fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
What's New in Angular 11?
By: Chameera Dulanga
Tags: Angular 11, Angular, JavaScript, Front End Development, Programming

Component Test Harnesses

Component test harness allows tests to interact with components using supported APIs. This was first introduced in Angular 9. These APIs have the ability to interact with the components in a similar way to the end-users and tests can insulate themselves against the changes in the DOM.

At that time, this mechanism only supported Angular material. But with the latest release, a Component harness is available for all components.
Day 325 -Blossoms- Haibun Journey Beauty Each Day
By: Ada'S Poetry Alcove
Tags: Poetry, Haiku

Day 325 -Blossoms- Haibun Journey Beauty Each Day

Today’s beauty was blossoms. After last night’s rain and this morning’s storm I was quite surprised by all the new blossoms this afternoon. Their were many more jonquils, a double daffodils, more blooms on the hyacinth, and blossoms on the apple tree. In fact there were honey bees on some of the apple blossoms.

after the storms

life’s momentum continues

new growth sprouts
3 Defining Qualities of Highly Intelligent Students
By: Jaleel
Tags: Education, Self Improvement, Self, Personal Development, Lifestyle

They’re Attuned to Their Emotions

“There is no separation of mind and emotions; emotions, thinking, and learning are all linked.” — Eric Jensen

It can get lonely pretty quickly when you’re only focused on getting good grades. I remember being holed up in my room, just to study for hours on end. Despite acing every test, this only alienated me from my classmates.

Alternatively, truly intelligent students are known to thrive well with others. They have the emotional intelligence that allows them to manage their emotions and create positive relationships with their peers and professors.

This, of course, leads to better learning, supportive friendships, academic success, and future employment. More importantly, these skills often provide the foundation for habits that are beneficial later on in life.

Therefore, developing your emotional intelligence may give you an edge as a student. The iconic study that tracked high-IQ students for over 75 years found that those who achieved success had will-power, perseverance, and a desire to excel — qualities linked to emotional intelligence.

Meanwhile this year, a study in Australia also found that emotionally intelligent students get better exam results and better grades.

How to cultivate it

One of the best ways to ensure emotional intelligence is by active listening. During interactions, we’re usually concerned about what to say next or when the other person has finished speaking. This robs us of the opportunity to listen fully to what is being said.

Active listening requires more than summarizing back what we heard, but actually discerning the emotions behind them. It involves genuinely following the conversation by also responding with your own body language.
Chatter Static
By: Scott Leonardi
Tags: Poetry, Creative Writing, Poetry On Medium, Roommates, Frustration

Imagefrom Pixabay.com

Can’t focus

Can’t think

Patience is a worn thread

Logic’s on the brink

Static chatter never ceasing

drama for the fool

Baby boys in aging skin

drunken in their drool

Get me the fuck out of here

I’m done with Peter Pan

These Lost Boys surely earned their name

in no man’s Neverland

Yet, here I sit, behind a door

steaming by myself

These pests will test the best of me

A danger to my health

There’s solace in the old ink spill

A practice that I’ll prove

But still, before I lose my mind

I need to fucking move
Toward the Future
By: Dana Sanford
Tags: Sky Collection, Change, Inspiration, Poetry, Prompt

Ah, they were halcyon days,

before we knew the score.

The world was bright.

We were friends

and life was fresh.

The rot came slowly

to our view.

The fog cleared

to show that

our foundations

were built on

blood and slime.

We tried to ignore the horror.

We excused the men with

their evil grins

and blood-stained clothes

and sharp blades

for we could not believe

the evil born in their souls.

So we must acknowledge our terror

and think again upon our desires.

To build again

with what we know.

Visions of a better society

and Earth.

Diverse and accepting,

Balanced with wisdom

and ideals.

And maintain vigilance.

Bad actors and ignorance can subvert and exploit the things that we hold dear- “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.
$16 Million Total Investments for Blockchain Gaming Startup
By: Finrazor Team
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Cryptocurrency Investment, Fintech, Blockchain

Mythical Games acquires $16 million for Series A funding round. The startup will use the acquired funds to produce games that can be modified by players, brands, and developers. The generated content will be purchasable with in-game currencies bought with real-life money

Mythical Games plans to capitalize on the popularity of games such as Fortnite. It targets the development of games for the mobile market, the console, and PC.

The Edge of Blockchain in Gaming

Though games have rules which are prohibit trading game items for money, various online games have unofficial markets where players can buy or swap rare items using the game’s currency or real money.

Games made with the blockchain makes it possible to track trades of in-game items. With blockchain, items that go from one player to another can be traced using proof-of-acquisition or proof-of-ownership, thus preventing the proliferation of illegitimately obtained items.

What is Mythical Games

Mythical Games, based in Sherman Oaks, is a game technology studio integrating blockchain technology with gaming. The startup desires to create an ecosystem based on digital ownership, which they believe will benefit players, developers, and content creators.

CryptoKitties and a $15 Million Investment

Another recent news on gaming and investments: On 5 November, the creator of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, secured an additional $15 million investment for the funding of its expansion and development of new blockchain-based games and apps. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and SamsungNEXT are among the investors.
Ellipsis
By: Anthi Psomiadou
Tags: Earth, Ellipsis, Expression, Punctuation, Communication

…

Three dots.

Ellipsis.

A full stop that doesn’t want to be alone.

An ending that continues.

A declaration of an omission; an omission which reverses itself, if decoded by the reader.

A manifestation of cowardice on its one “edge”, but the absolute courage on its other.

Unclear communication on the one side of the coin, pure intercommunication on the other.

A lack-of-words so “wordy”, that includes the completeness of non-lacking.

A mark so liberated and liberating, that gives the absolute freedom to the receivers of the message to interpret it as they please.

Because you have to be really free to let others be free, too.

The earth’s orbit is also an ellipsis. So, we have to deal with ellipsis from the moment we are born on this spherical battle-field. But, the ellipsis contains a lot of answers, if we really manage to read between the …dots. The languages of nations aren’t exactly the point here; the language of the Universe though, is. — Right, Pythagoras? —
How to Install Laravel Valet on Mac
By: Alfredo Barron
Tags: Homebrew, Composer, Mac, PHP, Laravel

Configure your development environment on Mac in minutes

Step 1. Install Homebrew

In first step, we require to get Homebrew using bellow command, So open your terminal or command prompt and run bellow command

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Step 2. Install PHP

Install PHP 7.4 using Homebrew via

brew install php

Step 3. Install MySQL

Install MySQL 5.7 using Homebrew via

brew install mysql@5.7

Once MySQL has been installed, you may start it using the bellow command

brew services start mysql@5.7

Step 4. Install Composer

Install Composer run bellow command

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === 'e0012edf3e80b6978849f5eff0d4b4e4c79ff1609dd1e613307e16318854d24ae64f26d17af3ef0bf7cfb710ca74755a') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

php composer-setup.php

php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

After the command, you will have composer.phar file in the current directory and the composer command is available as:

php composer.phar [composer commnad]

In order to make composer available globally, you have to move the recently downloaded composer.phar to local user’s bin folder using bellow command:

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Now, you can access the composer from the terminal simply using the composer command. Thats it.

Step 5. Install Valet

Install Valet run bellow command:

composer global require laravel/valet

If you have a problem with the “Changed current directory to”. You need to add this folder to your unix path. You can do this by running the following:

PATH=$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin

Run the bellow command. This will configure and install Valet and DnsMasq, and register Valet’s daemon to launch when your system starts.

valet install

Step 6. Serving Sites

Once Valet is installed, you’re ready to start serving sites. Valet provides two commands to help you serve your Laravel sites: park and link .

The park Command
ซุปเปอร์สตาร์ลูกหนังญี่ปุ่น Keisuke Honda รับ $40 ล้านดอลล่าร์เป็นคริปโต โปรโหมต Exchange
Tags: Cryptocurrency, News, Bitcoin, ICO, Thailand

Japanese Soccer Star Honda Paid in Crypto to Promote Exchange - Bitcoin News

UPDATE: A previous version of this post claimed the sum Honda was being paid was 40 million USD. This has since been…
What next?
By: Martino Pietropoli
Tags: Drawing, 2020, Cartoon, Illustration, Comics

Did you find this article interesting?

If you liked it and if you feel like it, leave some claps to help whoever wrote it to pay his Lamborghini Urus.

Thank you!
Three Alternative Poems For Your Morning Commute
By: The Hairpin
Tags: Poetry, Commutes, Josh Lefkowitz

by Josh Lefkowitz

Greetings! Commuter!

Wherefore art thou awash

with the sticky salve of sadness?

Is it because of Brenda?

And what she said at the company-wide

lunchtime seminar yesterday?

You know what?

Brenda needs to learn to shut her mouth.

•••

When the sea is calm and green

And the sky grins in its darkened eternity

Offering numerous numinous starry winks

I feel at home in the world

and I also feel like telling you

That when you clip your fingernails on the train

We all think it’s absolutely disgusting.

You’re like Jared from those Subway commercials:

Nobody likes you.

•••

Please don’t run!

Another train’s a-comin’!

Listen — can you hear it?

It’s motorin’ and hummin’!

And anyhow, that one you missed —

It really ain’t so grand —

In fact, it just got hijacked

By a mariachi band.

•••

Photo via superamit/flickr.

Josh Lefkowitz writes poems and sometimes plays and/or essays. But mostly poems. He won the 2013 Wergle Flomp humor poetry prize.
Vitalik Buterin joins OMG to Donate $1 million towards refugee crisis in Uganda
Tags: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

Vitalik Buterin joins OMG to Donate $1 million towards refugee crisis in Uganda icotimer Follow Mar 31, 2018 · 2 min read

March 29, 2018 by Ramaa Mohan

In a moment of self-consciousness, as the combined market cap of the cryptocurrency market went just above $0.5 trillion USD, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted a series of tweets about whether the crypto community had actually earned any of the appraisals that was happening. He things questioned like, the actual difference the crypto community was making to the world and how many Venezuelan people had the community saved.

A couple of months on, Buterin is heeding his own train of thought and wanting to do good, has joined OmiseGo (OMG) to donate $1 million of OMG Token directly to refugees living poverty-stricken in Uganda and Kenya.

Countries neighbouring those of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are facing a huge refugee crisis right now. Because of the large and ever-increasing number of refugees entering their countries in the hope of finding something better than the place they left behind, the governments of Kenya and Uganda are stretched beyond their capacity.

The people who cross over to other countries are firstly poor, secondly illegal. To legalise their moves they must do the necessary paperwork and get their legal documents in place for which they need capital. While their skill-sets and intellectual property are intact, they have no money that they can put towards integrating themselves into the fabric of a new country. Which is exactly the helpless situation that Buterin is trying to better with his donation?

OmiseGo and GiveDirectly are organisations that allow people and patrons to donate in cryptocurrencies with the assurance that all donations will directly reach the people in need. The refugee crisis that is happening across the world is one of the main issues that these organisations, along with generous patrons like Vitalik, are trying to solve.

GiveDirectly believes that the intermediaries in the foreign aid sector have historically dominated the scene and have collected money on the behalf of people but also spent it for them. The company believes that the people in need are more equipped and have more right to decide where and how they want to use their money and will find a more effective use for the money they have if given the chance.
Improve Your User’s Service Experience with Relevant Routing
By: Raymond Chu
Tags: Tutorial, Chatbots, Wa Announcement, Virtual Assistant, Watson Assistant

Have you ever run into this scenario: You’re talking in a customer service chat inside a website. You ask to speak to a human and are routed to an agent who has zero understanding of what you need. And by the time the agent directs you to someone who actually knows what you want, you’re already frustrated with the entire experience.

The thing is, you’ve asked to speak to a human because you need to talk to someone who knows how to solve your problems. So it really does you no good if you get directed to someone who doesn’t have a clue of what you’re talking about. Can we just skip the part where the first “expert” directs you to a second, relevant expert already? What you need is to speak with an agent in the right department, immediately! Someone whose expertise is exactly what you’re looking for.

With Watson Assistant you can provide your users with exactly that sort of service experience! Watson Assistant’s Zendesk and Salesforce integrations automatically detect when and why your users need a live agent, and seamlessly transfers them to agents best suited to meet their needs.

So let’s go over an example to see how you can build such an experience for your users.
Fish and chips
By: Tyrone Graham
Tags: Poetry

“Bite,”

said the apparition, leering

like a skull

in the pause

it took to sum up the apple

of my jaundiced eye,

wondering

at the worm at its core in passing; “Bite,”

he had said. I

stepped back, of course, leery,

drawing in the folds of my robe. But he said

“Think!”

And inserted “I thank out of existence”

into my thoughts

at the roots

of my hairs, biting for emphasis. I

stepped back, drawing in my bated breath

hand over fist

— resisting the bait, waiting in hopes he would desist —

when he exploded “Look!” the apple, “See!”

the bite, “Think!” the mouthful, “Bite!” The leer again.

“But,” admonished his finger,

“It is ripe,” as “Right?” clamped my teeth.

On it.

“And again,” came reassurance. “Here and now and here.”

Adding, “Incidentally.”
Swing
By: Melissa Bee
Tags: Parenting, Self, Grief, Poetry, Melissa Bee

For 10 glorious weeks,

Only for 6 were you mine,

For the other 4,

You were taken before your time.

No sweet lullaby’s at bedtime.
Dump and load data with Docker
By: Brian Dart
Tags: Technology, Tech, Docker, Database, Data

We deal with a good amount of data at IHME. When I have to migrate data, I use mysqldump , but more recently I have been trying out mydumper and myloader . These two tools are helpful because they allow for:

parallelization of the backup/restore process

output file compression

the output of a single file per table which is easier to manage than the one file per database output of mysqldump .

These new tools are not without issue though. The biggest problem I found with mydumper and myloader is that you have to build the tools yourself. You can run sudo apt-get install mydumper , but that will install an older version that is missing some features and bug fixes. The process of building the tools isn’t a major roadblock, but I don’t want the extra hassle.

The solution I found is to run mydumper and myloader with Docker. By utilizing Docker, I don’t need to mess with building the tools. I only need to have Docker installed and find a Docker image on Docker Hub that suits my needs.

A quick search on Docker Hub indicates that the image below is popular for mydumper and myloader :

https://hub.docker.com/r/mysqlboy/docker-mydumper/
The Social Game
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Social Anxiety, Super Bowl, Comics, Sports

John’s totally into the Super Bowl. He’s just not into sports or contact.
6 Stoic Quotes That Got Me Through the Year
By: Owen Lloyd
Tags: Philosophy, Life, Stoicism, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

6 Stoic Quotes That Got Me Through the Year

We all needed to be a little stoic this year

Photo by Alex Voulgaris on Unsplash

I have always been a fan of the stoics.

Like many, I find their philosophy to be extremely simple and applicable to our everyday lives. While many philosophers tend to ramble through overly convoluted, barely comprehensible monologues, the stoics put a focus on creating a practical philosophy, one than somebody could pick up and start to follow in a matter of an hour to two if they were so inclined.

The year 2020 has been a good one to be a stoic. In fact, there are times when it has been absolutely necessary in order to keep ourselves sane.

While traversing a long period of illness due to long-haul COVID, I had to stay grounded. Stoicism allowed me to get through the worst days of my illness and come out of it stronger.

I tried to stick to the philosophy as a whole and incorporate the teachings of all the great stoics. However, there were some specific quotes that stuck with me, ones I kept coming back to when I felt as though I was at the end of my tether.

The words of the stoics always give me such a boost, and remind me to keep going.
The Tale of the Tiny Desk
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Politics, Readers Theater, Satire, Humor, Miniatures

SCENE 1

[MAN, SERVANT 1 are in a grand dressing room]

NARRATOR:

Each day the man rises up, changes his red tie, winks in the mirror

before calling the servant.

MAN:

SERVANT!

SERVANT 1 (reading the newspaper, flippant):

Yes, sir. What do you need?

MAN:

Brush my hair the way I like it.

SERVANT 1:

Are you sure?

MAN (face changing to a deep frown):

Why would I ask for it, if I wasn’t sure?

SERVANT 1 (shifting from foot to foot, as if needing to pee):

It’s just that, people think, er, people say…

MAN:

WHAT DO PEOPLE SAY?

SERVANT 1:

Never mind. (He gets the grooming tools).

MAN (picks up phone, clicks Twitter, types something, chuckles to himself)

SERVANT 1: (Comes back to brush MAN’S hair, is interrupted by a loud KNOCK at the door, looks to MAN to see what to do next.)

MAN:

Get the door! (picks up the brush and does his own hair, looks in the mirror and makes a kissing face.)

SERVANT 1:

Yes, sir. (Hurries to the door, but turns around quickly to face MAN)

MAN:

WHAT?

SERVANT 1:

Am I fired?

MAN:

OF COURSE!

SERVANT 1 (Bows his head then opens the door and runs off. )

SERVANT 2: (from the door)

They are ready for you, sir.

MAN:

How do I look?

SERVANT 2:

Better than ever.

NARRATOR:

The man goes to his press briefing.
A Closed Path Has No End
By: Terrye Turpin
Tags: Writing Prompts, Fiction, Short Story, Flash Fiction, Horror

She followed the ghost girl past the warning sign, along the sun dappled path into the dark woods. The trees parted, branches bowing to lead her through the forest until at last the girl turned.

“Here.” She pointed, her spectral arm sweeping across a mulch of sweet pine needles.

The hiker knelt — her knees pressed into soft soil. With trembling fingers, she brushed the dirt from the white, rounded dome, so like a bulb planted in shallow earth.

“Your grave?” she asked. How sad to spend eternal rest not blessed in consecrated ground.

“Oh no,” the girl replied. “It’s yours.”

Inspired by the photo above and prompted by http://www.phantomsway.com/2019/10/25/fiction-friday-100-word-challenge-a-closed-trail-maybe/
Our Initial Funding and Adviser Team Build Out
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Investing, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain

We announced great news that hints at our broad-based support and momentum. Namely, our initial funding and the strategic addition of industry experts and advisers to our team. Read on for more details.

Funding

We announced $2.5 million raised in 2017 from early investors and supporters including Aslanoba Capital, Bogazici Ventures, and Next Ventures. The initial funding will support our general business operations as well as the development of key products including our Colendi app.

Advisers

In addition to ongoing foundational support from industry leading infrastructure technology organizations ConsenSys and Token Foundry, our team continues its strong growth trajectory with the addition of a number of strategic partners who bring additional expertise in fintech, blockchain and mobile technology and product development. They include:

Nico Jose “Nix” Nolledo — chairman and former CEO of Xurpas Inc., one of the Philippines’ largest technology firms. As founder and CEO of ODX, Xurpas’ Singapore-based wholly owned subsidiary that has businesses involving blockchain, he brings his goal of providing free access to the internet to mobile consumers in emerging markets.

Baris Ozistek — CEO of Netmarble EMEA, a top 10 global PC and Mobile game developer and publisher. Ozistek has a demonstrated history of leading successful brands in the fintech, online gaming and venture building sectors.

Oguz Serdar — co-founder and CEO at Limk, a content distribution and discovery platform that helps websites grow traffic and engage audiences, has a background in product development, user experience and business development.

Sinan Koç — Currently in a leadership role with Token Foundry and ConsenSys, Koç is a widely-respected expert and entrepreneur in the finance and fintech arena. Earlier, he was co-founder of peer-to-peer money transfer company Geld and co-founder at location-based messaging startup Radius. He holds a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, as well as Turkey’s prestigious Koç School.

The already-impressive roster of current advisers includes:

Colendi co-founder and CEO Bulent Tekmen commented on the strong support and growing momentum saying, “These investments will enable us to pursue our vision of redefining the credit scoring market and enable us to help the approximately 3 billion unbanked and underbanked worldwide to enter the financial ecosystem. Our advisers will work alongside us as strategic partners. As we continue to expand our activities and area of influence, each partner will play a crucial role in our growth. We consider it a great privilege to have such amazing leaders join as they will be key assets to our growing team.”

We will keep on working hard for the Colendi Project and keep you updated. Keep following us!
Perks of Being a Vampire
By: Alex Tucker
Tags: Horror, Short Story, Fiction, Short Fiction, Vampires

Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash

Our world isn’t all Buffies and Van Helsings, you know… that brand of warrior is much rarer than the movies would have you believe.

At least, among humans.

It helps, to be a vampire.

Leave aside the flashy combat footage so familiar from your Blade and Underworld films. I’m aghast at the lack of creativity in such cinematography.

The incredibly strong vampire kills many men with his incredible strength.

The outlandishly fast vampire steals many secrets from human scientists with his outlandish speed.

The satanically seductive vampire seduces many women with his secrets of seduction.

I yawn at such scenes. Is that the limit of human imagination?

My hands are as solid as steel gauntlets and move faster than a hummingbird’s breath. Of course, I could tear out your entrails with my bare fingers or punch through a solid oaken door.

But for what?

I’m not saying I’m not evil. Far from it. By most human definitions I’m wickeder than a demon. I once bathed in the blood of a bride and groom while their wedding party waited in the next room.

The newspapers came up with a dandy tale to explain that one.

The only thing is, I’m much less interested in humans than you all seem to anticipate. I mean, consider my perspective… I’ve had a fixed diet with a single staple for the past two thousand some odd years.

If you had to eat nothing but raw shrimp for two millennia, wouldn’t it start to sicken you? Even if the shrimp learned to tap dance and sing and construct cybernetic systems… your kind has become a tad bland for my palate.

But I can see I’m boring you. My excuses. Bon appétit to me, and a good death to you.

Try to taste better than your spouse.
FWRD
Tags: Work, Social Media, Publishing, Digital Marketing, Media

Creator of You Are Not Alone | I'm not a writer, just write what's on my mind..

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Getting started with Hadoop
By: Aravind R. Yarram
Tags: Hortonworks Sandbox, Hadoop, Hortonworks, Sandbox

Getting started with Hadoop ecosystem is quite different than getting hands dirty with any other library. I plan to document here, few important points of my learning for the benefit of others.

Local Installation

I’ve chosen to try Hortonworks Sandbox for the following reasons.You can also install the sandbox provided by Cloudera (known as Cloudera QuickStart VM) instead.

to try out few additional packages like Hue, HCatalog etc.

runs on 32-bit and 64-bit OS (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OSX)

Prerequisites

Minimum 4GB RAM; 8Gb required to run Ambari and Hbase

Virtualization enabled on BIOS

NOTE

I had to re-image my laptop when I tried to enable the virtualization from BIOS. So make sure to backup all important data and try at your own discretion. Instructions on enabling the virtualization are provided below.

Installation

Enable virtualization in BIOS

1. Press Esc during system start-up to bring the below screen

2. Press F10 to enter BIOS and then select System Configuration

3. Select Device Configurations

4. Enable the below two settings

5. Download Oracle Virtual Box from here

6. Download Hortonworks Sandbox VM from here

7. Follow the rest of the instructions from here

Credentials

root/hadoop

hue/hadoop

Connectivity

http://127.0.0.1:8888 SSH: 127.0.0.1 2222 SCP: 127.0.0.1 2222

URL’s
After Rain
By: Jane Woodman
Tags: Earth, Life, Elements, Free Verse

a meditation

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Sun –

All eat the sun

Translated by succulent vines,

Generous trees.

Water –

Cress and cactus

Clean the water,

Washing into everything.

Earth –

Earth raises all life,

Brings all life back

To itself.

Wind –

Breath of all

Sun, Water, Earth,

Moving, circling, rising, falling.

One grand gesture — lengthened, broadened, patterned, ornamented, beautiful — Enough.
[New Release]Tournament Feature 1.0
Tags: Art, Gaming, Blockchain, Ethereum, Releases

Tournament has been one of most requested features by our community requests for quite some time. Today, we are excited to announce the release of the new feature.

Registration

Each tournament is scheduled at a specific date and time and will be informed to players ahead of time, mostly via our website feeds. Once registration opens, those who wish to join must register in advance of the tournament start date. Tournament slots are limited to 32 per tournament on a first-come-first-served basis. Players will have around 48 hours to register for each tournament.

To confirm registration, players need to pay a fee in either ETH or EMONT and form a team of minimum 3 attackers. For the 1st version of the feature, fee is currently set to 0. Players can edit their team before the start date, for example in a circumstance that they see a higher probability of winning with another set of Mon.

Once the registration window ends, registered players will be paired up against each other randomly to fight in the first round. Winners of the 1st round will proceed to the second round and so on. This will continue until the champion is identified. All matches are automated at the moment and team lineup remain throughout all rounds. You can expect to reform team, swap positions after each round in the future.

For now, there are 2 kinds of tournaments:

Beginner : Open to Mons level 1 to 26

: Open to Mons level 1 to 26 Rookie : Open to Mons level 26 and above

Prizes

Beginner tournament

Winner — a random Common Mon out of Cryptise, Ekopi, Tygloo and Matara

Rookie tournament

Winner — a random Rare Mon randomly out of Greipawn, Kikapole, Dusprite and Iquander

Registration is open now, this is your chance to show you’re the best!

How to Register?

Enter the Etheremon game and find this house

Good luck!

Etheremon Team

— — —

Follow us:
Write For Next Level Swift
By: Mats Bauer
Tags: Swift, Getting Started, Introduction, iOS, Next Level Swift

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Welcome!

We are always looking for talented and passionate writers and developers to get more content out to our community. If that’s you, let’s look into what kind of content we are regularly looking for:

Tutorials in Swift and iOS development. This can be about anything, from basic to advanced, SwiftUI, or Storyboard.

Best practices you learned over time and want to share

Code snippets that help you be more productive

Multiplatform approaches that make Swift integration into Android easier. This can be, for example, Flutter or Kotlin Multiplatform.

Styleguide

To improve the reading experience for everyone, we created a simple style guide. All of the items below need to be fulfilled.

Your profile must have a complete name and profile image. The article must consist of a title, a short description (subtitle), a header image, and a body. For header images, you can use sites like Pexels or Unsplash, and you must name any third party image source. Articles should be clean and shouldn’t reference any personal links. This contains links to private Twitter Accounts or newsletters. Short Code can be inline or a separate code block. Please add longer code using GitHub Gist. All the content you use must be yours and yours to share. Let’s keep it fair!

How we choose stories

When looking for new stories, we focus on the content only. We are limiting the number of stories we publish every day to give every story the chance to be seen.

Submit your stories

If you are new to writing for Next Level Swift, you can Submit your Medium draft right here. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

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Sexing My Way Around The World.
By: Ava Starr
Tags: Sexuality, Gender Equality, Travel, Tinder, Sex

Sexing My Way Around The World.

Is it just as cringe-y if a woman does it?

Photo by T.H. Chia on Unsplash

I had a kind of sexual reawakening about four months ago, not long after I moved to China.

I also started sleeping with men again for the first time in seven years.

Realising how easy it was to find available men in a populated city like Shanghai has definitely boosted my sexual confidence.

This has sent me on a bit of a casual sex bender.

I’ve loved the new freedom, joy, and desire that this has brought. I feel like a sexy, powerful goddess (which is incidentally what I make some of my lovers call me).

I come from Australia, which is a multicultural nation but mostly in metropolitan areas (which I rarely lived in).

Moving to Shanghai I was delighted to find a smorgasbord of international delights, just waiting to be…. tasted.

A close friend of mine, who loves to hear all the down and dirty details of my sex life, noticed the new global trends in my sexual selections, and made a joke about buying one of those scratch-off world maps so I could “see where I had gone”.

I thought it was a brilliant idea! Sexing one’s way around the world, comparing and contrasting lovers, enjoying the dishes on offer at the inter-continental buffet… what an undertaking.

I don’t have room in my apartment for a map, but someone had told me about an app you can use for tracking the countries you’ve traveled to called ‘been’.

I downloaded it and immediately started tagging all the countries I had ‘been’ to sexually. Disappointingly it was not as many as I thought. But it meant I had a way to track my mission to ‘conquer the world’.

And then I stopped and thought:

If I heard of a guy doing this, I’d probably be a bit disgusted. A dude, trying to bang his way around the world, sleeping with people to put pins on a map. Isn’t that kind of gross?

I’m a liberated woman who thoroughly enjoys casual sex, and genuinely appreciates meeting people from all different cultures.

Sometimes when I’m browsing on Tinder I am super attracted to someone, and other times I look at where they’re from and think ‘well, they’re just okay, but they would tick another country off the list’.

I’m still sleeping with people I like, even if they are from a country that I have already hit. But I am definitely on the lookout for new cultures to take for a spin.

I am curious to know how sexual habits and bodies change from continent to continent. Are the clichés true? Are Latin lovers more passionate? Would an Indian partner know how to kama my sutra? Once you go black, do you ever go back? (I have indeed gone back quite a few times since first going black, because, well — it’s great; however I am a little too curious and adventurous to be exclusive.)

And the most important question of all: does this international expedition make me a bad person or an intrepid sexual explorer?

And, if I were a man, would that change the answer?
Viva la #GenerationBlockchain
By: Erick Pinos
Tags: Education, Swarm, Bitcoin, Students, Blockchain

Over 4,000 students and 500 schools across 117 countries.

The revolution will be decentralized.

About Me

My name is Erick Pinos. I like Iron Man, peanut butter, and blockchain. I got a glimpse of the rabbit hole in 2014 when the MIT Bitcoin Project airdropped $100 worth of Bitcoin to every MIT student. I slowly but surely descended into blockchain fanaticism when I learned about the world-changing ramifications of projects like Ethereum and Steem. I started trying every blockchain service I came across and kept a blog on Steemit. Fortunately, the rest of the world soon caught on. Inspired by Sia’s story of starting at HackMIT 2013, I did HackMIT 2017 in the hopes of kicking off my own project. Our team won the ConsenSys prize for best blockchain hack. We didn’t continue the project after but I did join the Digital Currency Initiative and did research on decentralized solar microgrids. I became president of the MIT Bitcoin Club, presided over the 2018 MIT Bitcoin Expo, and spent the majority of my time skipping class to travel to blockchain conferences and meeting everybody that I could. After graduating MIT, I became the CTO of Game Theory Group, a blockchain advisory firm and research center.

After an eight month soirée as the director of operations for BEN, I will be taking over the role of executive director from Jinglan Wang, who led BEN through it’s explosive growth in 2017 and 2018. She will continue being one of BEN’s most kickass advisors while she focuses on developing cryptoeconomics.study, the first open source course in the world dedicated to the emerging field of cryptoeconomics. She’ll also be working on Handshake, a decentralized solution to replace centralized Certificate Authorities and DNS by optimistically distributing ownership.

About BEN

BEN’s mission is to create an open and free world by promoting technological literacy through technological decentralization. Blockchain will free the flow of value across cyberspace like the Internet freed the flow of information. Blockchain is a tool for accessibility, banking the unbanked, democratizing access to financial instruments, reaching untapped markets, utilizing unused resources, and making digital cats.

BEN is a decentralized swarm. Read Swarmwise to understand.
Cowboy Up: Gay Men in Rural America
By: Loren A Olson Md
Tags: Sexuality, Creative Non Fiction, Rural, LGBTQ, Relationships

LGBTQIA/Sexuality/Relationships

Cowboy Up: Gay Men in Rural America

When we study gay life, place matters.

DarioStudios/DepositPhotos/37637117/Licensed to author

Several old men wearing seed corn ballcaps sat around in the feed store in St. Charles, Iowa, drinking Folger’s coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Although Doug and I never heard this conversation, I imagine it went something like this:

Have ya’ seen what those two sissy boys that bought the old Palmer place are doin’?

Isn’t that the darndest thing you ever saw! (Good Baptists didn’t say “damn.’)

They’re gonna raise some weird lookin’ cattle with a white stripe around the middle.

Those cattle belong in a zoo. They look like Oreos. (Everyone chuckles.)

They even bought a Russian tractor, ‘stead of a John Deere.

Well, I’ll be. Never saw such a thing.

And they’ve never farmed before!

They’re plannin’ on sellin’ GRASS-fed beef. (Heads shake all around.)

That meat ‘il be as tough as a fourteen-point buck!

Well, they won’t last long out there.

St. Charles, Iowa, is a town of a little over four hundred people about thirty miles south of Des Moines. And yet, it was a world away from where we’d been living. St. Charles’ claim to fame is as the site of the oldest of the covered bridges made famous by The Bridges of Madison County. I drove by the Imes bridge each day on my commute to my job in Des Moines.

Doug and I stood out from the rest of the people in St. Charles, Iowa, for several reasons.

St. Charles could be any-town in rural America. These small towns are often characterized as friendly and overly nice. But small towns in rural America are rather insular. They welcome visitors but can be inhospitable to interlopers that stay too long and threaten their way of life.

People don’t lock their houses. and they leave their keys in the car. But they also have a loaded shotgun under their beds. Life centers around church and family. They are overwhelmingly traditional, and the community quickly identifies, judges, and shares any deviances from those expectations.

Democrats are as closeted as gay people.

People in St. Charles knew who Doug and I were before we knew them. No one ever asked us about our relationship. Still, whenever we introduced ourselves to anyone, the townspeople knowingly raised their eyebrows, moved their eyes to the side, and said, “Oh, you must know Tom and Dan.” In twenty-five years of living there, we never met Tom and Dan.

Having grown up in a small town, I was a bit nervous about living there. I fully expected to come home to the farm one day and see FAGGOTS spray-painted in white letters across the length of our long red barn. But it never happened.

Willful ignorance is a powerful force in rural America.

If you pretend not to know the truth, you can avoid making tough decisions based on that information. If we didn’t make a fuss about being gay, most of Madison County tolerated us. Some might even accept us.
A User Lost 4,005 LINK After Sending Them To Smart Contract Belonging To Defi Game Aavegotchi
By: The Crypto Basic
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Altcoins, Altcoinnews, Cryptocurrency News, Defi

The user sent 4,005 LINK worth about $52,800 to a smart contract of Aavegotchi game contract that does not support Link. The tokens are irrevocable lost and are gone forever.

According to Github’s article, a user mistakenly sent LINK tokens to a smart contract belonging to the Defi game Aavegotchi. The contract does not support these tokens, so they are lost forever.

User Dawid (@d13kabani), a father of two and aavegotchi enthusiast made the mistake that every cryptocurrency user fears the most, Aavegotchi developer pixel craft studios confirmed.

According to the article, the user mistakenly sent most of his cryptocurrency savings to a GHST staking contract that he had previously interacted with instead of depositing them on Binance. The developers added that since it is impossible to cancel such action in cryptocurrencies, user LINK coins are permanently stuck in an immutable GHST contract.

However, the Aavegotchi project decided to help the user by creating a unique santagotchi wallet so that other cryptocurrency enthusiasts can donate money to the victim. At Christmas, Aavegotchi will transfer all donations to the affected user.

Developer Nick Mudge explained that the ERC-20 Ethereum standard is vulnerable to such errors.

This is a problem of the ERC-20 standard. It does not allow you to check whether a contract can accept specific tokens. Mudge said.

He cited two proposals for improving Ethereum ERC20 tokens. ERC-777 and ERC-223. The first prevents the address from receiving assets that it does not support. The second is compatible with the ERC-20 standard and was specifically created to avoid users from losing money due to errors.

Such mistakes happen quite often. In October, a user lost 28,050 AAVE after sending them to the token’s smart contract address.

Read Complete Story Of A Poor DAD on Github
SwiftUI and WatchOS: Action Buttons Beneath the Navigation Bar
By: Andrea Culot
Tags: Swift, Swiftui, Programming, Xcode, Apple Watch

SwiftUI and WatchOS: Action Buttons Beneath the Navigation Bar

Update your watchOS app to meet the new Apple guidelines

Photo from Apple Developer.

As we all know, the introduction of watchOS 7 has killed the force touch. In fact, in versions of watchOS before watchOS 7, people could press firmly on the display to open a hidden menu of actions relevant to the current screen.

Now Apple suggests removing hidden menus from our app, examining each item to determine whether it provides information, or it performs an action.

In their Human Interface Guidelines, they provide some alternatives for actionable items. One of them is putting an action button beneath the navigation bar.

Photo from Apple Developer.

In this design, people drag down to reveal the button. Even though such a button isn’t visible when the screen first opens, people can discover it easily because dragging is a very common gesture. For example, Mail relocates the Compose button from a hidden menu to a position above the list of messages in an inbox. The Compose button is out of the way until people drag down on the screen to refresh the message list.

In this article, we are going to examine this solution. This is what our app will look like:

App in action

Let’s first create a new SwiftUI watchOS project:

Select WatchOS and then Watch App:
I’m Done Running
By: Blair Fawcett
Tags: Women, Self Improvement, Self, Life, Poetry

I’m done running

Away

From my past.

Away from my past which has always swirled around me, taunting me. “You’ll never escape me,” the intention echoed. I can still feel it’s cruel grasp around my back and throat, choking the energy, soul, and ambition from my body.

I am ready to turn around and face down all the karmic injustices. I am ready to relinquish the loops I created, manufactured, and perpetuated.

I have stumbled and fallen so many times, and it’s all because I refuse to let go of my past. Like a jilted lover, it cruelly derides me. And yet I am obsessed with it. I am confused by my past and transfixed by it. Like a trainwreck or a tragic fire.

I have realized that I have been so obsessed with the reflections of the past, that I have not focused on my present and future. Unlike Narcissus, I must turn my eyes away from the pond, and meet the sunrise.

I must change, grow, and learn.

When I fall, I will get up.

When I get up, I will rise.

When I rise, I will uplift others.

I think about how many lost minutes, hours, and days I spent going over my own tragedies and I realize the only way to retrieve them is to move forward.

After all, the sad, lonely girl in my past was special all along. She was me.

And I think, and I know, that I am right.
The Record Book
By: Josh Hallman
Tags: Adventure, Josh Ford, Book, Blog

A mysterious book found in the basement at my mom’s house.
Microsoft uses ‘blockchain’: but does it benefit anyone other than Microsoft?
By: Finrazor Team
Tags: Crypto, Ethereum, Fintech, Blockchain, Microsoft

Microsoft launches a new version of Ethereum blockchain on its Azure cloud servers. Its consensus model is based on Proof-of-Authority, the governance model that allows the network to be administered by a centralized owner.

That’s a corporate solution for those companies that don’t want to share their data on a public blockchain. A new blockchain can be deployed in a few clicks, making it an easy option for DLT integration into any business.

Okay, let’s agree on this, it’s not a blockchain. How is this different from an old good database, if you have it stored somewhere on third party servers, in this case, Microsoft, and has someone who can do practically anything, modify, or even delete it? We can call it corporate databases, but this blockchain thing has gone too far. You can’t just slap ‘blockchain’ on everything.

If a company doesn’t want to use a decentralized network it doesn’t need blockchain then. The greatest advantage of blockchain is its decentralization and immutability, secured by thousands of miners. It’s understandable that Microsoft, being one of the leaders, wants to keep its position, introduces new products, and it doesn’t care how its products are called, is it blockchain or not, the most important here is to get companies to use Azure Cloud Servers, that’s it. No doubt, someone will use it, just to make a headline ‘Company X now uses blockchain’. But does it benefit anyone other than Microsoft?
Review of Medium’s New Publication Features and Writer Profile Redesign
By: Medium Formatting
Tags: Blogging Tips, Publication, Medium Partner Program, Writing Tips, Medium

A few months ago, Medium announced that they were making Medium “more expressive” and that several new features would be implemented.

Chief among these changes was the launching of controls around color, headers, type, and branding so that you can personalize your space on Medium.

As part of this, Medium invited a number of writers to sign up for a private (and then public) beta test which allowed writers to control the layout and visual appearance of their publication.

I opted to test 2 of my publications in the early private beta program — Digital Marketing Lab and Escaping The 9–5.

After testing the new features for about 4 months, and having already given feedback to Medium, I wanted to write a review summarizing what the changes actually consisted of and whether I preferred the new publication and writer profile redesign.