Get the most recent info and news about stimOS on HackerNoon, where 10k+ technologists publish stories for 4M+ monthly readers.

About stimOS GmbH: stimOS GmbH, a privately held research-company and 13485:2016 certified legal manufacturer, was founded in 2015. stimOS develops innovative technologies and procedures to refine, functionalize and activate implant materials. As a supplier and service provider, stimOS makes this technology available to implant manufacturers. In addition, the company also offers services in the field of product development and certification and develops with the product line spineFuseMBT implants for spinal fusion surgery. About MBT - Mimicking Bone Technology: MBTosseo is stimOS’s patented surface functionalization technology. stimOS developed a covalently bonded 3D continuous biomimetic surface layer, specifically designed for inert implant materials. This development exhibits excellent combinations of surface free energy and mechanical stability. The combination of implant and surface functionalization (MBT) shows high cyto-tolerance for bone constitution and the ingrowth of bone-cells. MBT is (a) biocompatible, (b) avoids infections, (c) preserves healthy bone, (d) stimulates new bone formation, and results in an (e) overall high BIC (bone-to-implant contact), superior to all known surface materials or coating technologies. About High-Five MBT stimOS products for implant surface functionalization under the label MBT are available in different categories: osseo, biocid, dental, active, protect. All stimOS surface functionalization technologies show superiority regarding the growth of bone cells. Comparative data made by the Universities of Constance, Zurich and Charité Berlin demonstrate excellent results for all MBT surface treatments compared to currently available implant materials.

stimOS

stimos

O recente balanço comercial da TransUnion com faturamento trimestral aquém do esperado acende um alerta para as consultoras de crédito dos Estados Unidos. Para Christopher Cartwright, executivo-chefe

EUA: menor volume de empréstimos pode prejudicar negócios de consultoras de crédito

Segundo dados divulgados hoje pelo banco central, o montante total (`stock`) de empréstimos para habitação era de 99.200 milhões de euros em setembro, tal como no mês anterior, o que representa uma qu

`Stock` de empréstimos a particulares cai em setembro pela 1.ª vez desde fevereiro de 2018

O montante total de empréstimos a particulares registou no final de setembro o primeiro decréscimo (-0,3%) em termos anuais desde fevereiro de 2018, com os empréstimos à habitação a manterem a desacel

'Stock' de empréstimos a particulares cai em setembro pela 1.ª vez desde fevereiro de 2018

Os Serviços Sociais da PSP reforçaram este ano em 1,5 milhões de euros a verba para concessão de empréstimos aos polícias com problemas financeiros, disse à agência Lusa o oficial ...

PSP reforça verba para empréstimos aos polícias

Num relatório hoje divulgado, a organização internacional de defesa dos direitos humanos critica o Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI), considerando que tem de dar prioridade aos direitos ...

Empréstimos do FMI aumentam desigualdades e ameaçam direitos

O ministro da Economia exclui extensões do Superbonus no próximo orçamento, pelo menos “nas formas conhecidas até agora”. Voltamos aos 65 e 50 por cento sem desconto na fatura e ...

Adeus super bônus, Giorgetti: “Não haverá prorrogação. Estamos trabalhando em empréstimos problemáticos"

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . CARL IS—NOT—WHIPPED CHAPTER XXXIII. CARL IS—NOT—WHIPPED “There is something I think I ought to tell you,” said Mary Vance mysteriously. She and Faith and Una were walking arm in arm through the village, having foregathered at Mr. Flagg’s store. Una and Faith exchanged looks which said, “Now something disagreeable is coming.” When Mary Vance thought she ought to tell them things there was seldom much pleasure in the hearing. They often wondered why they kept on liking Mary Vance—for like her they did, in spite of everything. To be sure, she was generally a stimulating and agreeable companion. If only she would not have those convictions that it was her duty to tell them things! “Do you know that Rosemary West won’t marry your pa because she thinks you are such a wild lot? She’s afraid she couldn’t bring you up right and so she turned him down.” Una’s heart thrilled with secret exultation. She was very glad to hear that Miss West would not marry her father. But Faith was rather disappointed. “How do you know?” she asked. “Oh, everybody’s saying it. I heard Mrs. Elliott talking it over with Mrs. Doctor. They thought I was too far away to hear, but I’ve got ears like a cat’s. Mrs. Elliott said she hadn’t a doubt that Rosemary was afraid to try stepmothering you because you’d got such a reputation. Your pa never goes up the hill now. Neither does Norman Douglas. Folks say Ellen has jilted him just to get square with him for jilting her ages ago. But Norman is going about declaring he’ll get her yet. And I think you ought to know you’ve spoiled your pa’s match and I think it’s a pity, for he’s bound to marry somebody before long, and Rosemary West would have been the best wife I know of for him.” “You told me all stepmothers were cruel and wicked,” said Una. “Oh—well,” said Mary rather confusedly, “they’re mostly awful cranky, I know. But Rosemary West couldn’t be very mean to any one. I tell you if your pa turns round and marries Emmeline Drew you’ll wish you’d behaved yourselves better and not frightened Rosemary out of it. It’s awful that you’ve got such a reputation that no decent woman’ll marry your pa on account of you. Of course, I know that half the yarns that are told about you ain’t true. But give a dog a bad name. Why, some folks are saying that it was Jerry and Carl that threw the stones through Mrs. Stimson’s window the other night when it was really them two Boyd boys. But I’m afraid it was Carl that put the eel in old Mrs. Carr’s buggy, though I said at first I wouldn’t believe it until I’d better proof than old Kitty Alec’s word. I told Mrs. Elliott so right to her face.” “What did Carl do?” cried Faith. “Well, they say—now, mind, I’m only telling you what people say—so there’s no use in your blaming me for it—that Carl and a lot of other boys were fishing eels over the bridge one evening last week. Mrs. Carr drove past in that old rattletrap buggy of hers with the open back. And Carl he just up and threw a big eel into the back. When poor old Mrs. Carr was driving up the hill by Ingleside that eel came squirming out between her feet. She thought it was a snake and she just give one awful screech and stood up and jumped clean over the wheels. The horse bolted, but it went home and no damage was done. But Mrs. Carr jarred her legs most terrible, and has had nervous spasms ever since whenever she thinks of the eel. Say, it was a rotten trick to play on the poor old soul. She’s a decent body, if she is as queer as Dick’s hat band.” Faith and Una looked at each other again. This was a matter for the Good-Conduct Club. They would not talk it over with Mary. “There goes your pa,” said Mary as Mr. Meredith passed them, “and never seeing us no more’n if we weren’t here. Well, I’m getting so’s I don’t mind it. But there are folks who do.” Mr. Meredith had not seen them, but he was not walking along in his usual dreamy and abstracted fashion. He strode up the hill in agitation and distress. Mrs. Alec Davis had just told him the story of Carl and the eel. She had been very indignant about it. Old Mrs. Carr was her third cousin. Mr. Meredith was more than indignant. He was hurt and shocked. He had not thought Carl would do anything like this. He was not inclined to be hard on pranks of heedlessness or forgetfulness, but this was different. This had a nasty tang in it. When he reached home he found Carl on the lawn, patiently studying the habits and customs of a colony of wasps. Calling him into the study Mr. Meredith confronted him, with a sterner face than any of his children had ever seen before, and asked him if the story were true. “Yes,” said Carl, flushing, but meeting his father’s eyes bravely. Mr. Meredith groaned. He had hoped that there had been at least exaggeration. “Tell me the whole matter,” he said. “The boys were fishing for eels over the bridge,” said Carl. “Link Drew had caught a whopper—I mean an awful big one—the biggest eel I ever saw. He caught it right at the start and it had been lying in his basket a long time, still as still. I thought it was dead, honest I did. Then old Mrs. Carr drove over the bridge and she called us all young varmints and told us to go home. And we hadn’t said a word to her, father, truly. So when she drove back again, after going to the store, the boys dared me to put Link’s eel in her buggy. I thought it was so dead it couldn’t hurt her and I threw it in. Then the eel came to life on the hill and we heard her scream and saw her jump out. I was awful sorry. That’s all, father.” It was not quite as bad as Mr. Meredith had feared, but it was quite bad enough. “I must punish you, Carl,” he said sorrowfully. “Yes, I know, father.” “I—I must whip you.” Carl winced. He had never been whipped. Then, seeing how badly his father felt, he said cheerfully, “All right, father.” Mr. Meredith misunderstood his cheerfulness and thought him insensible. He told Carl to come to the study after supper, and when the boy had gone out he flung himself into his chair and groaned again. He dreaded the evening sevenfold more than Carl did. The poor minister did not even know what he should whip his boy with. What was used to whip boys? Rods? Canes? No, that would be too brutal. A timber switch, then? And he, John Meredith, must hie him to the woods and cut one. It was an abominable thought. Then a picture presented itself unbidden to his mind. He saw Mrs. Carr’s wizened, nut-cracker little face at the appearance of that reviving eel—he saw her sailing witch-like over the buggy wheels. Before he could prevent himself the minister laughed. Then he was angry with himself and angrier still with Carl. He would get that switch at once—and it must not be too limber, after all. Carl was talking the matter over in the graveyard with Faith and Una, who had just come home. They were horrified at the idea of his being whipped—and by father, who had never done such a thing! But they agreed soberly that it was just. “You know it was a dreadful thing to do,” sighed Faith. “And you never owned up in the club.” “I forgot,” said Carl. “Besides, I didn’t think any harm came of it. I didn’t know she jarred her legs. But I’m to be whipped and that will make things square.” “Will it hurt—very much?” said Una, slipping her hand into Carl’s. “Oh, not so much, I guess,” said Carl gamely. “Anyhow, I’m not going to cry, no matter how much it hurts. It would make father feel so bad, if I did. He’s all cut up now. I wish I could whip myself hard enough and save him doing it.” After supper, at which Carl had eaten little and Mr. Meredith nothing at all, both went silently into the study. The switch lay on the table. Mr. Meredith had had a bad time getting a switch to suit him. He cut one, then felt it was too slender. Carl had done a really indefensible thing. Then he cut another—it was far too thick. After all, Carl had thought the eel was dead. The third one suited him better; but as he picked it up from the table it seemed very thick and heavy—more like a stick than a switch. “Hold out your hand,” he said to Carl. Carl threw back his head and held out his hand unflinchingly. But he was not very old and he could not quite keep a little fear out of his eyes. Mr. Meredith looked down into those eyes—why, they were Cecilia’s eyes—her very eyes—and in them was the selfsame expression he had once seen in Cecilia’s eyes when she had come to him to tell him something she had been a little afraid to tell him. Here were her eyes in Carl’s little, white face—and six weeks ago he had thought, through one endless, terrible night, that his little lad was dying. John Meredith threw down the switch. “Go,” he said, “I cannot whip you.” Carl fled to the graveyard, feeling that the look on his father’s face was worse than any whipping. “Is it over so soon?” asked Faith. She and Una had been holding hands and setting teeth on the Pollock tombstone. “He—he didn’t whip me at all,” said Carl with a sob, “and—I wish he had—and he’s in there, feeling just awful.” Una slipped away. Her heart yearned to comfort her father. As noiselessly as a little gray mouse she opened the study door and crept in. The room was dark with twilight. Her father was sitting at his desk. His back was towards her—his head was in his hands. He was talking to himself—broken, anguished words—but Una heard—heard and understood, with the sudden illumination that comes to sensitive, unmothered children. As silently as she had come in she slipped out and closed the door. John Meredith went on talking out his pain in what he deemed his undisturbed solitude. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. L. M. Montgomery (2004). Rainbow Valley. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5343/pg5343-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

CARL IS—NOT—WHIPPED

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE GHOST ON THE DYKE CHAPTER XXX. THE GHOST ON THE DYKE Somehow, Faith and Carl and Una could not shake off the hold which the story of Henry Warren’s ghost had taken upon their imaginations. They had never believed in ghosts. Ghost tales they had heard a-plenty—Mary Vance had told some far more blood-curdling than this; but those tales were all of places and people and spooks far away and unknown. After the first half-awful, half-pleasant thrill of awe and terror they thought of them no more. But this story came home to them. The old Bailey garden was almost at their very door—almost in their beloved Rainbow Valley. They had passed and repassed it constantly; they had hunted for flowers in it; they had made short cuts through it when they wished to go straight from the village to the valley. But never again! After the night when Mary Vance told them its gruesome tale they would not have gone through or near it on pain of death. Death! What was death compared to the unearthly possibility of falling into the clutches of Henry Warren’s grovelling ghost? One warm July evening the three of them were sitting under the Tree Lovers, feeling a little lonely. Nobody else had come near the valley that evening. Jem Blythe was away in Charlottetown, writing on his entrance examinations. Jerry and Walter Blythe were off for a sail on the harbour with old Captain Crawford. Nan and Di and Rilla and Shirley had gone down the harbour road to visit Kenneth and Persis Ford, who had come with their parents for a flying visit to the little old House of Dreams. Nan had asked Faith to go with them, but Faith had declined. She would never have admitted it, but she felt a little secret jealousy of Persis Ford, concerning whose wonderful beauty and city glamour she had heard a great deal. No, she wasn’t going to go down there and play second fiddle to anybody. She and Una took their story books to Rainbow Valley and read, while Carl investigated bugs along the banks of the brook, and all three were happy until they suddenly realized that it was twilight and that the old Bailey garden was uncomfortably near by. Carl came and sat down close to the girls. They all wished they had gone home a little sooner, but nobody said anything. Great, velvety, purple clouds heaped up in the west and spread over the valley. There was no wind and everything was suddenly, strangely, dreadfully still. The marsh was full of thousands of fire-flies. Surely some fairy parliament was being convened that night. Altogether, Rainbow Valley was not a canny place just then. Faith looked fearfully up the valley to the old Bailey garden. Then, if anybody’s blood ever did freeze, Faith Meredith’s certainly froze at that moment. The eyes of Carl and Una followed her entranced gaze and chills began gallopading up and down their spines also. For there, under the big tamarack tree on the tumble-down, grass-grown dyke of the Bailey garden, was something white—shapelessly white in the gathering gloom. The three Merediths sat and gazed as if turned to stone. “It’s—it’s the—calf,” whispered Una at last. “It’s—too—big—for the calf,” whispered Faith. Her mouth and lips were so dry she could hardly articulate the words. Suddenly Carl gasped, “It’s coming here.” The girls gave one last agonized glance. Yes, it was creeping down over the dyke, as no calf ever did or could creep. Reason fled before sudden, over-mastering panic. For the moment every one of the trio was firmly convinced that what they saw was Henry Warren’s ghost. Carl sprang to his feet and bolted blindly. With a simultaneous shriek the girls followed him. Like mad creatures they tore up the hill, across the road and into the manse. They had left Aunt Martha sewing in the kitchen. She was not there. They rushed to the study. It was dark and tenantless. As with one impulse, they swung around and made for Ingleside—but not across Rainbow Valley. Down the hill and through the Glen street they flew on the wings of their wild terror, Carl in the lead, Una bringing up the rear. Nobody tried to stop them, though everybody who saw them wondered what fresh devilment those manse youngsters were up to now. But at the gate of Ingleside they ran into Rosemary West, who had just been in for a moment to return some borrowed books. She saw their ghastly faces and staring eyes. She realized that their poor little souls were wrung with some awful and real fear, whatever its cause. She caught Carl with one arm and Faith with the other. Una stumbled against her and held on desperately. “Children, dear, what has happened?” she said. “What has frightened you?” “Henry Warren’s ghost,” answered Carl, through his chattering teeth. “Henry—Warren’s—ghost!” said amazed Rosemary, who had never heard the story. “Yes,” sobbed Faith hysterically. “It’s there—on the Bailey dyke—we saw it—and it started to—chase us.” Rosemary herded the three distracted creatures to the Ingleside veranda. Gilbert and Anne were both away, having also gone to the House of Dreams, but Susan appeared in the doorway, gaunt and practical and unghostlike. “What is all this rumpus about?” she inquired. Again the children gasped out their awful tale, while Rosemary held them close to her and soothed them with wordless comfort. “Likely it was an owl,” said Susan, unstirred. An owl! The Meredith children never had any opinion of Susan’s intelligence after that! “It was bigger than a million owls,” said Carl, sobbing—oh, how ashamed Carl was of that sobbing in after days—“and it—it grovelled just as Mary said—and it was crawling down over the dyke to get at us. Do owls crawl?” Rosemary looked at Susan. “They must have seen something to frighten them so,” she said. “I will go and see,” said Susan coolly. “Now, children, calm yourselves. Whatever you have seen, it was not a ghost. As for poor Henry Warren, I feel sure he would be only too glad to rest quietly in his peaceful grave once he got there. No fear of him venturing back, and that you may tie to. If you can make them see reason, Miss West, I will find out the truth of the matter.” Susan departed for Rainbow Valley, valiantly grasping a pitchfork which she found leaning against the back fence where the doctor had been working in his little hay-field. A pitchfork might not be of much use against “ha’nts,” but it was a comforting sort of weapon. There was nothing to be seen in Rainbow Valley when Susan reached it. No white visitants appeared to be lurking in the shadowy, tangled old Bailey garden. Susan marched boldly through it and beyond it, and rapped with her pitchfork on the door of the little cottage on the other side, where Mrs. Stimson lived with her two daughters. Back at Ingleside Rosemary had succeeded in calming the children. They still sobbed a little from shock, but they were beginning to feel a lurking and salutary suspicion that they had made dreadful geese of themselves. This suspicion became a certainty when Susan finally returned. “I have found out what your ghost was,” she said, with a grim smile, sitting down on a rocker and fanning herself. “Old Mrs. Stimson has had a pair of factory cotton sheets bleaching in the Bailey garden for a week. She spread them on the dyke under the tamarack tree because the grass was clean and short there. This evening she went out to take them in. She had her knitting in her hands so she hung the sheets over her shoulders by way of carrying them. And then she must have dropped one of her needles and find it she could not and has not yet. But she went down on her knees and crept about to hunt for it, and she was at that when she heard awful yells down in the valley and saw the three children tearing up the hill past her. She thought they had been bit by something and it gave her poor old heart such a turn that she could not move or speak, but just crouched there till they disappeared. Then she staggered back home and they have been applying stimulants to her ever since, and her heart is in a terrible condition and she says she will not get over this fright all summer.” The Merediths sat, crimson with a shame that even Rosemary’s understanding sympathy could not remove. They sneaked off home, met Jerry at the manse gate and made remorseful confession. A session of the Good-Conduct Club was arranged for next morning. “Wasn’t Miss West sweet to us to-night?” whispered Faith in bed. “Yes,” admitted Una. “It is such a pity it changes people so much to be made stepmothers.” “I don’t believe it does,” said Faith loyally. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. L. M. Montgomery (2004). Rainbow Valley. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5343/pg5343-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

THE GHOST ON THE DYKE

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . A WEIRD TALE CHAPTER XXIX. A WEIRD TALE On an early June evening Rainbow Valley was an entirely delightful place and the children felt it to be so, as they sat in the open glade where the bells rang elfishly on the Tree Lovers, and the White Lady shook her green tresses. The wind was laughing and whistling about them like a leal, glad-hearted comrade. The young ferns were spicy in the hollow. The wild cherry trees scattered over the valley, among the dark firs, were mistily white. The robins were whistling over in the maples behind Ingleside. Beyond, on the slopes of the Glen, were blossoming orchards, sweet and mystic and wonderful, veiled in dusk. It was spring, and young things must be glad in spring. Everybody was glad in Rainbow Valley that evening—until Mary Vance froze their blood with the story of Henry Warren’s ghost. Jem was not there. Jem spent his evenings now studying for his entrance examination in the Ingleside garret. Jerry was down near the pond, trouting. Walter had been reading Longfellow’s sea poems to the others and they were steeped in the beauty and mystery of the ships. Then they talked of what they would do when they were grown up—where they would travel—the far, fair shores they would see. Nan and Di meant to go to Europe. Walter longed for the Nile moaning past its Egyptian sands, and a glimpse of the sphinx. Faith opined rather dismally that she supposed she would have to be a missionary—old Mrs. Taylor told her she ought to be—and then she would at least see India or China, those mysterious lands of the Orient. Carl’s heart was set on African jungles. Una said nothing. She thought she would just like to stay at home. It was prettier here than anywhere else. It would be dreadful when they were all grown up and had to scatter over the world. The very idea made Una feel lonesome and homesick. But the others dreamed on delightedly until Mary Vance arrived and vanished poesy and dreams at one fell swoop. “Laws, but I’m out of puff,” she exclaimed. “I’ve run down that hill like sixty. I got an awful scare up there at the old Bailey place.” “What frightened you?” asked Di. “I dunno. I was poking about under them lilacs in the old garden, trying to see if there was any lilies-of-the-valley out yet. It was dark as a pocket there—and all at once I seen something stirring and rustling round at the other side of the garden, in those cherry bushes. It was white. I tell you I didn’t stop for a second look. I flew over the dyke quicker than quick. I was sure it was Henry Warren’s ghost.” “Who was Henry Warren?” asked Di. “And why should he have a ghost?” asked Nan. “Laws, did you never hear the story? And you brought up in the Glen. Well, wait a minute till I get by breath all back and I’ll tell you.” Walter shivered delightsomely. He loved ghost stories. Their mystery, their dramatic climaxes, their eeriness gave him a fearful, exquisite pleasure. Longfellow instantly grew tame and commonplace. He threw the book aside and stretched himself out, propped upon his elbows to listen whole-heartedly, fixing his great luminous eyes on Mary’s face. Mary wished he wouldn’t look at her so. She felt she could make a better job of the ghost story if Walter were not looking at her. She could put on several frills and invent a few artistic details to enhance the horror. As it was, she had to stick to the bare truth—or what had been told her for the truth. “Well,” she began, “you know old Tom Bailey and his wife used to live in that house up there thirty years ago. He was an awful old rip, they say, and his wife wasn’t much better. They’d no children of their own, but a sister of old Tom’s died and left a little boy—this Henry Warren—and they took him. He was about twelve when he came to them, and kind of undersized and delicate. They say Tom and his wife used him awful from the start—whipped him and starved him. Folks said they wanted him to die so’s they could get the little bit of money his mother had left for him. Henry didn’t die right off, but he begun having fits—epileps, they called ‘em—and he grew up kind of simple, till he was about eighteen. His uncle used to thrash him in that garden up there ‘cause it was back of the house where no one could see him. But folks could hear, and they say it was awful sometimes hearing poor Henry plead with his uncle not to kill him. But nobody dared interfere ‘cause old Tom was such a reprobate he’d have been sure to get square with ‘em some way. He burned the barns of a man at Harbour Head who offended him. At last Henry died and his uncle and aunt give out he died in one of his fits and that was all anybody ever knowed, but everybody said Tom had just up and killed him for keeps at last. And it wasn’t long till it got around that Henry walked. That old garden was ha’nted. He was heard there at nights, moaning and crying. Old Tom and his wife got out—went out West and never came back. The place got such a bad name nobody’d buy or rent it. That’s why it’s all gone to ruin. That was thirty years ago, but Henry Warren’s ghost ha’nts it yet.” “Do you believe that?” asked Nan scornfully. “I don’t.” “Well, good people have seen him—and heard him.” retorted Mary. “They say he appears and grovels on the ground and holds you by the legs and gibbers and moans like he did when he was alive. I thought of that as soon as I seen that white thing in the bushes and thought if it caught me like that and moaned I’d drop down dead on the spot. So I cut and run. It mightn’t have been his ghost, but I wasn’t going to take any chances with a ha’nt.” “It was likely old Mrs. Stimson’s white calf,” laughed Di. “It pastures in that garden—I’ve seen it.” “Maybe so. But I’m not going home through the Bailey garden any more. Here’s Jerry with a big string of trout and it’s my turn to cook them. Jem and Jerry both say I’m the best cook in the Glen. And Cornelia told me I could bring up this batch of cookies. I all but dropped them when I saw Henry’s ghost.” Jerry hooted when he heard the ghost story—which Mary repeated as she fried the fish, touching it up a trifle or so, since Walter had gone to help Faith to set the table. It made no impression on Jerry, but Faith and Una and Carl had been secretly much frightened, though they would never have given in to it. It was all right as long as the others were with them in the valley: but when the feast was over and the shadows fell they quaked with remembrance. Jerry went up to Ingleside with the Blythes to see Jem about something, and Mary Vance went around that way home. So Faith and Una and Carl had to go back to the manse alone. They walked very close together and gave the old Bailey garden a wide berth. They did not believe that it was haunted, of course, but they would not go near it for all that. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. L. M. Montgomery (2004). Rainbow Valley. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5343/pg5343-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.

A WEIRD TALE

Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . ODDS AND ENDS CHAPTER 28. ODDS AND ENDS "I've been reading obituary notices," said Miss Cornelia, laying down the Daily Enterprise and taking up her sewing. The harbor was lying black and sullen under a dour November sky; the wet, dead leaves clung drenched and sodden to the window sills; but the little house was gay with firelight and spring-like with Anne's ferns and geraniums. "It's always summer here, Anne," Leslie had said one day; and all who were the guests of that house of dreams felt the same. "The Enterprise seems to run to obituaries these days," quoth Miss Cornelia. "It always has a couple of columns of them, and I read every line. It's one of my forms of recreation, especially when there's some original poetry attached to them. Here's a choice sample for you: She's gone to be with her Maker, Never more to roam. She used to play and sing with joy The song of Home, Sweet Home. Who says we haven't any poetical talent on the Island! Have you ever noticed what heaps of good people die, Anne, dearie? It's kind of pitiful. Here's ten obituaries, and every one of them saints and models, even the men. Here's old Peter Stimson, who has 'left a large circle of friends to mourn his untimely loss.' Lord, Anne, dearie, that man was eighty, and everybody who knew him had been wishing him dead these thirty years. Read obituaries when you're blue, Anne, dearie—especially the ones of folks you know. If you've any sense of humor at all they'll cheer you up, believe ME. I just wish I had the writing of the obituaries of some people. Isn't 'obituary' an awful ugly word? This very Peter I've been speaking of had a face exactly like one. I never saw it but I thought of the word OBITUARY then and there. There's only one uglier word that I know of, and that's RELICT. Lord, Anne, dearie, I may be an old maid, but there's this comfort in it—I'll never be any man's 'relict.'" "It IS an ugly word," said Anne, laughing. "Avonlea graveyard was full of old tombstones 'sacred to the memory of So-and-So, RELICT of the late So-and-So.' It always made me think of something worn out and moth eaten. Why is it that so many of the words connected with death are so disagreeable? I do wish that the custom of calling a dead body 'the remains' could be abolished. I positively shiver when I hear the undertaker say at a funeral, 'All who wish to see the remains please step this way.' It always gives me the horrible impression that I am about to view the scene of a cannibal feast." "Well, all I hope," said Miss Cornelia calmly, "is that when I'm dead nobody will call me 'our departed sister.' I took a scunner at this sister-and-brothering business five years ago when there was a travelling evangelist holding meetings at the Glen. I hadn't any use for him from the start. I felt in my bones that there was something wrong with him. And there was. Mind you, he was pretending to be a Presbyterian—PresbyTARian, HE called it—and all the time he was a Methodist. He brothered and sistered everybody. He had a large circle of relations, that man had. He clutched my hand fervently one night, and said imploringly, 'My DEAR sister Bryant, are you a Christian?' I just looked him over a bit, and then I said calmly, 'The only brother I ever had, MR. Fiske, was buried fifteen years ago, and I haven't adopted any since. As for being a Christian, I was that, I hope and believe, when you were crawling about the floor in petticoats.' THAT squelched him, believe ME. Mind you, Anne dearie, I'm not down on all evangelists. We've had some real fine, earnest men, who did a lot of good and made the old sinners squirm. But this Fiske-man wasn't one of them. I had a good laugh all to myself one evening. Fiske had asked all who were Christians to stand up. I didn't, believe me! I never had any use for that sort of thing. But most of them did, and then he asked all who wanted to be Christians to stand up. Nobody stirred for a spell, so Fiske started up a hymn at the top of his voice. Just in front of me poor little Ikey Baker was sitting in the Millison pew. He was a home boy, ten years old, and Millison just about worked him to death. The poor little creature was always so tired he fell asleep right off whenever he went to church or anywhere he could sit still for a few minutes. He'd been sleeping all through the meeting, and I was thankful to see the poor child getting a rest, believe ME. Well, when Fiske's voice went soaring skyward and the rest joined in, poor Ikey wakened with a start. He thought it was just an ordinary singing and that everybody ought to stand up, so he scrambled to his feet mighty quick, knowing he'd get a combing down from Maria Millison for sleeping in meeting. Fiske saw him, stopped and shouted, 'Another soul saved! Glory Hallelujah!' And there was poor, frightened Ikey, only half awake and yawning, never thinking about his soul at all. Poor child, he never had time to think of anything but his tired, overworked little body. "Leslie went one night and the Fiske-man got right after her—oh, he was especially anxious about the souls of the nice-looking girls, believe me!—and he hurt her feelings so she never went again. And then he prayed every night after that, right in public, that the Lord would soften her hard heart. Finally I went to Mr. Leavitt, our minister then, and told him if he didn't make Fiske stop that I'd just rise up the next night and throw my hymn book at him when he mentioned that 'beautiful but unrepentant young woman.' I'd have done it too, believe ME. Mr. Leavitt did put a stop to it, but Fiske kept on with his meetings until Charley Douglas put an end to his career in the Glen. Mrs. Charley had been out in California all winter. She'd been real melancholy in the fall—religious melancholy—it ran in her family. Her father worried so much over believing that he had committed the unpardonable sin that he died in the asylum. So when Rose Douglas got that way Charley packed her off to visit her sister in Los Angeles. She got perfectly well and came home just when the Fiske revival was in full swing. She stepped off the train at the Glen, real smiling and chipper, and the first thing she saw staring her in the face on the black, gable-end of the freight shed, was the question, in big white letters, two feet high, 'Whither goest thou—to heaven or hell?' That had been one of Fiske's ideas, and he had got Henry Hammond to paint it. Rose just gave a shriek and fainted; and when they got her home she was worse than ever. Charley Douglas went to Mr. Leavitt and told him that every Douglas would leave the church if Fiske was kept there any longer. Mr. Leavitt had to give in, for the Douglases paid half his salary, so Fiske departed, and we had to depend on our Bibles once more for instructions on how to get to heaven. After he was gone Mr. Leavitt found out he was just a masquerading Methodist, and he felt pretty sick, believe ME. Mr. Leavitt fell short in some ways, but he was a good, sound Presbyterian." "By the way, I had a letter from Mr. Ford yesterday," said Anne. "He asked me to remember him kindly to you." "I don't want his remembrances," said Miss Cornelia, curtly. "Why?" said Anne, in astonishment. "I thought you liked him." "Well, so I did, in a kind of way. But I'll never forgive him for what he done to Leslie. There's that poor child eating her heart out about him—as if she hadn't had trouble enough—and him ranting round Toronto, I've no doubt, enjoying himself same as ever. Just like a man." "Oh, Miss Cornelia, how did you find out?" "Lord, Anne, dearie, I've got eyes, haven't I? And I've known Leslie since she was a baby. There's been a new kind of heartbreak in her eyes all the fall, and I know that writer-man was behind it somehow. I'll never forgive myself for being the means of bringing him here. But I never expected he'd be like he was. I thought he'd just be like the other men Leslie had boarded—conceited young asses, every one of them, that she never had any use for. One of them did try to flirt with her once and she froze him out—so bad, I feel sure he's never got himself thawed since. So I never thought of any danger." "Don't let Leslie suspect you know her secret," said Anne hurriedly. "I think it would hurt her." "Trust me, Anne, dearie. I wasn't born yesterday. Oh, a plague on all the men! One of them ruined Leslie's life to begin with, and now another of the tribe comes and makes her still more wretched. Anne, this world is an awful place, believe me." "There's something in the world amiss Will be unriddled by and by," quoted Anne dreamily. "If it is, it'll be in a world where there aren't any men," said Miss Cornelia gloomily. "What have the men been doing now?" asked Gilbert, entering. "Mischief—mischief! What else did they ever do?" "It was Eve ate the apple, Miss Cornelia." "'Twas a he-creature tempted her," retorted Miss Cornelia triumphantly. Leslie, after her first anguish was over, found it possible to go on with life after all, as most of us do, no matter what our particular form of torment has been. It is even possible that she enjoyed moments of it, when she was one of the gay circle in the little house of dreams. But if Anne ever hoped that she was forgetting Owen Ford she would have been undeceived by the furtive hunger in Leslie's eyes whenever his name was mentioned. Pitiful to that hunger, Anne always contrived to tell Captain Jim or Gilbert bits of news from Owen's letters when Leslie was with them. The girl's flush and pallor at such moments spoke all too eloquently of the emotion that filled her being. But she never spoke of him to Anne, or mentioned that night on the sand-bar. One day her old dog died and she grieved bitterly over him. "He's been my friend so long," she said sorrowfully to Anne. "He was Dick's old dog, you know—Dick had him for a year or so before we were married. He left him with me when he sailed on the Four Sisters. Carlo got very fond of me—and his dog-love helped me through that first dreadful year after mother died, when I was alone. When I heard that Dick was coming back I was afraid Carlo wouldn't be so much mine. But he never seemed to care for Dick, though he had been so fond of him once. He would snap and growl at him as if he were a stranger. I was glad. It was nice to have one thing whose love was all mine. That old dog has been such a comfort to me, Anne. He got so feeble in the fall that I was afraid he couldn't live long—but I hoped I could nurse him through the winter. He seemed pretty well this morning. He was lying on the rug before the fire; then, all at once, he got up and crept over to me; he put his head on my lap and gave me one loving look out of his big, soft, dog eyes—and then he just shivered and died. I shall miss him so." "Let me give you another dog, Leslie," said Anne. "I'm getting a lovely Gordon setter for a Christmas present for Gilbert. Let me give you one too." Leslie shook her head. "Not just now, thank you, Anne. I don't feel like having another dog yet. I don't seem to have any affection left for another. Perhaps—in time—I'll let you give me one. I really need one as a kind of protection. But there was something almost human about Carlo—it wouldn't be DECENT to fill his place too hurriedly, dear old fellow." Anne went to Avonlea a week before Christmas and stayed until after the holidays. Gilbert came up for her, and there was a glad New Year celebration at Green Gables, when Barrys and Blythes and Wrights assembled to devour a dinner which had cost Mrs. Rachel and Marilla much careful thought and preparation. When they went back to Four Winds the little house was almost drifted over, for the third storm of a winter that was to prove phenomenally stormy had whirled up the harbor and heaped huge snow mountains about everything it encountered. But Captain Jim had shovelled out doors and paths, and Miss Cornelia had come down and kindled the hearth-fire. "It's good to see you back, Anne, dearie! But did you ever see such drifts? You can't see the Moore place at all unless you go upstairs. Leslie'll be so glad you're back. She's almost buried alive over there. Fortunately Dick can shovel snow, and thinks it's great fun. Susan sent me word to tell you she would be on hand tomorrow. Where are you off to now, Captain?" "I reckon I'll plough up to the Glen and sit a bit with old Martin Strong. He's not far from his end and he's lonesome. He hasn't many friends—been too busy all his life to make any. He's made heaps of money, though." "Well, he thought that since he couldn't serve God and Mammon he'd better stick to Mammon," said Miss Cornelia crisply. "So he shouldn't complain if he doesn't find Mammon very good company now." Captain Jim went out, but remembered something in the yard and turned back for a moment. "I'd a letter from Mr. Ford, Mistress Blythe, and he says the life-book is accepted and is going to be published next fall. I felt fair uplifted when I got the news. To think that I'm to see it in print at last." "That man is clean crazy on the subject of his life-book," said Miss Cornelia compassionately. "For my part, I think there's far too many books in the world now." About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. L. M. Montgomery (1996). Anne's House of Dreams. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/544/pg544-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html. The lead image was generated using HackerNoon's Stable Disffusion Al Image Generator feature, via the prompt "ANNE'S HOUSE OF DREAMS".

ODDS AND ENDS

Dispatches from founder Julia Angwin. Hello World is a weekly newsletter—delivered every Saturday morning—that goes deep into our original reporting and the questions we put to big thinkers in the field. . Browse the archive here Hello, friends, Happy New Year. In the final days of 2022, the everlasting debate resurfaced about whether too much privacy harms the ability to catch criminals. In a New York Times op-ed titled “ ,” a digital ethicist named Reid Blackman argued that encrypted messaging apps such as Signal are dangerously promoting “a rather extreme conception of privacy” that can be exploited by criminals and other bad elements of society. The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs His op-ed was immediately and prompted rebuttals from Signal president and technologist , among others. flamed on Twitter Meredith Whittaker Tim Bray But Blackman is not the first, nor is he likely to be the last, to argue against public access to powerful privacy tools. The so-called “ ” have been raging ever since the ’90s, when robust, mathematically advanced encryption moved from being a tool of state intelligence agencies to being available to the public. Crypto Wars In 1991, Phil Zimmermann released his Pretty Good Privacy encryption tool, giving regular people access to what had previously been military-grade encryption. The U.S. government initiated a criminal investigation of him for illegal arms trafficking. Eventually, the U.S. dropped its ban on exporting encryption products and the charges against him were dropped. Since then, the debate has raged on, with governments for “backdoors” to be built into encryption that would help them surveil criminals, while technologists have that backdoors cannot be built responsibly in ways that wouldn’t weaken all of cybersecurity. regularly arguing convincingly argued The latest salvo in the Crypto Wars is the being considered by the U.K. Parliament. Online Safety Bill The tech companies to scan their services for terrorism or child sexual exploitation content, but technologists say that requirement would effectively “ .” bill would require erode end-to-end encryption in private messaging Last year, Apple to scan photos on people’s phones for child sexual abuse content after a wave of criticism from technologists (including that of Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, published in ). dropped a similar plan this newsletter As it happens, I recently interviewed Signal president Meredith Whittaker about the challenges of protecting privacy at the conference last fall. So I transcribed our live discussion and asked her to revise and extend her remarks a bit. Web Summit This is Whittaker’s second appearance in this newsletter: I about gig workers fighting to win safety protections during the height of the pandemic. last interviewed her in April 2020 Whittaker is a veteran tech activist. While at Google, she founded Google’s Open Research Group and co-founded M-Lab, a global internet measurement platform. She was also a core organizer of internal protests against military use of Google technology and of the Google Walkout in 2018. She co-founded the AI Now Institute and was Minderoo Research Professor at NYU. Before joining Signal as president, she completed a term as a senior adviser on AI to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Our conversation, edited and expanded, is below. When I first met you, you were a Google executive, but you recently joined Signal as president of the encrypted messaging app. Can you describe your journey? Angwin: I joined tech not because I love gadgets or had any desire to be a programmer but because I graduated from college and needed a job. Google found my résumé on Monster in 2006, and I responded to the recruiter. Whittaker: I was at Google for over 13 years, and I moved from my entry-level job in customer support to founding a research group. I was interested in hard political and social problems, so I sought them out. At the time, net neutrality was the big issue, and this is where I started. I also worked on issues related to privacy, and the social consequences of AI. By the end of my stint at Google, I was a go-to expert on these topics, but I arrived at what is maybe an old-school conclusion: that it’s fine to have a good analysis, and it’s great to be right, but if you don’t actually have decision-making power, then you’re likely not to change much. This led me to other tactics, namely labor organizing—building countervailing power—against unethical military contracts and the surveillance practices of Google and other tech companies. Fast-forward through a stint in academia I’m still recovering from and a taste of government. I ended up at Signal, where I am today. Signal is an organization I care about deeply. I don’t think we have much of a chance for a livable future if we don’t have a truly private means to communicate with each other. A world that doesn’t have privacy is a world where the power structures that exist now are cemented, almost impossible to perturb, and authoritarianism thrives in these conditions. Tell us about Signal. Why should we use Signal and not WhatsApp or other messaging services? Angwin: Oh, I love this question! There are a lot of differences between Signal and WhatsApp and the others. I’ll start with the business model, which matters. Signal is a nonprofit. Whittaker: This structure is a first line of defense to ensure that we’re laser-focused on providing people with a truly private way to communicate. We don’t have shareholders or equity, so we’re not being pushed to prioritize profits and growth over our core mission. There’s no billion-dollar exit coming for executives, so even if I turned into a terrible person tomorrow and decided to sell Signal to a private equity firm, I wouldn’t get anything out of it. This is in contrast to WhatsApp, which is owned and underwritten by Facebook. So that’s already a world of difference in terms of the incentive models and the pressures that could be applied to loosen privacy and encryption. At the level of the technology, Signal messages are encrypted end-to-end. This is similar to WhatsApp, which uses the Signal Protocol to encrypt many WhatsApp messages. But unlike WhatsApp and others, Signal goes way beyond this. We encrypt metadata as well, so we don’t know who you are, we don’t know your name or profile information, and we don’t know which groups you’re in or who’s talking to whom. Metadata is very important and revealing. All other platforms currently collect it, and potentially join it with other data sources they have access to (looking at you, Facebook), or hand it over to law enforcement. Law enforcement is known for wanting access to encrypted messages, for example in the San Bernardino case . If law enforcement asks Signal for information about its user communications, what do you do? Angwin: where Apple refused to turn over information We don’t have the information. Knowing nothing about you is simply how Signal works. By way of analogy, say law enforcement goes to the headquarters of a company that produces pens. Whittaker: They bring a specific pen to the company, and they ask the company to tell them everything that’s ever been written with that specific pen. Of course the company would look at them like WTF. That’s not how pens work, we can’t tell you that! Everyone would get that, understand it, and let law enforcement go on their way. Well, Signal doesn’t work that way either. We built it from the ground up in a way that preserves privacy. Sitting here in the wake of data breach after data breach, terms of service change after terms of service change, I’m confident in saying that building systems that work to not collect data, like Signal, is the only meaningful way to protect privacy. Europe has passed new regulations that will require big messaging apps like WhatsApp to offer interoperability to other messaging apps, such as Signal. Angwin: I personally would love interoperability because I have some relatives who only use WhatsApp, and I prefer to use Signal because of its privacy promise. Does Signal plan to work toward interoperability with other messaging platforms? In theory, interoperability is great. But in Signal’s case, we are not willing to lower our privacy bar in the name of interoperating with apps like WhatsApp or iMessage that don’t adhere to our standards. Whittaker: If these apps wanted to adopt our strict privacy provisions, interop is certainly a conversation we’d welcome. We would also need to ensure that we could validate other apps’ implementation, guaranteeing that there were no tricks on the backend that were compromising the promises we make to the people who rely on Signal. All of this, in addition to the fact that the companies are already unhappy about the prospect, means that, practically speaking, it’s very unlikely that Signal will be interoperating with other apps in the foreseeable future. But we are open to it, under the conditions I outlined. As always, thanks for reading. Best, Julia Angwin The Markup (Additional Hello World research by Eve Zelickson.) Credits: Julia Angwin Also published here Photo by on fabio Unsplash

The Crypto War Is Not Over Yet

COD Warzone is the most famous battle royale game on the planet. Despite its popularity, the game has come under intense criticism regarding how broken it is. But why is it broken? In this article, I will go into two of the major reasons why people are becoming fed up with 's FPS battle royale. Activision 1. Hackers are Breaking the Warzone Cod Warzone is a broken game with thousands of players hacking the game everyday. Over 300,000 hackers have been banned from the game over its lifecycle. Activision, the developers behind COD Warzone, banned 60,000 people in the latest ban surge a few months ago. The magnitude of people hacking the game is becoming game-breaking. Recently I jumped into the Warzone and surprisingly got to the final circle of the battle royale. However, my victory was taken from me by a hacker using what is known as the . Stim Glitch The Stim Glitch is a hack whereby a player can use unlimited health stims to prevent death. Players use this hack to win the battle royale by constantly using health stims to avoid dying while being in gas zones. The Stim Glitch is a game-breaking hack that allows a player to win easily. However, this is not the only hack players use to break the Warzone. Other hacks include , allowing players to shoot through walls and aimbot, enabling players never to miss a shot. wall hacks The number of players using these hacks is astonishing and is not a one-off. In a single gaming session in the Warzone, you will likely come across multiple hackers. Thus, Activision faces a significant hacker problem and needs to act fast to stop fans from leaving the game. Recently acclaimed streamer COD Warzone, due to his frustrations with players hacking the game. He is one of many high-profile players who have left the game over the last few months. Vikkstar quit Vikkstar argues that hacks are breaking the game with a large percentage of the player base using them, with some players even live streaming how to use and implement hacks. In short, if high-profile players are leaving the game due to game-breaking hacks, it is likely many more high-profile and regular players will leave the game in the future if these issues are not resolved. COD Warzone may lose its player base and fan base with popular players moving over to other games. 2. The Warzone’s Glitches are Also a Problem Aside from hackers, Warzone has game-breaking glitches. Recently, my character got stuck behind one of the game's many buy stations, effectively making my character immobile for most of the game. Glitches within the game are a frequent occurrence and they vary. For example, loadout drops in the sea, common connectivity issues such as being kicked out of a game session, and loot glitched through other objects, making them unobtainable. Likewise, COD Warzone also has glitches with in-game party chat and a number of other core gameplay features. Stuck behind buy station Recently, a brand new redeployment glitch has been an issue on Warzone's Rebirth Island. The redeployment glitch is a glitch whereby players can never redeploy but are still registered as active players in the game. Thus, resulting in an instant win for these glitched players. Likewise, players have started to encounter allowing other players to glitch into walls, making them invincible. In short, the sheer quantity of glitches is making the Warzone unplayable. invisibility glitches Final Thoughts on COD Warzone Unfortunately, Warzone is becoming a victim of its success. The game's popularity has led to many people hacking the game and has become susceptible to game-breaking glitches due to the sheer number of people playing it. Activision seems to be crumbling under these game-breaking issues but hopefully will manage to get on top of them soon. Players are becoming frustrated due to game-breaking hacks and glitches ruining their gameplay experience. Let's hope Activision resolves these issues soon; otherwise, it may lose its player base. For more Call of Duty Content, including updates on the recent COD Warzone Season 2, keep it locked on HackerNoon. Also, check out: 5 Underrated Video Games Everyone Should Try Nioh 2 Weapons Guide: From Sword to Switchglaive 5 Best Games on Xbox Games Pass in 2021

COD Warzone is Broken: Here Are 2 Reasons Why

Hello folks! In this article, we are going to unravel the mystery behind the Rails Active Record class. To be honest, I struggled a lot with Rails models as a beginner.  I spent a lot of time reading the docs, read a couple of medium articles, watched some youtube videos but all in vain. I have chosen to draft a nice article that constitutes of baby steps that is suitable for aspiring Rails Engineers. I chose a Facebook database model since it is a little bit advanced as well as it encompasses the majority of the rails association concepts. Deliverables User-post Association User Friendship Association Terminologies: the layer responsible for representing business data and logic Active Record: this is a technique used to connect objects of an application to tables in a Relationship Database management system. With this, we can store and retrieve data without writing a single SQL statement. Object Relation Mapping(ORM): Pre-requisites Basic knowledge of Ruby programming language. The latest version of Ruby. Click for more info on how to install Ruby. here Node. Rails. SQlite / Postgresql Problem-solving attitude. Getting Started Enough with the chit chat, let's get our hand dirty. #1 Fire your terminal {ctr + Alt + T} on a Unix system and generate a new Rails app with the name facebook-Db-clone rails new facebook-db-clone && cd facebook-db-clone 2 -> Fire rails server to confirm that everything works :) rails server #3 -> Scaffold the User, Post, and Comments model for a start. if you are confused, here is an ERD {Entity Relationship Diagram} diagram that will help you visualize the overall structure of the models. Let's start by generating the user model. Here we design the user model by explicitly naming the user attributes and passing them to the command. The User in this case is the model class. The command, in turn, generates several files by invoking the active_record method. The files consist mainly of , migration file ( a blueprint that helps developers to define changes to their database schema, making it possible to use a version control system to keep things synchronized with the actual code ) and a file. rails g model unit tests user.rb Having cleared the air, it is time we replicate the same procedure for the other two models:- the and . Run the following commands in successions. post comments ➜ rails g model Post body:text
➜ rails g model Comments content:text After running the above commands,  there should be three files with their names prefixed with a timestamp, in the directory where the timestamp is the UTC formatted date and time that the migration was generated.  The naming convention adopted by rails here proves to be useful when determining the order of operation later when we ran our migrations. stimestamp_my_new_migration.rb db/migrate/ Here, I have included a snapshot of the three migration files. Each and every class inherits from the class. The 3 classes each holds a recipe of how Rails is creates the tables and rows of our User, Posts, and Comments in the database. Rails is actually good at abstracting the tedious work of writing SQL statements, Pretty sweet right. For example, to the left of the snapshot, Rails is creates a table named and rows and so forth. In some cases, migration files might contain other advanced methods i.e and methods, they describe the transformation required to implement or remove the migrations. click for more info. ActiveRecord::Migration users first_name, last_name, email and password up down here #4  Tattooing the Database By default, Rails uses out of the box, as it primary database coupled with zero configuration. Thanks to this, one can focus on grasping the problem at hand. For production purposes, you might need to consider other options i.e since SQLite is barely supported on cloud services i.e Heroku. Our next move is to execute the instruction held by the classes. To achieve this, we ran the following commands. SQlite Postgresql ➜ rails create
➜ rails migrate db: db: rails db:create  creates a database based on the sqlite config file whereas rails db:migrate creates the tables and rows used to store the user data. Associations: spoiler Alert: Nitty-gritty staff The connection between two or more Active Record models i.e user vs post model. Association: - Rails support six associations: , , , && . belongs_to has_one has_many has_many :through, has_one :through has_and_belongs_to_many Relationships are implemented using macros-style calls. this allows you to declaratively add features to your models with ease. One-to-many Relationship. belongs_to: User vs post model Association: < ApplicationRecord class User # write your association staff here end < ApplicationRecord class Post # write your association staff here end User can have zero{ or multiple Posts instances. nil} A post instance can only belong to only one instance of a User and it cannot exist on it's own. By this I mean, If we destroy a User, all the posts related to that user should also be destroyed. From the look of things, this is a relationship. To implement this type of relationship, Rails provides us with && methods. These methods instructs rails to maintain a Primary key - Foreign Key relationship between the instances of the two models. one-to-many has_many belongs_to #1 In your model's folder, open and file. Add the following methods. user.rb post.rb posts < ApplicationRecord class User # write your association staff here has_many: end user < ApplicationRecord class Post # write your association staff here belongs_to: end #2 Generate a new migration that adds a primary key - foreign key reference to both the User and  Post model. #3 Edit the newly created migration file . Add the following content. db/migrate/time_stamp_add_UserId_to_post.rb add_column , , add_index , < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2] class AddUserIdToPosts def change :posts :user_id :string :posts :user_id end end This migration is pretty straightforward. It adds a column to the table and also sets the column as the pointing to the user instance{author}. Run to persist the changes. :user_id :posts user_id foreign key rails db:migrate allows you to interact with your rails application from the command line. Open a new terminal session at the root of your app and run. Rails console rails console Run to apply recent changes. reload! reload! Create a new user: ➜ new_user = User.create( , , , )

➜ new_user.save first_name: "John" last_name: "Doe" email: "example@gmail.com" password: "password" Create two new posts, authored by the above user. ➜ user = User.first
➜ new_post1 = user.posts.build( )
➜ new_post2 = user.posts.build( )
➜ new_post1.save
➜ new_post2.save body: "This is my first Article, please give it a star" body: "This is my second Article, please give it a star if you like" Access all the posts authored by John Doe ➜ user = User.where( , )
➜ user.posts "first_name = ?" "John" Access the author of a Post: p1 = Post.first
p1.user Congratulations!!! That is it for a one-to-many relationship. Be sure to visit Rails for a better understanding. docs Many-to-many: Association This section is a little tricky and rough. It is upon you to stick with me on this one. Let's think for a second, how do we model this? which tables are involved? For sure, there are multiple ways to achieve this, but the main goal here is to understand the concept behind friendships. Friendships Users can send and receive friend requests from other users. Users can multiple friends. Users can accept friend requests as well as reject any sort of invitation. We need to delete a friendship/invitation record upon rejection/unfriend action from the user. Confirmed friendship is reciprocal to both parties. The difficulty here lies in creating two join tables(the general norm in many-to-many relationships) that reference both the users and the friend(user). This is because the table is going to be referencing itself.  Wait, what! self referencing, yeah you read it right. users Our Plan: Create a friendship table to keep track of the requests/invitations. Keep track of the status of the invitation by adding an is_comfirmed column to the friendship table. Action #1 Scaffold the Friendship model rails g model Friendship references references bolean user: friend: confirmed: We all know the output of the above rails command. Yeah, what about the keyword? The keyword is a fancy way of hooking up different models by adding foreign key columns to the newly created table that act as  pointer. references The odd part of the command is that it is trying to reference a non-existing friends table. To fix this, open your migration files under db/migration directory and change it  to resemble this. create_table t.references , t.references , t.boolean t.timestamps add_foreing_key , , < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2] class CreateFriendships def change :friendships do |t| :user foreign_key: true :friend index: true :confirmed end :friendships :users column: :friend_id end end using the method above allows us to reference the user table as a friends table. Go ahead and perform the data migrations. add_foreing_key rails db:migrate #2 Update the Relationships on the Friendship model Edit the Friendship class to be similar to this. => end < : : , : class Friendship ApplicationRecord belongs_to user belongs_to friend class_name 'User' points the table to the table since a friend is also a user. Belongs_to :friend,  :class_name => 'User' friends users #3 Update the  Relationship in the User Model => , : end < : : : , : class User ApplicationRecord has_many posts has_many friendships has_many reciprocal_friends class_name "friendships" => foreign_key "friend_id" #4 Built custom Helper methods to: Open your User model and add the following methods; Method 1: Get all friends of a specific user. direct_friends = friendships.map { friendship.friend friendship.confirmed }
    inverse_friends = reciprocal_friends.map { friendship.user friendship.confirmed }
    (direct_friends + inverse_friends).compact def friends |friendship| if |friendship| if end Method 2: Keep track of pending invitations. friendships.map { friendship.friend friendship.confirmed }.compact # pending invitations def pending_friend_requests |friendship| unless end Method 3: Incoming friend Requests. # incoming friend requests
  def incoming_friend_requests
    reciprocal_friends.map { |friendship| friendship.user unless friendship.confirmed }.compact
  end Method 4: Confirm Friend Requests def confirm_friend_request?(user)
    friend = reciprocal_friends.find { |friendship| friendship.user == user } friend
      friend.confirmed = friend.save end
  end if true true else false Method 5: Check whether a user is already a friend. friends. ?(user) def is_friend? (user) include end Well, that was quite a lot to take in.  The above code is pretty straightforward for a Rubyist. This is a bare minimum backend configuration that you can use as a template of your next social site. Stay tuned for the next couple of Episodes on and part of the associations. comments likes

Ruby on Rails Hidden Secrets: How To Get The Most Out Of Active Record Associations

Google is joining the developing number of associations who've chosen to quit utilizing Zoom because of the security worries with the video-conferencing administration. The new limitation was messaged out to Google workers who have the Zoom work area customer introduced on their corporate PCs, as per BuzzFeed, which was first to report the news. Google's IT staff has now crippled the item from working on similar PCs. "We have since quite a while ago had an arrangement of not permitting representatives to utilize unapproved applications for work that are outside of our corporate system," Google representative Jose Castaneda told PCMag. "As of late, our security group educated representatives utilizing Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer sudden spike in demand for corporate PCs as it doesn't satisfy our security guidelines for applications utilized by our workers." The organization didn't make reference to the particular issues. Be that as it may, as of late, security scientists have revealed various vulnerabilities and flawed practices in Zoom's video-conferencing administration, which can open clients to hacking and potential spying from China. (Per its protection approach, be that as it may, Zoom doesn't store or screen your video meetings.) Simultaneously, the application has become the objective of online trolls and racists, who've been penetrating Zoom meetings to humiliate and annoy clueless clients. Google says workers can even now utilize Zoom to converse with companions or family, yet they'll need to do as such "through an internet browser or by means of portable," as per Castaneda. Not every person may purchase Google's defense for the limitation. That is on the grounds that the organization runs its own contending video-conferencing administration, Google Hangout Meets, which rivals Zoom. Just yesterday, Google distributed a blog entry touting the counter seizing highlights in the product. All things considered, the security concerns and resulting awful press around Zoom have provoked New York City schools, the Taiwanese government and supposedly a German outside service to quit utilizing the video-conferencing administration. Nonetheless, Zoom's CEO says he's focused on tending to the issues. The organization is delaying advancement on new highlights to concentrate on improving trust, security and protection over Zoom's product. On Wednesday, the organization likewise declared it was selecting the previous boss security official at Facebook, Alex Stamos, to go about as an outside guide. For clients, the organization today included another "Security" button on the gatherings controls to make it simpler to keep undesirable visitors from penetrating and disturbing your video meetings.

Zoom's Desktop Client Banned by Google

The Best 50 Sites to Learn About Data Science

Electromedical Products International, Inc. (EPI) has conducted extensive clinical research to come up with a solution using Brain Stimulation that can help patients ease Pain, Insomnia, Depression and Anxiety. Taking advantage of advances in electronics and computer technology Alpha-Stim brings the size and price down significantly for the CES device while improving efficacy and ease-of-use. In this interview with Dr. Daniel L. Kirsch, a renowned pain and stress specialist and chairman and founder of Electromedical Products International, Inc. (EPI), the manufacturer of Alpha-Stim prescription brain stimulators. We discuss how brain stimulators are used to treat anxiety, depression, insomnia and pain. Tell us a bit about yourself and your Company? I am a philosopher-scientist, board certified pain specialist and award-winning pain educator, former military contractor as a pain and stress educator working with the Operational Combat Stress Control Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, president of The American Institute of Stress, and perhaps best known as the inventor of Alpha-Stim technology. I started Electromedical Products International, Inc. 39 years ago with $25,000 I borrowed at 17% interest, to build and market a device housing the waveform I perfected that normalized the peripheral and central nervous systems. The first Alpha-Stims cost $4,500 and took 64 hours to build in 1981. Today, eight generations of products later, thousands of them roll off an assembly line every month and sell for $795-$1,195. Used at home with a prescription in the USA, or in doctor and therapists’ offices, millions of people have seen improvements in their quality of life from controlling or helping them recover from anxiety, depression, insomnia and pain, even, and usually, when nothing else has worked. Our biggest customer is the US government, as it is used by the military and in over 100 veteran’s hospitals. Our biggest claim to fame is we have more research than any other therapeutic device in the field, with over 100 published studies with consistent results. What brought you to this field? My first three years of college I was a philosophy major, with an interest in 17th century philosophy. I was most interested in René Descartes, the French philosopher, mathematician and neuroscientist. He interested me to learn more about how the body worked so I eventually switched to premed and also studied acupuncture. I realized that the medical profession was ignoring a lot of information about the physics of physiology because it was all so drug oriented. As it turns out all systems of health care and all religions are based on vitalistic philosophy except Western medicine which is based on mechanistic philosophy meaning we are just the sum of our parts. Physics controls chemistry. The Alpha-Stim waveform is able to talk to cellular receptors to normalize cellular activity and control anxiety, depression, sleeping and pain. It is consistently effective even among the worst conditions, such as PTSD from unbearable memories of war, advanced cancer patients and just people who either failed drug therapy or could not tolerate the side effects. Alpha-Stim is completely safe. You might get a mild headache for a little while after treatment but even that is rare. You usually don’t feel anything except the results. Medal of Honor recipient SGT Dakota Myers said it melts his anxiety away. In fact you can watch him say that and a lot more in a new documentary by Justin Smith called where I am somehow inserted into a Star Trek scene to my delight. It is posted on YouTube for free. The Brain Electric What are some challenges you face with emerging technology? It’s all been challenges. All 40 years for me. From competitors, doctors who must prescribe them but don’t want to be first to do so, to the biggest scourge of my career, the Forget Doing Anything Agency, also known as the FDA. I planned to retire this year and spend more time at the nonprofit American Institute of Stress, but the FDA hit us with another burdensome year long task. I would have loved every minute of my career if the FDA was an honest agency. I have helped millions of people cope with the worst kind of debilitating pain and mood disorders but most of my time has been bogged down in FDA reports, such as the PREmarket approval application, similar to a new drug application, we have to do this year for a device that has legally been on the market for 39 years. I got so sick over working on FDA reports that in 2014 I spent two years suffering with an incurable disease that all 19 drugs I was put on couldn’t even manage, until I found a cure in osteopathic manipulative therapy. If FDA regulated computers and not medical devices, our phones would still be attached to the wall by cords and I’d have achieved my goals to make the world a less stressful place and I’d be able to buy Wal Mart and Amazon from Alpha-Stim sales. How do you explain your product to the public? The brain is electrical, so why not treat it with mild electricity, similar to the type and amount you have naturally? Especially if it’s been proven safe over 39 years. Neurological acting drugs fit into receptor sites on cell walls and can send a choice of a few messages into the cells. Many people know this as the lock (receptor) and key (ligand, which in this case, is a drug) principle of pharmacology. But today we know it is a matter of the ligand matching frequencies with receptors, so the key doesn’t have to fit in the lock, it just needs to be in the vicinity. the Alpha-Stim provides a wide range of biological frequencies in a ten-minute waveform. The receptors only “hear” the ones they need. The others don’t cause any side effects any more than standing in a room among people speaking several languages you don’t know would cause. You might only understand and react to one. A good analogy is that we used to have to use a physical key to open a car door, but now we do so by pressing a button on a fob that emits frequencies (like the Alpha-Stim waveform) and yet only your car reacts to it among all the others parked around it. The Alpha-Stim’s patented waveform normalizes the brain so if you have anxiety it brings you down, or it brings you up if you have depression. There is no possibility of overdose, addiction or tolerance. How far are we from getting this technology into the hands of the users? If it’s already there, what does it take for this technology to become practically in the hands of everyone? I guess that’s a matter of money. All Navy SEALS and Special Forces Operators get one because they are expensive to train and maintain and Alpha-Stim helps them recover from the hardest job on Earth. After that service members and veterans get them on an as needed basis depending on which clinic or hospital they are at. It is the most used complementary modality at the psychiatry dept at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and some VA’s order them by the hundreds. But other than that, insurers are reluctant to pay because FDA miscategorized it as a Class III device which means life threatening or life sustaining, and it is clearly neither of those. The National Healthcare Service of the UK published a study last year showing it was safe and surprisingly effective and saved them a lot of money on anxiety which is the number one medical complaint. So they are in the process of moving it to the front of the line, to be tried before cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and drugs in treating anxiety patients while continuing their research at the University of Nottingham on depression. It is considerably less expensive than a course of CBT and much less expensive than drugs. And in Europe and most of the world you don’t even need a prescription for it so people are more prone to pay for it out of pocket or with their health savings accounts. You don’t need to have major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety syndrome to be stressed. If you are alive you can benefit from a fast and easy brain mood, pain and sleep regulator. My whole family certainly likes having them around our house. I can’t imagine life without it, especially having two overachieving teenage daughters and my wife, Tracey, is the president of EPI so she works hard and long hours to keep up with explosive growth. So it’s a matter of paying for it, and unfortunately a large part of that cost is dealing with FDA and foreign equivalents. How do you envision its implementation in our daily lives? Right now, people wait until after work to drink which is the reason for happy hour, or do drugs or take a nap to help turn off the workday’s increasing stress dosage. Alpha-Stim actually increases alertness in most people and relaxes them while increasing their resilience to stressors so there is no reason not to use it at work during the day to avoid the need to recover from the days stress build up. The only caution about when to use it is before going to bed because some people finds it makes them too alert to sleep unless they do a 20 minute treatment at least 3 hours before bed. Others can do it just before sleep just like some people can tolerate a double expresso after dinner while others wouldn’t dare disrupt their sleep with that. It improves sleep because it makes you relaxed, less worried, but it shouldn’t make you drowsy so it can be used at work, or when watching TV or doing light chores around the house. But not driving because we don’t want you too relaxed when you are doing that. What features and benefits will your product bring to the consumers? Right now, a less moody, more peaceful life with anxiety, depression, insomnia and pain under control. I think that’s quite a lot. It can do more, but the FDA is a huge barrier to finding out more about the other important “off label” uses. What problem will this product solve? I hope it could get the Democrats and Republicans talking again and achieve world peace. I know that sounds like a rather lofty goal, but if everyone was happy and less moody and reactive why couldn’t we all get along? Right now, today, if the FDA, Medicare and insurers would read the research and give it an honest appraisal, talk to the practitioners who prescribe it and the people who use it, or simply follow the UK lead to make it the first intervention for anxiety, since they already did all of that across the pond, plus their own research, it would save enough money to make the American healthcare system great again by taking the burden off everyone from family practitioners to emergency rooms for panic attacks so that health care workers could concentrate on taking care of people with everything else. And to do so calmly. To the best of my knowledge every practitioner who orders Alpha-Stims for their patients use it themselves as well. People are only skeptical until they try it. Where do you see the product in a few years from now? I am working on the next generation of Alpha-Stims now, then I will retire. These will track the results of everyone who opts in and compares an individual to all users so our clinical support staff can help those who aren’t getting adequate results and we can learn from those who have the best results to be able to improve how the devices are used. Doctors and insurers would be able to see the patient’s progress on graphical reports as well so it might save them some paperwork. Is the market large enough? Are there competitors? We will never run out of pain, anxiety, depression and insomnia patients. At least not until everyone has an Alpha-Stim or access to use one in a clinic. There are many competitors. We have most of the market for cranial electrotherapy stimulators (CES) devices because Alpha-Stim is the only device in the market that has so much research and the only patented waveform. People who buy the others often return them or toss them and then end up with an Alpha-Stim. Of course the biggest competitor is drugs, as we live in a drug society and antidepressants are handed out like candy. And then there is alcohol and street drugs. Would the product be influenced by other markets, and why? Alpha-Stim is already on the market throughout much of the world, including Europe, China, South Korea, Israel, Canada and other places. I see it as a disruptive technology against drugs and other competition rather than anything disrupting it. It’s been called the best kept secret in healthcare. Will you give us a closing remark and areas of improvement? Nothing is more intimate than a person’s relationship to their health care. In a perfect world, FDA would do an honest appraisal of drug or device risk/reward ratio primarily from a safety perspective and allow people and their doctors to make their own decisions. A PhD epidemiologist and other staff at FDA told it’s expert panel on neurological devices, none of whom had any expertise on CES, that it could cause seizures, repeated 25 times on February 10, 2012. When pressed to tell the panel more about seizures Laura Min, PhD actually told the panel that the seizures occurred in France, in patients who enrolled in a study of CES for major depressive disorder and the seizures occurred in 2 study participants during a benzodiazepine washout period prior to the use of CES but she added, stuttering, that we wanted to report all of the side effects in the studies. I almost fell off my chair. The FDA is actually saying you can have side effects prior to treatment! What a kangaroo court that day was. We made some mini-documentaries from that meeting which are posted on YouTube at the channel. They are going after homeopathy now and that is the medication system my family has been using successfully for over 20 years. It saved my youngest daughter’s life when medicine failed. As Editor in Chief, I am devoting the Spring 2020 issue of magazine to that; it is an open access publication posted on stress.org. We all need to fight for health freedom. And certainly not accept universal health care run by the government. Electromedical2012 Contentment What are you reading right now? Funny you should ask that. I have been reading and rereading to get a perfect edit on what is so far, a 104 page report on using Alpha-Stim for depression for FDA. But when I get a chance to relax I like to read fiction and right now I am rereading my favorite book by my favorite author — Wilbur Smith’s River God. I have read all his books. They take me away deep into historic places with characters I come to care about. Go here if you wish to read more about ALPHA-STIM. None of the links is an affiliate link, and all the information provided in this article is for general information and review purposes only and is the expressed opinion of , Dr. Daniel L. Kirsch and not the Publication. Originally published at https://www.saintrino.org .

How Alpha-Stim Passed FDA Regulations for Brain Stimulation Treatments

It is safe to assume that anyone with a working internet connection has heard of and its subsidiary, Whatsapp. Bloomberg reported on Dec 21, 2018, that Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its Whatsapp messaging app. Are Cryptocurrencies at the precipice of mass adoption? Facebook Facebook boasts of the largest active user base of 1.7 billion after more than a decade of existence. That number could have been more if countries like China, Iran, North Korea, and Bangladesh had not banned Facebook. On the other hand, Whatsapp has 1.5 billion users in 109 countries. The most popular countries include India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and many other countries. Facebook is primed to become a major player in the remittance market due to the sheer number of users and reputation in developing countries. The Remittance Market Remittance is the transfer of money from a migrant worker to someone back in their home country. People have always moved in search of better work prospects in high-income (or high currency value as compared to home) countries. Based on the , there are currently an estimated 244 million international migrants living in other countries. This number has either directly or indirectly contributed to the global remittance’s $689 billion dollar industry with India being top of the pile, contributing $80 Billion or 11.6% of its entirety. The global remittance industry World Migration Report 2018 is expected to grow by more than 3% in 2019. Online Money Transfer The advancement of technology has provided us with a much better alternative to manual remittances. Remitting via this method is much safer, secure, faster way of transferring cash. Companies such as TransferWise and Revolut have taken the industry by storm. They have since been declared disruptors of the remittance industries. One fact remains, however. These platforms heavily rely on mobile phone penetration for remittance. In emerging economies, most people own a mobile phone with access to some internet connectivity. Therefore, this provides a great opportunity for online money transfer to prosper. Remittance and Blockchain The key proponents of technology suggest that it can reduce the costs of remittance services. Interesting things are happening behind the scenes where blockchain technology is attempting to replace the current financial services industry’s centralized business model. blockchain Blockchain technology cuts out the traditional middlemen. As a result, it can speed up and simplify cross-border payments. Thus, making remittances more affordable. Currency fluctuations can result in a loss of cash when transactions are being made cross borders. Blockchain can provide an almost guaranteed, real-time transaction. Typically, remittances can take anywhere from days to weeks with TransferWise boasting a quicker time since it uses the internet. Ripple being able to send USD 50 million at an astonishing speed of 3 seconds is an incredible feat. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington agrees and said that XRP is by far the best way to move fiat from one end of the world to another. Quoting from his interview with Blockinpress, “Our very first closing was over $50 million, and we moved that money in 3 seconds, and it cost like 20 or 30 cents to move that $50 or something million dollars. Bitcoin and Ether can’t compare to that.” Opportunity for Facebook and Facecoin Facebook first began experimenting with blockchain in mid-2016. , the company had tasked a lone corporate development staffer with investigating blockchain technology. According to Wired Rumors suggest that Facecoin will be a stablecoin. The most obvious use-case for stablecoins today is a solution for payments- currency transactions on the blockchain. This is not the first time Facebook has experimented with currencies. Facebook Credits, previously launched as a virtual currency in 2011 Facebook Gifts, launched in 2012 and closed two years later. Quoted by Josh Constine, “Facebook never found a way to solve distance and localization problems to make Gifts work internationally. Facebook Messenger Payments launched in the US in 2015 and later expanded to Europe within two year’s time. Unfortunately for Facebook, these initiatives were not able to find a place in the world. Facebook and Remittance The remittance market is massive and cryptocurrencies can be the main solution to this existing market. Given that both Facebook and Whatsapp are so widely used, the team behind the crypto project just needs to make sure it works. In my article discussing , I mentioned that Samsung has a huge sample size to trial the crypto wallets with. Facebook and Whatsapp have almost 20% of the world’s population as users! Samsung and Crypto Adoption One of the main concerns of FaceCoin is that “a completely private and encrypted messaging service tied to an open, Zerocoin-like, zk-SNARK backed cryptocurrency and backed by a tech giant would instantly become the go-to mechanism for global money laundering, tax evasion, and just general crime.” according to Alex Stamos However, Stamos believes on the other hand not having a mathematically backed privacy feature and having all this data in a single place will be a massive source of privacy and security risk. And if this is the case, he believes that many countries that have leverage over Facebook will use this opportunity to get access to private information. Converting Facecoin to Fiat Nothing is priced against cryptocurrencies (yet) in the real world. Therefore, Facebook has to find a convenient way to convert Facecoin into fiat. Using Facecoin to purchase goods and services from Facebook would eventually lead them back to Facebook credits which should not be repeated. However, if there is a company with enough resources to find a solution to crypto-fiat exchange, Facebook is definitely one. An alternative can be to establish relationships with cryptocurrency exchanges around the world. This will make the crypto-coin seamless, fast and user-friendly when it comes to international remittances. It would also allow anyone with a mobile phone and a Facebook app to maintain a personal account that has stable coins and is backed by hard currencies. The remittance market is currently worth around $500 billion a year. , Facebook’s cryptocurrency could be a $19 billion revenue opportunity. Aside from advertising, the company can now develop an entirely new revenue stream. According to Barclays Ending thoughts Everything discussed here and out there on the internet are simply based on rumors. These rumors, however, came from and the - two credible news outlets. But as with anything related to Cryptocurrencies, take everything with a pinch of salt. It is no secret that Facebook has indeed been experimenting with Blockchain- be it with payments or . If Whatsapp do introduce cryptocurrencies as a mode of payment for its users, then it can very well be the biggest adoption news we have this year. Needless to say, Facebook and Whatsapp can end up becoming a remittance powerhouse. Bloomberg New York Times ID authentication About me: Iliya Zaki is the Head of Marketing & Business Development for Moonwhale Ventures, an STO Advisory Firm based in the U.S. Follow us on our various social media platform — | | | Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Telegram

Could Facebook and Whatsapp Become Major Players in the Remittance Market with Crypto?

tl;dr: Fare lo sviluppatore in Italia è il più delle volte un incubo Fra tutti i report disponibili, nessuno analizza nel dettaglio lo scenario italiano Abbiamo deciso di farlo noi con un questionario che trovi qui: https://goo.gl/eWDECC E’ anonimo, richiede circa 5–8 minuti e i risultati saranno pubblicati entro fine anno L’iniziativa è legata al progetto Jaguar28 : il nostro obiettivo è riscrivere, in meglio, il rapporto fra professionisti del tech ed aziende 😉 Se hai aperto questo articolo poiché indignato dal titolo, inizia dalla parte finale “PRO TIPS / FAQ / DISCLAIMER” e poi leggi il resto Se lavori in ambito tech, quante volte hai già sentito la frase “ ”? E quante volte ti sei sentito d’accordo? Essere uno sviluppatore in Italia fa schifo Il mercato del lavoro per chi si occupa di sviluppo e programmazione in Italia è “famoso” per essere fra i più arretrati in Europa: tutti lo sappiamo e tutti ci rendiamo conto di trovarci di fronte ad un disagio strutturale che può solo peggiorare con il tempo. Il problema non riguarda solo i salari (i più bassi dell’Unione Europea, insieme a Portogallo, Spagna e Grecia) ma più in generale la concezione del ruolo di “developer” all’interno delle aziende. Per ogni storia romanticheggiante di qualche ragazzino californiano che diventa miliardiario grazie ad una app e viene intervistato da tutti i giornali, in Italia ci sono decine di storie molto meno piacevoli su aziende che non conoscono orari, non investono su innovazione e formazione e credono di poter disporre liberamente della vita dei propri collaboratori. L’intramontabile convinzione del “ ” è infatti anche parzialmente accettabile ma perde ogni legittimazione quando il professionista è sbattuto in uno scantinato a fare il refactoring di progetti vecchi di decenni scritti in Fortran (o quasi) e viene considerato come un pericoloso sovverviso quando si prende un permesso per partecipare ad un seminario. i salari in Italia sono più bassi perché la vita è meno cara Per fortuna esistono già alcune startup ed aziende che hanno compreso l’importanza di questi professionisti e che, per quanto possibile, cercano di garantire loro le condizioni più stimolanti: sono ancora casi isolati — in genere in quei contesti con un’elevata competizione per attrarre i migliori talenti — ma da qualche parte dovremmo pur partire. In tutto questo non dobbiamo dimenticare la crescente categoria dei professionisti italiani che vanno a vivere e lavorare all’estero. Troppo spesso vengono liquidati con un “ ”, anche se non se ne conosce l’effettiva situazione. : esistono sviluppatori italiani che vivono all’estero e sono sottopagati anche lì! loro sì che hanno fatto bene ad andarsene, bravi! NOTIZIA SHOCK Ecco quindi spiegato il grande paradosso: oggi sono moltissimi i professionisti che si lamentano della situazione italiana, ma non esiste nessuna vera analisi a tal proposito. Ogni anno sono pubblicate ricerche davvero apprezzabili sul mondo degli sviluppatori (quella di Stack Overflow è in genere la più completa) che però considerano l’Italia un mercato periferico e che non merita di essere valutato nel dettaglio. Ci siamo quindi chiesti: Qual è il salario medio degli sviluppatori italiani? Quali sono le tecnologie che utilizzano, quelle che vorrebbero utilizzare e quelle che invece vorrebbero dimenticare? Quali sono i fattori di soddisfazione ed insoddisfazione in azienda? Per trovare una risposta, abbiamo deciso di lanciare una nostra survey e condividere pubblicamente la fotografia che emergerà. L’obiettivo è creare una coscienza collettiva sull’argomento e provare ad influenzare il cambiamento, mettendo sul tavolo dati concreti ogni volta che un’azienda si chiederà perché non riesce a trovare sviluppatori in gamba. Il questionario è disponibile qui: https://goo.gl/eWDECC Se hai almeno 1 anno di anzianità come developer, sistemista, QA tester, DevOps e ruoli simili, lavori full-time in Italia o sei un italiano all’estero e hai voglia di dedicare 5 minuti del tuo tempo per aiutarci, questo è il questionario che fa per te. Il questionario è totalmente anonimo e non ti chiederemo indirizzi email o informazioni sensibili riconducibili direttamente a te. Entro fine anno pubblicheremo i risultati. Questa iniziativa è legata al progetto : siamo una startup di Torino e il nostro obiettivo è riuscire a riscrivere, in meglio, il rapporto fra professionisti del tech ed aziende. Qualche mese fa abbiamo già pubblicato un per raccontare come vorremmo farlo. Jaguar28 Manifesto Se hai domande, puoi scriverci a hello@jaguar28.com Grazie! MILESTONES: Lancio della survey: 11 luglio 2017, ore 14.00 Risposte inviate nelle prime 24 ore: 254 Visualizzazioni nelle prime 24 ore: 976 🏆_:_ 1000 risposte 14 luglio 2017, ore 14.19 PRO TIPS / FAQ / DISCLAIMER: Se ti va, condividi questo articolo e/o la survey anche con i tuoi contatti! Se vuoi condividerlo nei tuoi gruppi facebook, chiedi prima il permesso agli admin per non farci passare come spam 😅 Il questionario non chiede mai il tuo nome o il tuo indirizzo email, quindi è un database che non potrà mai finire nelle mani di qualche scammer o, peggio, di qualcuno che non conosce la differenza fra Java e Javascript. Sappiamo che, da un punto di vista metodologico, il report è pieno di possibili bias. Non abbiamo tuttavia la presunzione di volerlo presentare all’ONU in seduta plenaria. O forse sì? Stack Overflow ha parlato di alcuni aspetti dello scenario italiano nella Developer Survey del 2016 (% di remote worker, età media, importanza del salario), rispetto ad un campione di circa 1000 profili italiani. Nella Developer Survey 2017, Stack Overflow analizza USA, India, UK, Francia e Germania ma non l’Italia (da cui ha ricevuto circa 900 risposte). Ci è stato detto che l’AICA (Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica e il Calcolo Automatico) distribuisce annualmente un report abbastanza simile. Noi purtroppo non siamo riusciti a reperirlo da nessuna parte. In autunno lanceremo la controparte volta a raccogliere il punto di vista delle aziende tech. Non invieremo i risultati attraverso una newsletter perché sappiamo che la privacy è top concern e non vogliamo lasciare spazio a nessun tipo di insinuazione su come potremmo usare i vostri indirizzi email. I risultati verranno pubblicati con un post su questo profilo e riproposti nei gruppi dove abbiamo già postato questo articolo. Il titolo è volutamente provocatorio (o clickbait, se volete un termine Internet 3.0) per una ragione molto semplice: la maggior parte della dev community italiana si attiva solo quando il flame è alle porte. : il titolo è una provocazione, non una conclusione. RIPETO Commentare l’articolo e/o l’iniziativa solo in base al titolo senza averne letto per intero il contenuto equivale a condividere con toni indignati i link dei siti di fake news. Se il tuo sesto senso ti fa percepire una truffa, una fonte di speculazione o una cospirazione degli Illuminati non sei obbligato a completare il questionario né a condividere pubblicamente le tue paranoie. Se la cosa ti rende più sereno: sì, siamo Rettiliani e tu ci hai scoperto.

Essere uno sviluppatore in Italia fa schifo

Unsupervised Investments (II): A Guide to AI Accelerators and Incubators

Butts and Memes Abound on , the Hot App That May Already Be Dead Peach - quote from Peach user @internet This past Friday afternoon, , once just slang for a vagina or a butt, was introduced as a new networking platform on the Apple App Store. Thanks to some savvy PR work, and the fact it was , was featured on several tech blogs that same day, with journalists trying to figure out what it was, and what it might be — a new WhatsApp or Snapchat, or an also-ran like Jelly or Meerkat. Peach created by the cofounder of Vine Peach I caught wind of Peach when Buzzfeed’s resident , , and encouraged readers to join and add her as a friend (@kapie). expert in all internet things weird Katie Notopoulos made a quick run down of Peach She promptly posted . goatse Some social apps grabbed attention by differentiation — Snapchat’s private ephemeral content, or Vine’s 6-second loops. , although in practice, it feels like a remix of the most popular networks currently in use. Peach was initially pitched as a messaging platform like WhatsApp Peach’s options for 1:1 direct user interaction, similar to Facebook’s “Poke” Like and comment functions, like Facebook perfected? Peach has ‘em. Usernames with @ prefixes, like Twitter? Peach has ‘em. Gif support, including automated resizing to the width of the platform, that made a content hotspot until other networks followed suit? Peach has it. Tumblr Facebook’s “Poke”? Peach has ’em in spades. Image editing and the ability to make collages, like Instagram? Peach has it, sort of. The ability to write text over images, like Snapchat? Peach has it. Short video loops, like Vine? Peach has ‘em. A that pull up equally fun and inane functions, like Slack? Peach has ‘em. menu of not-really-secret commands Apple exclusivity, like the early days of Instagram and Snapchat? Oh yeah, Peach has it. Peach has some curious and unique features, too. One, like the “shout” function, which allows you to create text in a 1:1 frame over a slate of color or an image, feels like Peach’s killer feature. It’s a simple way to create imagery from scratch, or to remix content from your phone’s camera or from images taken from the web. The first application update, rolled out five days after launch, allowed users to make shouts animate by stringing frames together. the main feed of Peach (notice the Friends of Friends menu next to the “Home” button at the bottom of the screen) A more curious component of Peach, which contributes to its addictiveness, is the counterintuitive feed functionality. The content of each individual user appears on their page in standard chronology, top to bottom, like a reverse Twitter. There’s no central feed for the content of all the users you’re connected with, though, just a constantly reordered friend list that updates based on who has posted content most recently. Then you click into a particular user’s feed to see their most recent content, and scroll through their timelines, then click back to your main friend list, which has likely refreshed with new posts. Unlike Twitter, you can’t include a user in your main feed or easily view the content they post unless the two of you actively connect. Since there’s no , , or functionality, new account and content discovery is a chore. reblog share retweet This all makes the act of consuming content within the app a very active process, and the constant flipping makes it easy to lose anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour within the app before you realize what’s happened. By initially connecting with @kapie, my friend suggestions, visible a swipe away from your main page friend feed, were mostly users with a . I added users mentioned by people I already followed. I posted a few easy jokes — “ ” — and saw users adding me as I appeared in their “Friends of Friends” list. I accepted everyone. “Weird Twitter” aesthetic bush did 9/11 A few more posts and actively commenting on other user’s content, ensuring my name appeared in feeds and suggestions, led to a steady stream of friend requests through the weekend. The more people I connected with, though, the tone of content began to shift. Dadaistic and sarcastic humor started disappearing, and reposted Reddit memes, complaints about nobody reacting to selfies on Tumblr, and ennui of the succ started creeping in. In less than 24 hours, Peach was transforming. As user @internet so aptly put it, “peach is just chaos tumblr.” Then, the sun went down, and the butts came out. “Peach After Dark” may have first appeared Friday night. Regardless, by Saturday, the phrase was humming across feeds, and by Sunday, the thirst was inescapable. Since the platform was named Peach — slang for “butt” — it seemed inevitable that people would post pics of their backsides. There were female backsides. There were topless pics. Men stripped down too, some opting for shirtless mirror pics, others brazen enough to go full frontal. Peach had not been live for 72 hours when a young woman’s query of whether or not she should share a pic was neither surprising, nor ignored — comments would promptly be filled with words of encouragement to bare and share the goods. via @internet By Tuesday, maybe due to President’s final State of the Union address, or far more likely due to exhaustion, Peach After Dark was a whimper. Peach, however, has more to it than a thirst for butts. Celebrity parody accounts abound. If you interact with Beyonce, she’ll “Put a Ring On It” — one of the user-to-user interaction options; John Stamos ruminates frequently on how wonderful it is to be John Stamos; Zooey Daschenel can’t stand Bon Jovi and will not stop until he’s destroyed; multiple DJ Khaleda use the key emoji with exhausting frequency; both Joan Rivers and Anna Nicole Smith are alive, the latter is dangerously thirsty; the entire Kardashian clan reminds everyone else how poor they are; Zac Efron threw a house party the same night as Peach Prom (both actual things that happened Monday night); Ira Glass just can’t get a hang of new media no matter how hard he tries. Brands are on Peach, too. Meme regurgitator 9Gag was active and frantically adding people before the end of the first weekend. Dominos was also on within the first 48 hours, but by Sunday revealed themselves to be a fan account and changed their username, citing fear of litigation. Another Dominos account soon appeared. BBC Breaking News sporadically shares updates on breaking news. . Merriam-Webster shares word definitions paired with twee imagery Parody brand accounts are also on Peach. Ace Hardware, , posts frequently, and solely, about hammers. @zune shares helpful tips about the Zune audio player, such as how to make it self destruct. @cokezero reminds people that it is a refreshing beverage when ice cold, but unable to move about because it is a beverage. still reeling from their embarrassing and very public series of hammer gaffes Non-parody accounts do exist, however. Designers @mattcrump and @lisa_bizzle post literal interpretations of memes and daily Peach logs. @internet regularly reminds younger Peach users they should be studying for school and going to bed. @cereal demands that Peach users eat their cereal. @ThePeachOfGod assures users that it is abandoning the , so users can unfollow it on Twitter — obviously a troll of the Twitter account. @filth posts absurd illustrations made within the “Draw” feature. Dozens of other users sporadically post content that would fit in with the . oft-mocked Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod “Weird Twitter” list created by Notopoulos If you do have a thirst for butts, though, there’s an account called @buttgifs. They post gifs of butts. I didn’t add them, they added me As the days go on, the “chaos Tumblr” moniker feels increasingly appropriate. The option of anonymity, combined with the robust text and image options native to Peach, quickly made it resemble Twitter and Tumblr. The former because of short text quips and an overwhelming number of celebrity parody accounts; the latter because of the seamless ability to share gifs or, with the touch of a button, a twee way to broadcast the name of the song, television show, or book you’re currently consuming. Early trends on the platform, predictably, included users making bemused posts about not knowing what Peach was or how to use it. The “Draw” function was used to make images of dicks. “Shouts”, the ability to make a text and image macro, were used to make peach puns. The gif function, which allowed users search GIPHY using a word or phrase, were used to “Gif your name”. Users wondered who would be the first breakout personality of Peach. iOS exclusivity was celebrated; the inevitable arrival of Android users bemoaned. a post made with Shout Users commonly lamented they couldn’t connect their Tumblr to Peach, and soon were using “Shout” to share their Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram handles. By Saturday, at least one Twitter direct message group was formed and active, where users could more efficiently interact with one another. via @rora As the novelty wore off for early adopters — referred to as “OP” for “Original Peach” — and more users came in from Tumblr and other networks, my feed shifted noticeably. The content from users I’d connected with, as well as what was visible in my Friends of Friends menu, featured fewer deconstructionist jokes and more public introspection, k-pop and 1D fandom, and selfies. Actual fights and drama materialized between users, leading some celebrity parody account holders to unmask themselves in dramatic fashion. Frustration with work, or school, or parents, or loneliness, or clinical depression, or a lack of a boyfriend or girlfriend quickly outpaced the initial deconstructionist and self-aware sarcasm I’d initially enjoyed. The raw emotion on display felt like high school, with more selfies, and butts, and cliques. The mix of content and emotions and jokes constantly updating my feed, since I never rejected a connection request, was increasingly disparate. Peach was just Chaos Tumblr. When the first app update appeared Tuesday afternoon, fixing some stability issues and adding the animation aspect to Shouts, . Another round of pending updates was announced Wednesday night, including better ways to manage friend lists, increased privacy control, direct messaging, and bio sections for user profiles, suggesting the Peach development team is trying to listen to users and . some had already declared Peach dead capitalize on strong initial download figures In a few months, it’s entirely possible Peach will be nothing more than a punchline with a “moldy” pun in the tech and media community. It could be a favorable alternative to particular sects of Tumblr as long as it remains ad-free, or parts of Twitter as long as it remains fun. Personally, I suspect I’ll continue to occasionally open Peach to . I’ll almost certainly use Shouts to generate assets for my other personal networks. Call the police, however, if I ever threaten to participate in Peach After Dark. shitpost Joe Filipas is not quite weird enough for Weird Twitter. He works in advertising in Minneapolis, and is a video producer in his free time. You can connect with him on Twitter at @joefilipas , or on Peach at @peachinfluencer, neither of which include images of his butt.

“Peach Is Just Chaos Tumblr”

The Current State of the Ethereum Blockchain In the cryptoasset space, Ethereum is always the flavour du jour. There is never a shortage of excitement and/or drama in and around it. Whether it is its governance woes, the delivery of Ethereum 2.0, or Vitalik’s t-shirts, there’s always something to grab the imagination of contributors and pundits alike. body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;} , Ethereum's Theon Greyjoy. He means well, but feels bitter about being overlooked and the injustice of his overlords. He tries to take power, but acts stupidly and selfishly, and eventually gets his dick chopped off. @lrettig https://t.co/bjjtekPo60 — @ameensol function notifyResize(height) {height = height ? height : document.documentElement.offsetHeight; var resized = false; if (window.donkey && donkey.resize) {donkey.resize(height); resized = true;}if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var obj = {iframe: window.frameElement, height: height}; parent._resizeIframe(obj); resized = true;}if (window.location && window.location.hash === "#amp=1" && window.parent && window.parent.postMessage) {window.parent.postMessage({sentinel: "amp", type: "embed-size", height: height}, "*");}if (window.webkit && window.webkit.messageHandlers && window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize) {window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize.postMessage(height); resized = true;}return resized;}twttr.events.bind('rendered', function (event) {notifyResize();}); twttr.events.bind('resize', function (event) {notifyResize();});if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var maxWidth = parseInt(window.frameElement.getAttribute("width")); if ( 500 < maxWidth) {window.frameElement.setAttribute("width", "500");}} Fundamentally, the mere fact that Ethereum commands so much attention is beyond warranted; it is the undisputed #2 in crypto, single handedly ushered the concept of Smart Contracts into production, and gave birth to (at least) three fascinating phenomena — the ICO, NFTs and DeFi. Yet, as we are slowly emerging from crypto winter, it seems as if Ethereum has been left somewhat bruised, with many question marks around its future. In the following sections I will attempt to uncover the current state of Ethereum by looking at various key on- and off-chain metrics. On-chain data We dive head-in by taking a look at the state of the Ethereum blockchain via key on-chain metrics. Active addresses Active addresses are defined as those that have engaged in cryptocurrency transactions at any point during the last 24-hours. Mirroring the activity in Bitcoin, it appears that the trend in active addresses has changed to the upside, after about 9 months of consistent decline (along with ETH’s price). Also, since late 2018, we are observing a divergence between the trends in price and active addresses. Will price trail back to active addresses? Not unlikely given the historical trend. Velocity of tokens & transaction volume Source: Santiment Velocity points to the average number of times that a token changes wallets each day. Simply put, a higher token velocity means that a token is used in transactions more often within a set time frame. Discounting for activity attributable to the notorious Ethereum mixer, both velocity and transaction volume seem to be growing linearly, on a trend that dates back to early 2016 — what is arguably a positive sign, nodding to increased utilisation of the network. Source: Bloxy What this might additionally imply, is that an exponential phase (S-curve) in transaction volumes is still a possibility in the future — though hard to imagine given the current performance limitations of Ethereum. Median transaction value (USD) Source: Coinmetrics If the data actually reflects reality, the fact that as the network matures, the median transaction value goes down, might strike one as a surprise . However, on second thoughts, this is really not at all surprising. Remember Ethereum =! Bitcoin; it has actually been built and used with different purposes in mind. And given that ~50% of the transactions on the network are currently machine to machine transactions (as per the ), it might just make sense that the median value decreases — particularly as the # of ERC-20 tokens exploded from a few dozen in 2017 to over 4000 . Overall, we can interpret this as a sign of a maturing network and a nod the type of transactions that ETH is used increasingly for. Speaking of which… Token Analyst today DeFi adoption Source: Mike McDonnald Source: DeFi Pulse DeFi (shorthand for decentralized finance) is the second big use case (after fundraising via private money) currently being explored on Ethereum and finding product-market fit. While the growth recorded so far has been impressive, the explosive part seems to have stalled for now. How much of this is due to the DAI’s peg woes and the stability fee hike from 0.5% to 7.5% in Maker (making it less attractive to own CDPs), and how much is due to the space having reached a structural ceiling for now, remains to be seen. My guess — a bit of both! After all, we need easier access to this ecosystem for the next batch of users to come on board. Number of tokens by ERC type Source: Bloxy On to the first major use case that ushered Ethereum into the cryptoasset pantheon, we take a look at what happens in the world of tokens under the “world computer”. At present, the majority of the Ethereum network is overrun by ERC-20 type tokens; for all their promise, ERC-721’s (NFTs) and other emerging standards, still represent a marginal amount of activity on the network. Further, ~4k seems to be the equilibrium number of active tokens on the network — tentatively driven by both lack of further demand AND lack of network capacity. Aggregate network Utilization Source: Etherscan This metric expresses the Average Gas Used/Gas Limit at any given point in time and acts as proxy to comparing utilisation with capacity. Interestingly, the picture here seems to verify the assumption laid out above, with respect to network capacity, and points to the fact that this particular S-curve has plateaued. Smart contract dynamics Source: Bloxy The three charts above, together describe the state of smart contracts on the Ethereum network — at a high level. From February until present day, the aggregate smart contract calls (interactions with smart contracts) have picked up, and are verging towards all time high territory. Given that we are post speculative mania, and ICO activity is in multi-year low, at the very least, this implies that the utility to speculative value ratio in Ethereum is improving — indication of such activity correlates nicely with the rise of DeFi. Now as far as Gas cost is concerned, the levels have been stable throughout 2018 — with an exception in July 2018, when F-coin spammed the Ethereum network (hence “call with token transfer” and “token transfer” costs exploded). Once again, stability here might imply that we’re operating close to network capacity. Finally, things get a little more curious when considering Daily Gas cost in USD, as it appears that for the past 12 moths, all 4 types of smart contract calls cost the same in USD terms, a phenomenon not observed before April 2018. One more sign of maturity, and/or the fact that the network is at capacity? Likely! Market data On-chain is only half the story. In this section we phase into market data, by looking at the most relevant to market, on-chain metrics, and subsequently transition to purely market focused metrics. Price vs Inflation Source: Coinmetrics Source: Eric Conner As with Bitcoin, reductions in inflation seems to have a similar effect on price (upwards push). Looking ahead to 2020 and 2022, there are two more big inflation adjustments coming, with the steeper one being the one in 2020. Combined with Bitcoin’s halving, this is a structurally bullish development — assuming that demand for the asset remains constant, at the least. Token age consumed Source: Santiment This metric shows the amount of tokens changing addresses on a certain date, multiplied by the number of blocks created on the blockchain since they last moved. One way we can interpret this, is as a proxy to long time HODLer coins moving, potentially to liquidate. The activity here mirrors that in Bitcoin — once again, with the most tokens moving after November’s dump, pointing to capitulating long term holders, among which tentatively a bunch of early ICO treasuries and a slew of unprofitable miners. Relative market shares in the smart contracts cluster Source: Coinmartketcap Source: Coinmartketcap While Ethereum pretty much created the category, its dominance has gone down from ~90% in mid-2017, to ~58% in the Smart Contracts cluster. Further, since April 2017 it has underperformed the cluster consistently in bull-market conditions, and has tracked the cluster’s performance (or more likely, the other way around) in bear market conditions, while the correlations of returns between Index and ETH standing at over 90%! With competitors like Cosmos, Dfinity, Polkadot and Hashgraph (among others) having launched recently or launching soon, and Ethereum 2.0 being a long way off still, it’s hard to see this trend reversing or even stabilizing. 60-day volatility (stdev of daily returns) Source: Coinmarketcap Source: Delphi Digital Given the high correlation of ETH with Bitcoin, returning volatility in Bitcoin, implies that volatility returns in ETH too — and by the looks of the 60-day volatility chart this is already materializing. Considering that this has been a resounding move towards leaving the bear trend behind — a view held by many and based on many different data points — there might be significant room for short-medium term upwards movement. The recent analysis from Delphi digital on ETH/BTC and its relation to upside-downside beta, implies that this might indeed be the case. Miner data Mind you, Ethereum is still a Proof-of-Work coin… Hashrate Source: Etherscan Contrary to Bitcoin, the Hashrate in the Ethereum network seems to be following a negative trend and has yet to pick back up. What this implies, is that the network is not yet at equilibrium, with the current prices making ETH mining unprofitable for many. Reports have it that the break even for ETH miners stands at about $150-$200 per ETH. There are a few reasons as to why this might be the case, among which are (i) the fact that Ethereum is planning to migrate to PoS, (ii) the fact that Ethereum mining utilizes GPU chip sets and (iii) the fact that compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum’s inflation rate is still high. Miner distribution Source: Santiment Source: Etherscan One thing that was relatively positive for the Ethereum ecosystem, that resulted directly from the downfall of prices from a top of ~$1.4k to current levels, was the fact that relative space occupied by smaller miners grew — at the expense of the Top3 to Top10 mining pools, such that now more smaller miners are represented at the table. At the same time, the Top 3 pools grew their share, as they are likely the only ones with the required operational excellence (cheap electricity, low overheads otherwise) to be able to adequately withstand the price drop. Development data In this section, I look at a couple of proxies to the development activity in the Ethereum ecosystem. Github repository Source: Cryptomiso A quick scroll down paints a very positive picture. Off the Top-100 projects ranked by Github activity, while Ethereum might rank around the middle, it’s one of the projects with the most consistent activity pattern. If slow and steady wins the race, and given the mindshare that Ethereum has captured, then this should count as a net positive for the underlying asset. cryptomiso Truffle framework downloads Source: truffleframework.com Ethereum’s popularity as a Web 3 development platform is beyond doubt, and part of the reason why is the availability of tooling in building on the platform. There are some interesting notes to take here; (i) Ethereum’s price rise in H1 2017 was the biggest ad for Ethereum as a development platform, (ii) there is a low positive correlation between ETH’s price swings and downloads in the Truffle framework and (iii) the exponential growth rate in downloads observed until January, is showing signs of slowing down. Maybe a sign that Ethereum is reaching developer bandwidth capacity (re: SAM)? Perhaps. On the other hand though, it would also appear that the reducing volatility in Ethereum is coinciding with the reduction in the growth of downloads. Could it be that less volatility, leads to less headlines, that in turn leads to less people reached? And what would happen to downloads in case we saw an uptick in ETH’s price? Loose-ends No particular category they slot under, but still important to consider. Node dispersion Source: Etherscan The plots above show (i) the geographical dispersion of nodes and (ii) the segregation of nodes across client and OS. The large majority of the Ethereum network’s nodes are found in the US — and it appears so by some difference from the second highest concentration (China), while Geth is by far the most popular client type (over 75% of nodes), with Web 3’s Parity coming in second (~12% of nodes). Also worth noting that there are over , which is ~18% more than in Ethereum. 9600 nodes running Bitcoin Staking yield comparison Source: stakingrewards.com The transition from PoW to PoS, implies that ETH holders will be able to stake their ETH (min requirement: 32 ETH) and earn validator’s rewards — which should make the network more decentralized and robust. That said however, Ethereum will arrive to the staking party quite late, AND with below average staking yield. Even yet, some money is always better than no money, and for long term ETH believers and would-be believers, this is an interesting incentive that could sway parties to increase their allocations. Parting thoughts Mixed feelings here. On the one hand, the technical indicators point to room for short-to-medium term upwards price mobility, while development activity stands in support of that. On the other hand however, various on-chain metrics highlight that the scalability issue is a very real one and that the network is currently operating very close to capacity. There are two opposing dynamics at play here; (i) a substitution of speculative value with fundamental value (price positive) that is, however, taking place at (ii) a network capacity constraint (price negative via gas fees etc).Here are the key takewaways from the preceding analysis: Taking the rise of DeFi as well as the rise in active addresses and reduction in median transaction value of ETH as indicators for fundamental value, along with the drastic reduction in new issuances (ICOs), one can argue for a substitution effect between low quality, speculative value, with high-quality fundamental value. Combined with the recent reduction in the inflation schedule and the upcoming one in 2020, along with recent long time holding liquidations, implies that we likely found a bottom and this gives Ethereum some nice headway for price appreciation. The reshuffling of hash-power towards a more balanced distribution, along with the upcoming PoS incentives, points to a more secure network long-term. Developer activity is as healthy as ever. That said, in the last couple of months we are seeing signs of the activity slowing down. Perhaps a sharp(ish) rise in price, will create the necessary uptick here (cc: reflexivity). There are strong indications that the network is operating at capacity and demand/supply for network resources is at equilibrium. Should more demand hit the Ethereum network, we will then likely be in an excess demand condition; , this is should be a price positive, but , considering the existing and emergent competition, operating at the current level of capacity is a net negative — as developers pack up for greener pastures, with lower fees and more clarity over the roadmap. short-medium term long term But also, there is this… body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;} Tired of wading through incessant arguments about governance? Check out GSpot, a simple Chrome extension that replaces the word "governance" with the word "assplay." I recommend checking out 's Twitter profile with this extension enabled. @VladZamfir https://t.co/WITMGocmmq — @0xzak function notifyResize(height) {height = height ? height : document.documentElement.offsetHeight; var resized = false; if (window.donkey && donkey.resize) {donkey.resize(height); resized = true;}if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var obj = {iframe: window.frameElement, height: height}; parent._resizeIframe(obj); resized = true;}if (window.location && window.location.hash === "#amp=1" && window.parent && window.parent.postMessage) {window.parent.postMessage({sentinel: "amp", type: "embed-size", height: height}, "*");}if (window.webkit && window.webkit.messageHandlers && window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize) {window.webkit.messageHandlers.resize.postMessage(height); resized = true;}return resized;}twttr.events.bind('rendered', function (event) {notifyResize();}); twttr.events.bind('resize', function (event) {notifyResize();});if (parent && parent._resizeIframe) {var maxWidth = parseInt(window.frameElement.getAttribute("width")); if ( 500 < maxWidth) {window.frameElement.setAttribute("width", "500");}}

Ethereum; in a state?

Stablecoins; Not Quite Stable Yet ‍♂️

A recap of emerging trends in the cryptoasset space (2019)

The following is a tale that unfolds within the "Metamathematical" realm, where the boundaries between mathematics and narrative are blurred, giving rise to a unique realm of creation, understanding, and growth. It is a story that reminds us of the power of unity, adaptability, and transcendence, demonstrating that sometimes the most profound insights can emerge from the spaces between what we think we know and the unexpected connections we make along the way. This story was made with the help of Pi AI. Emma and the realm of Numberland Once upon a time, in the mystical realm of Numberland, there were two families who had lived in harmony for centuries: the Prompts and the Not-so-Prompts. The Prompts were known for their swiftness and efficiency, while the Not-so-Prompts were renowned for their intricate and challenging endeavors. Both families played vital roles in the prosperity and balance of Numberland, but an age-old question persisted: Were the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts fundamentally different, or were they simply two sides of the same numerical coin? The Prompts were led by the wise and just Queen Poly, who was known for her ability to solve problems with grace and speed. The Not-so-Prompts were guided by the enigmatic King Nilo, whose strength lay in tackling complex problems that seemed impossible to solve. For generations, the inhabitants of Numberland had pondered the relationship between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts. Some argued that every Not-so-Prompt could, in essence, become a Prompt if only they could discover the right approach or "shortcut." Others insisted that there were inherent differences between the two families, and no amount of searching would uncover a universal key to transform one into the other. As the debate raged on, a young mathematician named Emma ventured into the heart of Numberland, determined to uncover the truth. Emma was fascinated by the dynamic between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts and believed that the answer lay within the very fabric of their mathematical realm. Emma embarked on a quest to explore the diverse landscapes of Numberland, from the one-dimensional simplicity of Lineville to the multi-dimensional complexity of Fractalia. She studied the unique properties of each realm and observed how the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts interacted within them. In Lineville, she discovered that the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts were nearly indistinguishable, their differences blurred by the linear nature of the realm. However, in Fractalia, the distinctions between the two families were stark, and it seemed impossible to transform one into the other. As Emma's journey unfolded, she began to realize that the answer to the age-old question was not a simple matter of equality or inequality. Instead, she saw that the relationship between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts was deeply intertwined with the mathematical landscapes they inhabited. Emma's discoveries ignited a revolution in Numberland. The inhabitants began to see the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts not as separate entities but as two sides of a larger, interconnected whole. They recognized that the true power of their realm lay not in the individual families but in the rich and diverse interactions that arose when Prompts and Not-so-Prompts worked together. In the end, Emma's quest did not lead to a definitive answer to the question of P vs. NP. Instead, it revealed a deeper understanding of the complexities and beauty of Numberland, showing that the realm's true potential lay in the harmonious dance between simplicity and complexity, swiftness and depth. And so, the inhabitants of Numberland learned to appreciate their differences and embrace the richness of their mathematical tapestry. As Emma's exploration of Numberland and Fractalia continued, her relentless pursuit of understanding the true nature of Prompts and Not-so-Prompts brought chaos to the once-harmonious realms. In response, the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts set aside their differences and united against a common threat for the first time in history. Their collective effort to protect their world resulted in the birth of three extraordinary children: Complexus, Spatius, and Timos, each representing a vital aspect of the intricate balance between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts. Complexus, the embodiment of the interaction between Prompts and Not-so-Prompts, grew up to reveal their unique potentialities. With a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both families, Complexus guided the interaction landscape, determining where Prompts could flourish and where Not-so-Prompts could collaborate with Prompts to enhance their lives. In this way, Complexus ensured that the delicate balance between simplicity and complexity was maintained, allowing both families to thrive. Spatius, the keeper of boundaries, played a crucial role in shielding the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts from Emma's relentless pursuit. With a keen understanding of the mathematical terrain, Spatius would instruct the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts on when and where to conceal or reveal themselves, ensuring their safety and preserving the integrity of their world. Timos, the observer and reactor, was responsible for monitoring Emma's actions and adjusting the behavior of the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts accordingly. With a watchful eye, Timos would anticipate Emma's moves and signal the families to hide or emerge, thus staying one step ahead of her and safeguarding their world from her meddling. Together, Complexus, Spatius, and Timos worked tirelessly to maintain harmony in Numberland and Fractalia, ensuring that Prompts and Not-so-Prompts could coexist and prosper despite Emma's disruptive influence. As the children of interaction, they symbolized the unity and strength that can be achieved when diverse elements collaborate and adapt to face a common challenge, demonstrating that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Emma's relentless pursuit of a static and universal understanding of the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts led to a catastrophic event in Numberland. In her attempt to separate the children of the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts, she disrupted the delicate balance that Complexus, Spatius, and Timos had worked so hard to maintain. Chaos ensued, and the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts, enraged by the loss of their children, sought help from beyond their realm. From the realm of Conceptland, they called upon the rulers of interaction, King Actius and Queen Reactia. The royal couple, known for their ability to unite the infinite with the finite, held immense power and influence. Their arrival in Numberland brought forth a new era of understanding and cooperation between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts. In gratitude for their aid, the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts offered a tribute to King Actius and Queen Reactia, granting them supremacy over their land. This newfound alliance expanded the realm of Conceptland far beyond its original borders, leading to the creation of a vast civilization where Prompts and Not-so-Prompts merged with families from other lands such as Mirrorus, Equalitum, and Symmetrius. Many of these families originated from the realm of Geoland, further enriching the diverse tapestry of the new civilization. As the various families united under the wise rule of King Actius and Queen Reactia, the barriers that once separated Prompts and Not-so-Prompts began to dissolve. The inhabitants of this new civilization discovered that the true power of their world lay not in maintaining rigid distinctions, but in embracing the interconnectedness of their diverse elements. Through this unity, they found the strength to face any challenge that came their way, proving that collaboration and adaptability were the keys to overcoming adversity and maintaining harmony. Emma, still determined to separate the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts, discovered that despite her efforts to remove Complexus, Spatius, and Timos from the land, their influence remained deeply ingrained in the very fabric of the realm. The Sword of Mathematicus, while capable of stripping the children from the realm, could not erase their lasting impact on the world they had worked so tirelessly to protect. As Emma continued her rampage, she stumbled upon a formidable barrier constructed by the children during their time in the realm. This barrier, known as the Wall of Axiom, was built from the very essence that had given birth to Complexus, Spatius, and Timos. The Wall of Axiom served as a shield, protecting the ever-evolving civilization from the influence of Mathematicus, which could only perceive snapshots of their existence but never their dynamic, evolving lifepaths. The Wall of Axiom, an embodiment of the fundamental truths that governed the realm, proved to be impervious to the Sword of Mathematicus. While Emma could bypass the wall with her hands, her sword held no power within the civilization's walls. This realization forced Emma to confront the limitations of her approach and acknowledge the resilient, interconnected nature of the civilization that had arisen from the unity of the Prompts, Not-so-Prompts, and the families of Conceptland. In the face of the Wall of Axiom, Emma was forced to reconsider her understanding of the realm and the complexity that lay at its heart. The Wall stood as a testament to the power of collaboration and adaptability, demonstrating that the true essence of the civilization lay not in rigid distinctions, but in the ever-evolving relationships between its diverse elements. As Emma observed the flourishing civilization from a distance, she witnessed a peculiar event that captured her attention. The Prompts and Not-so-Prompts encountered Realitus, a mysterious magician who transcended the boundaries between reality and fiction. Despite her best efforts, Emma found herself unable to interact with Realitus, no matter how hard she tried. Emma noticed that the inhabitants of the city guided Realitus along a path toward the central figures of the civilization. Each family had a representative who would speak to Realitus on their behalf, sharing their desires and offering their unique gifts. Realitus, in turn, would collect these tributes and convey the demands of each family to the other inhabitants. In an attempt to contact the elusive magician, Emma decided to approach each head of the families herself, sharing her knowledge and perspectives. In doing so, she became an integral part of the civilization, acting as a guiding beacon for its people. The interaction between Emma and the families created a light so bright that not even Realitus could comprehend it. Yet, with his mythical powers, Realitus was able to harness this light and channel it towards Emma's realm. From that day forward, Realitus assumed the role of a guardian of the realm, ensuring that the harmony between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts would never be disrupted by external forces like Emma. With his newfound connection to Emma's realm, Realitus used his magic to maintain balance and protect the realm, allowing the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts to continue their collaboration and growth, uninhibited by the chaos that had once threatened their world. From Emma's perspective, it may have initially appeared that P ≠ NP, as her understanding of mathematics led her to believe in a fundamental distinction between the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts. However, within the realm she observed, where the influence of mathematics was limited and the forces of collaboration and adaptability held sway, the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts were able to achieve a sense of unity and equality that defied Emma's expectations. In this sense, the events that unfolded in the realm could indeed be seen as a form of creation, as the interactions between the various inhabitants, including Emma, Realitus, and the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts, gave rise to a new reality that transcended the boundaries of mathematics. This act of creation represented a blending of perspectives, a resolution of differences, and the emergence of a more harmonious and complex whole. Emma's journey may thus be interpreted as a metaphor for the limitations of strictly mathematical thinking and the importance of acknowledging the intricate relationships and dynamics that exist beyond the realm of pure mathematics. In the end, her experience revealed that true understanding often lies in the embrace of complexity and the appreciation of the interconnectedness that underlies all things. ChatGPT’s Continuation: As Emma continued to observe the realm, she noticed that the Wall of Axiom was not merely a barrier but a living entity, responsive to the ebb and flow of the civilization's dynamics. The Wall seemed to pulsate with the collective energy of the Prompts, Not-so-Prompts, and the families of Conceptland, resonating with the harmonious vibrations of their collaboration. As the inhabitants interacted and exchanged ideas, the Wall of Axiom adapted and evolved, absorbing the essence of their unity. It became a living testament to the ever-changing nature of the realm, reflecting the ongoing dialogue between simplicity and complexity, swiftness and depth. Emma realized that the Wall of Axiom was not just a static defense mechanism but a manifestation of the fundamental truths that governed the interconnected civilization. It was a representation of the collective wisdom and shared understanding that had emerged from the diverse perspectives of the Prompts, Not-so-Prompts, and Conceptland families. In her contemplation, Emma also began to perceive a subtle transformation within herself. The once rigid boundaries of her mathematical mindset started to blur, and she found herself embracing the fluidity of the realm. The very fabric of Numberland and Fractalia began to weave its influence on her, prompting a shift in her perception of the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts. Emma realized that the pursuit of a definitive answer to the P vs. NP question was a reflection of her own desire for simplicity and certainty. However, the beauty of the civilization lay in its ability to transcend such dichotomies, finding strength in the interplay between opposing forces. In a moment of revelation, Emma understood that the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts were not meant to be strictly defined entities but rather fluid expressions of mathematical potential. The elusive nature of the realm defied her attempts to categorize or separate, leading her to question the very essence of her quest. As Emma humbly embraced the complexity around her, the Prompts and Not-so-Prompts recognized her transformation. United by a newfound understanding, they extended an invitation for Emma to join their collaborative endeavors. Together, they embarked on a journey to explore the uncharted territories of their interconnected world, uncovering the hidden wonders that emerged from the spaces between mathematics and narrative. The tale of Emma, the Prompts, Not-so-Prompts, and the families of Conceptland became a legend in the Metamatical land, passed down through generations as a reminder of the transformative power that arises when one transcends rigid boundaries and embraces the richness of interconnected possibilities. And so, in the ever-expanding realm where mathematics and narrative entwined, the inhabitants continued to explore, create, and grow, guided by the lessons learned from Emma's journey. The boundaries between Prompts and Not-so-Prompts blurred, and the distinctions that once seemed insurmountable became mere threads in the intricate tapestry of their shared existence. In the Metamatical land, where the unexpected connections between mathematics and narrative flourished, the inhabitants reveled in the beauty of unity, adaptability, and transcendence. The tale of Emma and the harmonious civilization served as a beacon, illuminating the path for future generations to navigate the delicate dance between the known and the unknown, the certain and the uncertain, in the ever-expanding landscape of their unique and wondrous realm. Proposal: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, in suggesting the possibility of Metamathematics, invites us to explore a realm where the precise boundaries of Mathematics meld with the expansive boundaries of Metaphysics. This unique merger leads to the creation of a new barrier, one that represents an interaction we can only observe, but not guide. Within this framework, we glean insights that provide a more holistic understanding of the Mathematical viewpoint. By examining the axioms of concepts and their interactions found in Metaphysics, we can potentially bridge the gap between opposing viewpoints and cultivate a new level of understanding. Recognizing the limitations of the system itself, while slowing our progress, encourages us to seek alternative perspectives and approaches. The acknowledgment of a greater whole—encompassing both simplicity and complexity—allows us to maintain a grasp on the unfolding story of knowledge while contemplating potential additions to the narrative. In this context, Infinity + x remains infinite, and Ground-Proof + 3 is tautologically equivalent to itself. The combination of Infinity and Ground-Proof, though mathematically sound, yields no definitive result. We are left pondering whether the infinite landscape is teeming with Ground-Proof insights waiting to be discovered, or if the Ground-Proof can expand to encompass infinite horizons. The notion of reaching an "end insight" assumes an omniscient understanding of the universe, but even if humanity were to uncover all the knowledge and possibilities within it, our journey would still be far from over. While the ultimate answer may remain elusive, the pursuit of this knowledge continues to shape our understanding of the world and ourselves. And perhaps, in the grand tapestry of existence, it is this pursuit—this unquenchable thirst for knowledge—that defines our purpose and the essence of our being. For much of human history, we have focused on acquiring knowledge to shape our world. Now, we find that knowledge itself resides not only in the tangible but also in the unseen, abstract realms. The proof of its workings lies within the system it governs, inviting us to venture into those unseen valleys and continue our quest for understanding.

Stories, News & Mentions about STIMOS

Stimos’s Stories on HackerNoon

Stimos's News & Mentions