fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Quiet
By: Matthew Leo
Tags: Writing, Poetry, Self Improvement, Meditation, Life

A Poetic Experiment in Meditation

Photo by Katherine Clara from Pexels

Quiet. I fall quietly

Into the leaves until

I feel apart of them.

I step back into the oak’s bark

And feel the grove’s life

Throbbing around me.

I step into its center

And as hidden as it is,

I bury myself within the roots

And kiss the water

Sending the thickest trees

Of the hardest wood

Guarded by steel thorn bushes.

Here, I am home.

Now and again, I ride the winds

But always fearing to stray above the clouds

And steering clear of all who

Wish to cure this vagabond’s heart.

© 2020 Matthew Leo

Thank you so much for giving me some of your time. It means the world to me. If you enjoyed this poem, please click on the clappy hands at the bottom as many times as you feel it deserves. Please feel free to tweet, share on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, or to whoever you think might enjoy it as well. Take care and Be well.

Your wordsmith,

Matt

Care to follow me further down the rabbit hole, Alice? Here are a few more poems I believe you will enjoy:
Fine tuning a classifier in scikit-learn
By: Kevin Arvai
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Optimization, Algorithms

It’s easy to understand that many machine learning problems benefit from either precision or recall as their optimal performance metric but implementing the concept requires knowledge of a detailed process. My first few attempts to fine-tune models for recall (sensitivity) were difficult, so I decided to share my experience.

This post is from my first Kaggle kernel, where my aim was not to build a robust classifier, rather I wanted to show the practicality of optimizing a classifier for sensitivity. In figure A below, the goal is to move the decision threshold to the left. This minimizes false negatives, which are especially troublesome in the dataset chosen for this post. It contains features from images of 357 benign and 212 malignant breast biopsies. A false negative sample equates to missing a diagnosis of a malignant tumor. The data file can be downloaded here.

The goal of this post is to outline how to move the decision threshold to the left in Figure A, reducing false negatives and maximizing sensitivity.

With scikit-learn, tuning a classifier for recall can be achieved in (at least) two main steps.

Using GridSearchCV to tune your model by searching for the best hyperparameters and keeping the classifier with the highest recall score. Adjust the decision threshold using the precision-recall curve and the roc curve, which is a more involved method that I will walk through.

Start by loading the necessary libraries and the data.

The class distribution can be found by counting the diagnosis column. B for benign and M for malignant.

B 357

M 212

Name: diagnosis, dtype: int64

Convert the class labels and split the data into training and test sets. train_test_split with stratify=True results in consistent class distribution between training and test sets:

# show the distribution

print('y_train class distribution')

print(y_train.value_counts(normalize=True)) print('y_test class distribution')

print(y_test.value_counts(normalize=True)) y_train class distribution

0 0.626761

1 0.373239

Name: diagnosis, dtype: float64

y_test class distribution

0 0.629371

1 0.370629

Name: diagnosis, dtype: float64

Now that the data has been prepared, the classifier can be built.
Ethereum Volatility — Flash Crash Followed by Explosion
Tags: Eth, Cryptocurrency, Gdax, Ethereum

Volatility isn’t exactly an unfamiliar concept for the budding world of cryptocurrency, but this last couple of weeks, Ethereum — the best 2017 performer of the scene — gave it all a new meaning.

Having reached highs in excess of $410 at one point in early June, and having had its value taken to about $317 by a subsequent market correction, the cryptocurrency fell to $0.10 last Wednesday. Yes, you read that right: at one point during last Wednesday (21st of June 2017), on the GDAX exchange, an Ethereum was trading for $0.10. What’s still more interesting is that since then, ETH has rebounded massively and it is not worth more than $317 again.

What caused the flash crash though and how did the subsequent rebound come about? The causes behind this ridiculous volatility do indeed say quite a bit about the maturity of ETH and the cryptocurrency vertical in general. There was a lot of speculation in this regard too, but until GDAX President Adam White chimed in, no one really knew anything certain.

According to White, the incident that triggered the temporary collapse was the placing of a multi-million dollar market sell order, which shook the very foundations of the Ethereum blockchain’s digital token. The above said order resulted in a price-slip from $317 to about $224, enough to trigger the execution of some 800 stop-loss orders, which effectively battered the token into the ground. Margin-funding liquidations also contributed to the meltdown, making matters worse still.

Obviously, seeing ETH trade as low as a dime, prompted many investors to begin stocking up on the token, a move which then drove the price back up sharply.

In response to the kneejerk moves, GDAX temporarily suspended the trading of the ETH-USD pair. An investigation into the matter was also launched, which came up with no evidence of wrongdoing of any kind.

Since the incident, the value of the Ethereum digital token continued to rise, within more reasonable limits this time. The June 29 session saw it shoot as high as $329. According to Redwood City Ventures’ Sean Walsh, the spike was the result of investors’ natural reaction to recent volatility. The sell-off which lead up to the flash crash, was by all means drastic and as such, it called for a natural correction, which is most certainly what we are witnessing right now.
Remote is not a substitute
By: Zvonimir Spajic
Tags: Remote Work

Every time a popular book is turned into a movie, an outcry of disappointed book lovers follows. While some adaptations really are terrible, what often happens is many of those book lovers fall into the trap of expecting the movie to give them the same experience as the book. Movies and books are different art forms and if you’re approaching the movie as a substitute for a book then you’re bound to be disappointed.

Going remote

With COVID-19 pandemic forcing many companies to transition to remote work, there has been a surge in advice on remote work. Veteran remote workers are handing out their advice and novice remote workers are sharing their first impressions and experiences. One thing I noticed is most practical advice deals with how to find remote counter-parts to some in-office activity.

Ministry of Silly Walks

One piece of advice I recently heard was to dress up, go outside, and walk a few circles around the house before you start working. While I do understand the reasoning behind this proposition, I still find it outright silly. Though many people say they miss the commute when switching to remote work, what they really miss is not so much the commute itself, which they often describe as exhausting and aggravating, but the side-effect of its repetitive nature. It serves as a kind of ritual, sending signals to your brain that work is coming, so it could start getting into “work mode.”

With the commute suddenly gone, you also lose that side effect ritual and you need to replace it. With what? Well, that’s the good thing about remote work: replace it with whatever suits you! Maybe it’s a run, a bike ride, or a walk (yes, even a walk around your house) or maybe it’s just making yourself a cup of coffee. What matters is you find your daily ritual, so your brain gets that same signal to start going into “work mode”. But you don’t need to perform some silly activity to trick yourself into thinking you are doing something (commuting) when you are not actually doing it.

Embrace the differences

The underlying problem here is the approach to remote work as a substitute for office work. It is not a substitute. It’s a different way of work and as such, it has its own ways of doing things. If you want to make it work, then embrace it fully — with its similarities but also all it’s differences to traditional office work. My advice is to use the flexibility remote work offers you to explore what works for you instead of trying to emulate every office activity. If you don’t, then remote work will always remain as a substitute for the real thing. And just as those book lovers, you’re bound to be disappointed and miss out on the uniqueness of the experience that a different medium offers you.
Write for One Voyage Away. Here is how to become a contributor to…
Tags: Travel Writing, Travel, Write For Us Travel, Write For Us Health, Write For Us

If you feel like on the same wave with us, be sure to drop an e-mail to kauza@cuddlynest.com or comment below “I want to be a writer.” We will connect with you to see what you have to put on the table.

In case you are writing us an e-mail, include a link to your profile and the piece of writing you are the proudest of. Make sure to only send us unpublished draft links if you want to get featured.

We are all different, all travelling differently, yet enjoying the same benefit travel brig to all of us. Freedom. Growth. Self-improvement.

Join the travel tribe!
Calibrate
By: Will Schmit
Tags: Violence, Resistance Poetry, Poetry, Mass Shootings, Gun Violence

photo by Donald Gianatti at Unsplash

I make songs

of wrong notes,

misplaced words,

voice box filled to breaking.

Begrudging expenses,

I swipe small spiders

off my money. My voice,

at the edge of expiring milk.

The ice asks

how to prove God

in winter. Ink

thin as blood.

The shootings stack

like yellow pages

waiting for dumpsters.

Sleeping dogs lie about the dream.

The initial shock,

of civilian terror, is plausible.

This could happen again.

Never has lost its place.
Efficient Euclidean distance computation in pandas
By: Yong Jun
Tags: Pandas, Data Science, Geospatial

Efficient Euclidean distance computation in pandas

- A neat little trick

In data science, we often encountered problems where geography matters such as the classic house price prediction problem. In most cases, it never harms to use k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) or similar strategy to compute a locality based reference price as part of your feature engineering.

The most important hyperparameter in k-NN is the distance metric and the Euclidean distance is an obvious choice for geospatial problems. Also known as the “straight line” distance or the L² norm, it is calculated using this formula:

The problem with using k-NN for feature training is that in theory, it is an O(n²) operation: every data point needs to consider every other data point as a potential nearest neighbour. In the absence of specialized techniques like spatial indexing, we can do well speeding things up with some vectorization.
She Beamed Light on Every Shore
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Poetry, Matriarchy, Mythology, Creativity, Saturnalia

She Beamed Light on Every Shore

A role reversal myth for Saturnalia

Photo by Jennifer Marquez on Unsplash

waiting for offerings,

she beamed light

on every shore

barefoot, winter sands

a net of clams

terracotta filled with

foreign fruits

and she wept,

a sign of leadership

humility, gratitude

friendship

a queen through a

firm and nurturing hand

whose world was this:

each man and child

and woman honored

for their unique genetics

still an ancient custom,

they lit candles

shielding flames from

dark winds

the men wept,

a sign of strength

to show vulnerability

overcome by awe

of their mothers

belief that life

was the truest gift,

but not always

possible

the bearer of life

the most beautiful

sacred, respected,

and protected

and so civilizations

and cultures grew

through this understanding

power, an innate quality

was to be used as protection

of earth

to waste and spoil, high crimes

progress could be made

through the efforts

of those who wished to

harvest

no one exploited

no one forced

evil was rare

and justice was swift

and fair

equality was taught from birth

bridges were built

so humanity was satisfied

sharing resources

was the true adaptation

there was peace on earth

and she beamed light on every shore
Are You Writing Enough?
By: Anisa Nasir
Tags: Writing, Advice, Creative Writing, Creativity, Writing Tips

How I plan to power through and make the sacrifices necessary to work on my book

I’m going to start small, with fifteen minutes at the start of my workday, to write to my heart’s content in that document. I can’t expect to give hours to a project when I have other responsibilities to tend to, but at least I can rest assured that progress is being made.

On days where I have a bit of downtime, I will work on my book leisurely, allowing my imagination to run wild with all the possibilities that made me fall in love with fiction-writing in the first place.

Here’s what I’ve learned about “writing enough.”

You’re your own worst critic. You’re going to be temperamental at times, running yourself mad as you try to get copious amounts of work done, but you get to decide what constitutes enough.

Enough is being satisfied that you’ve made an effort, that you’ve completed the pressing work, and have left room to take care of yourself.

While writing for a majority of the day was a goal for me, it took me a very long time and a lot of inner criticism before I could pull it off. I stopped harboring this idea that until I write x amount of words every day, I can’t consider myself a writer.

This is what you need to do when you’re overwhelmed and have no idea where to start

You need to write it down. Write every little detail and frustration down so that you’ll be able to work it out like a math problem in grade school. This is not solely about planning; this is about seeing all of the things that worry you quite clearly.

Wanting to accomplish a goal is not how you establish a game-plan. It’s not how you rid yourself of feeling swamped. The only way you’re going to decide whether you’re writing enough and making the progress you need is if you take the time to work out the kinks in your planning.

I’m not good at keeping track of my progress beyond the current day. I’ll plan at the start, work through my tasks, and input any upcoming deadlines, but that’s about it. The reason I couldn’t decide whether I was doing enough was that I had no clear record of the work you’re doing. So, I decided to change that.

In my planner’s monthly spread, I’ll write a little note for every day I get a Medium article, blog post, or freelance deadline completed. Now, I leave a little space to note the days I worked on my novel.

After looking at last month’s spread, I could honestly see where my time was going, and that’s how I learned to make the necessary adjustments.
Waves Node: Major Update
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Bitcoin, Waves

This release sees a number of significant developments, including data transactions, Fair PoS, token burning and sponsored transactions.

Data Transactions

Data Transactions allow anyone post information to the blockchain. The maximum size of a data transaction is around 140kb. Fees for data transactions, calculated in WAVES, are proportional to transaction size: 100,000 per kilobyte, rounded up to the nearest kb. Since the transaction size is limited to 140kb, it will cost just 0.14 WAVES (less that $1). You can find out more about Data Transactions here: https://docs.wavesplatform.com/technical-details/data-transaction.html

Fair Proof of Stake

This is an update to our PoS system that removes some of the disadvantages for smaller miners. Whilst PoS should allow anyone to receive mining rewards in proportion to their WAVES balance, in practice the odds are stacked in favour of larger miners, who create a higher share of blocks. The protocol has been adjusted to reflect this and ensure that smaller miners are not pushed out.

Burn transactions for all

Any user can now burn tokens, which means destroying them by making cryptographically unspendable. This allows users who received spam tokens to remove them from their portfolios permanently.

The aсtivation of data transactions, Fair PoS, and token burning is going to happen at​ the end of June.

Sponsored transactions

An important update to the protocol is Sponsored Transactions. Sponsored transactions replace asset fees which allowed users to pay nodes directly with custom tokens. After activating the Sponsored transactions the issuer of the token will make deposit in WAVES, and this deposit will be used for paying for the nodes service. It is important that all nodes process transactions and do not refuse any due to them being economically unviable. Additionally, this ensures that there is always demand for WAVES, since transactions are cheap but not free. Sponsored transactions activation is awaited at the beginning of July. For more information, see https://docs.wavesplatform.com/proposals/sponsored-transactions.html.
Hydrogen Monthly Roundup- October 2018
By: Nahom Yemane
Tags: Hydro, Tech, Announcements, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency

Each month, we offer a roundup of announcements, products news, and developer updates from Hydrogen HQ.

Happy October! Let’s take a look at what went down this month at the Hydrogen HQ and get you up to speed.

Announcements:

We kicked the month off with Blocktoberfest, a series covering current product, new initiatives, and announcements. You can recap Blocktoberfest here.

We accepted the FiNext Award for Excellence in FinTech, Special thanks to our partnerships manager Sahil!

Product News/Dev Updates:

Andy, Anurag, Shane, and Noah proposed ERC-1484 to the Ethereum Improvement Protocol, ERC-1484 focuses on aggregating digital identity information that’s broadly interoperable with existing, proposed, and hypothetical future digital identity standards. We welcome all feedback on the proposal!

Proton v1.3 has been released with seven new services to Proton’s Wellness and Annuity suites.

Hydro is now apart of the ERC-725 alliance, ERC-725 is an Ethereum-based identity standard authored by Fabian Vogelsteller, creator of the ERC-20 standard and Web3.js framework.

If you also happen to be in the NYC area, come out to our Monthly Hydro meetup on November 13th! RSVP here.
We’re Live! New Community Forum and Developer Site!
By: Jenn Perez
Tags: Eos, IoT, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

Just recently, our team brainstormed on ways to bring the XYO community closer. And you know what we found? It didn’t matter if people were noob developers just learning how to code or advanced HODL’ers who bought XYO on day one — two things were on their wish lists:

Equity and XYO HODL’ers wanted:

A community forum to talk all things XYO, crypto and beyond, with topics like geo mining, local meetups, use cases and bug reports. They wanted us to take the close-knit vibe of our Telegram channel, and break it out in a more linear, organized format.

Developers — from new to experienced — had a much simpler need. They wanted:

An XYO documentation site. Not a code hub and not a forum, but a place to easily find documentation for SDKs, dApps, dApp building utilities, and other XYO tech.

We’ve been quietly building out these sites…and now they’re live!

Visit community.xyo.network for the community forum, and developers.xyo.network for the documentation site.

Here’s what you’ll find at the community forum:

Categories and threads on topics that you care about, from important announcements to crypto market news to use cases. No spammy stuff allowed.

Forums for Founding HODL’ers and our ultra-exclusive XYO Two Comma Club members.

A few areas for developers to talk shop. Struggling to deploy a dApp? Find a bug in one of our releases? You can talk it over at the community forum.

A clean, easy to digest format. We’re keeping this layout as simple and elegant as possible, so you can always find what you need — fast.

For our coders and technologists and developers heading over to developers.xyo.network, you’ll find:

Documentation. We’re still getting as much documentation in there as possible for dapploy, Gamma, map-based dApps and more, so check back often for updates.

Use cases to help explain how our blockchain location network and tech releases can solve industry-specific problems.

So, please visit these two new sites, bookmark them in your browser, and let us know what you think!
How To Read And Extract The Most Information When You Have No Time.
By: Aldric Chen
Tags: Writing, Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Reading, Thinking

How To Read And Extract The Most Information When You Have No Time.

This is a skill I mastered when I was in college. You know, those days where knowledge is arbitraged for alphabet grades? How can we do so by using the least amount of time?

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Do you remember reference books? I mean those thick hardcover books where it takes 1,000 plus pages to get through from the front to the end?

Yes, I remember. When it comes to applied psychology and strategic management, reaching the final page destination is mission impossible.

Well, almost.

Almost. This is because I discovered the secrets of decoding a 1,000-page book into a keynote version within an hour.

This is what we need to do.

First step. Read what the others say about the book and the author. We can find it in the book blurb.

That would give a good idea of what the book is good for.

Next, read the prologue. This explains the birth of the book, why the author wrote what he wrote.

When we understand the author’s intent, the content of the book falls in place immediately.

Then head straight to the Table of Contents. Read this like the skeleton of the book. Stitch the chapter headers together, and you will have the 5-minute keynote version of the book.

If time is an issue — Stop here.

We would already have the author’s intent, reviews from others, content page keyword summary.

It is good enough for a party conversation.

If we can spare another 10–15 minutes, we can proceed to do the following.

Read the introduction and then conclusion chapter back to back. We would have covered the hypothesis and conclusion of findings without the need to slog through the process details.

That would cover the keynote summary plus high-level details.

Again, stop here as we wish. We would have gotten 50% or slightly more.

If we have more time to spare, then this is the last step I recommend.

Read the other chapters focusing on the topic sentences of every paragraph. Why so?

That is because every author — especially academic writers — writes with structure. The opening sentence of each paragraph is meant to introduce the idea of that paragraph.

They aren’t copywriters with fanciful styles. They write to present their thoughts in a structured fashion.

Once we decode their structure, it is easy to create our own cheat sheet.

This is mine.

I hope this will be helpful to you.

Happy Reading!

Aldric
Five Quick and Easy Recipes for Time-Starved Parents
By: Fredrick Gold
Tags: Food, Parenting, Humor, Recipes

Parenting

Five Quick and Easy Recipes for Time-Starved Parents

A little sugar broccoli casserole never killed anyone (yet).

Photo by Fredrick Gold (Author)

Two month into quarantine, my household is just a few murders short of Tiger King status. Chaos reigns as our three-bedroom flat has been turned into Post WWII Germany, with small, sharp toys littering our carpeted wasteland. Last night I slipped on a half-used glue stick in the bathroom and cartoonishly fell to the tile floor, nearly shattering my cranium like a porcelain urn. Luckily, my son’s generously-stuffed Peppa Pig plushy was ready to break my fall. I never thought I’d say this … but I love that fat little pig.

If you are still feeding your kids fruits and vegetables at this point —you can burn in Hell. You probably are one of those people who posts smiling pictures of your family on Instagram despite the reality that you and your spouse are in a month-long blood feud that will devolve into a hand-to-hand combat any minute now. If you are living in reality, like me, and are searching for some quick and easy recipes to feed your kids, you’ve come to the right place.
I Will Write My Life Into Existence
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Success, Writing, Inspiration, Life Lessons, Life

My life was over by age thirty. I knew this because I had done absolutely nothing as an adult that I could be proud of, but also because my mother had ingrained it into my head that Jesus was coming back so soon.

So soon that I wasn't supposed to care about having any of my own dreams. I was supposed to devote whatever was left of my life to God.

Since my childhood days were filled with end-times prophecies and statements that the second coming of Christ was imminent, I came away with the notion that there was no time for me to have a full life at all.

So, I entered a militaristic ministry internship straight out of high school, got married at twenty, and went wherever the evangelical winds blew me.

Before I knew it, I was a divorced virgin whose life had been swallowed up by anxiety and depression. I had nothing to show for that life.

And then I turned thirty.

I couldn’t understand how or why I felt so damn used up, but I did. I felt like the pitiful end of a tube of toothpaste. Like when you know you should probably just open up a new tube but there’s still something in there so you keep squishing, scraping, and awkwardly folding the thing to get those last little bits out.

Totally unproductive, and you do it for no good reason beyond not wanting to open up a brand new tube.

That was my life, and I grew so weary of trying to make something out of sticky little bits that I eventually went off the deep end. After so many years of being scared to do anything I truly wanted, I finally gave myself permission to be reckless at thirty-one-years-old.

I had an affair with a married man and wound up pregnant shortly before his divorce was finalized. Then, I became a single mom at thirty-two.

After more than three decades of fear to take a risk or do the wrong thing, I took a pretty terrible risk and finally did the wrong thing. It wasn’t even a year of rebellion before I got my reality check in the form of a cheating fiance, sore breasts, and constant nausea.

Before I knew it, there was this colicky, premature baby who needed the world from me.
Swipner App 改版 2018
By: Alan Chen
Tags: Redesign, UX, UI, Credit Cards

in Both Sides of the Table
Daily Bit #105: 51% Chance of Pain
By: Daily Bit
Tags: Crypto, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Bitcoin

Word On The Street

So… You’re Saying There’s A Chance?

The latest buzz in crypto concerns 51crypto, a site that lists the theoretical cost of a 51% attack on dozens of blockchain networks. And with several networks listed as vulnerable for little more than $1 per hour, this isn’t your standard proclamation of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt — it challenges the basic motives for using blockchains.

Blockchain integrity is a big deal. The immutability of Bitcoin’s blockchain and its ability to protect against double spend attempts are two reasons why the application was originally hailed as Digital Gold. Assuming that 51crypto’s calculations are reliable, the trustworthiness of greater exposed networks goes out the window.

How it’s plugged: The site explains that hashing power, which upholds a blockchain’s security, can be rented from miners on sites such as Nicehash to reduce the capital costs of laying siege to a network.

The Thing Is… It’s Complicated

Before folks head for the hills, it’s worth deferring to altcoin mining legend @notsofast, who reminds us that these costs are all theoretical. Along with the costs being one sided and excluding other variables, there’s the matter of the profitability of the attack. Sure, transactions can be censored, but attacks on micro cap networks require seamless execution if bad actors want to walk away with a monetary profit.

The bottom line: If you’re concerned about blockchain security, don’t dabble with untested projects. Follow the suggestion of Blockchain Capital partner Spencer Bogart and stick with Bitcoin — 51crypto lists the cost of a 51% attack at nearly $554k.

**Breaking News Alert**

@cnLedger reported that Internet security firm Qihoo 360 identified “a series of epic vulnerabilities” in the EOS platform, with EOS representatives stating that “the EOS network will not be officially launched until these issues are fixed.”

Reports are coming in that indicate that the bugs have been resolved. The price of EOS took a momentary spill following the news, dipping roughly 8% before joining the bulk of the market in an early morning rally.
The Mother of My Children
By: Harley King
Tags: Mothers, Mental Illness, Aliens, Poetry, Galaxy

The Mother of My Children

A Story-Poem

Canva-Photo by Nikiko — 268709

She stands naked

at the edge of the highway

waiting for aliens

to pick her up and

fly her to another galaxy

where doctors will

stick strange instruments

in her breasts in order to

measure the thickness

of her motherly love

for children and pets.

She does not remember

the date of her own birth

or the color of her mother’s

hair. I wrap her shivering

body in a blanket and

guide her slowly to

my car. She smiles

and asks if we will

be home soon. I nod.
How I Learned About Sex From Stephen King
By: Anthony Aycock
Tags: Writing, Sex, Education, Parenting, Books

It has three sex scenes, one of which, the child orgy, is famously icky. Grady Hendrix calls it “the heart of the book” while also saying that “good taste and Stephen King have never really been on speaking terms.” King himself finds it “fascinating” that there is so much furor over that scene “and so little about the multiple child murders.”

Ickiness aside, the scene didn’t do much for me. How could I learn from a bunch of eleven-year-olds patty-caking their way through intercourse?

More instructive were two scenes that take place in 1985, when the Losers, all grown up, are summoned to their hometown of Derry to face Pennywise, the monster they thought they defeated in 1958.

Beverly is married to Tom, an abusive creep. When she forgets Tom’s loathing of cigarettes and lights up in his car, he smashes her across the jaw.

Later, she sleeps with him. It is tempting to say she does it out of fear or obligation, but she seems genuinely turned on, moaning at his touch, grabbing his hand to “thrust it between her legs.”

(Middle School Me imagined his hand just above her knees, clenched like a tennis ball in a relay race.)

King focuses on Tom’s perspective: what he sees (Beverly’s flushed face), feels (her nails in his back, her teeth in his shoulder), and hears (her scream at the end). This was useful imagery; it helped me picture what happened.

King can be coarse, referring to Beverly’s “ass” and “tits,” but he is also lyrical, as in this line:

“Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil.”

A lot is tucked into this line. “Oil” doesn’t mean Valvoline but something like frankincense, smooth and luxurious. How could something that soothing make Beverly bite and scratch? I didn’t know, but it suggested sex was multifarious, sometimes confusing, and an assault on the senses. All are true, as I would eventually discover.

In the second scene (page 888 in my Signet paperback, still dog-eared), Beverly is in Derry with Bill, another Loser. After an evening of reminiscing, the two have sex. This time, King shows he can write from a woman’s perspective:

“Beverly felt her climax coming. She moved toward it, working for it, never doubting it would come. Her body suddenly stuttered and seemed to leap upward . . . pleasure so great it was nearly agony spilled out of unsuspected floodgates.”

I’ve never liked the clinical-sounding “climaxed,” and the rest of the passage is too vague. What does it mean that Beverly’s body “stuttered”? At age fifteen, I needed an operations manual, not a prose poem. Yet the scene is warm and affirming, exactly what I needed to calm my fear.

(For a repressed preacher’s kid in adolescence, a hundred killer clowns aren’t as terrifying as intimacy with a woman.)
Daily SG: 4 Dec 2014
By: The Singapore Daily
Tags: Digital, Ge2016, General Elections, Editor, Delay

Singapore is a Smart Nation

- Bertha Harian: Come out swinging? Or whinging?

— Top of the Word: Singapore on way to becoming world’s first smart nation

— Tankoktim: Smart Nation

— Today Voices: Smart City drive: More efforts needed to integrate, educate

— 否极泰来 Piji Tailai: Smart Nation, SG50, and Categorical Inflexibility

— My Singapore News: Going hysterical over SGX glitches

— Mothership: 6 ways a futuristic Singapore can be better than it is now

Regardless of Race, Language or Religion

- Yawning Bread: Haram to speak of ham

A Vote for Change

- Thoughts of a Cynical Investor: Coming GE: Real problem for the PAP

— Likedatosocanmeh: GE 2016 — vote for a real government, not CEOs of Singapore Inc
Never a Yesterday nor a Tomorrow
Tags: Enjoy, Poetry, Peace, A Cornered Gurl, Life

There’s only one sensible way to live: Don’t be prepared for life.

Don’t numb the jolt of the future with your silly anticipations and expectations.

Let the novelty of the future hit you in full swing.

Experience first-hand all the genres of life.
NVM: A must-know tool for front-end developers
By: Kesk - -
Tags: JavaScript, Node, Angular, Nvm, React

NVM: A must-know tool for front-end developers

The easiest way to working with Node

If you use Angular, React, or another framework or different versions of them, you will have suffered the need to change the version of Node in your system. But switching between Node environments for local development It’s not easy, and it usually slows down the work.

One day I discovered NVM, and my work was simplified and accelerated. But what is NVM?

Node Version Manager

In simple words: NVM is a version manager for node.js.

NVM is a tool that makes switching between existing versions of Node much easier. This is especially helpful when developers are working on various projects that have different versions of Node. Without NVM you’d have to continuously uninstall and reinstall node versions and their global packages to use the different versions.

NVM makes it possible to:

To have multiple projects whose libraries need to be building against different versions.

If you’re building an app, NVM gives you a way to get around the hurdles that can come with each update.

You can quickly test how your application behaves with different Node versions.

Download any remote versions of Node locally with a simple command.

It makes it easy to test applications with different JavaScript levels.

NVM works with multiple types of shells.

Install NVM

NVM is straightforward to set up, follow the next steps:

or

Running either of the above commands downloads an installation script and runs it:

To check that NVM is correctly installed, open a new terminal and type in:

$ nvm -version

If everything is right, you will get back the version of the NVM package manager installed:

If your system does not find NVM execute the following command:

$ export NVM_DIR="$([ -z "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME-}" ] && printf %s "${HOME}/.nvm" || printf %s "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/nvm")"

[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"I

Using NVM

NVM is straightforward to use.

Here is a list of the most important commands:

To download, compile, and install the latest release of Node, execute the following command:

$ nvm install node

Note: Node is an alias to request the last version of Node.

To shows you all available remote versions of Node:
The Pyromancer and Their Girlfriend
By: Ariel Cross
Tags: Urban Fantasy, LGBTQ, Vampires, Flash Fiction, Magic

Photo by Morgan Sessions on Unsplash

“I’m going to incinerate him.”

River’s expression, as always, was unreadable. Of course, fooling Mina was something of a chore, since she was a vampire. Emotions were given away by pulse and scent quite readily. River appreciated that Mina was not obnoxious about it, and they had long since given up any hope of masking their feelings with her. In fact, they liked it that way. They loved it, even.

The couple was sitting in a quiet coffehouse in northern Cincinnati, one pretending to sip her tea while the other was genuinely enjoying theirs. They came for the atmosphere more than anything. It was a comfortable place, vaguely magical, and welcoming to all. The owner and most of the employees were In the Know, which always made places feel safer.

Mina placed a cool hand on River’s shoulder. The vampire’s blue eyes were crinkled with concern.

“There’s no need for incineration,” Mina said with an undisguised trace of admiration for the pyromancer’s passion.

River’s face twitched with the desire to grimace as they stared at their girlfriend. The temperature of the air around them rose a few degrees.

“Mina,” the pyromancer said levelly, “he turned you into a vampire.”

“To which I consented,” Mina added patiently.

“You were manipulated.”

Mina placed her hands on her hips. “I was fully informed. I knew he was a manipulative bastard by that point, but I made my choice, knowing what it meant.” Her face softened, and she stroked River’s cheek. “Just because I have regrets, that doesn’t mean I should take them out on him.”

“Fine.” River subsided and crossed their arms. Their pulse slowed somewhat, and the air around them cooled to room temperature again.

A pyromancer had to be careful with their emotions.

“Oh, don’t misunderstand,” Mina hastened to clarify. She rested her elbows on the tabletop and folded her hands under her chin. “There are plenty of reasons to kill him…”

The vampire’s sapphire eyes gleamed with a sudden and terrible bloodlust. River blinked in surprise, but the pyromancer otherwise kept their expression steady. Their pulse was a dirty traitor, revealing their arousal at the intensity of their girlfriend’s expression.

Mina smiled, baring her fangs just a little. “…and I will be the one who has that pleasure.”
Europe vs Apple: what you need to know
By: Andreas Sandre
Tags: Tech, Europe, Apple, Ireland, Antitrust

Europe vs Apple: what you need to know

5 must reads on Apple’s $14.5 billion EU tax ruling

1. A Message to the Apple Community in Europe

Letter by Tim Cook, Apple

2. Ireland gave illegal tax benefits to Apple worth up to €13 billion

Press Release by the European Commission

3. Irish Government disagrees profoundly with Commission on Apple

Press release by the Irish Department of Finance

4. Apple Must Pay Billions for Tax Breaks in Ireland, E.U. Orders

by James Kanter and Mark Scott, The New York Times

5. Apple must now pay its taxes. This is a vindication of protest

Opinion by Owen Jones, The Guardian
Political Poetry
Tags: Poetry, Poems On Medium, Poetry On Medium, Politics, Poem

We all view the world through a unique lens. Politics is in literally everything from our churches to our social organizations to news events and crime to our governments. This is the place to share your view, regardless of your political leanings: all are welcome.

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Do You Suffer From Formulaic Content Fatigue?
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Communication, Media, Marketing, Language, Social Media

How can we tell the difference between a genuine narrative that comes straight from the heart and one that is hyped up to milk clicks?

Anything dripping with pathos and exaggeration tends to make me feel uncomfortable as it seems to beg for validation. “Look at me”, this kind of copy says, “I have it way worse than everybody else, and if you have feelings, you should compensate me for my misery.” Give me your money and make me feel better about myself, please!

Unsurprisingly, this kind of writing has become a niche, but whose idea was it to weaponize empathy, compassion, and authenticity? And how might this benefit us as a society?

The strength of the personal essay is that it helps humanize universal issues that are often difficult to discuss; it can thus work as a conversation starter. However, many writers are pawning their privacy for clicks without any care for their future selves or indeed those they write about.

Then again, many allege ours is a post-privacy world, something that I wholeheartedly reject as a journalist because the respect of privacy is at the heart of my profession and protected by a strict code of conduct, i.e., ethics.

And if we’re committed to full disclosure and transparency, we can always continue the conversation off the page; I often do. I also try to be mindful of what I put on permanent record in published essays that will live on the internet forever.

When a piece seems to exist purely as a nod to exhibitionism in the race to disclose as much as possible, I can’t help but recoil. To me, shock value and sensationalism will always remain the sworn enemies of informative, thought-provoking content. For example, I really don’t wish to read about what’s oozing from anyone’s nether regions, but I once inadvertently did.

And yet, choosing to address humans’ innate voyeuristic tendencies is a business strategy like any other. Because it’s lucrative, it’s seen as successful and worth emulating.

The pursuit of profit at all costs explains the endless slew of formulaic filler content flooding every corner of the internet.

Even though it invariably lowers platform quality, many choose to write it because it pays, no matter how meta it gets. As a case in point, “paycheck porn” does exceedingly well when it’s presented as inspirational; it spawns innumerable pieces where authors gloat about how much they make writing online, to the point that it becomes the most frequent thing they write about.

Such content pays handsomely, it’s easy and quick to put together, and unsuspecting readers lap it up, so what’s not to love?
The Perfect End Of The World
By: Lori Brown
Tags: Science Fiction, Short Story, Family, Fiction, Fantasy

Nobody could have predicted it.

The Perfect End Of The World

A fictional short story about an unexpected party that everyone was invited to.

Photo by Susannah Burleson on Unsplash

The way people predicted the end of times before the invite looks so pessimistic in retrospect. It almost seems like people of Earth were trying to find certain doom, but that isn’t at all how it played out.

Shaking my head and chuckling at the bizarre ways we lived on Earth before the invite, I refocused my attention on the room full of people.

The crowd was noisy, buzzing with the sounds of women and men flirting. Husbands and wives were joined by singles and committed couples on an expansive dance floor. Tables with rotating, snack-filled centerpieces were staggered at the edges of the dance floor and a library at the end of the room also housed a sparkling bar with the best selections of beverages and refreshments I had ever seen. And free always.

Every 15 minutes exactly a voice would announce on a speaker that the kids were safely playing in their special garden wing, and all kids were accounted for. The voice was usually a soft, pleasant, female voice but occasionally a male voice would do the announcements. They both sounded equally calming and pleasant.

The purpose of the announcements over the loudspeakers in the adult's social cathedral was to further emphasize the reasons the parents in the building could relax and enjoy their time. But I am a mother, and just hearing the words “Your kid is fine.” simply isn't enough to convince me that I don’t need to see it with my own eyes. For the parents who are highly protective of their kids, they found a way to soothe us too.

There was a full-time monitoring system that connected each parent directly to their own children, so if the soothing announcement of their well-being wasn't enough to relax someone, they could instantly verify that their child was safe and having fun with a tap of a button on a simple bracelet.

That was the one thing that finally convinced me that I could actually spend the leisure time with the adults without worrying endlessly about my 13-year-old son, in the youth garden.

I was such a stickler on Earth before the invite.
10 tips to power-up your Java security
By: Dor Farber
Tags: Java, Security, Programming, Coding, Software Development

“Security”, this word has been said so much in the past few years,

Nowadays it seems like even the smallest company must take this aspect into account.

FYI, security tools, both attack, and defensive ones, get improved by companies, groups, and individuals, so it’s really necessary to understand that there is an entire industry who’s search for security vulnerabilities every day and no matter on what side you are, this game is far from ending.

According to Oracle, there are 9,000,000 java developers across the globe (BTW, Wikipedia claims it’s 10,000,000 🤔).

So I thought it would be a good place to start writing such tips.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Defends Plan to Eliminate Super-Majority Rule
By: Honest Austin
Tags: Texas Politics, Texas, Texas Legislature, Txlege

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, left, at the dais of the Texas Senate (Texas Senate Photo)

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick is defending a plan to change Senate rules to allow a bill to pass with a mere majority vote, rather than three-fifths of the votes.

Although the Texas Constitution says that the Legislature can pass a law with a simple majority vote in each chamber, the Senate’s own internal rules require 19 of 31 votes. Before 2015 the bar was even higher at two-thirds (21 votes).

The Senate can change these rules at the outset of a legislative session, and that is what the lieutenant governor has proposed to do in 2021.

This change would ensure that a Republican majority could still pass laws in the Senate in 2021 even if Democrats pick up one or more seats at the polls in November, narrowing the current Republican majority of 19 seats.

As lieutenant governor, Patrick presides over the Senate and plays a major role in setting the agenda and enforcing the chamber’s rules. If his idea garners the support of other Republican lawmakers, then the new rule is likely to take effect in the Senate chamber in January 2021, when the next legislative session begins.

But Patrick’s plan prompted backlash from five former Republican state senators, who said the rule change would make the Senate more partisan and less “collegial.”

In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, former Senators Cyndi Krier (San Antonio), Bill Ratliff (Mount Pleasant), David Sibley (Waco), Steve Ogden (Bryan), Bob Deuell (Greenville) and Craig Estes (Wichita Falls) said the Senate rule helped to “cool down some of the fevered legislation filed in the Senate or passed by a simple majority of the Texas House of Representatives.”

The super-majority rule, they argued, “encourages, even forces, senators to work with colleagues across the political aisle. In our experience, working in a bipartisan manner led to better legislation and made the Texas Senate a more collegial body.”

Patrick responded in a letter to the Houston Chronicle on Feb. 15: “Before 2015, Democrats had used the 21-vote requirement to block any bill they didn’t like. Founding father James Madison once said a two-thirds vote in Congress would lead to the tyranny of the minority…”

He went on to argue that the supermajority rule had led to unnecessary special sessions of the Legislature during Governor Rick Perry’s time in office, because the rules are different during special sessions. “These former senators seem to have forgotten how many special sessions we had during Perry’s tenure,” Patrick said.

Patrick continued, “The senators vote on the rules at the beginning of each legislative session and ultimately, they will decide if we adopt majority rule — a bedrock principle of democracy — in the Texas Senate. My position is clear: I do not believe an arbitrary parliamentary rule should ever stop us from moving an agenda forward that has the support of the conservative majority in Texas.”