fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Working With Visual Studio Code
By: Ken Bourke
Tags: Software Development, Csharp, Dotnet, Learn To Code, Programming

Set Up Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a modular, flexible editor — it’s not designed to work with only one programming language. Visual Studio Code users can install extensions to make it easier to work with specific languages in Visual Studio Code.

Open the Extensions window in Visual Studio Code and search for C#.
Some things I learned about data-driven storytelling in Schloss Dagstuhl
By: Moritz Stefaner
Tags: Storytelling, Data Visualization

Trick question: What do social media, business, dance, marketing, design, photography, life, film, hollywood, branding, journalism, speaking, travel, leadership, pr, folk, advertising, instagram, fundraising, country music, pitching, employer branding, and marketing your skills for a job have in common?

Well, they are all about storytelling, according to the first 5 pages of results for the respective Google search.
Fish vs. Zsh vs. Bash and Why You Should Switch to Fish
By: Sid Mohanty, Captain Techie
Tags: Mac, Productivity, Linux, Bash, Programming

What’s Special About fish?

Fish Shell logo

Easy to understand and use

Unlike the other shells that need a lot of setting-up to work the way you want them to, fish works perfectly right out of the box.

It ships with the most widely used features already included, which are present when you start using it without needing to install any additional plugins or tweak any configuration files unless you want to. Its syntax is simple, clean, and consistent.

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature that we all wish our CLI could perform. It saves a lot of time and frustration. Well, fish does it, and it does it pretty well.

It shows you whether your command or the directory to be searched exists before you even hit enter. You’ll know whether you’re typing anything wrong before you hit enter. This makes it easier for people to parse commands, and find errors.

It highlights (most) errors in red, such as misspelled commands, misspelled options, reading from non-existing files, mismatched parenthesis and quotes, and many other common errors.

It also features highlighting of matching quotes and parenthesis. Oh, and it’s pretty, colorful.

Configuration for fish shells

The fish community maintains Oh My Fish, which is a shell framework inspired by Oh My Zsh. It offers a lot of beautiful prompt themes and awesome plugins, is lightweight, awesome, and easy to use.

It also offers a web-based configuration feature. Just type:

fish_config

You will land on the website with which you can customize the skin of your shell.

web_config page for fish

Inline searchable history

This is an interactive feature of this Shell. You begin typing a command and press the up key to see all the times in the Shell history where you used that command before.

To search the history, simply type in the search query, and press the up key. By using the up and down arrow, you can search for older and newer matches. The fish history automatically removes duplicate matches and the matching substring is highlighted.

These features make searching and reusing previous commands much faster.

Inline auto-suggestion

Fish suggests commands as you type and shows the suggestion on the right of the cursor, in grey. If you mistype a command, it will show in red to indicate that it’s an invalid command.

It also suggests the most frequently used commands and auto-completes while you type, based on your history and valid files available.

Demonstration for inline auto-suggestion

Tab completion using man page data

Fish can parse CLI tool man pages in various formats. Type in a command and “tab” through all the suggested auto-completions.
Introduction to Video Object Detection
By: Guandong Liu
Tags: Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Video Object Detection

Limitations of Still-image Object Detector

Before we dive deep into these papers, we need to first understand what limitations still-image object detectors have and how we can leverage our knowledge to extend current frameworks to videos.

First, simply applying image detectors to videos would introduce unaffordable computational cost by running models for each frame in videos.

The accuracy is also affected by motion blur, video defocus, and rare poses that only appear in videos but seldom observed in still images.

So, we want to design a new framework or extend current frameworks for video object detection task.
Great Christmas Songs from the past, What's your favorite song?
By: Peter Moore
Tags: Songs, Artist, Family, Christmas, Music

New research has revealed which Christmas songs have been the most listened to over the past years — and for that matter, which songs have been given the most plays.

With Christmas time upon us once again— which means seasonal songs can be heard on every corner, of your shopping trips will be soundtracked by the likes of Wizzard, Band-Aid, Elton John, Slade, George Michael, all the usual suspects.

But which one of these festive favorites will you hear the most this Christmas 2020?

The Performing Rights Society, (PRS) who track plays of songs on TV and radio — issued their research, which revealed Britains’ favorite top 10 Christmas songs:

Britain’s Top 10 Favourite Christmas Songs…

1–The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl — Fairytale Of New York

This well-loved but occasionally controversial festive song was first released in 1987.

2- Wham! — Last Christmas

The late George Michael and his musical partner Andrew Ridgeley released this Christmas classic in 1984.

3- Slade — Merry Xmas Everybody

Noddy Holder’s evergreen Christmas tune was originally issued in 1973 and has been around for a long, long time.

4- Bing Crosby — White Christmas

Made famous by the film Holiday Inn, this eternal song first topped the US charts in 1942!

5- Wizzard — I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

Roy Wood’s sleigh-belled strewn song went head to head in the charts with Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody in 1973.
Don’t believe the hype
By: Martin Vetterli
Tags: Market, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Computer Science, Technology

Where we try to understand what’s behind past, current and future tech trends.

Photo by Michael Afonso on Unsplash

The tech industry may not sound quite as stylish as the fashion industry, but it is certainly also prone to fashion effects. For example, tech often makes big promises and thus raises hopes, leading to trends and hypes. So how can we know if a new technology is really a “hot topic” and not just a passing fad?

Let’s look at two examples from the past digital decades to understand this better. One is the concept of Peer­-to-­peer (P2P), which started about fifteen years ago. The idea was that we would all connect directly with each other for Internet services, instead of going through centralized entities. A number of research initiatives and products were developed based on this concept, such as Skype, but today very little remains (in fact even Skype switched back to a traditional centralized model).

Another concept from the past decade is cloud computing, that we explained in a previous column. The idea was to provide IT as a service, thus allowing companies and people to rent computation in a dynamic, scalable way rather than having to buy and install their own servers. Here, the impact has been dramatic and the entire IT industry has been transformed.

However, it is not just a case of working out versus fizzling out. Sometimes major transformations happen only on the second or third wave. Think for example of smartphones. Before the iPhone arrived, there was a lot of skepticism among specialists about mobile computing (after all, its arrival had been heralded multiple times, to no avail). But then finally the right combination of technology, design and product innovation appeared — and mobiles took off.

So what is the lesson? In the moment itself it is very hard to tell the real impact that a new technology might have on society. However, while we can’t predict the future, there are signs to look for. For this we need to take the rational view and ask factual questions like: are the applications addressing actual issues? Is there a true groundswell of adoption outside of the technologies’ originators? Are there symptoms of a bubble associated with the domain?

Take for example two of the current hot topics: blockchain and deep learning (artificial intelligence). Both are clearly extremely interesting from a technical and scientific viewpoint, and both have a lot of ongoing activity and media exposure. But where will they be in 10 years? While not even experts know, trying to address the above questions can give a first hint.

But the best indicator remains time. After all, time is very good at separating the wheat from the chaff (or as statisticians might say, everything “regresses to the mean”). And in more prosaic terms, I would just follow the credo “don’t believe the hype” when it comes to judging current tech trends. This famous sentence was originated by Noam Chomsky, and then brought to the masses via a song of the American hip hop band Public Enemy. Or was that just another hype?
Anger and Love
By: Bernadette Decarlo
Tags: Poetry, Society, Love, Anger

Anger and Love

There is a choice

Photo by Azrul Aziz on Unsplash

If I could live inside the walls that have no divide, I would not have love and anger inside. There is a fine line that exists between love and anger. Some say it is passion others view it as human. To me, they are two words that stand side by side. Which one do I choose to multiply?

Humanity

I see love and anger with the human race, over color and faith. It saddens me because the skin is so thin, and the race consciousness focuses on the difference. I am a white woman with a child and grandchildren that are mixed. I love them and kiss them on their beautiful brown skin.

It does not matter what faith you are; there is only one God. Get past the prejudice of religion and join me in spirituality where we are all one in all there is.

I do not see much love expressed. But anger is present in young and old. And our government has no respect, and rudeness is prevalent. They are leaders that represent scars of indifference. They do not know we exist because of their prejudice.

Mother and child

Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

Give your children hugs and kisses so they may thrive. There is hatred where they play, and it has taught them to discriminate. Some declare vulnerability as being weak, but that is how they become strong.

I never saw my mother and father kiss or hug. Although I knew they were in love. But what grace my eyes could’ve beheld if they did.

Thank you, Ruchi, for the prompt. “Anger and Love”.
Building A Sustainable Trust in Our Government — By Olumide Idowu
By: Iccdi Africa
Tags: Environment, Youth Development, Climate Change, Women, Government

I was invited by the United Nations to join other young people to foster collaboration and mutual understanding with young people, as key stakeholders in the development of this country.

We (young people) are the critical segment of the population that cannot be left behind in any effort towards nation-building. One of the specific outcomes we envision through this dialogue is a better understanding of the focus areas of youth, how to address and raise awareness around concerns, and to collectively create strategies that can tackle key issues in the country as we build forward better.

“From Protest to Constructive Engagement” which comes in at a very critical time of a country like Nigeria.

My outcome after this dialogue focused more on TRUST and how young people need to start looking at how we can be part of making this trust a reality in making sure we are part of the system that we want to see in coming years.

Trust in government represents the confidence of citizens in the actions of a “government to do what is right and perceived fair” Citizen expectations are key to their trust in government. As citizens become more educated, their expectations of government performance rise. If citizens’ expectations rise faster than the actual performance of governments, trust and satisfaction could decline. Citizens’ trust towards government is influenced differently whether they have a positive or negative experience with service delivery. A negative experience has a much stronger impact on trust in government than a positive one. Targeting public policies towards dissatisfied citizens will therefore have a stronger impact on trust in government. We also look at how we can gather data the will help the government understand the kind of young people they are trying to carrying along in building a nation that is sustainable for all. We need data to inform the work of governments so that youth can better participate in policy-making.

I want to thank the United Nation and UNDP in Nigeria for the invitation to join this conversation physically with UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed, and selected influential youth in Nigeria together with Hon. Minister Dame Pauline Kedem Tallen- Federal Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development and Hon. Sunday Dare — Federal Minister of Youth and Sports Development.

I look forward to a more sustainable way to build more trust in our government and the system we are hoping for, for the future generation.

By Olumide Idowu
The Fluid Nature of Individuality
By: Carlos E. Perez
Tags: AI

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

The concept of individuality or the self is a very fluid concept that we often don’t extend enough effort in exploring.

https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/12/what-is-individual-and-how-do-we-find.html

All biological intelligence are forms of collective and cooperative intelligence that maintain their identity across time in an attractor of non-linear dynamics. Collectives are formed by individuals yet a collective itself has its own individuality. In biology, it is not the individual that survives, but rather the entire collective (i.e. its species).

It is indeed insightful to study roles provided by different genders that lead to the robustness of a species. It is intriguing that the strategies at the genetic level appear to be conserved across many scales. We see robust algorithms in protein folding and in sexual reproduction mechanisms. Just as there are new behaviors that arise as the universe creates new kinds of atoms, there are analogously new kinds of behaviors that biological evolution uncovers that are conserved across species and scale.

In Physics we seek out symmetries so as to find invariances in nature and ultimately laws of nature. In Biology, these invariances are expressed on the notion of individuality or self. Invariance in biology is not just a consequence of causational invariance as found in Physics. But rather a consequence of intentionality enabled by actions forged by causality. Intentions however are a compositional thing. But they only scale if there is shared intentionality across the individuals of the collective.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to survive as a consequence of the shared consensus among its individual holders. Mining and proof of stake mechanisms are just decentralized consensus making algorithms. Civilizations and societies scale and eventually take over the world as a consequence of consensus mechanisms that coordinate the many individuals in their respective collectives. The same robustness that private property renders in a free economy is represented in the individual subject stance of members of a species. Decision-making is local but there is an emergent behavior of the collective that preserves its identity.

Individuals intentionally sacrifice themselves in wars for the survival of the collective. The downward causation delivered by culture incentivizes the individual to de-prioritize their own individuality. In the grand scheme of biology, it is the males of a species that are sacrificed so that the females of the species continue to pro-create. Males are effectively the red shirt crewmen in Star Trek. The story doesn’t begin when a red-shirt crewman gets vaporized. It always happens at the beginning of every story.

But none of the viewers actually care. They only care about the crew surviving their journey. Thus individuality actually belongs to the crew (i.e. the collective).
How to Store and Fetch From DynamoDB With AWS Lambda
By: Lukonde Mwila
Tags: AWS, Programming, AWS Lambda, Dynamodb, Serverless

Create Handler Functions

In our handler.ts file, I’m going to create a function named respond that wraps the response that gets sent back to the client. This function takes two parameters:

The data we’re sending as a response. The HTTP response status code.

export const respond = (fulfillmentText: any, statusCode: number): any => {

return {

statusCode,

body: JSON.stringify(fulfillmentText),

headers: {

"Access-Control-Allow-Credentials": true,

"Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*",

"Content-Type": "application/json"

}

};

};

Next, I’m going to create the two handlers that I defined as functions in the serverless.yml file.

These two functions call other functions that don’t exist yet, so let’s go ahead and create them. In your app directory, you can create another folder called dynamodb-actions , and in there create an index.ts file. In our index.ts file, we’re going to instantiate the DynamoDB DocumentClient object from the JavaScript AWS SDK.

const dynamoDB = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient();

There should be no need for you to install it on a project level since the Lambda environment ships with it. However, I would advise you to install the AWS SDK globally on your local machine for local development purposes.

The first function we will create is saveItemInDB , which will take the two relevant arguments required to create an item in our to-do-list table. We then create the parameters ( params ) for the DocumentClient’s put function by specifying the table name and the item we want to store in the table.

The second function we are going to create is getItemFromDB . We will use this function to retrieve an item from the to-do-list table by specifying the table name as well as the item ID as a key in the parameters ( params ) for the DocumentClient’s get function.

/** get a to-do item from the db table */

export function getItemFromDB(id: string) {

const params = {

TableName: "to-do-list",

Key: {

id

}

}; return dynamoDB

.get(params)

.promise()

.then(res => res.Item)

.catch(err => err);

}
🌌 CARTOON: Parking
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Art, Comics, Cartoon, Science, Cities

🌌 CARTOON: Parking

Is there life on Mars?

Cartoonist’s Note №1

I really don’t care if there’s life on Mars. I just want there to be parking.

Cartoonist’s Note №2

Like all of my cartoons, this one was “not distributed in topics.”

Cartoonist’s Note №3

Medium recently demonetized cartoons, poetry, flash fiction and other short articles. This was likely a deliberate attempt to drive creators of short content from the platform by crippling them financially (aren’t billionaires wonderful?). Help even the score by buying me a coffee.

Cartoonist’s Note №4

My new one-man Medium magazine is called — Rolli.

Psst: you might like these cartoons, too:

Psst: you really ought to watch this strange old cartoon in its entirety:

Psst: here’s an important message:

Medium CEO Ev Williams

Medium’s unexpected and unwelcome change in the way it compensates members of its Partner Program — payment is now based on how long it takes people to read an article rather than how much they like it (if at all) — rewards creators of long, padded articles, and essentially demonetizes shorter content.

As nearly all of my posts are poetry, cartoons, or efficient fiction/essays, I’m faring very poorly under this new system.

Since the change was implemented, my Partner Program earnings have plummeted by 90%, and hundreds (if not thousands) of others are in the boat.

If you want to help, send a tweet or email to Medium CEO Ev Williams (ev@medium.com) and/or to yourfriends@medium.com expressing your displeasure with the unfair new system, and asking them to restore all the missing earnings which have essentially been stolen from its writers. I and others would be so grateful!

Slowly re-reading this post 100 times would also help enormously ;)

So would buying me a coffee.
ESLint for Noobs
Tags: Beginners Guide, Programming, JavaScript, Typescript, Eslint Config

ESLint Rules 😱

If you explore the content of .eslintrc.json — surely you will see a field rules , and in it some more fields. The inner fields are the rules — to be more specific, rule names e.g. no-unused-vars on the other side the rule options i.e. if that rule breaches what ESLint is suppose to do, e.g. "error" viz. report an error.

Rules comes in various combinations of settings. As an example,

"quotes": ["error", "double"]

Here, the rules translates: if the quotes are not double quotes (“”), report error. Again, if we look into another variation of the same example —

"quotes": ["warn", "double"]

Meaning, if the quotes (“”) are not double quotes, report it as a warning rather than error.

It is possible to disable the rule with off as shown below.

// Reports Error

"quotes": ["error", "double"]

// OR

"quotes": [2, "double"] // Reports Warning

"quotes": ["ward", "double"]

// OR

"quotes": [1, "double"] // Reports Nothing i.e. off

"quotes": ["off", "double"]

// OR

"quotes": [0, "double"]

To summarize,

"off" or 0 - turn the rule off

or - turn the rule off "warn" or 1 - turn the rule on as a warning (doesn't affect exit code)

or - turn the rule on as a warning (doesn't affect exit code) "error" or 2 - turn the rule on as an error (exit code will be 1)

Now that you understand how to read these simple rules, explore an example by yourself—

use-isnan: ["error", {"enforceForSwitchCase": true}]
On the Verge
By: Paul Fishwick
Tags: Engineering, Kinetic, Machine

The verge and foliot escapement. The first mechanical clocks, building on the older principle of water flow for energy, employed a solid weight to yield the computation of time. If we just tied a weight and let it drop, we would not have to wait long, and we would be able to measure time only in seconds. So the trick for a mechanical clock without water, but instead using a weight, is to delay the time of the weight drop. This was done with an escapement. The verge is the vertical post and the foliot, the horizontally rotating bar. This animation (which can be viewed by clicking on the above image) is from Peter Ceperley who has a good explanation of the gear train powered via the escapement control. Think of this escapement is the medieval equivalent of a square wave — a mechanism to achieve an oscillating signal.
10 Java Articles You should Read in 2021
Tags: Articles, Coding, Javarevisited, Java, Programming

10 Java Articles You should Read in 2021

Best stories of Javarevisited publication

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Hello guys, another month pass by and we are ready with another edition of the best of Javarevisited. The growth is good, with more readers and authors are joining Javarevisited every day. If you are also a Java author or write on medium, you can join the Javarevisited publication to give your story more exposure.

Anyway, here are the most viewed articles of Javarevsitied last month.

This was the best and most viewed article of this month on Javarevisited, it wasn’t like the viral article of last month which got 147K views but this one got around 12.5K views.

The list contains some of the recent worth reading books for Java developers on key skills like Spring Boot, Best Practices, and recent Java development. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it to read it now.
Ta dose crypto du vendredi 23 mars — Le Japon met la pression sur Binance
Tags: Google, Blockchain, Binance, Huawei, Bitcoin

Japan orders Binance crypto exchange to close or face police action, bitcoin rally falters …

According to a report by financial news outlet Nikkei, Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) has ordered the closure…
How to Make a Custom Screensaver for Mac OS X
By: Trevor Phillips
Tags: Software Development, Computer Science, Programming, Design

Step 1: Project Setup

Screensavers for Mac OS X are developed with Xcode. The first thing you’ll need to do is create a new Xcode project with the category “Screen Saver.”

I named my project Pong, but you can name yours anything you’d like. As of Xcode 10.2.1, Xcode will generate some files: PongView.h , PongView.m , and Info.plist .

Since Objective-C isn’t the prettiest language and Swift is becoming more mainstream, we’re going to delete these auto-generated Objective-C files and create a new file, PongView.swift .

The structure of this Swift file is quite simple. You can copy-paste the template from below:

We will use the function draw() to render content for each frame of the screensaver animation.

We will use the function animateOneFrame() to update the “state” of the screensaver every time the animation timer fires (this timer is created and handled automatically by the OS). It’s important to call setNeedsDisplay(bounds) at the end of this function so that the OS knows to re-draw the screen.

Important: Since we got rid of the Objective-C stuff and are using Swift, the project’s Info.plist file needs to be updated. Prefix the value for the key “Principal class” with the name of the Xcode project. For example, my Xcode project is called Pong, so I changed the value from PongView to Pong.PongView .

Step 2: Implement Logic

The state of our pong screensaver is going to be tracked with just a few simple variables:

In the init() function, we’re going to configure the ball’s initial position and velocity. We set the initial position to the center of the screen and set the initial velocity to a random vector with magnitude 10 .

Now we need some helper functions to determine when the ball makes contact with the edges of the screen and/or with the paddle. The following two functions will do the trick:

The function ballHitPaddle() is not 100% robust for verifying contact between the ball and paddle, I know. But for our purposes, it’s good enough.

Now, we’re going to use these helper functions to update the “state” of our screensaver in animateOneFrame() .

The paddle is guaranteed to track the x-position of the ball. Therefore, it will always make contact with the ball before it bounces on the bottom of the screen (unless you set the ball’s velocity really high, in which case it could “jump through” the paddle).
Google TW 面試趣 - Test Engineer, Android
Tags: Work, Google, Test Engineer, Interview, 面試心得

某天收到一封來自 Google TW - Test Engineer, Android 的面試邀請，於是開始請HR幫忙安排後續一切事情，首先要先感謝 HR Jenny 很用心、很細心的跟我說明接下來面試的流程，也提供我許多面試相關的參考文件，真的是萬般感謝，讓我感到備受尊重。當然! 面試不外乎還是要刷刷題目~這我就不多說了!

Google TW 面試流程:

Recruiter Prescreen → Phone Interview → Onsite Interview ( 4–5 sessions ) → Hiring Committee Review → Offer Review → Offer Delivery (Yippee!)

先說結果，很可惜的我在第二關就直接GG，但我還是覺得整個經驗是令我感到有點神奇與黑人問號的?

面試時間約莫45分鐘(透過Google Hangout視訊會議)，視訊電話接通之後，先與interviewer打招呼，她請我先自我介紹，我開始敘述我的工作經驗bla~bla~bla~5年的工作經驗如何如何，之前是如何建立自動化測試..如何測試..測試過什麼樣的產品..寫過什麼測試工具與建立測試架構...等(我約莫用3分鐘時間口述完畢)。

接著直接在 Google Doc 上貼上一段題目，第一次在Google Doc寫code囉~XD 如下:

Vampire number: positive integer v that can be factored into two integers x*y,

where base-10 digits of v are equal to the set of base-10 digits of x and y. These two factors are called the fangs.

Examples:

688 = 86 x 8

1260 = 21 x 60

1530 = 30 x 51

125460 = 204 x 615 = 246 x 510

12546 = 246 x 51

Please implement a method to check if it is a vampire number.

boolean isVampire(int x, int y) {

[fill here]

}
Becoming a Monopoly Was Always Facebook’s Goal
By: Will Oremus
Tags: Facebook, Antitrust, Technology, Social Media

Becoming a Monopoly Was Always Facebook’s Goal

‘Copy, acquire, and kill’

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image

Wednesday’s filing of a major government antitrust suit against Facebook is a landmark in the internet’s history. We knew the suit was coming; we didn’t know it would call for a full-on breakup that would split off Instagram and WhatsApp from the parent company. You can read the Federal Trade Commission’s 53-page complaint here.

Some commentators were quick to question how the FTC and 46 state attorneys general could credibly claim Facebook’s 2012 Instagram acquisition and 2014 WhatsApp acquisition constituted monopolistic behavior, given that the deals withstood antitrust scrutiny at the time. Indeed, both purchases were mocked by many as frivolous overpays, and few foresaw Instagram or WhatsApp growing into the giants that they’ve become under Facebook’s ownership.

That Facebook saw something others didn’t may be a testament to the company’s farsightedness and business acumen. But just because certain regulators and pundits didn’t recognize what Mark Zuckerberg was up to at the time doesn’t mean the company is innocent of anticompetitive behavior.

On the contrary, we now have evidence of what I and many others argued from the start: that Zuckerberg’s goal was always to monopolize social networking. Internal Facebook emails published as part of this year’s Congressional antitrust investigation make clear that the acquisitions were primarily about neutralizing potential competitors, not improving Facebook’s products. They were part of a long-term strategy that has come to be known as “copy, acquire, and kill,” aimed at ensuring Facebook would be not just a social network but the social network, even as social networking became a massive, world-changing global industry.

Zuckerberg has said on multiple occasions that Bill Gates was his childhood hero — a tech titan known as much for his ruthless monopolization of desktop computing as his ingenuity and philanthropy. He reportedly used to shout “domination!” at the end of Facebook staff meetings. And his company has spent the past year frantically integrating Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger with Facebook in a fairly naked bid to complicate a breakup bid.

These anecdotes are not an indictment in themselves: There remains much to be proven if the FTC is to succeed in forcing a breakup. But they at least mean absolutely no one should be surprised that Facebook’s actions over the years are now being called monopolistic — least of all Zuckerberg or the company itself.
Using $auth module’s redirect in tandem with $router.push in Nuxt.js
By: Abrar Shariar
Tags: JavaScript, Front End Development, Vuejs, Nuxtjs, Config

Recently I came across the issue of using the auth module in Nuxt.js and invoking a $router.push in subsequent line of code in the same method. The conundrum began when the lines after the auth.loginWith method did not execute as intended since the page was redirected to the redirect URI.

It has been only a week in the Vue.js land, so I suppose this issue is something faced by many newbies.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

So, here goes where it all started:

I have a authenticate() function, whose body looks like:

Now, notice that once the line: 2 gets invoked, the execution is handed over to the auth middleware of nuxt.js. Thus, using a $router.push in line:5 is redundant.

Before we proceed any further, let’s take a look where the auth’s configs are defined:

Go to: nuxt.config.js

Find the key auth

Notice, the home key.

Bingo!

This is exactly where we want to tweak.

Before we do any tweaking, let’s make it clear what we are trying to do and why:

We want to use all the good things offered by the auth module, other than the redirect thing.

module, other than the thing. The lines after the $auth.loginWith are necessary to be executed before the view can be updated. In this case it is a loading and success notification that needs to be shown before the user is redirected to the dashboard upon successful login.

Now, the only thing left to do is disabling the redirect case in auth option

home: false will do the job!

The auth object in nuxt.config.js would look like this now:

Bam! We are done.
The Next Level of Data Visualization in Python
By: Will Koehrsen
Tags: Data Science, Data Visualization, Python, Education, Towards Data Science

The Next Level of Data Visualization in Python

How to make great-looking, fully-interactive plots with a single line of Python

The sunk-cost fallacy is one of many harmful cognitive biases to which humans fall prey. It refers to our tendency to continue to devote time and resources to a lost cause because we have already spent — sunk — so much time in the pursuit. The sunk-cost fallacy applies to staying in bad jobs longer than we should, slaving away at a project even when it’s clear it won’t work, and yes, continuing to use a tedious, outdated plotting library — matplotlib — when more efficient, interactive, and better-looking alternatives exist.

Over the past few months, I’ve realized the only reason I use matplotlib is the hundreds of hours I’ve sunk into learning the convoluted syntax. This complication leads to hours of frustration on StackOverflow figuring out how to format dates or add a second y-axis. Fortunately, this is a great time for Python plotting, and after exploring the options, a clear winner — in terms of ease-of-use, documentation, and functionality — is the plotly Python library. In this article, we’ll dive right into plotly , learning how to make better plots in less time — often with one line of code.

All of the code for this article is available on GitHub. The charts are all interactive and can be viewed on NBViewer here.

Example of plotly figures (source)

Plotly Brief Overview

The plotly Python package is an open-source library built on plotly.js which in turn is built on d3.js . We’ll be using a wrapper on plotly called cufflinks designed to work with Pandas dataframes. So, our entire stack is cufflinks > plotly > plotly.js > d3.js which means we get the efficiency of coding in Python with the incredible interactive graphics capabilities of d3.

(Plotly itself is a graphics company with several products and open-source tools. The Python library is free to use, and we can make unlimited charts in offline mode plus up to 25 charts in online mode to share with the world.)

All the work in this article was done in a Jupyter Notebook with plotly + cufflinks running in offline mode. After installing plotly and cufflinks with pip install cufflinks plotly import the following to run in Jupyter:
Roxting
By: Alexandro Chen
Tags: Short Story, Love, Fiction, Fiction Friday, Music

From that day on, I developed an obsessive routine: I would come back from class, buy a Suntory beer, and spend the night in my dorm refreshing Aika’s YouTube post. I did that for three torturous days.

On the fourth day, she replied with “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye.

I blinked at my laptop. Did she mean… that she knew me?

To cast my doubts aside, I posted Toby Keith’s “Do I Know You?” My full name and country were displayed on my YouTube account, so she had all the information she needed. I waited five minutes. Hit “Refresh.” Waited five minutes. Hit “Refresh.” The screen remained unchanged.

I brought my fist to the desk and leaned my chin into it. Perhaps the answer lay in Aika’s previous reply, not in a new one. I Googled the lyrics of “Somebody That I Used to Know” and examined the first verse.

Now and then I think of when we were together

Like when you said you felt so happy you could die

Told myself that you were right for me

But felt so lonely in your company

But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember

Yes, this was probably the Aika I used to be with. And no, we hadn’t grown apart because she’d gone to Australia; she’d gone to Australia because we’d grown apart. But why had that happened? I replayed the memory in my head.

Back then, besides studying, I’d had a personal project: Ourse, a mobile game where couples could buy a home, then add furniture, build rooms, and even raise a pet. It’d been designed to strengthen intimate relationships. Involving myself in it, however, weakened mine. I didn’t have time for going out, not even to meet Aika. So to spend more time with me, she’d visit my apartment to write her reports, prepare tea for me, and sleep alone in my bed.

The only form of communication we had was music (more specifically American and British rock). She would curate the playlist one day — Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Coldplay. I would the next — The Ramones, Nirvana, The Doors. Instead of talking, we let the songs echo our feelings.

One afternoon, she put on “Do You Still Love Me?” by The Dave Clark Five:

Do you still love me

It’s been such a long time

Since I held you in my arms

Do you still miss me

It’s been such a long time

I still need your lovin’ charms

That same night I played “Still Into You” by Paramore:

You felt the weight of the world

Fall off your shoulder

And to your favorite song

We sang along to the start of forever

And after all this time I’m still into you

Since Aika had neither complained nor lamented, I thought this dynamic had been enough for her. I was wrong.
3 Tips to Overcome the XY Problem
By: Živković Miloš
Tags: Software Development, Business, Business Development, Software Engineering, Soft Skills

3 Tips to Overcome the XY Problem

Stop trying to figure out solution Y, when you don’t understand problem X

Photo by Sergey Pesterev on Unsplash

You’ve had problems with files. Probably due to their file extensions. Let’s say you wanted the last three characters to determine the file type. You ask some people questions about it.

You search for code to find the last three characters. Your coworkers probably have some suggestions, so you ask them as well.

You’re stuck on your solution, without looking back at the problem.

You’ve got into the XY problem. Let’s go into the details of it.
“Our unity is our strength, and our diversity is our power.”
By: Jada Gomez
Tags: Society, Kamala Harris, Quotes, Black Lives Matter, Racism

More from Momentum Follow

Momentum is a blog that captures and reflects the moment we find ourselves in, one where rampant anti-Black racism is leading to violence, trauma, protest, reflection, sorrow, and more. Momentum doesn’t look away when the news cycle shifts.
Flutter’da Temel Widgetlar ile Bir Uygulama Tasarımı Örneği
By: Fatih Can
Tags: Mobile App Development, Software Development, Flutter, Flutter Türkiye, Flutter Widget

fatihhcan/noteApp

Note App with Flutter. Contribute to fatihhcan/noteApp development by creating an account on GitHub.
The Difference Between Poetry and Prose
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Poetry, Creativity, Learning, Art, Prose

Poetry is written in lines, and sometimes involves rhyme, rhythm, and other musical devices. It focuses on the euphony, the sound of the words, as much as it focuses on the literal meaning of the words. Liberties can be taken with pretty much all of what we consider the rules of language and clear communication.

What is being communicated is not as important as the way it is being communicated.

Most people have a general idea of what poetry looks like. Even from a young age, kids are taught nursery rhymes, are taught to put together acrostics and “haiku”. We have a visual idea of what poetry looks like on the page, what it sounds like when it’s read aloud.

But prose is so much less specific. Is it just everything else?

Pretty much.

Because I am a word nerd, I love looking at word etymologies. Words don’t pop up in a vacuum, not even newfangled words like yeet, which can be tenuously traced back to Proto-Indo-European if you’re feeling salty enough to scold a Boomer who gripes about “kids these days”.

And the etymology for prose is particularly illuminating: basically, it’s a truncation of the Latin phrase prosa oratorio — straightforward or direct speech.

That’s a good way to think of it. Prose is going to be straightforward. It’s more interested in succinctly providing information, telling a story, explaining something, than it is in the artistry of the language used to do so.

Of course, all of this exists on a sliding scale. If you’re writing a novel, you’re going to put a varying amount of focus on making the language itself beautiful — even if it never quite crosses the line into being poetic. On the other hand, if you’re drafting a business contract, you’re focusing entirely on clarity and literal meaning. The artistry of the language is the least of the considerations.

Somewhere on this spectrum, we draw a line. Everything to one side falls under the umbrella of poetry, on the other, prose.

A rough illustration, courtesy of the author.

There is quite a lot of room for flexibility and artistry in between the two terms. Yes, even for infusing prose into poetry, which is a whole sub-genre of poetics worth checking out.

Your novel shouldn’t be pedantic and dry. If it reads like a legal arrangement, there’s something wrong going on. It needs an infusion of poetic devices, of figurative language.

Likewise, your academic research shouldn’t read like a bodice-ripper. Yes, even if you’re talking about sex. Those things are pretty much designed to knock you out — and to provide valuable information, without mincing words or getting too artsy about it.
What I’m Excited About From GitHub Universe 2020
By: Ben Soyka
Tags: JavaScript, Github, Startup, Github Universe, Programming

Automerge for PRs

Most of the time, you need a review or two and some checks to pass before a pull request can be merged. This can take some time, so GitHub is adding the ability to click a button to enable automerging on a PR.

What this means is you’ll be able to finish up a pull request and enable automerging, and then it’ll be automatically merged when all the right conditions are met. This makes it so you don’t need to check back on your PR’s status every five minutes because it’ll automatically merge when it needs to.
The Ivy Leagues Have Released 67 Free Online Business Courses For You To Take Right Now
By: Maddie Rosier
Tags: Life Lessons, Learning, Business, Marketing, Business Strategy

Well, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia and Penn are currently offering free online courses across multiple topics on Class Central.

Below are 67 business courses you can have a crack at from the comfort of your own couch.

Whether you find yourself needing some stimulation, or if you’ve gained some more time up your sleeves during lockdown, this is a great way to learn some new skills and knowledge.

This list was kindly curated by Dhawal Sha, the founder of Class Central. I have pulled this from the list of 450 curated courses he lists out here.

If “Business” isn’t your topic of choice, you will also find courses on Programming, Humanities, Science, Health and Personal Development, amongst many.

Below are the business courses still available right now:
Your Mom Was Right
By: Martha Himes
Tags: Health, Diet, Fasting, Weight Loss

What is intermittent fasting?

You’re already intermittently fasting at night when you sleep. The idea behind the new fasting fad is to extend that period of not-eating for a couple of hours or longer. Maybe you postpone breakfast or skip it altogether. Maybe you skip dinner instead.

Instead of being considered starvation, skipping meals is now considered healthy. “In the past century, a shift has occurred away from disease caused by insufficient nutrient supply towards over-nutrition, leading to obesity and diabetes, atherosclerosis, and cardiometabolic disease,” explained a 2018 report from the Washington University School of Medicine.

Intermittent fasting is an outgrowth of research into caloric restriction. First theorized in the early 1900s, experiments on animals throughout the 20th century demonstrated an extended lifespan resulted from the reduction of caloric intake by a third.

The National Institute of Aging began a clinical trial on humans in 2002 called CALERIE. CALERIE studied human participants over a series of years. The trial results supported previous research, connecting “sustained human calorie restriction (for at least two years) and the favorable effects on predictors of longevity and cardiometabolic risk factors.”

What’s the difference between intermittent fasting and caloric restriction? Caloric restriction means you eat as often as you like, but substantially fewer calories. Intermittent fasting features two or three meals compressed into a short period of time, with more rest and digestion time before dinner and breakfast.

During that increased digestion time, your body shifts over to burning fat. “After about 8 hours of fasting, the liver will use the last of its glucose reserves. At this point, the body enters into a state called gluconeogenesis, marking the body’s transition into fasting mode. Studies have shown that gluconeogenesis increases the number of calories the body burns. With no carbohydrates coming in, the body creates its own glucose using mainly fat,” Medical News Today reported.

In no way are either caloric restriction or intermittent fasting intended to create starvation or anorexia. The key here is that you have to eat a regular meal at some point, or your body will go into starvation mode and begin eating muscle when it runs out of fat.

But burning fat while you sleep sounds pretty good, right?
Interview: 3LetterzNuk Talks about Bringing the Heat on ‘I’m Back’
By: Randall Radic
Tags: Hip Hop, 3letterznuk, Im Back, Interview, Music

3LetterzNuk

Atlanta-based rapper 3LetterzNuk dropped a new mixtape, I’m Back, not long ago via ZENtertainment/Sony Music.

3LetterzNuk first made an impact in 2015, when he signed with FloRida’s IMG imprint. Now with ZENtertainment/Sony Music, he’s definitely back and ready to go, which explains the mixtape’s title — I’m Back.

3LetterzNuk’s track record witnesses his talent: over 9 million streams with Aaron Carter on “Fool’s Gold” and almost 2 million streams on “I Wonder,” featuring Marco Foster. 3’s dope fusion of pop, hip-hop, and cool textures of R&B generates tasty banging sonic concoctions.

Pop Off sat down with 3LetterzNuk to delve into his influences, what he’s listening to right now, and how he keeps his sound unique.

What three things can’t you live without?

My family, music, and running water.

What’s your favorite song to belt out in the car or the shower?

The song “Move Your Feet” by Junior Senior.

How did you get started in music? What’s the backstory there?

When I was in high school, my friends invited me to the studio. I found that I was impatient with their creative process, so I got up and went in the booth and started freestyling. They were impressed with my rhythm, cadence, and my voice. When I saw their reactions, it was the first time I felt gifted with entertaining. I’ve always wanted to be in entertainment but mostly as an actor. But when I got the reaction, and it was different than when I acted, danced, or played basketball, I was hooked.

What musicians influenced you the most?

Jay-Z, Drake, and Chris Brown are three of my most prominent influences.

3LetterzNuk

Which artists are you listening to right now?

DaBaby, Lil Baby, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan, KCamp, and Tory Lanez are some of my top listens of the moment.

What was the inspiration for your new I’m Back mixtape?

Honestly, the youth inspired the sound. I tapped in with a lot of what the younger people were listening to and consuming which influenced the mixtape.

How do you keep your sound fresh and avoid coming across as derivative?

I am constantly working on my own music and it evolves into something unique based on my creativity at that time.

What can you share about your songwriting process?

It’s completely organic. Sometimes I have to be riding in the car. Sometimes I have to be in an open space in the studio. Sometimes I have to be alone with my headphones and just sit down and study the beat over and over.

How have you been handling the coronavirus situation?

I just dropped new music for the first time in two years. I’m pretty excited about it and I’ve been working super hard on that. The quarantine has been a blessing in disguise, as it made me concentrate on the music. I wrote the 9 new singles on the mixtape, while in quarantine.

Why do you make music?

Because it’s on the inside of me and there’s nothing I love more than spending my time creating.

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