutations and prayers to the moon

will not save me from the injustice

ever-present in the banality of working hours.

I want the recognition of being

a whole and complete person in my own right

I want to move through the spaces

that this world offers

with the same entitlement to them

that has been your birthright

I want you to act on the truth

that this is my birthright too.
Why is The Surface of the Moon Rusting?
By: James Maynard
Tags: Space, Moon, Science, Chemistry, Earth

Rust on the Moon shouldn’t be possible, but there it is — so how did it form? Actually, Earth may be to blame.

Rust on the Moon discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft orbiting our planetary companion suggests complex interactions between the Sun, Earth, and Moon. With little water or oxygen, iron oxide (rust) still formed in the harsh environment of the lunar surface, detected within hematite deposits recorded by the lunar orbiter more than a decade ago.

Hematite is created on Earth from the interactions of oxygen and water on iron deposits. However, with water in short supply on the Moon (except inside craters at the poles) and a scarcity of oxygen, researchers are puzzled how the mineral may have formed.

Deposits of water ice are seen in blue in this map produced by the Chandrayaan-1 mission more than a decade ago. Image credit: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ./USGS

The Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument (M3) onboard the lunar orbiter found telltale signs of hematite, which should not exist in the arid environment on the Moon. The distinctive red color of Mars is a result of iron oxide (rust) on its surface. However, Mars was once a water world — unlike the Moon.

“At first, I totally didn’t believe it. It shouldn’t exist based on the conditions present on the Moon. But since we discovered water on the Moon, people have been speculating that there could be a greater variety of minerals than we realize if that water had reacted with rocks,” Abigail Fraeman of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) stated.
5 Ways to Fail Your Million Dollar Experiments
By: Leihua Ye, Ph.D. Researcher
Tags: User Research Design, Causation, Causal Inference, Business Experiments, Research Design

At Netflix (Reimagining Experimentation) and other leading tech companies (Airbnb), extensive A/B tests have become an intrinsic part of the decision making process. As the saying goes, no business decision shall be made without A/B testing your customers.

True! Business experimentation provides rich information about our customer behavior and helps us better understand the gap between customer thinking and behavior. As a Ph.D. Researcher in human behavior, trust me, people think and behave differently. Often of the time, they tell you one thing and do the opposite instead.

Without doing experiments, there is no way of knowing how customers would react to the new product. It’s like blind men measuring an elephant’s size: we don’t get the full picture.

Like any research method, experiments have drawbacks and assumptions, but industry folks often do it wrong when they are not met. If it happens (unfortunately), we may face the most undesirable case scenario: decision-making with false evidence.

For Data Scientists, no evidence is better than false evidence!

It is so because we can sit tight with no evidence but make wrong decisions if provided with the opposite evidence.

In this post, we delve into 5 common mistakes that may cost you millions of dollars and the coping strategies.

(I have contributed several pieces on business experimentation. Check them out: why experiments, natural experiments, ITS, RDD, and DID).
It’s a real thing…
By: Tree Langdon
Tags: Self Improvement, Technology, Space, Entertainment, Science

Marvel Fans Unite With Trekkies Against Space Force Guardians | News Break

Last year, the US Space Force logo was touted as a rip off of the emblem for Starfleet Command. Screenshot by author…