fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
This New Year Will Be Different: I Will Live an Envied Life
By: Erica Lies
Tags: Humor, New Year, New Years Resolutions, Satire

In this New Year I will travel every day. I will visit Yellowstone. The great Redwoods. Big Sur. The microwave. The couch. Back again.

This year, I will learn a new language. The little owl from DuoLingo will be my bitch.

This year I will hack my productivity using the Pomodoro method. But I will call it the “Limone” because I am an iconoclast dedicated to using Italian words when an English one would suffice.

This year I will be the human equivalent of a Rumi quote set in Helvetica typescript over an image of a broken door in Jaipur, India.

This year I will Live. I will Laugh. I will Love.

I will cut all negative toxicity out of my life. Including Marisa and her constant chatter about how she’s cutting all the negative toxicity from her life.

This year I will release a line of limited edition travel fedoras. Each one will come with a cocktail recipe and a vape pen.

I will focus. Rather than endlessly scrolling Pinterest for the perfect kitchen backsplash, I will attain venture capital funding for my self-created fitness and nutrition regimen.

This year I will start a fitness and nutrition regimen.

I will go to ballet barre class every day. Except the days Marisa goes. She never shuts up about how her boyfriend, Chauncy, took her to Mykonos and bought her a cavoodle, also named Chauncy.

This year, I won’t go to Coachella. I will BE Coachella.

I will pivot my career to app design. The first will be a platform for changing careers. It’s called Pivt.

This year I will try something new and scary every day. I will hang glide in Mexico and ski black diamonds in Aspen. I will try chocolate-covered crickets. I will eat off-brand flaming hot Cheetos.

In 2019 I will prioritize self care. I will spend one day a week in a head-to-toe body mask of activated charcoal.

I will get more sleep. As soon as I awaken each morning, I will turn in for the night.

I will take deep, controlled breaths. I will use the box breathing method of counting to four on the inhale. On a four-count exhale, I will tune out Marisa’s prattle about her new startup, a box subscription service for expectant dog moms.

This year, I will not get drunk and tell Marisa my startup ideas.

Each day of 2019, I will post a carefree Instagram with ample lens flare. Each will be a selfie with my hands half in my pockets in a casual posture that says, “I’ve been caught by surprise! It’s mere coincidence someone took a photograph at this moment.” I will be wearing one of my limited edition travel fedoras in a shade I have dubbed “Vasca,” which is Italian for “bathtub.”

I will start my Etsy store. I will craft bespoke anklets from visions I’ve had on ayahuasca.

This year I will try ayahuasca.

This year I will run a marathon. I will train so hard it causes stress fractures in my femurs which I will humblebrag about to friends. They will accept this as a shining example of my dedication as well as an acceptable excuse for why I can’t go to Marisa’s going-away party when really I just don’t want to hear any fucking more about Mykonos.
Jodie Foster’s New Movie ‘Money Monster’ Explains Our Rigged Financial System
By: Nicole Dieker
Tags: Money, Financial Crisis, Movies

Jodie Foster is directing a new movie about the financial industry starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts and let’s all watch the trailer RIGHT NOW:

If you can’t watch the trailer RIGHT NOW for whatever reason, let me recap:

George Clooney plays a “financial television personality” a la Jim Cramer, with Julia Roberts as his no-nonsense producer. BUT WHO’S THAT GUY ON CAMERA TWO? It’s Jack O’Connell as Everyman, charging onto the set with a GUN and a BOMB VEST and demanding that Clooney explain exactly why O’Connell lost all of his money after following Clooney’s tips—or things are going to BLOW UP.

Yes, it’s a bit of Up in the Air plus Broadcast News plus American Dreamz, probably with a little Die Hard thrown in there. (Rest in peace, Alan Rickman.)

But I don’t care if it’s derivative, and I’m trying not to care that I have a little bit of mental unease at the idea that I’m getting excited about watching a plot that resembles a mass shooting.

I am still going to watch the FINANCIAL CRISIS out of this movie.

Here’s what Foster told Yahoo! Movies:

“It’s really hard to explain to somebody what happened to their money,” says Foster. “It takes an hour and a half of tense time to tell [O’Connell’s character] what happened,” she adds, arguing that certain financial systems are complicated by design. “It is rigged for the elite who understand the system. It’s specifically intended that the casual stockholder does not have the benefit of the best choices.”

George Clooney spending 90 minutes explaining a rigged financial system while wearing a bomb vest? SIGN ME UP. GIVE ME MY TICKET NOW.

Release date is May 13. Who’s in?
A High-Five to Life
By: Simran Kankas
Tags: Life Lessons, Health, Mental Health, Poetry, Life

I am trying to fight back

Doing everything I can

Sometimes I feel I am failing

Life has some other plan

Frustration with my disease

Is making me hate my body

The pain and fear is taking over

And killing me slowly

It hurts when I breathe

Holding a pen is a challenge

I don’t understand how and why

Did I end up with this enemy

I never believed in revenge

Seems like I am losing this fight

Still keeping my hopes high

I don’t want to give up on life

Before leaving this world

I want to give life a high-five
鳥のお話
Tags: Japanese, 日本, Stories, Japan, 日本語

in Both Sides of the Table
Analyzing Tesla’s Supercharger Locations
Tags: Cars, Tesla

Tesla Supercharger Station in Gilroy, California

As one of the earlier execs at PayPal, entrepreneur Elon Musk understands the value of networks and how to solve the “Chicken-and-Egg” dilemma. Which is why he is building a fast-growing network of supercharger stations around the world. These superchargers allow owners of Tesla’s Model S electronic cars to charge their vehicles in less than an hour and for free. Tesla claims that the superchargers “provide 170 miles of range in as little as 30 minutes”.

In November 2015, Silk data journalist Alice Corona collected information on Tesla’s 556 supercharger stations and mapped them into a single data resource. She then analyzed the data. She found a lot of the expected but also some surprises.

Supercharger Stations Map Global Economic Power Structure

The distribution of supercharger stations roughly maps the global economic distribution with the U.S. and China hosting 58% of all stations, followed by German, the United Kingdom and France in order. Curiously absent from the top rankings was Japan. Apparently Tesla has not put a priority on Japan, or the Land of the Rising Sun is not home to enough Tesla buyers to justify a big expansion (although Musk has told Japanese media that he will put in place enough stations to allow someone to drive a Tesl end-to-end on the main island of Honshu).

Chinese Cities Dominate the Ranks of Most Supercharger Saturated Burgs

Six of the seven cities with the highest number of Tesla supercharger stations are located in China. The only non-Chinese city in that list is London, England in the United Kingdom. Additionally, Chinese cities occupy 10 or the 20 places among top-ranked supercharger cities. So how about San Francisco and Palo Alto in the United States? Actually, the hedge fund capitals of Darien and Greenwich in Connecticut have more charging stations than any other U.S. city. For now, at least, Tesla’s remain a car for the elite of the elite.

Asia Far Behind U.S. and Europe

Of the 547 stations captured in this data, only 87 were located in Asia or Oceania (Australia). China made the lion’s share of all those stations. So even though this is the Pacific Century, Tesla has elected to largely focus its supercharger network on North America and Europe.

These are some lightweight observations based on the data. As Tesla builds out the network and introduces cheaper vehicles, it will be curious to see whether Elon leaves in place the free charging aspect. If so, that could prove a tremendous magnet for Tesla owners — the prospect of “free gas on highways” for lift.
Haiku #60
By: Aline G.
Tags: Creative Writing, Anxiety, Poetry, Writer, Poem

Six Years of poetry-only publishing, PoetsUnlimited was a diverse, engaging and authentic poetry magazine. For most of that time a daily publication, it was always diverse and original, and free-to-read by all.

Follow
Reasons behind tic tok popularity
By: Pushpender Yadav
Tags: Blogger, Social Media, Tiktok App, Blogging, Blogging Tips

Why is the content of short video apps so addictive?

The reason is quite simple; You know that our mind is fascinated by new things — And these apps trigger that section of our brain and are built for supplying infinite new content every second.

If you ever use any short video app; You will see that there is hardly repetition of videos; Plus, you get fresh content from all corners of the world.

Furthermore, this content is too short; you don’t need a complex mind to understand this; even a child; who doesn’t even understand basic “A to Z” can make videos on these platforms and watch them.

This is also one reason behind these apps' popularity; You don’t need any professional knowledge to get popularity on these short video apps. You only need a capability to mimic, and nothing else.

To be frank with you — I don’t use any of these apps and not recommends them either because of the app's content plus addictivity.

But now Mark Zuckerberg has taken a step and added reels to Instagram, which is quite similar to the tic tok, that’s why I sometimes come across short videos. That’s why I am writing this article.

These apps are good for short-term use, but their long-term effect is not good for you as well as for your mental health because they decrease the user's patience level.
6 Easy React Tricks That May Surprise You
By: Emre Yilmaz
Tags: React, JavaScript, Programming, Technology, Software Engineering

React Keys with Fragments

Sometimes you need to render multiple components inside lists. If there’s no need for a container, use React Fragment. Here’s an example:

The code above is totally legit but React will start to complain about keys:

Warning: Each child in a list should have a unique "key" prop.

You see the error and say “Yeah, whatever.” Then you replace the fragment with a div .
Stock Market Clustering-Data Science Projects
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Projects, Data Science, Data

In this project, we will be extracting live Stock Market data from yahoo finance. We will find similarities amongst various companies using their stock market prices and then cluster them into different clusters using the K-means algorithm.

Note that is an unsupervised machine learning problem and will use an unsupervised machine learning technique with the help of the K-means algorithm.

NB: “pandas_datareader” extract data from various Internet sources into a DataFrame. Currently, the following sources are supported:

Yahoo! Finance

Google Finance

St.Louis FED (FRED)

Kenneth French’s data library

World Bank

Google Analytics

….and few others

Before we start, please note that this tutorial is part of the Data Science Project Mastery Program, which is a practical hands-on data science tutorial for anyone to learn data science right from the basics to advance by building projects and great Data Science Portfolio. Feel free to check it out.

In order for you to make the best out of this tutorial, I have put this tutorial in the form of a video for better understanding

Watch and work along

INTRODUCTION
Crypto 101: Multi-sig
By: Nick Neuman
Tags: Crypto, Bitcoin, Crypto 101, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

Crypto 101: Multi-sig

Explain it like I’m 5

Part of our mission at Casa is to help teach people about cryptocurrency and why it’s important. We’re starting a series of Crypto 101 posts, which we’ll post here and, soon, on our fancy new website (just launched today 🙌). We hope these will be a good resource for those who want short explainers on tough topics.

Our first post is on multi-signature (“multi-sig”) wallets. Multi-sig is an important concept and is core to the Casa product. But when my mom asks me what Casa does, I can’t just come out guns blazing using words like “multi-sig”. That’s a surefire recipe for the that’s-nice-honeys. So, here is my attempt at explaining multi-sig in a way that’s short and to the point, but still gives a good picture for the crypto-uninitiated.

We’ve moved our blog! To continue reading this article, visit the link below:

https://blog.keys.casa/crypto-101-multi-sig/
Don’t let a crisis go to waste
By: John Peterson
Tags: Life Lessons, Motivation, Grief

We stood on the tanbark, holding up a hand to block the sun as we looked up. Will stared down at us from the top of the playground structure. And by top, I mean the roof that was not meant to be climbed on.

Was he really going to jump? Shit. I hoped not. If Will jumped, we’d all have to do the same. Such was the sole purpose of our 3rd grade “Daredevils” club.

As he always did, Will jumped. Then we all jumped.

Will couldn’t help being cool. If he fell during graduation, it’d be endearing. If he beat you in foursquare, you’d secretly feel honored. If he took up trumpet, your guitar would instantly feel lame.

So when he decided to join the Army after high school I instinctively thought — “oh, that’s cool.” I imagined he’d be sitting in some kind of tent in the desert, being cool Will and making everyone laugh.

I was camping on the beach when I found out Will was killed in Iraq. I quietly left my tent and climbed onto a giant boulder that stretched from the sand out to sea. I laid on my back, stared at the sky, and cried like a little baby.

That may have been the first time I considered the stars. They were no longer my evening’s wallpaper.

What I saw that night were the delicate echoes of a thousand suns, dusted across the impossible emptiness of space. I wanted to witness them every night.

Fast-forward two weeks and I was inside my apartment on a beautiful night, indifferently watching Seinfeld re-runs as the stars quietly drifted outside, unseen and forgotten.
These Historical Women Dolls Will Make You Scream with Delight
By: Laura Berlinsky-Schine
Tags: Culture, Feminism, Humor, History, Satire

Have you frequently thought, “Susan B. Anthony was pretty cool, but I wish she had been just a little bit hotter? Mattel agrees, and that’s why they want to make sure every girl has one of their Inspiring Women dolls. Because until their flaws have been cut away, how will children care what they did? Rosa Parks with wrinkles? No, thank you! Rosa Parks with legs for days? Yes, please!

Check out our lineup of other heroines—now with conventional attractiveness that makes them worthy of our admiration.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Sporting bright red pumps and a peace sign necklace made out of pearls, everything about this spicy lady screams “first.” With her signature fur coat and a double D bra size, she’s the FLILF you never knew you needed to teach your daughter that human rights advocates can be smart, confident, and yummy.

Harriet Tubman

Here’s a woman who puts the “sass” in Moses, if you mispronounce it slightly. She wears a chic conductor cap (get it?), and instead of the pistol she carried to protect escapees and encourage the terrified to press onward, she holds a super-sharp nail file, perfect for smoothing out those rough tips (or warding off slave-catchers). Her finger — painted pink — is always pressed against her lips. Can you keep this secret?

Marie Curie

This is one radioactive madame! Sure, she was a chemist, but we’ve decked her out in a nurse’s outfit. She also comes with librarian glasses because boys like women who are nerd-hot. Our naughty Nobel laureate has a beaker that looks like a champagne flute. Why not?

Queen Elizabeth I

England’s favorite monarch wouldn’t stay a virgin for long in a high-necked, low-backed red and gold dress with a hoop skirt, emblazoned with a crown. In one dainty, snow-white hand she holds the head of her cousin, Mary (she’s fierce!); in the other, a compact. Just call the ginger temptress her meOWOW-esty.

Frida Kahlo

Wasn’t it high time that someone plucked Frida’s eyebrows? We did that and more, swapping out her long skirts for a mini and adding giant hoop earrings and a beret, something every artiste should have. Hear her say “¡Hola, amigos!” when you press her belly button — it’s right underneath her crop top.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Order in the court…and on the catwalk! Mattel doesn’t think it’s too soon to add their newest historical hottie to the lineup. RBG wasn’t just known as a women’s rights advocate; she also had a super-tiny waist. Her black robe comes with a cinched belt to show off her skinny figure. And we haven’t forgotten her signature dissent collar!
Test Components in the Next.js Project with Jest and Enzyme- Part 1. Steps for the Environment setting
By: Sean Hs
Tags: Software Testing, React, JavaScript, Software Development, Jest

Introduction

Jest is one of the popular test libraries and it comes from Facebook. There are many resources for us to set the environment. However, it becomes complicated when trying to apply Jest to the Next.js project for testing React components.

This article includes the following topics.
Why You Should Listen Charles Darwin?
By: The Despicable Hippie
Tags: Personal Growth, Personal Development, Self, Self Development, Self Improvement

Especially at a time like the one we are living in at the moment.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, it is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Covid-19 showed us how life can change quickly, how our economy, and life is fragile, we see merchants, who once had a good livelihood, from one moment to another, it’s over. Manifs take place in the streets all around the globe, because they are against the closure of the establishments and are left without money for food. But whose fault is it?

Over the years we have been witnessing several world crises, crises that brought poverty, hunger, death, but for some reason, we humans, continue to not change the way we live, until, a virus that we cannot see in the naked eye, “attacked”.

And right now, these are the main problems:

Having only one source of income is the worst thing, a person can have;

Businesses that do not have a year of expenses aside are the first to face bankruptcy;

The jobs that society said were deplorable, are now well regarded because at least there’s money to put food on the table;

People who didn’t have a savings account are now suffering the consequences.

And, last but not least, materialistic stuff doesn’t matter.

Don’t worry, I don’t blame you, at least, not entirely, you have some guilt, but not all. You and I were educated in an unorthodox way, a form of education that only serves to maintain the economic model, in which we are inserted, for many years, working for 50 (or more), and then go to retirement for a few years.

And, if we didn’t previously believe this, the pandemic came as a white-gloved stoner…but, as Darwin said, anyone who adapts well to change, wins.

We must not blame others for the mistakes we have made, if we are in an embarrassing situation, we must get out of it, and learn not to repeat it again. We should learn from our mistakes, and not expecting others to come and rescue us. We are our own rescue boat.

Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel
Quarantine Helped Me Confront My Fear of Hair Loss
By: Amanda Oliver
Tags: Alopecia, Nonfiction, Loss, Coping, Memoir

Alopecia occurs when the immune system attacks hair follicles. The body fails to recognize its own cells, its own hair. It is commonly believed that alopecia is brought on by stress, though scientists still aren’t certain. The only thing they are confident about asserting is that alopecia, of any kind, is incurable. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t come and go for some people, including me, but there is no guarantee of any final going.

I have some combination of alopecia areata — round bald patches on the scalp and face — and alopecia universalis — complete loss of hair on the scalp and body.

There are less than a dozen hairs on my arms, legs, and armpits combined. Previous boyfriends and lovers have tried to count the hairs sometimes — four on my left leg, three on my right leg (all of them on my kneecap), four in each of my armpits.

Sometimes, when new hairs came in, we’d celebrate, naked and laughing.

New or less attentive lovers often wonder out loud how I’m so soft and eventually I point out that I have no hair on most of my body. A search ensues — my arms are rotated, the duvet is pulled back and there is some crawling down the mattress to have a look, the back of the hand used to give my calves a once-over. The conclusion is always the same: I am hairless and soft and telling the truth.
Is Medium Supposed To Make Me Money, Help Me Grow As A Writer, Build Me A Fan Base, I’m Lost!
By: Mr. Francis
Tags: Money, Humor, Writing, Writer, Writers On Writing

I admit it. I’m confused.

Yet another round of changes as to how Medium gauges what we, the content sausages, can do to earn a living.

Or more accurately, our writer’s monthly allowance.

I’ve been writing on Medium off and on for about two years now. And I take it seriously, to a point.

I’ve spent money on courses and books trying to crack the Medium system so that I have a greater chance of earning a bit more money.

Of course, I’m nowhere near as prolific as many of the great writers on this platform.

But, there’s a reason for that.

I also try to sell my short stories to magazines, the few left, or to online literary websites.

The kind of writing I like to think that I do best, mixing fact with humour, tend to be short stories.

Tales that take a long time to craft to the point where they are ready to be read.

I like to think all writers have a basket where they collect their ideas about what to write about.

Some of those fit better in some places, and others go well in other spots.

I don’t think of Medium as being less than some of the magazines I submit to; it’s more that Medium isn’t the appropriate platform for my longer stories.

In my now seemingly hopelessly optimistic writer’s mind, I thought that I could work on the long pieces for publication and survive by writing shorter ones on this site.

My friends, who read my work on Medium, have graciously put up with my constantly changing demands, “Please clap more, no, don’t clap now just take your time and read it slower, no what I, uh, I mean, just forward my stories to…”

Now?

Now I’m not sure what to say to them.

Keep reading seems to be the easiest answer, I guess.
Pistachio Pesto: A Twist on a Classic
By: Mary Andino
Tags: Food, Italian, Recipes For Cooking, Cooking, European

For me, pesto is one of those dishes that feel special and luxurious but still doesn’t leave me with a pile of dishes to do afterward. My love for pesto is endless; it’s my version of mayo or ketchup- a must-have condiment. I am fully in favor of most shortcuts in the kitchen: go ahead and use that pre-made puff pastry or chicken sausage. Pesto, however, is not one cheat that I can vouch for. Most pre-made pestos lack the full flavor punch that the sauce should deliver. While I am a devotee of Trader Joes 99% of the time, their jarred Genovese Pesto is a travesty- it is far too thick and chunky, and tastes overwhelmingly of just olive oil. Making the sauce is worth it- it only takes five minutes and six ingredients.

My favorite things about pesto are its simplicity and versatility. You really only need one tool to make pesto: a food processor, mini-chopper, or blender: any tool with a powered blade will do. Combine everything, give it a whiz, add the oil, give it another whiz, and boom- you’ve got sauce bursting with delicious herby saltiness. For serving pesto with pasta, save some of the pasta water that the pasta was boiled in. Adding a 1/4 to 1/2 cup of this starchy, salty goodness to your pesto right before adding it to the cooked pasta will make the sauce silky and help it distribute evenly over the pasta. Pasta water= liquid gold.

While of course pesto and pasta will never fail you, feel free to think beyond noodles. I use it as a sauce for pizza or a spread on sandwiches and grilled cheese: a tomato, turkey, pesto, and mozzarella cheese panini is one heck of a lunch. It’s also great as a sauce to spice up a perfectly fine, but slightly boring dinner, like roast chicken and veggies. This recipe even has breakfast potential: it’s a fun take on a big Saturday morning breakfast scramble: think eggs, potatoes, red bell peppers, zucchini, goat cheese, and pesto.

One great use for pesto: homemade pizza with chicken sausage, pistachio pesto, and mozzarella

As a grown adult who sometimes struggles to eat her green leafy vegetables, pesto is also a savior. I trick myself into eating them by substituting half of the basil in the recipe with arugula. The arugula adds a nice pepperiness that is balanced by the creaminess of the nuts and cheese. If you’re cooking for kids or adults who eat like kids and looking for a nutritious pesto, this variation has got your back.
Exempted
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Poetry, Isolation, Loneliness, Image

Exempted

A Poem

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Internal alienations

the run-around for the lexically

impaired

and then taken to a building

to look over the town

count footsteps in snow

the tracks of snowblowers

casually leaving my driveway

exempt from their

ministrations

The close quiet of nights

in a house alone

reading

or something

counting down the days to

what —

it doesn’t take the time you

want it to

or

it just isn’t moving that quick

and you feel

belayed

and the roped tied to something

you weren’t even

prepared to admit existed

but clearly

you’re stopped

A portrait of more hands

a field that sings

in starlight with the dark

whipping

past the crack in the window

and the odd

narrow

minute that races by to

remind you it can

but by now

all you sense is an

exclusion
Machine learning fundamentals. 2.Gradient descent algorithm
By: Celine Surai
Tags: Machine Learning, Linear Regression, Data Science, Gradient Descent, Software Engineering

In Machine learning we use gradient descent to update the parameters of our model, i.e. parameters in this case refers to coefficients in linear regression or weights in neural networks.

What is Gradient descent?

Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm used to minimize a function by iteratively moving in the direction of the steepest descent as defined by the negative of a gradient.

Let’s take an example of the slope below.

Our goal is to reach the bottom of the hill. We go about this by iteratively taking steps until we get to the bottom where we can no longer go downhill.

How do we go about this?

By calculating the negative gradient and using it to take steps in the direction it specifies.

Gradient descent formula

gradient descent algorithm

where j = 0,1 refers to index features

At each iteration j, one should simultaneously update the parameters θ1​,θ2​,…,θn​. Updating a specific parameter prior to calculating another one on the j(th) iteration would yield to a wrong implementation.

In the formula,alpha refers to the learning rate. Note: learning rate in the example above refers to the size of steps we take. If we take large steps, we risk overshooting the lowest point, similarly if we take small steps, we risk taking a longer time getting to the lowest point.

More about learning rate

If the learning rate is too large, the gradient descent can overshoot the minimum, i.e. fail to converge or diverge.

If it is too small our gradient descent becomes too slow.

As we approach the local minimum, the gradient will automatically take smaller steps. Therefore, no need to decrease the learning rate over time.

Gradient descent can converge to a local minimum even with the learning rate fixed.

The learning rate value is always a small value such as 0.1 or 0.01

When applied to linear regression, we derive a new gradient descent equation. This is how we get to minimize the cost function

N/B if you are planning to explore machine learning it is important to have a grasp on how to minimize a cost function.

Let’s have a look at the cost function formula we learnt before,

cost function

Here is the new gradient descent for linear regression equation. We can substitute our actual cost function and our actual hypothesis function and modify the equation to :

gradient descent algorithm for linear regression

where m is the size of the training set, tθ0​ a constant that will be changing simultaneously with θ1​ and xi​, yi​ are values of the given training set (data).

And that’s it! We have the Gradient descent algorithm for linear regression!

One more thing: This algorithm is sometimes referred to as Batch gradient descent. This refers to the fact that refers to the fact that in every step of gradient descent, we’re looking at all of the training examples.

I hope that this article has helped you understand Gradient Descent more

Next we are going to work towards understanding Linear regression more!
How To Survive Quarantine With The Help Of Some Old Jokes
By: John Devore
Tags: Coronavirus, Culture, Books, Religion, Humor

There will come a time when this pandemic becomes history. I hope to live long enough to talk about what these past few months were like with a new generation. The fear. The isolation. The sounds of non-stop ambulance sirens. The inescapable smell of hand sanitizer. The anger that we could have done more to stop the spread of the virus but we couldn’t bother to put forth the effort.

I will remember missing my own family in Texas. My glasses fogging up because of the face masks. The endless grim statistics. The not knowing. I will also remember standing on the lawn of Emilyn’s family’s house and staring at her mother and sister from six-feet away as the funeral home loaded his body into the back of a van. A few moments earlier, the bag had been unzipped so his daughters could say good-bye, at a distance.

This is the pandemic, at least to me. It’s not photos of sourdough bread posted on social media nor is it jokes about not wearing pants to virtual meetings. It’s not even the politicians who failed the country — cowards, every one of them. No. The pandemic of 2020 will always be two sisters and a mother unable to console or comfort one another.

A few days later we held an online video conference service for friends and family which was better than nothing. One old Jew noted, “at least there’s no bad seat on Zoom!”

The last time I saw Richard alive was at a funeral a month or so before he passed. A relative had died, suddenly. It was a tragedy. I think all funerals should be Jewish funerals: the deceased is put into the ground as soon as possible. Then loved ones gather around, cry, and are reminded that only family and community and God matter, and then everyone shovels a little dirt on the coffin. It’s humble. Honest. Connected to the now and to the beyond. And it makes me angry he was denied this because of the virus.

“Funerals are for the living,” he said to me as we walked back to the car. It was a gray day but his eyes still twinkled.

On the ride home I told Emilyn what her dad had told me about funerals being for the living. She confirmed that was one of his many sayings. She then told a joke that was one of his other go-to’s. She imitated the Yiddish accent he would put on when asking old friends “nu?” Here it goes:
I’m Letting It All Go
By: Iva Hotko
Tags: A Rebels Prompt, Prompt, Letting Go, Poetry, Poem

Poetry

I’m Letting It All Go

A Rebel’s Prompt, Letting Go

Image by the Author

Do doors hide secrets,

or are they scattered around

in fragments of thought,

judgment and regret

hidden between the lines,

masked with a smile,

revived within the sigh

for the time passed by?

The illusion of your love for me

was the secret I kept so carefully

but self-deception only goes so far

leaving you broken

when the mist starts to rise.

Screaming in silent screams

drowning in my own fears,

I was clinging to the life that once was,

withering in the past.

You didn’t care enough to say

- It’s over, let’s go our separate ways.

Hail of tears, anger, and despair

made me aware of the life I was living

and all the things I was missing.

Hope brought nothing but pain,

making me believe in a fairy tale

that someday things would change.

No more!

I have hit the floor

of the abyss of my own making

shattered into pieces, I’ve waited.

I have crawled and I’ve bled,

and with each drop that I’ve shed

I got stronger to say

- No more, I’m letting it all go!

~ Iva
“3 diamonds” means water
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Death, Memories, Illness, Poetry, Cancer

They’ve taken parts of all of us, the morning cracks the whip now

in a room I have forgotten, but not that I slept in the bed to your right,

not that I wanted to correct you but couldn’t in my love,

that was breaking as night fell and I couldn’t know,

that later I thought I could curse you for leaving and

I couldn’t know that I would fear this,

grow to hate this hospital and all hospitals,

that they constantly bring life to bear, yes, I know that too,

but there’s a crisis of reality — my father has been replaced by a shell,

all the familiar lines are there but faint,

as if sketched from a distance with one eye closed.

I am orphaned by a recognition,

by a morning I am left holding,

thinking the words are wonderful.
Running RASA bot with AWS-EC2
By: Samrudha Kelkar
Tags: Ec2, Rasa, Chatbots, AWS, Rasa Core

RASA has been actively developing its NLP stack on top of spacy. If you follow their git then you can relate to it. No doubt the latest changes are awesome!! Rasa-core is now streamlined to run a rasa server, they have decoupled customization actions from the actual bot stack. Actions now can run in a separate server as you might want in production scenarios.

However, it took away developer-loved-control of the bot. Earlier we used to feel things working in front of us which now have been abstracted down. This was expected with the maturity of the platform.

In this blog, we will explore doing simple hosting of rasa core in AWS EC2. Then we will run an old-school flask application on Heroku to talk to the bot.

Step 1] Get your bot working locally

If you already have your rasa bot running, then cool. But if you don’t, do not worry. You can use an awesome starter pack available here. This will build your bot right away.

pip install -r requirements.txt

make train-nlu

make train-core

make cmdline

Try chatting with the bot to ensure it is responding as desired.
Where Do You Stand in the Fight of Good Vs Evil?
By: Don Simkovich
Tags: Morality, Crime, Crime Fiction, Society, Writing

Before I get too profound, I know that we all love a great story. We like a good story, but we all love a great story!

Stories that are memorable with likeable characters who have strength, courage and humor draw us to the page.

Can stories shape our thinking, even subconsciously? Perhaps so. When I started writing this, I immediately thought of the musical Oliver with all the pickpocketing and treachery. The story was so well done that I don’t need to draw a moral conclusion from any of it.

And author Lee Child has done a great job of memorializing Jack Reacher in the minds of loyal readers. He’s been that unsavory Savior — the imperfect hero.

As an author, or co-author in the Tom Stone Detective stories, we’ve had a few characters who are truly memorable to me.

In our most recent thriller novel release, Tom Stone: Subterfuge, I really connected with a man who comes from Baja California and is swept up in the terrors of smuggling drugs. Luis Delgado.

He has little power against the cartels that forced him and his son onto a narco-sub, but he has tremendous resolve.

Here’s a brief excerpt with little context — Delgado survives a tragic explosion but his son doesn’t. The body is recovered and Delgado is in the morgue with Detective Tom Stone and an interpreter to identify the remains:

Stone kept his mouth shut like he always did, even though anger

at the injustice boiled up inside. Delgado fell to his knees, made the sign

of the cross, and cried hard. Stone gave him plenty of time to let his

emotions loose. Delgado had recovered physically from the wounds

inflicted by his captors, but he’d carry the emotional scars of trauma

from losing his son for the rest of his life.

Once his tears were reduced to sniffles, Delgado stood again. “I

trust God will judge their souls.” He stared at the corpses and made a

bold declaration. “And may God grant me the power to strike terror in

the hearts of any who are still alive.” His jaw tightened and fists clenched.

Stone understood Delgado’s anger. They left the building and

headed to the Crown Vic where Stone got behind the wheel and Delgado

got in the back seat with Officer Guevara.

Delgado was outwardly quiet, but Stone knew his mind was

working hard.

He started the car and pulled into the street when he heard

Delgado muttering. “What’s he saying?”

Guevara responded. “I don’t know. Something about,

‘Vengeance is mine says the Lord.’”

“Tell him not to do anything stupid. The police will handle it.”

Guevara repeated what Stone said.

Delgado didn’t respond and stared out the window.
Day 29–2 Sum Input is a Binary Search Tree
By: House Of Codes
Tags: Software Development, Coding, Programming, Interview, Java

Day 29–2 Sum Input is a Binary Search Tree

100 Days to Amazon

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Out of Free Stories? Here is my Friend Link.

100 Days to Amazon — Day 29 2Sum Input is a BST

Introduction👓

Hey Guys, Today is day 29 of the challenge that I took. Wherein I will be solving every day for 100 days the programming questions that have been asked in previous interviews.

You have a bonus at the end if you keep reading. You can find out the companies that have asked these questions in real interviews.

All these problems are taken from the following e-book. 🎓

This is completely free 🆓 if you have an amazon kindle subscription.

This e-book contains 100 coding problems that have been asked in top tech interview questions. It also has a guide to solving all the problems in 200+ ways. These problems I assure you has been asked in previous interviews.

You have to decide whether you want to go unprepared for a tech interview or go ahead and quick search for this guide to solve the 100 problems.

Begin Your ascent to greatness

Day 29–2 Sum Input is a BST

AIM

Given a Binary Search Tree and a target number, return true if there exist two elements in the BST such that their sum is equal to the given target

Example

Input:

5

/ \

3 6

/ \ \

2 4 7



Target = 9



Output: True

Code👇

Author: Akshay Ravindran

Algorithm👨‍🎓

The in order traversal of a binary search tree will give us the input in sorted order. Store the sorted order in a list. Now, Create two pointers that point to the left end of the list and the right end of the list. Add the two values and check for three conditions: if it is equal to the target value return true. If the sum is greater than the target value. Reduce the right pointer. If the sum is lesser than the target value. Increase the left pointer. At the end of the traversal. Return false 🔚

Conclusion

Have you come across this question in your interview before? Share it in the comment section below. 🤝

Don’t forget to hit the follow button✅to receive updates when we post new coding challenges. Tell us how you solved this problem. 🔥 We would be thrilled to read them. ❤ We can feature your method in one of the blog posts.

Want to become outstanding in java programming?

Click HERE 🧨🎊🎃

I have published an ebook. A compilation of 100 Java(Interview) Programming problems which have been solved. (HackerRank) 🐱‍💻

This is completely free 🆓 if you have an amazon kindle subscription.

Companies

Previous Blog Posts
Who the Hell is Drew Sparkman?
By: Drew Sparkman
Tags: Philosophy, Writers Bios, Psychology, Self, Writing

Who the Hell is Drew Sparkman?

A writer’s bio (correction: a fumbled writer’s bio)

Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

In the summer of 2008, A Hopi man revealed a tribal custom to me.

He must have been in his late 30s, tanned and leathery skin, taller than my 5'10" frame, thinning black hair, and black beady eyes that scanned me over through wireframe glasses.

He was soft-spoken, respectful, composed, and he considered his words.

I was freshly 22 with long blond locks, a hair-covered chin, and dusty rope-made sandalias on my feet. A university student on an anthropological field study with Southwest Native American tribes, I was idealistic, stupid, confident, and inconsiderate.

Naturally, I had asked him about tribal rites-of-passages without ever considering such events were closely guarded secrets.

In his eyes, I was a product of the invasive white-European cultural that had conquered his ancestors’ communities, disrespected their very existence, and organized their lives into government-provided reserves as if they were chickens on the factory farm.

In my eyes, he was an object of study with information I wanted.

Still, he was kind enough to answer.

He said that when the moment arrives for boys to become men, they are taken to an undescribed sacred spot. While there, they go through the cryptically-worded “ceremonies.”

Upon finishing, the boys emerge men and are given new names.

Finding that curious and worthy of more inconsiderate and thoughtless questions, I asked why the new name.

As we walked around the dusty streets of his “pueblo” in northeastern Arizona, he turned to look at me as if I had just asked him why his skin was darker than mine.

“Because they have new identities.”
How to Center Instagram Iframe Embeds in Wordpress
By: Tremaine Eto
Tags: HTML, Programming, Software Development, WordPress, CSS

If you just want the solution

CSS

.instagram-media {

min-width: 235px !important;

width: 60% !important;

}

What’s the issue at hand?

Instagram post embedding is really useful in Wordpress. The premise is tantalizingly simple: just copy and paste the Instagram URL into your post, and Wordpress handles the rest. The picture will magically appear!

To Wordpress’s credit, what I just described works basically perfectly to that point. Whenever I paste in my specific Instagram URL, the picture renders in the post.

However, there’s one major flaw.

The posts are left-aligned by default, which is fine, but there’s no way (if there is a way, please let me know — I’ll replace this whole darn article with it!) in the Visual Editor to center the Instagram embed in the post.

The default result looks like this:

Not ideal.

It works for some sites, but in mine I specifically want it to be centered.

An initial solution

You’re going to want to switch your post or page editor to “Edit HTML” for this.

Basically, within the post, go and find the Instagram link(s) you want to center. It would look something like this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsOGulcndj-/

You will then want to surround that link with the following tags:

<div align="center">

[embed]

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsOGulcndj-/

[/embed]

</div>

What this will do is center the Instagram embed in the context it’s in. You can preview or even publish the post to see the embed centered like this:

So much better.

A more complete solution for mobile

In my case, the above solution worked great — on desktop and tablet views. The Instagram embed centered as I wanted there, but for phone views (and therefore smaller screens), the image seemed to be cut off on the right side.

Any centering formatting didn’t really matter because the entire embed was just too wide for the screen; responsiveness didn’t seem to be part of the equation, so it looked like this:

Yuck.

My solution was to isolate the specific Instagram embed CSS component and then shrink its width so that it would fit smaller screens just as well it would fit larger screens. That would look something like this (and is what I initially gave at the beginning of the article):

CSS

.instagram-media {

min-width: 235px !important;

width: 60% !important;

}

The exact values may differ for you, but this is what worked for me. It also is more kind of hard-coded, so it may not work for all use cases. This may thus be just an interim solution while you figure out a more responsive means; I’m using this right now until I can find device screen sizes it doesn’t work for.

The whole embed fits for all views! Finally!

It can sort of get tiring to add this CSS to every single post or page where you have Instagram embeds, so I used a custom CSS Wordpress plugin called WP Add Custom CSS. I’m not at all affiliated with that plugin except that I use it; I really like it for my use case.
Notre nouvelle image de marque: au-delà d’une belle apparence.
By: Lia Elbaz
Tags: Branding, Website, Web Design

Osedea

We’re on a mission to build a more efficient and enjoyable world
The Legacy of Donny Hathaway
Tags: Music, Legacy, Music Voices, Donny Hathaway, Poetry

The Legacy of Donny Hathaway

Extension of the man

courtesy of gettyimages.com

“When I think of music, I think of music in its totality, complete. From the lowest blues to the highest symphony.”

— Donny Hathaway

I

Hear

Donny

Hathaway

As if he never

Left

Us –

His voice

Lingering

Like the Holy Ghost:

“Sing

Your

Greatest

Song…someday

We will all be free!”
日本刀の威力に見る、『Ghost of Tsushima』の描く「繊細な日本」
Tags: Column, ゲーム, Videogames, PS4, 日本語

in Both Sides of the Table
What You Can Learn From Lowe’s Experiment to Employ Robots in Their Stores
By: Chipp Norcross
Tags: Singularity University, Corporate Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Community, Robotics

The Lowebot is the latest incarnation of the relationship between Lowe’s Home Improvment and Fellow Robots, one of the many envelope-pushing startups we have at Singularity University. This collaboration, which also spawned the OSHbot which has now been in service in an Orchard Supply Hardware (a Lowe’s subsidiary) in the Bay Area for two years now, is an example that I always point out to the boards and executive teams that come through Singularity University. It represents two things that most Fortune 500 companies are not doing, namely:

Being bold. Doing so publicly.

While the Lowebot is certainly earning media mentions and could easily be mistaken for a media gimmick, the most valuable opportunity I see with the Lowebot is the opportunity to learn. Not just to see what robots can do in a retail store environment, but the opportunity to learn how humans use and interact with them and to leverage that information to evolve not only the next version of the Lowebot, but the entire field of robotic assistants. If robotic assistants are our future, then Lowe’s is quickly discovering more about that future, in a real-world environment, than anyone else and that has implications well beyond home improvement.

My advice to CEOs is to do something as bold as what Lowe’s is doing with the Lowebot. Do it to learn. Do it to stake a claim in a new or developing industry. And if you can’t figure out what to do, then look for progressive and forward-thinking talent and partners who can help you find something bold to do. Because in today’s business environment if you aren’t boldly leading into the future, you’re probably falling behind.
Pandemic Benediction №1
By: Emily Swan
Tags: Spirituality, Pandemic, Faith, Christianity, Prayer

I bless you with grace for self-kindness in these times.

May your body receive restful sleep and nourishing food to maintain your health.

May your anxieties be alleviated by the knowledge of God’s goodness, faithfulness and — above all — God’s nearness.

May you see yourself and others through rose-colored glasses, and

May your friends and family see you through rose-colored glasses, too.

May you encounter extraordinary thoughtfulness that is the best of humanity, and may you find your own empathy and concern for others expanding each day.

Above all, may you experience the peace of God in the middle of this storm — the peace that believers long before us described as passing all understanding.

Go in peace.

Wash your hands.

Love your neighbors.

You are not alone.