fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Guide to Neural Network Loss Functions with Applications in Keras
By: Andre Ye
Tags: Machine Learning, AI, Neural Networks, Loss Function, Keras

Cross Entropy

Binary Cross-Entropy is defined mathematically as —

— given a correct target t and a predicted value p.

Given values of p for a correct target 0, the binary cross entropy value can be graphed as —

Given values of p for a correct target 1, the binary cross entropy value can be graphed as —

Entropy is the measure of uncertainty in a certain distribution, and cross-entropy is the value representing the uncertainty between the target distribution and the predicted distribution.

#FOR COMPILING

model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer='sgd')

# optimizer can be substituted for another one #FOR EVALUATING

keras.losses.binary_crossentropy(y_true, y_pred, from_logits=False, label_smoothing=0)

Categorical Cross Entropy and Sparse Categorical Cross Entropy are versions of Binary Cross Entropy, adapted for several classes. Categorical cross entropy should be used when one sample has several classes or labels are soft probabilities, and sparse categorical cross entropy should be used when the classes are mutually exclusive.

Categorical cross-entropy:

#FOR COMPILING

model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='sgd')

# optimizer can be substituted for another one #FOR EVALUATING

keras.losses.categorical_crossentropy(y_true, y_pred, from_logits=False, label_smoothing=0)

Sparse categorical cross-entropy:
Tim Draper out of the Frying Pan in Class Action Lawsuit against Tezos
Tags: Crypto, Startup, Lawsuit, Tezos, ICO

The lawsuits against Tim Draper and Bitcoin Suisse AG have been thrown out by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of Northern California.

The Tezos Foundation, Bitcoin Suisse AG, Tim Draper, and several other defendants have been at the center of a legal mess surrounding the $232 million Tezos ICO fundraiser completed in July of 2017. However, the lawsuits against Tim Draper and Bitcoin Suisse AG have been thrown out by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California.

This move was in response to motions for dismissal from both parties.

Bitcoin Suisse AG was awarded a full dismissal. But the plaintiffs will have 20 days to amend their suit against Draper before dismissal. The Brietmans and the Tezos Foundation also filled for dismissal, but the motions were rejected by Judge Seeborg.

A Big Legal Mess for Everyone Involved

In 2017, several class-action lawsuits were filed against the Tezos Foundation, Bitcoin Suisse AG, Dynamic Leger Solution (DLS) and several other parties. The suits allege that the Tezos ICO violated laws related to the sale of securities, unfair corporate competition, and other violations.

Tim Draper is a minority shareholder in DLS and his public appearances may have bolstered the legitimacy of the Tezos crowd sale in the eyes of the public. However, the judge decided that the plaintiffs did not sufficiently support their legal claims against him. Therefore, the suit against Draper has been dismissed if the plaintiffs fail to amend their claim within the allotted timeframe. Bitcoin Suisse AG is located in Switzerland and was awarded a full dismissal because the court does not have jurisdiction over it.

Disclaimer: information contained herein is provided without considering your personal circumstances, therefore should not be construed as financial advice, investment recommendation or an offer of, or solicitation for, any transactions in cryptocurrencies.
Warrior Princess
By: Peggy Wangmo
Tags: Poetry, Women, Womens Rights, Mental Health, A Cornered Gurl

I was born on the battlefield

Fighting delusions created by society(they).

Delusions harboring evil in the name of glory,

lurking in the nook and cranny.

Friends succumbed, loved ones fallen,

Villages burning and communities grieving.

I didn’t know what I was revolting about.

caught off guard I wasn’t given a weapon to fend for.

Never-ending battles rioted in the field

To safeguard something I did not know what.

A battle fought for centuries,

Even the greatest of the great fall.

I know not what I had perpetrated,

Being a woman was war in itself.

The greatest crusade I had to fight,

To own me for me, and not for others.

This world assumes they can instruct you

To cherish or condone parts of yourself.

They reckon they govern you

And boast reliable their vision of you.

Your body is not yours,

It’s for somebody to ridicule, judge and glare,

Dissect to suit their idea of beauty.

So many facets of being a woman.

They disown you and abandon you

To fend off the nightmares they forged.

When you yearn for a remedy they elude you.

Furthermore, forsaking you to fend for yourself.

Yet, I am here, triumphing crusades.

There aren’t all triumphs but I will remain,

To Fight for me, to fight for all,

Because I am a warrior.
What is Causing a Strange 16-Day Radio Burst from Space?
By: James Maynard
Tags: Technology, Canada, Astronomy, Space, Science

CHIME for a Change

The CHIME network operates at lower frequencies than many other instruments — 400 Megahertz — compared to the 700 MHz (and above) at which the most-similar instruments operate. The antennae are also capable of viewing an area of sky 14 degrees across at one time — the size of 784 full moons laid out in a perfect square.

“It consists of four 100-meter-long, semi-cylindrical antennas that look like a half-pipe for snowboarding. The facility operates around the clock and scans the entire northern sky each day — giving it an excellent shot at catching transient FRBs,” Alexandra Witze reports in Nature.

A look inside one of the four antennas of the CHIME radio telescope. Image credit: CHIME

The four cylindrical reflectors, each measuring 20 meters wide by 100 meters long (65x328 feet), are aligned north to south to capture signals stretching (nearly) from horizon to horizon. The focus of each cylinder reflects radio waves up to 256 dual-polarization antennas, providing the instrument with an enormous field of view of the sky. Each of these antennae are capable of receiving signals with frequencies from 400 to 800 MHz, which are then amplified in two stages using low-noise amplifiers developed for cellular communications.

“To search for FRBs, CHIME will continuously scan 1024 separate points or “beams” on the sky 24/7. Each beam is sampled at 16,000 different frequencies and at a rate of 1000 times per second, corresponding to 130 billion bits of data per second to be sifted through in real time,” the CHIME team describes.

The mysteries of FRB’s are explored with instruments including the CHIME radio telescope. Video credit: McGill University.

“Over and over in the history of astronomy, a new instrument finds things we never expected to see.” — astrophysicist Rainer Weiss, MIT

This novel radio telescope was not yet fully commissioned at the time the earliest observations of FRB 180814 were taken, potentially creating gaps in data about the event. It is possible that further observations of the radio source using this instrument could provide significant information about the nature of this unusual signal.

“Throughout our pre-commissioning phase, the telescope and CHIME/FRB instrument were operated intermittently without a simple schedule and with varying levels of sensitivity. For this reason, calculating the on-sky exposure to any position is challenging at present,” researchers describe.

Astronomers at this radio network in the hills of British Columbia traced the signal to a spiral galaxy 500 million light years from the Milky Way. Further investigations will be needed to determine which object in that galaxy is responsible for the outbursts.
12 Reasons CAMELOT’S END makes a great Christmas gift
By: Jon Ward
Tags: Christmas, Christmas Gifts, Books

The new paperback cover, out January 2020

Click on each title to read more. CAMELOT’S END is available here.

Remember books? You might have thought Ronald Reagan was the only thing worth knowing about 1980. Wow were you wrong. Politics got you down? Reading history can help. You can’t watch “Succession” and “The Masked Singer” all winter break. I wrote from a place of love — not spite, or indifference, or timidity. Jimmy Carter is more appreciated now than when he left office. This book, in telling his incredible personal story, explains why. Ted Kennedy is less respected now in some ways than when he passed away a decade ago, especially following the release of the movie Chappaquiddick (2018). This book explains why he may have acted the way he did that night in 1969, without letting him off the hook in any way. Only people who want to see the world in black and white will dislike this book. You’re not like that. You are an open-minded, thoughtful, curious person. This is a book for you. The story is not an info dump or an academic book. I wrote it in such a way that the story has momentum and suspense. Books make great Christmas gifts. But only if they’re good books. Bad books, not so much. You won’t regret giving this book to someone. They will thank you, probably for years. This book has more balance than Jimmy Carter. Seriously, he keeps falling down. Read about him and then go see him teach Sunday school. You thought Thanksgiving with your family was awkward? Wait until you see what happens when Ted and Jimmy find themselves on the convention stage together.

** If you buy this book from an indie bookstore near you, you’ll be supporting your local economy and proving once and for all that good, old-fashioned bookstores are alive and well.

*** If you’re based in Washington, DC, I might even be able to sign your copy!
What Would Hov Do? A Weekly Column From Me, Joel Leon.
By: Joel Leon.
Tags: Relationships, Hip Hop, Mental Health, Love, Life

Jay-Z is undoubtedly the greatest emcee of all-time. Argue with ya muva.

But, he is also a motivational speaker, at least to me, anyway. If tall, Trump-supportin’ Tony Robbins’ ass can have that title, then I think Shawn Corey Carter deserves the same acclaim. Who else could get Black men over 40 to STILL wear button-ups and denim jeans to the club like we did when he dropped “Change Clothes,” and simultaneously get us all to cop Motorola pagers (“I Just Wanna Love U”) back in the day?

But seriously, Jay-Z’s music has helped and guided me through some real situations through his music — suicidal ideations (“Regrets”), bossin’ up (the entire American Gangster album), and even falling in love (“Excuse Me Miss”). Imagine a world in which you could have Jay-Z — bucket hat low, Ace of Spades in one hand, keys to a Phantom in the other, cigar in his mouth — planted on your shoulder with the answers to all of your larger-than-life problems?

You’re in luck! While we can’t physically get Jay-Z to appear on your shoulder magically — that would be weird as f*ck considering he’s like 6’2 or whatever — we can use something just as helpful, his blueprint, if you will: Jay-Z lyrics.

Welcome to WWHD or what we’re calling here at Medium, “What Would Hov Do?”, a weekly column by yours truly where you, the avid Medium reader, send me questions about absolutely anything. Then, I serve as an empathetic listener, vulnerability checker, and bullshit wrangler. But all my answers will be guided by Jay-Z’s lyrics. Think of Hov bars as the foundation to help you get the clarity you need about life, love, politics and everything in between. I’m just the messenger here.

Having trouble as a new father? I’ve been there, plus Jay-Z’s probably got a bar for that. Just cheated on your fiancé? That, too. Contemplating self-harm? Tell me about it — Jay-Z and I got you covered.

So, here’s where you come in. Below you’ll see a hyperlink that will send you to a concise but very charming Google doc where you’ll drop me a few sentences describing your issue. Then, I’ll get to work.

You get to keep it anonymous, too. The last thing I need is somebody’s ex-flame-turned-grits-thrower following me on my daily coffee run. I’ll answer one question a week, so make yours a good one and keep ’em coming!

Lemme go dust my shoulders off.

Submit your WWHD questions here.

P.S.- For the newbies out there, feel free to get familiar with some of my previous Medium work here. And here. Oh, and here too. Be sure to follow the kid on Medium for all the latest and greatest updates!
Different Types of Big Data Architecture Layers & Technology Stacks
By: Board Infinity
Tags: Big Data Training, Big Data Architecture, Data Science, Big Data, Big Data Analytics

Many users from the developer community as well as other proponents of Big Data are of the view that Big Data technology stack is congruent to the Hadoop technology stack (as Hadoop as per many is congruous to Big Data).

This may not be the case specifically for top companies as the Big Data technology stack encompasses a rich context of multiple layers. Before coming to the technology stack and the series of tools & technologies employed for project executions; it is important to understand the different layers of Big Data Technology Stack

Different layers in Big Data Technology

Big Data in its true essence is not limited to a particular technology; rather the end to end big data architecture layers encompasses a series of four — mentioned below for reference.

The data layer is the backend of the entire system wherein this layer stores all the raw data which comes in from different sources including transactional systems, sensors, archives, analytics data; and so on.

The importance of the ingestion or integration layer comes into being as the raw data stored in the data layer may not be directly consumed in the processing layer. Hence the ingestion massages the data in a way that it can be processed using specific tools & technologies used in the processing layer.

The processing layer is the arguably the most important layer in the end to end Big Data technology stack as the actual number crunching happens in this layer. In this layer, analysts process large volume of data into relevant data marts which finally goes to the presentation layer (also known as the business intelligence layer).

The ‘BI-layer’ is the topmost layer in the technology stack which is where the actual analysis & insight generation happens.

Technology Stack for each of these Big Data layers

The technology stack in the four layers as mentioned above are described below –

1) Data layer — The technologies majorly used in this layer are Amazon S3, Hadoop HDFS, MongoDB etc. (specifically database technologies)

2) Ingestion layer — The technologies used in the integration or ingestion layer include Blendo, Stitch, Kafka launched by Apache and so on.

3) Processing layer — Common tools and technologies used in the processing layer includes PostgreSQL, Apache Spark, Redshift by Amazon etc.

4) Analysis layer — This layer is primarily into visualization & presentation; and the tools used in this layer includes PowerBI, QlikView, Tableau etc.
Server for data professional
Tags: Shiny, Airflow, R, Python, Servers

The server has a broad range of applications. In this blog, we discover all the interesting and fun ways of using server by any data professional. 💻 Be it a data analyst, data scientist, data engineer or DevOps for data pipelines this is a blog for you :)

The general idea is that the setup of a server is complicated and needs a lot of experience with Linux and many other tools 🛠. But, it need not be that complicated. If you are working with Big data it becomes imperative to have a server. The long times that are needed to extract the data and then the processing time has real potential to test your patience. I would love to have a server of my own which could even be an old system that is functional but it just stuffed somewhere in the attic. or even more amazing would be a server that has good processing power that is rented.

There is a never-ending list of things I want out of this server, however, I sketched out some of the prioritized applications that I would like to start with as my minimum requirements. They are as follows. Let us go bottom-up starting with data extraction and at the end leading to the data reporting with dashboards. As a fan of open-source software all the discussed tools below are open-sourced. This ensures greater availability of the budget💰 for more powerful hardware.
Things I Learned After My First Year On Medium
Tags: Writers Life, Writing, Writers On Writing, Writer, Médium

It’s possible to use Medium earnings as a source of (side) income.

This is for those who are skeptical about earning money online. I’ve made significant money through this article that’s been read over 20,000 times. January was the month I earned the most.

I put all of my Medium earnings into my savings account and reinvest them into mutual funds that will keep earning.

I also invested in building my first ever website which is intended for gaining writing clients.

Focus on writing, not on views, reads, claps, and earnings.

I hope you are on the Medium Partner Program because you love writing and seeing your work online gives you a sense of fulfillment.

If you’re here for the money, there’s a big chance that it’s not going to work. You’ll end up disappointed with earning something like this.

Screenshot by the author

Write and publish as often as you can.

In this interview with Medium top writer Sinem Günel, Sinem shares how she stays consistent with writing daily.

Others let drafts sit for 2–3 days before submitting it to a publication. Others prefer not to submit to publications all the time.

There are different methods and ways to get a good writing rhythm but the main goal is to publish articles — good ones, of course.

Interact with your fellow Medium writers.

People in Medium support groups on Facebook such as Womxn On Medium want to learn and succeed as much as you do. Most of them are supportive and positive. Ask questions, respond to polls, share ideas, and energy.

Be a Medium reader.

Read other Medium writers’ work, highlight the best lines, clap and leave a comment on every article you read. This is the best way to support a writer. I wrote about this here.

Learn how to restock your energies.

Writing can be exhausting especially when done daily. A few ways to address this, according to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, are writing Morning Pages, going on solo nature dates, and filling the well by doing something repetitive physically. She says

A ny piece of work draws heavily on our artistic well. Overtapping the well, like overfishing the pond, leaves us with diminished resources.

I wrote about my experience in reading this amazing book here.
How To Respond When That Moment Has Gone
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Ideas, Writing, History, Salsa, Philosophy

The Encyclopedia

This phrase didn’t make Denis Diderot famous. It would be his ground-breaking work on an Encyclopedia that would make him a household name. His revolutionary idea was to ask his peers to contribute entries for which he would edit. Unlike every other encyclopedia before his, all of which contained knowledge only from the author.

Some of the entries, like the expanded idea of allowing multiple entries from other authors, were deemed revolutionary. The French authorities were outraged at some of the suggestions posed in the book. One of them, that governments should be concerned with the welfare of its citizens, drew particular attention. Mired in controversy, the project was suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed, accusations arose regarding seditious content concerning the editor’s entries on religion and natural law.

Denis was a pessimist. He believed human beings lacked free will and that our characters and behaviors were completely determined by our genetic inheritance. We couldn’t change who we are. Nature over nurture. A man who was associated with such a positive project, the Encyclopedia, that would bring enlightenment to so many, didn’t believe people could be enlightened. In effect, he was a progressive thinker who didn’t believe in the possibility of progress!

“Diderot wanted the Encyclopédie to give all the knowledge of the world to the people of France. However, the Encyclopédie threatened the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it took for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and industry. It asserted the doctrine that the main concern of the nation’s government ought to be the nation’s common people. It was believed that the Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759, the Encyclopédie was formally suppressed.” — Wikipedia

The Encyclopedia was banned by the Church in 1758. One year later, the government had followed suit. Many of his contributors was thrown in jail.

It would be twelve years from finishing the final chapters of the manuscript to being fully published. By then, the publishing house had got cold feet. Not wanting to court controversy, the editors heavily censored Denis’s words, removing anything that formed an opinion against the church or the state.

Pessimist Denis would later express his concerns to his friends that the twenty-five years he had spent on the project had been wasted. Yet the Encyclopedia was considered one of the forerunners of the French Revolution such was its impact.
How to Create an Instance in AWS
By: Alfredo Barron
Tags: Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu, AWS, Linux

Thanks for reading! I’m Alfredo Barrón, Feel free to connect with me via Twitter.
Interesting musings…
By: Alok Tyagi
Tags: Social Ideas, Innovation, Startups, Enterpreneurship, Cloud Computing

During the last few days — I stumbled on 2 interesting thread.

One from Frank Scavo — where he summed up Nick Carr’s presentation on Cloud computing and how it is changing the IT landscape. Not much new here from Cloud computing perspective — but I like how Nick uses historical analogy and compare it to the past trend in the Power industry. I have included Nick’s talk on Youtube here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYP3uMOobqk&feature=player_embedded]

Second one is from Dave Kellogg — who summed up recent Tom Siebel talk and some of the initiative that he is working on. It is a good summary of some of the larger trends affecting our society in the current day and age. More and more folks are jumping in to help monitor and mitigate carbon footprint we leave behind on daily basis. This influx of both capital and intellectual power will help make the world a better place. It is also becoming good business as more and more bright people jump on the bandwagon to improve energy utilization and work towards providing better alternative sources.

Particularly, I like one of the link that point to Zerofootprint product offering. It has simple calculator that people can use to analyze how much we contribute to the CO2 emission and how we can be more conscious in our daily life reducing the CO2 footprint we generate. Also, it share up and coming enterprise applications for companies to measure and manage their own carbon footprint. It is not only good from the social consciousness perspective — but also good business.

Enjoy!
Now we’re just negotiating on a price.
By: Alexandra Samuel
Tags: Email Marketing, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Spam

Hello,

My name is Olivia XXXX and I’m an accounts manager at [demonic marketing site]. I found your site http://alexandrasamuel.com recently on the web and

was impressed by its layout and content I feel that it could be suitable

for my client.

We are interested in publishing an article (which I can supply) on

your website,

The article will have a link to my client’s site in it. The link must

be do follow and we cant have any disclaimers\advertising tags.

Let me know if this is something you offer, and if so, what do you

charge for it?

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Thanks,

Olivia XXXX
Zippie Summer Product Update
By: Pasi Rusila
Tags: Marketing, Smartphones, Loyalty, Blockchain, Africa

Zippie wallet is now live in Africa with the first partners and with a refreshed user experience. Read below for more.

Live with first customers in Zambia

As mentioned in our previous update in June, we launched with first customers AfriDelivery, Tigmoo and Musanga in Zambia. The launch event attracted a full house and Zippie was covered by top local press, the largest TV station ZNBC among others.

Since the launch, things have moved forward as planned and AfriDelivery’s and Tigmoo’s users can now get prepaid airtime rewards directly to their Zippie-powered wallets by referring friends. In other words, Zippie solution is live in the market with real customers and users :)

Best of all, users don’t need bank accounts, credit cards or app downloads to earn and send and receive rewards — just a basic smartphone with a browser is enough.

Tigmoo ecommerce shop promoting Zippie-powered airtime rewards in their main page

New wallet UX

Previously, we also mentioned that we’re working on a more streamlined and dynamic user experience to make it easy for people to onboard and use our wallet and get airtime.

We’re happy to say that the new UX is now released to our Zambian partners and the initial feedback has been very encouraging. Our partners appreciate the clean and simple UI and smooth onboarding of new users.
[Paper] Backprop: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Weakly Supervised Object Localization)
By: Sik-Ho Tsang
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Object Localization, Convolutional Network, Deep Learning, Weakly Supervised

[Paper] Backprop: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Weakly Supervised Object Localization)

Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) Using AlexNet

Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford

In this story, Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps (Backprop), by Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, is shortly presented. You may already know, this is a paper from the famous VGG research group. It is called Backprop since the latter papers call it Backprop when mentioning it.

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is to find the bounding box of the main object within the image, with only the image-level label, but without the bounding box label.

In this paper:

Two visualizing methods are proposed: One is gradient-based method and one is saliency-based method.

are proposed: One is method and one is method. For saliency-based method, GraphCut is utilized for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL).

This is a paper in 2014 ICLR Workshop with over 2200 citations. (Sik-Ho Tsang @ Medium)
“Amazon has tried to maximize profit at the expense of its own workers’ safety, skimping disastrously on workplace protections and paid time off.”
By: Sarah Kessler
Tags: Amazon, Business, Ethics, Tech, Prime Day

In April, OneZero’s Brian Merchant made the case that the pandemic put an end to the Amazon debate: Considering a long list of abuses at the company, he argues, shopping on its platform is unethical.

It’s a case worth keeping in mind during Amazon Prime Day, the company’s annual shopping holiday — actually two days long — that runs on October 13 and 14 after being pushed back from July this year.

Merchant writes that as Amazon stock hit record highs during the pandemic, the company slashed its affiliate sales fees, failed to inform workers of the risks of the virus, made decisions that hurt vendors, and fought its workers’ efforts to improve their working conditions — all on top of its already long record as a bad civic actor.

Read more here:
A Short Guide on How to Create Glassmorphic Elements in Pure CSS
By: Albert Walicki
Tags: Design, Glassmorphism, Programming, CSS, UX

Glassmorphism — The CSS Way

Glassmorphism is pretty easy to achieve for front-end developers. There is one main CSS property that we can use: backdrop-filter . This property allows you to apply multiple effects such as blur, sepia, and greyscale to the area behind your component. Since it applies to everything behind the component, to see the effect, you must make this element at least partially transparent.

To create the glassmorphism effect, you should use backdrop-filter: blur() .

<div class="basic">

<div class="blur"></div>

</div> .basic {

width: 200px;

height: 200px;

background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);

position: relative;

}

.blur {

position: absolute;

bottom: 25px;

right: 162px;

width: 200px;

height: 200px;

background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);

backdrop-filter: blur(5px);

}

Basic component

The image behind has straight background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4) . The element above is a copy of the first one but with an additional backdrop-filter: blur(10px) property.

This is the simplest example of a new trend. But we can go even further. You can add, as recommended by Michał Malewicz, a border radius, white border, and a little bit more blur.

The last thing you can try is to add a 1px inner border with some transparency to your shape. It simulates the glass edge and can make the shape stand out more from the background.

<div class="basic">

<div class="blur"></div>

</div> .basic {

width: 200px;

height: 200px;

background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);

position: relative;

}

.blur {

position: absolute;

bottom: 25px;

right: 162px;

width: 200px;

height: 200px;

background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);

backdrop-filter: blur(10px);

border-radius: 10px;

border: 1px solid rgba(255,255,255,0.2);

}
Parallel Asynchronous API Call in Python
By: Sankhadip Samanta
Tags: Python3, Asynchronous, Python, Requests Library, Asyncio

Although here we will implement asynchronous program that will execute 15 different instance parallelly rather than waiting for every instance to be completed.

Let’s jump to the implementation.

First, we will see how synchronous program reacts

Sync Program Output

Here we are calling a API 15 times one by one . One API call starts only after previous API call finishes. If you look at output, it takes 16.67 secs to complete 15 API calls. This is synchronous approach where next process starts when previous process ends. This type approach sometime costs heavy in real time project.

Now same we will implement same using async approach where we will make 15 API calls parallelly.

Async ProgramOutput

The max time taken to complete 2.45 secs.

The main advantage of using parallel execution is that code runs more efficiently and saves time.

This is it. If you are having any doubts, have a comment below
Invest In Happiness
By: Alexandra Androne
Tags: Poetry, Motivation, Blue Insights, Happiness, Inspiration

Invest In Happiness

One way — 4 LINES

Photo by Denise Jones on Unsplash

Invest in the happiest mind

You have one way to adore yourself

Positive and loving thoughts

It can be your perfect antidote
5 years of TicketSwap
Tags: Growth, News, Startup, Timeline

5 years of TicketSwap

Fighting fraud but especially: creating a community of fans

2012 As festival-goers, we weren’t so pleased with the current state of buying and selling tickets.

It all started when Hans Ober (aged 24 back then, and still a student) had a spare ticket for the Dutch festival, Lowlands. He scoured the internet for a safe and convenient way to sell it, but there wasn’t anything out there. In the end, he took the risk and listed the ticket on Marktplaats (the Dutch Craigslist). As is customary on Marktplaats, the buyer came over to his apartment to buy and pick-up the ticket, so already had access to a worrying amount of personal information (name, address, phone number etc.). Hans reluctantly handed over the tickets, to which the buyer responded: “Ok thanks! I’ll transfer the money somewhere next week!” 🙊

Hans: “That didn’t really feel good. In the end it worked out, but in times where online banking and exchanging PDF files was already possible, there must be a much more convenient way. Right?”

Hans shared his idea with Ruud Kamphuis (25 back then) and Frank Roor (26 back then), who had the technical know-how to build a website. Frank worked on the designs, Ruud thought about the technical architecture and Hans asked around to see whether others shared the same enthusiasm for the idea. There was one thing that was set in stone from day one: this website would be easy, fair and transparent. And above all, unique to the market, as it would only be accessible to real fans.

Frank: “To keep the story short: In 2012, the first version of TicketSwap was live. First, only friends and family used it. But then suddenly, on December 22nd, it happened… the first conversion of a ‘stranger’ was a fact.”

The feedback of TicketSwap’s first users couldn’t have been more positive. It worked! Event-goers could sell their tickets with a profit of max 20% on top of the original ticket price. The team reasoned that this was enough to cover added costs (like service and transaction fees) but too little to be enticing to traders. From then on, every new user coming on to use TicketSwap meant another step closer to a safe, fair, and easy secondary ticketing world.
Bible: Not the Best Schoolbook
By: Matt Bors
Tags: Religion, Science

Sign up for Taking Stock of COVID: New comics from The Nib

By The Nib

New comics from Matt Lubchansky, Keith Knight, and Niccolo Pizarro. Plus How Seniors Are Living With COVID-19. Take a look
What a Sea Turtle Can Teach You About Finding your Purpose
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Poetry, Comics, Life Lessons, Work, Writing

Have you ever seen a sea turtle?

Laboriously pull herself onto the beach from the ocean?

Have you ever seen a sea turtle scooch across the sand?

Each inch of progress is a battle of wills

Nature tells the turtle no you can’t

The turtle tells Nature, but I am
What is a Data Scientist?
By: Opex Analytics
Tags: Analytics, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence

What is a Data Scientist?

by Michael Watson

With the rise of big data and data in general (see here for a definition of big data), there is an increased need for people to analyze that data to turn it into information. Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil recently wrote an article in Harvard Business Review about how “data scientist” is going to be the hot job of the 21st century.

A data scientist is:

“…a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few years. (It was coined in 2008 by one of us, D.J. Patil, and Jeff Hammerbacher, then the respective leads of data and analytics efforts at LinkedIn and Facebook.)… ” “…More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data. It’s their preferred method of navigating the world around them. At ease in the digital realm, they are able to bring structure to large quantities of formless data and make analysis possible.”

The article is well-done and worth a read. I think you could extend the definition of “data scientist” to also include the field of operations research (which includes optimization). Besides just analyzing data, optimization can help you get even more value from the data.

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Freelance your way into Data Science now
By: Przemek Chojecki
Tags: Work, Python, Data Science, Freelancing, Freelance

Freelance your way into Data Science now

How to start with Data Science if you want to be a freelancer?

Here’s my suggestion on how to get started with skills training in Data Science.

Become a Data Science Freelancer

Learn Python from the Very Start

There are three reasons why a first-time data scientist must learn Python:

Most experienced Data Scientists who speak publically in this field swear by Python and its utility in ML and AI — and most already have a background in R.

A typical first-year data scientist will have the Data Science certification. If you’re already current on it, you can begin with quick exposure to Python because it’s learned by rote by those who have learned it before.

As a new data scientist, you need a good basis for building out your application and communicating the results of your code to those around you. With Python, you can research and prototype programs much faster and larger than with other languages, especially if you’re reading from Git where you have access to the source code.

The first step to becoming a data scientist, then, is to understand first, how a Python program is going to be used to handle data. There are hundreds of Python packages for various purposes, many of which are open source. Picking up one will go a long way toward learning the entirety of Python.

From there, begin reading Data Science Books and Data Science blogs.

For thorough tutorials in the field, check out Courses in Data Science.

Earn an Income Over Time — Learn in the Short Run and Earn a Living in the Long Run

Data science is ideal for people who are self-employed. You may do better and be more happy making 1 month salary, $30,000, or $60,000 a year if you have high skills, publish your coding prowess, and have the experience to provide valuable content for these job listings.

Even if you become a data scientist, you can make big money. If you work as a software engineer or product designer, which are traditionally the core roles for those who write the code, you can make $150,000 to $250,000 per year — no matter where you live as you can always work remotely, use Fiverr and Upwork for gigs. It is definitely possible.

If you work for a startup that develops a technology or product, your salary will vary, depending on the success of the company, because you will often get equity instead of a full payment. That’s the case if you for example find a job through Angelist.

So it’s really up to you which do you prefer: large company or a small one, or working as one-person freelancer. All is viable and all leads to success if you put in the work.

Good luck!
Time blocking to the rescue
By: Igor Carvalho
Tags: Time Blocking, Productivity, Time Block, Time Management

Nowadays that we are at home working, we can be very busy with a lot of tasks and no time to focus. Then we look for possible ways to solve this problem, task management here, task management there, and maybe some scheduling to help us with all meetings we have all day.

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

So, for the last weeks, I’ve been testing the Time Blocking practice to schedule almost my entire day. To be honest, it’s quite hard in the beginning, but over time it becomes quite simple to manage.

What is Time blocking?

As said before, Time blocking is a practice of planning out every moment of your day in advance dedicating specific time “blocks” for certain tasks and/or responsibilities.

When you start it, your calendar seems to be messy, but it’s quite the opposite when you are used to it. Because when you define all blocks it becomes harder for anyone to “steal” your time. So you can be focused on the tasks.

How to start?

Basically, define a big chunk of time for all the basic stuff you have to do. Like I did in the example below.

I defined a basic timeframe like work period. Then you can see how effective it is when you want to better plan your time. For sure when you define time chunks like that you may fail a bit in some periods of the day, but at least you will be able to better see, what you are focusing the most during your week.

One thing it’s possible to do, it’s to add a buffer time block, with that you don’t need to worry about the tasks that you’ve failed to do within the time block.

The most important thing it’s necessary to be understood, focus on the highest priorities of tasks you need to do every day. Because then you will put your highest effort right away in the most important tasks you need to deliver.

It takes time

For sure this practice takes time for you to get used to, so, in the beginning, you can try defining your time blocks every day before you start your work, then over time you will be able to see some patterns in your behavior. After a few days of planning days separately, try to define the whole week and customize the blocks however you want until you have a picture that fits better for your daily life.
What Marketers Can Learn From My Favorite Murder Podcast
Tags: Edelman, Marketing, Podcasts, Digital Marketing

My Favorite Murder is a successful comedy/true-crime hybrid podcast. It has been rated №1 in the iTunes Comedy podcast charts and №20 in overall podcasts. It has been running for almost a year and grew a highly-engaged fan base (“Murderinos”) largely through word-of-mouth tactics. True crime is a crowded category in podcasts, but My Favorite Murder hosts Karen and Georgia bring their own shock, outrage and witty, deadpan comedy spin to their storytelling.

Whether or not you’re a true crime fan, there are several lessons you can learn from the show:

My Favorite Murder is not highly produced, doesn’t involve expert interviews and the hosts openly admit to sourcing materials from Wikipedia. They curse, show when the stories scare them, don’t edit mistakes and spend time chatting about current events before they dig into the theme of their podcasts. By being true to their personalities and not trying to be like other true crime podcasts, the hosts have found a differentiating niche. Part of what makes My Favorite Murder so compelling is the emotion with which the hosts tell stories and talk about murder. Their fear, anxiety and shock comes into play and their feelings are contagious. To extend the conversation past the podcast, My Favorite Murder has a closed group on Facebook with over 100k people who post their “favorites” and discuss newsworthy cases. This keeps the fan base engaged in between new episodes of the show. Repeated phrases like “stay sexy, don’t get murdered” and “stay out of the woods” have latched on among Murderinos. The hosts of the show have used this to their advantage by encouraging fan art around such phrases, and have created a coded language for fans to self-identify and congregate. The hosts, and many fans of true crime in general become interested in murder stories because of their “hometown murders”: cases that occurred near them and were therefore particularly resonant. The hosts of the show encourage listener submission of “hometown murders” and dedicate minisodes of the show to sharing listener stories.

Amanda Kleinberg is a senior brand planner with the Digital practice in New York.
Why the Blackwater Pardons Are Far Worse Than Anyone Realizes
By: E. Rosalie
Tags: Leadership, Politics, Government, World, Science

Why the Blackwater Pardons Are Far Worse Than Anyone Realizes

The world just watched the US disregard the value of human life, mock the rule of law, hand extremists recruiting material, and sabotage its foreign policy. It’s hard to appreciate the extent of the damage.

The Pardon of the Blackwater Contractors:

Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard

The White House included four names on its list of pardons who may be unfamiliar, but they should not go without notice. To pardon them is to set free the killers of innocent men, women, and children. The injustice will fuel the next generation of extremists, will sour relations with Iraq, and make others reluctant to partner with us.

This subversion of the rule of law and defense of human life sends the message that corruption is alive, that the US prizes some lives above others. In the US, if your sister is the US Secretary of Education, then your employees may shoot a child in the head and walk free.

This comes following our very public and embarrassing foreign assault that we completely missed at the same time the US has stunned the world with its nonexistent national pandemic response (97% of member states have a national response per WHO).

The pardon disproves the claim that the US is dedicated “to investigating violations of U.S. law no matter where they occur.” It tarnishes the “commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war,” as the Department of Justice claimed in 2014.

Instead, the US offers a half-hearted, incoherent justification for pardoning people guilty of killing civilians.

To all who were present around noon on the day the “Blackwater contractors unleashed powerful sniper fire, machine guns, and grenade launchers on innocent men, women, and children,” you will be forgiven for doubting that this is a nation that respects the rule of law or human life.
Google Place Autocomplete API With Retrofit, Dagger, and Coroutines
By: Mustufa Ansari
Tags: Java, Kotlin, Android, AndroidDev, Android App Development

I thought that many developers could face the same situation that I have just gone through. The problem was that there is no article available on the internet related to Place Autocomplete API with MVVM and Retrofit.

If you are here and you got stuck while implementing Place Autocomplete API with Retrofit and MVVM, you are at the right place.

This going to be a very long tutorial because there is so much learning related to Android development. As you can see, I am using Dagger/Retrofit/Data Binding Library, and much more. So let’s begin. If you get stuck anywhere, feel free to comment.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seus

Let’s get started.
13 Pointless Things You Do Everyday Because You Still Believe it Works
By: J.J. Pryor
Tags: Motivation, Resolutions, Self Improvement, Habits, Life Lessons

Chasing your dreams without ever chasing the actions required

Photo by Yohann Lc on Unsplash

2021 is just around the corner. You tell your coworkers this is THE year you’ll finally stick to your New Year’s resolutions. Because this year is different, you explain. But you’re really just trying to convince yourself more than them.

Because you believe deep down that this isn’t the year. Underneath the surface you believe you won’t change. You can’t change. You’re a failure.

You tell your friends you want to hit the gym every day. You’re going to write a book. You’re going to complete that diet you’ve tried 45 times but never really stuck to it longer than 3.5 days. That diet you bragged to your friends about it completely changing your life after only 2 days..

You tell everyone this because it gives you a sense of false-responsibility. By spreading the word of how great you WILL be, you feel obligated to achieve that task. Because then you couldn’t possibly face your friends ever again.

But it never works like this, does it? Your coworkers will still like you. Your friends will still be there. It doesn’t not work because you’ve told everyone and anyone willing to listen to your goals. It never works because you don’t want it to work, on some level.

Because you don’t believe it can work.

You haven’t found a reason to believe it can work. To believe in the goal. In yourself.

Movie stars don’t lose 70 lbs and get jacked because they set New Year’s resolutions. They do it because they have to. Because they believe they have to. And they believe they can.

And they have a reason to believe.

Just because that reason might be $5 million dollars for them, doesn’t mean you can’t find an equally important reason for yourself.

When you set out to make your goals this year, don’t tell anyone.

Hell, don’t even make a New Year’s resolution.

Find a reason to achieve the goals you’ve always wanted to accomplish.

Make that reason everything you focus on. What you wake up to. What you dream about. What you think about when you glance at our cell phone 300 times a day.

You need a reason to go to the gym every day. You need a reason to stop eating a bag of chips every other night. You need a reason to feel proud enough of yourself to look in the mirror and say “I believe.”

When your coworkers, friends, and family inevitably bring up the exciting topic of resolutions over the next batch of Christmas cheer, tell them simply:

“Fuck resolutions.”

Find a reason to believe you can do something instead.

The rest will follow.

Believe me.

And then believe yourself.