fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Are You A Distant Dad?
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: Parenting, Advice, Self-awareness, Self Doubt, Fatherhood

Are You A Distant Dad?

Fear of failure hides our power. Practicing love shares our power.

Photo credit: iStock

By Robert Rannigan

Keeping distance from danger is a universal self-protective response. Fathers who hold themselves away from their children often experience their own children as dangerous — -emotionally. What can men do to resume their full emotional power as fathers?

Men who stay away from their children don’t understand or believe in themselves enough. They haven’t had sufficient exposure to healthy fathering. They haven’t watched and learned how to communicate their own loving presence, intimacy, and learning. Men who distance from their children, whether it’s in front of the T.V., at work or across the country, are avoiding hurt in themselves, which lingers from not receiving their own fathers’ loving attention.

As a therapist, my work is helping people understand where self-doubt is rooted. All of us have experienced feeling inferior. Men who are distant fathers have a history which includes a distant father.

Distancing

It doesn’t matter if the father was never there, left part way through development, died, or just lived distantly right under the same roof. The impact of father remoteness carries meaning into the life of children. Without a steady diet of dad’s loving attention, the experience of his detachment can become a threat to life itself. Daddy distance easily becomes a statement that “outsider children” have a tragic, permanent flaw. Bringing love to this experience is the only healing. Bringing love to his own children can feel impossible to a man experiencing core unworthiness.

And so distanced sons grow to be men unsure what healthy intimacy looks like. Feeling unimportant (because he was unloved) he unwittingly avoids the healing love of relationship with his own children. Going near loving acceptance within him brings his own pain nearer, and because he hasn’t dealt with it lovingly, it remains overpowering. Afraid, distant dad treats his wounded self and his children as peripheral rather than intimate and important.

The man living his experience as “I wasn’t good enough for dad to choose me” must either wake himself from the nightmare with healing self-love or continue to dream walk around his love-hungry children. Deeply wounded men — -isolated from father love, distanced from father-child intimacy — -are part of social confusion which can be healed by men courageous enough to look at their own fear and sadness with love.

Distant dads are an intergenerational habit and pattern of emotional atrophy. Children acting out in school, learning disabled, isolated, all need the balance and closeness of their fathers.
What A Different Christmas This Year!
By: Floyd Mori
Tags: Pandemic, Holidays, Coronavirus, Family, Christmas

What A Different Christmas This Year!

2020 was like no other

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Most people had small family gatherings or none at all

With the coronavirus pandemic still raging across the world, Christmas 2020 was very different for most people. With travel restrictions and social distancing recommended, people were not able to spend time with family members and friends as they normally would during the Christmas holidays.

People were advised to spend time with only those within their own households. Large gatherings and parties which are normal during the holidays were discouraged. Some people were unwilling to comply with the recommendations and held large parties. Either they exposed a lot of people to the dreaded COVID-19 virus or their parties were a failure because people were unwilling to attend because of possible exposure to the virus.

It was a different Christmas in many ways for people as travel was restricted so they were not able to spend the time with friends and family. Others did not heed the advice and got on planes or in cars to visit loved ones. Many people did travel, but most seemed to have taken precautions such as social distancing and the wearing of masks.

For people who do not have family and friends with whom to spend the holidays, this Christmas may not have been any different than what is normal for them. They may have spent the time alone as they do every holiday. They were in isolation, but it was no different for them.

Life was different this year, and Christmas was not the same for people who normally have loved ones with whom to share special occasions and holidays. They were not able to spend the time with the people who mean the most to them.

It is sad that many people do not have anyone with whom to share the holidays. For them, the coronavirus pandemic caused problems, but the holidays were no different. Homeless people likely did not see much difference in how Christmas was spent.

We should feel thankful and blessed if we have family and friends who care about us whether we were able to see them or not.
Insane workflows with Slack dialogs and YellowAnt!
By: Vishwa Krishnakumar
Tags: Chatbots, AI, Slack, DevOps, Software Development

Insane workflows with Slack dialogs and YellowAnt!

Make Slack your de-facto command-center

Slack’s recent release of Dialogs is a complete game-changer — it has opened up a whole new world of possibilities and marks a turning point in enterprise ChatOps. Here at YellowAnt, we built a bot that lets you manage all your workplace apps through commands and buttons and create and execute powerful command and event triggered cross-application workflows. With our integration with Slack Dialogs, YellowAnt has not only become much easier to work with, but a lot more functional and sticky. You can now take actions across your apps with simple Slack Dialogs. It’s awesome — Check it out!

You can now send and reply to emails from Slack with YellowAnt

Here’s how…

Commands for GMail

Create a YellowAnt account and Integrate GMail from the YellowAnt marketplace

Your GMail account will be accessible through the command gmail

Type gmail

YellowAnt will show you a list of GMail commands

Under send, click on Run this command.

Send email dialog

This opens a dialog where you type out the message details

Click on Execute. Your mail will on its way!

Insane! Right?

Replying to emails from Slack with YellowAnt

YellowAnt GMail integration brings all your emails into Slack with some action buttons like Star, Mark as Read or Important, and Reply

Click on Reply. This opens the Gmail reply dialog

Type out the body of the reply. hit Execute

Voila! Your reply is sent!
5 Things Confident People Do Differently
By: Zoe Yu
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Psychology, Advice, Inspiration

5. They Don’t Sell Themselves Short

How often do you doubt yourself? How often do you think that you’re not equipped to handle a situation in a relationship, not qualified for a promotion at work, not competent at any given skill? How often do you second guess your every move, doubt every decision you make?

Unfortunately, the resounding answer for most people is “too often.”

In our modern-day and age, self-doubt and low self-esteem run rampant. Confidence is fickle, running in the veins of the rarest — difficult to catch, and even more difficult to keep; there one moment, gone the next.

When it comes to understanding their abilities, confident people set the bar high. They don’t underscore their capabilities, strength, or ability to succeed. They possess a firm realization of their own momentous potential and believe in the undertakings they are capable of achieving.

Most importantly, confident people don’t deter themselves from an opportunity by underestimating what they’re capable of. In short, they refuse to be outsmarted by the little voice in their heads — they listen instead to the beating of their heart, the one that says, “you are enough.”

In its purest form, confidence is the building block to experiencing more. It rids the metaphorical stopper, allowing you to trust in your overwhelming capacity to achieve and deserve every wide-open door to opportunity.
Get Off The Internet
By: Justin Cox
Tags: Internet, Technology, Social Media, Apple, Life

Photo by Harry Knight on Unsplash

“Card games, now that’s a good way to pass the time.”

An older woman observes my group of fifteen high school students huddled in circles playing games. We’ve just spent a week in the Dominican Republic and are enjoying a layover in the Miami airport before our final flight home.

Throughout the week, card games have been the go-to evening pastime. The kids teach each other new games, joke, and converse over the cards. That same spirit of joy passes here in the airport.

I overhear the woman observing my students and return to the email demanding attention on my phone.

The day we left for the Dominican Republic, Pew Research released a new study showing 95% of US teenagers own a smartphone. The same study reports 89% of teenagers are connected to the internet multiple times per day or more.

Teenagers get a bad rap.

Read any study and you’ll believe they’re over-connected and addicted to their phones. While often unreported, adults are just as connected as teens. The difference? Teenagers have a better grip on their boundaries.

In my work with students it’s clear they understand healthy digital boundaries. Adults, not so much. Did I mention I was the one playing on my phone while all the teens were engaged with each other?

Teenagers are “digital natives”. Ubiquitous connection is their first language. Adults are “digital immigrants”. Instead of naturally understanding technology and healthy boundaries, we’ve had to force ourselves to learn both. The technology we’re good with. The boundaries? Not so much.

The alternatives to healthy boundaries are burnout and broken relationships. These are not good alternatives. We need to learn when to use our phones and when to put them down.

In the fall, Apple is releasing a new iOS feature called Screen Time. This will analyze and record app usage and allow for limits. Tell your phone you only want to use Facebook for ten minutes a day and when you hit the limit, Apple will cut you off.

Sure, having our phones remind us to put them down seems silly, but if it helps us set healthier boundaries then I’m all for it.

Don’t want to use Screen Time? Follow Dexter Thomas on Twitter. He routinely tweets to “get off the internet”. It’s a good reminder to put the phone down.
Joe Abrams Invests in Ponder
Tags: Blockchain, Recruiting, Social Network, Investing, Startup

We’re thrilled to announce that Joe Abrams, co-founder of MySpace and one of the fathers of social media, has decided to invest in Ponder and join our Board of Directors as an observer. Joe is an extremely successful entrepreneur and an expert in emerging growth companies in areas including technology, drug discovery technology, consumer products, big data, and online job placement.

“Ponder is building a gamified referral platform on the blockchain, that will completely change the incentives for recruiting, business partnerships and personal relationships. I’m thrilled to not only be an investor but provide strategic guidance as the company grows!” said Abrams.

Joe was a co-founder of The Software Toolworks, which he sold to Pearson PLC for $462m in 1994. He later co-founded Intermix Media, the parent company of MySpace, which he sold to News Corp in 2005 for $580m. Mr. Abrams also sits on the advisory boards for several companies including Recruiter.com, an online global recruiting service offering an industry leading job market technology platform.

With his breadth of experience in technology and social networks, Joe is the perfect executive and strategic thinker to help the Ponder ecosystem grow over the coming years.

Learn more about the Ponder platform and token sale here!
My Top 3 — August 28th, 2019. Giving credit where credit is due
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Awareness, Life Lessons, Humanity, Mental Health, Humility

My Top 3 — August 28th, 2019

Giving credit where credit is due

( Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash)

If You Want To Be Happy, Learn To Be Humble

I think we could all do with a healthy dose of humility once in a while. I know I do. I’m not egotistical by nature, but we all have our moments, I think. And it’s so easy to get caught up in ourselves — ego is a very demanding thing. We need to learn to “knock ourselves down a peg” once in a while.

Helen Cassidy Page takes the no-nonsense approach to getting over the Know-It-All syndrome we all secretly — and not so secretly — possess. A lesson we all need to learn.

Will Humanity Ever Learn?

About fifteen years ago, I boycotted the news — from all outlets. I don’t watch it, read it, or listen to it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care what’s going on in the world, or that I don’t care. It’s simply a defense mechanism — a sanity-saver if you will. With so much bad going on in the world, it’s hard to keep your faith in humanity when you’re constantly bombarded with it at every turn.

Jon Peters hit me in the gut and took the breath out of me with this one. We love to think, as humans, that we’ve got it right. That we’re doing the right thing — our hearts are in the right place, and we’ve all got our priorities in check. The hard and simple truth is that we don’t. The truth hurts. We need to fix it before it’s too late.

Anxiety Preys on the Torture of Uncertainty

My heart broke when I read this piece. I don’t know if it was the despair or the fierce determination — or maybe it was the way Matt Clarke describes his emotions. I feel like this is a brutally honest account of how people who suffer from anxiety really feel.

Understanding this condition, and knowing the constant internal tug-o-war sufferers are going through, I believe can help us gain the insight we need — the empathy — to truly be there for those in need. We never really know what another person is going through.
Find the Noble Integer
By: Teiva Harsanyi
Tags: Arrays, Programming, Java, Coding, Algorithms

Problem

Noble Integer: InterviewBit

Given an integer array, find if an integer p exists in the array such that the number of integers greater than p in the array equals to p. If such an integer is found return 1 else return -1 .

Solving Process

Simplify Input

This problem is not very difficult but to solve it we have to apply a well known technique to simplify the given inputs.

Let’s take a small example:

2, 6, 1, 3

This input should return 1 as 2 is a noble integer. We know that by counting the number of integers greater than 2 (3 and 4).

Yet, how to solve this problem without having an implementation in O(n²)? The answer is to simplify the inputs.

What if in our case the array was sorted?

1, 2, 3, 6

The integer 2 is at index 1, whereas the array size is 4. The success condition is the following:

size(array) - index - 1 == array[i]

Once the problem is solved using a simplification, we need to check the implications in terms of complexity. If our solution is acceptable, we generalize to the initial problem.

In our case, we have to:

Sort the array => O(n log(n))

Iterate over each element and check the previous condition => O(n)

It means the solution is O(n log(n)).

Bear in mind, sorting an array can’t be done with a better solution than a O(n log(n)) (like a merge sort for example).

Also, we have to make sure our solution covers all corner cases.

What about the following example, after being sorted:

1, 2, 2, 3

x

At index 1, the condition is going to be true. Yet, this should not be a match.

In our case, we also have to cover duplicate by checking if the next integer is equals to the current one.

A possible implementation in Java:
Changling
By: Ann Litts
Tags: Life Lessons, Nursing, Self-awareness, Careers, Life

Photo by Jessica Podraza on Unsplash

August 2018:

I have begun working with cancer patients recently. It is a major shift from the task-oriented, literally, sterile world of the OR I left behind. I am becoming immersed in their stories.

Social workers and other nurses have warned me to find my edges and reinforce my boundaries, but they don’t understand. I have come to this work to take down my boundaries at last. To ‘see’ The Humans who are my patients.

And even this early in the process, the patients are changing me.

I find myself humbled at their courage and in awe of their ability to live in The Now with joy and abandon. I know some will transition. This will be the diagnosis which provides the portal to the Next Thing for them. I am honored to be here with them to share this as well.

Nothing teaches you the value of Life more swiftly than staring mortality square in the face.

This week I found patients, even relatively newly diagnosed, reveling in Life. Tasting it, rolling it over on their tongues, and finding the Joy in this moment. Grateful, kind, and strong. Finding a Gift in their diagnosis even amongst the shock of it all and the chaos of creating a new reality which includes surgery, chemo, and All. The. Things.

The Grace brought by the support staff and nurses into this world is profound. I feel as though The Universe has been grooming me my whole life for this job. Emotionally, spiritually, as well as the skill set I bring to it on a professional level.

I am grateful beyond words to share their journey. And thankful to have listened to my intuition when She pointed me in this direction over and over again when The Universe kept nudging me to move on with My Life.

I find myself leaning into all the parts of me I had kept hidden. I want to open my heart, be kind, show Love, be Real Ann right down to my core all the time without even thinking about it these days.

Listen to your still small voice. I beg of you. She will take you to the most beautiful places and you will meet the most amazing humans. She is the travel agent for your soul. Never be afraid to let Her book you a new adventure. Any cost you pay in the short term reaps you such long term benefits it is not even to be counted.

Let The Universe change you into who you are truly meant to become.

Namaste.
3 Ways USAID Is Giving Hope to Iraqis Returning Home After Being Displaced by ISIS
Tags: Middle East, Conflict, Iraq, ISIS, Humanitarian

Mr. Saeed, who has been working as a day laborer despite suffering from a chronic illness, hopes this support from USAID will soon enable him to open an electrical shop in Rambosi. The new shop will allow him to continue to earn a steady income and contribute to rebuilding the local economy without depending on work as a day laborer.

Cash Assistance for Community Resilience

The district of Baiji, home to Iraq’s largest oil refinery, endured several major battles during the ISIS occupation, causing residents to flee for their lives.

Before the conflict, Ahmed, 32, had a thriving produce shop. When he returned, only piles of rubble remained where houses and buildings once stood. His own house was partially destroyed and is no longer structurally sound.

With support from USAID’s partners in the Cash Consortium for Iraq, Ahmed’s produce stand is flourishing. / USAID

After returning, Ahmed worked tirelessly as a day laborer to put food on the table. Some nights he and his family would go without food because he could not find work. When Ahmed received cash assistance from the Cash Consortium for Iraq (CCI) in December 2019, he was grateful. Now his family could start improving the quality of their lives beyond just bare survival.

USAID supports the CCI, which delivers critical financial support to vulnerable, conflict-affected households in five governorates so they can purchase food and essential supplies, or develop their own livelihoods.

Ahmed decided to invest some of the funds into restarting his business. Since reopening in July, Ahmed’s business has flourished. With his new income, he has diversified the range of fruits and vegetables he sells, and has been able to repay all his loans.

Now, Ahmed is starting to think about how he can use his business to help others in his community who continue to struggle:

“I remember what it was like to not have anything to eat. I want to find a way to give back to my community.”

Since 2017, USAID has supported over 26,000 vulnerable, conflict-affected households with cash transfers through CCI, as the organization’s largest donor. Prior to COVID-19, monthly cash transfers were delivered to eligible households for one, two, or three months depending on each family’s level of need. Now during the pandemic, a one-time cash transfer is distributed to all eligible households to simplify distributions and limit the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
Many iPhone Users Are Reporting Weird Screentime Issues With iOS 14.2
By: Henry Gruett
Tags: Technology, Apple, iOS, Technews, Tech

Many iPhone Users Are Reporting Weird Screentime Issues With iOS 14.2

12 Hours from an App I Don’t Even Have Installed

My screentime claims I used my phone for 13 hours today. And what’s weirder is that it’s all coming from the Apple Support app… an app I don’t even have installed.

Screenshot by author

Turns out I’m not the only one seeing weird issues with screentime. There doesn’t seem to be a correlation in regards to the iPhone model. It also doesn’t seem to be a very common problem.

However, others have been reporting other odd screentime glitches. Some have reported their screentime being inaccurately high with no app to blame. And others are also reporting that their phone claims they’ve spent hours on websites they’ve never visited.

And many more people have claimed other problems with iOS 14 giving outrageously inaccurate screentime stats. Reports on Apple Discussion boards and Reddit have been surfacing. User kenijean had their settings app clock in 19 hours of use.

Another person’s screentime had Twitter open for 20 hours and they didn’t even have the Twitter app downloaded.

It seems that everyone’s scenario is a bit different but as far as my research has shown, it seems to be a bug consistent with iOS 14.2. It seems to be yet another bug with iOS 14.2 that Apple is holding the fix off until they release 14.3 instead of releasing a 14.2.1 version.
Don’t Follow JavaScript Trends
By: Nikola Đuza
Tags: Angular, Nodejs, JavaScript, React, Programming

Rewriting Your Code

Some time ago, a cover for an imaginary book surfaced on the @ThePracticalDev Twitter account. Back in 2016, it was fashionable to make fun of the ever-changing world of JavaScript in a bit of a different manner than folks do today.

Psst, I’ve invented the time machine (don’t tell anyone)! Let’s quickly travel back in time to 2016. SWOOSH! We are there. The JavaScript landscape looks like this:

If you’re using a JavaScript framework or want to use a framework, Angular.js is probably something you’d choose. But the news about Angular 2 that’ll make you rewrite almost everything is just around the corner. Also, this new kid on the block — React.js — is coming up and getting ripe. Of course, there’s Vanilla JS, and no-framework-folks are there. Not using a framework is still a popular opinion in 2016, but it’s slowly fading.

Knowing all of this, what would you do? Which path would you choose, and why? The answer might seem obvious now that you come from the future: React. But if you decided Angular.js, a couple of years down the road, you’ll get tempted to use new Angular versions and have to rewrite your code. If you chose to use React, you’d be a lucky winner since everyone is riding the React train nowadays.

Now, you get tempted to drop class components and use functional components with those sweet, sweet hooks, right? Well, at least it’s not a whole new API to learn as with the Angular.js — Angular 2 change, right?

So many choices, so little time. What to do?

It doesn’t matter what we choose now or what we chose back in the day. We’ll still get tempted or have to rewrite our code later down the road. Reasons to do it might vary:

Your company was using [insert framework name] and is unable to hire new folks

You feel the old solution isn;t working out for you anymore, and you want something new

You succumbed to the industry trends and want to use the latest and greatest

Unless we break the cycle.
Dear Apple, Please Make a Next-Gen Apple Cinema Display for ‘Normal People’
By: Martin Andersson Aaberge
Tags: Technology, Apple, Content Creation, Hardware, Creative

Pro Display XDR Alternatives

The alternatives to the XDR are less appealing. While Apple uses aluminum, others still use plastic. Sure, some screens look good, but you can not go beyond good with plastic. Why aren’t more manufacturers using premium materials?

The main problem with the XDR for the average consumer is that it costs $7.000. This is a screen most people should stay away from as it is targeted at high-end professional users.

So where does that leave the average Joe? Nowhere really. There are no options and you have to look elsewhere.

Even Apple lists LGs displays as options on their site. I’m not sure this is a sign they won’t bother with displays for you and me anymore.

After days of research, there are a few alternatives you can consider. Good luck learning the model names though.

BenQ

One of the best options offered by BenQ is the Designer Professional Monitor with 31.5-inch, 4K UHD, Display P3 |PD3220U.

With its similar size and great panel, it is a valid competitor. The display is high rez (although not 6k) with a 10-bit HDR panel.

You can daisy-chain it to set up multiple monitors and it comes with a puck with buttons so you can quickly change color modes (if you’re a fan of more clutter on your desk)

ASUS

ASUS has a lineup targeted towards creative users. They have a whole series called ProArt.

It is within this lineup we find some of the best alternatives to the XDR.

The ASUS ProArt Display PA32UCX-K 4K HDR IPS Mini LED Professional Monitor — 32”

There is a variety of models to choose from. The K model f.ex. has the calibration tool included.

LG

LG has a few options. Apple sells the 27-inch LG UltraFine 5K Display on their site and it is tailored for the mac. It doesn’t even have hardware menus as the OS will help you with the settings.

It is packed with a web camera, microphones, speakers, and several USB-C ports. The thunderbolt plug also powers your MacBook.

If you are looking for more screen real estate, you can have a look at the 34'’ LG 34WK95U-W UltraWide® 5K2K Nano IPS LED Monitor with HDR 600.

Working with widescreen is amazing. The productivity levels are boosted and you don’t get a screen border in the middle of your view.

Another popular option in the LG camp is the Ergo series. The LG 32UN880-B 32 Inch UltraFine™ Display Ergo 4K HDR10 Monitor is something to consider. The stand looks fantastic.
Learning to See: Visual Inspirations and Data Visualization
By: Giorgia Lupi
Tags: Art, Design, Data Visualization

Only apparently unrelated, abstract art and data visualization actually have a lot more in common than what one would expect, and can be considered by some means two very close disciplines.

A study on “Early Abstract Art and Experimental Gestalt Psychology” by Crétien van Campen of MIT draws the conclusion that the same theories that are universally recognized as a basis for perception studies to support effective data visualization, have actually also deeply influenced the work of abstract artists such as Kandinsky or Mondrian.

This common root that we can trace back to German psychologists of the early 20th century reveals how, while clearly pursuing different goals, abstract artists and data visualization designers both draw on common perception principles and apply them to simple shapes and a definite range of colors to create basic visual compositions that please the eye and, hopefully, deliver a message.
👔 Career Goals
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Humor, Comics, Cartoon, Coronavirus, Work

C A R T O O N

👔 Career Goals

What’s yours?

Cartoon by Rolli

Cartoonist’s Note №1

Though I personally enjoy my job, and can’t imagine retiring, I’ve observed that I’m in the minority. That said, I have no specific goals, other than to continue to exist. How about you?

Cartoonist’s Note №2

This cartoon will earn no money (Medium recently all-but-demonetized poetry, cartoons, flash fiction and other short articles). Please consider buying me a coffee. More coffee=more cartoons for you to enjoy.

Cartoonist’s Note №3

Like this cartoon? Get in on a coffee mug!

Cartoonist’s Note №4

This cartoon is brought to you by the letter “D.” “D” is for Dr. Franklin’s Staticy Cat and Other Outrageous Tales, my collection of humorous stories and drawings for children.

Cartoonist’s Note №5

My new one-man Medium magazine is called — Rolli. Subscribe today.

Cartoonist’s Note №6

From now on, I’m letting my readers determine how often I post new material. When this post reaches 1000 claps — but not before — I’ll post something new.

Cartoonist’s Note №7

You might like these cartoons, too.
The Gangster in the Blue Serge Suit
By: Ben Feibleman
Tags: Organized Crime, New York, History, True Crime, Mafia

After his release Dio moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania where he opened a dress manufacturing business. He sold it in 1950 before moving back to New York to open another dress company. If there was any doubt to Dio’s motivations in labor organizing, it was exemplified in what he did after he sold the Pennsylvania business for $12,000. One year later, Dio returned, demanding another $11,200 to use his influence to prevent the plant from unionizing, while at the same time scheming with corrupt union officials back in New York to take control of his own charter, the United Auto Workers-AFL Local 102.

Dio’s association with the unions brought heavy scrutiny from law enforcement which knew his reputation. This became a problem in his quest for union leadership. The parent organization accused Dio of stacking the management of local charters with unsavory characters with criminal histories, and sought a way to remove Dio and his ilk from the organization. Through the course of their investigations, they were even left baffled as to how Dio, who had never worked in the trade, acquired the charters to begin with. Union officials sought the procedural means to oust Dio, but like the challenges of Dio’s criminal prosecutions, the union investigations were unable to find victims willing to testify against him.

They finally succeeded in 1954 when Dio was successfully prosecuted for tax fraud due to income he had failed to report on the sale of his Pennsylvania dress business, and the bribes made to keep the plant non-union. With his 60-day jail sentence, the union leadership finally had something they could use to justify Dio’s ouster. In the end, the unions accused Dio’s local organizations of not even having members, deeming them “paper locals” due to their inflated or imaginary numbers. The Times reported that that the New York District Attorney’s office said Dio’s local existed for the sole purpose of forcing “extorsive action” against the public.

Yet even with Dio’s setbacks and brief jail sentence, he was still a stubborn problem for the authorities and the unions. One of the challenges to prosecuting individuals like Dio was uneven application of the law across the country as well as between city, state, and federal authorities, according to McCarthy. “It was a hodgepodge of enforcement,” he said. It took time for them to evolve and catch up with the criminals. In 1956, the U.S. Attorney’s office warned that New York was on the verge of a “gangster invasion.”

Much like the realignment of security agencies after the 9/11 attacks, city, state, and federal law enforcement started working on ways to share evidence and communicate more efficiently to effect more successful prosecutions of organized crime.

The timing was appropriate. After Dio’s release in 1954, he went right back to the labor racket he knew so well, and his methods grew even more brutal.
Octhum: a tool to unify different Artificial Intelligence approaches
By: Vitor Fonseca
Tags: Neural Networks, PHP, Rest Api, Artificial Intelligence, SaaS

Artificial Intelligences, in few words, are models that simulate human brains. For an example, Neural Networks, one of more famous artificial intelligence approach, learn about a scope (through an information database file or another font that contains patterns), simulate the neurons signals and your connections (synapsis), considering the weight of each one in a “brain processing”. Exactly this happens in our brain: we grew up learning patterns our entire life, classifying them in images, audios, and touches.

The great problem is that there isn’t an easy way to reuse artificial intelligence software, as we reuse our brain to process everything. If you need to work with tumor patterns, you will need to acquire a neural network that will have specific synapsis weights, and neuron quantities applied to this scope. If you are a biologist and need to recognize whales species by their noises, you will need to acquire another neural network platform, containing synapsis weights and neuron quantities completely different than the first case.

Octhum was made to solve this problem, training the intelligences with many models, verifying which model is the best and use it. In this way, we can use various scopes in the same platform, with each scope using the model that best suits. This is possible because Octhum requires the same formatting in the database file content.

Below we have two examples: an intelligence to decide what’s the color, based in RGB inputted, and another intelligence to decide what’s the abalone’s sex, based in some characteristics, like rings number, viscera weight, height, width, and others.

In the first intelligence, we should format the CSV file (used as database file in Octhum neural networks training) as in the image below, where the first column contains the final classifications, and other columns contain the inputs (or variables) associated with each classification. The second and third lines contain the minimum and maximum values of each variable (only to validation).

CSV formatted containing some RGBs and your respective colors

In the second intelligence, we should format the CSV file as we did in first intelligence, maintaining the same structure. To train any intelligence, the file format should be the same.

CSV formatted containing some abalone’s characteristics and your respectives sexes

Octhum will process these databases and will store the configured neural network, accessing it when the user wants to use the intelligence. When this happens, Octhum receives the values of the variables (defined by the user), input them in a neural network, and give a response with the final classification. The images below show the first intelligence being used.

Fields to input variable values

R=255, G=0, B=0 is red

R=0, G=255, B=0 is green
Python 3.9 Updates in 2 Minutes
By: Sujan Shirol
Tags: Programming, Python Programming, Python3, Updates, Python

The stable version of Python 3.9.0 has been released on 5th October 2020. Let’s see the new major features.

Dictionary Merging

Consider two dictionaries having the same key-value pairs except one of the values in one dictionary. For example, a person's email id has been changed recently which is in a new dictionary(b) and you would like to update the email id in the original dictionary(a) containing other details.

There are two ways to do it(updating dictionary a) in Python 3.9.

Output: {'id' : 10, 'username' : 'python3.9', 'email' : 'newpython@gmail.com'}

Type Hints

Python now supports native type hinting. You can have a list of integers only, if you try to add a string to the list it throws an error.

Removing Prefix/Suffix

Suppose I have a list of doctor's names and one out of them does not have ‘Dr.’ prefixed. Now I would like to remove the prefix so that I have only the names on my list.

Let’s first see how it was done before Python 3.9.

Output: ['Leonard McCoy', 'Beverly Crusher', 'Julian Bashir', 'The Doctor', 'Phlox']

Python 3.9 provides two functions to remove prefix and suffix:

removeprefix() removesuffix()

Now let’s see how to the above job after Python 3.9.

Output: ['Leonard McCoy', 'Beverly Crusher', 'Julian Bashir', 'The Doctor', 'Phlox']

Time Zones

Python 3.9 provides native capabilities to specify the timezone. Previously we had to do this by installing the third-party library called pytz.

The below code shows the time by timezone India.
HodlBot Launches on Product Hunt
By: Anthony Xie
Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Product Hunt, Startup

I just wanted to write this quick post to thank everybody for supporting us along the way.

We’re going after #1!!!

If you haven’t already, please drop by and give us some ❤️. Please don’t feel obligated to leave an upvote. We’d prefer if you dropped a comment and gave us some feedback instead 😊.

Our Maker comment on Product Hunt:

Hey Product Hunt,

Our platform first went live last fall, a year later we’re approaching $100M in executed trades 🎉with +10,000 users from 80 different countries 🌎. After following the PH community for years, we’re excited to share HodlBot with you.

We are fans of indexing & passive investing. Historically in the equity markets, indices have outperformed 90% of active managers over a 15-year period. We believe a well-diversified cryptocurrency portfolio will yield similar results compared to active traders.

We initially created HodlBot because we were frustrated there weren’t any simple solutions out there for everyday investors. Existing solutions either were only available for accredited investors, had terrible liquidity, or simply didn’t track the price of the underlying assets correctly.

We took a different approach by directly integrating HodlBot with the APIs of popular cryptocurrency exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Kucoin, Bittrex).

Our users hold the underlying assets, we don’t have withdrawal access, and we follow best practices to encrypt user data. When we first launched a MVP last year, all it did was diversify your portfolio across the top 20 coins by market cap. Since then we’ve added the ability to:

Since then we’ve added the ability to:

Create a custom portfolio weighting users can tweak

Create a custom index based on a starting & ending rank, with percentage caps, and different weighting strategies

Automatic rebalancing (custom frequency or threshold) that keeps your portfolio on track

Backtest a portfolio to see how it would have performed in the past

Blacklist coins you don’t want to include in an index

Cash-out a % of your portfolio into any coin in order to exit the market -Track the performance of your portfolio

Diversify your portfolio across cryptocurrency exchanges (Binance, Kraken, KuCoin, Bittrex, Coinbase)

At HodlBot, we’re big believers in being transparent and writing down what we’ve learned. If you want to learn more about what we’re doing, here are some of our best blogs:

Until next time friends,

Adios!
3 to read: Making journalism crowd funding work | Finding subscribers | What Jill Abramson got wrong
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Media, Journalism Ethics, Media Criticism, Jill Abramson, Journalism

Jan. 26, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

How The Correspondent became the largest journalism crowdfunding project in history — without 1 story on its site: News sites are increasingly turning to readers to be their financial saviors. But it’s not easy. So here’s a fascinating look at how The Correspondent patiently and carefully laid the groundwork for raising $2.6 million from more than 45,000 supporters. For people interested in starting their own crowd-funded news sites, this is a primer on how to do it well. Great story by Emily Goligoski and Aron Pilhofer for MembershipPuzzle.org.

How many paying subscribers do you need to keep a money-losing magazine afloat? A regional mag finds out: The digital age has not been kind to regional magazine, which at one point were fat, happy money-makers. Now they’re hanging on by their fingertips. So when Arkansas Magazine announced it would shut down if it didn’t get enough paid subscribers, the staff jumped in, pushing hard on social media. Here’s what happened. By Laura Hazard Owens for Nieman Lab.

What Jill Abramson gets wrong about the digital journalism: Abramson, the first female executive editor of the NYT, has written a book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” It’s a take on four big media players — the NYT, WaPo, Vice, and BuzzFeed, where media is headed, and her own bitter falling-out with the NYT. But apparently she had trouble wrangling the truth down about Vice and BuzzFeed. An angry war of tweets has erupted over what reporters at Vice and BuzzFeed claim are errors in the book. As Josephine Livingstone chronicles for The New Republic, it’s not a pretty. But it makes an interesting read.
6 Ways Strength Training Boosts Emotional Strength
By: Melissa Schwartz
Tags: Anxiety, Mental Health, Fitness, Personal Development, Stress

6 Ways Strength Training Boosts Emotional Strength

Tips from an ACSM Certified Personal Trainer

As a Personal Trainer, when I speak about strength training and weight lifting, a lot of people picture big guys throwing around weights. There are so many more benefits to strength training than a six-pack, and they have nothing to do with how we look!

1. A New Meditation Practice to Manage Anxiety

You may never have thought of lifting weights as a meditative practice. But it’s a focused time to count breaths and reps that can quiet even the busiest monkey mind. While meditating, it can be easy to let the mind wander to dinner plans or frustrations, but while training with a challenging and heavy weight, you have to concentrate fully.

2. Reduce Stress

Regular strength training reduces cortisol levels in the body. The only caveat — prioritize rest and restoration. Too much intense training without time to repair will raise cortisol levels. Shoot for consistency and sustainability.

3. Increased Cognitive Ability

Strength training builds connections between neurons, muscles, bones, and body awareness. Being in tune with the body allows us to become more self-aware and focused when it comes to identifying our needs and regulating our emotions.

4. Progress over Perfection

The process of focusing on progress and the process of weight lifting is a big life lesson. Strength training forces you to break down each session and progressively improve in small and measurable increments. That progress has hills and valleys, but when you zoom out — it’s inspiring to see that each session contributes to a greater goal.

5. Creates a Supportive Community

There are thousands of online and in-person fitness communities. Everyone shows up to improve their fitness regardless of their career, background, or what kind of day they had. The best of these communities have encouraging environments for any level and provide a great way to socialize in a low-pressure, fun environment.

6. Builds Confidence

I’ve heard from many of my clients that strength training has helped them feel more confident in other areas of their life. To lift something they never thought was possible creates a sense of possibility and pride in other areas of their life.

If you’ve never tried strength training before, starting out with a simple program just 2 x a week can have amazing benefits!
My Childhood Tourette’s, Explained
By: H. M. Johnson
Tags: Tourettes, Childhood, Psychology, Tics, Children

Image Source: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

My Childhood Tourette’s, Explained

My verbal tic put me up against the world at a young age.

The inexplicable feeling of being eaten up by an urge to verbally tic began when I was in the third grade. It was highly invasive — I always needed to clear my throat and make a deep humming noise several times per minute. No matter how deeply I breathed or tried to clear my mind, there it was — hmm, hmm. Hmmmmm.

I think that maybe there’s something to be said about my tic during the times for when I was alone. I was a solitary child who strongly preferred reading and staring at the wall to imagine things over playing with my peers. When I came home from school, I’d read, and at school it was my favorite thing to do during recess. The second I was finished with my classwork, which I’d rush through in order to read, I would often find myself imagining the books I would write once I was old enough. Maybe my tics were a way of grounding myself so that I wouldn’t get lost when I was staring into space or living inside the world of a story.

Considering my verbal tics during times where I was required to assimilate with my peers is a whole other story. I wanted to turn it off so badly. It was painful to have to give in to making the deep humming sound when I’d already earned the title of “rabbit teeth” by my classmates and begun experiencing teasing because I was the first kid in school to have braces. I had large buck teeth. The other kids laughed before my teeth were fixed and while they were actively being fixed by the braces, so the last thing I needed was yet another reason to be laughed at.

Don’t get me wrong — a lot of kids were really nice and forgiving about my little problem. To my face, most of them were decent about it, but I still didn’t fit into any groups and all of my attempts to make friends repeatedly failed. Some of the other girls were really embarrassed to be friends with me, and it was the kind of thing where we’d play at each other’s houses outside of school but they’d still pretend not to know me during class and I was always left out of the birthday parties. Friendless with a strange problem, my parents pulled me out of school for a few weeks.
Duck Tales: The Wonders of Integration
By: Gene Zeiniss
Tags: Authentication, Openfeign, Integration, Java, Spring Retry

Duck Tales: The Wonders of Integration

How I implemented the Integration with Third-Party Services using Request Interceptor and Spring Retry Template

Carl Barks painting of Uncle Scrooge McDuck.

Disney’s Duck Tales was a classic cartoon series in the early 1990s, at the time when I grew up. If you watched it, you probably just said “Duck Tales… woohoo!” in your head. The cartoon series told the story of Scrooge McDuck (an elderly Scottish anthropomorphic Pekin Duck known as a business magnate and the richest duck in the world) and his three grandnephews. Each episode told us about Scrooge and his companions’ various adventures, most of which frustrated the Beagle Boys’ attempts to steal Scrooge’s fortune.

Fast forward to the new season I’m making of Duck Tales. In (my) first episode we will integrate our system to Scrooge’s banking services (“Scrooge McDuck Money Bin inc”). Scrooge McDuck is willing to initiate electronic (21st century, you know) money transactions on behalf of the company I’m working for. In short, we developed a financial technology platform that provides instant credit to small businesses.

“A day without looking at me Money Bin is like a day without sunshine!” — Scrooge McDuck

Following the quote, once a day, the scheduler runs on our database and prepares the list of electronic payments that should be transferred to the client-business. The transfer is actually performed by the bank. So we send the request to Scrooge to originate the provided payment (“Payment Origination”). The status of each individual payment can be tracked by polling to “Check Payment Status” API.

Now, Scrooge McDuck vault, the Money Bin, has a thick door, which is designed to prevent villains from breaking in and diving into the McDuck fortune. This is an authorization token that is required by each API call. This token is valid for 24 hours. So far so good, right. Here’s come a catch: you can receive a new access token only after it has expired.

“I’ve got to get you to my vault. It’s the only safe place” — Scrooge McDuck

This shouldn’t be an issue if you perform a few calls a day. I mean, you can just get an access token before each communication with Scrooge’s bank. But, what if you perform hundreds of these calls? This might bump you into the threshold limit, and will quite ball up your logs.

The challenge was therefore to optimize code by eliminating any unnecessary API calls. The idea was to generate an access token on demand (on authorization error failure), using a try-catch with a retry mechanism.

Well, the odd thing to say, I’m using Spring Cloud OpenFeign for this integration. Let’s move forward, I’m going to show you my way to overcoming the challenge.