fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Month in Crypto — July 19. US Congress ask to halt Facebook’s…
By: Alex Clegg
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, A16z, Bitcoin

US Congress ask to halt Facebook’s crypto project Libra, Visa and a16z invest in crypto security company Anchorage, BITPoint hacked for $32M.

The News

The US Congress asked Facebook to pause development on their controversial cryptocurrency project, Libra, citing regulatory concerns over the impact of a global currency controlled by a private corporation. theguardian

Japanese exchange BITPoint was hacked with $32M in various cryptocurrencies stolen. time

German Regulators approved a tokenised real-estate-backed bond. The Berlin-based company will offer USD$280M worth of tokens over the ethereum public blockchain. coindesk

Capital

Visa and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in a $40M series B round in the cryptocurrency security start-up, Anchorage. The start-up is positioning itself as a secure cryptocurrency wallet service for Facebook’s Libra coin. techcrunch

Sia, the company behind a decentralised cloud storage platform raised $3.5M round led by Bain Capital Partners with notable investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners also participating. sia

Shell invested an undisclosed amount in the start-up LO3. The company has built a blockchain to allow neighbours to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables. forbes

Kraken, one of the large US cryptocurrency exchanges, acquired Interexchange. The company is a leading portfolio reconciliation tool for institutional traders. kraken

Adoption

Fujitsu announced a digital ID system built on the blockchain to minimise fraud in online transactions. fujitsu

The Ugandan President announced a partnership with the medical blockchain start-up, MediConnect, in an effort to tackle counterfeit drugs in the country. verdict

The Australian supermarket chain IGA now accepts cryptocurrencies as a form of payment through a partnership with Travelbybit. fxstreet

Market:

After five months of gains, the positive market run has reversed and the market was down 8% in July. Bitcoin remained neutral and was only down 2% for the month, finishing with a global average of USD $10,015. Ethereum performed worse, ending July 24% down at USD $214.
The Autumn Fox
By: Bridget Webber
Tags: Short Story, Poetry, Fiction, Nature, Autumn

Fox scouts the dawn with keen nose and ear, listening to the beat creak from the earth-tide.

Thump, thump, thump, the planet’s heart vibrating autumn leaves.

Crimson bronze and gold, fur and leaf, dance under the oak to life’s rhythm: A chorus of beauty under the morning sun rising to a saffron sky.

And when the day is done, weary, the contented fox curls, tight as a new leaf, to dream of the hare and pheasant in the sweet moon-song lullaby sung by the stars.
How to Add Your Recently Published Medium Articles to Your GitHub Readme
By: Iman Tumorang
Tags: Medium, Open Source, Github, Software Development, Programming

More About This Plug-In

I’m using Vercel for the static hosting and the serverless function to retrieve the recent articles. I might be able to add a custom domain, but that’s for later.

I’m using an RSS feed from Medium. You can get your RSS feed from Medium by entering this URL: https://medium.com/feed/@yourMediumUsername.

Then convert it to JSON using API RSS to JSON:

Make it generic so everyone is able to use it.

To make it generic so people can directly pass their Medium username to the serverless function:

https://github-readme-medium-recent-article.vercel.app/medium/@imantumorang

I need to make the folder of my serverless function as follows:

└── medium

└── [user]

└── [index].ts

The [user] directory is required so I can make the username dynamic. I was stuck on this problem when I was making the plug-in. Actually, I can create it using query-param like ?username=@imantumorang , but from my experience and keeping REST in mind, making it path-param is the proper way to tell that the param is required. Also, I want to keep the experience the same as when you’re visiting your Medium profile (e.g. medium.com/@imantumorang).

I knew that comments in the Medium articles would be added automatically to the RSS. To only display the article, I added a filter function on the function:

if (thumbnail.includes("cdn")) {

fixItem.push(element)

}

So I only enabled articles that have a thumbnail. I’m still looking for a workaround for this because if the article doesn’t have any thumbnail, it will be skipped. At least for now, if your article has a thumbnail, it will be displayed when we import it to your GitHub readme.

It may take time to be able to get your recent article to be listed (for a new article) since the API RSS to JSON is cached. Please wait around 1-3 hours after the article has been published on Medium.
The Profit With Marcus Lemonis: Santa’s Workshop
By: Tyler Gooch
Tags: Humor, Satire, Finance, Christmas, Television

The Profit With Marcus Lemonis: Santa’s Workshop

Only one man can save a workshop hoping to make toys for every child in the world.

Santa Photo by Cottonbro on Pexels. The Profit is property of CNBC (Fair Use)

Self-made millionaire Marcus Lemonis risks his own money helping small business owners. His professional acumen and valuable insights have saved countless companies around the globe. Today, Marcus is headed to an overworked and struggling warehouse in the North Pole.

Act One

It’s June. Marcus arrives at the workshop and is shocked. All of the machines are off and none of the workers are on the floor. Where is everyone? An elf tells Marcus that they can’t work right now because Santa hasn’t collected any orders.

Mrs. Claus begs Marcus to help. “He’s sunk everything we have into this workshop. This is our home. This is all we have and if we lose it, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

Santa gives Marcus a tour of the factory and explains that he has to wait until later in the year to start collecting orders because a) children are constantly changing their minds about what they want for Christmas and b) parents are weird about letting their kids sit on the lap of an overweight bearded man in shorts, drenched in sweat from the summer heat.

Marcus tells Santa he sees a lot of inefficiencies but that he loves Santa’s brand. He offers $800,000 for a 20% stake in the North Pole. Santa reluctantly agrees, telling the cameras, if things don’t work out, he will simply outlive Marcus as “Santa is immortal and, while I can’t know for sure, I assume he [Marcus] is not.”

Marcus makes it clear that the money comes with a stipulation: that Marcus is in charge.

Act Two

Bernard, the head elf, tells Marcus that he wants to use technology to predict what the hot toy will be so the elves can get a start on manufacturing it earlier in the year. Santa scoffs at this idea. He brings up 1998 when he let Bernard try to pre-produce that year’s supposed hot toy, an action figure of a man who’d been bitten by a radioactive centipede and sprouted one hundred beefy human arms from his torso, only to be caught flat-footed when the letters rolled in and revealed the real hot toy of the year: the Furby. “We tried Bernard’s way and it almost ruined us,” Santa says in a way that makes it clear that he is not budging. Bernard insists that the Furby was an anomaly, an outlier; that the Furby made no sense in theory or practice. What even was it?

Marcus is deeply moved by a sob story he hears from Carol, an elf who has been working in the factory for 140 years and has never gotten a pay raise, or any pay at all, for that matter.

When he gets a look at the financial records Marcus almost loses his cool. He’s impressed by the low cost of labor but baffled when he sees no money coming in.

Marcus and Santa almost come to blows when Marcus asks to see the copyright documents for the PS5s Santa is manufacturing, only to find out that Santa does not have the rights to produce these, or any of the toys he makes.

Act Three
Nature and Me
By: Debbie Walker
Tags: Poetry, Life, Nature, Creation, Poem

My sky is full of stars

But I have clouds in my heart.

My eyes are filled with mist

And I have rain in my hands.

Sunshine marks my path

While the snow falls behind.

Creation exists within me

To surround my soul forever.
The Cause: Loving Activism
By: Patsy Starke
Tags: Resistance Poetry, Transgender, LGBTQ, Activism, Gender Identity

I won’t be your cause

nor,

can you be my cause

but,

you can be your cause

and

I’ll be my cause

then,

we can support each other’s cause.

Patsy, 2018
The Letters
By: Tien Skye
Tags: Superstition, Humour, Chain Letter, Relationships, Flash Fiction

He found the letters while looking for a nail file in the dressing table; he finally knew the truth behind their misfortune. To think she was capable of such vile act! His very own wife!

Yet, she was unrepentant upon confrontation.

“They’re harmless, dear. All chain letters are.”
Jumpy-Jacks
By: Terry Trueman
Tags: Poetry, Self Deprecation, Exercise, Counter Erotic, Humor

Jumpy-Jacks

Not every poem I write . . .

Image courtesy of Patrick Tomasso, Unsplash

. . . is going to make perfect sense,

or move the world into a better orbit,

or make your grandma or great auntie beam

with pride and cure

some major diseases or

send super-models into orgasmic delight.

This isn’t just because

I have some need

to sound too clever by half

and/or to show-off in any way.

It IS because,

I old now . . .

Image courtesy of author

. . . and not every

feeling, thought, insight,

hope, fear, fantasy, dream

I possess or that possesses me

is all that clear to me either.

And, you know,

after all, they are poems,

(F’-in’ poems!).

Roland Smith portrait of author from author’s pers. pics

I suppose

I should do more push-ups

(like if I could do ANY!)

Or jumpy-jacks (let’s just leave that

one alone)

sit-ups, leg-lifts, pelvic self-exams —

anything, ANYTHING,

So that all my stuff

would hum and giggle and glow

like little glow-worms!

Nope,

sorry, I guess . . .

although come to think of it

not really all THAT sorry —

sure as hell not sorry enuf

to do jumpy-jacks.

*****************************************

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Trueman

Most of my books can be found . . .somewhere . . Go ahead . . buy one, by a bunch . . . or get it all here for free!! xoxoxoxox
Fixing the Domain/Default Pair Error on Flutter
By: Lew C
Tags: Flutter App Development, Android Development, Software Development, Flutter, Ios Development

Photo by Eugen Str on Unsplash

If you’re like me, you’ve been enjoying using Flutter to make some really great apps lately. One of the things about using such a cutting edge framework is that you’re bound to encounter some potentially weird issues…without knowing exactly how to fix it.

I just spent 4 hours on the domain/default pair issue. In your build log it looks like this:

It’s not clear what is going wrong here. Looking up further in the build log gives us some more idea.

Can you spot it? It’s the last line. For some reason, Flutter is trying to recursively add our assets folder into our build, which is making the build break with a totally unrelated and nonsensical error. This issue tracks the problem, with a wide array of potential fixed (like moving your assets folder elsewhere, checking if you have .env files in your project root), but none of them fixed it for me.

I hypothesised that this could be happening because of how I was including my assets. In my project, it looked like this:

assets:

- winkydude.json

- assets/avatars/

- phone.png

- logo.png

The problem was with the bolded line — I was including a folder and figuring Flutter could just bring everything from that folder in recursively. I changed it to this, where I explicitly called out every single file that was in that folder.

assets:

- winkydude.json

# - assets/avatars/

- phone.png

- logo.png

- assets/avatars/bike.json

- assets/avatars/coffeebiscuit.json

- assets/avatars/hearts.json

- assets/avatars/ice_cream.json

- assets/avatars/sheepcart.json

- assets/avatars/sheepcomputer.json

- assets/avatars/sheepoutrun.json

- assets/avatars/sheeprain.json

- assets/avatars/sheepswimming.json

And my build started working.

I don’t want to name every file in my assets directory

You probably should anyway, right? That way you get to see in your commits over time when specific files came and left your build. And you’re not just adding a bucket of files into your app.

As I come across more ways of fixing this issue, I’ll update this article.

I hope this helps you! Comment if it does (or if it doesn’t). And happy Fluttering!

https://www.twitter.com/FlutterComm
My First Time Rimming Was Magical
By: Chris Hedges
Tags: Erotica, Red Curtain Erotica, Transgender, LGBTQ, Dick Pics

I love rimming. It makes me hot pleasing a man

The first time I was rimmed was part of my spiritual first anal experience. It made me want to give the pleasure I had received to someone else.

Continue reading My First Time Rimming Was Magical.
Hayes Valley: Then & Now
By: Ben Zotto
Tags: Hayes Valley, Builtenvironment, San Francisco, Urban Planning, History

The “Ham & Eggs” fire began in the immediate aftermath of the 1906 earthquake when someone attempted to cook breakfast indoors with a damaged chimney. To prevent further destruction of this kind, meals were then prepared (safely) outdoors for a time. This view of Fell Street, taken between Octavia and Laguna Streets, shows the makeshift kitchens in the road. Look very closely and you might see “KEEP OUT” scrawled on one of them.

The whole streetscape of buildings at left would eventually be demolished for a Central Freeway off-ramp. That site is today under construction as a future 108-unit affordable housing complex.

The tower of Sacred Heart Church (currently hosting The Church of 8 Wheels) on Fillmore St is just visible in both photos at the center background. A handful of other buildings also survived the 112 years between the images: the two western corners at Laguna St are still there, as are a couple structures on the right side of Fell St in the photos.
King: We’re Hack Again!
By: Tech At King
Tags: Hacks, Technology, Gaming, Tech, Hackathons

By James Glass, Xavier Gibert & Zuzanna Kruszczynska

On each Hack Day at King, we round-up tech gurus from far and wide with a creative range of ideas on how to improve the technologies and internal tools that we use.

Our recent Barcelona Hack Day event gave King employees a chance to take a break from daily work to collaborate and connect with new Kingsters.

It’s also where new product ideas can come to life!

From hacks designed around improving ticket features on JIRA, to increasing our time-efficiency using software tools. Some projects were just meant to bring Kingsters together from different disciplines while learning about other subjects such as Clojure.

The Winner! — Improving Filtro with KSQL

By Xavier — “Super Cool” Java Developer

This Hack Day project highlighted how Filtro could be improved if its backend was replaced with KSQL.

What’s Filtro?

Filtro is a logging tool to view and filter tracking events at King in development, QA, and live environments. However, when the user needs to transform/aggregate events, programming knowledge is required to create a Java/Groovy script. This along with the fact that tech incidents can and will occur were central reasons for building this project, as it would allow quicker response-times for solutions to the issues when they occur.

“… it supports a varied range of streaming operations, including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, windowing, and sessionisation.”

Xavier proudly holding his trophy!

W hat is KSQL?

This is an open source streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka. It offers a simple and complete interactive SQL interface for stream processing on Kafka. KSQL is scalable, elastic and fault-tolerant, supporting a varied range of streaming operations that are essential at King including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, windowing, and sessionisation.

Normally to find any errors or anomalies, as a dev, you would need to write an RBEA script. The benefits of using KSQL for this hack project included: No coding, no additional analytics cluster, streams and tables as first-class constructs along with access to the rich Apache Kafka interconnected system.

The outcome — The project is in developmental stages; however, it works in terms of functionality and would need access to a properly configured environment in QA for example. A local test environment was used at the hack demo to illustrate how it could be applied to detect anomalies in the data.

The challenges — Working on a project that didn’t use Kafta and wasn’t prepared to process events was challenging along with trying to find something that was not only useful for developers but also useful for other users such as Data Scientists.

The future — Getting access to a UI on top of an API would further help this project move forward which could potentially help King detect incidents as they occur much quicker. The project still has a long way to go, however, the initial results have been shared with the product owner of Filtro at King so let’s see!

King — Hack Day Barcelona Video Snippet
Dev Portfolios: How to Stand Out From the Crowd
By: Albert Walicki
Tags: Programming, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Learning To Code

Create Interesting Projects for Your Portfolio

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

I am a front end developer who owns a small software house. As an entrepreneur, I’ve seen many candidate’s portfolios. Many landing pages created by those developers were pixel-perfectly identical!

In Poland, we have an incredible challenge for front-end developers called “The Weekly Web Dev Challenge.” I love this challenge and I participated in it when I was a junior. Each week participants create landing pages and are then given feedback.

So, after a few challenges, multiple developers had similar projects in their portfolios/CVs, which they then used to apply to the same employers.

Put yourself in the employer’s shoes. You’re looking for a new developer, so you posted a job offer. After a few hours, you get ten CVs, all with the same project! Not one stands out from the crowd.

Those challenges are useful for practice, but they’re not suitable when you’re trying to distinguish yourself. No one tells you that when you’re looking for your first job. That’s why I’m telling you now!
The Front-End Features You Might Have Missed
By: Adrien Miquel
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Front End Development, Web Development, JavaScript

User Interface

Layout

Creating a web app starts with building an attractive and accurate layout that will attract the user and make them spend a lot of time on your website.

Many CSS frameworks exist, and maybe you will find the one fitting your needs. The most famous one is Bootstrap, and thanks to CSS preprocessors’ new capabilities, you can easily customize it. They suggest various components and controls that will give a homogeneous aspect to your site.

To date, Bootstrap has released an alpha of its fifth version.

If you prefer creating your own CSS framework (i.e., component aspect, spacings, containers, etc.), flexbox is a good bet to manage flexible blocks of content.

CSS Grid uses another approach by dividing blocks of content into a grid.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness is the ability for a website to adapt the disposal of its content according to the reader’s device. For instance, you won’t see this article the same way if you read it on your smartphone and on your desktop.

The responsiveness of a web app helps to display content precisely and improves readability and user experience.

As MDN web docs says, “Media queries are useful when you want to modify your site or app depending on a device’s general type (such as print vs. screen) or specific characteristics and parameters (such as screen resolution or browser viewport width).”

CSS media queries are a powerful way to handle responsiveness.

You can use them paired with Flexbox or CSS Grid, as we saw earlier. If you prefer using a CSS framework, responsiveness is usually already managed. You just need to add specific CSS classes.

Using srcset for images can be a good option to make your images responsive. It allows you to render the same image with different initial sizing according to the device dimension, keeping the aspect ratio and reducing its weight in the bundle.

Homogeneous components and controls

Having homogenous components and controls will be soft on users’ eyes. It’s like a guideline, a breadcrumb for the users, and an identity for your company.

If you want to use an existing framework, here are the famous JS framework libraries:

Angular — Angular’s alternative is Angular Material, with powerful components and a complete CDK.

React — The material design implementation of web components: Material UI.

Vue.js — Finally, the Vue.js community has created its own implementation of material guidelines: Vuetify.

Validation and errors

Validating is essential when you deal with user inputs. Whether the errors come from network issues, server errors, or bad user inputs, it’s important to manage validation and errors in your app.

Angular — As a complete framework, Angular provides an API regarding form validation.

React — The most-used plugin to handle form validation in a React app might be React Hook Form.

Vue.js — A funny play on words for this Vue.js version: vuelidate
Having fun with HTML5 — Range type input
By: Yan Cui
Tags: Html5, Programming

Besides the much talked about video tag, HTML5 also introduced a couple of new input types, one of which is a rather interesting range input type which basically translates to a slider bar control:

The range input type is currently supported by the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and Opera while other browsers such as Firefox simply treat the field as a textbox.

There are four available attributes — min, max, step and value. min and max should be self explanatory, step determines the size of each increment/decrement and value is the current value of the slider and also determines the placement of the slider when the element is loaded (if not specified, the slider will appear at the centre of the control when it’s first loaded):

[code lang=”javascript” light=”true”]

<input type=”range” min=”0" max=”200" step=”5"></input>

[/code]

[code lang=”javascript” light=”true”]

<input type=”range” min=”0" max=”200" value=”0" step=”5"></input>

[/code]

I talked about the new border radius property being introduced in CSS3 in my previous blog post, and with a little JQuery I’ve put together a quick demo here of how a 400px by 400px square looks as the border radius changes.

If you look at the source of the page you will see that I added a changeBorder javascript function to handle the onchange event fired by the slider, which dynamically updates the HTML content of an internal CSS class called mySliderBarStyles using the current value of the slider control:

[code lang=”javascript”]

<input id=”mySliderBar” type=”range” min=”0" max=”200" value=”0" step=”5"

onchange=”changeBorder(this.value)”></input>

…

<script type=”text/javascript”>

function changeBorder(newValue) {

var newRadius = newValue + “px”;

// set the html content of the label showing the current radius value

$(“#rangeValue”).html(newRadius);

// set the style with the new radius value

$(“#mySliderBarStyles”).html(

“#myDiv { -webkit-border-radius: “ + newRadius + “; }”

);

}

</script>

…

<style type=”text/css” id=”mySliderBarStyles”></style>

[/code]

References:

Dive Into HTML5
Merry Christmas 🎄 / Ripple sued by SEC / Coinbase filed for IPO
By: Gaurav Agrawal
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Coinmonks, Bitcoin

Merry Christmas 🎄 / Ripple sued by SEC / Coinbase filed for IPO

U.S. government is targeting cryptocurrency to expand the reach of its financial surveillance

Coinbase announced on Thursday that it has confidentially filed for a public offering, becoming the latest in a parade of high-profile startups to pursue an IPO in 2020.

Ripple Inc. said it will defend itself against a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission that claims the company violated investor-protection laws when it sold a bitcoin-like digital asset called XRP.

On Friday, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced a proposed regulation that would require money service businesses (which includes, for example, cryptocurrency exchanges) to collect identity data about people who transact with their customers using self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets or foreign exchanges.

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Developers

Wanna become a Etheruem and Web3 developer? Start here.

Miscellaneous

Money movers

Chrome is bad

Swether — design your Christmas sweater NFT

Podcasts & Videos 💽

All the ways crypto can make gaming more Fuf

Diving deep into liquidity mining

Crypto from the Outside

Hackathons, Events & Summits

Inout 7.0 virtual hackathon challenge

Decentralized Web Seattle meets Dec 17th

ETHGlobal’s Market Make hackathon

Crypto Deals and Discount 🔖

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If you like to write educational articles on crypto/blockchain space and wanna get published on Coinmonks publication. Just mail me at gaurav@coincodecap.com or DM me Twitter
Episode 6: Divide and conquer
By: Martin Breitsprecher
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Peer To Peer, Blockchain Technology, Bitcoin

Episode 6: Divide and conquer

Combining transactions into blocks

Now that everyone keeps a list of all orders at The Blockchain Bar, how can our friends make sure to detect errors quickly and make it easy to correct them?

Carol detects an error in her list. She says: “Bob, my list is shorter than yours, there must be something wrong!”

Bob replies totally annoyed: “Oh no! Now we have to go back and compare all those pages. Isn’t there a better way?”

Alice smiles: “Easy! Let’s compare the list every time we reach the end of a page. Then potential errors can only be on that current page. If everything is correct, we’ll hand out all drinks ordered on that page.”

In blockchain systems, transactions are also grouped into “pages”, which are called “blocks”. From time to time, all computers compare their current block with each other, agree on the correct version and start a new one.

Do they really need to compare the pages line by line to detect an error? Find out in the following episodes …

Or maybe you first want to read more about block building on TheBlockchainBar.com.

Nacatmoto’s Lesson #6: Blocks of transactions

The story of Blockruption’s Blockchain Bar began in June 2018, when Martin Breitsprecher and Collin Müller sat in a restaurant in the port of Hamburg. For a long time, they had been trying several approaches of explaining the blockchain to non-nerds. While joking around, they discovered that almost any blockchain concept can be explained with a hypothetical bar that is run by the guests themselves in a beer-to-beer … uh … peer-to-peer fashion.
IMPEACHMENT BOMBSHELL: New Revelation Suggests Dems Can Remove Trump from Office by Winning Election
By: Sir Longfellow
Tags: Impeachment, Politics, Democrats

IMPEACHMENT BOMBSHELL: New Revelation Suggests Dems Can Remove Trump from Office by Winning Election Sir Longfellow Follow Feb 5 · 2 min read

Just hours after the senate voted to acquit Trump of both charges levied against him, a stunning revelation has rocked the Democratic Party, sending shockwaves through the impeachment proceedings and giving new life to the glum lot who had all but given up on any hope of removing Trump from office.

In a closed doors session inside the Democratic house chamber earlier today, an anonymous whistleblower made the courageous assertion that Trump can still, indeed, be removed from office, should Dems find a way to miraculously prevail in the upcoming election.

“It’s like a bigger impeachment trial, is what I’m told,” said Nancy Pelosi, excitedly re-ordering a pallet of commemorative pens from Amazon. “Except this time, it’s based on popularity, which, if my Myspace friends list is any indication, is currently at its highest tally since 2004.”

Though we have little information on the whistleblower’s identity, they are believed to be a Postmates delivery driver, who happened to deliver a luke-warm basket of falafels to the chamber of crestfallen dems just as they received the news that Trump had, once again, thwarted their latest attempt to relieve him of The Presidency.

When asked by our reporters if they had any candidates who they thought could defeat Trump, none of the democrats in attendance offered any further insight, though reporters from The Penny Press noted that the muffled cries of Bernie Sanders could be heard emanating from what appeared to be a potato sack stuffed underneath Elizabeth Warren’s desk.

Said Mr. Sanders, “I’m still here.”

Upon being informed by our staff that winning the general election would require a lawful vote of “the people,” Dems responded by angrily overturning the monopoly board, sending the Republicans’ plastic hotels (of which there were, at this point, many) skidding across the floor, before storming out of the chamber.
Hosting a website for free on github pages.
By: Faiza Anan Noor
Tags: JavaScript, Web Development, Github, Github Pages, HTML

Click on the “+” icon at the top and then click new Repository.

Step 3: Naming your Repository

Give an appropriate and relevant name to your repository and make sure that it’s set to Public in the description. And then lastly hit “create Repository“ button at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4: Pushing files to the Repository

This step simply includes pushing your website code to the repository. I’ll suggest using git bash for this purpose. Just open up git bash in the directory of your code and then execute the following commands first:

git init

git add .

git commit -m "Initial upload"

Now bring in your repository link, and execute the following command:

git remote add origin https://github.com/faiza993/bg-color-changer.git

Here the term “https://github.com/faiza993/bg-color-changer.git” refers to our github repository link.

Now execute this:

git push -u origin main

Now this is finally upload your codes to the remote repository.

Step 5: Enabling Github pages:

i) Firstly, go to settings on your repository in the following way
Horny, Lonely, Crippled
By: Victoria Ponte
Tags: Disability, Sex, Gratitude, Casual Sex, Dating

John Rocha for Pexels

Horny, Lonely, Crippled

Different Reasons For Having Casual Sex

Many believe sex is better with someone you know and/or love. Despite this, there is still lots of casual hooking up going on. People have various reasons for engaging in this behavior that can also lead to hurt feelings, depression, shame, unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Some are simply horny and don’t want to be in a committed relationship. Loneliness can also lead people to casual hookups which may bring temporary relief from their sense of isolation. Perhaps oddly, I occasionally hook up with someone not because I’m horny or lonely, but because I am crippled and doing so makes me feel alive and grateful I can still do it.

I was left totally paralyzed on my left side from a stroke during pregnancy when I was 35. I didn’t have sex for the next five years until my husband recovered enough from the trauma and my depression lifted enough for me to become interested again. I thought having sex was life affirming and having survived a life threatening ordeal I thought I should be having lots of it.

Unfortunately my husband didn’t share my enthusiasm. We drifted.

When he thought opening our marriage might help, I reluctantly went along with it because I was willing to do whatever it took to keep the marriage intact. We each started dating other people.

I was not interested in hooking up with anyone just to have sex. I wanted a relationship, too. I met a nice man right away and we had a great time, including lots of sex. He was polyamorous and lived with his girlfriend. So I continued dating new people, too.

Since we weren’t monogamous, it occurred to me that I could have sex with anyone I wanted. It looked like an adventure worth trying. Since the stroke, I was about living life all out. I mostly dated around, and only had sex with a few people.

After about two years, I was connecting with someone online who was extremely hot to trot. I realized there was no real reason why I shouldn’t just meet him at a hotel near me and try this casual sex thing.

Sure it was a safety gamble. It was also a thrill to feel the freedom and empowerment. Unfortunately, there was some nonconsensual activity with that hookup so I cut ties with the guy.

Being 52 and disabled gave me a sense of being less than desirable sometimes. But I found out this wasn’t always the case.

When my boyfriend moved away I connected with a handsome man I had dated a year before just for sex. There wasn’t much connection between us otherwise, but the sex was pretty good.

I kept in touch with him even after I met someone else I’ve been in a relationship with. We have not defined our relationship as exclusive, so occasionally I go to his house for sex just because I can.

I’m not particularly lonely or horny since my boyfriend is great at fulfilling my needs for companionship and sex, but it’s important to me to know that another hot guy still wants me and I am able to do this.

I’m here to live life to its fullest while I can. Life is uncertain.
First Moon
By: A. Christine Myers
Tags: Poetry, Night, Mindfulness, Nature, Moon

Photo by Ankhesenamun on Unsplash

In a corner of last sunbeams,

Where evening green and blue

Gently evaporated to pure light,

There nestled the palest of new moons,

Infant of the evening,

Cradled between treetop and dark cloud

That overspread the start of starless night.
Be Calmer — Listening to Plum Village Choir
By: Zen Michael
Tags: Thich Nhat Hanh, Plum Village, Mindfulness, Meditation, Self Improvement

Be Calmer — Listening to Plum Village Choir

Learn simple ways to reduce stress

Photo by Magicbowls from Pexels

Sometimes we find sounds or melodies that seem to have the power to stop our endless stream of thoughts.

I find it curious how this effect does not seem to be dependent on our ability or knowledge to understand what we are hearing. On the other hand, perhaps this is the explanation, the motive by which we obtain this effect.

Perhaps it is exactly because we do not understand what we are hearing. This lack of knowledge seems to prevent our brain from immediately trying to catalog and interpret what we hear, freeing our attention to focus on something deeper or more intuitive.

This is precisely what I feel when I listen to the Namo Avalokiteshvara interpretation by the Plum Village choir. For those who don’t know them, Plum Village is a Buddhist community of mindfulness practice founded by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I don’t understand the words they sing, nor do I know if these are words or just sounds that form a melody. I don’t know if it’s a song, a mantra, or a prayer. I already thought of going to look for the lyrics or an explanation to understand what they sing. Then I gave up on that idea: I’m afraid that getting to know more about music will break the calming effect that listening to this interpretation has on me.

In addition to the sounds, my attention is also attracted by the expression on the faces of the various elements that participate in this choir from Plum Village. They all seem to be sharing a very profound and at the same time very calm joy.

I find it very relaxing to listen this music, so here I share it with you.

Click on the video, focus your attention, get ready for a special moment.

I hope you enjoy it and that this experience has in you a relaxing effect similar to what I feel.

I often watch/listen to this video to calm myself down or just to take a short break between tasks. If the video has a similar effect in itself, here is one more resource that you can use anytime to create more calm moments in your life.
Who Does Recognize Palestine as a State?
By: Amr Eleraqi
Tags: Palestine, Infotimes Stories, Data Visualization, Maps

The state of Palestine is already a full member-state of many other regional and international organisations all over the world, including the European Union (EU). Nine out of 28 EU member-states have already recognized Palestine as a state, while the latter enjoys Representative Status with the rest. Palestine is also a de jure sovereign state in the region as recognized by at least 137 UN members. Those 137 nations have a combined population of more than 5.5 billion people. While, the major holdouts are the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe. Palestine has an observer-state status in the UN since 2012. This implicitly amounts to a de facto recognition of Palestinian statehood in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip (with occupied East Jerusalem as the designated capital), illegally occupied by Israel since the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967.

The map below shows countries that recognize Palestine as a state.
Loom Protocol — The Next Generation
Tags: Technology, Software Development, Blockchain, Enterprise Technology, Ethereum

Loom Network’s mainnet, Basechain, went live in December 2018, and since then, we’ve upgraded the protocol numerous times in order to fix bugs and add many new features. One of our primary goals has always been to ensure that our mainnet upgrades resulted in zero downtime for dapp developers and users. Barring a few brief chain halts in the early days, we’ve done a pretty good job of reaching that liveness goal.

Unfortunately, such live upgrades are not without a cost. Some core dependencies of the Loom protocol couldn’t be upgraded without incurring a significant amount of downtime, because backwards compatibility was not as high of a priority for the authors of those dependencies as it was for us. This lack of backward compatibility in our dependencies forced our blockchain development team to spend a significant amount of time carefully backporting important bug fixes and features. However, backporting has its limits, as the code eventually diverges too far for that approach to remain practical.

The Loom protocol code has also accumulated a lot of cruft since the mainnet went live. We’ve shipped a few features that turned out to be less useful than we envisioned, and we fixed many bugs in some non-ideal ways to ensure that the fixes could be deployed without any downtime.

So we need to address all that technical debt, upgrade core dependencies, and redesign some of the core systems — now that we have a much better understanding of how the initial designs performed in production. It’s time for us to build the next major version of the Loom protocol that will power Basechain and other blockchains we build for our enterprise clients. Let’s take a look at a non-exhaustive list of changes that will be going into the new version:

Upgrade the consensus engine to the latest 0.33.X Tendermint release to take advantage of all the performance improvements and bug fixes.

Upgrade go-ethereum to v1.9.14 to benefit from optimizations made to EVM opcodes and storage.

Address a number of design issues in the EVM integration affecting receipts, Tx hashes, gas estimation, and contract debugging.

Improve reliability of the contract events system.

Integrate a WASM runtime to support performant and upgradable smart contracts to replace native Go smart contracts. Native Go smart contracts underpin many important capabilities of the current Loom protocol including DPoS, ETH and LOOM transfers, and token transfers between chains. These smart contracts are powerful and performant when compared to EVM contracts, but are also more difficult to implement correctly because they can do a lot more than an EVM contract — including causing consensus failures that can result in chain halts.

We’ll be sharing more technical details about these changes in the following months.
Software Developer, Problem Solver: My Experience Interning at Procurify
Tags: Co Op, Procurify, Software Development

Software Developer, Problem Solver: My Experience Interning at Procurify Cynthia Follow Dec 16 · 3 min read

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ― Laozi

Before interning as a software developer at Procurify, I envisioned a FinTech startup to be a Hackathon in its corporate incarnation. My work at Procurify proves this vision right and wrong. While technical proficiency is key to programming, software development is by no means equivalent to coding thousands of lines with a foreseeable deadline. At Procurify, I had the privilege to work with a team solving problems around payments and customer onboarding―an awesome group of individuals that have encouraged my personal growth beyond being busy. With their tremendous trust and support, I was able to grow quickly in technical proficiency and problem solving.

In the Procurify developer blog series, the engineering team members have introduced programming techniques, remote work, and company culture. In this post, I focus on my takeaways on problem solving.

A meme representing my team at Procurify. Work with them to find out the story behind it.

Takeaway 1: understanding a problem to solve and planning the right strategy can be just as rewarding as actioning on a task immediately. An unforgettable experience was the first time I helped drive product development and build a solution to a problem from beginning to end — building an audit log for a key piece of account configuration. During the initial analysis, the project may take 2–3 months to complete. However, through problem analysis meetings, we were able to identify the root cause for the issue and ship out a central portion first. Through a much shortened iteration, we achieved three goals:

1. Adding values to customers two months in advance.

2. Eliminating related support tickets 100%.

3. Collecting data for future iterations.

Working on the project motivated me to execute ownership with a customer-centred vision.

This winter, Procurify Pay Card is on the way

Takeaway 2: Identifying urgency and prioritizing is key to good problem solving. With the rise of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, I helped the team drive a project related to credit card shipment. This was a time sensitive issue as it affected customer onboarding. Meanwhile, as the service targets the entire customer base, an important work is to tailor the service to high demands. By identifying both urgency and priority, we were able to exceed the expectation with a one-week-faster turnaround. The time we saved allowed us to improve the API performance by 4–5 times. Through the work, I gained invaluable experience on how to exceed expectations while anticipating and taking into account client needs.

In a fully distributed world, working with a good team allows you to flatten your learning curve as an individual. The internship at Procurify has sped up my growth as a software developer and as a problem solver.
Which QSR chain has the most loyal fanbase?
By: Mike Schoppmann
Tags: Qsr, Loyalty, Loyalty Program, Customer Loyalty, Technology

Which QSR chain has the most loyal fanbase?

Foursquare unveils second annual QSR Loyalty Index

By: Mike Schoppmann and Ariel Segal

For the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) biz, it’s all about “Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty” (to quote Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna). Competition is fierce and loyalty is king. With more than 350,000 QSRs in the U.S., marketers and QSR chains need to be smarter, faster, and more innovative if they want to encourage repeat business. Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty!

At Foursquare, our deep understanding of where people go in the real world gives us the unique ability to analyze foot traffic patterns and dining trends from the U.S. consumers who make up our growing, always-on foot traffic panel. Our annual Loyalty Index provides the most accurate assessment of customer loyalty based on a complex set of behaviors and preferences, and distills them into a single metric that can be compared across chains.

To measure customer loyalty, Foursquare uses four key metrics to identify which chains foster the most dedicated fanbase:

Visit Frequency : The average number of visits per diner within a year.

: The average number of visits per diner within a year. Market Penetration : The percentage of all QSR diners who visited the chain within a year. (Penetration was only measured for regions in which the chain exists, so a chain in the northeast, for example, was not impacted for its regionality.)

: The percentage of all QSR diners who visited the chain within a year. (Penetration was only measured for regions in which the chain exists, so a chain in the northeast, for example, was not impacted for its regionality.) Share of Wallet : The percentage of the consumer’s total QSR visits that a particular chain captures within a year.

: The percentage of the consumer’s total QSR visits that a particular chain captures within a year. Fanaticism Threshold: The number of visits within a year required for a customer to be within the top 1% of customers who visit a particular chain, on a scale of 1 to 50.

So without further ado, here is this year’s top 20 QSR chains with the most devoted diners:

Hungry for more? Download our 2018 QSR Loyalty Index report to see the complete list of the top 50 national QSR chains, case studies on the biggest winners and movers, and strategies for what marketers can do to increase consumer loyalty.

To get in touch, visit us at enterprise.foursquare.com or email ads@foursquare.com.

Methodology:

For this analysis, Foursquare’s data scientists analyzed a panel of users who have been active on the Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm apps, as well as partner apps, for a minimum of one year and have visited at least one of the analyzed chains between July 1st, 2017 and June 30th 2018.Foursquare examined the top 50 QSR chains by revenue, as determined by QSR Magazine. All data is anonymized, aggregated and/or pseudonymized, and normalized to match the U.S. Census (removing age, gender, or geographical bias).