Yes, writing is hard. But if you can first grasp the origins and qualities of bad writing, you may learn to diagnose and cure problems in your own prose (keeping things simple helps a lot). Similarly heartening is the observation that most first drafts are second-rate, so becoming a skilled rewriter is the thing. These five works are excellent sources of insight and inspiration.

BIMI is a way to verify information about your brand. Like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF—three methods for verifying sender information—BIMI is a text record that lives on your servers. In fact, it works right alongside SPF, DMARC, and DKIM to signal to email clients that you are you. As such, BIMI aids in deliverability, too.

In the decades since it was first proposed, the initiative and the world around it have changed profoundly. Optimism and ambition for the BRI have been replaced by broken promises, cracked dams, and wrecked state treasuries throughout the emerging economies and trading partners who took a chance on Xi’s signature infrastructure and investment program.

Introduced as a means to fund much-needed infrastructure and connectivity, the BRI has imposed a staggering bill on the countries that signed up for it.

One of the bad learnings you get from YC is that there’s a formula for success, and it looks like this: First you do some brainstorming. Then you come up with a good idea that can scale to a billion dollars (otherwise what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?) Then you work hard until you find “product-market-fit.” And then if the noises from investors indicate you won’t be getting a next round of funding, you start looking for a “pivot.”

This so-called formula is nonsense. First, good ideas rarely come to us from a brainstorming session. They come from wandering about with an open mind until we stumble on an opportunity worth pursuing. Most of your ideas will be bad ideas, because unfortunately you’re not a genius visionary. So the best way to find good ideas is to have many ideas, try them out, take what works, and throw away the rest. But this is not what YC wants you to do. YC wants you to pick an idea that has market pull (or the potential for it), and to then dig a hole in the same spot until you reach the boiling magma. Because what if you stop digging just before you strike gold? When you’re cheap and expendable, that’s not an optimal strategy for the YC fund. You must go all in. Diversification is for your YC overlords, not for you.

FOR THE past twenty years or so, social scientists have affirmed what parents think when they are at their most exasperated and dyspeptic: children make you miserable. In 2004 Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and others discovered that parents thought that looking after their children was about as enjoyable as doing the housework. Two meta-studies (studies of studies) in 2012 found that, in most of the research, self-reported “life satisfaction” (a measure of happiness) was a bit lower when there was a child in the house.

The effect was not large. But there is something odd about these findings. In rich countries at least, people decide to have children. A few children are doubtless unplanned but only a few. If children make parents unhappy, why do they keep having them? The puzzle, says Letizia Mencarini of Bocconi University, is why isn’t fertility even lower in countries where people have a choice? Parents far outnumber the childless at every stage of adulthood. A new generation of research helps answer that question, and suggests that children are more likely to make parents happy than was once thought.

spaCy is a modern Python library for industrial-strength Natural Language Processing. In this free and interactive online course, you'll learn how to use spaCy to build advanced natural language understanding systems, using both rule-based and machine learning approaches.

Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

Pacstall uses the stable base of Ubuntu but allows you to use bleeding edge software with little to no compromises, so you don't have to worry about security patches or new features.

Recently, I became curious about the origin of the common Japanese word “ありがとう” (arigatou), which is used in modern Japanese to express gratitude or simply say “Thank you”. I had heard from several people that it originally meant something like “It is hard for me to exist”, and for some time I accepted this explanation. After all, one way to write this word is “有り難う”, which contains a form of “aru” (to exist), and a form of “gatai” which can be used to mean the previous verb is difficult to do.