fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
View from the Monolith
By: Rob Edwards
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Healthcare, Startup, Stories, Accelerator

According to Wikipedia, the fifth largest employer in the world in 2015 was the UK’s National Health Service, clocking in at a cool 1.7 million employees. I was one of them. My name is Rob Edwards, and I’m going through a period of adjustment as I move from that to the Finnish start-up scene.

Welcome to the view from the Monolith

That 1.7 million is a little misleading of course. The NHS is subdivided many times. I worked for a Trust in London that had ‘only’ 5,000 employees. (Probably. Our IT Training team needed to train all staff on a new IT system, and we were never quite able to nail down exactly how many people that would be). The Trust included four hospitals, and each hospital had its own departments run by consultants — doctors who made life and death decisions every day. Brilliant, amazing, talented, wonderful people, but put four of them in a room to decide something and you would get an average of 5 deeply held contradictory opinions.

And then there was all the oversight. Targets and budgets imposed by central government, a government whose policies were changeable thanks to the fickleness of politics. The NHS is too big to truly fail, but spontaneous it is not.

I love the NHS and am proud to have served, but crikey it was slow.

And now I’m here in Helsinki at The Shortcut, learning about the Finnish start-up culture. Four weeks in and I’m suffering whiplash.

Head… spinning…

Start-ups are so much smaller, so much faster. We’ve had some fascinating guest speakers in the first few weeks of the Catalyst Programme (learn more about that here). We heard from eighteen-year olds who started a company, PALS, two years ago and are already talking about revenue trebling in the last year, Taxify, a tech company also only a few years old, that are already major global players, and Naava, a company that is bringing cleaner air to offices using NASA tech. Fascinating, diverse and to me, astonishingly rapid.

If the pace of it all is bewildering, the acceptance of the potential for failure is remarkable. One Venture Capitalist told us that the model they used required a company they invested in be able to recoup the failure of nine other companies, because those were the statistics. We heard from one person who had been a Founder of four different start-ups, some successful, some not. He wasn’t blasé about the failures, but took them in his stride, as part of the start-up gamble.

Do I have the mindset to be an entrepreneur, to found my own start-up? Perhaps not. But the culture is exciting, the ethos fascinating. The thought that one big idea, hard work, planning and a dash of luck could set you on the path to being the next big thing? I can see the appeal.

I’d certainly throw my hat in the ring to join a start-up, and that’s the other side of the Catalyst programme, to prepare people for that culture shock. And I’m up for that, just as soon as the room stops spinning.

Thanks for reading, join me next time on View from the Monolith, when I’ll talk about some of the language of the start-up community.
Make Changes With Confidence
By: Mitchell Mason
Tags: Chatbots, Watson Assistant, Wa Announcement, Announcements

Make Changes With Confidence

Announcing Versions in Watson Assistant

Let’s say you’ve built an assistant and released it to your users. It’s getting traffic and you’re coming up with all kinds of great things you want to add to it. Whether you finally have time to add all of the content you didn’t get to add initially — or you’re noticing gaps in your assistant’s experience — you know you need to make some updates. Before today, to make these updates, you would’ve either had to…

A) make a real-time change to the assistant/skill that is currently live

B) make a separate copy of your live skill, edit it, then re-deploy it

Both of these approaches are pretty painful. In the case of scenario A, it’s a risky idea to update your skill in a live environment. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to send a message that matches with something you’re currently working on — that would be like driving down a highway that’s still under construction! And scenario B involves the painstaking process of managing a bunch of related but totally disconnected skill copies. Yuck!

Announcing Skill Versions!

To make the process of updating your skills way easier, we’re releasing skill versions within Watson Assistant! It allows you to save a non-editable snapshot of your skill and then link it to an assistant. This means that you can control exactly what your users will interact with in “production” while continuing to update your skill (all without getting users caught in the construction zone). Here’s a short video explaining the basics:

The Essentials

Now, when you view one of your dialog skills, you will see a button called ‘Save a Version’ as well as a new tab to review your version history.

As you might guess, anytime you save a new version, you will see that new version in your version history. From the version history tab, you can link any of these saved versions to an assistant. If you’d like to be able to test your updates before launching in production, you can set up multiple assistants (i.e. dev, test, prod), all pointed at different versions of the same skill.

All of this has two major benefits:

First, whether you call Watson Assistant from your own application or from one of our managed integrations, you’re always pointing at the same, static assistant. This means that you no longer have to manage the *painful* process of re-pointing your app at a new copy of the same skill every time you want to deploy a change. The swapping of skill versions is now entirely handled in the Assistant, with zero downtime between updates.

Your app or integrations now point to one static assistant

Second, we’ve made it much easier to manage your conversation logs across environments. Meaning you can now work on improvements to your skill using production conversation logs — all without accidentally damaging what’s currently live in production. See our documentation on managing your development lifecycle.
How does binary code work?
By: Vishal Sharma
Tags: Tech, Programming, Code, Computer Science, Technology

How Does Binary Code Work?

No one talks about it!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There are 10 types of people in this world — those who understand binary and those who don’t!

We’re intensely involved in applications, interfaces, social media — in a word, technology. We watch movies for entertainment, explore maps for direction, and every word you are seeing on your screen right now. What is it? How are they generated? How do they look like at their most granular stage?

Only 1s and 0s! Just imagine seeing it all just as millions of 1s and 0s. Nerve-wracking, right? But, it’s the truth. At the granular level, all we are seeing on our computer screen are 1s and 0s.

Computers use binary to store data. Not only because it’s a reliable way of storing the data, but computers only understand 1s and 0s — binary. A computer’s main memory consists of transistors that switch between high and low voltage levels — sometimes 5V, sometimes 0. That reading is done by the computer’s processor which reads the transistor state — high or low — to control the computer’s other devices, according to software instructions.
Venus Performs Gymnastics
By: Aimée Gramblin
Tags: Self Love, Psychology, Aimee Gramblin, Poetry, Life

Burial to sharp-tongued bones

and hips that cut into lover’s thighs.

Trompe l’oeil means deceives the eye.

And she does as she looks in the mirror,

imagines sculpting herself a new body

with modeling clay in any form desired:

firm thickness through the waist

stainlesssteelbowlfulofbelly that fits

snuggly into David’s backside.

Thunder thighs to implant

power prints in terrafirma.

Malleable flesh,

mounds of mountainous

backsides and breasts,

curvaceous cloud hips.

She no longer requires Vogue’s

shallow space to lay herself to waste

and unleashes soft seductive shapes.
Paper-Winged Angels
By: Ana-Maria Schweitzer
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Reading, Emil Cioran, Poetry, Spiritual Secrets

Paper-Winged Angels

On books and why we need them

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

What better way

to face your days,

than filling yourself up

with words that interrupt

the flux of conscience

the pain of sentience?

Just open up a book

the words will fix a hook

deep through your eyes and neck

and pull you down a trek

of blissful forgetting

from your own, senseless fretting.

Life has to be endured

as no one can be cured

by lies and by illusions.

Escaping from confusions

my paper-winged angels

deliver me tonight,

through black marks on crisp white.
Rebirth: The future of Virtual Production
Tags: Unreal Engine, Virtual Production, 3d, 3d Rendering, Short Film

Having access to a vast library of high quality assets from day one is key to efficient virtual production. Furthermore, what is essentially a digital movie set can be easily converted into a video game environment in no time, truly maximizing the value of production.

Maximizing efficiency

The high-quality real-time rendering engine of Unreal Engine 4 and its ease of use allows artists to test many ideas in a short amount of time, virtually risk-free. From scene assembly and lighting to post processing and color grading final pixels, everything is done completely in-engine. For a project of the visual scale of Rebirth, but with few people and a very limited time-frame, this interactive real-time workflow was a pre-requisite.

SideFX Houdini played an important role in creating effects like volumetric fog, optimizing the assets for very specific needs and automating various manual tasks.

One of the most time-consuming tasks when creating environments is the manual process of importing each and every asset for every single shot.

One of the most time-consuming tasks when creating environments is the manual process of importing each and every asset for every single shot. This is where Quixel Bridge came into play; by automatically importing the textures and geometry from any given asset, whilst also setting up the shader.

Beyond Rebirth

As films, commercials and most visualized products become more and more ambitious, the current shooting process is starting to show its artistic and financial limits. The cost associated with traveling to specific locations, buying/creating equipment for these sites, licensing costs and permits can all end up spiraling the budget out of control.

Image courtesy of The Future Group

Virtual Production plays a key role in solving these problems. Artists get to iterate more on each shot without having to worry about cost. This creates new opportunities for projects to become more ambitious with a fairly restricted budget still.

Pre-production, production and post-production all happen in the same phase with the same tools, with artists and programmers reviewing each step of the process.

Virtual production is the natural evolution of entertainment, and it’s just getting started.
The Consequences of Toxic Male Sex Advice
By: Benjamin Davis
Tags: Relationships, This Is Us, Masculinity, Self-awareness, Sexuality

The Consequences of Toxic Male Sex Advice

A bit of ‘wisdom’ passed down from man to man over the years that needs to stop

Photo: Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy/Getty Images

When I was around 10 years old, my parent’s friend Dick (yes, his name was Dick) sat me and my cousins down to tell us about this epic threesome he had in his twenties. I don’t remember the details, except that they were “babes.” I do remember that it was the first time — the first of many times — throughout my childhood and teen years that older adult men would corner me to regale me with their youthful sexual escapades, all of which starred women who never had an identity beyond their physical features. At the end of all these tellings two things were always true:

I was expected to be impressed, enthralled, and inspired. I was.

The constantly reinforced advice that came along with all these stories was: You have to have as much sex with as many women as possible — because if you don’t, how can you prove you are a man? This same advice was oozing between the lines of movies and TV shows throughout the ’90s and early 2000s. James Bond isn’t as cool without “Bond girls,” right?

I came to the conclusion that despite being a stubborn, garrulous, walking ADHD commercial, my most undesirable quality was clear: I was a “virgin.” My solution was to lie through my teeth. This lie, of course, didn’t make me any more desirable. Into my college years, I went my “virginity” with me. And I realized I’d trapped myself. I thought, If someone does decide to have sex with me believing I’ve had sex before, they’re going to expect me to do a good job.

Once, when a woman took me back to her dorm room, she started kissing me and taking off my pants. I moved my hands all over her like someone gently patting flour onto raw pastry dough. I had no idea what I was doing. She pulled away from me and said, “How many people have you had sex with?”

I said, “Two?”

She sighed and said, “Right. I’m going to bed.”

Then she walked past me, curled up on her bed, and went to sleep.
Interview a Reporter: What makes a good story with Techcrunch’s, Anthony Ha
By: Ronjini Joshua
Tags: TechCrunch, Startup, Interview, Media Relations

As a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, Anthony Ha knows what makes a good story. He has put in over eight years as a journalist, including time as an award-winning government reporter in California. Anthony sat down with TST to share industry insights for connecting with journalists and creating stories that move readers past the headline.

Anthony Ha Profile:

Years as a journalist: 8+

Number of pitches you get per day: 150

Number of pieces you write each week: ~10

TST: How can startups differentiate themselves to get your attention?

AH: The most effective way is personal name recognition and getting prominent investment. For example, I’m going to pay attention if the CEO has a unique story, or if someone I trust introduces me to the startup.

What I’m looking for is real human passion. I want to be able to imagine that I would totally use whatever item, product or service is being talked about. I want to see whether it would be important with potential to transform an industry.

TST: What do you think about the press release?

AH: Releases are useful and it’s nice to have certain things in writing. It’s a good way to decide whether it’s interesting enough to write about. Quotes in press releases are always incredibly massaged and on message. I very rarely use press release quote unless they are saying something concrete and specific.

I view a press release on email, not the wire. If you’re a startup I’m reading it over email.

When do you recommend that a company reach out to you for a product launch? About a week before the launch is ideal, possibly a little earlier than that. I typically write and post nearly immediately so if a pitch comes in too early it can easily be overlooked. The risk of pitching too early is that there’s always something else to write that’s more pressing.

Who do you want to talk to when you’re working on a story?

I prefer to talk to the CEO or someone who can speak directly with as much honesty to the topic of the story. I want to talk to whomever owns the project and can talk about it the best.

Titles matter but the content matters more.

Rule of thumb: if I’m not a priority, your story isn’t either.

When someone offers you an exclusive, does it make the story (if there is one) a better offer?

There are some stories that an exclusive can potentially help. Some however, won’t. Writers have some kind of say what they will write. Since 90% of the things that journalists write are based on interest a journalist may make time for it.

How can companies help support your writing process?

By being ready to talk about your product or service. Ideally you’ll have a fact sheet or press release that I can refer to. Images. Journalists do not just want a logo or boring headshots, so include various visual assets.

Key Takeaways for Your Startup:
【図説】色彩調整で作る水中表現｜Photoshopデジタルペインティング
By: Yuko Fukushima
Tags: Digital Painting, Tutorial, Photoshop, メイキング, 日本語

in Both Sides of the Table
About Me — Kathy Chaffin Gerstorff
By: Kathy Gerstorff
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Introduction, Poetry, Writer, About Me

About Me — Kathy Chaffin Gerstorff

Writer, Poet, Flower Child, Perpetual Student, Bibliophile, Technophile, Nature Lover, Mermaid…

To find love, give love. ~ Kathy Chaffin Gerstorff

I’m excited to find a home for my blog writing on Medium. I have written on many platforms over the years starting with AOL in the late 90’s. When Medium first started, I was writing on WordPress and Blogger. I wish I would have paid more attention when I first heard of this platform for passionate writers and voracious readers, but no worries, I’m here now with you!

I love Medium’s clean design with no annoying pop-ups or banner ads. It’s so refreshing and very much worth the cost of a cup of coffee to read unique stories and discover talented writers.
“Make sure you major in something useful” “ My parents won’t let me major in that.
By: Adam Allred
Tags: Blog, Purpose, Passion, Poetry, Education

This concept of being useless has been in my head for awhile, since a professor in school mentioned it in conversation with me and a friend. At first it didn’t make sense, but after some thought it made so much sense. This professor pursued a degree in pure mathematics which is just math theory, where the calculation doesn’t matter as much as how you got to the answer. In the world of STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics ), pure math is, or is thought of as the most useless of the world. Most of those students only see math as a tool, not as its own entity with its own purposes. Even more of those students know nothing about the history of mathematics that is involved in the math that they use, and how those mathematicians studied pure mathematics.

I also am pursuing pure mathematics, and to add on top of that, a minor in philosophy. Two of the things that most people would deem as useless. I don’t want to become an engineer, or go into finance or anything like that. I want to just do math: write about it, learn about it, teach it.

So when I say do the useless thing, I mean do what you love. Follow whatever your passion is and do nothing but that thing. If you don’t know what your passion could be, then do everything until you find it. You are lucky to have been born now, in a time when you can do whatever you want after you do the job to pay the bills. It is expected by 2020 that 50% of America will have a side hustle. Try everything, and if you like a bunch of stuff then you have the ability to do it all! But make sure that you put your happiness above everything.
The Fragmented Designer
By: Pascal Barry
Tags: Design, UI, Skills, UX, Product Design

More from Pascal Barry Follow

Designer of digital products, brands, websites and type. Co-founder at akord.com, a tech startup based in Paris. Visit the source at www.blogofpascal.com
It’s All About the Approach
By: Mike Vardy
Tags: Decision Making, Productivity, Time Management, To Do List, Attention

Photo by Oskar Kadaksoo on Unsplash

When I start my day, I don’t ask myself “What am I going to do today?” because that is too open-ended of a question. I need to have a focal point of some sort — something that will direct my attention to whatever my intentions for the day are. That’s why I have that overarching focus in the form of a Daily Theme.

That changes the question to one that isn’t open-ended at all. “What day is it today?” has a precise answer. Then the follow-up question — “What is today’s Daily Theme?” — also has a precise answer.

Once I’ve answered those questions, I can work through the tasks on my to-do list with less friction and more flow.

Approach your to-do list with reason. When you do that then you can approach the tasks on your to-do list with passion and intuition.
React 2020 — P5: Class Components
By: Dino Cajic
Tags: JavaScript, React, Programming, Reactjs, Web Development

In the two previous articles we looked at functional components.

Although the React team seems like they want to move away from class-based components, they’re still here. As a side note, I like and prefer class components. We’ve touched on class components in the Deeper Intro article.

A class based component is a class that extends React.Component and contains a render() method that returns a JSX element. We can convert functional components into class components pretty easily.

Let’s create a class component that lists a movie where Jim Carrey was awesome. We’ll start by creating a Sonic.js file inside of our src/components directory. If you haven’t seen Sonic yet, I highly recommend it (especially if you have kids).

Just like with functional components, we need to import React.

import React from 'react';

The class will extend React.Component and will contain a render() method that returns an element. The render() method is a life-cycle method (we’ll look at life-cycle methods in later articles). The render() life-cycle method is a required method meaning that each time that you create a class component, that component will need to have the render() method.

Just like functional components, class components will need to be exported so that they can be rendered later on. The importing process is the same as with functional components. We’ll import the class component inside of the App component and render it.

Make sure you have your development server running: npm start.

Since we don’t know how to pass arguments yet to class components, to display an additional movie by Jim Carrey, you’ll have to create a new component. So, create the component Mask.js in src/components, import it into App and render it below <Sonic />.

You might have noticed that we’re importing a class component into the App functional component. Yes, you can do that. You can also import functional components into class components. We’re going to be looking at passing arguments to components in the next article since we don’t want to keep creating individual components for each movie that Jim Carrey has appeared in.
Scars and Burial
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Thinking, Musing, Illumination Curated, Poetry, Image

Scars and Burial

A Poem

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

The wind tore down one of my eavestroughs

and I don’t have the heart

to bury the damned thing, but I haven’t

got a ladder, either

Change keeps carving deep ruts here

miniature explosions of dust

and the rubbish we keep

hanging onto to be alright with the world

I’d be a better letter-writer

if I had anyone to send things to

but then I don’t want you to have to know

any of this

Immobility frees me up

to do some more sentencing

but the verdictive tendencies can

get me in trouble

I really don’t know

why I keep pointing at the scars

I guess it’s just a wrestling

with skin that doesn’t go anywhere
APIOps appreciation — Amazon Gift Cards for active participants
By: Jarkko Moilanen
Tags: Startup, Meetup, Bitcoin, Apiops

As community manager I’ve been thinking of ways to reward active members. I asked the community in meetup.com groups about ideas how to do that. The rewards have to be globally usable since we are becoming global network. Therefore movie tickets to local theatre were out of the question.

Tradition has been started!

One of the ways that came up was Amazon Gift Card. I decided to try it! The first time we handed out Amazon Gift card for active meetup participant was March 7th at Tampere. The meetup was about API security and Timo Härkönen was the one who made history by receiving the first token of appreciation.
iPhone SE 2020: The Toyota of Phones
By: Ryan Kubalek
Tags: Apple, Phone, Technology, iPhone, Mobile

Alright, let me quickly explain my title. Toyota makes reliable and comfortable cars for extremely fair prices. How do they do this? They make cuts where they can, and they keep what’s really important.

And that’s exactly what Apple did here.

I’m going to start you off with a disclaimer. I’m not a tech guy. That means this article isn’t going to dive deep into the depths of technology and processor power.

What it is going to do is give the average consumer, someone who wants a good phone but gets lost when someone starts talking about phone chips, like me, a good idea of what the iPhone SE 2020 is really like.

It has an A13 chip, which I’ve been told is a good thing.

So, on with the details.
The Fear of Beauty
By: Sebastián González De León
Tags: Darkness, Literature, Beauty, Poetry, Poem

A man walks into a dark room

He was told that there is a painting

But he cannot see it

The painting is blind

Yet it remembers its colors

And won’t allow anyone to turn on the light

The painting fears

That one day

The light

Will eventually burn its beautiful colors
Why I Think the Gemini ETF is Approved
By: Mois Nathan
Tags: Bitcoin, Etf, Ethereum, Investing, Blockchain

Cameron: “It was approved.” Credit: Mashable

I would like begin by defining an ETF, because when I first heard about it around 2014 I din't know exactly what it was. Simply put, the ETF issues shares on a underlying asset. In the case of the bitcoin ETF, that will be bitcoins. For example, 1 share in that particular ETF could represent 0.01 bitcoins. The actual cryptocurrency will be managed by the Gemini Trust Company (GTC), the private keys will be distributed to different personas in different geographic locations, cold stored.

There are a few components of an ETF.

NAV (Net Asset Value) — This represents the daily updates by the fund managers in the end of the trading session, valuing the assets held minus the fees of the fund.

INAV (Indicative Net Asset Value) — This is the calculation of the asset value at market price.

PD (Primary Dealer) — These are firms that can redeem ETF units from the fund manager. In the case of the bitcoin ETF these will be known as quant/high-frequency trading firms.

DMM (Designated Market Maker) — These are firms contracted by the ETF that will provide bid/ask at specific market prices.

PCF (Portfolio Composition File) — This is the report of the amounts of assets the fund holds and will be published in the beginning of each trading day.

I still do not fully understand the ETF creation mechanism, but I think that DMMs will sell/buy shares on the market and then buy/sell bitcoins at specific points of time before the PCF report. Honestly, I'm not that interested in the specifics of their mechanisms since I prefer to hold the bitcoins itself, instead of some IOUs.

In my opinion, the ETF is already approved.

I watch the market daily. Since the last meeting between regulators, Gemini owners and their business partners (on February 14), the price of bitcoin went up by more than 20%.

Why I think it is approved? Because the Gemini exchange is one of the most (if not the most) regulated cryptoexchanges. In addition, the Winklevoss are serious entrepreneurs coming from the legacy financial sector and have operated various other businesses there.

Some people argue that a bitcoin ETF is an Trojan horse that will give banks and big financial institutions more say when it come to the bitcoin price. This is ok. The Bitcoin network itself will be fine (hopefully after we end the FUD around block size). Also, the core bitcoin community will also be fine, since “old-timers” are quite used to price fluctuations. Moreover, it is very possible that institutional investors are already “in bitcoin” and have participated in its price formation for a while.

All of this is my own subjective, personal opinion based only on my experience. I'm just bliblabluing :)
職涯駭客｜ 2020 Jumpstart Global青年創新論壇 節錄
By: Louis Hsiao
Tags: Ntue, Jumpstartpro, Jumpstart, Growth Mindset, 兆yo

in Both Sides of the Table
How Markets Rallied On Fake News
Tags: Donald Trump, Trade, Politics, Business, Fake News

If you had to take a guess of how Trump measures his success, you’d likely choose the performance of the U.S stock market. As of now, POTUS is sitting comfortably with the S&P500 near all-time highs. But to anyone following the business news, they know trading over the past year hasn't been plain sailing but a volatile ride.

Sentiment of newsflow shifts rapidly from positive to negative within hours, sometimes minutes. The “markets rally on trade war optimism,” headline published by mainstream financial media yields over 17,300,000 results on Google, followed shortly by its nemesis, “trade war optimism fades as stocks fall.”

At the same time, Trump and the Chinese have figured out a way to reduce the pain of declining sentiment in both economies. By publicly releasing any positive — but totally misleading or fake — news, it causes panic buying in the stock market. But humans aren’t going to fall for the same “pump and dump” strategy over and over again. They aren’t the one's trading. The actual buyers are computer algorithms programmed to react to news-based events.

If you went back in time and told any famous market guru, “the President’s social media account and algorithms drive market sentiment,” they’d laugh at you profusely. Yet the machines fall for the same trick every time. Any period of substantial decline is met by the Plunge Protection Team stepping in, pumping stock prices.

As news of potential impeachment keeps spreading like a wildfire, it’s puzzling why nobody brings up the fact this happens in the stock market every day. According to the Security Exchange Commission’s website, it appears the Trump administration is engaging in acts of market manipulation on a daily basis:

“Intentional conduct designed to deceive investors by controlling or artificially affecting the market for a security.”

Now that sounds familiar.

While the narrative of a potential trade agreement stays in motion from both sides, the stock market remains bullish, thanks to algos trading stocks on the buy-side until they’re programmed to do differently. They are concealing the harsh truth for Trump: he knows deep down there’s no hope of a deal.

Traders will just have to get used to the current state of affairs as Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party employ a “sit and wait” policy, choosing to delay their plans for Belt & Road, just so they outlast the current U.S President and his policies. It wouldn't be in their best interest to contemplate any kind of deal until he’s out of office. They’ll keep talking, but only that.

China’s priorities are more in line with Democrat leaders who are in favor of a more globalist order, therefore, it makes sense for Xi to wait till after the 2020 U.S election before hinting at any kind of agreement with Trump. One thing is for sure: they won’t allow a populist U.S President to undo all the progress they’ve made over the past few decades.

And that’s exactly what a trade deal with the U.S will do.
Sherlock and Squares HackerRank
By: Abhishek Singh Thakur
Tags: Cpp, Programming, Coding, Hackerrank, Competitive Programming

Problem :

Watson likes to challenge Sherlock’s math ability. He will provide a starting and ending value describing a range of integers. Sherlock must determine the number of square integers within that range, inclusive of the endpoints.

Note: A square integer is an integer which is the square of an integer, e.g. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25.

For example, the range is a = 24 and b = 49, inclusive. There are three square integers in the range: 25, 36 and 49.

Read full problem : Sherlock and Squares.

Solution :

Let the integer variables first_num store the first number of the range and last_num store the last number of the range.

To find number of square integers in the range [first_num, last_num] , first we calculate square root of the first_num and an integer variable count stores the number of square integers in the range.

For eg. in the range [35, 70], variable sr is equal to 5 since √35 = 5.916. If square of sr is greater than or equal to the first_num and less than or equal to the last_num then the number ( sr * sr ) is in the range and is a square integer.

C++ Implementation on Programmercave

Other Competitive Programming Problems and Solutions

Circular Array Rotation

Drawing Book HackerRank Challenge
GRABAMEAL — AIRBNB FOR RESTAURANT BASED ON BLOCKCHAIN
Tags: ICO, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

GrabAMeal is the first decentralized meal-serving network built on top of a set GrabAMeal collaboration and trust processes that connects meal providers (Sellers) with guests (Buyers). GrabAMeal enables a diverse ecosystem that allows heterogeneous stakeholders to transact on the platform and adding value to their own business and to the network.

THE PROBLEM

FOR BUYERS

Buyers of meals are the backbone of the demand economy of online meal servicing. Buyers are compelled to eat out of the limited options at a higher cost and typically do not have any redressal mechanism for quality issues. Lack of information regarding food items, preparation and servings cause serious agony to the buyers globally.

Typical problems faced by buyers are:

Healthy food

Transparency

High cost

Dispute resolution

FOR SELLERS

Sellers of meals face many environmental issues in business leading to frequent failure and discontinuance.

Commission food

Merit for quality

Understanding customer

Value harvesting

HOW DOES GRABAMEAL WORK

GrabAMeal works based on 3 protocols:

1. GrabAMeal Identification,

2. GrabAMeal Dispute Resolution and

3. GrabAMeal Reward

These protocols are based on AI and ML.

SOLUTION PROVIDED BY GRABAMEAL

Decentralized marketplace to eliminate intermediaries

Identity management and reputation rating of the participants as an ongoing process based on Block Chain

Distribution of the value accrued from the growth of the network among participants

Democratic mechanism involving participants to resolve conflicts fairly and transparently

An advanced set of protocols, GrabaMeal Identification, GrabAMeal Dispute and GrabaMeal Reward, based on AI and MI.

To know more about GrabAMeal world or if you have any questions, look them up in our website: https://grabameal.world/ico/ or

FAQ https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/home

or

send us a support ticket

https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

or

feel free to email us at: contact@grabameal.world

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Highest Trader Kaun: WRX/INR
By: Wazirx Bitcoin Exchange
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Cryptocurrency News, Crypto, Announcements, Cryptocurrency

Namaste Tribe! To start the weekend party early, we’re having a Highest Trader Kaun for WRX/INR starting tomorrow 9 AM IST.

Total bounty worth ₹1,00,000 worth WRX! Share this

How can I participate and win?

Winners will be decided on the basis of the volume and number of WRX traded in our INR market. Here’s how to qualify:

For volume of trades: Minimum trade volume of ₹5,000 worth of WRX

of trades: Minimum trade volume of ₹5,000 worth of WRX For number of trades: Minimum 50 trades

When is the contest?

Friday, 22nd May: 9 AM — 9 PM IST

Click here to invite your friends to participate!

What’s the bounty 💰

For volume of trades:

For the highest volume of trades: 2441 WRX (worth ₹25,000)

volume of trades: 2441 WRX (worth ₹25,000) For the 2nd highest volume of trades: 1562 WRX (worth ₹16,000)

volume of trades: 1562 WRX (worth ₹16,000) For the 3rd highest volume of trades: 1171 WRX (worth ₹12,000)

volume of trades: 1171 WRX (worth ₹12,000) For each of the next top 17 highest volume of trades: 97 WRX (worth ₹1,000)

Total bounty for volume of trades is ₹70,000 worth WRX

For the number of trades:

For the highest number of trades: 878 WRX (worth ₹9,000)

number of trades: 878 WRX (worth ₹9,000) For the 2nd highest number of trades: 488 WRX (worth ₹5,000)

number of trades: 488 WRX (worth ₹5,000) For the 3rd highest number of trades: 234 WRX (worth ₹2,400)

number of trades: 234 WRX (worth ₹2,400) For each of the next top 17 highest number of trades: 78 WRX (worth ₹800)

Total bounty for number of trades is ₹30,000 worth WRX

Note: You can qualify for only one category of bounty (volume or number) whichever has a higher value. For example, if you’re the 2nd highest trader in terms of number, and 2nd highest in terms of volume, then you’ll get bounty for the “volume”. Also, self-trading is not allowed.

Take advantage of the contest leaderboard, trade smartly and win!

Calling all you WRX traders. Both volume as well as number of trades matter, so bring on your A-game! 🚀

Prizes will be distributed within 3 days!
Placing Antiquity’s Afterlife. For the Hamburghian scholar Aby Warburg…
By: Kristen Hook
Tags: Afterlife Of Latin, Cultural Memory, Aby Warburg, Renaissance, Features

“O quae de cunctis foelix mortalibus una es, / Polia quae vivis mortua, sed melius.” [O, you! uniquely fortunate among mortals: Polia, / You, who live dead — but better.]

Thus a poem introducing the anonymous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) rejoices over the singularly happy fate of the nymph, Polia: hailed as “she who lives dead — but better.”

We will find that similar words make up the nymph’s Latin “epitaph” (Epitaphium Poliae) at the close of the cryptic book, contributing to its sepulchral tone and general, lapidary spirit:

“Foelix Polia, quae sepulta vivis, / Charo marte Poliphilus quiescens / Iam fecit vigilare te sopitam.” [O, happy Polia! You, who live — though entombed; / Polifilo, now recovering from the harsh battle, / once made a sleeping-you wake.]

The Hypnerotomachia, the account of “Polifilo’s Love-Battle in a Dream,” reflects a new kind of lived relationship with Antiquity as it emerged in 15th century humanist and philosophical circles. Written in a strange and uniquely challenging Italian, paired with an abundance of enigmatic woodcuts, the beautiful book has been called everything from an “archaeological romance” to the “Finnegans Wake of the Renaissance.”

While the Hypnerotomachia clearly depicts a philological passion, it is still tricky to pinpoint exactly what our protagonist Polifilo (“lover of Polia”) is pursuing in his dream-quest. Who is Polia? What is Polia, this figure who lives despite her death? (And perhaps even because of it, if having died is what makes her “live better,” and better than other mortals…)

Giorgio Agamben suggests that Polia is not simply a figure of Ancient learning, a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of the past (in which case her name might derive from the Greek poli). In Agamben’s reading, Polifilo’s love instead takes her name from the Greek poliòs, polìa, “the grey lady” or “old woman” (“Il sogno della lingua,” Categorie italiane [1996]). That is to say, Polia is a figure for Latin itself: a petrified memory of the “dead” language that haunts the Hypnerotomachia’s stony, tedious Italian.

The remains of antiquity. Woodcuts from the Hypnerotomachia Polifili. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Polia’s life is her afterlife in Polifilo’s uncomfortable, Latinizing vernacular: a language slowed down by the weight of her presence within it. Both focusing and disorienting our reading, we run into Polia word after word, like the marble ruins, tablets, and other structures the marveling Polifilo stumbles upon in his sleep. We note, too, that Polia’s resurrection is not properly a “renaissance,” i.e. a death followed by a rebirth. Instead, she has paradoxically survived her own death, waking spectrally for a moment (she is made to vigilare) in the wordy dream of the text.
To Still the Speed
By: Jessica Lee Mcmillan
Tags: Music, Anxiety, Audible Sundays, Poetry, Dark Night Of The Soul

I’ve come here frantic

in twisting motion of day,

I grasp at the trunk

and hold up my face.

I breathe bright

calling out in sky

high trajectory.

To still the speed, I bend.

I drive feet into grass

until the shadows flex

and stars vent in long cries

on damp and black bars.

Everything gathers round

frenzied instrument in song

but greater arcs of light

pace the spheres above.

And after crescendo,

in sonorous clime,

the whistles in vastness

stretch to dawn.

I melt in advent of light,

chest humming inside,

electric throat lulled,

pacified and tuned,

in morning unafraid.

Jessica Lee McMillan © 2020 | Inspired by Oliver Coates’ “Caregiver” Parts 1–5 from his new release skins ‘n slime. Listen to all five parts in Soundcloud link above or via Spotify below.
Vacation!
By: Pawan Kumar
Tags: Relationships, Psychology, Love, Loneliness, Poetry

Who to apply?

She wants a vacation from herself.

She’s so tired.
PSEO student will be a doctor who understands patients’ autism
By: Molly Wilson
Tags: Autism, Bethel University, Doctors, Pseo, Asperger Syndrome

PSEO student will be a doctor who understands patients’ autism

Megan Carver has autism, which changes the way she answers questions and what she wants for her future.

By Molly Wilson | Reporter

Megan Carver sits in the South Dale Pediatrics doctor’s office. Her doctor keeps repeating the same question.

“How was your day?”

A blanket of silence covers the room. Carver’s stuck.

Which answer do they want? Should I tell them about school? Which class? Do they want to know how I am feeling?

“I feel like there’s a right or wrong answer. I am going to give them the wrong thing” — Megan Carver, PSEO student

The doctor asks again. Carver’s mom sits next to her and waits for the doctor to give up. They always do. None of them understand Carver’s high functioning autism. They just assume she is being rude.

“It feels like sometimes they are looking for a specific answer,” Carver said. “I feel like there’s a right or wrong answer. I am going to give them the wrong thing. … It just makes me anxious I guess.”

Carver studies in her dorm room on campus. She is a PSEO student and decided that she was ready for the next step after high school. Carver is mainly considering attending the University of Kansas in the fall. “[PSEO is] a good way with my Aspergers and stuff, to test the waters and get everything sorted out before I might head off to college far away,” Carver said. | Photo by Molly Wilson

This is a story about a girl who wants to help kids like her; kids who can’t find the right answer. She wants to be the doctor. But instead of repeating the question, she will know to ask a more specific one.

In a different visit, the doctors tried to put Carver back in Prairie Care, a residential facility, again they did not understand. The doctors thought she had clinical depression. Sitting there with self-inflicted bite marks Carver felt like she was “crawling out of her own skin.” Her brain was actually flooding with serotonin because of an increase in her medication dosage. Carver had to convince them that this was a rare case of serotonin syndrome. The facility, where she was bullied and the doctors did not understand her, could not solve the depression she did not have.

It took so much energy to sit in those doctor’s appointments which is why Carver wants to study applied behavioral sciences with a concentration on children with autism at the University of Kansas next year.
Shame: Self-Discovery Card
By: Jordin James
Tags: Inspiration, Spirituality, Mental Health, Psychology, Self

Shame is the misguided older sibling within you that tries to protect you from abandonment by instructing you to abandon yourself.

What shame doesn’t know is true love will never abandon you. True love knows you inside and out and it is still with you, inside your bones, forever holding on to your heart.

Underneath shame is, “the ashamed one,” within you — the younger sibling that believes they are too broken to be worthy of love.

Wrap the ashamed one in your arms, just as your highest self wraps you in theirs, and listen to the whispers that have been chanting within you since birth:
Code Smell 31 — Accidental Methods on Business Objects
By: Maximiliano Contieri
Tags: Software Design, Programming, Code Smells, Clean Code, Persistence

Adding persistence, serialization, displaying, importing, exporting code to an object bloats its protocol and brings coupling.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

Problems

Readability

Coupling

Maintainability

Solutions

Keep your objects clean. Decouple business objects. Separate accidental concerns: Move Persistence, Formatting, Serialization to special objects. Keep essential protocol using bijection.

Examples

Persistence

Identifiers

Serialization

Formatting

Sample Code

Wrong

Right

Detection

It is difficult (but not impossible) to create linting rules based on naming and hinting for suspect names.

Exceptions

Some frameworks force us to inject dirty code in our objects. (For example identifiers).

We should try to use better languages/frameworks.

Tags

Declarative

Conclusion

We are very used to see business objects polluted. This is normal. We need to reflect on the consequences and coupling from these designs.
The Long Game
By: Simon Huckk
Tags: Life Lessons, Goals, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life

The Long Game

A strategy for success

One of the most valuable things I’ve adopted in the last few years has been a journaling habit. It’s not fancy. It’s not complicated. I don’t always do it, some days I don’t get around to it. Almost every day, though, I scribble something down in my (now digital) diary.

Along with a daily habit, I have a reminder set in my calendar for a quarterly review. It’s just a quick touch in to see how the last three months have been. One of the steps is to go back through my daily entries and open 10 random days and read them.

Why? It’s a reminder of the journey that I’ve traveled, and more importantly the progress I’ve made. From my experience, having that journey front-of-mind when planning the future is the best way to prime your thinking for measurable, and therefore sustainable, success. Let me explain.

Being forward-focused is an innate trait of human beings. It’s one of the primary reasons we’ve evolved to the top of the food chain. As the pressure to become a better, faster, stronger version of ourselves increases, we place more emphasis on big wins. I want to get there now.

Unicorns, billionaires, IPO’s, world records, millions of followers — they’re constant reminders of what success looks like. The media is full of overnight successes like Facebook. That causes a bias.

When a new year rolls in, too many people see it as an opportunity for the break-through success they’ve been waiting for. This is going to be my year. It’s also the primary reason most people never follow through on their new year’s resolutions and achieve what they want to.

Tackling a big, hairy, audacious goal is hard. Mountains always look intimidating when you’re standing at the foot of them. When things are broken down into sizeable chunks with intermediate finish lines, the inertia to start moving is far less. The long game is knowing that the small wins add up. Consistently putting one foot in front of the other is what moves the needle.

Journalling places an emphasis on the long game. By reading through your entries from 2 days, weeks, or months ago, you’re reminded of where you’ve come from. It shifts the focus away from “what can I achieve this year” towards “what can I do today that will pay off in 10 years' time”.

Most people overestimate what you can achieve in one year, and grossly underestimate what you can achieve in 5 or 10. The journey to success is made up of small increments of effort over a long period of time.

As the year winds down, and we ponder what the next loop around the sun holds, consider the long game when you’re planning your future. Do you know where you want to be in 5, 10 or 15 years from now? What steps can you take today, that will set that flywheel in motion?
得意なことで仕事を受注するために必要な3つのこと
By: プロブロガーのタクスズキ
Tags: Japanese, Medium Japan, Media

in Both Sides of the Table
好產品的 10 個共同特性？好設計背後的底層邏輯？
By: 侯智薰 Raymond Ch Hou
Tags: 中文, Psychology, Product, Design, Business

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