fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
MARY
By: Tim O'Neil
Tags: Immigration, Education, Africa, Facesoface, Ethiopia

I was born and raised in Ethiopia. I grew up with a loving and supportive family. When I first came to Worcester, I didn’t like it as there wasn’t that much to do outside of Clark. Soon enough, when I got my first off-campus position at ACE during my junior year, my perception of Worcester changed. It was never about Worcester not being able to offer me anything, but rather my lack of interest in trying to find new things to do outside of Clark.

I got involved with ACE after my friend, Rose Wine, told me about an open STEM teacher position for the Saturday program. During my time with ACE, I worked as a STEM teacher and helped with the curriculum development for the Saturday program. I taught two classes for the lower grades every Saturday morning for two years up until I graduated from Clark.

ACE gave me a platform to not only help young students with their education but also mentor them to see the best in themselves. ACE students have gone through tough situations and to see them come to class every Saturday morning with a smile on their faces has taught me to be grateful and to never take anything for granted.

College has helped me meet some amazing people from different parts of the world and pushed me to grow in ways I didn’t expect. I learned about my values and the importance of staying true to what I believe.

This fall, I will be starting graduate school at Boston University to pursue a Master’s in Bioinformatics.

ACE appealed to me because it is centered on helping African refugees and immigrants. Many of them lack the support they need and ACE is trying to combat that. It is important to give back and support ACE because ACE is not just helping students get by and pass some classes, ACE is investing in the future of these young students.

ACE students have gone through tough situations and to see them come to class every Saturday morning with a smile on their faces has taught me to be grateful and to never take anything for granted.
Writing for Your Business: How To Sell Your Products & Services
By: Joelle Mumley
Tags: Content Marketing, Sales, Products And Services, Business, Writing

Writing for Your Business: How To Sell Your Products & Services

The Ultimate Purpose of Content Marketing

Writing is important for your business because it helps you spread your message and build trust with your audience. However, each of these is not an end in and of themselves. They build towards one thing — selling your product or service.

I have a certain level of discomfort talking about the idea of selling. In fact, I was tempted to avoid talking directly about this topic altogether! And, yet, what is the purpose of content marketing except to sell what you have to offer?

However, sustainable sales over the long term only happen when people understand what you are offering, why it is important, and trust you to be the one to deliver it to them. If you just start selling without the other two, you won’t reach your potential.

So what strategies are useful when selling through content marketing?

Pull marketing instead of push marketing.

Push marketing is a way of selling that takes the product to the customer. Pull marketing draws the customer to the product. While both can be necessary for different situations, pull marketing is often preferred by consumers. Push marketing should be used sparingly.

Generally, pull marketing is concerned with brand loyalty and ensuring that customers keep coming back, whereas push marketing is more concerned with short-term sales. So content marketing is naturally well suited to pull marketing — taking small, consistent, purposeful steps to create fans of your business and brand.

Creating content purposefully.

Be strategic in your writing — just because you’re not always overtly selling doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have sales in mind as you choose what to communicate. If you sell stationery, for example, you can write about the lost art of writing letters, how journalling is good for mental health, and how you’ve used a weekly planner to be more productive. You are advocating for the value and utility of the products you sell.

Every piece of content you produce should consider your end goal — to sell your quality products and services to your audience.
A Death in Luhansk
By: Darryl Willis
Tags: War, Poetry, Ukraine, Ukraine Donetsk Luhansk, Grief

Photo by Akent879 | pixabay.com | Public Domain

A Death in Luhansk

We were minding our own business,

driving and laughing and making fun.

It was all we could do with the world

falling in shards around: a crushed

pysanka under the boots of men

and boys playing at their games.

We did not see the soldiers nor

the armed and running ballot thieves.

We drove between a cacophony

of guns and screams. Vanya lost

his voice, his chest burst open, a blooming

flower the color of his car.

I felt a horse kick my back;

then all was numb. Vanya’s eyes

were empty as if something had

disappeared; and so it was.
BitNautic Partners with The Schneider Group
Tags: Shipping, Fashion, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Logistics

BitNautic Partners with The Schneider Group

BitNautic starts a new collaboration with one of the world’s leading companies in the trade of high-quality natural fibers.

Another important partnership for BitNautic, this time with The Schneider Group, a top player in the global market of processing and supply of high-quality wools and natural fibres, operating in Italy, Argentina, China, Iran, Mongolia and Egypt.

This collaboration will allow an exchange of ideas between the two companies, with BitNautic making use of the expertise of The Schneider Group’s logistics executives to enhance and further develop the BitNautic platform, and The Schneider Group putting one foot forward in the future by getting a front-row seat for the revolution of the logistics sector.

This partnership has already started to produce new ideas. The original project keeps evolving to better suit the needs of our future customers, and to create a seamless experience for the user in the platform, from warehouse to destination.

We at BitNautic are very excited to have a chance to work with professionals of this stature, and we’re looking forward for our working together with The Schneider Group.

About BitNautic

Based in Lugano, BitNautic is a single platform, capable of holding together all the major players of the shipping market: carriers, shippers, producers, buyers. Based on the blockchain, it is a completely transparent network, where ship owners can list their ships, update their location in real time, and cargo owners can find the best routes for their shipments, and at the best price. At the same time this allows them to forge new business relationships, extending their network and bringing new customers to their business.

About The Schneider Group

For nearly a century, The Schneider Group has been a leading name in the processing and trading of fine wools and speciality fibres. Schneider trades in the most prominent textile hubs worldwide. They aim to offer a comprehensive customer service that encompasses specialized services, custom technical assistance and tailored advice besides promoting the uniqueness and excellence of natural fibres to the public.

To know more visit: BitNautic, The Schneider Group

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Ethereum Noise
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum

The Internet makes the worst noise and the best sounds. Bitcoin, Soundcloud, Trolls, Twitter, bots and bitterness. Now Ethereum added to the party. Cryptocurrency’s latest buzz word, running on blockchain technology and projected to overtake Bitcoin by it’s most passionate evangelists. So I took the plunge yesterday and started mining it. First impressions. I still don’t understood what makes it a more viable cryptocurrrency than Bitcoin.

It was pretty easy to set up though and I was mining ether in Linux in no time. My machine runs quiet enough and the core temp of my cpu never rises above the high point. Suffice it to say I am pretty stoked to be mining Ethereum in Linux.

Will Ethereum rise above the fray? That depends on many unseen variables. If it takes blockchain technology way beyond what we can envision right now, all the more power to it.
The cure for ‘Industrial Disease’ is deliberate cold exposure.
By: Morozko Forge
Tags: Autoimmune, Diabetes, Biohacking, Obesity, Wellness

The cure for ‘Industrial Disease’ is deliberate cold exposure.

A constellation of deadly maladies termed “metabolic syndrome” result from excess insulin, called hyperinsulinemia.

by Thomas P Seager, PhD

CEO Morozko Forge, LLC

Prior to the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines, the principal cause of death was infectious disease by pathogenic microorganisms.

What’s remarkable in the history of disease is the incredible resistance of medical professionals and societies to what was called “germ theory.” Despite definitive evidence of infection as the principal mechanism disease contagion in 1762, physicians clung to false beliefs in “miasma” and refused to adopt basic sanitation practices like hand washing — even after these practices were proven to save lives.

In our current post-industrial age, infectious disease is no longer the #1 killer. Instead, a much more complex constellation of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and its complications, and Alzheimer’s account for over half the deaths in United States.

What’s remarkable is that all of these diseases have a common root cause called “metabolic syndrome,” yet physicians still stubbornly cling to false beliefs about cholesterol, carbohydrates, saturated fat, and the relationship between nutrition, metabolism, and health. as a consequence, medical institutions stubbornly cling to practices that keep making their patients sicker.

The problem has reached staggering proportions:

These non-communicable (i.e, non-infectious) diseases are so pervasive that nearly 60% of the American population is now considered obese or overweight, and the range of related medical, and psychological issues related to ‘Industrial Disease’ is almost too broad to comprehend. Table 1 below organizes and describes them.

What is now clear to all but traditional, institutionalized physicians is that the quality and quantity of human life depends on regulation of insulin.

And there are only three ways to keep your insulin levels healthy:

Keto eating: low carb, low gylcemic index, fasting, and/or calorie restricted. Exercise. Deliberate cold exposure: recruit and activate brown fat, consume blood glucose, and improve insulin sensitivity.

Everyone knows about the importance of diet and exercise.

At Morozko Forge, we specialize in deliberate cold exposure, because it may be the fastest, easiest, and most overlooked healing modality for recovering from the ill effects of modernity.

Morozko isn’t waiting for the medical establishment to imitate the benefits of deliberate cold exposure in a pill, or a surgical procedure. Our experiences of weight loss, health restoration, and metabolic regulation have been so profound that we will continue to experiment with our own protocols, and build a community of practitioners, scientists, biohackers, and engineers for sharing life-saving knowledge.
Pelican’s group—Audacity Capital Signals
By: Mike Read
Tags: Economics, Business, Cfd

Pelican’s group—Audacity Capital Signals

Every month, Pelican will be conducting an interview with one of the top traders on the Pelican platform. This is to give a deeper and more insightful analysis into the character of the best traders within the Pelican community.

Karim Yousfi is a experienced trader and analyst. He is managing a team of 35 traders at Audacity Capital London Trading Floor.

He is founder of the Hidden Talents Program for financial traders training, Karim has an in depth knowledge of the Oil , FX markets, macroeconomics and central bank policies . He is a regular speaker in different seminars across the UK and Europe.

When and how did you learn to trade successfully?

he managed funds in several banks and Hedge funds in Europe and Middle east, where he has traded a variety of financial instruments, from equities and options to stock index futures and foreign exchange.

How long have you been a mentor and what sent you down that path?

For the last 5 years , Leaving the corporate world and starting an entrepreneurship adventure.

In brief, what is your trading strategy?

Our strategy based on Market action and custom fibo level

What is your track record in terms of performance?

We re short term guys , we try to make a quick money and dont leave exposure for long time

Do you require potential students to have a level of trading expertise already or can you educate those new to trading?

The best students are without any trading experience, they start brand new with right pat , however , traders with bit experience , they come most of the time with bad habits , hard to get rid of .

With regard to risk management what account size do you recommend, as a minimum, for those students following you via your Pelican group?

I suggest low risk , dont risk more than 2% per trade , never trade with money you cant afford to lose , the account bigger will be better to perform well.

Do you specialise in specific markets?

FX and commodities

Do you use Stops and Limits?

Yes, very important

Do you trade directly or use orders?

Depends of the market conditions

How many trades do you average a week/month?

5 -10 trades

What time commitment do you recommend to benefit from your service on Pelican?

3 months

What are the subscription costs associated with your Pelican group?

£49 p/m

What excites you about the future of your Pelican group?

What makes pelican great and unique app is the possibility to interact with traders , copy trades , learn and see live P&L.
Watson Assistant: I am not a Parrot!
By: Omar Marwan Megawer
Tags: Watson Assistant, Wa Tutorial, Chatbots, Tutorial, Virtual Assistant

Behavior Correction

An approach to solve this behavior is to simply record all the intents/topics that a specific user asked at every interaction.

Start by creating an empty array in the start of your dialog.

Then add a node under your Welcome node to always record the intents being asked by the user.

This node jumps to the rest of your dialog to provide a response based on the detected intent

Now that you have recorded all the intents in an array and the virtual assistant is aware of all the topics, you can check if this is a repeated topic at every interaction.

Now it depends on how you want your virtual assistant to behave in such a situation, you can either acknowledge that this is a second time and provide the same response, you can ask the user to check previous responses in the chat or even ask the user to rephrase his/her question.

It’s easier to provide multiple variations here to mimic the behavior of a human agent

In this approach, the virtual assistant is acknowledging the fact that it might be a repeated question and asking the user to rephrase the question in case it is a training issue.

In the same node, the intent is removed from the “intents_asked” array to allow the user to repeat the question and get a response afterwards if s/he insists.

This should be the complete behavior after modification of the dialog

You can download this sample from here.
How to Prompt Users of New App Versions With Service Workers in React
By: Dennis O'Keeffe
Tags: JavaScript, Service Worker, Programming, Typescript, React

How to Prompt Users of New App Versions With Service Workers in React

Create a React app and a service worker that alerts your users

Photo by the author (background by Clément H on Unsplash).

Service workers can a powerful utility for increasing performance in your app. They provide some powerful caching mechanisms and modern capabilities. However, they are generally misunderstood in web development.

A common misconception is that when new content is available, it will only be loaded once all tabs for your progressive web app are closed.

While this can be the default behaviour, you can speed this process up by skipping the wait and prompting the user to update.

In this short tutorial, we will do just that to a Create React App setup.
理解加密经济学
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Cryptoeconomics

in In Fitness And In Health
The tree’s name
By: Haram Yoon
Tags: Poetry, Trees, Literally Literary

Hey there tree,

I envy your destiny

You stand among confused passengers,

yet nobody finds it odd that you are choosing the stand still

Hey there tree,

Just tell me how nice it is exactly

when your sole purpose is

to be green and leafy

to breathe and stand

to connect to the mushrooms blooming on your bark

To meditate the insects resting between your leaves

Perhaps it isn’t so nice as it seems

Perhaps I am bending your universe

In the shape of my my spite and helplessness

relegating the complexity of life into a silent simplicity

cancelling your voice only unheard but not certainly unsaid

Just because you looked so effortlessly beautiful

Wagging the newborn green softly in the autumn breeze

not worrying about school bells or money

Breathing and existing without giving an explanation

But no,

do not pity me

to be praised of one’s destiny is one thing

To respond with sympathy is another

instead break me apart,

with the chilly sing-song in your articulation

marking the infinity of having your voice fall before the crust of the bark

Just how our sighs congeals as clouds from reaching the atmosphere

Only appearing as fluid motion of a solid surface from the outside

Tell me the solitude inscribed on hour trunk

About the desolate sounds

your bark makes went they crumble

How the leaves can not move by itself in the air
How To Host Flutter Web In Linux Using Nginx
By: Agustinus Theodorus
Tags: Software Development, Software Engineering, Programming, Flutter, Deployment

What would you need?

Umm, first of all, a private server.

With serverless capabilities nowadays it is no wonder that people prefer Firebase, it’s free and it’s painless. Obvious choice.

But what if we want to go independent? Away from the norms? Well, you have to learn it all yourself. Because we are using Nginx, then the server must be a Linux server, not a Windows server.

Assuming you use a Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distro. Here’s a starter script to help you get started.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install nginx

There, I just saved you some googling time. If you want an in-depth guide on Nginx, I suggest you read this post by Digital Ocean.

Do we need to install the Flutter SDK on our server?

Umm, yes, and no.

Let me elaborate. It is possible to install the SDK, but why do you need exactly? Installing the SDK helps you to test quick changes to the code on the server to try to fix a few production-related bugs like a cowboy!

Meme from memegenerator.net

I won’t do it though because SDKs consumes a lot of memory and requires a lot of RAM to be compiled. Your private server might not have enough RAM to process it. Believe me, I’ve tried. My VPS only had around 400MB of RAM enough to run a small app but not enough to compile the SDK. So I didn’t install it.

So this just leaves one option either you use CI/CD to deploy your Flutter app to your VPS or just use plain old git. By using Git I mean by pushing your builds to the repository. This might not be a best practice for some teams as the entire software world almost unilaterally agree on using CI/CD, but hey — a cowboy’s gotta do what a cowboy’s gotta do.

I am not going into how much of a best practice this tutorial is going to be rather how simple and understandable it is. So let me just leave this choice to you.

Do I need a domain?

Do you need a domain? No. It is not required because we are learning how to host a Flutter web app using Nginx using a domain or not is not of this tutorial’s concern.
Episode 61: What a surgeon looks like, GAP win, Ladies storm hackathon and a good subreddit
By: Ada S Sisters
Tags: New Yorker, Surgeon, Gap, Tech, Podcast

Listen here: iTunes | Libsyn | Spreaker | Stitcher | BluBrry

We’re all consumers, and one of the benefits of social media is that we get direct access to give feedback to businesses. Just this week I tweeted about battery issues to Apple, and got a solution through tweets. And the CEO of GAP just took a 5-year-old’s complaint to “I can do that” in two weeks.

Maybe United should take a page from GAP.

And this is the second time we’ve talked about a brand using cancer as a metaphor for something stupid in their social media — this time Cosmo thinks cancer is a great solution for weight loss.

But we also have some good news stories — a sub-Reddit recently solved a 20 year old mystery, the Ladies Storm Hackathon on GitHub is a great resource we want everyone using and all these surgeons mimicking the cover of the New Yorker.
kamimai — Go言語製DBマイグレーションツールの紹介
By: Eureka
Tags: Tech, Go

Learn more about how Eureka technology and engineering

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What aspiring entrepreneurs can learn about innovation from the field of integrative healthcare
By: Dr. David Minkoff M.D.
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Integrative Health, Health, Healthcare, Integrative Medicine

Steve Jobs once said that,

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Whether or not you fully believe that, it’s true that being an innovator is one of the most highly valued traits in the world of business. In fact, some have gone so far as to say there are really only two functions of business — innovation being one, marketing the other.

Innovating doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, though. In fact, innovating doesn’t require inventing anything at all. Even though the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, innovation in the strictest sense is more about application than anything else. Consider a few of the runaway success stories from the last decade.

Innovating into the big-time

Long story short, you don’t need to create something brand new and unheard of in order to be successful. What you need is to be imaginative in taking existing products, services, or data, and applying them in a useful, replicable way.

Innovation in healthcare paradigms

In some ways, integrative medicine epitomizes the innovative mindset. Within the integrative approach, there is very little to no emphasis placed on inventing new healthcare practices. Instead, researchers and practitioners are looking for ways to combine existing data, techniques, and therapies in a highly personalized, holistic way.

IM joins the proven abilities of modern medicine with established practices and healing traditions from all around the world to achieve the goal of treating not just one disease at a time, but one whole patient at a time, addressing their overall well-being from physical, mental, environmental, and spiritual standpoints. Almost everyone would agree that a personalized and holistic approach is the best way to provide healthcare. The question is how, and that’s what integrative practitioners are helping to answer day in and day out.

Fast-track to success

Innovations are better solutions. They might meet a new set of requirements or an inarticulate need, but whatever the case, learning to identify their potential is the root of success, not just for entrepreneurs, but for anyone who wants to improve at what they do.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying,

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.”

You can solve problems without innovating, and you can innovate without really solving any problems, but when you put the two together, you might just find the world at your fingertips.
Wanna Shoot Like a Pro? Start Using These 12 Portrait Elements Now
By: Edneil Jocusol
Tags: Creativity, Freelancing, Lifestyle, Art, Photography

Wanna Shoot Like a Pro? Start Using These 12 Portrait Elements Now

Key Takeaway: Reveal the model’s raw emotion

“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” — Andy Warhol

My passion for portrait photography began when I saw my childhood photos 25 years ago. You know, when you only had a limited film of 12 shots in your Fujifilm camera? And back then, people don’t know how to charm their way in front of the lens yet.

Every time our family gathers together, we skim our photo albums from the 90s. I cringe whenever I see pictures that are not well-cropped, angles that really have no story to tell, and poorly-lit shots that destroy the moment.

I promised myself that if I get to have my own DSLR camera someday, I won’t waste every emotion and character of the object I am taking a photograph of. Because I believe that a shot only happens once. Take it the second time and it will never be the same again. Never.

This article will teach you simple portrait photography elements that I’ve learned in the past three years. I am far from a pro yet, but the techniques I will show here are inspired by Tom Ang’s book, Digital Photography Masterclass. Tom advises to “form a relationship with your subject, no matter how powerful or busy they are”.

The models featured here are dear to my heart — friends, colleagues, family, ex-girlfriend, and churchmates. They are my guinea pigs for all the crazy stuff I asked them to do, and I have their permission to use their photos for my blog, and other media exposure.

By the way, I am using Nikon D3400 with a built-in standard lens AF-P DX Nikkor 18–55mm (1:3.5–5.6G VR). I also included standard specs per photo for your references such as ISO, focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.
Deep Learning Based Emotion Recognition with PyTorch and TensorFlow
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Innovation, Deep Learning, NLP

Deep Learning Based Emotion Recognition with PyTorch and TensorFlow

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to train deep neural networks, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), for addressing a natural language task known as emotion recognition.

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to train deep neural networks, such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), for addressing a natural language task known as emotion recognition. We will cover everything you need to know to get started with NLP using deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. We will cover the common best practices, functionalities, and steps you need to understand the basics of TensorFlow’s and PyTorch’s APIs to build powerful predictive models via the computation graph. In the process of building our models, we will compare PyTorch and TensorFlow to let the learner appreciate the strengths of each tool.

Below is a clip demonstrating what the notebooks contains:

TensorFlow version (Colab Notebook | GitHub)

PyTorch version (Colab Notebook | GitHub)
Two States of the Union
By: Dan Faltesek
Tags: Rhetoric, State Of The Union, Data Science

The State of the Union is one of the few times in any given year when most people hear a public speech, much less read think pieces and rhetorical criticism about a speech. The contemporary “state of the union” address is a century old—meaning the presidential tradition of delivering what might be an epideictic (praise and blame) speech is a key part of what we’ve come to expect from the office.

When I listened to this year’s speech, I was struck by the emotional whipsaw of it. The highest possible highs trading off with the lowest lows. This seemed quite different from past addresses I have written about.

The general format of the State of the Union address involves the president being introduced by the Speaker of the House (Trump chose to launch right in this year—procedural style be gone), followed by a list of highlights and something like the phrase “the state of our union is strong.” This phrase is a cornerstone of any of these addresses, much like any Spider-Man film will include someone saying “with great power comes great responsibility.” The middle of the speech is usually a boring list of policy priorities. My prior research suggests that the middle of the speech is intentionally boring to lead into a positive ending.

This year’s State of the Union, however, violated my expectations in some surprising ways (e.g., the reproductive rights section of the speech). Using some fairly basic methods in sentiment analysis, I’ve created a rhetorical critique of the speech. Sentiment analysis is a form of emotion A.I. that uses text analysis and language processing to assess the affect of subjective information. It can be used with any kind of text, and is often used in marketing and customer service in relation to survey responses and online posts, but it provides an interesting look at the rhetoric and language used in speeches as well. The code I used to build this project, and the base CSV needed to reproduce it, are available on Github.

I am not interested in facts so much as style here. Facts are useful and important, but they miss the real power of the epideictic address to assign praise and blame. Line by line debate is ineffective in these cases because affect always wins out over argument in speeches. It just doesn’t matter how fast or how strong the facts are.
One More Day
By: Ivette Cruz
Tags: Poetry, Relationships, Positive Thinking, Love, Parenting

Sign up for Just Sharing Some Love - of Poetry and Fiction

By Share The Love

A short newsletter to let all our subscribers know just how their publication is doing and highlights of our week. Take a look
10 Ways to Stay Technical as an Engineering Manager
By: Ardy Dedase
Tags: Software Development, Management, Startup, Software Engineering, Programming

10 Ways to Stay Technical as an Engineering Manager

Shake off the technical rust when you feel occupied with the manager’s schedule without affecting your management responsibilities

The irony of being a software engineer is that I wanted to get into management at some point. However, when I finally moved to management, I was doing less of the technical ”maker” work I used to do as a software engineer. That shift has bothered me. How can I acknowledge with full conviction that I am a “software engineering” manager?

As a manager, for the most part, your organization has a different set of expectations for you compared to when you were an engineer. Your organization expects you to manage people and do a little bit of everything. Your responsibilities could include coaching and mentoring your team, people management, project management, technical roadmap planning, goal setting, appraisals, stakeholder management, hiring, budget planning, headcount planning, etc. You might feel that your managerial role is pulling you away from the reason you became a software engineer in the first place — to write code and build software.

Many times in my career as an engineering manager, I felt rusty as a technical contributor. The “rust” became more apparent for me when I started to go for technical interviews. I wish I had dealt with it sooner. I predominantly marked my weeks with a manager’s schedule and a tiny block of a maker’s schedule. There were long periods when I needed to spend a bit more time on people management. During these periods, I stopped contributing to my team’s core code base so I didn’t potentially block the team’s progress. As such, I barely contributed anything technical to the team.

Being an engineering manager is a continuous balancing act between “engineering” and “management.” It can give you the flexibility to decide where to focus depending on your organization’s needs. The flexibility itself is also its pitfall. If you are not deliberate, you will end up neglecting the “engineering” side of your role.

The good news is there are high-output tasks that can help you stay technically sharp without neglecting your management responsibilities. I’ll walk you through these different ways in no particular order.
Rules for Using Cast-Iron Cookware
By: Evan Allgood
Tags: Comedy, Satire, Humor, Cooking, Kitchen

Congratulations on acquiring your first piece of cast-iron cookware, presumably as a wedding gift or in a drunken two a.m. Amazon spree when you were feeling particularly “mature.”

Cast-iron is the Cadillac of cookware, but there are a few eensy weensy guidelines to go over before cementing your status as some sort of flapjack monarch. Don’t worry! These rules are totally logical and easy to follow. Everyone says so.

1. Do not clean your cast-iron cookware.

Normally it’d be disgusting to not scrub the thing you make quiche in, but cast-iron, uh… cleans itself with its own oils! The oil forms a seal in the pan that keeps dirt out, because science. Yep, just give that day-old lasagna a gentle wipe with a dry paper towel, and the pan will be good as new, we swear.

Then, after each use, coat your cast-iron cookware in even more grease — you know, to keep it clean. Nothing counterintuitive or weird about that!

2. Do not let the cast-iron touch your other cookware.

Oh, you want to store your cast-iron in the cupboard with every other pot and pan you own? And here we thought you were an adult human with a fully formed brain.

Do you have any idea how sensitive cast-iron is? One glance from a stainless steel pan and it will crumble into a heap of crushed hopes. One whisper from the aluminum and it will be but an inkling of a memory of a dream of a better life, one where you were not such a monumental screw-up.

Cast-iron is the purest of all possible cookware. Instead of nesting this rock-hard culinary Adonis in a filthy pile of imperfections, maybe you should do the world a favor and nest yourself in the garbage.

Ok, this is all perfectly reasonable so far, onto Rule #3!

3. Do not put your cast-iron cookware in or near sunlight.

If light hits the cast-iron, it will instantly rust and die.

No light and no cupboards! What is hard about this?!

4. Do not use the cast-iron after midnight.

Late night cooking is liable to keep your loved ones or roommates up, especially if you’re making one of your “famous” tilapia grilled cheeses.

Oh, also, if you use the cast-iron after midnight, it will encase itself in an oily cocoon before emerging a few hours later as a scaly, mischievous pot-goblin that wants to raise absolute hell in your building. Pot-goblins seem cute at first, but they can get pretty violent. (People have died.)

Really thought most of this stuff was self-explanatory!

5. Do not under any circumstance let the cast-iron come into contact with water.

If you get the cast-iron wet, the pot-goblins multiply. Duh-doy.

6. Do not use your cast-iron cookware.

Yeah, the cast-iron is really more of a conversation piece.
All Bitcoin (Don’t) go to Heaven
By: Jack Mayer
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Bitcoin

Cryptocurrencies carry a number of risks that can affect a person in their lifetime. But what happens to crypto when a person dies?

The number of retail investors is exploding, and with even grandma getting in on the action, how much crypto can be lost forever?

Supporters list decentralization and anonymity as two advantages of crypto, but these benefits can result in lost assets. With no intermediaries, help desk, guarantees, rights, or recourse, loved ones may have a difficult time recovering crypto from the deceased.

Popular U.S. exchange Coinbase does offer a solution for asset transfer, provided that the beneficiary has a death certificate, last will and testament, probate documents, and ID. However, this assumes that the deceased held all of his/her assets on the exchange. Holding assets on exchanges is a well-known worst practice — given the lack of control over private keys and susceptibility to hacking — and is unlikely for anyone serious about crypto, and/or with large holdings.

Here are some obvious yet important ways to protect your loved ones from permanently losing out on your gains (assuming the crypto bubble hasn’t collapsed at the time of this reading):

1) List crypto assets in a will, and designate a beneficiary.

2) Provide instructions for recovery: including storage methods, passwords, private keys, two-factor authentication (2FA) procedures, etc. With 2FA, additional information should be disclosed: including email and phone passwords.

3) Make sure your instructions are detailed, but clear and easy to follow. Don’t assume beneficiaries will be technologically savvy.

These measures may seem simple, but many crypto investors are younger and may not focus on complex, seemingly distant, and morbid issues such as estate planning. Others simply may not realize the differences between traditional assets and crypto, and the implications of those differences.

Of course, this insight is for naught if Buffet is right. But if not, proper estate planning is essential for anyone with crypto assets and loved ones.

Otherwise, when you’re gone, your crypto is likely to vanish into the ether.

All views expressed are my own.
Trading Competition won 1,000 BNB
Tags: Financex, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Competition, Bnb

FinanceX is a cryptocurrency exchange providing users with a convenient, reliable and secure platform with a specific focus on providing fiat-coin trading pairs

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Friday 28th May Live Prayers and Speech
By: Virtual Mosque
Tags: Speech, Live, Prayers

We are the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam and this publication is dedicated to portraying the true, peaceful instructions of the final religion through our live broadcasts in the UK and regular editorials.

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UNTITLED
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Trains, Literary Impulse, Women

UNTITLED

A poem

Photo by Denis Chick on Unsplash

I.

at five she is awake

the passing rail trembles as she

picks up her jug of water to

save from spills of overcrowding

II.

her saree tapers at

its waisted knot,

pulled distant from sequined

dust pans lying creviced

in webs of thread,

lint balled on knees

never reveals the

soft abrasions within

days are festive

so festive is the cloth

III.

rails are midnight to me

soft jingles of industrial dance

a salt shaker rotates, stills

flat pivots and nights go on.
Maybe
By: Kelso J.
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Death, Love, Susan Neleist

Courtesy of Susan Neleist

If this is what dying feels like, I’ll invite it in with open arms.

Maybe we can sit at the table and talk about all the places I’d wish I’d gone.

or maybe how the sun illuminated his eyes so perfectly sometimes.

Maybe we’ll drink coffee or tea or vodka

and maybe I’ll cry.

and then we’ll probably cuddle.

and maybe kiss, and perhaps

fall in love.

And then it will be black.

And I will forget all the stupid things I never said to keep you around and the things I should have done to make myself happy.
Comparing Arrays in JavaScript
By: Carla Stickler
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Bootcamp, Arrays, Code

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just compare two arrays like this:

[1,2,3] === [1,2,3]

That would be great! But unfortunately, it can’t be done because arrays are actually objects in javascript. Primitive types can be compared by their value in javascript, like strings and integers. However objects are more complex types and are compared by their reference, or place they are stored in memory. So every time an object is created, it is given a reference to a space where it is stored. So, even though an object may look identical, its reference is not.

So what does this mean for us, when we are trying to compare two arrays?

It means that we can’t just compare them point blank like we tried to above. We will need to look at each individual item in the array and compare it to each individual item of the other array.

When comparing two arrays, the easiest way to know if they are not the same is to compare their lengths. So we start by building out our method likes so:

function compareTwoArrays(arr1, arr2) {

if (arr1.length === arr2.length) {

return false

}

}

If this is true, our arrays are most definitely not identical and we can exit out of our function and return false .

The next thing we want to look for is if each item in arr1 equals each item in arr2 . For this we will need to iterate over our arrays and compare each item, which in our case are integers and integers are primitive types in javascript and can be compared!

function compareTwoArrays(arr1, arr2) {

if (arr1.length !== arr2.length) {

return false

} else {

for (let i = 0; i < arr1.length; i++){

if (arr1[i] !== arr2[i]){

return false

} else {

continue

}

}

}

return true

}

If our the number at arr1[i] does not equal the number at the same index of arr2 we know that this is not a match and therefore we return false and break out of our loop. If it is a match, we continue on through our iteration to the next index. Once i is not longer less than the length of our array and our if statement never equates to true , we end our loop and continue to the last line of our function and return true .
T-Shirt Design
By: Pito Salas
Tags: Code, Tshirt

Code T-Shirt, © Pito Salas, 2012. Let me know if you want to order one!
THETA Airdrop Information
By: Theta Labs
Tags: Technology, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain

Dear Theta supporter,

Thank you once again for being patient as we prepare to airdrop you 100 free Theta Tokens (you’re eligible if you passed KYC and whitelisted your ETH address by Jan 3, 2018). We truly appreciate your attention and time supporting our project. Here’s the process:

Starting Monday, Jan 15 at 12 noon PST, please login to your account on our website: https://www.thetatoken.org/, confirm your ERC20 wallet address and CLAIM your airdrop tokens. ** IMPORTANT: you need to manually click “CLAIM” ** We will close this process on Monday, Jan 29 at 12 noon PST, to give everyone plenty of time to claim their tokens and get into the queue. Only those who have claimed will receive free Theta Tokens. Beginning on Monday, Feb 5 at 12 noon PST we will process and start transferring the tokens in batches. Please allow up to 5–7 days as we will likely have over ten thousand of you to process so thanks in advance for your patience here.

Unfortunately, for various reasons we cannot include citizens and residents of US, China and OFAC countries. Again, we appreciate everything you’ve done for us and hope you will continue to support Theta through 2018 and beyond.

Best,

Mitch Liu

CEO, SLIVER.tv / Theta Labs
How to Use “Solomon’s Paradox” to Make Better Decisions
By: Tara Blair Ball
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Relationships, Self, Personal Development

When I was 22, I dated a man who cheated on me with a woman I knew. I was hopelessly in love with him. I ached for him so much that when he wanted to get back into my bed after being in hers, I let him. And when he got back into her bed and wanted back in mine again, I let him.

It went on like this for months.

He would make promises. He would break them. We would break up, but then have a tearful reunion followed by passionate fucking a few days later. I was so immersed in making it work, in figuring out how to change it that I was drowning.

At that same time, a friend of mine discovered her own boyfriend was cheating on her.

She showed up to my apartment with mascara smudged all over her face.

“I love him! What do I do?” she sobbed.

I brought her tissues and whiskey and said, “You have to leave! You don’t deserve to be this miserable with someone who doesn’t want to uphold the promises you made to each other.”

After my friend walked home, I went to the apartment of the man who had now cheated on me dozens of times. I stood on his doorstep wearing just a pea coat and shoes. It was January. It took him a while to come to the door. My teeth were rattling, but I could hear him moving inside.

Finally, he opened the door, and I walked in.

“Jesus, what took you so long?”

“I just woke up,” he said. “Long day.” He was rubbing the back of his head and cutting his eyes around the room.

“Kiss me,” I said.

He obeyed, and I slipped off my shoes and unbuttoned my jacket for him. When he laid me on his bed, I could smell a perfume that wasn’t mine on the pillows. For that moment, while he was with me, I didn’t care because he had chosen me. If only for that moment, that night.

But when I fell asleep, I had a dream in which I kissed the other woman’s soft mouth and tasted him on her lips.

Even though I’d so wisely told my friend in the same situation that she needed to leave, it took that dream to make me realize that I was giving myself to someone who wasn’t willing to give themselves wholly to me. When I walked out of his apartment the next morning, I never walked back in again.

For all of us, it’s hard to judge a problem clearly when we’re immersed in it.

It requires distance to judge things more reasonably.

King Solomon, known for his wisdom and sage advice, couldn’t save himself from making disastrous choices that led to his kingdom’s demise, which is why psychological scientist Igor Grossmann dubbed this phenomenon the “Solomon’s Paradox.”

Grossmann discovered within his research that, “people reason more wisely about other people’s social problems than about their own.”
All you need to know about whiteboard markers
By: Yuri Malishenko
Tags: Facilitation, Visual Thinking, Whiteboards, Visualization, Marker

Since this article is truly a very long read and you need to be somewhat nerdy about markers (just like me) to read it in its entirety. Or maybe you want to learn all of the nitty-gritty details. But if you are out of time and you need to have a quick answer to the question: “Okay, out of those 9 assessed markers, what would be the best choice for me?” then you can read this section only and maybe later look into the below high-level overview each of the markers. You might arbitrary review other sections when you have more time and in any order you prefer, it does not really matter as long as you enjoy the read.

I was hesitating to suggest the ranking based on my own opinion, but decided to present each of the marker under consideration as an unnumbered list with pros and cons for each. I will let each reader decide what is the best marker.

Edding

Pros: great colour, outstanding tip quality, nice ergonomics, cheap, available in most European countries, limited reliability.

Cons: might be somewhat smelly for some people, black and red colours fade over time.

Pilot

Pros: great tip quality, great colour and ink flow, refillable, widely available.

Cons: the ergonomics is certainly not the best, might be too smelly for some people.

Expo

Pros: cheap, great colour, great ink flow, nice felt tips.

Cons: limited to US, has some ergonomics issues, might be too smelly for some people, not refillable.

Sharpie

Pros: cheap, great colour and ink flow, nice felt tips, limited availability in Europe.

Cons: has some ergonomics issues, might be too smelly for some people, not refillable, might be tricky to remove if you keep it on the board long enough, colour may be unstable.

Pentel

Pros: fancy pump-up action, great colours and ink flow, relatively easily available.

Cons: smelly, pricey, not refillable, has some ergonomics issues.

Neuland

Pros: is the least smelly, fantastic ergonomics, great ink flow, refillable, there is grey colour available.

Cons: re-fills might not be available for purchase in some countries, not easily available, colour is sometimes unstable, tip is too soft, very expensive compared to other markers.

Artline

Pros: is almost not smelly, good ergonomics, great ink coverage and flow.

Cons: not refillable, the most expensive among other markers, not widely available.

Staedtler

Pros: fantastic plastic boxes for sets, available in most European countries, nice ergonomics, limited reliability.

Cons: quality of the tip, pale colours (black is not impressive) that may fade over time, one of the smelliest if you are concerned.

Lyreco

Pros: relatively cheap, great colours.

Cons: one of the smelliest, poor quality of the tip, very limited colour range, not easily available, not refillable, has some ergonomics issues, colour is sometimes unstable (especially the black one).