fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
📚Do You Remember…
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Other, Humor, Medium, Life, Books

📚Do You Remember…

When I was just about murdered by books?

Illustration by Rolli

The very first thing I ever posted on Medium was a humorous essay, with drawings, called “I Was Just About Murdered by Books.”

The piece did well. It was curated by Medium in several categories, reached a wide audience, and earned some decent $.

Those days, of course, are over. Endless, unwanted, cost-cutting algorithm changes now ensure that creative writing earns nothing, and is seen and read by practically no-one.

For the sin of criticizing Medium, as well, I’ve been blacklisted from further curation.

These are grim times, indeed. I’m still happy with my first essay, though. Have a look:

Here’s to the good old days, friend.

Cheers,

Note №1

Due to Medium’s constant, baffling and unwanted algorithm changes, whose apparent purpose is to drive creative and/or intelligent people from the platform forever, this post will earn no money. If you enjoyed it, please consider buying me a coffee. More coffee=more posts for you to enjoy.

Note №2

My latest book is The Sea-Wave. You might like it. Grab a copy at your favorite independent bookstore. Or Amazon (Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Amazon UK).

Note №3

NEVER MISS A POST. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter. It’s free.
Buy $200 Of FNX & Receive 300 SET!!!
Tags: Blockchain, ICO, Airdrop, Promotion, Cryptocurrency

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Fatherhood: My favorite hip-hop tales
By: Shamontiel L. Vaughn
Tags: Rakim, Black Fatherhood, Parenthood, Hip Hop, Fatherhood

Fatherhood: My favorite hip-hop tales

Why black fatherhood stories are much-needed in hip-hop culture

Mahogany. Follow the Leader. Paid in Full. Juice. I Ain’t No Joke. When I cracked open the 2019 book “Sweat the Technique” by hip-hop legend Rakim, I expected to hear about these songs and his rise to stardom.

Photo credit: MikaV/Wikimedia Commons

What I did not expect to do was listen to a Frank Sinatra song with a different ear*, and then skip around through pages to get to all of the entertaining tales about his father. A young Rakim repeatedly kept trying his dad’s patience. For me, these father-son tales are the highlight of the entire book.

Although I still cannot picture Rakim running a hot dog stand, this was indeed an idea he got from his dad. The ultimatum about Job Corps? Yup, that one I could see. Just as he does in his lyrics, I can visualize the scene in which he described how his father caught him cutting class, and it sounded like something straight out of a TV script. And then there were less-funny moments — his father found a gun under Rakim’s pillow. (I was shocked by the hard lesson Rakim learned from that one but laughed at his father’s response.)

These may be the overlooked tales in “Sweat the Technique,” but are so necessary to read in hip-hop culture. Rakim — who is notoriously private — could’ve easily just talked about his rap career and left family out altogether, but he clearly felt one was as important as the other. Generation Y and Z, plus my fellow Millennials, need to be able to hear tales of fathers who stuck around, not just the ones who disappeared. And books like these give them the opportunity to do so.
Journey Mapping
By: Bradley Nice
Tags: Ux Designer, Product Design, Journey Maps, UX, UX Design

What is the best way for a UX designer to look at the product from the point of view of a customer? Of course, it is a journey map!

A journey map is the visualization of the whole set of actions that the user goes through to achieve the goal. That gives the UX designer a great opportunity to find all the weaknesses of the product.

These are the simple steps to create a journey map:

Define the actor. Your actor or user persona is the one who is using your product. You should know your audience very well to understand why and how they interact with your product. There might be a great difference between how the product is supposed to be used and how it is actually used.

Your actor or user persona is the one who is using your product. You should know your audience very well to understand why and how they interact with your product. There might be a great difference between how the product is supposed to be used and how it is actually used. Goal. That is what the user wants to achieve using your product. To pay a bill? To buy a new gadget? Or something more complex? In fact, goals can be different: high-level, including many steps and simple but detailed. When you define the goal, you will clearly see the actions to achieve it. You can take into consideration the user’s motivation. What makes them interact with your product?

That is what the user wants to achieve using your product. To pay a bill? To buy a new gadget? Or something more complex? In fact, goals can be different: high-level, including many steps and simple but detailed. When you define the goal, you will clearly see the actions to achieve it. You can take into consideration the user’s motivation. What makes them interact with your product? Scenario. It describes what actions the user is going to take to achieve the goal. Along with the actions, we should take into consideration the user’s expectations — what the user wants to get as a result. For example, to find information easily, to buy a ticket in a couple of clicks, etc.

It describes what actions the user is going to take to achieve the goal. Along with the actions, we should take into consideration the user’s expectations — what the user wants to get as a result. For example, to find information easily, to buy a ticket in a couple of clicks, etc. Actions and emotions. These are the actual steps the user takes and what they are feeling along with that. The way your product works may make the users feel frustrated or delighted. That matters as well.

A journey map may give answers to many questions on how to improve the product. Look at the product from the point of view of users, and you will see a lot.

Have a nice day!

Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors
Millennial Dads Might Just Be The Best Generation of Dads Yet
By: Sean Kernan
Tags: Parenting, Love, Family, Life, Life Lessons

Family & Parenting

Millennial Dads Might Just Be The Best Generation of Dads Yet

How modern dads are disregarding the sins of the past to forge a new legacy.

Author purchased via istock images

I was fortunate in that I had two great parents. I didn’t know it at the time. Like many kids, I took it all for granted. It wasn’t until I went out into the world and started hearing the stories about deadbeat dads, absentee dads, and worse.

One of my girlfriends had a father who hadn’t worked in 20 years. He was milking military disability for a back injury that didn’t stop him from surfing every day. In fact, he saved most of his government checks to either party or take surfing trips to Mexico. Then, when my girlfriend’s 21st birthday came around, he couldn’t afford to buy her a present. It was one of many frustrating moments I was left to attend to.

However, if we look closer at today’s dad data, things look good. Millennial dads are crushing it.
3 Examples of why AI won’t take your Creative Jobs.
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Merznlp, Ai In Discourse, Published Ddi

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Tips from AIT desk | 07.06.18 | 1.1
Tags: Blockchain, Trading Signal, Trading Ideas, Trading Strategy, Trading Tips

Have a look at some more treasures our ML analysts prepared for you today.

#AIT_TIPS

The well-known cryptocurrency Lisk was recently listed on a large cryptocurrency exchange OKex. Traditionally, such events lead to an increased demand for the coin because of expansion of the market of potential buyers. Due to the project’s prominence and media coverage in the blockchain community, we can look forward to rising value in the next few days. In addition, if you look at the chart, you will see that the price has recently fallen from 0.0013, but then rebounded from the support level in the area of 0.0012 Satoshi. This may indicate the purchases of large players. You can buy now and put a stop-loss for the level. Exit on the bounce or at 0.0013 price.
Q3 Project — Idea Sharing and Group Formation
By: Dylan Thorwaldson
Tags: Nodejs, Learning To Code, JavaScript, Software Development, Health

Today marks the first day of our Quarter 3 project “week”. I am thankful that we will technically have more than a week to work because we have a lot to do!

We started out today writing all of our different ideas on the whiteboard, and then we essentially voted on which ideas we wanted to turn into actual projects. We formed groups based on how we voted for the different project ideas.

There were a lot of exciting and good ideas written on the board today, and I was really impressed by the things that my classmates came up with. I am inspired by the creativity that surrounds me at Galvanize; it makes me want to be more creative. Amanda had an awesome idea for an app that helped people call their government representatives, but the idea that I ended up wanting to work on the most was Rachel’s. Actually, Amanda, Rachel and I will all be working on Rachel’s idea, and I am pumped to be part of team RAD working on Wellminder!

Wellminder

Wellminder is a holistic wellness app. Since we spent time this afternoon filling out the project proposal, I may as well use the project description we wrote there:

Wellminder is a mobile application that tracks and determines patterns between wellness factors so users can work towards positive health choices.

I am eager to get going on this app because I think it’s an awesome idea, and it’s definitely something that I would personally want to use. It’s different from other fitness apps because instead of calorie counting or exercise tracking, it will take a more holistic approach to health and wellness tracking. Essentially, we want the app to ask its users a small series of questions each day about what they’ve done and how they are feeling, tracking and making visualizations of patterns.

I am feeling pretty ill, so after we finished filling out our project proposal I headed home and have been working from here this afternoon. Amanda and Rachel have already come up with some wireframes for Wellminder, and in my opinion they look awesome. Here are a couple of them:

I can’t wait to tackle the many challenges that building this app will bring. React Native, here we come. Go to RAD.
Student Spotlight: Building a Life Around Your New Career
By: April Bloc.Io
Tags: Happy Alumni, Programming, Web Development

Tell me: what were you doing before Bloc?

Account Management for a marketing agency.

Why did you end up taking Bloc?

I started dabbling in code a couple years ago, taking various free online courses. I ended up going on a month-long work-abroad retreat with a group of people (most of them were programmers) and I loved learning from them and seeing how they’ve been able to work remotely and travel. That pretty much sealed the deal for me for wanting to work full-time in web development. A few months later I enrolled in Bloc.

How did taking Bloc impact your career and life?

Bloc has impacted my life in so many ways. The experience was incredibly challenging and emotional but I just kept pushing. It’s so rewarding to have been successful in something I worked so hard to get. This experience makes me want to grow and be better in more facets of my life, not just my career.

In addition, I love the opportunities that come with this experience. Now that I’m in the industry, I can’t wait to keep growing and building a lifestyle around my new career. My only regret is not doing Bloc sooner!

What was your favorite part of the Bloc curriculum?

I had a lot of fun working with Node.

Tell us about your favorite project. What was it and what was your process?

My favorite project was Blocipedia because I enjoyed the flow that came with building out the application from the view to the model. I build this at a point in the course when I was a lot more comfortable with programming and the project turned out to be a lot of fun!
InspireFirst Podcast EP 03 with Hamlet Batista
By: Chris Craft
Tags: SEO, Machine Learning, Podcast, Blogging, Marketing

Episode 3 is out!

In this episode we speak to Hamlet Batista, a programmer, speaker, writer, and the CEO of RankSense. We have an excellent discussion about topics Hamlet is passionate about — SEO and machine learning.

During the conversation we also dive into:

His journey and upbringing

Tips on basic on-page SEO strategies or tactics

Social media’s impact on blog traffic

How RankSense speeds up the slow process of SEO to get their users ranked fast

Be on the look out for more insightful episodes! We’re talking to industry experts in the blogosphere, digital content world, and the book publishing business. You don’t want to miss out!

The InspireFirst podcast is available on Spotify Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.

Listen to and follow the podcast for tons of writing and marketing inspiration. Let us know what you think by remembering to rate and review the show!

Be blessed,

Chris

P.S. — If you wanna start a podcast like this one, here ya’ go!
How to Enjoy the Pulp Playlist
By: Ron Gatsby
Tags: How To, Spotify, Creative Process, Music, The Pulp

Step 1. Put yourself in a relaxed state of your choosing (we don’t judge).

Step 2. Listen to a Pulp Playlist. Some playlist are conceptual while others are simply new music to get you hyped and inspired to create something new.

Step 3. Do something you enjoy. We recommend dancing, writing, cooking, exercising, cleaning your house (this is relaxing for some) or anything else you can do with background music on. The goal is for you to go on a journey into how the music makes you feel while you’re handling your biz.

Step 4. Enjoy the vibes.
BigQuery best practice IoT. Google Cloud best practice for data…
Tags: Google, Google Cloud Platform, IoT, Data Visualization, Data Science

The vibration “peaks” in that same toilet location correlate with entering the room (lights going on and off) which hardens the ML label. If timestamps were not there it would only be a mush of information. Instead we have a 95% confidence in real time of a complex human action. This is then clear enough for an AI to “understand”.

The same can be done for sleeping, eating, living room activities which over time create share price like graphs of a person’s life (and there’s a ton of useful analytics software for finance which can be re-purposed for accurate health care trends).

How will I feel in 2 days?

Imagine asking the question “how is my mother?” and seeing that she is OK, in real time, with predictive medical insight for the future.

Without her wearing anything, no cameras or speech microphones. How valuable is that insight to a concerned relative? Or possibly a service trying to manage hundreds of thousands of patients in a city at the same time?

It is one thing to have real time data at low cost.

It is another to have analytics processed fast enough (of that data) but also in real time to produce results in less than 100 milliseconds latency at scale.

Here how this will look in production.

Factory environments:

Temperature, pressure, humidity and organic gases for each day of the week. Strong outliers in the organic gases show emissions / cleaning events.

For certifying safety and environmental compliance, BigQuery messages are easily authenticated and hashed at source using on board crypto.
Creating Core Values that Actually Stick
By: Debbie Madden
Tags: Leadership, Culture, Core Values, Company Culture, Startup

Company core values. On paper, they are a set of words or phrases that embody who you are as a team. They have been hailed as a “company’s DNA”, “the culture of the organization,” and the “best kept secret of true high performance.”

By definition, core values are the fundamental beliefs of a company.

Is it all true? Are core values really the heart and soul of an organization. Or are they hype?

The truth is, core values are often hype and serve no real value. Too often, teams write a list of idealistic words on a page and then forget about them.

Core Values Gone Wrong

I was part of a team years ago that had core values; we formed them together. We dutifully wrote them down and painstakingly word-smithed each one until we got all six values “just right.” We then rolled them out to the whole company and people cheered! We were thrilled. We had done it. We created a set of core values and rested easy knowing we were destined for great things.

And then, those core values sat on a shelf. Once in a while someone would mention one. Not a single person could recite all six of them.

A year after these core values were created, we discovered one of our clients was a clear values mismatch. An employee brought this to the attention of the leadership team and the CEO shrugged it off. He chose to take the short-term financial gain over protecting the health of the company.

Unfortunately, these core values were hype; they didn’t carry any real weight. When push came to shove, they were meaningless.

Core Values That Boost Success

Fast forward to today. My current team has core values. We formed them together and wrote them down, just like my last team did.

However, the core values that I have today truly boost success. In fact, I credit them for a large chunk of our success. What’s the difference that sets these core values apart from others I’ve seen fail?

It’s not the value itself. It’s not the wording or the choice of value that matters.

The only way that core values boost success is if the team is willing to:

1. Lose money over it

2. Fire an employee or customer over it

Core values must guide you on what not to do as much as they guide on what to do. We have fired clients who do not align with our core values. We analyze every employee on each of our five core values and if any employee does not consistently uphold a core value, they are given feedback, and may even be fired or demoted.

Core Values Should Never Be Static

The best way to ensure your core values continuously boost success is to treat them as living, dynamic things. The concept that you ought to finalize core values and never update them is outdated. Our core values are written in a Google doc. As we learn and get deeper in our company’s journey, we edit the descriptions if needed. Core values aren’t a set of empty promises that make you look good — they are a set of real beliefs. If the company matures or changes and its belief system changes, the core values should be fluid alongside the evolution of the business.

Originally posted on Inc
Google Would Like To Change The Way Website Identity Is Presented
By: Paul Walsh
Tags: Google, Chrome, Cybersecurity, Crypto, Phishing

Google recently announced its intention to rework how Chrome conveys what website you’re looking at, so that you don’t have to contend with increasingly “long and unintelligible URLs” — and the fraud that has sprung up around them.

Chrome usable security lead Emily Stark that Google isn’t trying to induce chaos by eliminating URLs. Rather, it wants to make it harder for hackers to capitalize on user confusion about the identity of a website. According to a Wired article, “the endless haze of complicated URLs gives attackers cover for effective scams”. They can create a malicious link that seems to lead to a legitimate site, but actually automatically redirects victims to a phishing page. Or they can design malicious pages with URLs that look similar to real ones, hoping victims won’t notice that they’re on G00gle rather than Google.

According to Stark

What we’re really talking about is changing the way site identity is presented. “People should know easily what site they’re on, and they shouldn’t be confused into thinking they’re on another site. It shouldn’t take advanced knowledge of how the internet works to figure that out.

Google is working on a new way to create warnings for Chrome users when a URL seems potentially phishy. I just can’t see how they can get this right without a massive number of false positives — which will upset a lot of website owners who are wrongly accused of being a scam.

Chrome does have some built-in anti-phishing security. But unfortunately, it’s impossible for them to stay ahead of every new phishing scam.

And there’s no mention of URLs that are opened and shared inside mobile apps. Most Web browsing on mobile is done inside an app WebView.

Is Google taking a leaf out of MetaCert’s handbook?

MetaCert has already built the solution that Google is researching. And it’s not restricted to Chrome users either. This is a problem / solution that I’ve been working on for many many years — before I founded MetaCert in fact.

Google is right. Change is needed.
High-Order Functions
By: Sejan Miah
Tags: Mapreduce, Functional Programming, iOS

What is a high order function?

A function that takes in a function as an argument, returns a function, or both. Yes, functions can take in other functions, they are closures. A closure is a self-contained block of code that can be passed around. Functions are considered 1st Class Citizens, meaning Swift supports to pass functions as arguments, return functions and also assign them to variables. This is possible because a function is a kind of closure.

MAP:

The MAP method, takes in a closure as an argument and the closure calls each item once in the array. After these items are called, we receive back an array containing the mapped results over the sequence’s elements.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

In the variable newNumbers, the map method goes through each element in the array, while satisfying it’s condition, which is to multiple each element in the array by itself. The variables newNumbers and mappedNumbers showcase the different ways in which we can write the closure implementation. $0 is shorthand notation for the first element in the closure, $1 is the second one. If we look at the second line, we can see that it is more verbose, but does the same thing. We get an array of [1, 4, 9] in both instances.

Now let’s create a function that does the exact same thing and pass it into map:

If we look at the our fettyMap constant, we are getting back an array of squared integers and we were able to do this by passing in our square function as a parameter into map! It is important to note that the return type of a mapped function does NOT have to be the same TYPE as the function’s elements, this is depicted through our constant fettyMap2. High-Order functions are dope!

Here are a few examples of using the map function but with arrays of strings:

Finally, I will leave you with an example of chaining High-Order Functions.

I hope that after these few examples you’ll try out these wonderful methods.
YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS
By: Maynard Originals
Tags: Consciousness, Choices, Marianne Williamson

You have a choice. Someone can surround you with sand. Someone can even throw sand in your face. But no one can make you build your house on sand unless you choose to. You can always build your house on rock. You are at cause where you place your consciousness. You are not always at cause where your circumstances are because other people will do what they can to change your circumstances. But you are always at cause where you place your consciousness. ~ Marianne Williamson ~

Try being aware of “right now.” Do your best to live as much as you can in the only moment that you ever really live in and control. The moment that is most important to you is right now. This moment is all there ever was, is, and will be. That’s why it makes sense to place your consciousness in the “Now.”

(Visit us at www.secretserendipity.com.)
The Prayer I Pray When I’m Stuck in a Rut
By: Trey Watts
Tags: Recovery, Faith, Spirituality, Life Lessons, Prayer

The Prayer I Pray When I’m Stuck in a Rut

Old habits die hard.

Do you ever feel like you keep finding yourself in the same spot? You try and try but no matter what you do you keep struggling with the same old things? It might be booze, or food, or certain behaviors.

It’s frustrating and demoralizing.

Old habits die hard. Especially, when we’re trying to fix ourselves. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to us though.

If our same old ideas, thoughts, and fears landed us in this rut, why do we think they’ll help us out of it?

To be frank, crazy can’t fix crazy.

We need a new perspective if we hope to claw our way out. We need new pair of glasses, if you will, with which to see ourselves and our circumstances if we hope to move past our current situation.

Below is a prayer that was suggested to me from a friend of mine in a 12 Step program, when I found myself in a tough place. Its called the “Set Aside Prayer”. It gets right to the heart of the matter.

The prayer goes as follows…

The Set Aside Prayer God, please help me set aside everything I think I know about myself, my disease, the 12 steps, and especially You; So I may have an open mind and a new experience of all these things. Please let me see the truth.

Obviously, you can substitute “my struggle” for “my disease” and “my ideas” for the “12 Steps”.

If the “God” thing throws you for a loop, you can say “Higher Power” or “The Universe”. It’s up to you.

Give the “ Set Aside Prayer” a chance the next time your stuck. It’s helped millions in Recovery, I’d be willing to bet it will help you too.
Have You Treated Life as a Competition? Let Me Help You Rethink.
By: Mari Teresienė
Tags: Self Improvement, Insecurity, Social Media, Self, Psychology

I spent my childhood sitting on a motorbike with my mom. She took me everywhere — to school, English course, markets…

She is a true bold rider. My mom always wants everything to be quick. Quick, quick, quick. “Time is money,” she says all the time. Picture some macho men bringing their shoulders and back down on their huge motorbike, that’s exactly how she looked like on hers. Except she only rides a small manual motorbike.

We used to live in a small neighbourhood where there were barely any cars passing by. Whenever my mom took me somewhere, we’d have to go through some deserted roads, a cemetery, and small forests. We reached the bigger roads after 2 or 3 kilometres, and that’s where it all started.

I began to see it as a race.

And somehow it resembles how I’ve often seen my life. As a competition.
Voorhees Summer Twilight series kicks off next week
By: Grace Maiorano
Tags: Music, New Jersey

Voorhees Summer Twilight series kicks off next week

The 52nd Street Band will take the stage next Thursday.

The first show in the township’s 2018 Summer Twilight Series will be on Thursday, June 21, and will feature The 52nd Street Band, a six-piece ensemble recreating the performances of arguably the greatest rock and roll keyboard player ever, the Piano Man, Billy Joel.

The 52nd Street Band has become the ultimate tribute to the music of Billy Joel. The show is free and starts at 7:30 p.m. on the “Great Lawn” at Connolly Park.

A beer garden and food trucks will open at 6:30 p.m.

For more information, visit www.voorheesnj.com or call the show hot line at (856) 882-SHOW.
“Dapper” Devs Unite
By: Rachel Pascascio
Tags: Blockchain, Dapps, Development, Education, Networking

Sounds like a barber shop quartet, but these guys are making something far more interesting than harmonious melodies. Blockchain development has grown exponentially over recent years. While no one seems to have missed the enormous amounts of opportunity crypto holds, the demand seems to be outpacing the supply of experienced Devs needed to keep up.

Enter DApperNetwork, “a global community of early tech adopters building

next generation decentralized apps with blockchain technology”. Founder Eric Chung, adjunct faculty at the University of Southern California and co-founder at Los Angeles Blockchain Lab, is bringing the Dev community together with events, hack nights, and even panel discussions with industry experts discussing hot topics and trends in blockchain. These panel nights feature a Q&A session where panelists are quizzed by community members, leading to insightful discussions and an imparting of knowledge that would otherwise be tedious to acquire.

The most intriguing service the DApper Network provides is the Developer Bootcamps. These weekend training camps teach participants with at least one year of programming experience how to build an Ethereum app. Training covers the ins and outs of the Ethereum blockchain, solidity code, and simple smart contracts. Led by the DApper Network’s awesome team of mentors, participants also learn how to utilize Truffle and Web3.js to build their own decentralized apps. Participants learn about use cases from the mentors before working on their own smart contract projects. But the best part about these bootcamps may be that they are mobile! Community members can request a boot camp in their city or attend one nearby. You’d expect such valuable training to be costly but with tuition set at less than $400 this may be the smartest investment in your development education you can make.

The shortage of devs in blockchain is an issue many have noticed, in fact blockchain solutions are already in the works to address this concern. NULS for example has built a modular blockchain to assist devs new and old in their DApps projects; simplifying the process while providing users the opportunity to customize their subchain to meet their solution needs. With the DApper Network, Eric and his experienced team of mentors are doing their part to educate and assist new devs in building the future of blockchain.

Eric Chung is teaching blockchain at USC Fall 2018.

Join the DApper Network family here → http://www.thedappernetwork.com/ and see just how beneficial a global community can be to your continued growth and education within this ever-changing industry.
Dear 19-year-old self
By: Mike Sanchez
Tags: Personal, Life Lessons, Random, Self Expression, Growing Up

Photo by Søren Astrup Jørgensen on Unsplash

The first thing you need to do when you read this is to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself why you’re wearing clothes three times your size. I know hiphop and gangsta rap is big during this time but really?

Second thing you need to do is to turn off that computer, get out of the house, and explore the world. There’s beauty in it although I know it’ll be hard for you to understand this right now.

Third thing I need you to do is pick up a book and commit to reading it. After you finish that book, pick up another and do the same. Believe me, these will help you a lot down the road.

You have a great family. You don’t have a troubled life like the rappers you idolize — don’t try to live theirs. It’s okay to talk to other people. You don’t have to be in front of the computer all the time living your virtual life. If you’re still using HeLLpHyRe as your handle, please know that it is tacky and you’re better off using your real name and conversing in the real world.

By now you’re probably thinking of dropping out of college, bored because you’re not learning anything new. You’re probably thinking computer science was the wrong choice and lean towards shifting to a different course. Don’t do it. Soldier on and graduate in a year or two. And if you’ve done the three things I’ve mentioned above, you probably know by now that you don’t have to get a job right away.

Try entrepreneurship. Try starting something. You might not be successful right away but by now you should know that failure is okay. Try this for a year or two and if by then you haven’t found success — whatever your definition of it is — that’s okay. Try getting a job to get some experience. It’s going to be pretty exciting getting that first paycheck but do know that it’s more about the experience than the money.

Learn as much as you can but please don’t mess it all up by doing stupid shit — things that you’ll consider to be cool, things you think will get you in. Don’t bother. These are all superficial and you’ll realize later on that it’s all a waste of time.

By your early twenties, you should’ve gathered enough experience to make you realize you can do great things. I also hope you’ve found God and is thinking about accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior by this time. Again, this might seem a little arbitrary to you, but believe me this will help you greatly later in life.

Do things. Experiment. Learn. Then do it all over again. This is the best time to do such things since you don’t have anything else to think of but yourself. Try to wait a little longer before starting a family as this will complicate things a lot.

If by your mid-twenties you’re still doing the three things I’ve mentioned above, you’re on a path to become successful. You can settle down by your thirties. Find a beautiful woman, start a family, and buy that huge house. By now, you’re probably a millionaire already. You made it! Congratulations, kid.
Productivity While Quarantined: Getting to Inbox Zero
By: Jason Cherubini, Cpa Mba
Tags: Getting Things Done, Productivity, Email Management, Inbox Zero, Gtd

Extra Steps to Supercharge Your Email

Reframe the way you think of email: It’s a text message, not a letter.

Emails should be short. They are a practical tool, not a place to show your writing skills. Think of email as a slightly longer form text message. A pleasant opening line, three sentences to get to the point of the email, and a friendly closing is more than enough for the majority of emails. Keeping emails short will save you time and let you plow through emails efficiently while also aiding others to be efficient in their emails. And as others follow suit and send efficient emails to you, it will help you in the future.

“How to write a good email: 1. Write your email. 2. Delete most of it, 3. Send” ~Dan Munz

Draft stock emails (or parts of emails)

Don’t retread the same ground countless times. There are numerous types of emails that we send that are carbon copies of each other. Making introductions, sending expected documents, etc. can all be re-used from previous writings. So create some standard templates that you can use for all of your recurring messages to save yourself time in the future.

Use the tools that are useful (and don’t use the distracting ones)

There are a lot of productivity tools on the market. Some useful, others not. The problem with not useful tools is not just that they don’t help, but they can serve as a distraction themselves that lowers efficiency. A key example of this is folders to organize emails. With few exceptions (like “Follow Up” or “Working On” folders), spending the time to organize emails will keep you busy but won’t help with your efficiency. The search function in most email providers is almost always the best way to find specific emails. So, make sure the tools you are using are helpful and not just distractions.

Deal with emails in batches

Dealing with emails the moment they come in may seem like a small use of time, only a few seconds or a minute to handle, but it’s much more than that. Recent studies have shown that it takes up to Twenty-Three minutes to get back on task after a distraction. So, don’t look at emails as small tasks that require immediate attention, but batch the emails into a single large job to be dealt with at predetermined intervals throughout the day. Setting a half-hour aside at the beginning, middle, and end of the day will mean that no email sits for more than a few hours without attention. You can then deal with all of your inboxes at once, efficiently plowing through and implementing the tools of inbox zero.
Mommy
By: Thomas Gaudex
Tags: New Year, Love, Grief, Mothers, Family

Mommy

A Poem

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

what I really wish

on this first day of the year

and all the others too

that you don’t cry anymore

my sweet mommy
Doctailor — Self Customisable Smart Contracts & Agreements on the Blockchain
By: Mars Robertson
Tags: Blockchain, Token Sale, Ethereum, ICO

Be careful when investing in crypto

There is no such thing as free money.

I cannot recommend highly enough this list: https://chrisdunn.com/50-crypto-trading-investing-lessons/

Chris Dunn drops nuggets of knowledge, it’s seriously good stuff. Some of my favourite picks:

9. The best way to day trade cryptocurrencies is — DON’T! 29. You WILL make every mistake in the book. Don’t beat yourself up when you make mistakes, just learn and try not to make the same mistake twice.

I totally admit I made most of the mistakes on the list. Now I’m a little bit wiser and the more I know the more cautious and sceptical I become…

Manage your private keys

Be careful how you keep your private keys and backups. Hardware wallets surely the best.

Quite seriously — you don’t want programs on your computer to have access to your private keys. Keeping private keys on a separate device is by far the best protection against a hack or a virus. Private keys never leave the device, they are used to sign the transaction that is then broadcasted to the network.

Markets are…

Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent. — so you think printing Tether is a scam and crypto bubble will pop?

Ride the wave, trend is your friend.

Personally I don’t have energy for day trading, I just buy and hodl, or earn (directly in crypto) and hodl.

Sure fire research questions

DYOR — do your own research, ask difficult questions. I wish everyone investing was asking these:

How much tokens issued pre-pre-pre-ICO for strategic investors, what is their discount, what is their lock-in period?

Check Bloomberg, Reuters, Fortune logos on the website — anyone can include an image, not everyone can get press coverage.

Check with advisors and partners — are they really committed to the project, did they update their LinkedIn?

DYOR — do your own research, it will save you a lot of stress. To have faith and confidence, to know that you did the work is a great feeling.

Handy links once again:
A Look at the Math Behind Decision Trees
By: Bhanu Soni
Tags: Supervised Learning, Regression, Programming, Machine Learning, Regression Algorithm

Tree Pruning

As author and professor Peter van der Heijden writes:

“The process illustrated above may generate good predictions on the training

set but is likely to overfit the data, leading to poor test set performance. … A better strategy is to grow a very large tree T0 and then prune it back to obtain a subtree.”

How do we determine the best way to prune the tree?

Select a subtree that leads to the lowest test error rate.

How?

It can be done by using cross-validation or the validation set approach. According to Van der Heijden:

“Cost complexity pruning — also known as weakest link pruning — is used to do this. We consider a sequence of trees indexed by a nonnegative tuning parameter α. For each value of α, there corresponds a subtree T ⊂ T 0 such that

Eq1

is as small as possible.”

|T | = number of terminal nodes of the tree T.

R = rectangle corresponding to the mth terminal node and yhat Rm is the predicted response associated with Rm (i.e. the mean of the training observations in Rm).

α = tuning parameter controls a trade-off between the subtree’s complexity and its fit to the training data.

When α = 0, then the subtree T will simply equal T0 because then Eq1 just measures the training error.

However, as α increases, there is a price to pay for having a tree with many terminal nodes, and so the quantity Eq1 will tend to be minimized for a smaller subtree.

As we increase α from zero in Eq1, branches get pruned from the tree in a nested and predictable fashion, so obtaining the whole sequence of subtrees as a function of α is easy. We can select a value of α using a validation set or cross-validation. Then we return to the full data set and obtain the subtree corresponding to α.
When art is open sourced
By: Yasmeen Turayhi
Tags: Art, Creativity, Hacks, Music, Open Source

In the software technology world, we’ve seen a massive trend towards open-source technology.

Before I get into a deeper discussion, I want to define “open-source”, which is code made available globally — that is, for every developer or anyone who knows how to access and use the code. Open source platforms provide a method for collaboration on a global scale.

Some examples include Google’s open-source machine learning library TensorFlow, and the open sourced cloud computing infrastructure as a service platform — OpenStack. While open-source is nothing new, it’s certainly a trend that seems to be continuing.

The result has been rewarding as many companies are building products off the backs of existing technologies. With borderless access and democratization of ideas and information, the rates of progress that we’re seeing are unprecedented.

For the first time in history, every human citizen has a chance to tap into existing systems of thought and borrow code to build entirely new types of technologies and services.

However, while we’ve seen this become popular in the computer software space, this “open-source” phenomenon hasn’t been widely adopted in the mainframe of entirely different disciplines outside of software.

I realized this recently after coming across a video on YouTube last week. In this video, a songwriter sings a song with no background music and has trouble finding the right melody.

What happens next is incredible.

Over 20+ musical instruments from Piano, Bass, Drums Swing, Drums Beat, DoubleBass, Classic Guitar, Keyboard 1, Cymbal, Saxophone, Tuba, Keyboard 2, String, Cello 1, DoubleBass, Keyboard 3 submit their instrumental melodies across the globe via YouTube to support and bring the lyrics and the songwriters’ original song to life called “Give it up”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoHxoz_0ykI

In this case, what started as a simple song with no instruments turned into a beautiful masterpiece with the contribution of other artists.

Imagine what we could create if the entire world and all disciplines were open-sourced and adopted this model.

For those of us who have half written stories, a canvas that remains partially painted, or a design that could benefit from a global audience — how many new ideas do you think would emerge if we were to open-source our art?

Who knows what possibilities exist?

We might very well find our individual artistic endeavors turn into global symphonies.
Changelly is now available on Ginco.
By: The Ginco Team
Tags: English, Blockchain, Wallet, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Changelly is now available in your Ginco Wallet

For the past few months, we have been working closely with the Changelly team to provide a special experience to our users. Ginco is proud to announce that we are now in a strategic partnership with Changelly, one of the most innovative companies in the blockchain space. Please check for our latest updates from the Appstore — the latest version of Ginco will come already integrated with Changelly’s instant cross-chain exchange function.

With this update, our users can:

Implement cross-chain exchanges among six blockchains and 15 cryptocurrencies supported within Ginco Wallet

Make safe and secure exchange transactions from your smartphone without exposing your private key to anyone

The benefits of using Changelly in Ginco

Instant cross-chain exchange: With Changelly you can now implement instant cross-chain exchanges inside your Ginco Wallet. This means you can exchange cryptocurrencies from different blockchains. For example, you can exchange XRP for BTC, or BCH for ETC or choose from the many more options available in Ginco Wallet.

Safe and secure: Make safe and secure transactions from your smartphone without exposing your private key to anyone.

Save your time and fees: You no longer need to send your cryptocurrency to exchanges, which will save you time and money.

You can now select Changelly!

Make it happen with Changelly

Enjoy a safe and secure exchange with Changelly. The graphic below illustrates how one would exchange their cryptocurrencies using Changelly within Ginco.

Stay tuned for additional exchange features currently in the works. Ginco continually strives to make your crypto experience the best available.

Install Ginco, the decentralized crypto wallet from here:

https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/ginco-cryptocurrency-wallet/id1348680429?l=en&mt=8

※Please note: Due to current government regulations, this function is only available outside of Japan and the United States.
Mirror Screaming
By: Joseph Coco
Tags: Mental Health, Poetry, Self-awareness, Poem, Self

Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash

They say seeing is believing

So why is it when I look in the mirror

I can’t find anything worthy about that person

Eye contact

Held direct

Yet from my mouth

Vomits regret

Down my chest

Onto the floor

I can’t do this anymore

This spell of hatred

Bloody red fungus

Overtaking everything

When was the last time

Someone existed in this room

Someone real

Someone who wanted to be

A living thing

Corpse flies chorus

Watch them sing

I can’t get up

Over that hill

To unload this baggage

Let it spill

Down to the valley

A violent push

In my left hand

I try to crush

This feeble heart

Couldn't fit the bill

Next time I know

That I will

Be better than this

A stronger soul

Unconventional

Breaking molds

I hate myself

No amount of gold

Will increase my value

So I’ve been told

Etched to my nails

My ears

My eyes

To the tears that spill

When I cry

Out for help

All alone

The world a teacher

She has shown

Callous treatment

What I should seek

Anxiety ridden

Way too meek

Two-step towards progress

Improve my health

I’d rather vanish

Resume my stealth.
Sport Programming Practice
Tags: Coding, Programming, Interview Questions, Sports, Algorithms

Practice questions for competitive programming

This is a series of notes taken by me in my practice. I’ll be practicing from A2oj . It is a free website which has something called as ladders. Like every ladder it helps you get from the bottom to the top. In this case it helps you climb up from a lower rating to a higher rating on codeforces. Each ladder has a listing of problems from codeforces with increasing level of difficulty. To access the listing you have to join the platform and then register to the ladder. The ladder I’ll be doing will be this.

This will be a series of notes on my thoughts as I solve the problems. Hope you find it useful.

You can find links to my notes below. I’ll update this as I solve.