fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Singular Factoring at the 4YFN
By: Singular Factory
Tags: Eventos, Wupplier, Fintech, English Posts

In our case, we wanted to show Singular Factoring, a FinTech solution that wants to make life easier for clients and suppliers, being aware that one of the biggest challenges in organizations are their own treasury and invoice management. We were recently selected as one of the most interesting FinTech solution at the Citi Mobile Challenge, organized by Citi Bank in Sydney.

Singular Factoring shows you yout treasury history and forecast and simplifies the invoice management and communications. In order to do so you can add your invoice by filling an online form, or upload directly your files. Besides, in order to simplify communications, prevent missing email and forgetting about what you said on the phone, every invoice has a panel to its right where you can send all the actions that you need (send them to your client, tell that there is an incidence etc). This way both of you are looking exactly at the same document and all the communications are saved next to it.

The Tool can be used asynchronously so that it helps you organize yourself but then you send your bank transfers manually, but it can also be connected to your ERP so that the invoice and payment orders get scheduled and inside your system.

However, one of the most interesting assets of Singular Factoring is helping clients obtain a benefit by supporting their supplier chain. One of the biggest challenges for suppliers is the delay in payments, that may be sent in sixty, ninety or a hundred and twenty days… which is almost a half of the year. Anytime after an invoice has been accepted, we provide the suppliers a tool that allow them to offer the client a discount in exchange for advancing the payment.

We are really proud about our progress, since January 2016 some clients are already using our platform, counting with one of the biggest supermarket chain in Mexico, and a Hotel Chain in Miami or a Freight Road Transport company in USA.

We are also excited about the new road map, including finantial institutions in the plaftorm or creating our own crowd-discounting platform, so that private investors and even the domestic public can invest in the companies they choose, and these companies could use these funding lines for advancing their discounts.

In resume, our feedback was absolutely positive and we are really excited about the news we shared and the next steps we are taking. Exhibiting at the 4YFN has been a great opportunity to show our work.

4YFN is clearly an appointment that every starp-up should take into consideration, a must-be-there.
Debugging C++ Programs in Vim
By: Timothy Karani
Tags: Debugging, Cplusplus, Vim, Gdb

Vim can work with GDB to debug C++ programs. This feature works in Vim version 8.1+. In this blog post, we’ll go through debugging C++ in Vim.

Setting Things Up

You need to load the plugin using the command:

:packadd termdebug

You have to do this every time you want to debug. If you want this to happen automatically, add the command to your .vimrc .

In .vimrc:

packadd termdebug

The code below is for the sample program that we are going to debug. Open vim and type it. We are going to save it as hello.cpp

in hello.cpp:

We are going to compile the program using g++ :

in your terminal:

The -g flag tells g++ to produce debugging information that gdb can work with.

Debugging

Assuming you still have the program open in vim, we can start debugging by either of these two ways:

Variant 1

Termdebug accepts the program name as the argument. In our case, we compiled hello.cpp to hello .

:Termdebug hello

Variant 2

The argument is optional so you can still start the debugging environment by just typing:

:Termdebug

In this case, however, we have to explicitly make GDB know the file/program we are going to debug:

in the GDB window inside of vim:

(gdb) file hello

Once you have started Termdebug , you can run it in either of the two following ways:

Through a Vim command :Run

In the GDB window:

(gdb) run

Here is a screenshot of my Vim environment at this stage:
The Paintings of Geometric Cows in the 19th Century UK
By: Kamna Kirti
Tags: Culture, Humor, Art, Painting, History

Why cows were depicted as rectangular in paintings

The wealthy farm owners publicized their wealth and status by commissioning corpulent cow paintings and boasting the new breeding techniques and practices. The “rustic or naive art” was used to portray the mega-sized cows with their petite and tiny landowners.

Rich farmers incorporated improved breeding and feeding methods to grow the size of their livestock. Oil cakes and turnips were fed to cows.

The elite farmers used the exaggerated paintings of cows in exhibitions and as an act of self-promotion. The giant cattle in the paintings were prized possessions of the wealthy owners as the cattle were sold worth a good amount of money only by looking at their paintings and prints.
The Doughnut Hoe
By: Bella Cooper
Tags: Fiction, Humor, Erotica, Sexuality

Erotic Humor (Elements of Babysitter and Drama)

After high school, I was lost. What to do? I’m not an ordinary girl and the job I wanted most in the world was illegal and dangerous, but where there’s a will, as they say…

I am a prostitute, duh, as if you didn’t guess that. I love my job; I love the happiness and calm it brings the guys who I fuck and suck. It’s a little silly, but when I first found out about sex from my dad's Playboy stash, I pined to be one of Hef’s girls. Then when I found out you could make money at it, my mind was blown. I was like, why is everyone not doing this?

It’s not all fun and games, of course. Being a sex worker is serious business, and it has its risks, but when a guy is on top of me, sweating out a load into my pussy, it’s completely worth it. I remember my first time. Summer, it was blazing hot. I was a newly minted adult, having just turned eighteen, and I was tired of masturbating to the magazines I snuck out of my dad's stash. I wanted dick. I wanted to fuck for money, but how to start.

I was at the local doughnut shop, aptly named ‘the doughnut hole,’ which was run by an older Jewish guy, we just called Mr. Grumpy Pants. When I spotted Mr. Miller getting a dozen doughnuts. I baby sat for him for a couple years.

“Hey, Erin. You’re looking good. How have you been?” he asked.

“Ok, graduated. No job, not sure I want to go to school.”

“Any ideas? What you’re interested in I mean?”

I had a lot of ideas, but no balls. I was pretty stupid in those days, but you have to try shit to learn, am I right?. I knew Mr. Miller, Allen Miller. He was a tall handsome man in his later forties, muscular and fit, bitchy wife. He’s the kind of dad babysitters dream about.

“I have a few. One in particular, but I don’t know how to even start.”

“Yeah, businesses can be tough. A lot of shit to do, licences, taxes. If you’re thinking about doing….”

He was talking too much, grabbing his cock through his khaki pants made that go away. It was the first cock I ever had in my hand. I looked down and focused on the hard rod of man meat swelling even more to my touch.

“So I was thinking of something more, under the table, Mr. M., less paperwork, licences, taxes,” I said.

“Ok. Well. What did you have in mind? How can I help?”

“Let’s talk pricing? How does that work? You’re a vice cop, right? You must know.” Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Mr. Miller is a detective.

“Well, ten, I guess, for what you’re doing. Twenty a blowjob, forty for, you know. It depends. It goes higher,” He said. “But that’s the least of your problems. There’s all that cash flow, safety.”

Mr. Grumpy Pants looked pissed. He stood there with tongs waiting to take the rest of Mr. Miller’s Order. He had caught wind of my playing around and was clearing his throat. We separated and Allen gave him the rest of the order, and one for me.
Bitupper: the brightest events of the first half of May
By: Maria Fomina
Tags: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Consensus, Charlie Lee, Litecoin

The development team, including the very founder of the ecosystem, continues to work hard on Bitupper. Right now we disclose a few secret development news to you, which have not been announced before!

So, are you ready?

At the moment, the alpha version of an advanced search and tips system of Bitupper’s own search engine is implemented and the development of it continues.

Last week, the development of a new Bitupper Passport service started. We will tell more about it in one of the following posts.

And finally, we propose our users to watch a video report from the place of events in New York — Mikhail Sergeev, CCO of Bitupper, on his impressions of a successful meeting with Charlie Lee and of the Bitupper project.
Oranges
By: Agnes Laurens
Tags: Writing, Poetry, Fruits, Creativity, Life

Composer Sergei Prokoviev composed the music “The Love For Three Oranges” for orchestra. This piece has been transcripted for other instruments too.

Here is one for you:
Cosine similarity in Neo4J
By: Mike Palei
Tags: Neo4j, How To, Machine Learning, Cosine Similarity, Data Science

Cosine similarity in Neo4J

This post will showcase the use of cosine similarity algorithm in Neo4J and also provide examples in addition to the available documentation.

Update: The O’Reilly book “Graph Algorithms on Apache Spark and Neo4j Book is now available as free ebook download, from neo4j.com

Without further ado, here is the problem set:

I had a collection of people’s images and I wanted to find images showing the same person. Since the collection was not labeled, I could not tackle this task as a pure classificaton problem.

I manually created a list of persons of interest and downloaded their “prototypical” pictures from the web.

Next step was to extract embeddings from both the “prototypical” images and from each image in my collection. For this I used a pretrained Resnet50 model from keras.applications.

import glob

import numpy as np

from scipy.misc import imresize

from keras.applications import resnet50

from keras.models import Model IMAGE_SIZE = 224

IMAGE_DIR=<directory_with_images> resnet_model = resnet50.ResNet50(weights="imagenet",

include_top=True)

preprocessor = resnet50.preprocess_inputmodel = Model(inputs=resnet_model.input,

outputs=resnet_model.layers[-1].output) image_names = glob.glob(IMAGE_DIR+'/*.jpg')

num_vecs = 0

image_names = sorted(image_names) batched_images = [] for i in range(len(image_names)):

image = plt.imread(image_names[i])

image = imresize(image, (IMAGE_SIZE, IMAGE_SIZE))

batched_images.append(image) X = preprocessor(np.array(batched_images, dtype="float32"))

vectors = model.predict(X)



Once I obtained the embeddings, I saved each image as a node in Neo4j using the following schema (the person_name property is optional, it was only filled for the manually downloaded “prototypical” images):
Our Minivan Can Fly!
By: Jennifer Cowie King
Tags: Childhood, Motherhood, Family, Children, Parenting

I’ll let you in on a secret, our minivan can fly! Yes, it’s true. Once everyone is buckled in, we brace ourselves for the countdown out the driveway. I know, I know, minivans and even airplanes don’t have countdowns, but in our world…they DO. We are a minivan airplane rocket.



10..9..8..7..6..5..4..3..2..1..BLAST OFF!!!! And Pilot Mommy has hit the road. My co-pilot son is eagerly pushing his executive controls on his car seat and proudly wearing his navy blue pilot blazer with the airplane buttons held on with safety pins — a Halloween costume from last year. My navigator daughter has flipped open her hippopotamus book a.k.a her Guide Map of Ultimate Maneuverability and is ready to navigate us through challenging morning rush hour air traffic.



“Whooaa, there goes a truck airplane!” shouts my son the co-pilot.



“There goes a bus airplane and another bus airplane!” screams his sister, the navigator. She is not to be outdone.



“Navigator daughter, please check your maps and tell me if we head due south at the next light?”



“Yes, Mommy, we do. We certainly do,” she states with conviction.



“O.K. heading south it is,” states Pilot Mommy.



“There’s a FIRE TRUCK airplane! A FIRE TRUCK AIRPLANE, MOMMY!!”, shrieks my son the co-pilot.

“MOMMY! MOMMY!” he shrieks again…just in case I wasn’t listening. Which is impossible because I am almost deaf by this time. This aging pilot could use some super dooper ear plugs. After all, it is 8:00 am and I’ve only had one cup of tea.

“I see it, co-pilot son! Wow, a fire truck airplane. Here comes the flashing lights, prepare to slow down. I’ll contact the tower.”

Squawk** **Squawk** **Squawk** **Static**

“Pilot to preschool tower.”

“Pilot Mommy to the preschool tower, do you read?”



“Yes, Pilot Mommy, come in.” …a mystery voice from the tower.



“We’re on our descent. Prepare for landing, co-pilot son & navigator daughter.”

Brooommmm…Booom….braaa…nnnerrrr…sounds of landing

Our minivan comes to a halt in front of the preschool. The side doors slide open with a dramatic whoosh. My son the co-pilot and my daughter the navigator exit their car seats with a leap after I push their magic release buttons. I throw one blue backpack and one red backpack over both of my shoulders, grab one small hand of each of my children and steer everyone to the school gate. All have arrived safely and in good spirits.

This is a good day. I have them fairly regularly considering I have two children who are both currently three, yet not twins. But, the best part hadn’t come yet. No, the best part was at the end of the preschool day when I picked up a dirt covered boy and a paint covered girl and my son said, “Mommy, thank you for pretending the car was an airplane.”

“You’re welcome co-pilot boy,” I said.

Some days the magic sticks.
From The Junction: Paying it Forward
By: Stephen M. Tomic
Tags: Writing, Poetry, Fiction, Novel, Publishing

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

Hello friends and fellow readers,

It’s been a while. I’m not a weekly (or monthly, for that matter) newsletter kind of guy, preferring to save these missives for big news and special occasions.

I think we’re all burned out on big news at the moment.

But, there are few things that are a greater cause for celebration than the publication of a new book. Whether it be a poetry chapbook or a novel, the third in a series, or an authorial debut. For every writer, it’s a BIG DEAL. The untold hours spent crafting every line and word, trying to make it absolutely perfect. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the trash can filled with crumpled pages.

Some are talented and lucky (or well-connected) enough to score an agent, to have their manuscript honed and sculpted by brilliant editors, released by a pre-eminent publishing house, and given a sizable marketing budget to climb to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.

If only we all could be so fortunate.

The path of an indie writer puts the emphasis on “independent”. The work doesn’t stop with the writing. There’s still the editing to do, the cover design, the formatting, and the most dreaded of actions: self-promotion.

And when all that is done, and your book appears available for purchase, there’s the hope that your friends and family at the very least will support you and buy it, of course; but the deeper, more secret wish is for an absolute stranger to stumble upon your words, read them, and make a connection.

I’ve been privileged to encounter some wonderful writers in my time here on Medium, and to publish them here at The Junction. And wouldn’t you believe that several of them have published books you can buy now!

I want to use this platform to pay it forward and help give these indie writers a nudge of marketing.

After all, we’re all in this together.
Beacon
By: Emma Tuftin
Tags: Poetry, Friendship, Poetry On Medium, Relationships, Poem

POETRY

Photo: Sean Pierce via Unsplash

Flicker in the wind,

sputter against the rain,

the elements may try their best,

but can’t destroy the flame.

It holds true in the sun,

but shines brightest at night,

when we can’t see the way forward,

when we need the most light.

Always constant and steady,

it cuts through time and space,

drawing us closer together,

a bond nothing can replace.
World Refugee Day: ‘Safe in Malawi, now we must escape the coronavirus’
By: World Food Programme
Tags: World Refugee Day, Covid 19, Coronavirus, Refugees, Malawi

Primo Luanda, Tatiana Bauma and Resh Tikwa are refugees living in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, 50 km from the capital of Malawi, Lilongwe, where the World Food Programme (WFP) distributes food, and the cash to buy food, to refugees. The three are part of Ramiro Prod, a community-based youth organization in Dzaleka that promotes artistic and creative expression. Below they speak in one voice, following conversations with WFP staff.

Dzaleka Refugee Camp is extremely congested. Photo: WFP/Primo Luanda

This is where we live. We are people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and many other countries. We’ve fled violence, persecution and insecurity to find peace in Malawi. The camp we live in is designed for 10,000 people. But we are more than 40,000 people here. It is, indeed, crowded.

For a couple of months now, we’ve seen buckets at the entrance of churches and shops. We’ve seen people wearing masks. We’ve seen offices closing down. What is going on?

Gracia Alfonsine, 11, washes her hand. Thanks to sensitization drives, children are more aware of hygiene issues. Photo: WFP/Primo Luanda

We’ve also seen our schools closing. Our little brothers and sisters make up new games every day to while away the hours but there is still boredom here — lots of it. It’s sad to see classrooms shut down.
Welcoming Committee
By: Background Noise Comics
Tags: Humor, Travel, Family, Puerto Rico, Comics

Written by

Daily comic by Lisa Burdige and John Hazard about balancing life, love and kids in the gig economy.
Everyone I Know Has Two Names
By: Guy New York
Tags: Love, Poetry, Poem, Sex Work

Writers, dancers, fuckers, beaters, liars, flyers, and little girl creepers.

Each one with two names or three names or four

We know what you call us–we’ve heard it before

We drink on Tuesdays in between buyers and fuck on the weekend when everyone’s tired

And nobody knows who’s who anymore which is just how we like it

And just how we’ll stay

If you ask him his name he’ll smile a bit

She’ll give you a kiss and you’ll give her a tip

And the reason he’s grinning is ’cause everyone knows

That names don’t mean nothing in painting or prose

So we’ll write and we’ll dance and we’ll fuck and we’ll beat

We’ll lie our hearts out and then fly in our sleep

You can’t stop the music, the groans, or the come

Our bruises will mark us, our scars make us one

All those little girl dancers and lazy romancers

Will keep the world spinning

And loving too much

You can’t stop the tide when the weirdos come out

And there’s nowhere to run where you can’t hear our shouts

And if you forget who you nailed to the cross

Who you dragged through the mud

Who you battered with fear

Remember we like nails, and mud, guts, and tears

So do what you do

’Cause we’ll always be here.
9 Nodding Strategies for Your Next Meeting
By: Sarah Cooper
Tags: Humor, Work, Meetings

You‘ve got a bunch of meetings coming up, but do you have your nodding strategy ready?

A solid nodding strategy could mean the difference between seeming like you understand what’s going on and losing a job.

More seasoned professionals may think they can just nod the same way they did in their last meeting, but that’s not an option — people will notice. Consider this: when someone’s nodding the wrong way don’t you immediately lose trust in them? I know I do.

To help you keep your nodding game fresh, here are nine nodding strategies you can choose from for your next meeting.
What’s new on sls-dev-tools?
By: Mansur Pasha
Tags: AWS, Serverless, NPM, Open Source, Lambda

We have a bunch of new features in our second post alpha iteration of sls-dev-tools, with the introduction of support for EventBridge Injection as well as stack & function deployment from inside the tool.

For those who haven’t heard of it, sls-dev-tools is an opensource project that aims at becoming the equivalent of Chrome Dev Tools for the Serverless World. Our goal is to provide the Serverless community with metrics, logs and feedback directly in the terminal, eliminating the need to constantly jump to the AWS Console.

The new features released with version 0.2.1

Deployment from within the tool

A feature we’re really excited to announce is the ability to deploy lambdas from within the tool in a single keypress. You can select a function and press “d” to deploy it individually, or press “s” and deploy the whole stack. Additional commands can be passed to the deploy argument via the sls-dev-tools config.

This feature is framework agnostic, working for the Serverless Framework and the SAM framework by passing the --sam option and adding any additional fields to the sls-dev-tools config.

EventBridge “Event injection”

The tool now shows you a list of your EventBuses from EventBridge. Tabbing to the new EventBus section and selecting an Event Bus will allow you to press “i”, opening up a prefilled modal that lets you enter parameters for a custom event, and submit it to the bus, all from within the tool.

Accessible help menu

As the tool and functionality grows, so does this list of available commands!

sls-dev-tools now allows you to view a list of all the keyboard shortcuts within the tool with a handy help modal by pressing “h”.

What’s next?

The team is working on integrating the tool with the EventBridge Schema Registry to allow you to inject Events with ease.

In addition to this will be the ability to run your favourite test suites from inside the tool, and invoking lambdas in a single keypress. Stay tuned!

Your contribution is priceless

If you find this tool useful or have any feedback please get in touch via GitHub issues or Twitter.

And, if you like what you’re seeing a ⭐️would go a long way!

We are also actively looking for contributors and will be available to help you find good first issues, code review and assistance on developing out any new functionality.

Docs: https://theodo-uk.github.io/sls-dev-tools/
Use short-form Medium stories as a way to curate your content.
By: August Birch
Tags: Freelancing, Marketing, Writing, Short Form, Medium

Use short-form Medium stories as a way to curate your content. If you’ve written a couple stories on Medium as I did (over 1,200) you might have a big library of content we can learn from.

Even your best reader doesn’t have the time to scroll through everything you’ve written — and she shouldn’t.

As creators it’s our job, not only to make new stuff, but to curate our best stuff to save our readers some time.

Using short-form stories, you can can curate your best work in bite-sized pieces, to help grab new readers for older, still-relevant content. Medium won’t do it for you. You’ve got to tell the others.

Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers
A Life Changing Secret
By: Jennifer Marie
Tags: World War II, Holocaust, Nazis, History, Refugees

How one man made a difference to the lives of so many.

From bbc.com

Grete Winston was searching through her attic in 1988 and stumbled across a scrapbook she had never seen before. It was filled with names, photos, and various other documents that painted a picture she was unaware of until that moment.

From cbsnews.com

The scrapbook belonged to her husband, Nicholas Winston, and it illustrated an effort which led to saving the lives of 669 children from certain death as the threats of the Nazi regime became more imminent with each passing day. He had remained quiet about his participation in rescuing these children from Czechoslovakia and nearly 50 years after his remarkable mission the world would realize how one individual can truly make an impact. Grete reached out to Holocaust historian, Dr. Elisabeth Maxwell, to share the heroic efforts of her husband and from there the word spread which highlighted the endeavors.

From cbsnews.com

Nicholas Winston was a stockbroker in London in 1938 and was planning a vacation to Switzerland to go on a ski trip in December of that year. He chose to forego that trip and instead journeyed to Czechoslovakia after he had received a phone call from his friend, Martin Blake, who requested his assistance on an interesting assignment. Once he arrived, he was asked to help in the refugee camps where thousands of people were being forced to live in horrifying conditions. Winston believed that the outbreak of war was inevitable and realized that something must be done to help refugee children. He had a vision and was determined to start a mass evacuation to get these children to safety. There was no organization dedicated to assisting these children which prompted the decision to operate under the guise of a legitimate organization, The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia-Children’s Section. The establishment was a true operation; however, they did not have a section that was focused on children. Winston has said that he had to utilize forgery and blackmail to ensure the mission was achieved.
Getting Started As a Data Scientist
Tags: Analytics, Technology, Learning, Data Science, Data

Course Work and Mentorship

Data science is kind of like web development in the sense that there might be one or two courses at your college on the subject. But, there isn’t really a fully thought out set of courses that prepare you for the industry.

So how do young aspiring data scientist get started? Here are a couple of solid ways to get into the data science field.

Get an internship as a data scientist (this will make it very easy later on)

Move laterally in a company into a data science role

Complete a data science boot camp

Develop your own application incorporating data science (this is probably the hardest)

Depending on your background, the path you take to break into the data science field varies. For example, if you have a background in finance and you work as a financial analyst it will probably be difficult to move laterally in a company to a data science position.

Thus, if you believe you are interested in data science and don’t have a tech background, then a boot camp might be your best option. These can be pricey, but we have seen people with English backgrounds land jobs at great tech companies as data scientists after completing a boot camp.

Of course, we do find getting an internship early on in your career to be one of the best ways to set yourself up for future data scientist roles. This is because interviewers are often a little easier on you since you are new to the field and afterward you’ll have real-world experience.

Once you have your first role, another invaluable asset is a great mentor. A great mentor does not have to be someone that is dedicated to being your mentor. Instead, it can be anyone at your company who is amazing at what they do. Honestly, everyone could be your mentor. Perhaps one employee is really good at communicating, another at programming, and still another at UI. Don’t limit yourself to the mentor your company may provide. Learn from everyone on the team.

In the end, there are many different paths to getting that first data scientist role. So don’t give up because the first path you try fails! If you can’t get an internship, try to move laterally within a company, if you can’t do that, maybe consider a boot camp. All the while, make sure you are building up your portfolio!
From the field with Inanna
By: International Med. Corps
Tags: Jordan, Syrian Refugees, Syria, Refugees, From The Field

From the field with Inanna

As we marked Syria’s civil war entering its 8th year, Inanna Sarkis took over our Instagram to share photos and stories from her time in Jordan, where she visited our programs for Syrian refugees.

We provide protection and psychological activities for children and youth through Makani (“my space” in Arabic) Centers.

Inanna visited our Makani Centers in Zarqa and Mafraq, where she met many inspiring children and young people.

The Makani Centers provide youth with learning opportunities, life skills training and psychosocial support services.

The Centers also promote social cohesion, as they are open to both Jordanian and Syrian children and supported by community-based committees who help identify and refer vulnerable children.

Inanna also visited the hospital we run in Azraq refugee camp, which is home to nearly 38,000 Syrians.

The Makani Centers also help raise awareness about child rights, gender-based violence and other protection issues.

It was honor to welcome Inanna to Jordan, helping us tell the story of the Syrian people affected by the civil war and the new lives they are building in Jordan.

Learn more about our programs in Jordan

Follow International Medical Corps on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Before you go… Hold down the clap 👏 button if you liked the content! It will help this post gain exposure .
Grid Parity. Explanation in detail
By: Solar Dao
Tags: Sdao, Parity, Solar Dao, Renewable Energy, Off The Grid

The rapid decline in prices for the equipment production and solar power plants maintenance provides this Green Industry a leading place in the renewable energy market and huge prospects for use. Solar energy is the cheapest and most effective way of generating electricity for many countries. In this article, we will talk about Grid Parity and what countries have already managed to achieve it.

Confusion in terminology

Due to insufficient study and lack of scientific presentations, the Parity term is not always identically interpreted. Latter the “Grid Parity” meant a certain comparison of RES with classical types of generation. The term’s essence identified the status of green energy, the improvement of which (the low cost of a RES energy unit compared to coal, gas, nuclear or other) was called Parity.

However, grid electricity can be generated by several types of sources at once, and the tariff includes other parameters in addition to the energy cost. So:

Grid Parity is the case when a consumer using own generation on renewable energy sources could achieve a cost of kilowatt/hour (called LCOE) equal to or lower than the tariff cost from the Grid per kilowatt/hour.

A clear distinction. When does Parity occur?

The European technological and innovative platform for photovoltaics (ETIP PV) has carefully made calculations to show what Grid Parity is, and which countries in Europe have already achieved it. All of important nuances were taken into account.

First of all, the company noted that the consumer’s full self-provision by solar energy is an extremely complex process, since daily generation is variable. Therefore, excessive energy sold to the network at a wholesale price was considered. For real Grid Parity calculations, the data were used without taking the use of power storage. The RES use subsidies and special national tariffs were also not taken into account, for the sake of clear result.

The calculation of the Real Grid Parity was made this way:
Proof of Exponentiation using Wesolowski’s Method
By: Prof Bill Buchanan Obe
Tags: Cybersecurity, Cryptography

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

With zero-knowledge proofs we can implement a proof of exponentiation, and where Peggy can prove to Victor that she knows the required exponentiation. For this, we can significantly reduce the computation required, as we can define the field in which the calculations are performed in. But field we define that there are a limit number of outputs from a calculation, as we perform them with a (mod N) operation (and where the values go from 0 to N-1). The smaller the number of bits in N, the less time it will take to compute.

One method was produced by Wesolowski’s [1], and which is defined in Dan Boneh’s paper [2]:

So let’s look at the Wesolowski method and how it reduces the complexity of the zero-knowledge proof process. First, Peggy and Victor know three values u, w and x and where:

w=u^x

Peggy will prove to Victor that she still knows the values of u and x, based on a challenge. Initially, Victor generates an n-bit prime number (l) and passes it to Victor. Victor then computes a quotient and a residue of x given our n-bit prime number, with:

q=x/l

and:

x=ql+r

Victor then sends (Q) of:

Q=u^q (mod l)

Victor then computes:

r=x (mod l)

And will accept the proof if:

Q^l u^r=w

A sample of the code is:

A sample run is [here]:

Number of bits in prime: 128 Shared values:

u= 724344246685237324594883523846158072601724787874

x= 547734540830014782431283202202713039802985747397

w=u^x= 238782518159789218222694692120029338665 Victor sends a prime number:

l= 296352719987870864011244230554561688627 Peggy computes:

r 215487843639236261332429467563846617173

q 1848252112 Peggy sends:

Q= 243826098549616820202795998041856248447 Victor computes:

r= 215487843639236261332429467563846617173

W= 238782518159789218222694692120029338665 Peggy has proven she knows the exponent

Conclusions

We need to change the way we prove things, such as our passwords. The method defined here does some magic and allows Peggy to prove a secret to Victor. In Wesolowski’s paper, he introduces a triple (u, w, t) that satisﬁes w = u^{2^t}.

References

[1] Benjamin Wesolowski. Eﬃcient veriﬁable delay functions. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2018/623, 2018. https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/623.

[2] Boneh, D., Bünz, B., & Fisch, B. (2019, August). Batching techniques for accumulators with applications to iops and stateless blockchains. In Annual International Cryptology Conference (pp. 561–586). Springer, Cham. https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1188.pdf
[Geeky] RMagick and memory leaks
By: Pito Salas
Tags: Life

A recent post talked about creating a “Domain Specific Language” for image processing of ballots. I’ve made a lot of progress on that project and wanted to give an update.



One commenter (my pal Aleks) said to ‘watch out for RMagick as it has major memory leaks. I talked to him further and he recommended using MiniMagick instead. I investigated.



It turns out indeed that my RMagick app was gobbling up tons of memory.



Both RMagick and MiniMagick are Ruby bindings to ImageMagick which is a comprehensive image processing library, written in C I believe. The differences between RMagick and Mini Magick are:

RMagick uses the ImageMagick API and presents a comprehensive ‘rubyfication’ of the ImageMagtick api. This is useful but you do find that you jump back and forth between the RMagick doc and the ImageMagick doc to see what methods in one correspond to which ones in the other. MiniMagick on the other hand is a very thin veneer over ImageMagick’s command line utilities. It generally uses ‘method-not-found’ to decide to invoke the corresponding C method. This means that the ImageMagick doc is your primary source. The MiniMagick source itself is a single tiny (but sophisticated) Ruby script. RMagick creates in memory ImageMagick (‘malloc’) objects and retains pointers to those inside of Ruby structures. Unless those Ruby structures are garbage collected, the ImageMagick objects just hang around and eat memory, hence the memory leak reputation. Because as far as Ruby is concerned, not that much memory has been used yet, natural garbage collections don’t occur and your system memory footprint gets bigger and bigger. MiniMagick works only with files; it never creates the ImageMagick malloc objects and hence does not suffer from the memory leak. On the other hand, with a complex process like what I am working on, you are creating, saving and reading a lot of files, which slows things down.

I did nearly a day of coding comparing the two and while MiniMagick made the memory leaks go away, in the end it was slower for my purposes than RMagick, probably due to the files that were constantly being created, opened and saved. Note after a few dozen complicated operations, the RMagick version got super slow and basically hung because of memory consumption.



That was easily solved with a little research. I found a post that explained how to address the apparent memory leaks in RMagick: I added a forced reclamation of the ImageMagick malloc object whenever I am done with one (Image.destroy! is the call) and the huge leak is gone. Not sure yet whether there are other ones, but for now, RMagick wins for me!
The Three Most Important Issues to Address When Writing a Post for Medium
By: Jessica Lynn
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Success, Inspiration, Writing, Blogging

Anyone can make money on Medium. You don’t need a degree; you don’t need an agent or a publisher. If you can write and write well, you can earn a living from writing. If you love to write, you’ll probably do even better.

Because of this, Medium is my favorite platform; they pay me when people read my words.

The latest on Medium

Medium has been cracking down on titles that read like clickbait, which means I have to change my mindset on what constitutes as clickbait and what doesn’t.

Here is the latest from Medium:

“Clickbait is content that’s designed to entice a reader to click. It often shows up in the form of deceptive or manipulative story packaging — a hyperbolic claim, a too-wide curiosity gap, a titillating image, etc. These stories do not follow through on their promise and often leave the reader unsatisfied.”

My highest viewed post, The One Book That Will Change Your Life, offers up a title that is now considered “clickbait,” as do several of my older titles that went on to do well and were curated.

They probably wouldn’t get curated if they were published today.

At the time The One Book That Will Change Your Life (published in 2019), was curated into two topics.

I don’t qualify this title as clickbait because I delivered on the promise the title suggests (although, I realize that’s a subjective statement). I believe it is the one book that could change your life, and the message in the post resonates with readers. The book did change my life (no hyperbole).

I’ve been getting rejected from publications with the same note, “the title is clickbait — it won’t get curated.”

Until recently, I didn’t fully know the extent of what Medium considers clickbait. I need to change my thinking on this if I want to get into the larger publications. One of my posts was rejected for a title that read, “Practice This Quality, and You Will Attract Others to You.” The “this” is considered clickbait. Because I’m not telling the reader what the quality is that will make you attractive to others.

If you want to get into Medium publications, you’ll have to play the game or publish in your own publication (another benefit to running your own publication). However, you most likely won’t get curated. Significant downside.

Curation is still the most important metric on Medium you want to aim for and not miss. Curation means Medium pushes your story across its platform. It’s topics that drive Medium’s algorithm, and the more topics a story is curated in, the better for your story and your bottom line.

More eyeballs equate to more of the green stuff. Giving your story a longer shelf life.

The story I referenced above didn’t take off for months after publication; curation helped push it across Medium’s homepage. Views mean nothing; it just means someone clicked. The metric you should pay attention to is the average reading time because it determines the payout. You want your stories to be curated if you want to make money.
Why Classical Music is good
By: Israel Barraza
Tags: Music

Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash

I like classical music. I really do. Classical music has a great range, it can get you hyped up or it can calm you down. I like classical music because the big symphonies sound like massive epic stories without words. Some of them help you understand the time periods in which they were composed. I believe that most people don’t have a good understanding of what classical music means or who composed it or what it might sound like. In fact most people believe that classical music is what they hear from Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, But there is so much more to it than that. Classical music is an umbrella term for what in reality is a lot of time periods compiled together. Some people don’t like that classical music is quote “boring”, I don’t believe that this is the case though, I believe that people just haven’t been introduced to the right composers or the songs that they like. Since most people have only heard Ludwig Van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart they think of all classical music, which is again a massive blanket term, as this very narrow sample size which they think of as all classical music as boring. The thing is that there are a lot of different ranges of music, for example some people may believe that this song is boring (even though I find it to be beautiful), but they’ve never heard this song which is much more exciting.
How did we get here?
By: Kathy Jacobs
Tags: Resistance Poetry, Poetry, Resistance, Change, Politics

Photo by VanveenJF on Unsplash

How did we move from a country complaining about a president’s tan suit,

To a country that excuses locker room talk, bullying, and fear mongering?



How did we go from years of constant investigations into charges imagined,

To a place where guilty pleas by multiple defendants is “Fake news”?



How did we go from “Emails on a private server” are terrible

To private emails and private cell phones are perfectly fine?



How did we go from freedom and protection for all who serve

To a time where DACA and LBGTQ means you can’t serve?



When did truth stop mattering?

How did we go from eight years of legality and truth

To three thousand lies a year?



How did we get to a place where Russian interference

Is something to ignore instead of something to fight?



How did it become ok to neutralize

A president because of the color of his skin?

How did we go from celebration

To discrimination, fear and paranoia?



How did we get here?

How do we get back?

I wrote this last May for a project that never got to publication. I ran across it the other day. I realized that it is still not only applicable, the man in charge has gotten worse — as have his assistants.

I still have hope that we can find a way back to who we should be. The change in the House of Representatives helps. Holding him accountable will help even more.
Every time you forget someone’s name, a dog dies… 😵🙋‍♀️
By: Garima Singh
Tags: Brain, Neuroscience, Task Management, Mindfulness, Productivity

MEMORY IN THE TIME OF INFORMATION OVERLOAD ✌

In these days of constantly exploding information technology, we are all willy-nilly exposed to more information than we have the power to process. It is virtually impossible to avoid knowledge of what is happening in the world around, even if you don’t really want to know.

Every day, we’re bombarded with tonnes of information. To process it efficiently, it’s important to compartmentalize it and get rid of the unwanted. Your brain is like your cupboard. The cleaner it is, the easier it is to find useful information. An uncluttered mind would be able to store important information in an efficient and effective manner and retrieve it quickly when required.

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

HOW CAN I DEAL WITH INFORMATION OVERLOAD? ✅

Start by reducing the load of trivia in your brain. A lot of information need not be stored in your memory because you can store it elsewhere for use. You have to realize that our brains, no matter how efficient, are still finite resources. They have limits to what they can store and process. There are no such limits on external storage, however, so you must take advantage of that.

Build yourself a second brain, as Tiago Forte puts it.

EASY DOs ✅

Jotting down important information at a single place, carrying a small diary for reminders; these are a few immediate fixes. However, you can take it a step further and create a digital, universal notebook of sorts for all your data.

For managing tasks, you can use simple to-do list apps like these:

To Do List Google Tasks Any.do Microsoft To Do Or you can make one yourself if you’re a developer.😉

If you’re already comfortable with to-do lists and want to take this a step further, you must invest in a good note-taking app that can serve as a second brain. Some of the best ones out there are:

Notion

2. Roam Research

3. Evernote

4. Workflowy
4 Common Mistakes When Shipping Internationally
By: Akin Shoyoye
Tags: Logistics, Ecommerce, Startup

Shipping internationally represents more than just a way to get your goods from your door to your customers worldwide. Doing this effectively demonstrates your commitment to quality and your dedication to all of your customers.

While logistics and shipping mistakes are easy to make, the good news is that they’re just as easy to identify and correct. By catching these common mistakes, you’ll gain a competitive edge and most importantly get your products to their destination in the best condition.

Your valued customers will feel that you understand their needs. Read on for some of the most common international shipping mistakes and how you can correct them.

1. Not understanding your destination’s regulations

Shipping domestically is fairly straightforward. The moment you make the move to ship outside the U.S., you’ll enter into all sorts of mess. Countries have their own regulations and customs requirements, some more extensive than others.

Work with your fulfillment partner to make sure you have the proper documentation at hand and your product is in compliance to enter the specific country. You should also perform your due diligence and stay up to date on a country’s laws because current events have a great impact on them.

2. Incorrectly packaged shipments

Too many times the wrong box is chosen for the product. This is usually happens because the product may just fit into whatever was picked, but sometimes the packaging may be too big or too tight.

This can significantly impact your shipping costs. Having the appropriate packaging ready and proper planning will keep you ahead of the game, saving you a lot of time and money.

Also be aware of the quality of your boxes. Keep in consideration that the box will suffer quite the beating, especially when traveling over seas.

3. Mislabeled packages

Mislabeling your packages — putting the wrong address — causes delays and increases shipping costs. Don’t forget that your boxes and labels will also need to reflect information such as the country of origin and the presence of any note-worthy materials.

No one likes when their package goes to the wrong address.

Also remember to double check the weight, dimensions and shipping zone. You should communicate well with your fulfillment partner to clear up any possible labeling issues and make sure you have the green light to ship.

4. Choosing the wrong shipping company

Having the appropriate shipping company on deck is imperative for international operations as the right partner is well-equipped to handle the obstacles that normally fall into play. There’s a tendency to choose the cheapest carrier, but this is the most common mistake.

Don’t play with choosing a carrier.

A lot of the time the low cost carriers most likely have hidden not initially told to you and may be too inexperienced. In the same breath, There are carriers that are relatively cheap and provide great value. You really need to perform your research to identify them.