fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
It’s All Been Done Before
By: Tobias Van Schneider
Tags: Creativity

I Google it and sure enough, dozens of headlines appear on the subject. Many people have already written about it from every possible angle. It’s already covered. Why should I bullshit about it, likely with a lot less authority than some of these people, when it’s already been done before?

Few things kill creativity faster than fear. In this case, it’s the fear of sounding trite or naive. The fear of being dull, derivative or worse — irrelevant.

It’s funny how every human has their own unique experiences, ideologies and voice, yet are unfailingly the same. The same stories have been told in countless ways. The same character archetypes have appeared in books, TV shows and movies since before those mediums existed. The same emotions or ideas have been expressed in every imaginable form spanning centuries. And so it will continue until the end of time.

Nothing is original. Yet with each interpretation or adaptation of the same idea, it is slightly different. That’s what innovation is. It’s how our humanity moves forward. It may be something we’ve all seen and heard before, but now it’s been explored, reinvented and maybe even made better by someone else. It is new.

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” — Einstein

I’ve written about perfectionism, about the imposter syndrome, about trusting your gut and competing with yourself. None of these articles are groundbreaking. We’ve beaten those themes to a pulp as creatives over the years, but I wrote about them anyway. They are worn topics but clichés are clichés for a reason — they are universally relatable and will be as long as human beings exist.

And I’ve heard from many readers who found these articles helpful or encouraging in some way. That may be because they personally haven’t read about it before, or it was a good reminder, or they just appreciated my perspective on the subject. Whatever the reason, they were useful to someone and that’s enough.

It’s all been done before. But it hasn’t been done by me.

The same truth applies to any form of creativity. Our writing, our designs, our music, our art. New creations and radical ideas are introduced all the time, but so are familiar ones. (This subject itself, that it’s all been done before, has been done before.) They just take on a new shape. That doesn’t necessarily make them any less compelling, beautiful or valuable.

In fact, most designers, writers, artists, musicians and makers learn by copying first. Do a bit of research and you’ll find some of the world’s greatest inventions (Edison’s light bulb, Apple computers, Ford cars) were just a better iteration of something someone else already did. My .mail email concept is a great example as well. I didn’t invent the concept of an email client. I used preexisting elements and tried to make them better.
Count Items in Python With the Help of Counter Objects
By: Yong Cui
Tags: Python, Software Development, Technology, Data Science, Programming

Count Items in Python With the Help of Counter Objects

The easy way to count objects in a data container

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash

The Premise

When we deal with data containers, such as tuples and lists, in Python we often need to count particular elements. One common way to do this is to use the count() function — you specify the element you want to count and the function returns the count.

Let’s take a look at some code for its use:

The count() function

As you can see above, we used the count() function with a list of scores.

One thing to note: When the elements specified in the function aren’t included in the list, we’ll get a count of zero, as expected. If we want to count the occurrences of all the elements, we’ll have to iterate them, as shown in the following code snippet:

Count All Elements

Several things are worth highlighting in the above:

To avoid counting elements of the same value, we use the set() constructor to convert these iterables to set objects. This means duplicate elements are removed — the for loop will only go over distinct elements to get their correct cumulative counts.

constructor to convert these iterables to set objects. This means duplicate elements are removed — the for loop will only go over distinct elements to get their correct cumulative counts. The count() function doesn’t only work with the list objects, it can also with tuples and strings. More generally, the count() function works with sequence data in Python, including strings, lists, tuples, and bytes.

As shown above, we have to use a for loop to iterate the elements to retrieve the counts for each individual element. It’s a bit tedious.
Glasses Can Make You Depressed
By: Sabana Grande
Tags: Health, Humor, Lifestyle, Short Story, Life

My landlord was blind as a bat for 20 years.

He would ignore you on the street, squint at everything around him such that people thought that he was upset, and type with his face to the keyboard.

He had a problem.

However, somehow, through some stupid bullshit, he managed to own about 8 pairs of glasses which are still around his home. None of them were for his prescription. I’m not talking about sunglasses. Real glasses he somehow randomly bought. He couldn’t see anything through any of them.

He had never been to an ophthalmologist.

He had another idea. Instead of going to an ophthalmologist to get a pair of proper glasses, he just bought huge screens — since that was what bothered him most about his ailment, not being able to watch TV.

He bought a 100ft plasma that took up the whole living room and would sit in front of it on a chair — he still couldn’t see from the couches. This is a true story.

He continued to do this for years. During that time, people advised him to get glasses.

He did. He got glasses.

Photo by Anna Syla on Unsplash

They were light grey and square and he looked like a scientist. He looked quite smart.

He was also depressed now.

For the first time, he said, he could see the state of the sinks and bathrooms around his home. He had thought they were all sparkling clean before when he couldn’t see anything.

Since he came back from the ophthalmologist with new glasses, he has been depressed. He said it would take him weeks to clean all the dirt around his house that he couldn’t see before.

Let this be a warning to you people. Glasses can make you depressed.
Setting Focus For Accessibility In React Native
By: Jessica Byrne
Tags: React Native, Software Development, Mobile App Development, Accessibility, Code

Attempt 1: useRef()

If you have a functional component, you might reach for useRef() like you would in React… However, you might be surprised when your attempt doesn’t work.

import React, { useRef } from 'react';



const EditableField = () => { const myElement = useRef(); const onModalClose = () => {

myElement .current.focus();

}; return (

<View>

<TouchableOpacity

accessible

ref={myElement}

onPress{() => {

Alert.alert(

'I am an alert',

'Which tells you more information',

[{ text: 'Okay', onPress: onModalClose }],

{ cancelable: true },

);

}}

>

Click Me!

</TouchableOpacity>

</View>

)

};

};

Attempt 2: createRef

In my case, I had a large class component, so I reached for createRef. I wrote the code as I normally would for a React component. However, this approach wasn’t working.

import React, { createRef } from 'react';

import { Alert, TouchableOpacity, View } from 'react-native'; renderElement() { const myElement = createRef(); const onModalClose = () => {

if(myElement && myElement.current) {

myElement.current.focus();

}

} return (

<View>

<TouchableOpacity

accessible

ref={myElement}

onPress{() => {

Alert.alert(

'I am an alert',

'Which tells you more information',

[{ text: 'Okay', onPress: onModalClose }],

{ cancelable: true },

);

}}

>

Click Me!

</TouchableOpacity>

</View>

)

};

The Key To The Solution for React Native

The key to the React Native solution are two elements:

findNodeHandle: obtains a native node handle for a component

AccessibilityInfo: Identifies whether or not the device has a screen reader that is currently active.

Using these two react-native elements, you can come up with something like this to grab the element and set the focus:

const reactTag = findNodeHandle(myElement.current);

if (reactTag) {

AccessibilityInfo.setAccessibilityFocus(reactTag);

}

Solution for Functional Components:

import React, { useRef } from 'react';

import { Alert, TouchableOpacity, View, AccessibilityInfo, findNodeHandle } from 'react-native'; const EditableField = () => { const myElement = useRef(); const onModalClose = () => {

if(myElement && myElement.current) {

const reactTag = findNodeHandle(myElement.current);

if (reactTag) {

AccessibilityInfo.setAccessibilityFocus(reactTag);

}

}

}; return (

<View>

<TouchableOpacity

accessible

ref={myElement}

onPress{() => {

Alert.alert(

'I am an alert',

'Which tells you more information',

[{ text: 'Okay', onPress: onModalClose }],

{ cancelable: true },

);

}}

>

Click Me!

</TouchableOpacity>

</View>

)

};

Solution for Class Components:

Although this approach might have worked in web, for React Native, there is a different way.
Variety Of Encoders In NLP
By: Pratik Bhavsar
Tags: Naturallanguageprocessing, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning

Evaluation of sentence embeddings in downstream and linguistic probing tasks

So I was reading this paper and it opened Pandora’s box for me. Ideally, we want an embedding model which gives us the smallest embedding vector and works great for the task. The smaller the embedding size, the lesser the compute required for training as well as inference.

As you can see, there is a huge variation in the size of embedding — varies from 300 to 4800. As per the basics, more the vector size, the more information it can contain! But is it actually true? Let’s see how they perform on the tasks.

Different embedding models and their vector size — https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06259

Classification tasks

Authors tried out different classification tasks as shown below to understand the performance of these models. For the linguistic probing tasks, a MLP was used with a single hidden layer of 50 neurons, with no dropout added, using Adam optimizer with a batch size of 64.

(For the Word Content (WC) probing task in which a Logistic Regression was used since it provided consistently better results)

Classification tasks

From the results we can see that different ELMo embeddings perform really good for classification tasks. USE and InferSent also top on some of the tasks. The difference between the best and the 2nd best is around 2%. Word2Vec and GloVe do not top in any task as expected but their performance is also in the range of 3%.

The thing to note here — ELMo has a vector size of 1024, USE has 512 and InferSent has 4096. So if somebody has to actually put a system to production, his first choice will be USE and then maybe ELMo.

Results for classification tasks.

Semantic relatedness tasks

Then they try out the embeddings for semantic relatedness and textual similarity tasks. This time USE(Transformer) model is a clear winner. If we neglect InferSent, which is 8x bigger embedding than USE, USE is far ahead of others.

This makes USE a clear choice for semantic search and similar question kind of tasks.

BTW, when should we use USE(DAN) and USE(Transformer)? The performance of USE(DAN) is O(n) with length of text while its O(n²) for USE(Transformer). So if you are dealing with long texts, you might want to go with USE(DAN).

Linguistic probing tasks

Next, they show results for Linguistic probing tasks which consist of some esoteric tasks. In this case, ELMo seems to rule the world!

BShift (bi-gram shift) task — the goal is to identify whether if two consecutive tokens within the sentence have been inverted or not such as “This is my Eve Christmas”

The differences are huge between ELMo and non-ELMo models.

Information retrieval tasks

In the caption-image retrieval task, each image and language features are jointly evaluated with the objective of ranking a collection of images in respect to a given caption (image retrieval task — text2image) or ranking captions with respect to a given image (caption retrieval — image2text).

InferSent is a clear winner in this one. The 2nd in the line is ELMo.
How to Set Up Tailwind CSS V2.0 With Next.js 10
By: Jake Prins
Tags: Programming, Tailwind Css, Nextjs, React, JavaScript

How to Set Up Tailwind CSS V2.0 With Next.js 10

Use the new Tailwind CSS and Next.js in your React project

Photo by TJ K. on Unsplash.

In the last months of 2020, a couple of great framework updates have been released. First was the release of Next.js 10, which came with a lot of nice features, like the new image component that automatically optimizes images.

Secondly, 18 months after the 1.0 release, the Tailwind team released v2.0 of their CSS framework. This new update included lots of improvements like a new color palette and dark mode support.

Using the latest version of Next.js with Tailwind CSS is a very powerful combination to create and style web applications. Let’s walk through the steps of setting a new project up.
Present Era Would Inspire Tragedy — Dare to Feel
By: Francine Fallara
Tags: Poetry, Feelings, Emotions, Society, Blue Insights

Step out of this cybernetic society

Nowadays harsh control key

No commitment absentee

Brittle Wi-Fi connectivity

Detached sensitivity

Being lonely discontinuity

Dumped on survival with nobody

Present era would inspire tragedy

To any modern Shakespeare wannabe
Adele’s “Someone Like You” Video
By: Edith Zimmerman
Tags: Adele, Music, Music Videos

(How do you get hair like that?)
Scaling Christmas: An Illustrated Adventure
By: Brandon Weaver
Tags: Christmas, Scalability, DevOps, AWS, Developer

Heads up, we’ve moved! If you’d like to continue keeping up with the latest technical content from Square please visit us at our new home https://developer.squareup.com/blog

The lemurs are back! This time they’ve come for a special Christmas-themed adventure about how Christmas scales, using practical lessons in holiday operations.

Now let’s see what they’re up to today.

Meet Red

You may have already met Red some time in the past from other talks and events. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Red is a magical lemur. He’s also particularly fond of Christmas, especially presents.

Every year he sends Santa a letter, like clockwork. Every year, Santa delivers.

This raises a question though: how exactly does Santa do it? How does he scale Christmas?

Let’s journey to the North Pole to see if we can find some answers.

The North Pole
Pain Has A New Definition
By: Zachary Walston
Tags: Pain, Research, Health, Healthcare, Thoughts

Photo: ragsac/Getty Images

The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) has a new definition of pain.

“An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.”

The IASP also added 6 key Notes and the etymology of the word pain for further valuable context.

For many researchers and clinicians, the new definition is underwhelming, especially considering the previous definition was developed in 1979. But it does add the term “resembling” which is an important reminder that damage does not need to be present for the perception of pain to occur.

*For larger research deep dives, check out zacharywalston.com and the Clinical Gap Podcast.
Responding to threats over endorsement
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Trump, Data, Media, Investigative Journalism, Journalism

By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>

Oct. 18, 2016: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail.

“How do we respond to threats after our Hillary endorsement? This is how”: With grace, dignity and steely resolve. The Arizona Republic publishes in a Republican stronghold — and it had never endorsed a Democrat for president in its history, until this election. Their endorsement of Hillary Clinton ignited a wave of threatening responses. To those who sent in “vile threats,” the Republic’s Mi-Ai Parrish delivers a measured response that touches on forgiveness, the First Amendment, and fierce determination to be fair. A brilliant response. An economist makes the case for saving investigative journalism: Investigative reporting is expensive and time consuming. For that reason, many newsrooms have reluctantly dismantled or cut back on investigations to deploy scarce resources in other spots. Yet Stanford Prof Jay Hamilton argues in his book, “Democracy’s Detectives,” that investigative teams actually make economic sense. They help newsrooms differentiate and strengthen their brand against competitors, and hugely benefit society. For those worried about the state of investigative journalism (ie: me), it’s a refreshing read. Book review by Rick Edmonds for Poynter. Creating a ‘data diary’ to understand your news consumption: How many of us give active thought to how we consume data? Where we go and how we use it? Miguel Paz instructed his students to track their data consumption over a week. They learned fascinating lessons about themselves and the media. (Transparency alert: Miguel and I attended a similar class together.)

Get notified via email: Send note to 3toread (at) gmail.com

Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
The Magic 5
By: Omar Elgabry
Tags: Software Engineering, Software Development, Careers, Programming, Career Advice

1. Coding

A software is a piece of code (along with documents). So, first, learn how to code. Just pick any language. I would suggest to go with Python or C++ (just basics no OOP). Also, spend some time learning HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript (again, just the basics). It won’t hurt.

Mastering OOP is essential for any developer who wants to build a high quality software. Object-Orientation was intended to be closer to the real world, hence, make it easier and more realistic.

Writing code is not enough. Everyone can do it. The trick is how to write an efficient algorithm in terms of memory and time, and to know about different data structures, so you know when to use which data structure, and what each data structure is good at and when it’s terrible.

💡I would suggest first to start with a quick look at different data structures. Your brain is like the car battery, if you didn’t use the car for a long time, the battery will die. Similarly, if you didn’t use your brain; solving algorithmic challenges, your brain will die. So, always, always, practice.

In step [3-A], as you start learning about algorithms, you need to compare algorithms. Which one is better than the other?. Will it solve the largest test cases in acceptable time and memory?. Big O Notation is a convenient way to express the worst-case scenario for an algorithm.

Most often, you’ll work with databases, won’t you?. So, learn about: why we need a database, what’s a database, DBMS, basic features of a database, database design process, normalization, SQL, indexing, transactions & stored procedures, and the different types of databases.

Focus first on the relational databases, then move towards different categories, like NoSQL Databases. Most of the introductions to NoSQL databases assume you already understand relation database concepts and will use these concepts to explain what’s offered by NoSQL databases.

Software engineering is an engineering discipline that’s applied to the development of software. So, learn about software process and software process models (waterfall, prototyping, spiral, iterative, agile, etc), and software process activities (requirements, design and implementation, verification and validation, and maintenance).

Since most of the time what you’ll do is object-oriented (meaning we are oriented or focused around objects). So, need to learn about OOAD, system modeling, UML, design principles and design patterns.
Beautiful Boxplots With Statistical Significance Annotation
By: Serafeim Loukas
Tags: Machine Learning, Visualization, Box Plot, Data Science, Data Visualization

The statistical tests

Step 4: Now it’s time to do the statistical tests. We will use a two-sample t-test (since our group are independent) to test if the mean value of any of these 4 features (i.e. sepal length, sepal width, petal length, petal width) is statistically different between the 2 groups of flowers (setosa and versicolor).

#* Statistical tests for differences in the features across groups

from scipy import stats

all_t = list()

all_p = list()

for case in range(len(feature_names)):

sub_df = df_long[df_long.Feature == feature_names[case]]

g1 = sub_df[sub_df['Group'] == 0]['Value'].values

g2 = sub_df[sub_df['Group'] == 1]['Value'].values

t, p = stats.ttest_ind(g1, g2)

all_t.append(t)

all_p.append(p)

To do the statistical test we just used:

t, p = stats.ttest_ind(g1, g2)

Here we compare the mean of g1 (group 1: setosa) to the mean of g2 (group 2: versicolor) and we do that for all 4 features (using the for loop).

But how can we know if the mean of g1 (group 1: setosa) was significantly greater or smaller than the mean of g2 (group 2: versicolor) ?

For this we need to look at the t-values.

print(all_t)

[-10.52098626754911, 9.454975848128596, -39.492719391538095, -34.08034154357719] print(feature_names)

['sepal length (cm)', 'sepal width (cm)', 'petal length (cm)', 'petal width (cm)']

Interpretation:

If the t-value is positive (>0) then the mean of g1 (group 1: setosa) was significantly greater than the mean of g2 (group 2: versicolor).

If the t-value is negative (<0) then the mean of g1 (group 1: setosa) was significantly smaller than the mean of g2 (group 2: versicolor).

Reminder: feature_names = [‘sepal length (cm)’, ‘sepal width (cm)’, ‘petal length (cm)’, ‘petal width (cm)’].
Houston’s Hot Girls Having 2019’s Best Songs Is Both Trill & Important
By: Marcus K. Dowling
Tags: Music, Rap, Pop Culture, Houston, Feminism

Swishahouse Records was founded as an independent label in 1997 that initially specialized in releasing mixtapes made by DJs who slowed down, scratched over, and remixed top-40 songs. From there, they released albums by artists including Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Chamillionaire, and Slim Thug. Much like Beyoncé releasing her single in a way that asserted her excellence at a time when people maybe weren’t necessarily even contemplating how great she truly was, and sounding so unassailably good that if you think otherwise you could be a hater, Swishahouse’s strategy of unifying Houston’s streets behind singles before rap and pop’s mainstream could do anything other than accept their excellence, one-time Aftermath Records A&R Angelo Sanders noted, “[Swishahouse are] able to get their product out on the streets to specific regions at a greater speed than a major … They’re able to flood that whole Texas market with a product before the majors are able to notice what is going on out there.”

At present, “Big Ole Freak” has been named as one of Billboard’s 50 best songs and videos of 2019. As for “Before I Let Go?” You’ve probably eaten a spare rib or hot dog to it or two so far this summer. As for the legacy of Houston’s big year? Beyoncé’s “Before I Let Go” is played at the close of the Netflix release of her iconic 2018 Coachella performance. This two-plus hour greatest hits performance was also released as a full album, which for the purposes of the streaming-happy and commercially resurgent music industry likely feels akin to discovering a one-stop pill that heals all of the industry’s remaining financial ailments. Ideally, the likes of Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Tierra Whack, Rapsody, and numerous others are allowed the longest tail journey to chase massive success. At present, mainstream pop culture’s attention span for artistic excellence in hip-hop is short. But, given what Megan Thee Stallion has accomplished so far with a single from out of relative “left field” and other releases that deserve so much more acclaim, one can only believe that this portends well for the future.

For the past four decades, Houston’s defined itself as an essential player in the present and future of hip-hop and pop culture. In exceeding the existing standards in this regard set by the likes of the Geto Boys and Swishahouse Records, what Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion are accomplishing for the future of music and popular culture in 2019 is significant and worthy of praise.

Or, I could just close this like chopped and screwed ‘Yoncé does on Netflix album closer and originally 2013-released single “I Been On.”

Rolling high, leather and wood

Keep it trill, that’s what good
Hyperloop, o conceito de transporte de alta velocidade, está chegando à China
By: Futuro Exponencial
Tags: Transportation, Future, Hyperloop

in In Fitness And In Health
Emilia-Romagna Innodata - kpi6 - Medium
Tags: Big Data, Innovation, Big Data Analytics, Data Visualization, Press Release

🚀🚀🚀 The all-in-one Digital Consumer Intelligence platform that doubles the efficiency of your marketing activities.

Follow
I Can’t Sleep
By: Ioana Andrei
Tags: Society, Poetry On Medium, Insomnia, Anger, Poetry

I Can’t Sleep

A poetic rant

Photo by Gregory Pappas on Unsplash

Everything makes me angry

The hypocrisy

The misogyny

The racist bullshit

The lack of caring

The lack of thinking

The narcissistic

bullshit.

It makes me so angry

I can’t sleep

It’s so hot

I can’t sleep

I feel helpless

and I can’t sleep

I hate that I can’t change it.

Heat rising underneath my skin

I’ve always wondered if I could take it off.

No air through the windows

No air through my lungs

My belly is swollen

My legs are naked

The more I touch,

the more I burn

The more my anger turns.
Monster Under My Bed
Tags: Horror, Children, Monsters, Poetry, Creativity

I close my eyes

I want to scream

I bite my tongue

And dive into a dream

Of happy days

And garden games

But the pain goes on

On and on

On and on

And on and on

Now I feel the blood

The sheets are red

Told you, Mama

A monster’s in my bed
What’s new in sls-dev-tools? — 15/04
By: Mansur Pasha
Tags: Lambda, Open Source, AWS, NPM, Serverless

https://theodo-uk.github.io/sls-dev-tools/

This week, sls-dev-tools adds support for the EventBridge Schema Registry, with the aim to reduce the amount of time you spend in the AWS console downloading event schemas, and get you straight to injecting events.

Additionally, we had another community contribution from Serkan Ozal from Thundra (@serkan_ozal) to show you your function runtimes! If there’s a feature or change you want to see in sls-dev-tools and you know how you want to do it, we’d love for you to submit a PR and feature you in our next article.

For those who haven’t heard of it, sls-dev-tools is an opensource project that aims at becoming the equivalent of Chrome Dev Tools for the Serverless World. Our goal is to provide the Serverless community with metrics, logs and feedback directly in the terminal, eliminating the need to constantly jump to the AWS Console.

If you find this tool useful or have any feedback please get in touch via GitHub issues or Twitter, and if you like what you’re seeing a ⭐️would go a long way!

The new features released with version 0.2.3

Access the Event Schema Registry from within the tool

The tool now allows you to view your discovered EventBridge Registries and the schemas they contain. Select an EventBus and press “r” to open the Event Registry window.

View all your EventBridge registries

Enter Event properties using dynamically generated forms

On selecting a registry and a schema, the tool extracts the properties and creates a form allowing you to edit each one individually. Submitting these values will take you to the Event Injection screen, with the Detail field populated for you.

Don’t worry about the JSON, we’ll fill everything in for you

View your function runtimes in the lambda functions pane

The tool now shows you the runtime of your functions from the moment you start it. Thanks again to Serkan (@serkan_ozal) for this contribution!

What’s next?

After extending the Event Registry functionality to work for all event schemas, we’re turning our attention to providing more statistics for given lambda functions, and running test suites from inside the tool. Stay tuned!

We are also actively looking for contributors and will be available to help you find good first issues, code review and assistance on developing out any new functionality.

https://github.com/Theodo-UK/sls-dev-tools

Docs: https://theodo-uk.github.io/sls-dev-tools/
CRUD Operations with MongoDB in Android Development
By: Daniel Kioko
Tags: Android App Development, Software Development, Android, Mongodb, Java

Find Documents 🔍

We’ll begin with finding documents since this operation come’s first before updating or deleting any specific data. We can find all documents from a database collection using the ‘collection.find()’ action. Specific documents can be found by defining a filter.

Document filter = new Document()

.append("_id", new Document().append("$exists", true));



RemoteFindIterable findResults = itemsCollection

.find(filter)

Create & Upload Documents 📤

Let’s assume you’re creating a social media app. To upload a post, we’d have to upload a data object containing information such as the picture URL, the caption, and maybe the date it was posted. We’d then define the Document item as shown below:

new Document()

.append("_id": qwizy001)

.append("imageURL", "

.append("caption", "It's Crazy Cold Here")

.append("date", "1-1-2020")); Document post =Document().append("_id": qwizy001).append("imageURL", " https://unsplash.com/photos/4P0E3zcs_Nc ").append("caption", "It's Crazy Cold Here").append("date", "1-1-2020"));

Once we’ve gathered all the information for the post, we can upload it to a collection in the database using the ‘collection.insertOne()’ action.
The Benadryl Challenge on Tik Tok
Tags: Parenting Advice, Parenting, Health, Benadryl, Tiktok App

The Benadryl Challenge on Tik Tok OAO Follow Sep 29 · 3 min read

A dangerous trend all parents should be aware of

Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

Yet another new and dangerous trend is being touted on the social media application called Tik Tok. It is called the Benadryl Challenge, where people are encouraged to take high doses of Benadryl to help induce a high that causes hallucination. This trend has led to the death of a 15-year-old Oklahoma female teen and the report of hospitalization of three others in Fort Worth, Texas.

What is Benadryl?

Benadryl is an over-the-counter, first-generation antihistamine used to treat allergies and hay fever. The pharmacologic name is diphenhydramine. It acts by blocking histamine, which is responsible for allergic reactions. When used at the appropriate dose, it is effective and safe for its intended use.

Benadryl Toxicity

When used in high doses, Benadryl displays anticholinergic properties that produce a well-known group of symptoms with a classic description. The mnemonic that helps us remember some of the symptoms include:

Dry as a bone — It prevents sweating by blocking the nerves that supply the sweat glands causing dry skin.

Red as a beet — It causes the blood vessels that supply the skin to dilate, causing skin flushing.

Blind as a bat — It causes the pupils to dilate, disrupting accommodation and causing blurry vision.

Hot as a hare — Since it disrupts sweating, which helps cool the body, the body temperature increases, and fever occurs.

Full as a flask — It reduces the contraction of the bladder muscle and prevents opening of the urethral sphincter causing urinary retention and a full bladder.

Mad as a hatter — There is anxiety, agitation, slurred speech, confusion, disorientation, visual hallucinations, bizarre behavior, delirium, psychosis, coma, and seizures.

Hallucinations are described as “Alice in Wonderland-like” or “Lilliputian” because there is the distortion of the visual perception, making people look bigger or smaller. Patients with an altered mental status may grab at invisible objects in the air.

A fast heart rate and reduced bowel sounds are other findings.

Other medications with similar effects

Many other medications also have the same effects at toxic levels, as Benadryl does. Some of these medicines treat Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, vomiting, overactive bladder, muscle relaxants, and even some plants like jimson weed, mandrake, and deadly nightshade.

Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) warning

Following the reported death and hospitalizations, the FDA warned about the danger of taking Benadryl at doses greater than recommended for age or weight. FDA is currently investigating this trend and promises to provide more information after their investigation.

Tik Tok has been urged to delete the index video to prevent copycats.

Health care providers should also be aware of the Benadryl Challenge to guide caregivers and manage cases appropriately.
How to Choose the URL That Best Markets Your Business Online
By: Pierre Debois
Tags: Marketing, SEO, Business, Website Design, Strategy

How to Choose the URL That Best Markets Your Business Online

Selecting the URL is a critical marketing element to your success — here’s what to plan for your website.

Robinson’s in Chicago made a strategic decision to select a URL based on its ribs offering. But businesses must be leery of selecting a URL that does not reflect its other offerings.

URL. Three letters that are very important to businesses online. They are meant to give users a way of connecting to a business through a Website page, social media profile, Web app, or a digital medium.

Often businesses like to include a keyword into the URL. The purpose of the keyword is to draw a site to a higher position on a given search query and become more discoverable to people who are conducting the search. Because the people doing the search are potential customers, businesses consider this strategy a terrific way to attract customers at a low initial cost.

However, words have to be chosen carefully and weighed against how a business operates. Keywords for businesses often are the common products and services they are offering. In a search those words are usually searched every day — tires, pies, home repair, restaurants — the list can go on.

Many businesses change over time. This means that the URL has to change to reflect the new offerings as part of an SEO strategy. Despite the seemingly high priority to insert keywords in a website, a too-specific keyword can create a branding issue for a business. The business can be too well-known for one product, when it may want to focus on other offerings that have a higher margin.

For example, let's say that our restaurant that has focused on barbeque rib and chicken decides to offer another set of meals, ones that have a better profit margin for the restaurant. A URL like www.RIBS1.com may remind customers more of the ribs than the other meals. In general, being too specific in the URL can overlook an opportunity to shift a business’ brand towards an image that entices customers to call for other offerings or even to call more frequently.

This does not mean you can’t change a URL. Of course, you can change it. But changing URLs can trigger a reevaluation of a website structure to incorporate keywords. That creates a lot of work to match the services the business offers more services that appear more frequently in search queries.

With that in mind, let’s look at what steps you should keep in mind when selecting a URL for your business, be it a small owner-operator, a non-profit organization, or a burgeoning enterprise.
John Lennon in Exile
By: M.G. Siegler
Tags: Life, John Lennon, The Beatles, Music

This article on John Lennon’s (and Yoko Ono’s) time in exile (on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his murder) by Barbara Graustark is full of gems (as, presumably, is her 1980 book on the topic).¹ A few choice ones:

In early 1976, he and Yoko went into a self-imposed lockdown. His movements weren’t limited, and his finances were secure, but he shut off the outside world to find his purpose again. During those years, while Ono took over the business and dealt with the lawyers from her downstairs office at the Dakota, where they lived on the Upper West Side, Lennon was the ultimate homebody. Staff in the apartment on the seventh floor recall hearing him happily playing the white piano in the couple’s all-white living room overlooking Central Park, and singing Beatles songs, one after the other. He was shaping his days around Sean, he said: up at 6 a.m., “have a cup of tea — no caffeine — and plan what Sean’s going to have for breakfast, and he comes out, we communicate, and then I’m thinking about the next meal, like Mrs. Higgins, in Wisconsin,” he said.

John Lennon, dad.

At first it was very hard not to be doing something musical. It was a matter of no clarity and no desire to do it because I was supposed to. The real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding, comes to me and I’m just a channel. But in order to get that clear channel open again, I had to stop picking up every radio station in the world, in the universe. So my turning away for it is how I began to heal again. There was a hard withdrawal period, what people must go through at 65, and then I started being a househusband and swung my attention onto Sean. And then I realized, I’m not supposed to be doing something, I am doing something, and then I was free.

Such a nice thought. It also reminds me a bit of the end of Yesterday, last year’s sort of fun/sort of throw-away Beatles tribute/rom-com, which also has a sort of great moment that I’m quasi-spoiling right now.²

Lastly, on the topic of if Lennon felt like he missed something by not going out in New York City all those years:

Picasso didn’t go to the museums. He was either painting, or eating or [having sex]. Picasso lived where he lived and people came to see him. That’s what I did. Did Picasso go down to some studio to watch people paint?

One might imagine what Lennon actually said in the “[having sex]” blank. There are many more gems here. Lennon was murdered a year before I was born. He was just one year older than I am now. It was just 10 years after The Beatles broke up. Still such a loss.

Fine, one last one:
Paid protester website highlights difference between disinformation and parody
Tags: Technology, George Floyd, Protest, Fake News, Facebook

A satirical website that claims to offer protesters-for-hire has ignited conspiracy theories among far-right Facebook groups suggesting the current protest actions in the United States are staged. The website, Protestjobs.com, has been shared over 30,000 times in Facebook posts since the start of the year, with the vast majority of these shares occurring after May 31.

Satirical news reports being mistaken for legitimate news is not a new phenomenon, with websites like The Onion (which grew out of its eponymous paper copy) and Clickhole occasionally being picked up by mainstream influencers or organizations as actual news. Comprehending the distinction is not always easy, as disclaimers on these satirical sources are not always straightforward or transparent.

The relationship between satire and disinformation is a funny one. Described above, some disinformants use existing satire and parody and hope their audience takes it as fact. While in other cases, we see the inverse: disinformants getting caught in the act, then claiming that it was all a joke. Their disinformation was a parody. The result is a convoluted information environment.

The Protestjobs.com website and its Twitter account (@protestjobs) has historically been used to troll people claiming that protesters are paid during a number of protests in the United States and around the world. The website has been openly studied as satire, and it has now ironically itself become “proof” that paid-for actors are used to agitate and amplify the protests.

Based on a tip from BuzzFeed, a DFRLab analysis shows that the parody website was mistaken for truth and used by pro-Trump, far-right, and conspiracist groups on Facebook to delegitimize the ongoing protests against police brutality, not only in the United States, but in Australia and Canada as well.

False flags and satire

The Protestjobs.com website was registered more than three years ago on February 2, 2017. Since its inception, little has changed; the website offers users the option to hire “millions of protesters” using one of several packages, ranging from the affordable “EZ-riot” (with an optional “car/dumpster fire” upgrade) to a tailor-made package that includes celebrity appearances and a tweet by National Parks.
Sneak Attack
By: Elizabeth Helmich
Tags: Childhood, One Line, Music, Moments, Parenting

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

A ninja closes in on

the victim’s aproned hips

sashaying in time to James

Brown, sheathing dual

swords precisely when

that high note hits

to steal a hug

from mom.
10 React Interview Questions for 2020
By: Michael Krasnov
Tags: JavaScript, React, Interview, Programming, React Native

What’s the Difference Between Class-Based Components and Functional Components?

The most obvious differences are syntax and definition. A functional component is a function that returns another component. A class-based component is a class whose render function returns another component. But which one should you use and when?

Prior to React 16.8, before Hooks were introduced, only the class-based components could hold internal state and lifecycle methods, and functional components could only rely on props (thus, they were stateless). So, it was easy: use classes for stateful components and functions for stateless.

But now, React Hooks such as useState and useEffect let you have state and lifecycle methods inside functional components. Additionally, React team is encouraging everyone to move away from class-based components because of performance issues and poor class implementation in JavaScript. There are still a few features still missing from functional components, however. One of those is error boundaries, so you are forced to use class-based components.

Here are examples of both approaches. This is the same component, implementing a counter button, both in class-based components and in functional:
Please Don’t Tell My Mom What I Write About Her
By: Shannon Ashley
Tags: Writing, Family, Life, Parenting, Abuse

My mother had a terrible habit of never wanting to see me spread my wings and fly. Up until I was in seventh grade, she frequently hijacked my school projects, going as far as doing 100% of whatever I set out to do. Her reasoning was always that she could do it better, and that I would (or should) be embarrassed with my final results.

Every year, I dreaded my school's talent expo because my mother wouldn’t let me work alone. One year, I decided to submit a Play-Doh sculpture, but my mom took over and made the whole damn thing herself. She crafted a little girl sitting in a grassy park. I hated that thing, and worse yet, it won a blue ribbon.

When I was eight years old or so, I decided to do my own talent show project that my mother couldn’t take over. I chose to sing a song. Now here’s something you should know about me — I am in love with music, but I can’t sing worth a damn. As a kid, my heart would just break listening to the music I loved and wishing I could do it justice.

But I didn’t care that I couldn’t sing great. I thought that maybe I could even learn how to sing better. My mom, however, was terribly unhappy with my choice to sing. She didn’t mince words when she explained that I didn’t have a good enough voice, so if I insisted upon singing, it had to be my own song to show any degree of talent.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Sure, I sang a song, but it wasn’t my song. It was one my mother wrote. God, I hated that song. I hated the tune, I hated the words, and I hated my mother’s constant message that I might as well not try because nothing I made would ever be good enough.

To be fair, my mother is now oddly self-deprecating. Everything she does is “not good” or “embarrassing.” Just yesterday, I had to insist that she stop criticizing her own work when she helped my daughter make paper dolls.

I stepped in, remembering all of the blasted mixed messages when I was young. “If you keep criticizing yourself, she’ll think that’s normal, mom. I don’t want Sophie growing up to belittle her own efforts or be afraid to even try.” It’s awkward when you have to parent your parent just to do right by your kid. Now my mom's been making comments that she doesn't want to "get in trouble" with me again.

I don't want my daughter to suffer as I did.
The Release of Apollo Client 3
By: Joan Saum
Tags: Angular, JavaScript, React, Programming, Vue

The Release of Apollo Client 3

Discover what's new in this release

Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash

Apollo Client is a state management library for JavaScript that enables you to manage both local and remote data with GraphQL. It provides built-in integration with React and also other frameworks such as Angular, Vue, Amber, Meteor, etc.

After 11 months of work and multiples Betas and releases, Apollo Client launched v3 a few days ago. Let's discover what this release contains.
Breaking Up with My Diet
By: Kyrie Gray
Tags: Humor, Relationships, Health, Diet, Culture

Breaking Up with My Diet

It’s not you, it’s us

Image licensed from Depositphotos

Dear Diet,

By the time you read this I’ll be at the pizzeria. This isn’t how I wanted you to find out. I should have been honest from the beginning. However, I can’t pretend to be happy anymore. So I’m just going to say it. It’s over between us.

Please don’t take this breakup personally! It’s not you. It’s us. We aren’t good for each other. Not when we are trying to be exclusive. You need someone who is goal-oriented. Someone with a perfect top bun who truly believes that smoothies are a delicious dessert. You need someone who yearns to wear size-zero yoga pants more than feeling perfectly textured bread crumbs on their tongue.

And you know what? That’s not me.

Of course, there is someone else. You could sense it. You asked me to tell you the truth, and I lied. You were right. It was carbs all along.

I’m guessing you are about to angrily throw this letter away but I beg you to hear me out! I didn’t realize that carbs meant so much to me. Yet the more you told me to stay away, the more attracted I was to their complexness.

At first we’d innocently hang out, making eyes at each other at a pasta restaurant. Carbs would tease me about the salad I was eating. “You need a real meal,” they would say. I’d laugh it off, but my stomach would rumble with desire.

Then we started to do more things together. I can’t help it. I love a bad food group.

But beneath the stigma I learned that your foe was…sweet. Literally, as sometimes they were cake. But, more importantly, they was comforting. We’d watch Netflix together. They would help me deal with school and work stress. Plus they never made me feel guilty or like I had to choose.

“Sure, you can see other foods,” they’d say. “You’re an adult.”

And that’s why we are breaking up. Because with you, diet, I feel restricted. And I don’t think it’s for my own good, as you keep insisting. I know others congratulated us. Friends told me how fortunate I was to have you in my life, how amazing I looked.

However, I don’t care what others think anymore.

I hope we won’t be enemies. I will always remember you. Especially since summer is coming up and I really want us be on talking terms before I have to get into a bikini.

See you around!

Sincerely,

Your carb-loving friend.