fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How to Progress Rapidly as a Developer
By: Szymon Adamiak
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Python, Learning To Code, Education

Don’t Waste Your Time

When you’ve mastered coding fundamentals, the learning curve becomes steeper. New concepts are significantly harder to grasp. You need to learn effectively in order to progress.

Assume you’ve watched a great tutorial. You coded along and built an app with your teacher. But two days later you don’t remember much. When you try to use new knowledge, you get stuck. You feel the urge to watch that great tutorial again.

Don’t do it.

Time is a precious resource. You shouldn’t use it for rewatching or rereading.

Here are three simple techniques that help you study effectively.

Active recall

Active recall is a process in which you try to retrieve information from memory, instead of rereading it. A typical example is the use of flashcards.

You can use active recall anytime when learning to code. Next time when you’re watching or reading a tutorial, don’t code. Focus on following a teacher. Then try to recreate code from memory. Only get back to the lesson if you can’t reproduce some part.

Spaced repetition

You’ll understand new concepts much better if you learn in smaller chunks spread over time than if you cram in one sitting. Create a repetition system with the breaks increasing each time.

For example, learn about closures for thirty minutes. Check out what the closure is and when to use it, see some code samples, take notes, or make flashcards. Tomorrow, try to recall information about closure from memory. If you succeed, try again after three days. Each time lengthen a delay between repetitions. If you fail — stick to this same delay.

Experiment with different schedules to find the one that suits you the best.

Tests

Remember how you used to learn at school? You may have studied over all the semester, but you worked hardest and learned the most before the exam. Use that to your advantage.

Create a simple schedule. For example, devote two hours to testing once a month. You can easily find tests online or create them by yourself. The exam doesn’t need to have a traditional form. It’s even better if you test yourself by making an app using the knowledge you want to solidify.
Talko + Slack
By: Talko Team
Tags: Mobile, Apps, Slack

Shortly after our launch we heard from several teams who were using both Slack and Talko daily. We heard from product development teams who do daily “standups”, sales teams who do weekly status calls, event marketers who communicate across event sites, and several others. They described using Slack for team messaging, and Talko for team calling.

These teams were asking for a more integrated way to use Talko and Slack.

So we built it, and a couple months ago we began using it (and loving it!) every day to start our own daily standup calls from Slack. Beta customers helped us refine the integrated user experience over the past few weeks. We’re thankful for the feedback from X Prize Foundation, Litmus, Vision Critical, Nodo Arquitectos, 8:45A, Velocity Growth, and several others.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Talko is an “official” Slack integration! It’s now simple to set up, and openly available for any team to start using. The benefits include:

Reliable team calls on mobile or web : Team members’ iPhones immediately ring when a call starts in a Slack channel. Regardless of location or network, everyone can have a reliable, high quality call experience.

: Team members’ iPhones immediately ring when a call starts in a Slack channel. Regardless of location or network, everyone can have a reliable, high quality call experience. Transparent and productive communications: All Talko calls are recorded. Team members who couldn’t be there LIVE can enter later to listen to the entire call or just its important moments. This helps teams stay in sync, remember critical decisions, and get things done quicker.

As a bonus, teams using our Slack integration can take part in team calls via an early beta of our web app. This allows everyone to participate in the most natural way possible. Mobile team members will answer the Talko ring on their iPhone (Android is coming soon), while those at their desktop can choose to use the web app with the Google Chrome browser.

How it Works

Starting a Talko call is as simple as typing “/talko <subject>” in any Slack channel. The subject is optional, but often helpful because it indicates to others what you want to talk about. When you send the slash command, slackbot responds with a link that is visible only to the call creator. Click that link to begin the call.
How to Build a Brand: The Ultimate Guide to Brand Strategy
By: Brittany Jezouit
Tags: Marketing, Brand, Better Marketing Archive, Storytelling, Communication

How to Build a Brand: The Ultimate Guide to Brand Strategy

Better Marketing’s best advice for understanding the principles that make a brand successful

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

Nearly every “Introduction to Marketing” class begins with the same concept: the brand.

What I like about brand strategy is that it exists in the space between marketing and psychology. To define a brand is to think through the why of your organization, startup, or personal brand identity. There are nearly five million people with the phrase “brand strategy” in their job title on LinkedIn. Understanding the principles of branding is a skill in high demand, and the phrase “brand strategy” has arguably become nearly synonymous with marketing itself.

In short, brand identity is the cornerstone of marketing — but it can also be hard to figure out.

Below, you’ll find our best resources for understanding, defining, and building a brand. Spend an afternoon reading through this guide, and you’ll come away with a better understanding of how to apply these ideas to your own brand — with expert step-by-step plans, brand storytelling exercises to follow, and a myriad of case studies to draw inspiration from.
Price Discovery + BTC Analysis
By: Coin Observatory
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Fintech, Crypto, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Efficiency and Reflexivity of Markets.

Price Discovery

By short selling Bitcoin, shorts engage in a practice defined as price discovery, in this instance short sellers are attempting to “discover” a new price low. In this article I highlight their current attempts, previous attempts, and the overall impact this can have on the market.

“Price Discovery: By providing a contrarian point of view and going against the crowd, short sellers facilitate price discovery for stocks.” -Definition by Investopedia

The above chart is a visualization of Short selling efforts and price discovery.

For this analysis we utilize engulfing candles, rate of change, and trading ranges.

Bearish Engulfing candles, are price discovery attempts. Bears sell short, and attempt to decrease Bitcoin’s price.

Volume, demonstrates current interest in Bitcoin’s price. High volume bars signify buyer interest at current market price.

Bearish Engulfing candles, are bulls coming in strong and signaling that price currently after a discovery is of interest. Hence executing market orders and elevating the price upwards.

Rate Of Change, for the case of this study we’re going to utilize a switch from negative high volume bars, to positive green high volume bars at a certain price.

Trading Ranges, the orange lines represent support and resistance levels.

Reflexive, knee-jerk type of reaction, otherwise referred to as an “automatic rally”

Current intra-day price action signifies that price discovery to the downside is being countered by positive buy volume. And currently price action is to the upside as Bitcoin is climbing through the trading ranges and establishing new levels of support at previous resistances. Price is reactive, and is buy volume is entering the chart reflexively at range lows where price discovery meets Market Maker interest.
Mid-30s vs. Mid-20s Millennial Women
By: Andrew Hutchinson
Tags: Culture, Women, Humor, Comics, Creativity

Sign up for Yapjaw

By Slackjaw

Yapjaw is Medium's #1 newsletter for all things humor, and we're sorry to say you'll only receive it a few times a month. Take a look
Shine Bright This Christmas!
By: Trista Ainsworth
Tags: Poetry On Medium, Holiday Greetings, Christmas, Poetry, Wishes

Shine Bright This Christmas!

Much love to my dear friends

Watercolor & Colored Pencil Card by the Author: Trista Signe Ainsworth

Shine bright,

You have a light to give,

Your star sparkles on,

Even in the darkest night.

Shine bright,

You have a gift to bestow,

Your spark is here for us,

Even in the emptiness of space.

Shine bright,

You have so much to show,

Your love is here to stay,

Even in the hardest of times.
Treating Someone Like a Number Can Be a Good Thing
By: Zoe Naz
Tags: Ideas, Psychology, Business, Technology, Marketing

Treating Someone Like a Number Can Be a Good Thing

Some marketing rules are meant to be broken

Photo by Element5 Digital from Pexels

“Don’t treat someone like a number.” We’ve all heard the saying.

Most of us can agree that treating someone like a number lacks compassion or worst, strips someone of their humanity.

According to a Salesforce survey of over 6,000 participants, 84% of people said that “being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.”

As marketers, we use statistics and numbers all the time to add credibility, like “X% of customers love our product.” These quantitative expressions are acceptable as they address the collective.

But we know in situations when addressing individuals directly, numbers will create a negative brand perception. No one wants to be addressed as case number 20,233 in a support ticket or put into a batch email campaign for…baby clothes.

With that in mind, is there ever a time when treating an individual like a number can be a good idea?

The other day I found my answer. I logged into Betterment, a robo-investing platform I have an account with, and lo and behold, they addressed me as customer 87,420. And I cheered!

Here’s an example of how treating someone like a number is smart marketing.

Screenshot took of my Betterment Dashboard

Why did it work?

Instead of just making it about their brand reaching the ten-year milestone, they made it about me. I felt like I was a part of their journey, as an early adopter of a platform. And finally, I feel connected to the brand.

To take their strategy one step further, I would have loved some context on how many customers they have, and how much money they have helped those customers earn.

Sometimes, being treated like a number is as personalized as it gets. What “don’t treat people like a number” really means is not to be impersonal. It has nothing to do with numbers.

Some marketing rules need to be broken. Marketing isn’t a collective set of actions, it’s the process of crafting a compelling narrative that people connect to.

No playbook will have all the answers on the best way to foster a real connection. But psychology can hold some answers.

Feeling like customers belong to a brand or business, far outways being treated as a customer. Apple mastered that art, and you can too by thinking less about marketing tactics and more about how to make people feel like they are a part of something bigger than just a brand milestone.

To do so, foster a community, stand for something (and therefore against something), remember and share something about them, create personalized and customized experiences, and allow them a platform to share their ideas and feedback.

If you do that right, your customers will feel heard. And there’s no stronger loyalty program than that.
Assholes: A Theory — VIFF 2019. I gotta say, it is just fun to say the…
By: Jennifer Hammersmark
Tags: Documentary, Review, Assholes, Workplace Culture, Entitlement

I gotta say, it is just fun to say the word! And it is just as funny to see the people in this film use the word asshole, with conviction and meaning.

Director John Walker, Documentary Filmmaker

A relatively lighthearted presentation on a not-so-light issue: the age of entitlement.

John does a great job of drawing information from a number of diverse people on the subject, including John Cleese, Author Aaron James (this film is based on his book of the same name), and LGBTQ Activist and former politician, Vladimir Luxuria, to name a few.

My favourite story in the film: Baird. Baird is a financial services firm in the U.S. that has a no asshole rule. Yup, that’s right, if it is discovered that you are one, you won’t be working there! As a result, they are one of Fortune’s Best 100 Companies To Work For.

This film is entertaining, and at times serious, about an important value that we can all take home.
To that Knight who got the Princess
By: Pau R.
Tags: Girl, Poetry

You got the fairest

You’re one lucky boy

You found this one soul worth keeping

So keep her

She’s worth it until the end of all things

Protect her, shield her from harm

Keep her away and safe from the evils

Be at the ready, raise your weapon of choice

Wave your banner to let them know you mean it

To keep her

Until the end of all of things
How To Capture Your Complete Writing History
By: Barry Desautels
Tags: Writing Prompts, Writer, Writing, Writing Tips, Writing Life

Your writing history tells the personal story of how you overcame all the obstacles, and achieved literary success. It will only be a long interesting tale if you don’t quit, and instead, keep writing and spend a little time recording the ups and downs of the journey.

Every successful writer ends up running a business. But not every writer knows how to make it efficient and profitable.

It’s a long road between your first article and all the money you dream of making. Most writers do a lot of experimenting, stumbling, quitting, restarting, and living through their own particular version of hell on earth before a road of success unfolds behind them.

A writer's life should develop with at least a bit of order. That means creating a filing system that can grow with the business, and the discipline to maintain that semblance of organization.

Making money is not the first thing you should worry about. That will grow over time, and systems to look after income already exist. But what do you do with everything else? There are a couple of tools you can use.
Ковырялся тут, ковырялся… И наковырял.
By: Orion Nebula
Tags: Music, Video, Mad People

in Both Sides of the Table
Low Vitamin D Levels as a Risk Factor for Greater Covid-19 Severity
By: Shin Jie Yong
Tags: Health, Coronavirus, Science, Advice, Life

Low Vitamin D Levels as a Risk Factor for Greater Covid-19 Severity

Evidence from cohort studies, an observational study, meta-analyses, and reviews.

PART I: Cohort Studies

This study, “Low plasma 25(OH) vitamin D level is associated with increased risk of COVID‐19 infection: an Israeli population‐based study,” was published in July. Researchers in Israel identified lower overall vitamin D levels in 782 Covid-19 compared to 7,025 non-Covid-19 participants. More importantly, low vitamin D levels increased the odds of hospitalization by 95%, after adjusting for demographics and comorbidities confounders. “Low plasma 25(OH)D level appears to be an independent risk factor for COVID‐19 infection and hospitalization,” the authors concluded.

In a smaller cohort study, titled “Low serum 25‐hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) levels in patients hospitalized with COVID‐19 are associated with greater disease severity,” researchers measured blood vitamin D levels in 134 people tested positive for Covid-19 in the UK. They found that only 19% of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) had normal vitamin D levels, and this number is 39.1% in those with non-ICU level severity. This relationship between low baseline vitamin D status and greater Covid-19 severity is also seen in a separate cohort study of 80 patients.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) • Blu-ray [Criterion Collection]
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Comedy, Film, Review, Criterion Collection, Movies

The 1960s were a period in entertainment where the threat of televisions was playing on the minds of studio executives. Filmmakers feared audiences would favour staying at home over going to the cinema, and paying money for the privilege, so efforts were made to ensure the big screen experience offered something TV didn’t. Half-a-century later, in the age of IMAX and 3D, does any of this sound familiar?

Back then, studios aimed to ensure major releases were as glamorous and grandiose as possible. That’s partly why Mad World was crammed with popular celebrities of the time, and why Kramer wanted to shoot it on Ultra Panavision 70 in “one-projector” Cinerama. That’s 70mm film print displayed on an enormous curved screen, intended to synchronise images from three standard 35mm projectors. Does a knockabout comedy warrant the kind of high-end presentation 2001: A Space Odyssey or Laurence of Arabia enjoyed? It’s debatable, but you can’t doubt the ambition.

Mad World remains an irresistibly madcap experience. One that’s been very influential and often parodied through the decades.

The craziness begins when a career thief called “Smiler” Grogan (Jimmy Durante), on the run from the police, veers off the California desert highway in his car. Five passing motorists come to his aide: neurotic dentist Melville Crimp (Sid Caesar) and his wife Monica (Edie Adams); deliveryman Lennie Piker (Jonathan Winters); hen-pecked entrepreneur J. Russell Finch (Milton Berle), his sweet wife Emmeline (Dorothy Provine), and obnoxious mother-in-law (Ethel Merman); and two friends travelling to Las Vegas called Ding “Dingy” Bell (Mickey Rooney) and Benjy Benjamin (Buddy Hackett).

Sadly, Grogan dies of injuries sustained in the road accident, but not before revealing to them that he’s buried $350,000 ($2.7 million today) in Santa Rosita State Park “under a big W”. Initially agreeing to cooperate and keep the treasure a secret from the police, the group’s inability to settle on how to share the money forces them into a selfish race to claim the buried cash.

Along the way, each traveller winds up in various misadventures as they make their way towards the Mexican border, dragging other people into their escalating hysteria to become super rich. There’s an alcoholic pilot (Jim Backus), smarmy British Army officer Algernon Hawthorne (Terry-Thomas), conman Otto Meyer (Phil Silvers), two gas station owners (Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan), mummy’s boy Sylvester (Dick Shawn), two cabbies (Peter Falk, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), and the retiring Captain T.G Culpeper (Spencer Tracey) who’s been chasing Grogan for years and switches his attention to pursing them cross-country.
Way late review: Haywire
By: Joshua Hoover
Tags: Action, Entertainment, 2011, Movie Reviews, R

Steven Soderbergh could have made the female Bourne movie. I’m afraid Joe Wright beat him to that with 2011’s Hanna. Granted, Hanna was an adolescent girl set in a bizarre modern day fairy tale. Haywire replaces the girl with a woman MMA fighter and trades the fairy tale for mostly mundane exposition.

Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is on the run. It’s not clear what for exactly in the opening moments of the film but we learn quickly that someone is not happy with her being out and about. There is something different about Mallory. Within minutes she is bashing in the head of Channing Tatum as she makes a run for it out of the rural diner. She forces a young man to get in his car and give her the keys. And away they go.

During the car ride Mallory explains her predicament. She’s a special agent for a private company that does work for various government agencies. It’s not the cleanest line of work and the reward for a job well done is being setup by her boss Kenneth (Ewan McGregor). Mallory escapes the trap with casualties trailing behind her. From that point forward the hunt is on for Mallory Kane.

What should be an action packed movie is mostly a lot of slowly paced scenes with plenty of dialogue to fill the gaps. A star studded cast fills the movie but is put to little use. Everyone seems subdued. And while some may blame Gina Carano for bringing the level of acting down several notches, she is not the problem. The entire cast is incapable of breaking free of the malaise that plagues them. Carano may be a bit of a gimmick, but no one can blame her for the lulls in the pacing, the generally out of place soundtrack, the dialogue heavy screenplay, and the ugly look of the film. Soderbergh’s style normally agrees with me. His penchant for using odd coloring is normally OK, but Haywire is flat out ugly. The colors distort an already flat looking picture. Rather than artistic, the look feels sloppy at best.

When there is action, it’s quite good. The fighting is not cut up with quick edits and annoying close ups that obscure the action. Fights are given the room to breathe, which is a rarity these days where special effects and hyperactive editing make a mess of far too many action sequences. Those scenes are entertaining and leave one wondering why there are five minutes of action followed up by three times as much filler. If only Soderbergh took his sense of fun and style with Ocean’s Eleven and mixed it with the energy of the fight scenes. Oh well.

[xrr rating=2.5/5 label=” “]

This post is part of my Way late reviews. Read more reviews here.

[youtube width=”640" height=”360"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFV0Uvzpz0o[/youtube]
CZ & Pomp on Crypto Law
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Cryptolaw, Cryptocurrency News, Blockchain, Binance

CZ: [Many] missed the international aspect of blockchain. Binance is one of the earliest companies that rolled out simultaneously in 180 countries. Most of the mentality before was: let me target and conquer the U.S. market first, then we’ll move to China, then we’ll move to India, then we’ll move to Europe.

Now, there’s no borders. You can grow in many countries at once. In the early days, that was on the key factors that allowed us to grow quickly.

Pomp: This idea that the blockchain permits a world without borders is fascinating to me. As you were building Binance, what would you say were the biggest challenges? Obviously there is the regulation challenge, but other than that, what else were those challenges in the early days that maybe people don’t know that you faced.

CZ: So, the regulatory space is very challenging when you are growing in 180 countries because theoretically there are 180 slightly different variations of regulations going on.

Also, in our industry, to be honest, the regulations are still unclear in most of those countries; probably in all of those countries to some extent. So that’s always challenging.

You don’t want to step on someone’s toes; you don’t want to violate something. But the rules are not clear. What you can and cannot do is a little bit fuzzy.

So you have to have a very strong moral compass. You have to have very strong ethical values. As the team gets bigger, we have to make sure the ethical values are inherent in every person. So we have to hire people very carefully to have that value.

So that’s probably the biggest challenge we have — to get the team right. Once you have the team with those kind of values, things become a lot easier.
Pendobrak Dikotomi Pengusaha vs Karyawan : Koperasi Pekerja
By: M Sena Luphdika
Tags: Worker Cooperatives, Koperasi, Koperasi Pekerja, Entrepreneurship

Good Job: The Growth of Co-operative Business in British Columbia | The Tyee

Editor's note: Rachel's story is based on an audio documentary she created last year. Scroll down to find the…
BitClave Weekly Update — Feb 18, 2018
Tags: Search, Bitclave, Ethereum, Decentralized, Blockchain

Development

MatchICO

After receiving numerous requests from users who have tokens in their wallets, we updated our token calculating algorithm. Today, we take existing tokens into account for wallet balance valuation.

Add more wallets to your MatchICO account and enjoy generous offers.

Bitclave.com

We launched our redesigned landing page for Bitclave.com. We would appreciate your feedback at info@bitclave.com.

Platform

Last week we completed the client side API and the sample application demonstrating the usage of the registration and data sharing protocols. We also moved forward with the Ethereum-based implementation of the protocol.

As hinted in last week’s newsletter, here is the more advanced challenge. This time you need to figure out what is the email address of our first user. The first user is implemented as a bot and his name is “adam”. For this challenge you’ll need to register into the system by going to our very basic sample app https://base-bitclave-com.herokuapp.com. Then you will need to ask “adam” to share his email address. “adam” is a very social bot, so he shares his email with everyone. All you need to do is to ask, but to do so, you’ll need to figure out “adam”’s public ID. To discover “adams” public ID you need to use the API here https://base2-bitclva-com.herokuapp.com/swagger-ui.html. Remember — “adam” is a bot.

The first 5 participants in this challenge will get 150 CAT tokens. Please contact us via chat on the main website to provide your answer.

Marketing

Last week we commenced working with a Branding Agency who we are partnering to launch our brand guidelines for BitClave and for our various products. This will streamline our efforts in keeping differentiation from the products in the market and the value proposition that we have. The process has already started this week and there will be hands-on research conducted where we will have our community participating as well.

We now have a monthly marketing metrics tool ready that will assess our performance month on month on our overall marketing efforts. This is will be in sync with the digital editorial calendar we mentioned in our last week update.

Our Co-Founders are now active on Twitter for any questions you have to them. Follow both of them here:

Events/meetings

Last week we participated in Bitcoin Superconference at Dallas. With hundreds of participants primarily from the US, it was a good event for syncing up with our US users. We met many interesting people and received a lot of feedback about our products within the community. The overall feedback for our products is very positive, which gives our core team additional motivation.

Here’s a brief video of our CEO & Co-Founder, Alex Bessonov and our Head of Blockchain, Mark Shwartzman sharing their experience from Bitcoin Superconference.

Community

Please keep submitting questions for the next AMA session using tag #AMA.

Questions

Here we have collected the top questions we have received from our community this week:
เว็บโหลดไวขึ้นด้วย Web Font แบบ WOFF 2.0
By: Suranart Niamcome
Tags: Coding, Highlight, CSS

in Both Sides of the Table
Basicolans Newsletter Issue #19
Tags: Brand, Archive, Newsletter

Basicolans Newsletter Issue #19

From the Archives: Volume 2, Issue #7 (August 2014)

The seeds for Basicolans began brewing around this time. Did someone say, all great ideas start with a misspelling ;)
In the Midst of It All
By: Pam Wye
Tags: Teaching, Schools, Comics, Monastery, Education

St. Benedict's Prep on 60 Minutes - St. Benedict's Prep

St. Benedict's Prep is devoted to preparing boys in and around Newark to fulfill their potential as emotionally mature…
Getting started with Cocoapods
By: Mats Bauer
Tags: Software Development, Cocoapods, iOS, Mobile App Development, Swift

Getting started with Cocoapods

Quickstart to installing third-party libraries in any Xcode project

Photo by David Bartus from Pexels

Even though Apple packs a lot of functionality into their native Kits (for example, UIKit, HomeKit, or WebKit), developers often require third-party libraries to get their apps running with the least amount of effort. This article will check out how to get our Xcode project running with Cocoapods and install a library.

Install Cocoapods

Before we can use it, we need to install Cocoapods. This can be done via the terminal using homebrew or gem. If you have homebrew installed, run:

brew install cocoapods

Otherwise use:

sudo gem install cocoapods

Initialize Cocoapods in Project

Next, we need to initialize our project. In a terminal, go to your project directory (the level where the .xcodeproj file is). Then we run:

pod init

This initializes the project to be Cocoapod compatible and creates a new file called Podfile. The file contains the libraries/dependencies supposed to be installed. Open the Podfile using (for example) nano. sudo nano Podfile

To add a pod, uncomment line 6. Add new pods by creating new rows after use_framework! . Most libraries on Github will give you the pod address like pod 'Library' .

After you added the desired libraries, exit the Podfile and run pod install . This will install all the dependencies.

Open the project with the Cocoapods.

After you installed the pods, you need to close the project you had open before ( .xcodeproj ) From now on, you will have to open the file ending with .xcworkspace . From there, you will be able to use all the installed Pods!

If you liked this article feel free to follow us.
The Poetry of Nature
By: Beth Bruno
Tags: Meditation, Nature, Mindfulness, Poetry, Poem

The Poetry of Nature

Morning Meditation

Photo by Carsten Stalljohann on Unsplash

Perfect quiet is the canvas

on which the sounds of nature (and man)

are brushed.

Churring of a lone cricket,

harmonized by the buzzing and whirring

of unknown insects.

Coyote pack yips and barks

howling

its early morning joy.

A car, in the distance

with no muffler.

Then, total silence.

Now, the train’s mournful cry

steel on rails, like a meditation gong.

I listen until the sound is only a memory.

Then, silence returns.

Then, whinny of screech owl,

hoots of barred owl.

A rooster crows.

Pinpricks of stars

in a black velvet sky

give way to soft, misty light.

Coffee sends fragrant

curlicues of steam

into my nostrils.

Dogs bark.

Cows low.

Another train.

Perfect silence.

I hear a single leaf fall to the ground.

It has let go, as I must.

My mantra — “Not always so.”

Morning meditation.
Why I am Thankful When Publications Reject My Work
By: Olivia Marlene
Tags: Gratitude, Publication, Rejection, Writing, Ｍedium

Why I am Thankful When Publications Reject My Work

I’m honest, I’m not hurt at all

Photo by Dan on Unsplash

I’m still lost

I can’t settle on a style of writing until now. I simply don’t know how to. I keep thinking about what does it take to produce a good story? I want to figure out the answer on my own.

For now, I just have to write. I have to let ideas flow. It's easy to write if only writing would stop there but it's not. It's complicated.

I have another problem – most of the time, my stories don’t sound nice. I edit a lot but still, I end up with a story that doesn’t feel right.

For how long will I wait? When will the story be ready?
Vue.js Komponenten mit ASP.NET Core ohne JavaScript Bundler
Tags: Vuejs, JavaScript, Single File Component, Deutsch, Aspnetcore

tolbxela/ASP.NET-Core-Vue.js

Sample Project for my Medium story GitHub is home to over 50 million developers working together to host and review…
ain’t no party like a nihilist party
Tags: Nihilism, Humor, Comics, Philosophy

ain’t no party like a nihilist party

‘cuz a nihilist party is utterly meaningless

https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/1054/

embrace the void, baby!!!

i mean, unless you’ve got a better idea?
“Pennyworth” Returns in March 2021
By: Shain E. Thomas
Tags: Streaming Service, Television, Epix, Pennyworth, DC Comics

Rob Bailey’s The Hunted Fox, shortly after Dr Lucius Fox (Simon Manyonda) makes his first appearance, ended with a horrifying cliffhanger.

Colonel John Salt (Edward Hogg) successfully demonstrated Stormcloud, an extremely deadly chemical weapon, works. Lucius, unbeknownst to other demonstration attendees, secretly records the experiment.

With there being no new episode until Sunday, 7 March 2021, noting what unfolds in this latest instalment, series fans are left speculating what comes next.

Image Credit: IMDb.com

Pennyworth, developed by Gotham creator Bruno Heller, originally premiered on Sunday, 28 July 2019. Pennyworth, mainly set in London during the mid-twentieth century, revolves around former SAS soldier Alfred “Alfie” Pennyworth (Jack Bannon).

Alfie, in the first series, quickly became the target of the Raven Society. The Raven Society, a group led by Lord James Harwood (Jason Flemyng), had aspirations of taking control of the British government and subsequently the country itself. Arthur Pennyworth (Ian Puleston-Davies), Alfie’s father, is revealed a Raven Society supporter.

American operatives Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge) and Martha Kane (Emma Paetz), with very different agendas, worked with the No Name League to undermine the Raven Society.

The first series finale, with Alfie having shot and killed his own father, left viewers with the impression the Raven Society had been stopped and Lord Harwood had been imprisoned.

The second series premiere, Danny Cannon’s The Heavy Crown, revealed Lord Harwood had escaped and gained support from much of the British military.

The Raven Society and the No Name League have respectively changed the names to the Raven Union and the English League. Civil war, not for the first time in the country’s history, has become a reality.

A few cities, inclusive of London, Liverpool, and Manchester, have managed to remain true to The Queen (Jessica Ellerby) and her government. The newly developed Stormcloud chemical weapon could be a significant game-changer.

Series fans will have to wait until Sunday, 7 March 2021 to discover which direction the wind blows. If Lord Harwood has his way, noting the successful demonstration, the future looks bleak.

Previously …
12月の詩
Tags: Japanese, 日本, Japan, Poetry, 日本語

in Both Sides of the Table
Why x86 won’t survive
By: Ishan Misra
Tags: Tech, Amd, Google, Microsoft, Intel

Seems like a small amount, right? No. These 3 flaws are some of the most major ones found in recent history that effect almost all laptop, desktop and server cores. While fixes have been implemented for the first two, the major drawback is performance hits of up to 15%. Soon after Spectre and Meltdown were fixed, SMT/Hyper Threading has been shown to make Speculative Execution Flaws on both Intel and AMD CPUs’ worse. x86, with it’s old and cluttered instruction set, is starting to show it’s age and it’s inability to do what it once could.

This is where ARM comes in. ARM, founded in 1990, is a newer and more lightweight “alternative” to desktop processors, usually used in mobile phones. Most smartphones today use an ARM based processor — such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series, Kirin and Apple’s custom 7nm A series processors. These are lightweight, powerful, and extremely efficient. These processors ARE better than some high end gaming desktops from a few years ago, but there is one major drawback to them — which is why they’re never used in laptops.

App compatibility.

The newest iPad pro vs Macbook Pro geekbench

Just about every application has been developed solely for x86, with no room for ARM in mind. However, that’s beginning to change. Google is helping Qualcomm and Microsoft to bring their browser to ARM powered Windows devices. It’s a slow start, but this marks the beginning of the end of x86.

Google has seen the benefits of ARM, so has Apple and Microsoft. If they began working on making everything ARM compatible, many major developers (such as Adobe) will follow suit and release their own software for this architecture. As more compatibility is added, more users will switch to ARM because of speed, reliability, security and price. More people will leave x86 CPUs with their glaring vulnerabilities, and replace them with ARM powered devices.

Of course this won’t happen in a year or even two, but it will eventually happen. It will be the end of x86, and we’re probably better off without it.
On Friendships . . .
By: Terry Trueman
Tags: Friends, Honesty, Humor, Poetry, Writing Life

On Friendships . . .

I Have Several Friends

And then there are some other people

who think of themselves as my friends.

Is this how it is for you too?

Take your time…

It’s not like I’m listening anyway.

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

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia:

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

Thanks ILLUMINATION for letting me pitch, via this short-form poem, my longest and best work!

Sheehan. An Epic Poem of Love and Loss | by Terry Trueman | ILLUMINATION | Medium
The Two-Fold Shocking Story Of I Will Always Love You
By: Edward Anderson
Tags: Music, Pop Culture, Celebrity, Money, Writing

The Two-Fold Shocking Story Of I Will Always Love You

Throw away what you thought you knew about the iconic song.

Photo courtesy of JB ROWLAND/GETTY IMAGES

“I Will Always Love You,” is a number one smash hit. Varying artists have tried to capture the charts by recording it. Especially ever since the beloved, and uber-talented Whitney Houston turned it into an American standard.

Many people grew up only knowing her version of the song. When asked who sings the song, the top answer is always Houston. However, another legendary singer actually wrote the song.

One Miss Dolly Parton.

No Feud Just Money

One of the biggest misconceptions about the song is that it led to a feud between Parton and Houston in the early 1990s. Tabloids seized on the outsized success of the song to make the claims that the divas were arguing about who’s song it is.

Parton set the record straight. She had sent the song over to the producers of The Bodyguard but hadn’t heard anything back from them. In fact, she didn’t know they had chosen “I Will Always Love You” until she heard it on the radio. Like the rest of us, she was blown away by Houston’s version of the song.

Parton has been quoted as saying this about the alleged feud between her and Houston: “And somebody — there was a tabloid story saying that Whitney and I were in a big feud, she said it was her song and I said it was mine. None of that was ever true. I was so flattered, so honored, and so lucky that she did it.” Why is she lucky? As the sole credited songwriter on the song, Parton rakes in all of the royalties that the song generates.

The True Meaning Of The Song

One might think that “I Will Always Love You” is a romantic break up song. Certainly, the lyrics lend themselves to the interpretation. But back in 1973, when Parton first wrote the song, it was for a different kind of breakup.

At the beginning of her career, Parton worked with Porter Wagoner. She appeared on his show and recorded music with him. It was a very successful pairing. Parton, however, was ready for something new. She wanted to be a solo act.

When Parton approached Wagoner and let him know that she was ready to spread her wings, he scoffed. He wanted her to stay and continue their successful partnership. Parton took to writing “I Will Always Love You” as a way to let him know that she was serious about leaving the show and their partnership.

It turned out to be one of the most profitable breakups ever.
Leaving Behind the Person You Were in Your 20s
By: T.S. Lowry
Tags: Life Lessons, Culture, Self, Drinking, Writing Life

Many people spend their twenties in bars with one hand weighed down by 12 ounces, or 1.5 depending on what they’re celebrating — and, who are we kidding, they’re always celebrating something. A friend’s birthday routinely turns into an all-day event as if people are competing for the last drunk standing.

I spent the last year of my twenties *mostly* sober. Okay, maybe more like half the year. But who’s counting? While I’d like to say my decision to put down the bottle was because I’m tired of wasting my weekends drinking my money away, the truth has more to do with current events than my newfound maturity. Living in Los Angeles during a pandemic has meant being sheltered in place for months, surrounded by stress and fear, and avoiding human contact like the plague. Plus, my asthmatic self doesn’t want to get sick. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I can’t imagine my family having to bury me via Zoom.

I don’t want my legacy to be a drunk. Even though my drunken antics typically consist of broadcasting personal financial shit or declaring my feelings toward certain people — and then drowning in a self-made pool of guilt and anxiety the next day as I try to recall the things I’ve said (and done). I do love drinking, and I’ve written enough about its lore, seduction, and downfalls. It has been a big part of my life since my senior year of high school because I believed it opened doors to the person I thought I wanted to be. I’m well aware of the ramifications, but the more I dwell on it, the more I feel like I’m taking one step forward and two steps back. There’s going to come a point when I’ll need to stop thinking and talking about it and start acting. Why not now?

I love to party, but I’ve never been an everyday drinker. On too many occasions, I found myself trying to keep up with friends with higher tolerances. I’ve lost the battle with Alcohol countless times and often debated leaving the party early. For the majority of 2020, the last year of my twenties, I didn’t just leave the party early — I never bothered showing up. I stopped drinking during the pandemic because I wanted to, withdrawal-free, which is important for me to specify. For 27 consecutive weeks, I chose to stay dry. Instead of cracking open a beer on the weekends, I stuck to my guns and stayed sober.
How to Fight Imposter Syndrome
By: Michael Lanasa
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Learning, Self, Life

Dig back into the archives of your memory as a child. Do you remember the first time you pretended to be someone or something you weren’t?

A superhero. A dinosaur.

A majority of children learn from an early age how to take on a fictional role. Regular weekends playing with friends or the holy grail of make-believe, Halloween.

Now tap that forward arrow on the video player in your mind. Skip ahead to the early years of adulthood; in the workplace, college or otherwise.

Do you remember the first time you said or thought, “I am _____”?

That blank could have been anything from a graphic designer to a rock climber. You believed in both your desire and self-identified as what you wanted to be, regardless of how the outside world defined you.

Humans are life-long learners, even if we don’t always recognize it. Anyone who identifies by a title is more than likely still learning and improving. Nobody is born with the skills to be an architect, only the building blocks of interest and desire. On day one of educating oneself, I’d argue we’re already what we aim to be — albeit untested.
What Is Product Analytics and Why Do You Need It?
Tags: Database, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Data

Today the term Product Analytics is not a well known word in the industry. When I talk about Rakam, a product analytics tool, I can see the confused faces in front of me. Let me enlighten you in this subject and also to save myself from seeing the confused faces. Also,I will try to give you a better insight on product analytics.

Product Analytics

In simple words, analytics that allow you to understand how your users behave while using your product is Product Analytics. This works best with the digital products as it is easier to track and analyze customer event data with digital footprints. Analyzing your customers behaviour can lead to finding why your customers are churning, converting or coming back to your product.

What Industries Benefit Most From Product Analytics?

In my previous article I mentioned the industries that benefits most from the analytics. Companies which has a mobile or web application can benefit the most from utilising product analytics. Data driven companies are dependent on consumer behaviour. For better understanding of user behaviour, conducting analysis such as funnel, retention and segmentation is a must. Insights gathered by these analysis could be used to provide better experience for your users. Having data on user level can help companies to have an advantage in today’s competitive business environment. From our customers we’ve learnt that they’ve achieved increased return on their profits by user event tracking to see these returns, one need to have an understanding of product analytics and use it efficiently.

What Can You Get From Product Analytics?

Product analytics is often confused with marketing analytics. But unlike marketing analytics, product analytics is focused on a product. It allows you to track and analyse your user events to make your product better. As the names suggests, the focus is on your product. Data gathered from using product analytics features is used by product managers, growth managers and UX designers to make improvements on their products.

Read the rest of the article from here
ROMANIA IS THE LEADER IN IMPLEMENTING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
By: International Relations
Tags: Economy, Anton Caragea, Environment, Ecology, Diplomacy

IRICE is dedicated to promote the international relations of Romania and to develop the economic, cultural and diplomatic relations with nations of the world.

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Onde nascem os memes?
By: Thiago Acioli
Tags: Infográficos, Internet, Infobase Interativa, Das Antigas, Memes

in Both Sides of the Table
§45 Berlin — Ghost-City. When asked his opinion on Berlin Karl…
Tags: City, Karl Lagerfield, Hipsters, Berlin, Tom Wolfe

When asked his opinion on Berlin Karl Lagerfeld suggested that something is missing in the city, which used to be there:

“Berlin could be great, but for me Berlin is like a human body with an arm and a leg missing. What they did there — the Russians — made it forever something [which does not have] the soul which Berlin was famous for… they want to be trendy, they want to be so trendy that they look sometimes like a second-rate London. That’s not that easy. For me — I know so well the past of Berlin, and the spirit of Berlin — and the whole thing and the Berlin [of] today, I don’t know. For me there is not enough left from what […] Berlin [was] all about — the spirit of Berlin. There was a way. There was a tournure d’esprit [mindset]. Someone who was typical for that was Helmut Newton. He had this kind of genius.” (Lagerfeld 2014: 04.50–06.00).

In Back to Blood from 2012 Tom Wolfe describes the inhabitants of Miami’s Wynwood as a ‘new social phenomenon — and … real estate phenomenon — of the late nineteenth century: the “art district”.’ (Wolfe 2012: Ch. 18). After the artists, without talent, have inhabited a new area, ‘Here they come…droves of well-educated and well-healed people skipping and screaming with nostalgie de la boue, “nostalgia for the mud” eager to inhale the emanations of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.”

Berlin is an excellent example and a key source for such ‘art districts’. It is more the representation of art and its use as a lifestyle accessory that matters than art itself.

In fact, Berliners are hardly artists at all. They are hipsters. And the figure of the hipster is a sad and wretched figure in our contemporary society. He is completely lost, in search of something. His modus operandi is negation, irony and inversion: he rejects and dismisses, and what momentarily exists in the spaces ‘in between’ he uses to adorn the surface of his being as if it were profound.

Berlin- city of lost souls? Ghost-town?

/Fred Weibull

References

BBC. 2008. “1963: Kennedy: ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner.’” http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/26/newsid_3379000/3379061.stm.

Lagerfeld, Karl. 2014. The Big Interview: Karl Lagerfeld Interview by Tyler Brûlé. https://monocle.com/film/design/the-big-interview-karl-lagerfeld/.

Wolfe, Tom. 2012. Back to Blood. New York: Little, Brown & Co
Maintenance Fee Reduced
By: Hash.Pro Cloud Mining
Tags: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Mining, Cloud Mining

This Substation supplies green energy to our Datacenter

Dear miners,

Recently, the daily mining profit was affected by the large price fluctuations of cryptocurrency. We have decided to reduce the mining contract selling price from $75 to $60, extend the contract time from 2 years to 3 years, and cut the daily maintenance fee from $0.21 to $0.18. The maintenance fee change is also applicable for all the contracts activated since the 1st May, including rewarded hashpower.

To know more about us:

View our presentation video here.

website: https://hash.pro;

telegram: https://t.me/hashpro_en

Happy Mining!