fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Look at That, My Stats are Up!
By: Kim Smyth
Tags: 100 Naked Words, Writing, Statistics, Productivity

Isaac Smith for Unsplash

Why is this important, you might ask? Well, for one, improved stats means more eyes are seeing my work, a win in itself. Two, higher stats usually relates to money earned, and in my case, I earned about a dollar more than last month. Not great, yet it proves that more work equals more money- yes it’s hard, but at some point, if I keep writing, and improving at my craft, eventually I will be making enough to replace my part-time income. Maybe more…it’s all about how much one wants it. Of course, I have my hands in lots of pots trying to earn a buck from my writing. Some day all those bucks will add up to something. Am I right?!
What’s Next?
By: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
Tags: Anxiety, Mental Health, Nonfiction, Comics, Lifestyle

Cartoonist for the New Yorker among other places. I love my mom and white wine. My graphic memoir MURDER BOOK out in 2021. Follow on Insta @CartoonsbyHilary!

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Why a Good Swift Developer Doesn’t Need to Know a Ton of Patterns
By: Adebayo Ijidakinro
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Swift Programming, Startup, Swift, iOS App Development

Patterns are based on principles, so learn the principles and you’ll write better code

Modularity Reusability Easy to read Easy to modify.

These four principles should always be applied when you write code. These principles can be broken down into others. But at the end of the day, it’s these four core principles that matter. Focus on those principles and you’ll write great code.

When you first start an application, it’s difficult to know where that application will be in one year. Applications evolve. This makes it difficult at the outset to know what pattern is going to fit your scenario. So how do you counteract this?

If you understand the principles behind the patterns, then you can implement those principles from the start.

Making sure that you maintain modularity. Writing things to be reusable when you have the opportunity. Properly documenting your code.

All these things should always be applied. And they can always be applied, no matter what the scenario.

So don’t overly concern yourself over what pattern to use. Concern yourself over how to apply those four principles.
Late One Morning
By: Jen Maidenberg
Tags: Love, Writing, Nonfiction, Salvador Dali, Poetry

For Salvador Dali (and you)

Photo by Sandra Klaas via Unsplash

It is always the same window

no matter how many other

windows

roll past

it is this window

that’s the first.

Always.

It is always the same window

on the third floor

in the house

on Argyle.

It is early

even when it’s late

one morning.

It is always the same window

hard to shut

unlike the other

windows

hard to open

it is this one I look out from

always.

Even when it’s closed

it is always the same

window.
How to Get & Stay “In The Zone”
By: Hannah Davies
Tags: Positive Psychology, Attention, Flow, Psychology, Productivity

How to Get & Stay “In The Zone”

A masterclass from research on the flow state.

Attention is our most precious resource.

It’s also one we’re giving away like free sweets. We give up hours of attention each day with little to show for it — scrolling Facebook, watching YouTube compilations.

What if we could spend this same time in an intensely rewarding way?

This is where the flow state comes in. In 1975, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a famous psychologist and founder of positive psychology, investigated which states people felt the happiest in: which enabled them to find meaning in their lives.

He interviewed rock climbers, surgeons, shepherds, artists, and scientists of all incomes and backgrounds. He found they all held the ability to attain a state of “effortless absorption and control” in common. They felt the most satisfied with their time spent in that state.

“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The flow state isn’t a magical, unobtainable superpower. All of us can, and do, enter flow when consumed by something we are passionate about.

However, most of us do this by accident — flow is the reason it’s so hard to say no to “one last match” before you sleep.

By examining how flow is induced, how it works, what it feels like, and how we reach it, we can channel this powerful state of mind to gain more from our lives, and our endeavours within them.
Hungry for Food, not Fame
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Memoir, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Journalism, Life

By the time I immigrate to America in 2013, I’m lost for words, wondering what to make of it all, floundering.

Although I’ll be locked into denial mode for a long time, I sink into major depression, the kind that paralyzes you, renders you helpless.

I may have led an interesting and varied life to date, but the illness has somehow convinced me I have nothing to show for it.

After bending for years on end, I break.

As a result, my household is forced to struggle on one income that never stretches far enough in Seattle, one of the most expensive cities in America. As our financial burden grows, our marriage strains and groans under the weight of it all.

My writing voice is gone, I stop generating ideas, pitching… my mind is utterly blank, and not just editorially.

I haven’t a clue what to do with myself, how to move on, how to reboot this human who seems to have drifted so very far away from her original purpose.

Even my personal blog — which is directly responsible for my American life — falls to the wayside after almost a decade of writing it under one guise or another.

For five years, I’m a hermit with a library card, a yoga mat I keep by my desk so that it guilts me into using it, and the growing shame of someone with a great many dots far too incapacitated to connect them.

It takes me three years to face the page and tell this story and another two to put it to bed, and to put enough distance between my public media dream, the sporadic newspaper ramblings of a foreign woman at the heart of the Atlantic, beef ham, and me.

During this time, News From the Azores is erased, an institutional embarrassment never to be mentioned again save for a handful of screen captures from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and a lone academic citation.

And yet, I have no regrets.

My faith in the power of words and in journalism as a public service remains intact.

After a long and painful hiatus that lasts for years, I start writing again, collapse some more, then finally get back on the horse this summer.

I’m relearning everything.

If vocation is a blessing, it can also be a curse.

And I have so far failed to get rid of it.
How Batching and Stacking Can Solve Your Time Management Problem
By: Tim Jackson
Tags: Management, CEO, Startup, Venture Capital, Productivity

Learning from open-heart surgery

Batching is a great way you can reduce the stress and overhead of having to keep track of lots of identical things at once. But what do you do when the things aren’t identical? Here I was influenced by Atul Gawande’s brilliant book The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande is a top surgeon in Boston, who also writes for the New Yorker about health policy, and his book is about the way that even the most experienced and talented doctors can make mistakes, particularly when they’re doing something complex that requires lots of steps and lots of concentration. It may sound bizarre, but surgeons have been known to forget about a sponge or even a scalpel, and mistakenly sew them up inside the bodies of a patient after an operation.

What Gawande realised was that a simple step-by-step checklist can help eliminate these errors. Airline pilots have used them for years; unfortunately, doctors haven’t, and many of them declared themselves insulted by even the suggestion that they might make a mistake. Hence the need for Gawande’s book. He has had to work hard to persuade senior doctors that they’re not infallible. As a result of Gawande’s work, a number of hospitals have managed to persuade their most talented people that following a checklist isn’t an insult to their intelligence — and the result is a higher success rate and a lower infection rate in operations.

I applied this in my own work by identifying the many small tasks that need to be done regularly, and turning them into checklists that can be easily followed. The items don’t have to be related, or part of a sequence that makes up a bigger whole. But there’s a benefit in doing them together, because that allows you to knock off a stack of small tasks in one go — and once you do this regularly, you’ve got a ‘habit stack’.

SJ Scott’s book Habit Stacking gives some valuable advice on how to create habit stacks. Pick a number of things that take less than five minutes each, that aren’t part of some bigger whole, and that are simple to complete and improve your life or your work. Put them in a logical order and create a checklist for them that takes 30 minutes or less to complete. And then do them every day or every week as required.

Scott has some good advice on how to make habit stacks work. Choose an appropriate time and location for them so that you can regularly get them done. Build one routine at a time, rather than trying to checklistify your entire life in one go. Start with small wins, and articulate to yourself why you’re doing this and how you hope to benefit. Make yourself accountable by telling someone else about the new process you’ve put in, and asking them to check with you how it’s going. Do your best to repeat regularly on the schedule you’ve decided, and finally give yourself some rewards, even if they’re small, for succeeding.
How Many Times a day do you Think About Dying?
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Relationships, Self, Mental Health, Psychology, Culture

Sunshine is gently warming the tip of my nose and I can make out different birds chirping.

I will myself to stay under the duvet a while longer and focus on the sensation of warmth on my face, on the sounds outside, and on how exhausted I still am. Perhaps if I resist wakefulness the birds will lull me back to sleep so I can try to start the day again a little later, with better thoughts.

No sooner has the possibility of more rest entered my consciousness that a train wrenches me out of my reverie again.

Every single detail of last night comes back to me, how I stood still gritting my teeth so I wouldn’t run, how I stood under the shower so I wouldn’t run.

How I stood staring at the kitchen counter so I wouldn’t run, how I stood staring at the page and months of work so I wouldn’t run.

How I stood my ground in the face of a brain that urged me to destroy absolutely everything, including the pain of being alive.
Story or Article?
By: Harry F. Karoussos
Tags: Storytelling, Writing, Medium

A writer has the right and responsibility of choosing their content’s attire. You can either go to the ball dressed classier that any royal face, or dirtier than any hardcore punk. Either way, the spotlight will shine on you; what’s to be done, is simply determine which way to attract it.

The publisher — or any private writer for that matter — may go with the benefit of freedom of speech. No boundaries to mention if one is to follow this path of free movements in terms of words, paragraphs and other basic parts of a text structure. However, this is not to be mistaken with your text’s flow. Regardless of your choosing in general terms, including format, you must always have a comprehensible order of ideas if you wish for someone other than yourself to ever read — let alone enjoy — your written work. Back on the structure principles, it should also be noted that the very fundamentals of a text’s base must always be present regardless of your preferences. Remember, not even freely-expressed poets got away with skipping commas, colons, semi-colons or apostrophes.

On the contrary, a fan of logic, order, and structured thinking would surely pave the way towards a more technically-based text. It might even come to a point where their writing partly becomes a form of art; just like a painter examines every small touch of their pen against the canvas, a writer forms paragraphs only where they believe it will make the reader feel more euphoric than any other part afterwards. Both make choices to the best interest of their work’s final result. Never should one forget, nevertheless, that this path is not limited to paragraph-aligning and certain spaces in-between phrases. Structure also implies means of logic, like the ones we previously explained that will lead to de facto; graphs, statistics, equations, official papers etc.
10 Underrated Python Skills
By: Nicole Janeway Bills
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Python, Computer Science, Data Science, Programming

#1 — Understanding the __main__ function

Using if __name__ == '__main__' provides the flexibility to write code that can be executed from the command line or imported as a package into an interactive environment. This conditional statement controls how the program will execute given the context.

You should expect that a user running your code as an executable has different goals than a user importing your code as a package. The if __name__ == ‘__main__' statement provides control flow based on the environment in which your code is being executed.

__name__ is a special variable in the module’s global namespace

is a special variable in the module’s global namespace It has a repr() method that is set by Python

method that is set by Python The value of repr(__name__) depends on the execution context

depends on the execution context From the command line, repr(__name__) evaluates to ‘__main__’ — therefore any code in the if block will run

evaluates to ‘__main__’ — therefore any code in the if block will run Imported as a package, repr(__name__) evaluates to the name of the import — therefore code in the if block will not run

Why is this helpful? Well, someone running your code from the command line will have the intention of executing functions right away. This may not be true of someone importing your package as utility code into a Jupyter Notebook.

In if __name__ == ‘__main__' you should create a function called main() that contains the code you want to run. Across programming languages, the main function provides an entry point for execution. In Python, we name this function main() only by convention — unlike lower level languages, Python does not ascribe any special significance to the main function. By using the standard terminology however, we let other programmers know that this function represents the starting point of the code that accomplishes the primary task of the script.

Rather than including blocks of task-accomplishing code within main() , the main function should call other functions stored within the module. Effective modularization allows the user to reuse aspects of the code as they wish.

The extent to which you modularize is up to you — more functions means more flexibility and easier reuse, but may make your package more difficult for a human to read and interpret as they traverse logical breaks between functions.
Can Language Help you Heal?
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Language, Travel, Mental Health, Portugal, Psychology

Something eery always happens the minute I step inside a plane bound for Portugal.

No matter how stressed out and overtired I am, all it takes is a “Boa tarde!*” or “Bom dia!**” to set me right. Greetings from the flight crew, captain chatter, and even the safety briefing all have a calming effect on me. By the time we take off, I’m relaxed and sporting a smile that stretches from ear to ear.

I just can’t help it.

I fall head over heels in love with the Azores — one of Portugal’s autonomous regions made up of nine islands — in 2007. My ending up on a remote volcanic rock in the middle of the North Atlantic is a result of happenstance, a last-minute work assignment as a tour director.

I’ve never even set foot in continental Portugal before, but in the time it takes to go from the airport to the hotel, I’m smitten. Within a year, I’ve made São Miguel island my base as I continue to travel around the world leading tours. Within two, I’m back into journalism working for Portuguese public media and newspapers, in English and Portuguese. By then, I’m deeply integrated into local society and feel at home for the first time in a long time.

Much as some places can upend your life when you least expect it, another language can unlock a whole new world.

Not only is Portuguese the key to accessing the culture of a wide community of countries spanning the globe, from Portugal to Cabo Verde via Brazil and Angola but it puts me in touch with a side of me I’ve never met before. In Portuguese, I’m more emotionally fluent and poetry sometimes happens, even though it is an art I’ve never practiced in any other language. Every now and then, a line, a stanza, or even a whole poem comes out of nowhere, unbidden.

Portuguese is that couple extra octaves my voice never knew it needed, a language that enriches my life and nourishes my heart and mind.

Alas, the 2008 financial crisis cripples Portugal for years and I struggle as much as everyone else even though I’m working. My circumstances become untenable and I have to leave in 2011. Numb, I watch the coastline disappear into the expanse of blue down below and my life with it as I fly toward the unknown once more.

As I immigrate to the US in 2013, depression fells me and destroys everything.
Yemen’s Civil War and Social Media
By: Damian Radcliffe
Tags: Middle East, Social Media, Conflict, Yemen, Journalism

Debate over showing the impact of the war

Facebook received backlash after it removed posts from users who shared images of emaciated Yemeni children published in the New York Times.

“At issue,” the Times explained, “was a photograph of a starving child.”

Image: Amal Hussain, a 7-year-old Yemeni girl, whose picture sparked a strong response. Amal was photographed suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Source: Tyler Hicks/The New York Time[iii]

“The article included several images of emaciated children. Some were crying. Some were listless. One, a 7-year-old girl named Amal, was shown gazing to the side, with flesh so paper-thin that her collarbone and rib cage were plainly visible.”

“Yes, Tyler’s images are hard to look at. They are brutal. But they are also brutally honest,” the Times’ Eric Nagourney and Michael Slackman wrote. “They reveal the horror that is Yemen today. You may choose not to look at them. But we thought you should be the ones to decide.”[iv]

Facebook has since emailed an explanation to the Times and republished the initial Facebook posts.[v]

“As our community standards explain, we don’t allow nude images of children on Facebook, but we know this is an important image of global significance,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement printed by the Times. “We’re restoring the posts we removed on this basis.”
Writing Begins with Reading
By: Laura Manipura
Tags: Libraries, Writing, Reading, Ftl Bio, Books

Writing Begins with Reading

My Journey

In the first part of this series, I talked about my mother’s earliest memories of reading, her parents and her childhood. In this post, I pick up with my mother’s earliest memories of me as a young child.

Writing Starts with Reading…

“I started reading to you when you were just an infant. I remember reading Mother Goose poems to you and you would like quietly in my arms and seemed to listen, starting about the time you were two months old.”

2. “You picked up reading so fast. Just a few weeks into first grade you were reading by yourself. You were reading third-grade books before the end of the school year.”

3. “You were always a voracious reader. When you were at the Day School, your class was often taken to the bookmobile. The other kids were amazed at the huge pile of books you checked out. You had so many that the boys had to help you carry them.”
26 Steps of Product & Dashboard Design
By: Jan Losert
Tags: Product Design, Sketch, Design, Dashboard, UX

Set up Project Folder and Start Collecting Moodboard

There are plenty of sites for inspiration — Dribbble, Behance, Pttrns, Pinterest etc. It’s really easy to find similar projects to the one you shall be working on. Additionally, there may be already a solution to a problem you’re experiencing and trying to solve.



When I start working on a new project, I always setup a folder with folders named — Source Files, Screens & Export, Inspiration & Resources. I save everything I find on the internet to Inspiration folder to be able to use it later to create basic moodboards. This folder could be filled with anything from plugins, swatches or even full case studies from Behance.

2. Going Low Fidelity

Whiteboard

If anyone can remember, I didn’t care much about the quality of wireframes in my previous article. The methods I use now are the following:



If we want to add a new feature or redesign a process we sit down and everybody at the meeting starts sketching ideas on a whiteboard, paper or even an iPad. This action allows us to put everyone on the team in the designer’s position. Later we end up with two design options to see which one works the best. We always try to go through the whole experience and discuss most of the edge cases during this part of the process. It is really crucial to address them now as opposed to during the design phase, or even worse, during the development part. That’s when you can lose a lot time and energy instead.

Map out all of your screens info (What data a user needs to input)

This is the time to go beyond the whiteboard and list out all of the user’s inputs and stories. Write down what exactly should a user insert into a particular screen and how can a user achieve the desired goals.

Write down all possible states

Because all dashboards, apps or websites’ forms have different states, this is another important step you shouldn’t forget.



While designing we need to be sure to address all of them. It’s nice to have shiny graphs and cool profile pictures in our Sketch files or PSDs. However, most likely, users will see the opposite side of your app. Especially when they come to your product. It’s necessary to be prepared. Below is an example of how we deal with empty states in one of our data components.
3 Easy Zen Ways to Boost Your Mood at Home This Winter
By: Maria Milojković
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Psychology

3 Easy Zen Ways to Boost Your Mood at Home This Winter

Happiness lies in simple everyday actions

Zen monks quarters in the Kennin-ji temple area of Kyoto © by Simone Parisi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Last spring, I found my peace in the middle of the COVID-19 panic. Of course, I hit the rock bottom first.

After four weeks of cooking, cleaning, and mothering two kids in isolation, I wanted to holler. I felt helpless and angry. We were locked in a skyscraper for four days every week. One night, I started to cough and panicked. Who was going to take care of the kids if I went to the hospital? Then I said to myself: “From tomorrow, you can’t check the news more than once a day.”

And so the change started. Every time I had enough, I went to the balcony. I’d put on a ridiculous straw hat and sit among the flower pots. I’d read a book, and soak up the April sun until my butt started to hurt. I was as Zen as you can be without a spiritual retreat around the block.

When we say Zen, we mean cool — not bothered by negative feelings. It’s far from the Buddhist Zen you achieve with a master and years of sitting meditation (Zazen). But you can practice Zen rituals to relax anywhere, even in a crowded city.

Zen is the enemy of productivity. You don’t multitask or work in bursts to do more. You do one thing at a time, slowly. Everyday chores become your meditation. You don’t ruminate. To be Zen, think like your grandma. Her life was slower, simpler, and harder — but probably happier than yours.

We haven’t finished with COVID-19 yet. The numbers of its victims are soaring everywhere again and you can feel panic in the media. Here are three simple habits that helped me focus on the present moment and they can help you as well.
The Literally Literary Weekly Update #3
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Poetry, Nonfiction, Ll Letters, Fiction, Writing

One Last Note

We have 27,489 followers at Literally Literary. We have approximately 200 writers. Even with these tremendous numbers, most of the submitted works get less than 20 views. Why? Algorithms.

How do we combat this and support each other? Bookmark our homepage and once a day, come here and see what you missed. The only way we can be the kind of community we all want to be is to support each others’ works by reading them.

Our homepage has a Top 25–30 that is updated every single day with new works published in the last month. Below that, you will find our trending works and then the latest ones that you may have missed. Be a participant and read works from amazing writers that maybe you don’t follow yet, but might want to.
Listening Out For The Australian Powerful Owl
By: The Labs
Tags: Powerful Owl, Ecology, Environment, Science, Birds

From studying law like a hawk to studying owls for science — QUT research student Callan Alexander is working with BirdLife Australia to help track and monitor Australia’s threatened powerful owl.

As part of his masters research, Alexander will develop an automated species recogniser — a computer algorithm that detects a species’ call from an audio recording.

To do this, he visited several nature reserves around Queensland and captured audio from the environment using acoustic monitors.

“We can take audio from an area and run it through the algorithm which should tell us if there are any powerful owls around,” Alexander said.

“This will help us accurately track the distribution of Australia’s largest owl, especially in remote areas that are difficult to visit regularly.”
5 (More) Reasons Why You Should be Writing for Medium
By: Brian Rowe
Tags: Writing, Medium, Success, Entrepreneurship, Love

I’ve been writing for Medium for 2 1/2 years, and I’ve loved every minute of it!

Even my worst days on Medium are fun. I love writing about writing, love engaging with other writers in this incredible community. I’m always thrilled by something every day, and every week and month is like a whole new adventure.

In August I talked about five reasons you should be writing for Medium…

And those, of course, are all valid reasons! It’s so much fun to write about what you want, and to actually make some income while doing it.

Taking chances on new topics is fun too, as is engaging with other writers on here. And of course it’s nice once in awhile to have your writing published, rather than have it linger for years and years like so many manuscripts you might write as a novelist (I’m shining a mirror on myself with that one).

Here are five more reasons to write for this site sooner rather than later!
Let’s build an eCommerce platform from scratch
By: Jay Patel
Tags: Design, Application, Website, Development, Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the most widespread & most demanding business these days. The easiest way to buy and sell goods nowadays is mostly done online through an eCommerce platform. It is a never-ending viral loop of a quickly growing platform to provide the physical product available to an end-user or another business entity.

You all be familiar with shopping online from Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, eBay, Ali Express and many others, the working methodologies are the same as they make sure to deliver the product and build trust amongst us. Most of the businesses these days are making there own small or medium scale eCommerce platforms to reach out to more people.

TL: DR;

I am talking about the technical part of building an eCommerce website and app. Before you develop one, you must dive deep inside to understand the business patterns of eCommerce.

For taking the next step towards developing your brand and creating your digital business platform, you need to know about your business. A little time is required to establish an eCommerce business if you have a solid understanding of your brand, trade, or idea.

Brief Knowledge about your business.

Designing and Prototypes

Developing

Testing

Launching

Designing

Designing is all about shaping the ideas to get quality designs out of it. The artboard and web pages are designed in software such as Adobe XD, Sketch for finalizing the prototype. Creating a Database design is an essential part of designing, and we can preferably be understanding the User Flows and ER diagrams for that. You can use FlowMapp or Creately for this purpose. The collab feature in the app helps the UI team to develop the user flows much faster.
The Place Where Everything Feels Cold and Empty Is Not Far Away
By: Abdullah Alshawaf
Tags: Short Story, Relationships, Mental Health, Poetry, Storytelling

The Place Where Everything Feels Cold and Empty Is Not Far Away

No one reached it yet, as it’s moving whenever they moved

Photo by Guillaume Bleyer on Unsplash

There was a group of men,

whose hearts never new the best

and no matter how much they desired it

they didn’t know where is it.

Their hopes clutched to one experiment

in which they will seek the worst,

to know its contrary

and peruse it.

They looked for the worst in men,

from the dreary traits

to the heroic merits.

They searched day and night

with one goal and aim:

To discover the truth.

And when they got tired,

when they decided to stop,

they turned to see the truth

sitting behind them all along,

then they lowered their heads

and looked into themselves.

The surprise hit, but not an actual surprise

because in most of the occasions

we predict the bad news and we pretend

we are shocked.

The men saw nothing in themselves,

but the worst of the worst

floating and swimming in their veins.

Their eyes scanning the lengths of their bodies,

as if they expected to find

anything else.

Emptiness. And I’m glad they gave it a name.

They stopped the research and looked

to one another,

to the only thing

they had in common.

It linked them like a thread of silk

barely stretching to unite them by

their sudden, semi-new goal:

Finding the worst in themselves before touching it in others.

And since they turned the project down,

they feared the thread would perish.

A long, awkward silence filled the place,

and until now flies only flew around them

increasing the tense.

A long, sweaty, thick hand stretched, or

that’s the description from one’s mind.

It hung up in the air, as to mark

a clothes hanger — a thick one.

Two hands stretched, then three

and slowly one by one, they shook hands

and tried to smile.

The days hastened by,

and the group of men

had more silk threads

and less envisions

of sweaty hands.

And they were astounded to look

into themselves and find

the emptiness

fading away

leaving words in its place:

Relationship, friendship, and love — ship, perhaps?

They were not certain yet.

And the moment came in which

they broke apart

and didn’t shatter.

They found the contrary.
How To Make The Coronavirus Work For You
Tags: Self Improvement, Mental Health, Covid-19, Coronavirus, Philosophy

Are you afraid or experiencing financial hardship during the coronavirus spread like I am? I can honestly say it gives me more of a reason to make my resume perfect, and it gives me the time to get the certification I’ve been wanting to further my career with. I can assure you, this is the perfect time to start doing the things you put off because you were too busy.

There are just so many things I can do to make this obstacle into the life raft I need to get ahead in the world.

This coronavirus is trying to split communities apart. It’s making people afraid to be be within 6 feet of each other. Maybe it’s time we start thinking of ways to communicate and feel that bond while still being quarantined. It is definitely possible with the technology we have today. When was the last time you wrote a nice letter to someone? We have email now! Or the “Marco Polo” app(not a sponsor), or called someone? Tell people what you are working on, what you’re grateful for.

The other day I called a friend up and just chatted with him for over an hour about nothing in particular, and felt a deep sense of friendship once the call ended. The kind I felt with him when we lived by each other and worked together. I haven’t felt that close of a bond with him in 7 years. Now I feel like calling all of my friends and just seeing how they are doing. It feels good.

Social media is a great way to connect but it’s also very intrusive and has built distrust within our social circles and communities. With all the companies spying on our psychological patterns and how we use social media, I understand why some of the older generation are wary to trust these corporations. I am the first one to say social media is not the healthiest way to communicate. But a time like this calls for thinking outside of that explanation and expand our communities through knowledge in the social media realm. Instead of fearing it, get to understand it and create your boundaries around it. Now is the time to pick up that phone and strengthen a bond with an old friend.

The impediment of self-quarantine is no reason to stop your life, it’s more reason to begin a new life. One where you do what you love to do as your work, that skill you dreamed of doing when you were a teenager, but instead chose a safer path. Create stronger bonds of friendship through the use of modern technology. Italians have been singing together and to each other. Their Air Force even put on a show for them to bring entertainment to their lives. When was the last time you got excited about seeing planes fly in the sky, I can surely say it’s been a long time for me.

And maybe sooner rather than later we will all understand what that ancient roman meant when he said:
How to Go No-Contact After a Breakup
By: Zita Fontaine
Tags: Relationships, Self, Mental Health, Love, Psychology

Every heartbreak hurts. Every break up will shatter you in some way. But there’s nothing more heart-wrenching than surviving after a relationship with a narcissist. There exists a whole range of toxic people out there, ranging from energy vampires, average jerks, selfish and entitled individuals and, right at the other end of the scale, narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths.

They are all dangerous and detrimental to your mental and emotional health. Relationships with such people are inevitably going to end — and either when you are breaking up with them, or when they discard you for the umpteenth time and you finally say it was enough. That’s when no contact comes into play.

Originally the no contact rule was made up by dating coaches who suggested no contact as a means of getting back with your ex. As if manipulating someone into wanting to be with you after they left you would really be a viable option for most of us. As if something utterly broken could be repaired by playing hot and cold.

I’m not saying it never works — some might need a wake-up call to realise how much they lost. But in most cases, it’s doesn’t.

No matter what kind of ideology or pseudo-science you put behind it, it’s still manipulation and it doesn’t work. It just not how it should be. There is usually a good reason that a relationship goes south, and in most cases, the breakup comes after you tried to solve your problems in a mature way.

In this case, manipulation is not the answer. But no contact shouldn’t be about manipulation. It is about self-preservation and survival, and it’s not selfish, but a necessary act.
Listening With Curiosity
By: Katy Velvet
Tags: Leadership, Self Improvement, Relationships, Mental Health, Psychology

Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

What is a Good Listener?

A good listener is someone who doesn’t talk over the other person. They are patient and pause in between sentences to allow others to speak. They address people by their names and make eye contact with them.

In May, I wrote an article called Talk Less, Say More where I talked about why you should invite others to share their perspectives with you. After all, people tend to be more attracted to those with good listening skills.

What I didn’t talk about were the techniques that I use for effective communication and what has helped me become a better listener over the years. If you have any tips you’d like to add, I’d love to hear from you below in the comments.

Be Curious About People
當創新創業從傳奇故事變成科學實驗
Tags: Steve Blank, Startup, Business Model Canvas, Customer Development, Science

in In Fitness And In Health
Python HOW: Image processing for OCR using OpenCV
By: Gabriel Harris Ph.D.
Tags: Optical Character Recogn, Python, Opencv, Image Processing, Programming

If your image has random noise, uneven illumination, holes in front objects, etc. There are few things that you can do before posting your image to a computer vision API. In this article, we go through few processing techniques to boost OCR results using OpenCV

TL;DR: full code

Install OpenCV

Install OpenCV using your preferred package manager

You might want to create a virtual environment first

Read the image

I will use the cover of the 1st edition of one of my favorite books as an example. Let’s first read the image, specifying the colour type of the image to coloured. This will read the image in the default colour format in OpenCV which is BGR (Blue-Green-Red). We will then convert the colour space to the more common RGB order (and for visualisation), and finally, write a small function to show the image without any interpolation:

Docs for imread , cvtColor, imshow. To convert to gray, use code=cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY in line 14

Original: Image shape: 1360H x 1036W x 3C

Crop image

Mostly, you either have a box coordinates around the text (from a labelling tool), or you are only interested in part of your image. Our image is a 3D numpy array. To crop it, we can simply slice along the height and width:

Cropped: Image shape: 580H x 900W x 3C

Add border (i.e. padding) (doc)

This might be useful for APIs with OCR models trained on documents (documents usually have white border)
Easily build a REST API with Spring Framework
By: Rafael Martins
Tags: Technology, Software Engineering, Java, Spring Framework, Programming

# The Concept

Before I even start explaining how to create an API, you should first know what this thing called “API” is.

To begin with, API stands for Application Programming Interface, Wikipedia explains it as:

A computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc.

Let’s try mapping it to a specific example: Imagine you have a portfolio web page, where you share some information about yourself, like interests, side-jobs, professional experience, projects, and so on. Now you want people who follow you, to be always up to speed about your Spotify preferences.

You may think about manually going to your Spotify account and copy your liked songs, it may work if you are an inactive user, however if not, it will quickly become a cumbersome task.

That’s when the API word comes in, Spotify and a lot of other companies already developed their APIs, so people like you can avoid problems like this.

developer.spotify.com

In such a context, you will simply need to contact their API and request all the data that may fulfill your needs. In this case, your liked songs.

An API can be described as an application that exposes services without the need of having a front end.

Let’s now create our API example so we can easily understand what has been explained so far.
Finished
By: J.W. Parr
Tags: Poetry, Haiku, Books, Writing, Publishing

Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.

Follow
Void: Self-Discovery Oracle Card
By: Jordin James
Tags: Self, Mental Health, Inspiration, Spirituality, Psychology

The void is the womb that births you into a truer version of yourself. It’s the hole in your heart where the infinite lives.

The void is where you let go of the illusions that no longer serve you. Even though it feels like dying, the void is not where you die, it is where the lies you tell about yourself die.

The void is the tunnel you pass through as you become both your future self and your original self all at once.

Only that which serves you is allowed to through the tunnel. You must leave behind all that is toxic.

Consider your time in the void sacred, for the void is where you meet the infinite.

The void is where you meet yourself.
I’m Suffering From LOPS—Maybe You Are, Too
By: Elizabeth Cauvel
Tags: Depression, Mental Health, This Is Us, Happiness, Coronavirus

I’m Suffering From LOPS—Maybe You Are, Too

The emotions of the pandemic hit me late

I remember where I was the night my friend texted me to tell me that “this coronavirus thing” was serious. They said I should have two weeks’ worth of nonperishable groceries on hand. I was in Brooklyn, and I scheduled a food delivery on Amazon Prime from my phone — mostly beans, rice, and pasta — as I walked to a bar to watch one of the Democratic primary debates. That was back in late February—approximately 4,000 years ago.

The night I placed a laughably insufficient grocery order when I heard the pandemic might actually be serious. I still thought Warren might have a real shot at the nomination. How young we were!

In the beginning, it felt novel. Yes, trips to get essentials were harrowing affairs, but for a while, nights hunkered down at home, drinking wine on social Zoom calls with friends, felt like a giant experiment.

We were facing the unknown, but we were in it together. We sewed our own masks. We learned how to regrow scallions. We baked and baked and baked. Even the difficult parts of working remotely had a certain freshness; I carefully curated an aesthetically pleasing workspace in the nook by my kitchen window. For those of us privileged enough to experience the pandemic safely ensconced inside our apartments with plenty of groceries, this was fine.

Now we’re within arm’s reach of setting our clocks back and weathering the season of early darkness, and it’s clear that most of us aren’t okay. I think I’m suffering from LOPS: late-onset pandemic sadness. I am not a clinical psychologist, and this is not a diagnosis — it’s just an acronym I made up. But I think many of us are feeling it.

We burned through our reserves of “powering through” and “coming together” and “self-care” months ago. And sadness and loneliness and hopelessness have been leaking, drop by drop, into those empty tanks where our resolve used to be.
The Future of Artificial Intelligence
By: Roy Klaasse Bos
Tags: Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Study, Data Science

Last month I got the opportunity to pick the brain of some of the T500 nominees during The Next Web Conference 2018. In this article, I’ll share their views on a frequently recurring presentation topic at the event: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Not only did I ask them about the opportunities they saw, but also about the — at least as important — challenges and risks they identified.

Daniëlle Tump (25)

What are your opinions on Elon Musk’s view that AI could become more intelligent than the humans that created it?

I’m in two minds. On the one hand, I do believe that AI can teach itself to become smarter than humans. But on the other hand, I think that if a human creates AI it can therefore control the limits in which it functions. For Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) I don’t see any problems because it requires humans to read brainwaves. BCI still has a long way to go, before being able to function in a more complex manner. At present, BCI can be used in the healthcare system, for example. It can help people move, eat or steer their wheelchair. But it can also be used for entertainment purposes: changing the song you’re listening to just by thinking about it, instead of typing it on your phone or computer.

Do you think there is sufficient knowledge about the brain to make optimum use out of BCI?

Understanding the brain is a huge challenge on itself, let alone understanding each individual brain. Each brain is different, depending on the person and their surroundings. But I don’t believe we should delay further development of BCI, just because we don’t understand everything yet. There are already several useful applications, despite not having a complete understanding of the brain and its capacities. That said, it will become necessary to develop policies when BCI is used in daily life. If used for a polygraph, for example.
Digital Prototypes after a weekend? Yes, please!
By: Yesmith Sanchez
Tags: Hackathons, Startup, Event, Entrepreneurship, Prototyping

The latest version of the Digital Prototyping Weekend took place at Holvi last Saturday and Sunday (13–14 October)

A team working on their prototype. Photo credit: Pedro Cunha

There were 8 amazing ideas, and if you missed what they were, here is a summary for you:

Teamify acknowledges the utter importance of having a good team in order to succeed and taking ideas further. With Teamify you would be able to find people that possess the skills that your team is lacking.

CryptoGallery is an app for art lovers that allows to buy art with cryptocurrency with swipe function to yay or nay your favorite art and that would be algorithm based and VR assisted.

Car Doctor tackles on the problem of car mechanics, what if your car were to be treated as a patient and its “illnesses” were to be recorded on a unique profile? Transparent information and no surprises in bills.

Talent Rocket focuses the attention on the shortage of tech professionals and offers an auction platform solution that helps mid and large companies to find and hire special tech talent.

Sharbel Dahlan facilitating the event. Photo credit: Pedro Cunha

OnGo Talk is an app that facilitates face to face conversations for travelers while they wait to continue their train or plane journey. Anything to alleviate the pain of waiting while traveling, right?

Chill at Work focuses on getting the most of those seemingly dead times during a business trip by allowing users to connect with local events and activities of their interest.

FloweRescue unites flower lovers and middle age flowers to avoid them going to the bin. How does it work? Florists offer their not-so-fresh flowers on an online platform, they find and lighten a new home. This environmentally friendly idea won the first place on the DPW due to its readiness and applicability. Good luck at Junction, you guys!

Winner teams. Photo credit: Pedro Cunha

Wolnut, a tool to help life and business coaches and their clients to achieve real transformation by closer tracking of progress and personal capability. So long procrastination and self-sabotage, hello goals! This idea is the winner of the second place with thumbs up for being a transferable concept.

Thanks to all for the hard work! Great ideas that we certainly hope to see materialized in the near future.

Besides Digital Prototyping Weekend, The Shortcut arranges a variety of other highly interesting events! Subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Facebook to learn more.