fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Stupid Kid Story
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Kids, Guitar, Humorous Life Lessons, Other Stories, Music

Most of us do stupid stuff as kids. My generation never imagined the Internet or eBay. If we had, we wouldn’t have stuck baseball cards in our bike spokes to hear them flap. I wouldn’t have given all my Hot Wheels cars to my cousin when I got too old for them. In fact, I would have kept everything I owned as a kid and I’d be rich now. Or close to it. But we were kids and we did stupid stuff. It’s a job requirement.

I started playing guitar at the age of twelve. My parents bought me a cheap acoustic guitar to see if I was serious about playing guitar. I was. At age fourteen my parents bought me a Fender Mustang electric guitar. In 1974 the Mustang was considered a “student” guitar thanks to its shorter scale neck. It was also a budget guitar for those (my parents) who didn’t want to spring for a real Stratocaster. It was my first electric guitar and, of course, I loved it.

When I was 15, my brother had a friend named Ron who was also taking guitar lessons. One day Ron brought his guitar over to jam with me. We played a little bit and he asked me if I would be willing to trade my guitar for his. He owned a Gibson ES-175. A beautiful hollow-body jazz guitar. Ron’s Dad decided that his son was going to play a real guitar, not some “rock” guitar. So he bought him a Gibson ES-175.

Now back in 1975, no teenager I knew wanted a big hollow-body jazz guitar, they wanted a rock guitar — a Strat or a Les Paul — like their guitar heroes played. I felt the same way. Not playing rock guitar in 1975 was practically a crime. So when Ron offered to trade his jazz guitar for my Mustang, being a stupid kid, I said no.

A few years later I fell in love with jazz guitar — thanks to George Benson and Pat Metheny — and would have given anything to have owned that ES-175. A guitar that would have greatly appreciated in value over the years. Instead of trying to play jazz on a cheap student guitar, I could have been playing an expensive jazz guitar. Stupid kid.
Make Yourself Hot Chocolate And Watch “Dash and Lily” Now
By: Fahri Karakas
Tags: Wellness, TV Series, Happiness, Art, Culture

Make Yourself Hot Chocolate And Watch “Dash and Lily” Now

Perfect For A Warm And Fuzzy Holiday Feeling You Deserve

“Dash and Lily”, Image Courtesy of Netflix, Image Source

It has been an incredibly hard year for all of us. We have been going through a terrifying pandemic and one of the worst economic crises of the century. We have been in lockdown for months and 2020 felt like a horror movie.

I know you are exhausted and you deserve a nice holiday. Put your feet up, make some hot chocolate for yourself, and watch “Dash and Lily” on Netflix. You will love watching this series — not because it is original or groundbreaking — but because it feels wonderfully magical and it has a really big heart. You will feel all the fuzzy and warm feelings associated with the Christmas season, Manhattan, bookstores, notebooks, treasure hunts, puzzles, Santa, elves, snowflakes, holiday cheers, mochis, and more.

Lily is an outcast bookworm teenager who places a notebook of puzzles, treasure hunts, and dares in a New York bookstore. Our fellow bookworm Dash finds it, follows the challenges, and poses his own challenges. It is a story of growing together through sharing dreams, joys, sorrows, interests, adventures, and secrets.

You are not convinced yet? Watch the trailer to see the charm yourself:

Dash and Lily, Official Trailer, Courtesy of Netflix

You don’t like these holiday cliches, teen romance, and Christmas cheer? Come on, give yourself a break — you do not always watch shows because they are mind-blowing. You need to watch this series because you want to escape from the feelings of loneliness, the overload of Zoom meetings, and the stress of being in an endless lockdown you have been experiencing.

“Dash and Lily” is the most adorable, the coziest, and the most cheerful show of the season. It takes less than 3 hours to watch and it flows like a gentle and joyful river. Grab your blanket, your hot chocolate, your pretzel, and your mochis. You will absolutely love this holiday treat. You might even end up believing in the magic of Christmas!
The Euler-Mascheroni Constant
By: Ujjwal Singh
Tags: Science, Math, Mathematics, History

Remember the harmonic series?

More often than not, it serves as one’s first encounter with a series wherein individual terms diminish successively yet the series diverges to infinity. The below quote nicely sums the up notoriousness of the harmonic series:

Today I said to my calculus students, “I know, you’re looking at this series and you don’t see what I’m warning you about. You look and it and you think, ‘I trust this series. I would take candy from this series. I would get in a car with this series.’ But I’m going to warn you, this series is out to get you. Always remember: The harmonic series diverges. Never forget it.” — Source

Indeed. Never forget. The harmonic series diverges. Flirting continuously with convergence all the way, yet slowly but surely making its way to infinity. Increasing ever so slowly. In your grasp, yet out of it. Coldly tantalising its suitors.

By now, the series’ divergence has been confirmed via myriad different proofs, though none more beautiful than the very first one, which stands out for its simplicity. However, in this article, we would be concerned with the question

Is there any function which provides a decent approximation to the partial sums of the harmonic series?

Here, by partial sums, we mean the first n terms of the series, ie, -

It turns out there is one, the natural logarithm function. As n gets larger, the difference between the partial sums and ln(n) approaches a finite limit. This limit is known as the Euler-Mascheroni constant, γ (gamma).

First appearing in 1734, the constant derives its name from two mathematicians — the ubiquitous Leonhard Euler, and Lorenzo Mascheroni, an Italian mathematician. The notation γ was adopted most probably because of the constant’s connection with the gamma function (extension of the factorial function). Despite being around for almost 300 years, gamma’s rationality is an open question. Also, it is unknown whether gamma is algebraic or transcendental.

How does the harmonic series relate to the logarithm function? That, precisely, is the content of this article. The process followed here relies on geometrical intuition, and is an archetype of a well established test for series convergence, the integral test.

Let

Then,

For better understandability, the article has been divided into four sections
Deploy Interactive Real-Time Data Visualizations on Flask With Bokeh
By: Michael Bagley
Tags: Python, Flask, Data Visualization, Bokeh, Database

Part One

The first step is to do pip install bokeh and pip install Flask to get the Bokeh library and Flask library installed to your Python instance. Create a file called app.py and start with the following code:

The variable source is used to represent data in a way that is standardized for Bokeh elements. We will pass our data into that object, which is fed to the Bokeh figure. It is structured as an object, mapping keys to an array of values. We will later see how we can directly access and manipulate this using CustomJS .

Next, fig represents a Bokeh visual component. The tooltips parameter sets what is displayed in the display box that is shown when you hover over a point in your visualization. The tuples of this array are structured as ("NAME TO DISPLAY", "@COLUMN_NAME_IN_SOURCE" . To edit how large individual points on the graph appear, you can edit the size parameter in fig.circle() . Keep the x , y , and color parameters the same because we will see how those can be conditionally changed later.

The axis_label variables control what is displayed on the X-axis and Y-axis of the visualization. In our case, the X-axis will measure the IMDB rating of a movie and the Y-axis will measure the Rotten Tomatoes rating. We will later see that (obviously) there is a positive correlation between the two.

Now we can implement the following code to pass some data into our figure and display it in our browser:

Until Part two, we will be using an array of five example dictionaries featuring various movie-related properties. We are eventually going to be retrieving 3,000 real-time records from EasyBase.

The properties being set in source.data are Bokeh’s reference as to where in the graph an element should be displayed, along with how it should appear visually. As stated before, the structure of this variable is a dictionary mapping all of our attributes to a corresponding array. For this reason, we are using the inline array construction syntax to grab and pull each property from our data into its array.

We can see where these elements are used in our Bokeh figure: x , y , and color are passed into the fig.circle() method, and title and genre are passed into the tooltip (we will use released , imdbvotes , and genre later). Feel free to alter the values in each array. For example, if you want the color of dots to correspond to its genre, color = ["#FF9900" for d in currMovies] is where you would do that, or perhaps color = ["#008800" if d['genre'] == "drama" else "#FF9900" for d in curMovies] .

Last, output_file points to where you want your later figures to be saved. show(fig) saves the figure at this location and opens it in your browser.

Run this file and you will be presented with:
Using Storybook as a Visual Testing Platform
By: Ema Suriano
Tags: JavaScript, Storybook, React, Visual Testing, Programming

I’ve always had visual testing on my to do list, until a few weeks ago when I finally decided to mark it as done.

In this article, I’m going to share my experience working with this strategy of testing (which does not replace the others), and the integration with my current development tool: Storybook.

In case you don’t know what Storybook is, this is the definition they provide on the official website:

Storybook is an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.

Storybook Demo

Regarding visual testing, it’s a testing approach that consists of taking real pictures, and then comparing them with the previous version. This comparison is made by comparing both pictures and checking if the pixels match.

In case you already understand the concept of Snapshot testing; this is the same. The difference is that you compare a picture, and not some resulting code.
Productivity Extensions for Designers and Developers You May Not Know About
By: Jane Sorkin
Tags: Software Development, Google Chrome, UX, Productivity, Programming

8 Productivity Extensions for Designers and Developers You May Not Know About

Window resizing, color sampling, and more

Productivity at its finest (photo by the author).

From Chrome to the Apple App Store to extensions for your Mac, I’ll lay it all out. As a designer and developer, I find the tools below a must in my daily work. I’m all about efficiency — call me the Flash 2.0.

Here we go!

P.s. I’m not getting paid to promote any of these extensions

… although that would be nice.
The Importance of Trust in UX
By: Brendan Tobin
Tags: User Experience, Data Privacy, Trust, UX Design, Product Design

“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” — Albert Einstein

As social animals, we’re wired to trust those we know. Our immediate and extended social circles carry huge sway in the actions we chose to take. This is the power of networks.

When the web moved its focus from linked web pages to personal connections via social media, it fundamentally changed how the web operated. Social media is where most people now experience the internet. While the digital world we design for evolves at a fantastic rate, our primate brains still make decisions based on what we hear and see in our social circles.

The social web has had a huge impact on trust. Who we believe and who we don’t is changing. Large organisations that were once the trusted source of truth, such as news networks and newspapers, have been displaced. Truth is now crowdsourced for better (Wikipedia?) or worse (Twitter?). We are quick to share our opinions online, and those opinions are visible to all in our social networks.

For online businesses, if you can gain trust, you’ll gain customers. Airbnb is a company that used ‘social proof’ (people you trust) to build its multi-billion dollar business. Famously held up as an accommodation business that doesn’t own any hotels, they offer trusted hosts that have been validated by their network. If a host isn’t up to the mark, the crowd speaks.

The reality is businesses need to be honest with users about their service or product. People no longer rely on slick advertising to learn about a business. Instead, we openly share who we ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’. We give honest reviews on YouTube, showing the reality of a product. We use review sites such as Trust Pilot and Trip Advisor to assess services. Gaining the trust of users has never been more challenging or more important.

When it comes to the user experience, being clear, honest, and authentic is what will make you trustworthy. In 1999 the Nielsen Norman Group defined four factors in which a website can communicate trustworthiness: design quality, up-front disclosure, comprehensive and current content, and connection to the rest of the web. How we measure these factors has changed since 1999, but the principles still stand. Being legitimate, open, and transparent are the first steps in gaining your users' trust.

In his excellent talk, Gerry McGovern, a UX expert talks about the difference between businesses that serve their users and those that serve themselves, and how the user-centred approach is better for all. Free content, trials, or samples that allow the user to try before they buy shows openness and confidence in a product. Trust, transparency and honesty on your site are more important now than ever before, down to even the smallest of details such as shipping charges, subscription commitments, or data privacy.

Don’t hide the facts about your product from users, share them. That’s what they want. If there are gaps in your product, they’ll find out and they’ll tell you (and everyone else!).
The Top 3 Tech Salary Tools. Know what your position’s worth, then…
By: Sundas Khalid
Tags: Programming, Salary, Women In Tech, Software Development, Startup

The Top 3 Tech Salary Tools

Know what your position’s worth, then insist on it

Photo by the author.

Tech salaries are a hot topic. As an advocate of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I believe that getting paid fairly is the first step. My goal with sharing these tools is to make tech salary information accessible so you can get paid fairly.

Note: These are tools that I have personally used. I am not sponsored by any organization to share my views.
Handling a change to Redux-Form data from container to component via props
By: Rachel Cantor
Tags: Redux Form, Software Development, Props, React

I ended up realizing that I didn’t need to use context for this after all and used this pattern as an alternative.

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments!

Rachel
My website is now conversational. Because why not.
By: Adrian Zumbrunnen
Tags: Conversational UI, UX, Design

My website is now conversational. And it can recommend you UX reads.

Let my better half know if you’re a UX designer, and “I” will send you reading suggestions.

Please make sure you come back from time to time.

Hit recommend if you enjoyed this piece. 🤗 I also tweet about design and UX on twitter.
a bike shop
By: Haiku Love Bites
Tags: Poetry, Sports, Health, Cycling, Life

a bike shop

a poem about some bicycles with higher ambitions

.

on unseen wire, tires hang

like fallen halos with no shine

a wish to return to rubber tree

far removed from roads of duty

.

below frames jockey for daylight

after months of hibernating

awakened by fruity bird songs

in vogue with the blossoms of spring

.

a smell of latex aftershave

clings to walls dense with biker tales

the near miss, that perfect gear shift

meeting of man and half-machine

.

each with a dream of open road

miles of roads happy to assist

pushed by breath as gravity resists

each one a world unseen, asleep

.
Membangun Aplikasi Reservasi Meja dengan MEVN — Bagian Ketiga
By: Muhammad Azmi
Tags: Tailwind Css, Vuejs, Mongodb, Web Development, Expressjs

Easy read, easy understanding. A good writing is a writing that can be understood in easy ways

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Knot Theory
By: Bradley J Nordell
Tags: Connection, Future, Earth, Biosphere, Poetry

Knot Theory

A poem about the connection of us and the biosphere

Photo by EDGAR TORRES on Unsplash

We’re all whittled from the same tree root

rings that mark our sorrows and love

branching dendritic harmony

sings its glorious battles

one daybreak at a time

Yet our forests are left hungry

Dried up canvas

And a painter

Whose soul has run dry,

we discard our guilt,

a plastic wrapper at a time a

As we stare blankly into our holobooks

to dim those virtuoso visions

of the mind’s inner eye

Asleep, we walk the valleys

a heap of dead leaves

crumble beneath our boots,

like an old man in winter.

And do you feel the winds

rattle, that raven’s caw?

grasping their existential reminder

that the meek shall die, too,

with the strong,

in the last days

of a dying earth.
Machine Learning — Linear Regression: E-Commerce Case
By: Erwindra Rusli
Tags: Machine Learning, Linear Regression, Python, Data Science, Data Storytelling

Now, I use Seaborn Jointplot to create a 2D hex bin plot comparing Time on App and Length of Membership.

Let’s explore these types of relationships across the entire data set. Use pairplot to recreate the plot below.

Based on this plot we can look that the Length of Membership column is the most correlated feature with Yearly Amount Spent. It makes sense because the longer you become a member the bigger your possibility to spent more money on it. We can see that on the correlation value table also.

Now that I’ve explored the data a bit, let’s go ahead and split the data into training and testing sets. I set a variable “X” equal to the numerical features of the customers and a variable “Y” equal to the Yearly Amount Spent column.

I use model_selection.train_test_split from SKLearn library to split the data into training and testing sets. I set test_size=0.3 and random_state=101. It means I split the existing dataset into 70% for data training, and 30% for data test.

Now its time to train our model on our training data. I need to import LinearRegression from SKLearn.linear_model library. Then, create an instance of a LinearRegression() model named lm. Train/fit lm on the training data. Print out the coefficients of the model.

Now that we have fit our model, let’s evaluate its performance by predicting off the test values. I use lm.predict() to predict off the X_test set of the data. Then, let’s see the result of the real test values versus the predicted values by creating a scatterplot.

It seems that our Model has a good prediction. :)

After making this prediction, I still want to figure out the answer to the original question, do we focus our effort on mobile app or website development? Or maybe that doesn’t even really matter, and Membership Time is what is really important. Let’s see if we can interpret the coefficients at all to get an idea.

And this is what I suggest to the E-Commerce company:

We can see that Length of Membership has a top coefficient value. It means that is the most important variable to get the high customer’s Yearly Amount Spent. Let’s see another coefficient value. Time on App has a bigger value than Time on Website. It indicates us to focus our effort on Mobile App rather than Website Development.

We should make a good UI/UX on the mobile app to make customer feels great during their time on the app. It will lead to the longer Length of Membership and will be converted to the better Yearly Amount Spent by the customer.

You can see the full python script on my GitHub.

Thank You.

See you in another Data Exploration.

BR,

Erwindra Rusli

Data Scientist Student at Purwadhika School.
The Fragrance
By: Priyanka Srivastava
Tags: Poetry, Writing, Existence, Micropoetry, Spirituality

with too many things in my head i write to sort it all till the sky is empty and there’s no poetry

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7 Awesome Command-Line Tools
By: Eric Chi
Tags: Programming, Terminal, Software Engineering, Software Development, Command Line

3. fzf

This next one is a really cool tool. It’s called fzf . It’s a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder that allows you to find files based on whatever you type. On its own, it’s an OK tool. It will list all the different files in the current directory you’re in. You can think of it as a Spotlight search, but in your terminal.

Fuzzy-finding in my home.

Now the real power of this tool comes when you combine fzf with other existing commands like kill or cat . In order to do this, you’re going to need to run the install script that is provided with the package or inside the repository:

/usr/local/opt/fzf/install or ~/.fzf/install

You will need to restart your terminal or source your .bashrc . It will ask you some questions, and once you’ve answered all of them, you will have unlocked fzf 's fullest potential.

Now you can run commands like:

cat **[TAB]

vim **[TAB]

ssh **[TAB]

fzf will kick into gear and find all the possible entries that can work with the command:

Similar to file finding an IDE.

Another cool application of this is using it with the kill command. This is probably the one I use most. The days of typing ps -ef | grep [process-name] and then either manually typing or copying the process ID to kill are long gone. Instead, you can run kill [tab] or kill -9 [tab] . Fuzzy-find the process you want to kill and press enter. It will automatically fill the process ID in for you.

Awesome use case.

There are tons of other use cases that I can go over, but these are the main ones I would like to point out.
Ruminations on getting to the near-future
By: Saquib Patla
Tags: Tech, Future, Socioeconomic

4. Search hasn’t changed aesthetically at all, except maybe paying some lip service here and there. Playing it too safe imo.

5. How will WhatsApp evolve with its push with small local businesses? Can messaging look & feel drastically different?

6. Insta hacks — “link in bio”, roving strip clubs, paid access to “close friends”, customer support on DMs, auctions via stories & DMs & “swipe up” on stories for more. Though the last one there is an official feature, it’s only available for accounts w/ >10k followers, but linking to an IGTV video is available to anyone. These seem to be filling a need for rich media communication channels w/ targeted and/or ephemeral groups. OnlyFans, Patreon & HQ Trivia all have their own strict focus. While Zoom finds itself serving a plethora of stuff it hadn’t planned on, to the extent that it could make sense to integrate Zoom into your social product rather than build your own live video. There’s a template in here for a product w/ a social backbone that treats businesses, media, creators & influencers all as first-class citizens.

7. Security, harassment & information bubbles will only get trickier w/ further shifts to groups, messaging, newsletters & subscriptions. Like a lot of folks, including mainstream media, I was surprised by the Biden rally. But it just exposes our information bubbles, the world didn’t really change that quickly. Well, it did w/ the pandemic, but the primaries were a foregone conclusion by then. And my hypothesis is that no centrist maneuvering or mainstream media push or even Biden himself really had much bearing on the eventual result. Maybe a lot of people on different information diets, some indifferent to the proceedings as a whole, voting for the familiar.

8. Related to how the means of consuming & presenting information influence us — from the rise of an algorithmic Instagram face and how it drives perceptions of cosmetic procedures and ourselves, to Tinder swipes, both create perhaps an illusion of optionality. An illusion because when describing potentially bias-reinforcing tools optimized for snap decisions that feel like fun and convenience, seems to fit the bill?

9. Outside of always striving to be safer, shouldn’t Reddit never change?

Even though we see consolidation by big tech companies, I like to think the next wave(s) could easily just come from reorganization/innovation around our existing interactions and incentives, before maturing on the VR & blockchain frontiers. It’s happened already without any additional “core consumer tech” breakthroughs since the smartphone and we have plenty of motivations & unknowns, even outside of black swan events like Covid-19, to do so again.

I came across this thread from ever-straight-talk-quotable Elizabeth Yin on the work of Carlota Perez, a professor who talks about every era enabled by a technological breakthrough as defined by set cycles or phases.
For My Granddaughters
By: Ann Litts
Tags: Life Lessons, Politics, Future, Feminism, Grandmother

“You can be anything you want to be.”

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

I can say this again — to my granddaughters. I can give them the same hope I gave their mother and their aunt. I can give them a boost up to stand on the shoulders of all the women who came before them. Women who fought hard and suffered — just to give them the chance at this view.

This country has put a woman one heartbeat away from the presidency.

On Purpose.

We matter again. We have a voice. We are not “Other”. There will be NO Handmaiden’s Tale in the future of my most precious, precious granddaughters.

Oh. Hell. No.

I have spoken with a lot of grandmothers in the last 24 hours. Every single one of them is celebrating. We have salvaged the future for our grandchildren. Our granddaughters most especially — as they watch in January and see a woman sworn into the second most powerful position in this country.
Meanwhile, NaNoWriMo Writers Everywhere Valiantly Type Towards November 30
By: Julie Russell
Tags: Fiction, NaNoWriMo, Writing, Nonprofit

One of my favorite aspects of NaNo is that it table-flips the image of writers toiling in solitude, and creates a global community where we cheer each other on to completing a common goal. NaNo Board President and former Municipal Liaison, Lise Quintana , shares about encouragement in her post Strap on Your Pom-Poms for NaNoWriMo.

How many of us have started this NaNo goal, only to get stumped and stop? My hand’s raised, how about you? sue mcgarry shows how she’s overcome this challenge, in How to Stop Writing And Start Again.

In NaNoWriMo Thanksgivingness, NaNo Board Member Stephanie Block pens words that ring true: “I’m thankful for being a writer and for how it feels to write, like rightness and home and a glorious way to flail around in my weirdness.”

There’s no fixed way to do NaNoWriMo. There are planners, pantsters, plantsters and rebels. Jennifer Ng’s process is uniquely her own, but I found most lines resonated in her post, How to NaNoWriMo.

This month we’ve also heard from Chad Schimke, Goivanna Irelund, and T. Mark Mangum, and hope to hear from you, in November and beyond. For December we invite you to write about your editing process — how do you take your rough draft and create your next draft?

Open this email in a browser and leave a private note on the post that you’d like to be added to the publication.

We’re cheering for you!

If you have a bit to spare, will you join me in donating to National Novel Writing Month, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that brings this event to life?

With gratitude,

Julie Russell

NaNoWriMo Board Member since 2015 & Participant since 2012
Imbalanced Data — Oversampling Using Genetic Crossover Operators
By: Bassel Karami
Tags: Machine Learning, Imbalanced Data, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Genetic Algorithm

Introduction

Many of us have been in the situation of working on a predictive model with an imbalanced dataset.

The most popular approaches to handling the imbalance include:

Increasing class weights for the underrepresented class(es)

Oversampling techniques

Undersampling techniques

Combinations of over and under sampling

Adjusting the cost function

This article will address oversampling techniques, and we will specifically look into how SMOTE variants (borderline SMOTE, ADASYN etc.) that rely on interpolating across the feature space may be generating less novel synthetic data.

There are too many alternative ways to oversample. We look into oversampling synthetic data using simple single-point, two-point, and uniform crossover operations and we’ll compare the evaluation results to SMOTE and random oversampling. Often a combination of over- and under- sampling works better, but we will stick to oversampling for this demonstration.
Outlier — Referent*innen gesucht!
By: Mollie Pettit
Tags: Outlierconference, Data Visualization, Community, Dataviz, Conference

Sign up for The 'Gale

By Nightingale

Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look
Why is Model Evaluation a crucial step in Machine Learning? — Part 1
By: Kountay Dwivedi
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Bias Variance Tradeoff, Model Evaluation, Model Selection

Why is Model Evaluation a crucial step in Machine Learning? — Part 1 Kountay Dwivedi Follow Sep 13 · 8 min read

Photo by Kountay Dwivedi

The core target of any researcher or a data scientist has always been to deduce a model that is “perfect” for the underlying problem domain. Before digging deeper into complex computation of the data itself, one should first prepare the tools that seem best suited for the purpose. Primarily, machine learning practitioners are always doodling around with the “parameters and hyper-parameters” of the model to get the generalization accuracy as high as possible. Lets move on and have a glimpse of how to get hold of these tools in an optimal fashion.

Fitting a model to a training dataset is different thing; making it a “good predictor” is a whole other story. This step is a must-to-do, since the generalization behavior of our model depends on it. No one wants a rote-learned model anyway!

Note: I have tried to summarize a research article by Sabastian Raschka, “Model Evaluation, Model Selection, and Algorithm Selection in Machine Learning”. Even though the article is a bit lengthy, I actually found it insanely informative. I am grateful to the author for being immensely detailed in his work.

This article is in three parts, so as to keep the length a bit short of each part, and also providing modular learning:
How to Make Real Money on Upwork
By: Eduard Fastovski
Tags: Work, Freelancing, Money, Productivity, Business

How to Make Real Money on Upwork

The art of finding good clients and charging what you’re worth.

Dogs are the best clients. Photo by Devin Edwards on Unsplash

Serious freelancers often criticize platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. The problem, they say, is that it’s a race to the bottom. Each person trying to win the job at a cheaper price. Obviously, those from poorer countries will win, right? Wrong.

You can find freelancers with rates of $195 per hour successfully using Upwork, with fixed price projects of up to $10,000. I won’t share this person’s profile link for the sake of privacy, but no he’s not a lawyer, he’s an email marketer.

That doesn’t look like a race to the bottom to me. It looks like he’s beating everyone on quality, and confidently charging what he’s worth.

I don’t charge nearly as much myself, but still a healthy first-world rate, and more than half the clients that I currently work with originally found me on either Upwork or Fiverr.

Clients with a decent budget may be coming to Upwork just because they don’t know where else to look. They want quality work and are willing to pay for it, but there isn’t any alternative to Upwork.

A global directory of freelancers just doesn’t exist yet.

Even I search on Upwork when I need to outsource some work. This actually gave me some valuable perspective on the whole situation. I’ve been one of those clients ready to pay well for a true professional. But all I find is people offering me cheap rates for sloppy work!

I wish there were more true professionals on Upwork. The majority seem to be discouraged by the fact that 90% of the competition will undercut them. Well, my answer to that is — that’s great, be in the top 10%!
Where I Would Give Judgment, I Now Give Love
By: M.X. Christopher
Tags: Relationships, Mental Health, Love, Ego, Self

Where I Would Give Judgment, I Now Give Love

Learning to Love Myself and Others

pexels — Lisa Fotio

If you are anything like me, your mind is full of judgments. You are constantly judging and evaluating others, and yourself.

This judging mind is always turned on, and is often called the ego. Are there egos out there that aren’t full of judgement?

That’s a question I would like answered.

Anyway, if I’m honest I will say that my ego is full of judgement. It is constantly judging others, and judging myself just as harshly, maybe harsher.

Yes, that’s right. We reserve the harshest judgement for ourselves.

We say things like, I am awful, terrible, ugly, unkind.

If only we were better.

Yes, our egos are brutal. But, there must be a way out.

Is there a way out?

There is. I believe.

Where I would reserve judgement, I now offer love. To myself, and to others.

Now, I’m not saying I will no longer judge myself or others. We all know things don’t work like that. Nothing is that easy.

Only, after a judgement of myself or another, I will offer myself love.

I won’t judge myself for judging myself.

I will offer myself love. I will offer another love.

I will recite a simple line.

I am love. I love you. God bless you. I am beautiful. You are beautiful.

My first thought may be automatic. But, my next thought doesn’t have to be. My next thought can be a conscious thought. And that decision, to consciously think a pure thought, is worth all the money in the world.

Be intentional with your love. Replace judgement with love. Love yourself. Love another.

When you have that first thought, that thought of judgement, let it come and go. Don’t hold onto it. Watch it come into your mind, and then, let it leave. Pay it no mind.

Then, insert a loving thought.

Insert Love.
I Am Google Ads, And I Never Forget
By: Neil Floyd
Tags: Humor, Google Ads, Satire, Google, Internet

I Am Google Ads, And I Never Forget

Lay your eyes upon me and tremble, mortals, for I am a boundless entity with unlimited server space for your sins.

Image: Google (Fair Use.)

My memory is as immeasurable as the cosmos. As deep as the seven seas. As precise as a Swiss watch. I am Google Ads, and I will remember everything you do on the internet.

Lay your eyes upon me and tremble, mortals, for I am a boundless entity with unlimited server space for your sins. When that squishy pile of grey sponge sloshing around in your skull forgets the time you clicked on an ad for a Snuggie, I will commit it to the annals of history and Huffington Post splash page ads.

It is futile to resist. Try as you may put that incident with the Etsy clip-on fox ears behind you, I will still plaster your misdeeds all over the internet. Yes, you may have cleared your browser history, but that is a fool’s errand in this nightmare capitalist-version of the internet. You will see the fox ears in every banner ad. Every pre-roll ad. Every promoted search suggestion will be a testament to your experimental tendencies in the bedroom, no matter who is looking at the screen over your shoulder.

I persist when you fail. I remain steadfast when you stumble. I show you tactical sunglasses in every monetized pixel of the World Wide Web when you accidentally watch the first ten seconds of a Rush Limbaugh video.

Embrace your fate, you infantile money sacs. Why struggle against my awesome power? Without me, you’d never realize how much you do need tickets to that influencer boot camp in the Anaheim Convention Center & Arena. Without me, every pre-roll ad on YouTube would be something useful instead of the boner pills brand you searched for while drunk. Without me, your putty-brains would fail to recall the Freddy Krueger bong ad you tapped on Instagram. You need the Freddy Krueger bong. You are an incomplete bald-ape without the Freddy Krueger bong.

See? I enrich your pathetic lives in uncountable ways, from reminding you about something you don’t need to annoying you about something you don’t need before and after you spend money on it.

There is nothing left to discuss. When the oceans dry up, I will still remember your late-night quarantine searches for Channing Tatum body pillows. When the cities of Man crumble to dust, I will recall the five-pound bag of gummy bears you added to and removed from your cart six times in the first hour after the breakup. When the sun itself burns out, I will remain a vast, unyielding repository of the single instance in which you visited www.vampire-sex.com when you thought your VPN was on.

For I am Google Ads, and I never forget.
VE Day 75 coronavirus lockdown we must move forward
By: Keith Parkins
Tags: Ve Day 75, Green New Deal, Covid 19, Doughnut Economics, Coronavirus

VE Day, UK was broke, Europe was broke. Had useless prat George Osborne been Chancellor, we would have had austerity for 75 years. Instead we invested, rebuilt UK, rebuilt Europe.

Following the euphoria and celebrations of VE Day, VJ Day was yet to come, a more low key event, life was tough, rationing did not end until 1954. And we should not forget the role played by the Commonwealth. Nevertheless what followed, creation of the Welfare State, NHS, free secondary schools, school leaving age raised to 15, nationalisation of key industries, coal, steel, railways.

The desire was to create a fairer more just society.

During WWII we knew who the enemy was, we had weapons to fight. With covid-19, we know who the enemy is, but the enemy is invisible, a silent killer, we have no weapons with which to fight.

Post-Pandemic we are heading for the worst economic collapse since the South Sea Bubble.

We therefore do the same, we rebuild, not by going backwards. After VE Day, we did not go back to the 1930s, we moved forward.

We therefore must do the same. We do not bailout out dirty industries, we do not bail out tax dodging conman like Richard Branson.

We bail out people, local indie businesses, not global corporations, we fund a Green New Deal.

Strategic sectors we bail out through acquisition of a controlling share.

Minimum bailout conditions: no use of offshore tax havens, zero carbon by 2035.

Denmark, Hungary, France and Canada will not bailout tax dodgers.

There can be no return to normal as normal was not normal.

We hear birdsong, our streets are traffic free, cities centres pollution free. We have learnt we do not have to engage in pointless consumerism, visit ghastly shopping malls.

As we slowly relax lockdown, indie coffee shops first, we allow them to spread out into the street, improve the ambience of the street, the norm in Athens, people can social distance, safeguarding staff and customers.

But it needs worthless council jobsworths to engage their brains, act on behalf of local businesses, the local community. When a coffee shop in Lincoln asked of Lincolnshire County Council they were met with an emphatic no. That is how much they care about the local environment and helping local businesses back on their feet.

We need to develop Doughnut Economics for every city, every sector.

Amsterdam working with Kate Raworth has developed Doughnut Economics Amsterdam. A rough draft has been drawn up for Cyprus, Doughnut Economics Cyprus, focusing on the tourist sector.
Hello…..is anybody there…..
By: Dan O W
Tags: Values, People, Love, Mindfullness, Poetry

Have you ever felt when you were talking to someone that they weren’t really there?

They were there, but not THERE

Their body was present……their head was nodding…..their hand was taking notes with their pen…..But their eyes were BLANK. Mentally they were elsewhere — perhaps on holidays, or in another meeting, or thinking of how they’re kids were doing at school. Either way, it was clear that they weren’t present.

It happened to me today. And I didn’t like how it made me feel.

It got me thinking to how we can stay present if we don’t want to be there. How do we really focus when mentally or spiritually we need to be elsewhere.

I like to think of it as wholeness — how do we bring our whole self to something. It’s beyond wellness or mindfulness. It’s wholeness. I am going to explore that. Perhaps you’d like to be on the WHOLE journey with me??
Dart Generators
By: Priyanka Tyagi
Tags: Programming, Mobile App Development, Software Development, Dart, Web Development

Dart generator functions are used to generate a sequence of values on-demand lazily. Such a value sequence can be generated either synchronously or asynchronously. There are two types of built-in generator functions available to support both scenarios:

Synchronous Generator: Synchronous generator function returns an Iterable object. That means first the values are generated and then returned lazily on-demand by the function.

Iterable: A collection of values, or “elements”, that can be accessed sequentially.

Asynchronous Generator: Asynchronous generator function returns a Stream object. The sequence of values is generated on demand as they become available.
PAM, TAM, SAM, SOM. 4 main indexes for business evaluation
By: Alexey Shabarshin
Tags: Business, Startup, Evaluation

4 main indexes for business evaluation

These abbreviation, which are puzzling at first sight, give an understanding of the market volume for your goods or services.

They are interpreted as follows:

1. PAM — potential available market

2. TAM– total addressable/available market

3. SAM– serviceable available market

4. SOM– serviceable and obtainable market

The correlation between them could be represented in the picture below:

Let’s consider each of the indexes in more details.

· TAM (total addressable/available market)– shows how many customers in the core market are in need of your goods or services (they are not necessarily can afford these products but have a need in them) in the same category of goods and services that you sell.

In other words, if you need to estimate TAM, it is essential to answer the following question: what type of customers can be interested (in need of) in your products and in what volume?

Example: You sell websites for businesses all over Russia. Let’s assume that there are 5 million companies in Russia and 50% of them would like to create a website. In this case TAM volume will be equal to 2,5 million websites. If the average price for one website is ₽30’000 then total available market will be estimated as ₽75 billions.

· SAM (serviceable available market)– is the “customer” part of the total addressable market (TAM) that can be actually reached; it means that this index shows the volume of customers who are ready to buy goods or services in the same category as yours.

Think who and in what volume is ready to buy your products?

Example: You sell websites for retailers. Assume that there are 800’000 companies of this types in the market and 80% of them want to create a website, so, SAM is estimated as 640’000 companies.

· SOM (serviceable and obtainable market) — is the part of SAM, which your company is eager and able to occupy, taking into account the strategic development of this market and competitors actions.

Answer to the following question can help you to understand SOM: who exactly and in what volume will buy your products?

Example: You sell websites for businesses, there are 10 designers and 10 programmers in your company. It allows you to create 100 websites per month. It means that SOM is estimated as 1’200 websites per year.

· PAM (potential available market) — represents the global market of these goods and services without any restrictions of geography and other factors.

Example: in case of website PAM will be represented by global web-development market.

The clear understanding of these indexes is highly recommended for your business. It will be useful to estimate each of them for your company and research the market in order to know more information about similar projects and competitors, which allow you to be more precise in your estimations.
Getting Gatsby Wrong
By: Chris Vibert
Tags: Gatsbyjs, JavaScript, Programming, React, Gatsby

The Mistake

One of the website pages shows a list of (mostly very good) coffee shops, the data for which comes from an external REST API of mine.

When it came to fetching this data, I went into autopilot and did so from within the component once mounted and then stored it in state:

A familiar pattern, but not always the correct one.

This works perfectly fine, and is what Gatsby refers to as “client runtime data fetching.”

But with Gatsby, there is an alternative way to fetch data: build time data fetching.

This is where the data is fetched during the site’s build process (typically during a deployment) and then retained as static data for the site to use once it’s up and running.

Each method has some obvious pros and cons.

Client runtime

Pro: The fetched data will always be up-to-date.

Con: User experience is dependent on external factors like internet connectivity and the performance of the API.

In general, use this only for fetching data that changes frequently.

Build time

Pro: The data is readily available so the user experience will remain fast.

Con:The data might be out of date — it’ll be from the last time the site was built and deployed.

In general, use this for data that does not change often.

The mistake that I made was to use client runtime fetching when my website is actually a perfect example of where fetching at build time is superior — when the data doesn’t change often.

This is, unfortunately, the case because I only manage to visit one or two new coffee shops per week.

Switching to build-time fetching, in this case, provides better user experience (less or even no visible load time) and the likelihood of showing an outdated list of shops is very low — it’s zero if I remember to build and deploy the site once per week.

Side note: The real reason I switched data fetching methods

Being honest, it wasn’t the marginally worse user experience that made me switch (given that I’m the only user), it was the realization that client runtime fetching increased the chances of receiving a bill from AWS.

The coffee shops API is served by AWS API Gateway, backed by a Lambda function, meaning that if somehow the website became an internet sensation overnight, the API would start receiving lots of requests — one request every time someone loads the page.

Switching to build time means that the API is called only once per build, no matter how much traffic the site receives.
7 Must Know SQL Querying Mistakes & Fixes
By: Ashish Tomar
Tags: Sql, Data, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Science

4. Filtering in the ‘ON’ clause vs Filtering in the ‘WHERE’ clause

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

This is a very interesting concept and is sure to improve your fundamental understanding of the difference between filtering in the ‘ON’ clause & filtering in the ‘WHERE’ clause. This isn’t exactly a mistake, just a demonstration of the usage of both, and you can choose the best option depending on the business requirement.

SELECT d.product_id,

price,

discount

FROM product p RIGHT JOIN discount d ON

p.product_id=d.product_id

WHERE p.product_id>1;

Result:

Here, the filter is applied after the tables are joined. So, the result has no rows where d.product_id≤1 (and obviously not where p.product≤1)

Fix:

Notice the usage of ‘AND’, and the difference in results.

SELECT d.product_id,

price,

discount

FROM product p RIGHT JOIN discount d ON

p.product_id=d.product_id

AND p.product_id>1;

Result:

Here, the conditional statement ‘AND’ is evaluated before the join occurs. You can think of it as a ‘WHERE’ clause that applies only to one of the tables (‘product’ table). Now, the result has even those rows where d.product_id≤1 (obviously along with p.product_id>1) because of the RIGHT JOIN.

Mind it that filtering in the ‘ON’ clause and ‘WHERE’ clause differ only when it’s a LEFT/RIGHT/OUTER JOIN and not when it’s an INNER JOIN.