fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Here’s to the Day When We Aren’t Surprised by a Woman’s Success
By: Carrie Wynn
Tags: Feminism, Equality, Women, Women In Tech, Sexuality

Can you imagine a world where we don’t have to cheer when a woman excels in her career?

Where a woman’s voice doesn’t fall on deaf ears during a meeting. Where she doesn’t have to fight through every obstacle to been seen. Where she is held to the highest of regards in every professional scenario.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to imagine a world where a woman is held to the exact same regard as a man.

Now, please don’t misunderstand my hope. I think it’s fantastic that there are more and more women in executive positions.

There is no question that times are changing rapidly as we continue to use our voices and advocate for ourselves.

But we have a long way to go.

Out of the Fortune 500 countries of 2019, only 25 of the CEO’s were women.

Even companies that are focused on women’s beauty preferences such as Revlon only just had their first women CEO as of 2018.

Other companies tout similar victories. Best Buy hired its first female CEO in 2018. Citi promoted the first bank CEO, Jane Fraser in 2019.

This is extremely encouraging for women of all generations.

But you know what I’m looking forward to?

When it’s not a surprise that a company had a woman take the reigns. When it is the norm and not something to be celebrated. When the first’s are no longer the first’s but one of many so that they become the norm.

If I ever have a daughter, I want her to look at the successful women of the world and know that she has the same chances of getting to their level as a man.

This will happen if we continue to advocate for our voices and rise up against adversity.

People are not going to stop trying to keep us quiet and to remember our place. Sexism will continue as long as we let it, but change is happening slowly but surely.
R.I.P. David Roback (Mazzy Star)
Tags: 中文, 夢幻民謠, 音樂, RIP, Dream Pop

Mazzy Star / Look On Down From The Bridge

I’m just gone, just gone

How could I say goodbye

Goodbye
Into The Unknown
By: Jasmine Koh
Tags: Exulansis, Unemployment, Quitting A Job, Life, Nonfiction

Into The Unknown

Literally Literary and The Writing Cooperative prompt

Photo by @thedirtiestjas

“You want to quit without getting a new job?” Her tone was incredulous, eyes so wide as if her voice hadn’t emphasised her shock enough already.

“Yes. I already told you why.” I could sense the now familiar crawl of impatience, creeping up on me like a slow itch growing under my skin.

Twirling her hair around her fingers, my friend looks like she’s thinking hard about the next piece of (probably meaningless) advice to give me, but I know her gaze is on her reflection in the cafe mirror.

“You know what?” I finally said after a moment’s pause. “I’ll go home and think about it again.”

“Yeah, I think that’s probably the best.” She mutters distractedly, her fingers now working a loose braid into her hair. (God I wish I could cut it off) “I’m not sure if you’re thinking right, maybe you’re too blinded by something.” She angles her face to see how the braid looks on her skin.

“Maybe.”

I roll my eyes as she starts snapping selfies for her Instagram.
I Will Never Forget the Party We Gave
By: Louise Foerster
Tags: Memory, Blue Insights, Poetry, Joy, Love

I Will Never Forget the Party We Gave

When everything was different.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

I am young and so are you.

We are giving a party in a basement with ping pong table buffet covered with homemade snacks, bottles and cans, and Santa napkins.

The music is loud, the room is crowded, and all of us dance and sing and stomp our furious youth because we can, because we’ve already lived our dreams in one another’s arms, and because it is Christmas and we are having a party with friends, dreams, and memories.

My hair was tangled wild with the wind blowing through it and you gazed at me with such wondrous, loving eyes.
Security Researcher Adds Spy Chip to IT Equipment for Just $200
Tags: Privacy, Information Technology, Security, Networking, Surveillance

by Ryan Whitwam

Credit: Getty Images

Malware scanners can protect your devices from malicious software, but what about malicious hardware? Implanting covert spy chips could give a bad actor unlimited access to your data, which is why Bloomberg Business’ SuperMicro report last year was so worrying. No evidence has surfaced to support those claims, but sneaking spy chips into hardware isn’t impossible, In fact, one security researcher says he’s figured out a way to do it for about $200 in his basement.

In the Bloomberg story, sources claimed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had secretly added small chips to SuperMicro’s server motherboards. These boards were later used in Apple and Amazon servers. The chips were allegedly tiny, no larger than a grain of rice. So, it was understandable they had snuck in under the radar. However, every company named in the story has denied it, and external reviews of SuperMicro boards found no such chips.

We know intelligence agencies like the NSA routinely insert spy chips into devices during transit, and security researcher Monta Elkins claims to have developed a version of that technique with off-the-shelf hardware. All Elkins needed was a $150 air-soldering tool, a $40 microscope, and some tiny programmable chips used in personal electronics projects.

Elkins approach uses an ATtiny85 chip salvaged from Digispark Arduino boards, each of which costs around $2. The chips have a total surface area of about 5mm, more than small enough to go unnoticed on a circuit board. You can see the chip indicated below, but Elkins says he could have made it even more stealthy if he hadn’t wanted to show the chip placement to fellow hackers.

As a proof of concept, Elkins created code for the chip that allowed him to interface with the administrator settings on a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall. Elkins says he chose that model because it was the cheapest one he could find on eBay, but the attack should work on all similar systems. When the compromised board boots up, the chip triggers the firewall’s password recovery feature and creates a new administrator account. An attacker could use that account to monitor network activity and steal data.

Elkins plans to reveal all the details of his project at the upcoming CS3sthlm security conference, but he’s not trying to prove Bloomberg’s report is accurate. Instead, he wants everyone to realize implanting spy hardware is trivially easy regardless of whether that report was true. It only cost him $200 to devise a strategy to do it, and a state-sponsored hacker with access to chip fabrication could make much more stealthy custom designs for a few thousand dollars.

Now read:
The AdJoin Story.
By: Daniel Courtenay
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Advertising Agency, Mobile, Advertising, Publishers

We started discussing AdJoin at the beginning of 2016 at which stage there was no name, a little like a game-plan and not very much knowledge on how we would do this or by when we’d have it done.

Fast forward 18 months…

We’ve worked hard at getting the moving parts that make up this proposition working properly. Inventory, audiences and revenue, remain the three pillars that form the foundation of our audience network. The 3 pillars that, at first thought seem straight forward and easy to dissect and put back together the way you want them to be. The 3 pillars that rely intently on one-another for the network to be a success and the 3 pillars that have been at the centre of the many fires we’ve had to put out over the last almost 2 years on our way to market.

Regardless of the challenges is been incredibly rewarding and I certainly wouldn’t chance it for anything.

I sat down with the good folk at World Wide Creative a few weeks ago to unpack more on @AdJoin — take a listen to the recording — I hope you enjoy!
Lunacy
By: Tarwin Stroh-Spijer
Tags: Insanity, Poetry

Repeating the same thing and expecting different results. Sounds like insanity.

I know.

But every time I expect the initial conditions to be different. I hope that a different butterfly will beat its wings this time and a different set of circumstances will throw a pebble in different stream. And that that stream runs into a different ocean and crashes upon a different shore and eats away a different cliff and a different house collapses.

It didn’t.

It’s the same house that I keep re-making. The same bed I keep making. The same choices and beliefs and the same small lies I tell myself until I believe that this castle will stand against the storm.

I know.

How can I not learn to see what is right there in front of me. To listen to the voice in my head. To the voice whispering in my ear. To the chorus of voices all around me. They tell me to do different. They tell me to listen. They tell me stop pretending. To stop hoping.

They tell me all these things but I keep telling myself to continue being me and one day a different butterfly will beat its wings.
Blockchain Beat — Dec 21, 2017
By: Solomon Lederer
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum

All The News That’s Fit for an Immutable Ledger

Upcoming Events

January 10 NYC— IoT & Blockchain Panel: Hyundai, IOTA, Atonomi

January 12 NYC— The Business of Blockchains

January 24 NYC— Blockchain & Law: Self-governance in an unregulated world

January 31 Boulder — The Business of Blockchains

Bitcoin Futures are Here

Bitcoin futures debut on CME, taking bigger Wall Street stage | Ken Sweet and Alexandra Olson via Associated Press Dec 18

The Award for Most Energy Consumption Goes To…

In 2020 Bitcoin will consume more power than the world does today | World Economic Forum via Medium | Dec 18

Blockchain takes on Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s cofounder wants to replace the online encyclopedia with the blockchain |Leah Brown via TechRepublic Dec 11

Blockchain for Boeing

Boeing Eyes Blockchain in Bid to Fight GPS Spoofing | Nikhilesh De via CoinDesk | Dec 18

Ethereum Ecosystem Update

New Whitepaper for the Dai Stablecoin System | Makerdao via Medium Dec 9

Introducing Trusted Relay Networks | Alex Miller via GRID+ Blog Dec 18

Zug ID: Exploring the First Publicly Verified Blockchain Identity |Paul Kohlhaas via Medium Dec 6

The Ethernaut: An EVM Game

Blockchain Job Market Update

Crypto Job Openings are Booming | via AngelList

Blockchain’s Boom Year: Job Market Grows 200% | Michael del Castillo via CoinDesk

Job Opportunities in Blockchain in 2018 | Patrick Thompson via CoinTelegraph
‘Daughter of Smoke and Bone’ Book Review
By: Dayle Fogarty
Tags: Book Recommendations, Writing, Writers, Book Review, Fantasy

‘Daughter of Smoke and Bone’ Book Review

A modern fantasy love story spanning across worlds.

Photo by Wojtek Witkowski on Unsplash

‘Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.’

This was one of those books where the back cover — though accurate in its premise of DOSAB — did not portray (in my mind anyway) the overall main point of the story.

That’s not to say it isn’t good or that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy it. Because I did! I was just expecting something other than where the story led, which is also a good thing. I like twists and turns, even subtle surprises, and early on in books too. Ever read The Bronze Horseman? Hands down has one of the best turning point moments in the first few chapters. Completely caught me off guard.

For aspiring authors and from a marketing point of view, DOSAB shows a great example of how a cleverly thought-out synopsis can still grab a reader’s attention without giving too much of the story or mystery away.

So back to DOSAB. We have the main character, Karou, a quirky and quick-witted art student in Prague living a double life. One where she hangs out with her best friend and has relationship dramas; the other, helping her odd (in many forms) and rather secretive chimaera father-like figure, Wishmonger Brimstone, by collecting teeth for wishes.

Sounds strange right?

Well the mystery of it all is what kept me eagerly going back night after night, wanting to know more, and with each new discovery of what on earth was going on I found myself hooked.

I imagined Laini Taylor listening to Inxs’ Never Tear Us Apart whilst writing this one because it was certainly on my mind during some moments between the main characters. And I’m not sure if this is purely coincidental or what might have inspired Taylor, but the film clip for this song was filmed in Prague! I know, weird.

And now I want to visit Prague. Ahhhh, one day.

Whilst Karou’s life was turning upside down in the story’s current timeline, it switches to a past timeline, providing a very long flashback to help answer some questions, to shed light on the mystery of Karou’s past and yet at the same time her entire existence.

The world building, character layering, the tension, all point to one undeniable fact, Laini Taylor has an amazing imagination with some unique story ideas, taking on existing tropes within this genre and making them her own.

Without giving too much away, it provides a nice balance of mush and sarcasm, action and romance. No moment was dwelled upon, yet the story didn’t move too quickly either. The pacing — spot on.

The undertones of identity formation, a sense of belonging, and new beginnings — or rather beginning again — reaches at the core of our human experience, our ability to evolve and adapt and change and grow.

A wonderful sentiment in a story about hope within times of conflict and the perils suffered through blind righteousness.
This Moment, Exactly So.
By: Pixel Magazine
Tags: Travel, Art, Photographer, Photography, Cuba

Being a fine-art photographer, as opposed to a photojournalist, my goal in creating images in Cuba (and presenting them in this book) is not only to show what Cuba is like, but more importantly for me, what it feels like to be in Cuba.

Not only have I spent many peak moments of my life in Cuba over the last two decades, but in 2002, I asked my wife, Juliet, to marry me atop the lighthouse of Morro Castle in Havana [ed. note: see top image].
Money: Captain of Pride
By: Valentine Nnebe
Tags: Satisfaction, Contentment, Wealth, Poetry, Money

Now, notes of great majesty, come home.

Freedom is the badge I choose

You’ve set and strapped me with demands.

My respect, that sense of dignity,

is attached to you.

Release me.

My real worth should have no bearing by the weight you occupy.

Cut those expectations you’ve attached to my identity.

I want to be remembered,

not just by how I’ve paid bills,

but by that sheer discipline of contentment.

In your abundance or lack,

I still want to be perceived correctly.

If pain is written in scarcity

then let fate ride.

I want the joy to see you serve

not the agony to see you torture.

If my choices are multiplied by you

certainly, my happiness isn’t, always.

I want to embrace the clean value,

the pristine worthiness the Creator bestows on each man –

not by his adorned attire, prestige or nationality,

but by that beauty you have little to contribute.

Money, self-glorious captain of pride.
Meet Lion, My Most Powerful Imaginary Friend
By: Jordin James
Tags: Mental Health, Life Lessons, Psychology, Life, Spirituality

I couldn’t see it then, but now I know Lion was with me when my father grabbed my stomach when I was 10, telling me, “We’re going to run this off of you this summer.”

Even then Lion was whispering, “You are worthy, you are worthy, you are worthy,” tears streaking his cheeks knowing I couldn’t yet hear him.

He was there when my father threatened to commit suicide, and when I came home to our puppy with an oozing hole in his skull because my dad said the six-month-old dog “tried to attack him,” and Lion was there that time my dad left to get more beer, leaving my brother and I alone with a mentally unstable homeless woman who talked about gouging people’s eyes out, and that time when I was 12 and he kicked me out of the house in the middle of the night in December shouting about how much he didn’t care if I ever came back.

Lion was there every time I came home from school to my dad passed out on the couch, malt liquor strewn across the living room, and every time my dad referred to my boobs as “mosquito bites.” Lion was there the time my dad made my 7-year-old brother stand at attention for hours in the dark while he sent me to the back-room, coming in every now and then, ordering me to stand up, asking me a question, and shoving me back on the bed when I answered it wrong.

Lion was there when I broke down crying because I had no friends, my dad raising his voice, yelling at me to shut the fuck up because, “You think I give a shit if you have friends or not?”

And Lion was there, at the pinnacle of it all, watching me use a kitchen knife to carve “DEEP?” into my thigh because my father told me I wasn’t a “real cutter” because he didn’t think my cuts went deep enough.

That was the moment Lion finally had enough.

Just a few months later, I cut ties with my father, Lion showed up as my desktop picture, there to watch over me as I fought off the villains in my nightmares.
MongoDB Europe 2017: Stitched together
By: Daniel Hilton
Tags: Tech, Mongodb, Software Engineering, Conference, Software Development

The talks

I attended a few talks, one a pretty gritty talk on MongoDB storage and how the amount of collections in 3.6 have been extended from about 100,000 max to up to 800,000 with some memory and cache handle tweaks (at a very high level). Brilliant for systems that use temporal collections where you rollover from collection to collection based on time or day.

The standout for me was a talk by Marco Bonezzi of MongoDB, about how to manage persistent storage with MongoDB in a containerised environment using Docker and Kubernetes. It was fantastic to be shown that your database can so easily remain highly available even with containers by nature being easily disposed of, and that even playing nicely with mongo elections within the replica set. All without any loss of service. The use of StatefulSet in Kubernetes is what it was born for, I highly recommend you give it a watch.

You can find his talk here, which has already been given at MongoDB World 2017.

Impressions

The usual fare of free t-shirts, hoodies and stickers (I envisage my laptop having a skin made purely of stickers eventually) was of course there. Unfortunately a slightly sour note was the size of the venue I believe was not suitable for the amount of people that turned up, with 3 ‘shards’ (read ‘rooms’) being massively smaller than the the first, resulting in full rooms not allowing people in to see the talks they had turned up to see. Combined with two agenda changes in one day, needless to say some people were quite irritated. They missed talks, or in the first instance were made to wait because the speaker himself didn’t know he was supposed to have arrived and started.

What I did experience was good, however a lack of polish and in my opinion too many breaks marred what could have been an excellent day. The new stuff MongoDB had to show was top-notch, but the venue I believe was not fit for the purpose.

Many thanks again to Compare the Market for funding my trip to the conference, it’s been fantastic to see the forefront of industry standard development and learn from some of the best minds in the business.
The Looming Anniversary
By: Nina Rosca
Tags: Short Story, Self, Love, Relationships, Nonfiction

I avoid answering questions that give away too much. One must remain a creature of mystery. Don’t get me wrong, I love risk. But you are not a risk I am willing to take.

Yet it doesn’t change the fact that our relationship was built on a gamble. It wasn’t born out of love or passion. The only reason we’re together is because I enjoy tempting fate. It’s one of my many fabulous flaws. I enjoy a good dare. I can still smell the singed hairs from my last one.

Yet, here we are, together in this mess. Were — until yesterday. Pushing the “pause” button on our relationship might be the easiest thing I’ve ever done. The first thing that crossed my mind as I put our “perfect” status to rest was the bottle of wine you’d promised me for our three-month anniversary.

Friday the 15th. This Friday.

And that’s how I began to question my materialistic tendencies again. I could very well buy myself a bottle of wine. Yet what I desire is the one you promised me. Our bottle. I immediately descend into a swirling chaos of questions.

The first one: do I want that bottle of wine so much because I’m secretly hoping that we are going to make it to our three-month anniversary?

Question number two: do I have a drinking problem? If I can’t stop myself from fantasizing about a cheap bottle of wine, then I must have a problem.

Number three: do any of these questions make any sense? Maybe, maybe not, but they are my questions, so I’m going to do my best to answer them. I wouldn’t want them to feel neglected. They deserve better.

We all do. Even you. I know my worth and still, that hasn’t stopped me from wondering whether you deserve more than I could offer you. Is that question number four? This is exhausting.

I’m the one always dealing the deck, shuffling the cards, rolling the dice. Because boredom is not my friend. I know that. At least, not the kind of friend that shows up unannounced when you’re bedridden, cooks and cleans for you while you lay there like an overcooked piece of spaghetti, feeds you, does the dishes, and then leaves you to enjoy your privacy. No.

She draws me in with her fun little games, throwing her childish dares in my face. Except this game had “DANGER” written all over it. BIG, red letters. I couldn’t say no. I deal the rules of the game and you’re just a pawn in my hands.

I keep waiting for the moment you’ll pick up the dice and make your own rules. Maybe that’s what I was trying to do all along — get you to play me by your rules.

I wanted you to take a chance for a change. I wanted you to taste the drama. But drama doesn’t taste as good when you’re the one stuck in the middle. Maybe things would have been different had you not been so afraid of taking risks. The only chance you ever took in your life was me. And look where that got you. Isn’t this fun?
React Hooks versus Classes
By: Rick L
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, React Hook, Functional Programming, React

Managing Local State

What is state in React?

In simple terms, state is simply an object that contains all your key-value pairs. State determines how your components render and behave.

State allows your components to be dynamic and interactive.

State is not to be confused with props . State is what is managed within the component, whereas props is what gets passed to the component.

How classes manage local state in React

Class components come from ES6 classes and are the default method for managing local state. They also allow side effects to occur through lifecycle methods.

To access and manage state in a class, you have to initialize this.state as an object within your constructor() , name your local state as a key, and set its initial value as the key’s value.

setState() is the default method for updating the state in a class, and this is what causes a component to re-render.

Furthermore, it is recommended to call setState() every time you want to modify state correctly pre hooks.

Here is a simple example of a counter with an increment button written in a class:

local state is set to counter = 0, handleIncrement() is passed as a callback into button

To set up a class component, you need a fair bit of boilerplate code, which is not limited to your conventional constructor() within your class, and the super() for extending the component.

For instance, it is necessary to add the this context in class components and bind it inside the constructor() on line 9.

We would need to bind this because of implicit binding in vanilla JavaScript.

When we pass the event handler function reference as a callback like this ( <button type=”button” onClick={this.handleIncrement}>+</button> ), we lose the context of this because handleIncrement() becomes just a regular function call without an owner object.

In this case, the value of this falls back to default binding and points to the global object or undefined if the function being invoked is using strict mode.
How to Talk to Kids about Race: Using Children’s Books to Start the Conversation
By: High Museum Of Art
Tags: Race, History, Education, BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights

Dozens of picture books featured in the High’s new Picture the Dream exhibition can help you pass on the passion for activism.

By Nalani Dowling, Education Research Assistant, High Museum of Art

2020 has been a year filled with unexpected turbulence, unanswered questions, and undue tragedy, both on an international scale and here in the city of Atlanta. A global pandemic has set the stage for the world to witness the racial inequality that still surges through this country in the form of discrimination and police brutality.

The tireless efforts of individual activists and movements such as Black Lives Matter have demonstrated that what W. E. B. Du Bois christened “the problem of the color line” has not been dissolved. We live in a time that many misleadingly believe to be post-racial, but the need for consistent discussion and the call to action around eradicating racism is as important today as it ever has been.
Firefly — IOTA’s Next Generation Wallet
By: Charlie Varley
Tags: Announcements, Iota, Wallet, Chrysalis, Firefly

IOTA 1.5 is fast approaching…

With it come a range of improvements that will transform IOTA from an exploratory research project into a mature, enterprise-ready protocol. Experimental features like trinary encoding and Winternitz One-Time Signatures (W-OTS) have been removed and replaced with carefully-selected, tried-and-tested standards. These changes will allow IOTA to realize the original promise of a DAG-based DLT protocol without the technical baggage and entry barriers introduced by early design choices.

The primary gateway to a DLT protocol for most people is a wallet. Wallets allow users to manage their cryptocurrency holdings and secure their private key when sending and receiving tokens. Conventionally wallets have limited their functionality to basic payments. But increasingly, wallets are expanding their feature sets and becoming platforms for the many innovations of DLT.

Until now, IOTA’s primary wallet has been Trinity. Trinity set a high standard in the industry, with a slick design and simplified user experience that few other wallets could match. Trinity was IOTA’s first stateful wallet, successfully making one-time signatures safe for human use. But Trinity, like the number system it owes its etymology to, will remain in IOTA 1.0.

A New Wallet For IOTA 1.5

We have taken IOTA 1.5 as an opportunity to rethink the wallet from the ground up, from transactional logic to user experience to design. We have drawn on everything we have learned over a three year period and built an app that will serve as a platform for IOTA’s current and future ecosystem. Our wallet for IOTA 1.5 and beyond will be called Firefly.
Asterisk Monthly: About Kindness [June, 2020]
By: Ana Luíza Azevedo
Tags: Asterisk Project, Kindness, Writing Prompts, Creative Writing, Weekly Prompts

Kindness can be a place, a memory, a food, a person…

I love to see and hear how different people describe different sensations of kindness for and from themselves, like it’s the only existent way to feel or do the gestures of kindness. When you love someone and you care for that person, you put as a goal do everything you can to make them smile, to make a bad day turn into a common, but safe, space to be you or just to unburden. When you really love, sometimes you can put yourself in second place, just for a tiny moment, to try to be better and be there. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, unless you know you also need to be kind with yourself too.

The real meaning of kindness comes from places and people that you trust and know that will be better or will make you feel better. The best way to share your feelings about kindness is doing things without hoping for something back. Do it because you feel you can and you feel you need to. Genuine gestures of kindness are powerful — and powerful people need to trust in other powerful ones.
Enraged man savagely slams ‘bratty kid’ to floor in Sichuan bus, stomps on his head
Tags: Wtf, China

Enraged man savagely slams ‘bratty kid’ to floor in Sichuan bus, stomps on his head

The man snapped after the kid gave him three light kicks

Footage of one man’s extremely savage response to being pestered by a “bratty kid” stirred up a storm on Chinese social media over the weekend, with a surprising number of netizens writing that the boy got what was coming to him.

The incident occurred on a public bus in the Sichuan city of Suining on Friday. In the surveillance video clip, the boy is seen dawdling around inside the bus as a seated fellow passenger tries to talk to him.

After the man says a few words, the boy responds by giving the man three tentative kicks.

In a flash, the man flies into a sudden and furious rage, picking up the kid and slamming him to the ground before viciously stomping on his head three times.

A fellow passenger quickly intervenes and tries to pick the boy up, but he soon slumps back to the ground. Then, another two passengers step forward to point fingers at the man and alert the bus driver about what happened.

You can watch the footage below, viewer discretion is advised:

Fortunately, the boy suffered only a swollen face from the attack and no lasting injuries. His parents said that he was taking the bus home from school alone when the incident occurred.

Meanwhile, the man, surnamed Guo, was picked up by police and placed in detention for 15 days. He later apologized to the child and the child’s family, and gave his explanation for what happened.

Guo said that he was dealing with a great deal of work-related stress and was agitated by the boy’s restlessness on the bus. He asked the kid if he wanted to take his seat. Instead, the boy responded unexpectedly by kicking him, a move that caused Guo to snap.

The majority of Weibo users have agreed that though the kid was certainly being a “brat,” he definitely didn’t deserve such an extreme punishment, writing that the man clearly went too far.

Still, more than a few netizens have spoken up in favor of the man, arguing that the kid got what was coming to him.

“I applaud this man for his actions. Maybe now, the kid will think twice before acting like such a brat,” wrote one net user. “The kid’s parents are the ones that are really at fault here,” added another.

“Because the kid’s wounds were only superficial, the beating wasn’t really that extreme, I think it was awesome,” argued yet another Weibo user.

The incident follows a similar — if not nearly as brutal — incident the previous week in which a pregnant woman was caught on camera deliberately tripping a 4-year-old child inside a restaurant after the kid accidentally caused one of the door flaps to hit her in the face as she was eating when he ran in.

Overall, the woman received more negative criticism than did Guo with netizens predicting that she will make for a bad mom.
roast duck (love is so sad)
By: Cheryl Chow
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Poetry, Hong Kong

october 7, 2020

daddy remembers

mui loves roast duck.

he used to stop at wanchai after a long day’s work

working at the traffic light, for what it’s worth

it is difficult to live with no sleep in your body

it is easy to live when you love her

living to show her you love her

living to buy your daughter her favourite food

(roast duck)

love is so sad

i don’t even remember

what daddy really likes to eat

because all that’s on the table

he’s placed for us

because all we’ve ever ordered

he’s ordered for us

love is so sad

mummy remembers

everything mui doesn’t acknowledge

she bakes now, how funny

her daughter lost her sweet tooth

many many moons ago

but mummy is trying.

difficult trying to know someone

who spent most of her life shutting you out

easy trying anyways

a fluffy butter cake

four vanilla almond tarts

the perfect financier?

love is so sad

there is blood on the toilet seat

i am a what they call a woman now

i am a product of my mother’s love

and now i am capable of my own

it’s not her fault but

she doesn’t know shit about

the love i bleed

and the things i would die for.

love is so sad
The Door
By: Peter Turner
Tags: Potential, Love, Poetry

You are the lock, and I am the key

The potential in you, I feel that I can see

Let's unleash it please, and you, in me

Let’s see where this door goes, this door of We

Its been many years, and I know I’m not owed

But time is finite, and so is this road

In every scene of pure happiness, in the foreground: the lock, you see!

Take her away, and there’s no picture left for the key

So please, oh please let's not let this corrode

For it tears me up, a constant implode

My eternal rock: friendships’ solitary brush

And the hard place is, remaining out of touch

But there is hope. Sharp, painful hope

And that is what makes it, so hard to cope

You see: ‘You’ and ‘I’ — they are merely projections

Ever-changing, and-fulfilling, their creators’ intentions

And this key’s essence, yes, I feel that you can Love?

What is that, oh God, if not a glimmer from above?

The way forward, blurry. But coming into focus

In the years of the Bull, the key meets the Logos

And maybe someday, we will meet back at the door?

..but the assumption must be, it’s on a ship that’s already left the shore.
Graceful Shutdown of NSQ Consumers
By: Ankit Agarwal
Tags: Graceful Shutdown, Nsqd, Golang, Nsq

Tokopedia ecosystem is powered by micro-services architecture using cutting-edge technologies. A plethora of web services are developed and deployed on daily basis enhancing the user’s experience.

Service Reload, thus, is an integral part of the deployment process and the smoother the process is, the easier is the life of the engineers. Over the years, multiple CI/CD tools have been developed to automate such deployment process and are adopted as per the requirements & expertise levels.

It is easier to attain the graceful reload of the HTTP services but the same is not true with NSQ consumers. The NSQ consumers stop as soon as they are reloaded and a new consumer spawns which then starts consuming the messages.

Now, the real question is:

Why do we need to perform the graceful shutdown of consumers? Aren’t the messages going to be handled by the newly spawned consumers?

The short answer is Yes but it does not have any impact only if the consumers are performing tasks that can be re-processed as per the business needs. However, it is not the case in most real-life situations. There are cases where the actions performed by the consumers need to be atomic or are scenarios where real-time processing is intended.

What to do?

System signals come to aid to achieve the graceful shutdown.

When the service reload command is triggered, the system sends SIGHUP signal to the workers/consumers. Consumers are listening to this signal and waits until the handlers have processed the message in-flight. However, the daemon starts another consumer as well with the reloaded configuration.

When the signal is received, consumers perform the following actions:

1. Request handlers to not process the new messages

2. Wait until all the concurrent handlers have completed their processing

3. Stop the Consumer Gracefully

The concurrent handlers are configured to maintain the global count of handlers processing the messages. DoProcess maintains the state to decide if the message received needs to be processed or re-queued.

When all the handlers are done processing their messages, a notification is sent to stop the consumer.

The above implementation helps to perform the Graceful Shutdown of the consumers but leads to another complexity. When the messages are re-queued to NSQd, they are moved to Deffered state and wait until the consumer is stopped. They are not being instantly picked up by another consumer.

To resolve the sticky behavior, MaxInFlight for the current consumer is configured to 0 . This informs NSQd that the consumer is no more able to receive any new messages and the messages are consumed by other consumers.

This implementation helped us to reload the consumers and process the requests received from clients in real-time without impacting the user experience.

Wrap Up

NSQ Consumers are the background jobs performing a plethora of jobs. This implementation helps to keep the sanity of the already running processes while loading the new binaries.

References
94 要創業！Fire 掉老闆當頭家之前必讀的暗黑數據書
By: Alexiangel Hong
Tags: 創業, 青年創業, Catering, Project The Lab

Brave dreamer. Love food, travel, and brain storming. Willing to enhance self day by day.

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Take Ownership of Your Life
By: Stef Hill
Tags: Life Lessons, Motivation, Self-awareness, Personal Development, Life

There are many things in life that create the illusion of helplessness in all of us:

The companies that sell us products.

The pervasive idea that we all need to escape from our lives.

The constant stream of bills, letters, emails and calls that sometimes make it hard to breathe at night.

The pervasive, surround sound rhetoric that says we should all be more, do more, have more and back all that up with elusively perfect relationships.

All of these messages and pressures combined take away from one of the most powerful truths in life. That is when you look in the mirror you are looking at your hero, your savior and your go-to problem solver.

Not only are we all far more capable than we think we are, we’re also capable of surviving without perfect answers to our problems.

What happens if something in your life goes wrong or is wrong and you don’t know what to do? You make the best decision you can for the present moment and then act on it as best you can. We all need help from time to time, sometimes it’s just nice to have a supportive hand or shoulder along the way. That said, external forces are not where your defining power in life comes from. When something goes wrong or a decision needs to be made it’s you as an individual that should be the first point of call; before you look to external sources.

Sometimes problems can feel overwhelming, life can feel overwhelming. It can feel like a domineering enemy is standing over you and making you feel small.

How will you ever fix this mess?

How will you ever manage to achieve what you want?

Who’s going to listen to someone like you?

What if that person you like doesn’t like you back?

What if something goes wrong?

All of these questions trigger anxiety and fear. The way the world asks them suggests there is no answer within us and that disaster is certain. You’ve heard these questions in your mind before now and you’ve made it this far. If you need a solution or a new way of doing something, the person you need to ask is in the mirror.
Google Doodle Celebrates: The Legacy of Pacita Abad
By: Drizia Bolaños
Tags: Google, Great Filipino, Philippines, Pacita Abad, Doodle

Google Doodle Celebrates: The Legacy of Pacita Abad

A Filipina Artist Who Painted the World in Colors

Photo credit: Google doodles

When the world seems dim and chaotic, Google Doodle timely placed a spotlight on Pacita Abad, a Filipina Ivatan artist who disrupted barriers with flying colors.

Pacita Abad (1946–2004), made history as the first woman to receive the Philippines’ prestigious Ten Outstanding Young Men award. A recognition that has always been given to men for the last 25 years until today in 1984 where she was vested for the illustrious award.

Supposedly to study law after finishing political science at the University of the Philippines, Diliman in 1967. She went to the United States, then changed careers and studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Art Students League in New York City.

Pacita Abad’s artwork on different mediums. Photo Credit: http://www.pacitaabad.com/Art/Index.php

Since then, she traveled the world and painted her way as an artist. For 30 years, Pacita Abad produced over 4,500 artworks and exhibited her paintings in over 200 museums and galleries around the world.

Free-spirited and brave, akin to her paintings, she strove for awareness in socio-political matters through art.

Filipina: A racial identity crisis by Pacita Abad in the Singapore Art Museum Photo Credit: http://www.pacitaabad.com/Art/Detail.php?id=4840

Legacy

The 180-foot, 230-ton steel truss Alkaff Bridge, Singapore’s first “Bridge of Art”. Painted by Pacita Abad and her crew of helpers. Photo Credit: http://www.pacitaabad.com/Art/Public-Art.php

In January 2004, despite undergoing daily treatment for cancer, Pacita Abad accepted the Alkaff Bridge project for free as her gift to the people of Singapore. Recognized as “Bridge of Art”, it is the first art bridge designed in Singapore.

She also pioneered Trapunto Painting, a unique technique of stitching and stuffing painted canvases to give them a three-dimensional, sculptural effect.

In December 2004, Pacita Abad lost her battle to cancer. Despite that, her legacy lives on through her artwork. To pay homage to his sister, Florencio “Butch” Abad established Fundacion Pacita Center for the Arts in 2005 to provide art opportunities to the children and communities living on the islands of Batanes, Philippines.
Text Classification with NLP on Kaggle Twitter Data
By: Nathan Torento
Tags: Text Classification, Tweet, NLP, Nlp Pipeline, Kaggle Competition

A 4-person team NLP Pipeline proposal on the “Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets” Kaggle Competition

“Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets” Kaggle Competition Home Page

0. Introduction

Overview

This paper will be based on the Kaggle competition Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets. It’s an introductory challenge to serve as practice for Natural Language Processing with focus on Text Classification. The competition creators gathered 10875 tweets that are reporting an emergency or some man-made/natural disaster — the selection process is left unspecified.

Dataset

There are three provided files:

- train.csv — the training set

- test.csv — the test set

- sample_submission.csv — the framework for official competition submissions

The training dataset contains these columns:

- id: a unique numeric identifier for each tweet

- text: the actual content in the tweet

- keyword: keywords from the tweet manually selected by the competition creators (may be blank)

- location: the location the tweet was sent from (may be blank)

- target: values are hand classified by creators as either 0 for non-disaster or 1 for disaster

The test set is similar to the training data set except for not having a target column.

The sample_submission contains the id and a target column for all the tweets that competitors will have to populate with their proposed models.

Goal

The challenge of the competition is to create a model that can most accurately predict the test set and achieve a high F1 Score (read more at https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.f1_score.html).

This team however hoped to use this challenge as their final academic opportunity to apply as many of the skills they’ve learned in a Practical Data Science Tutorial while exploring additional Data Science fields and methods they were interested in.

Thus, the team decided to create an NLP pipeline for this challenge, split it into four parts, and self-allocate as you will see in the Team Roles section below.

Important Note: Everyone worked on different sections of a pipeline, and those sections naturally vary in magnitude of required effort. Thus, while the team consolidated efforts to create output that fed or flowed into each other’s section, each member individually explored into aspects of the data or task that were not necessary for the pipeline. Explore their individual contributions through the articles linked below.

Team Roles
Türk Tarihinin Kırk Atlısı BİLGİNLER VE SANATÇILAR
By: Ahmet Çadırcı
Tags: Bilim, Bilginler Ve Sanatçılar, Osmanlı Tarihi, Siyaset, Tarih

in Both Sides of the Table
👀Huobi x CoinMarketCal👀A Coin To Keep An Eye On-Zcash!
By: Huobi Global
Tags: Huobi, Halving, Zcash, Buyzec, Zec Halving

🔹What is Zcash?

Zcash is a cryptocurrency aimed at using cryptography to provide enhanced privacy for its users compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Zcash is based on Bitcoin’s codebase. It shares many similarities such as a fixed total supply of 21 million units.

Transactions can be “transparent” and similar to bitcoin transactions in which case they are controlled by a t-addr, or can be a type of zero-knowledge proof called zk-SNARKs; the transactions are then said to be “shielded” and are controlled by a z-addr.

📅 Upcoming Event:

Nov. 17–18th Zcash (ZEC) Halving From coinmarketcal.com

🔹 What is a Zcash Halving?

Block halving event happens every 4 years on Zcash blockchain. Zcash’s initial block reward was 12.5 ZEC, new block reward will be 3.125 ZEC. The block reward splits every 4 years (840,000 mined blocks). This lowers the rate at which Zcash is generated. The halving is periodical and is programmed into Zcash’s code quoted from nicehash.

ZEC | USDT — [Daily Chart] Nov 9th 4:38 PDT EST

📈Analysis

September’s sweep of the lows into the Q3 open has confirmed this area as support and cleared the way to start a bullish trend in ZEC.

So far, the Q4 open has acted as resistance for the price. This price action could indicate that the current region is an accumulation zone before a much larger move up — possibly spurred on by next Tuesday’s halving.

Flipping this level into support would clear the way for further movement upward to challenge resistance at the range highs starting at $72.46. This move could extend into probable resistance at $85.98.

The Q3 open acted as strong support, but bulls might not get the chance to enter here if this is the start of a bullish trend. Instead, bulls are likely to enter at current support beginning at $58.21 if targeting a move toward the Q4 open.

🔹Trade ZEC on Huobi!

👀Follow Us On Twitter @HuobiGlobal + @CoinMarketCal

👀www.huobi.com; coinmarketcal.com

Risk Reminder:

1. Trading in digital assets comes with high risks due to huge price fluctuations. Users should be fully aware of the risks associated with digital asset trading and make prudent trading decisions.

2. Huobi Global’s announcements and information do not constitute investment advice, and Huobi will not bear responsibility or provide compensation for direct or indirect losses arising from trading decisions whilst relying on this information.
Why Did I Stay/Why Did I Join?
By: Deborah Christensen
Tags: Christianity, Self-awareness, Religious Trauma Syndrome, Course, Religion

Welcome to the first article (after my Welcome and introduction) in the course Reclaim Your Life: Rebuild Your Identity.

If you prefer to listen to me talk in the video then please feel free to follow along. Otherwise, I have condensed and transcribed the points discussed in this video for those who prefer to read.

So, understanding the reasons for involvement (joining or remaining) in an authoritarian type of religion can help you know yourself better.

Knowing yourself can help you in future decision making.

The reasons for why we do things or become involved in something are usually complex and multi-faceted.

It is easy to judge ourselves when we look back, but it helps to realise that usually, we were doing the best we could with the information we had available at the time.

There usually are a number of reasons why someone becomes involved in an authoritarian or fundamentalist religion; OR why they stay.

We will take a look in more depth at each of these reasons in articles following this one.