fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Our Dreams, Not mere fantasies
By: Suraj Ghimire
Tags: Relationships, Family, Life, Love, Dreams

Our Dreams, Not mere fantasies

This Shall be Our Story. We shall read it together.

Everyone has their own story to share. They are not only meant to be shared as fantasies but most of them are our dreams for what we live for.

What we live for, it can be any of the things. Our Spouse, our children, our own personal dream, or our passion to serve the neediest.

They need to be shared because they inspire each one of us.

They need to be written because they are worthy to be dreamt.

By This Shall Be Our Story

They need to be rewritten because, in time, they need to be read again, to look back at our journey, to rejoice in what we have come through.

Let us share our dreams, not mere fantasies.

A new publication in Medium, brought to you by a group of writers on Medium, especially for Family, Relationship, Love, Life, and Dream.

Here is our new logo.

Logo designed by Suraj Ghimire with the help of canva.com

Publishing your post with This Shall Be Our Story

Before you send your articles, please consider proofreading through Sign up for Grammarly and/or ProWritingAid. I would recommend using both.

Sign up for Grammarly.

Here is a review for Grammarly written by Suraj Ghimire

For New Writers

If you want to join us as a writer, fill the form with your Medium Profile, and draft link

We hope this platform will give you a platform to share your dream, that shall be not mere fantasies.

Meanwhile, either you are publishing for the first time or tenth time, you can publish your post and later add it to our publication.

We do not have hard rules that your post should be unpublished.

Although we are a small and new publication, we aim to grow ahead.

In our attempt to boost post linked with us and writers with us, every week we shall have a post of the week and writer of the week.

Our Facebook page is This Shall Be Our Story. Suraj Ghimire shares content using his own Twitter account.

Let's keep writing, folks.

Here are a few writing tips you may need to go through, If you haven’t.

Articles not to miss.

By Medium Writers Team.
Tutorials and courses worth taking NOW
By: Jana Bergant
Tags: Coding, Programming, Web Development, Course, Review

Hi,

you want to learn how to code and get the best development job?

Now is the best time to get the right education online.

I’ll tell you something. In my 20 years of development path, nobody has ever asked me what University did I take. The only thing they wanted to know was what I know and what I can do for them. Strange, ha!

I’ve got some reviews of courses and tutorials for you. In a ton of courses and specializations, it’s hard to find the best one. I know.

Here are my latest reviews. The rest you can find in my Medium publication or at my YouTube channel.

Just a hint. There is a SALE on Udemy happening right NOW. You can get the courses for the price of a pizza. Just make sure you pick the best one.

Mongodb Tutorials and Courses Worth Taking: ARTICLE / VIDEO.

Stephen Grider: Microservices with Node JS and React: ARTICLE / VIDEO

Best ANDROID app development courses: VIDEO

Enjoy your day!

Jana
by Martino Pietropoli
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Humor, Alien, Comics, Cartoon, Sunday

First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.

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The 2nd Time I Had Sex…
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: Sexuality, This Happened To Me, Life, Sex, Life Lessons

I actually don’t remember his name, this young man who was my second “lover.” Let’s call him Steve.

I met Steve through his best friend Dan that night I poured a full pitcher of beer over Dan’s head at the Peel Pub. I‘d just found out that Dan had knocked me up the night he raped me. And boy I was something mad!

Dan deserved to walk home soaking wet on that cold December night in Montreal. But Dan’s friends didn’t know that. They grabbed me and held me so Dan could hit me. Dan was the kind of guy who’d hit a girl.

But Dan didn’t hit me. He told his buddies he deserved it.

Dan deserved that and so much more.

But, rather than tell the police what went down three months earlier, my ‘payback,’ since I was now quite clearly a girl who had no morals, was to sleep with people Dan knew and then tell him how much better fucks they were than he was.

Steve was the first. I showed up at a party at his place—his rich step-dad’s place, really— and got drunk fast. I propositioned Steve. In one unholy act, I’d literally given up trying to be a good girl. If sex was power, I’d take the reigns even if it meant acting against everything I’d believed in until that day the doc said I was pregnant.

Steve was no saint and took me upstairs—to his parent’s bedroom. I couldn’t figure out why we didn’t just go to his room but I didn’t push it. Instead of having sex in his mother’s bed, we went into the master bathroom and he locked the door. Then he opened the attic hatch and we climbed up a drop-down ladder into the crawl space.

A crawl space filled with pink insulation.

So, the first time I had sex, I got pregnant. And the second time, I got a back full of tiny shards of glass.

After he’d come (I did not, no surprise), we dressed and went back down to the party. Steve ignored me and before I left, he was kissing another girl. A girl, Steve’s brother told me, was his girlfriend.

Boy, I sure showed Dan!
Blockchain Report — 6/27/2018
By: Christopher Durr
Tags: Investing, News, Cryptocurency, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Summary: Rapper Akon Is Creating His Own Cryptocurrency In Senegal; ING Survey Shows Interest In Cryptocurrency Expected To Double; Robinhood Is Launching A Cryptocurrency Wallet

Rapper Akon Is Creating His Own Cryptocurrency In Senegal

According to CNN, rapper Akon is building a futuristic cryptocurrency city in Senegal, which will do commerce exclusively in a digital coin he is creating called AKoin. The city will be built on a 2,000-acre land gifted to him by the President of Senegal, Macky Sall. AKoin is expected to launch early July.

At a conference, Akon said:

“I think that blockchain and crypto could be the saviour for Africa in many ways because it brings the power back to the people… Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology offer a more secure currency that enables people in Africa to advance themselves independent of the government.”

ING Survey Shows Interest In Cryptocurrency Expected To Double

According to Bitcoinist, a survey from ING bank showed that interest in cryptocurrency is expected to potentially “more than double”. The survey shows:

Sixty-six per cent of people in Europe say they have heard of cryptocurrency. Fewer than one in 10 (9%) own it. An additional 16 per cent say they expect to own it in future, which suggests uptake could more than double. Considering a third of those in Europe (34%) have not yet heard of cryptocurrency the growth potential could be even higher.

Jessica Exton, a behavioral scientist at ING, concluded that cryptocurrency interest is likely to grow in time but that this increased interest will be cause for some concern for traditional financial institutions. As a result, an economist at ING concluded that regulators will take a more active approach with cryptocurrency as more people consider cryptocurrencies as investments.

Robinhood Is Launching A Cryptocurrency Wallet

According to CCN, Robinhood is working on creating its own cryptocurrency wallet which would allow its customers to move assets from other wallets into the platform without having to sell them first.

In order to fulfill the goal of creating a cryptocurrency wallet, Robinhood has posted a job advertisement for a “Crypto Engineer”. The job advertisement states that the employee will:
Santa’s Home Town
By: Richard J. Goodrich
Tags: Roman, Christianity, Christmas, Religion, History

Santa’s Home Town

The Peripatetic Historian visits Patara, Turkey, birthplace of Saint Nicholas.

Roman Gate, Patara, Turkey. Author photograph.

Christmas specials and holiday displays have conditioned us to associate Santa Claus with the cold snows of the North Pole, but the real Saint Nick had a Mediterranean background. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth century Christian bishop, was born in the Greek city of Patara, once part of Lycia, but later folded into the Roman empire. It stands today on the southwestern coast of Turkey, roughly twenty kilometers from Kalkan.

Although Patara was an important port in Saint Nicholas’ day, time and sand silted the harbor; the city was slowly strangled and then abandoned. Today it is a well-preserved Roman ruin, most of it unexcavated, buried under meters of sand.

Sand is what draws the few tourists who visit the spot. Patara adjoins what is said to be the best beach on the Mediterranean―an eighteen mile strip of white, floury sand. Sunbathers spread blankets beneath red and blue parasols by day; at night, sea turtles crawl ashore to lay their eggs. The beach is a protected nesting area and humans are banned after dark.

Patara, Turkey. Author photograph.

The great stone ruins of Patara crumble beside the road that leads to the beach. Here, according to legend, Saint Nicholas of Myra was born and spent his early years. The earliest account of his life was written in the eighth century by a Byzantine monk named Michael the Archimandrite. Despite this late date, there are many references in earlier works to the eastern bishop, and it is possible that he attended the Council of Nicaea in 325.

According to the legends, Nicholas was born into a wealthy family of Patara. An unusually well-behaved boy, he acquired a local reputation for saintly behavior. As an infant, he only drank milk from his mother’s right breast, which symbolized his desire to stand at Christ’s right side. Once he made the transition to solid food, he quickly adopted the practice of fasting every Wednesday and Friday.

His uncle, also named Nicholas, was the bishop of Patara. When the elder Nicholas discerned a growing holiness in his nephew, he insisted that the young man enter holy orders. Nicholas began to study for the priesthood. A few years later, after ordination, Nicholas’ uncle left him in charge of the spiritual needs of the city while he took a trip to the Holy Land.
Take 5: Best English-Language Remakes
By: Frame Rated Staff
Tags: Movies, Remakes, Culture, Features, Film

Fistful of Dollars (USA, 1964) • Yojimbo (Japan, 1961)

It’s widely accepted that the Spaghetti Western was inspired by Japanese Samurai films, or chanbara. Hollywood directors saw the parallel in their semi-mythic settings and the potential of replacing swordsmen with gunmen, whilst keeping the central narratives intact. The samurai source material has always been superb, but international audience were slow on the uptake and it remained fairly obscure. Stylised samurai cinema only gained respect on the arthouse circuit, though the home video market would later help to build them a cult following. The recasting and re-telling of stories within a more familiar western framework was a quicker draw at the box office outside of Japan.

Yojimbo was hugely influential in Japan and abroad and spawned numerous imitators. Most notably, Sergio Leone saw it whilst writing A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and it left a lasting impression. Watch both films back-to-back and you’ll see many sequences could be following the same storyboard!

They also have prime plot devices in common. In both, the cool man of few words serves two masters who are at odds with each other, playing a risky game that sets two rival gangs against each other. There’s a woman in jeopardy in both, separated from their child. There are several stand-offs where the protagonist is outnumbered — but efficiently, almost clinically, dispatches his challengers. The motivations of both central characters are ambiguous, and each film is supremely stylish and absorbing. These two films changed their respective genres irrevocably. I love both versions!

Can Fistful really be called remake of Yojimbo, though? Leone tried to make out otherwise, but Kurosawa filed a lawsuit that changed his mind. In an out of court settlement, Leone admitted that Fistful was basically an unlicensed remake, paid a lump sum to Kurosawa and reportedly signed over 15% of the profits as a retrospective fee. But did he learn his lesson? Seems not, but maybe he learned not to mess with a tried and tested recipe. The third in his Dollars Trilogy — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) — was also inspired by a classic samurai movie, Hideo Gosha’s debut Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). Again, I love both!
Deep Learning on Giant Graphs
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

A graph visualization issued from the Opte Project, a tentative cartography of the Internet

By Vegard Flovik — 13 min read

Graph theory might sound like an intimidating and abstract topic to you, so why should you even spend your time reading an article about it? However, although it might not sound very applicable, there are actually an abundance of useful and important applications of graph theory! In this article, I will try to explain briefly what some of these applications are. In doing so, I will do my best to convince you that having at least some basic knowledge of this topic can be useful in solving some interesting problems you might come across.
Plugins of the Year
By: Alex R. Young
Tags: Git, Plugins, Motions

I’m peering out at you through a haze of Christmas dinner and fairy lights, finding a welcome distraction from assembling toys and cooking. I’ve written about many plugins over the last year, but I use two regularly, so I’d like to offer these morsels up as my plugins of the year.

The first is Seek, by Vic Goldfeld. Seek adds a new motion, s , for jumping based on two characters. There have been iterations on this idea since then, but I liked the simplicity of it, and the fact that it feels like built-in functionality.

The next is vim-signify. It shows linewise changes in a file, so you can easily see what lines have changed if you’re using a version control system like Git.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and I look forward to writing more about Vim in 2014!
Workshop on Media & Art
Tags: Art, Workshop, Archive

Shaheed Bhagat Singh College (University of Delhi) in association with SBSC Alumni Association held a Workshop on “CAREERS IN MEDIA AND ART” on Friday, the 9th October 2015 in the College premises. A total number of 110 students participated and 11 teachers attended this workshop. Mr. Pankaj Rakesh, media professional & visiting faculty at the Amity School of Communication and Ms. Poonam Baid, Project Coordinator, Delhi Art Gallery were the invited speakers for this workshop.

Ms. Poonam Baid makes a point

The workshop started with Ms. Pooonam giving a detailed talk on how the students can take up a career in ART and the various aspects associated with it. They only require an interest in the field and need not be a Professional Artist. But a quality to appreciate art can give them ample opportunities to make it a career, engaging themselves to organizing events, exhibitions managing art galleries and auctioning of art displays.

This was followed by Mr. Pankaj Rakesh, speaking on Career in Media. Along with lots of visual examples that included videos of short clips he explained how to take up still photography, cinematography, making of short message films, documentaries and animation. He gave a total insight to the glamour world, its advantages, difficulties, challenges and opportunities in this fast ever-growing field.
Find Out My Sullen Shadow
By: Sandeep Kumar Mishra
Tags: Poetry, Sandeep Kumar Mishra, Thesceneandheard, Sadness, Hope

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

In upper part of my body

A cognitive bell rings

From a dial up connection of live wires;

The modem is working JUST

To repeatedly provide the facsimile of

Barren and bald paths;

Inner lumbering of daily freight

Coiling, clutching upward;

There is no vivacity

The vital force parasited

How I inhale life?

My days and nights are bolted

Inside a brain cell,

My voice has held back;

Now it lays a plan to brawl my soul;

Residing in my own skull

It dictates notes imitating my tone,

If I could disintegrate my recall;

As my shadow has left me

There remains Just I, me and myself,

None is willing to be with me

Why is my brain, a black hole?

How could it not be a universe?

I have a constellation of migraine, tablets

Syringe, backache and insomnia,

Dream has become a dead pattern,

As worn out as fossil led glow;

Everything has become identical

Except the weight of consequence;

My gallery has ended

Now you can hang me on the wall

Then an unschooled grin came

Wait! Take a look

The glow has returned

Go, find out my sullen shadow
Spring Cleaning — Time to clean up your code
By: Quentin Ferrer
Tags: Refactoring, PHP, Programming, Clean Code, Best Practices

Background image by Francesco Mazzoli

Spring has arrived! At this time of year, everyone cleans their house thoroughly. As a developer, I suggest a different approach: Clean up your code.

What is clean code?

Clean code is easy to read, understand and maintain by the author of the code and other developers.

Why you should write clean code?

Writing clean code is a necessary mindset. It is very important for you and your co-workers. It will be easier and faster to improve, maintain and test a product if everyone understands the code. This increases the quality of a product and decreases the technical debt.

️How to clean your code?

The refactoring is to fight technical debt. It transforms a dirty code into clean code. Refactoring should be done as a series of small changes, each of which makes the existing code slightly better while still leaving the program in working order.
Patrón de diseño FACADE en PHP
By: Francisco Ugalde
Tags: Best Practices, Software Development, Clean Code, PHP, Facade Pattern

Senior Software Engineer | I love coding, software architectures and all new technologies. I’ll try to share, in an easy way, all the bits of my head.

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The Stock Market Doesn’t Represent The Real Economy
By: Kevin Mekulu
Tags: Economics, Business, Stock Market, Money, Finance

The Stock Market Is Forward-Looking

One of the most fundamental concepts you will learn in a finance course is the time value of money. The price of a stock is the present value of its future cash flows. Simply put, investors value stocks based on cash flows the company will receive years from now; which is why the stock market is said to be forward-looking. A perfect example would be high-growth tech companies which usually have juicy valuations without necessarily being profitable. Investors are paying for higher expected earnings years from now. Stock prices capture the near-term negative outlook but also a subsequent recovery.

The Economy Is Backward-Looking

A recession can be defined as the fall in GDP for two consecutive quarters. This is often the consequence of a general decline in the economic activities of a country; GDP growth figures are only released until after a quarter has ended. Additionally, economic data generally tells us about what has happened in the past which is not directly correlated to the performance of the forward-looking stock market. As they say on Wall Street, “past performance is not a guide to future performance.”

The Stock Market Is Not The Real Economy

To fully grasp this difference, we need to take a closer look at the structural difference that exists between the S&P 500 and the economy. The economy comprises a multitude of moving parts while the S&P 500 represents a preselected group of 500 large companies. It’s important to note that the FAAGM (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft) represents about 20% of the S&P 500 yet, their combined revenues only amounted to 4% of the US GDP.

The vast difference between the economy’s structure and the stock market’s structure clearly delineates the disconnect that exists between the economy and the stock market.

Conclusion

We can’t use the state of the economy as a proxy to value the stock market in general or individual stocks in particular

Just because the economy is tanking doesn’t necessarily mean the stock market should also be tanking and vice-versa

Structural differences between the economy and the stock market explain the disconnect between the two

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Sorting Out Feeling(s) with Ruby
By: Jake Mills
Tags: Coding, First Post, Ruby, Web Development, Flatiron School

I have a problem. Well, more like, I have feelings. It sounds like I’m trying to say that my feelings are a problem, which I’m not, but they are starting to FEEL that way.

Showing myself out.

I just started a fully immersive course in Software Engineering through the Flatiron School. Well, it’s supposed to be fully immersed, but due to a certain pandemic that should not be named, it’s more of an immersion via Zoom & Slack from the comfort of my parents basement in the middle of Stafford, VA about an hour south of our nation’s capital. I was hoping to be doing this in person in NYC, but again, thanks to COV…*cough*…I mean, IT that should not be named, I’m here. I’m here, trying to switch from touring the country as an actor, to diving head first into the digital world and languages that keep this Earth of ours connected. ALL that to say…I’m overwhelmed.

So, to help me sort all of these feelings out I’m looking at my main squeeze over the last two weeks, Ruby.

Ruby + Me

I’m going to define myself as a class called Feeler and my feelings as a class called Feeling. If we think about the relationship between feelings and myself, you could say that I have a lot, or have many, feelings, and feelings are my own, or belong to me. OR. The Feeler HAS MANY Feelings, and the Feelings BELONG TO the Feeler. Let’s set ’em up!
The Self that Dances
By: Paul Mulliner
Tags: Poetry, Philosophy, Spirituality, Mindfulness, Yoga

The self that dances in the sky of our heart

and drifts like summer breeze

through the conscious ocean of our being,

is a universal self

gazing through all of us,

dissolving all thought

like sunshine dissolving mist

near the surface of a pond,

transforming its dark water

into light.

The self that loves all life

like a parent loves their child,

is a self that dreams in all of us,

a larger self we know

in quieter moments of our life,

when sun shines green

through nearby leaves

and breathes the breath

of the invisible

into our heart.
#086 | Particle Effects And Factory Functions With JavaScript
By: Kelvin Zhao
Tags: Code, Javascript Tips, JavaScript, Coding, HTML

Yet another article on code! I must be on a roll. This came off a particle effect I was working on for a client. Initially, I was just generating little divs on the stage and moving them around, but as the number of particles grew, it started to get a little sluggish on my client’s tiny laptop. So I decided to convert the whole system into an HTML canvas so that the particles will be just a single drawing on the DOM instead.

I won’t go through the entire chunk of code here, but just some core learnings because as usual, this is meant as a note for myself to refer back to when I forget how these work — which will always happen sooner than later.
And You Must Fight the Dread
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Poetry, Life, Grief, Life Lessons, Hope

Perhaps you’ve learned to fear the coming storm

or else, derive from hopeful light some dread

that eats away the heat, the blessed warm

that you have wrapped around your hopeful head

as armor: grief will nibble at your nose

and eat, as frost, the tender bits of skin

so unprotected; melt the glowing rose

that you have tended, time and time again.

It’s easy, losing faith in dying dust;

despair a pretty weed in every hue,

but you are called to hold a hopeful trust

and keep it when the misery runs true.

For clouds will come, obliterating light

and sapping all your precious will to fight.
Sealed in C# — More than a visual keyword
By: Friedel Verpoort
Tags: Sealed Classes, Optimization, C Sharp Programming, Programming, Programming Tricks

When using the sealed keyword and if the compiler will have the confidence to make a direct method call and by consequence optimize and skip the vtable lookup completly. This won’t give you any massive performance gains, but it did improve performance when I used sealed consistently in a game engine’s hot-path. Next to that it also is good practice to explicitly express that the class wasn’t intended to be overwritten and remove any assumptions. This is both for future programmers on the project as well as for compilers of course.

This extra bit of information you are giving to the compiler helps it understand your code just a little better. I will have a little bit of an extra deepdive on the compilers side, but for most readers just remember to use the sealed keyword where you feel like it is appropriate.

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

Compiler Deepdive

You can see the exact implementation of this in the clang compiler(C++) here and it is worth noting that all compilers might have a slightly different implementation. However the general idea will be cross-compiler compatible. This technique has been used in Doom as well and fabian neatly explains how they got away with very little vtable lookups under unrolling the loop. Unity also has a nice article about this and uses an example to show the improvements.
V 2.15: Risk Score Profiles, Alert Settings, Customer Connections & Search Logs
By: Crystal Blockchain
Tags: Blockchain Analytics, Bitfury, Cryptocurrency, Crystal Blockchain, Bitcoin Wallet

In the latest update, the analytics team has improved risk scoring profiles, alert settings, customer connections, and added a search logging solution.

Risk Score Profile and Alert Settings History

Customers will now be able to save the history of changes to any risk score profiles or alert settings. This update will allow our users to track changes made by themselves or by colleagues (those using a corporate account) to ensure an audit trail is created.

Users can also restore the previous version of the risk score profile and alert settings from the history tab, as needed.

Customer Connections

We have introduced a connections solution for customers through the monitoring tool.

This update allows users to create a connections diagram for any customers’ deposited and/ or withdrawn amounts.

The diagram above shows a summary of a customer’s deposits and withdrawals. It allows users to estimate the source of the customer’s deposits (left) and the destination of the customer’s withdrawals (right.)

This greater level of detail means that users will now be able to see aggregated statistics on all transfers for a particular customer within the system.

The connections solution also enables users to see, not only the types of services the money was interacting with but also the exact names of these services.

Please note that withdrawal transfers without a transaction hash are not considered in connections.

Search Logging

Starting with this release, users will now be able to view previous search results within certain search dates (up to 20 results can be saved). Only successful search queries will be shown in the search bar so users can quickly navigate through them at ease.

Get in touch if there are any features you’d like to suggest to the team, or if you’d like more information about the platform.
Crypto dust to BNB tokens is now possible on Binance
Tags: Crypto Dust, Cryptocurrency, Binance, Bnb Token

Binance cryptocurrency exchange now lets users convert crypto dust into BNB tokens. Yes, you heard it right now Binance users can convert their Binance dust into BNB tokens and then buy other cryptocurrencies with that BNB tokens. Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the Binance CEO made this known via a tweet on April 23, 2018. Binance is currently the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world. Binance has currently more than 300 cryptocurrencies listed on their platform.

WHAT IS CRYPTO DUST?

Crypto Dust refers to the fractional value of any cryptocurrency which remains unused. It is usually impossible to trade crypto dust due to less in value than the transaction fees. Also being lower than the minimum trading limit it usually remains in the user’s wallet.

This new feature released by the Binance team will now allow their users convert their crypto dust into BNB tokens. You can convert balances with a valuation below 0.001 BTC to BNB once every 24 hours. It is not currently possible to convert delisted coins. At the time of writing this post, BNB is trading at $14.10 according to Coinmarketcap.

HOW TO CRYPTO CONVERT DUST TO BNB

In order to convert crypto dust to BNB tokens follow the process mentioned below –

Firstly login to your Binance account. Go to Funds and then click on Balances.

After that, you will see one extra feature added to your dashboard i.e. Convert to BNB. Click on Convert to BNB.

At the bottom of the screen, you will get the exact value to BNB that you will get after converting your crypto dust into BNB tokens. That all.

The reactions of the users regarding this feature is positive. The feature Convert to BNB is user-friendly.

What do you think about this new feature by Binance? Do you convert your Crypto dust or prefer to hodl? Let us know your views in the comment section below.
Liquefaction in the Daze
By: Dionne Charlet
Tags: Poem, Friendship, Loss, Free Verse, Mourning

Free verse and loss

Liquefaction in the Daze

In loving memory of Brandi Scanlon

Photo by David Reynolds on Unsplash

I scour the halo from my bones in denial. This ending of yours comes unbound from the pages of Marvel, where we’d scamper the waywards of New Orleans to ride mechanical bulls and squat on thrones.

I am amiss in the stream of a wildfire on this laptop atop photos of a courtyard and a tavern drive-by, crumpling to ash like a ScanTron of Bourbon Street swirled up and ablaze with mountains in lackluster. Sierra Madre and Jackson Square sashay to fire in the picture of your eyes. Your hair lashes in tongues where wild roses mottle to carbon with the loss of your sass.

I lack the comfort with self in the joy of you.

Ramshackle is the dawn in homage to tales of Loki and Iron Man whispering in light streaming through a broken shade missing beads from Katrina. Boxes fall over with memories teaming faux pearls and sword-shaped pens out of ink for the bluster of our sonnets.

Goodbye 3000, my beloved friend.

For more poetry by Dionne Charlet, click on the link below:
Writing software in natural way
Tags: Software Development

I am a product builder who specializes in programming. Strongly believe in humanist.

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Studies Reveal Link Between Trump and Rise in Sexism, Hate Crimes
By: Llowell Williams
Tags: Extremism, Racism, Politics, Sexism

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

There’s been plenty of talk about the so-called “Trump effect” among political commentators, usually meant to describe a trend within American politics of embracing vicious mudslinging. But there’s another type of Trump effect that’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that goes beyond a lack of civility.

I recently wrote about an Anti-Defamation League report which found that hate crime killings rose from 37 in 2017 to 50 in 2018 — with every perpetrator last year having a link to right-wing radicalism. While the reasoning for this could only be speculated about, recent studies help reaffirm what I and others have suspected: Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric is having a negative real world impact.

Recent research from political science experts at the University of North Texas found an uptick in hate crime incidents — such as vandalism, intimidation and physical violence — in counties where Trump held campaign rallies during the 2016 presidential race. These counties experienced a 226 percent increase in hate crime reports following his stops, as compared to the counties Trump did not visit.

This is a considerable change, though it’s arguably a “chicken and egg” scenario: Did Trump’s presence encourage more hate crimes, or was he inclined to visit counties where there was a predisposition toward such acts? In all likelihood, the reality is somewhere in between — but the connection is difficult to dismiss.

A separate study conducted by psychologists found another example of the Trump effect. It measured Americans’ views evaluated in terms of sexist beliefs and found that, following Trump’s presidential victory, Americans’ acceptance of certain misogynistic viewpoints had grown — though only among his own support base. What’s particularly remarkable about these findings is that it runs counter to a commonly held understanding in social science that argues that these types of views shift gradually over time, rather than being influenced by a single event.

Rather than acknowledge or even attempt to distance himself from these types of views, Trump has either turned a blind eye to these issues or, more often, continued to double down on language which is sexist or is encouraging of white nationalists. After all, this is the president who described neo-Nazis who participated in the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 as “very fine people” and last year described himself as a “nationalist.”

It’s not just language though. Trump also defunded programs aimed at curbing white nationalism and skinhead violence domestically — mere days after the deadly terrorist attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October.

With domestic — and even international — terrorists and perpetrators of hate crimes frequently invoking Trump or slogans associated with him, it becomes hard to claim this presidency isn’t having a meaningful (and deeply troubling) impact on American and Western society.

This article was originally published on Care2.com on March 30, 2019.
How to use Room Persistence library in Android using Kotlin
By: Vivek Maskara
Tags: Database, Room Persistence Library, Android, Kotlin, Android App Development

In this post, I will show you how to quickly add Room support for Room database in your app using Kotlin. There are quite a few articles on how to use Room but most of them are not up to date.

Earlier Room was part of the android.arch.persistence library but recently it was moved to androidx . I will walk you through the basic steps for setting up Room in your Android application.

Add library dependencies

Go ahead and add these dependencies in your app/build.gradle file. If you are using Kotlin, make sure to use kapt instead of annotationProcessor for room compiler.

Define the Entities

Next, define the tables for your room database. In Room world, tables are referred to as Entity . You can annotate any existing model class with the @Entity annotation to use it as an entity.

In the above example, we are defining the User entity.

Define the Dao

The Dao layer lets you query the database. You need to define an interface and annotate it with @Dao . You can either write raw SQL queries or use one of the predefined annotations for simple Insert , Delete or Update .

Define the Database

Next, you need to define an abstract class that extends the RoomDatabase . This class would give us the instances of the Dao that we defined earlier.

Note that you would need to annotate this class and pass a list of entities for the tables you want to have in your database. In this example, we are passing the User entity.

Init the Database

Now, you need to create an instance of the AppDatabase that you just defined. Its usually recommended to define it as a Singleton and use the same instance across the whole application.

Use the Database

Now, that we have the whole database setup, we can go ahead and insert data into it. First, we will write a few helper functions to get a mock list of users. In an actual application, this would be replaced by business logic to fetch the data either from an API call or through other user actions.

We would be calling the mockGetUsers function later to get a list of 10 users.

Insert users to the Database

Now, that we have a list of mocked users, we will go ahead and call the fetchUsers function to fetch a mocked list of users and save it to the database.

Note that any DB operations should be performed on a background thread. In this example, we are using Schedulers.io() to get a new background thread.

Fetch users from the database

Similarly, its straight forward to fetch users from the database.

The above function will fetch a list of all users from the database.
Mike Pence Quotes as Dennis the Menace Comics
By: Jack Shepherd
Tags: Comics, Humor, Culture, Election 2020, Politics

Mike Pence Quotes as Dennis the Menace Comics

“Pence the Menace” is the comic literally nobody asked for

Vice President Mike Pence has said a lot of things that are pretty hard to take! I thought some of them might go down a bit easier coming from America’s most lovable and mischievous boy next door.

But I was wrong about that! So very wrong. “Pence the Menace” should never have seen the light of day and I’m truly sorry.
Great Life Lessons from Lion King
By: Ungku Muhammad Zuhairi
Tags: Life Lessons, Disney, Personal Development, Lion King, Cartoon

Knowledge of balance

Mufasa teaches Simba about the Circle of Life. Source: Google Images

“Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope” — Mufasa

In this movie, Mufasa has taught Simba about the Circle of Life, an exquisite balance of life from small to big creatures. It is to teach Simba to acknowledge the balance of life and preserves it when he becomes the king.

Energy Pyramid. Source: Pinterest

Speaking of balance, there is an energy pyramid from producers to tertiary consumers or higher. Their amount(tropical level) must be in the correct amount or it will cause a trophic cascade, thus will cause and it will lead to the extinction of life.

There are more things to talk about balance such as the carbon cycle and the sea act as the heat sink for Earth. It is compulsory for us as sentient beings to learn those balance of life and it is our responsibility to preserve it.
Engineering Plutus — New & Improved
Tags: Mobile Payments, Fintech, Blockchain, Announcements, Bitcoin

The Plutus.it dev team has now grown to 8 developers pushing their limits. And since then, our codebase has increased substantially and automated KYC has gone live for the PlutusDEX.

If you haven’t already, please take a look at the general update recently posted by our CTO, Chris, where he talks about new hires and explains the restructuring of our development team. You can read more on his Medium blog below:
To Rollover or Not to Rollover
By: Liz Baker
Tags: Investing, Financial Planning, Rollover, Money, Retirement

Rollover to an IRA

Most of us are not at risk of either litigation or bankruptcy, so rolling over the money to an IRA is a good option.

The big advantage of an IRA is control. If you keep your money with an employer 401K, you are stuck with the limited choices presented to you. These plans famously have a limited number of investment choices; perhaps only three: stock, bond, and a money-market fund. If you are a buy-and-hold index investor, this might be just fine.

Another consideration is the fees. Your 401K might be charging you higher fees than you can get elsewhere. You may need to dig into the fine print to determine this.

Once you decide to make the switch, you can roll your money over to virtually any financial institution that supports IRAs. I currently keep my own IRAs at an institution where I can buy ANY stock, bond, ETF, or mutual fund available to the public. I like the choice.

Taking money out late — Required Minimum Distributions

Upon reaching age 72 (specifically, the April following the year you turn age 72) you are generally required to take Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your 401K and IRA accounts. The IRS is graciously letting your savings grow tax-free, but they want their cut eventually. RMDs are calculated by dividing your stash by a factor, which approximates how many more years the IRS thinks you are going to live. Mathematically, RMDs allow the IRS to effectively tax all your money before you die.

For example, let’s say you are 72 and have $1 million saved in tax-advantaged accounts. Your factor is 25.6. because the actuaries that work for the IRS believe your life expectancy (plus a spouse) is age 97 (72+25.6). You are required to take a distribution of 1M/25.6 = $39,063 this year, transferring this money (or shares) to a regular taxable account and paying the taxes.

Depending on your cash flow needs at age 72, RMDs might not be an issue. However, if you wish to keep that money growing tax-free, the location of this money becomes important.

If you are still working (yes, at age 72), you do not need to take RMDs from your current employer 401K. However, you still may need to take RMDs from your IRAs and any old employer 401K.

Note, that if you own more than 5% of the company, ie, you are self-employed, you still must take RMDs out of your employer Plan. Also, this RMD exception is completely up to the discretion of your employer; they may require everyone over age 72 to take RMDs, employed or not.

If you are retired, upon reaching age 72, you’ll also need to take RMDs from a Roth Account within a 401K or other plan.

However, if your Roth money is sitting in a Roth IRA, no RMDs are required

In summary, from an RMD perspective, rollover your Roth money to a Roth IRA, but if you plan to work past age 72, rollover traditional money into your next employer’s 401K.
Swing State Secretaries and the 2020 Elections
By: Harvard Ash Center
Tags: Voting, Harvard, Voter, Elections, Democracy

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation brought together a bipartisan group of secretaries from the key swing states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to discuss the challenges they are facing, the pressures they are under, and what they are doing to make the November election work for the citizens of their states.

Panelists included:

Jocelyn Benson, Secretary of State, Michigan

Kathy Boockvar, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Pennsylvania

Frank LaRose, Secretary of State, Ohio

Miles Rapoport (Moderator), Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy, Ash Center

Jocelyn Benson, Secretary of State, Michigan

“The biggest challenge is the challenge of election interference — interference in a way that would seek to sow seeds of doubt among our electorate, among our voters about the integrity of the process, and as a way of undermining their faith that the results of the election will be an accurate reflection of the will of the people.”

Frank LaRose, Secretary of State, Ohio

“I want to mention this effort to ensure that voters have accurate information. It is unfortunate, but it is a reality that we live with — whether it’s coming from foreign adversaries or coming from our own domestic American politicians. There’s a lot of misinformation swirling around.”

Kathy Boockvar, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Pennsylvania

“Disinformation, misinformation is the single most, biggest challenge we’re facing across the commonwealth and across the country. It’s something that secretaries of state and election officials have had to deal with for a long time. It’s just that the 24/7 news cycle, social media, and just how easy it is to retweet, repost, has really worsened that.”

Watch the full event recording
I
By: Robert Merrill
Tags: Awareness, Communication, Chat

I don’t have any idea why this was launched nearly a month ago and I am just finding it, but I think Facebook Chat is a pretty cool idea… and NOT because it’s “CHAT”.

Nevermind that TechCrunch somehow knew about Facebook Chat and I didn’t… must have been that day twitter was down..

First a few screenshots:

The first shows my facebook homepage, with a new “toolbar” along the bottom and a notifications window that pops up:

The second screenshot is a closeup of the status box, showing 9 online friends… 3 active, and 6 idle… and their statuses:

End of the day, I like this tool simply because its providing a drop-dead simple way to:

Touch in with people simply

Find out what’s happening in my network

Communicate with people as-needed in the same place I find them (it is inefficient to use one tool to locate someone and then another tool to communicate with them when you find them!)

I don’t know if FB CHAT has additional features, but I would like it to:
Can I Be The Almighty?
By: Maitreya Thakur
Tags: Religion, Life, History

“Religion is the prop of a man who has not yet found himself.”

This is an argument put forward by the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh. He denounced religion as the garb of a man who does not know himself. This is a radical statement and it gave me some food for thought. Having considered it for some time, I feel that this statement does hit on a significant point.

Only a man who has not realised his true potential, who has not realised how powerful he is, will search for a higher power to submit to. Man himself becomes the almighty should he come to realise his true power.

This sounds arrogant but what Bhagat Singh was alluding to was his belief that subscribing to a religion or God is a futile exercise. It gives you no power which you do not already have.

This makes sense to me; after all, what does one really gain by having a religion? At most, one gets a sense of belonging to a community — a group of people with a common set of values. This may be a priority to some and to those religion has some meaning. To others, religion serves no other purpose than to provide rules to stick by.

It could well be the tool to keep us buried.
“Faded”
Tags: Poetry, Poem, Covid 19, BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ

Faded

Cross my heart and hope to die

Don’t belong to any nation

If they find me facedown on the sidewalk

Will they look at my medical bracelet

Thoughts that cloud my mind

They’re all complicated

It’s 2020

Walking downtown with a faded twenty

In my wallet

Staring at all the closed shops

Remembering the time

My fingers used to fumble through the comics

It’s ironic

How I used to hate leaving the house

Now I’m trapped

And looking for a way out
Morning Medicine
By: Ani Vidrine
Tags: Poetry, Spirituality, Metaphysics, Nonduality, Nature

Morning Medicine

Poems From The Porch

photo by Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau on Unsplash.com

It is quiet and peaceful on this powder pink morning,

a warm cup of coffee comforting my hand.

The sunlight is caressing the tops of the trees

as the happy rooster calls out his greeting.

Freely given fire gifts

of woodsy aroma,

soothing heat,

crackle, and flame

are offering their magic.

The morning medicine of the porch

is enlivening,

not intoxicating,

because it offers

clarity and healing.

Open, receptive,

fertile, and silent,

the ever-present

Witness and Participant,

I am.