fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
An Open Letter To My Favorite Writer About Pinning Stories On Your Profile Page
By: Vishnu S Virtues
Tags: Language, Creativity, Psychology, Culture, Lifestyle

A humble request from a dedicated reader

I know this is going to sound weird so please don’t hold it against me but I’m having an awful time accessing your articles. Every time I show up on your page, I notice the entire first page of stories are pinned stories that you’ve been writing over the past 6 months. These are your greatest hits. The four stories on your profile page are all pinned. The next page has four more pinned stories. The third page had four more pinned stories.

I only find your newest post on the fourth page. This morning, I found your new post about adopting stray cats on the fifth page. It took me 8 minutes to get to your newest story. I don’t mind doing this for you and will continue to wade through all your pinned posts but I have a humble request for you today?

Can you have a few less pinned posts so we see your latest article towards the top of your profile page?

Reading your stories used to take a few minutes but now it’s taking me 8 minutes to even get to your latest post. I have to stumble through all of your greatest hits before I find what I’m looking for. Only after the 8 minutes do I get to your post and spend another 7 minutes reading it. What used to take me 7 minutes takes closer to 15 these days.

I’m asking for your assistance and come to you with the most simple request to put your latest story on page 2 or at least page 3 of your profile. If you can help me cut down the searching time for your newest post by half, I would be ever so grateful.

An earnest plea to get some of my time back

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against your 16 pinned posts but I just would like to get in, read and get out. Currently, it feels like I need to plan a trip to the city known as your profile page. I have no google map on how to get there and little instructions when I do there. I go around in circles searching through publication dates to find your most recent post.

Posting a few less of your pinned posts upfront will help me get to what I’m looking for sooner. I’m humbly requesting that you give me a little bit more of my time back. Each 4 minutes that I can save from finding your most recent post allows me to read someone else’s post or even one of your old posts. I mean no offense or harm. I am no hater or troll. I come with genuine gratitude and an earnest plea.

Thank you for understanding and I look forward to seeing your latest post soon. I hope I won’t have to spend the regular 8 minutes to find it by going through all the pinned posts.

Your reader and fan,

Pinned Out

p.s. This is in no way a bribe but I just donated another $20 to your KoFi account. You can use it for coffee or to pay for your Medium subscription or for groceries. I ask nothing in return. You don’t have to move your latest story to the top of the profile page but if you did, I would be forever grateful and there may be more KoFi donations coming your way.
A Comprehensive Guide To Publishing Poetry On Medium
By: Jonathan Greene
Tags: Guides And Tutorials, Poetry, Creativity, Writing, Poetry On Medium

A Comprehensive Guide To Publishing Poetry On Medium

Best Practices, Tips & Tricks, and What Not To Do

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

This is for anyone who publishes poetry or plans to, on Medium.

Offline poetry is something different. The formatting options and creative iconography are endless. In our journals or on our typewriters, or even in a document, we can use spacing for emphasis. We can freely indent on a piece of paper the exact amount we think is necessary to tell a small part of the story, without using more words. But this is Medium.

When it comes to poetry on Medium, there aren’t many formatting options and I know you may think this is an odd thing to say, but I think that’s a good thing. A site like this is visually pleasing because of its consistency. Even though we are all different as writers, the limited formatting options make the screen pretty similar no matter who you are reading. Poets don’t like this.

Poets on Medium try to come up with ways to use formatting to enhance their work, but the truth is, there isn’t much you can do. And isn’t it a better thing that the full breadth of power has to come from our words on here? I think it is. Would I like an easier way to indent once in a while? Actually, no, but I bet some would. But we can only work with the options we are given.

Part of my goal in writing this is selfish. I edit and publish so much poetry between Assemblage and Loose Words, that I wanted to give an overview of the errors I see the most. And some of these things aren’t errors so much as oversights or just something missed when you are new to the platform. Either way, it will help you as much as it will help me. Hopefully more.
To Be or Not To Be (2020)
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: Videos, Artificial Intelligence, Music, Art, Culture

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VJ Loop | RGB Plasmas
By: Michael 'Myk Eff' Filimowicz
Tags: Design, Flair, Technology, Creativity, Art

This blog takes the broadest conception of sound design possible including visual effects because audio likes video. Over 90,000 views annually.

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A Useful Framework for Naming Your Classes, Functions, and Variables
Tags: Python, Software Development, Programming, Software Engineering, JavaScript

Actions Are the Heart of a Function

Actions are the verb part of your function name. They’re the most important part in describing what the function does.

- get

Accesses data immediately (i.e., shorthand getter of internal data).

function getFruitsCount() {

return this.fruits.length;

}

- set

Declaratively sets a variable with value A to value B .

const fruits = 0 function setFruits(nextFruits) {

fruits = nextFruits

} setFruits(5)

console.log(fruits) // 5

- reset

Sets a variable back to its initial value or state.

const initialFruits = 5

const fruits = initialFruits

setFruits(10)

console.log(fruits) // 10 function resetFruits() {

fruits = initialFruits

} resetFruits()

console.log(fruits) // 5

- fetch

Requests data, which takes time (e.g., an async request).

function fetchPosts(postCount) {

return fetch('https://api.dev/posts', {...})

}

- remove

Removes something from somewhere.

For example, if you have a collection of selected filters on a search page, removing one of them from the collection is removeFilter , not deleteFilter (and this is how you’d naturally say it in English as well):

function removeFilter(filterName, filters) {

return filters.filter(name => name !== filterName)

} const selectedFilters = ['price', 'availability', 'size']

removeFilter('price', selectedFilters)

- delete

Completely erases something from the realm of existence.

Imagine you’re a content editor, and there’s that notorious post you wish to get rid of. Once you clicked a shiny delete-post button, the CMS performed a deletePost action, not a removePost one.

function deletePost(id) {

return database.find({ id }).delete()

}

- compose

Creates new data from existing data. This is mostly applicable to strings, objects, or functions.

function composePageUrl(pageName, pageId) {

return `${pageName.toLowerCase()}-${pageId}`

}

- handle

Handles an action. Often used when naming a callback method.
Top Five Reasons to Learn Version Control Systems
By: Abishaik Mohan
Tags: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Productivity, Creativity

Have you ever been in a situation when you were continually saving multiple documents with random names and got confused when you looked at them after a month or so?

Well, many of us have been there including me and we know how tough that is each time!

With the amount of information we’re being exposed to increasing each day, it’s important, not just for the Software Engineers, but also for many of them to retrieve any piece of information from anywhere without arduous efforts.

For Software Engineers, it’s all the more crucial to gets hands-on experience using Version Control tools as they’ll be using them in their daily lives.

So, without any further adieu, let’s mainly realize the top five reasons why Software Engineers (and obviously, others) should learn Version Control.
Python for FPL(!) Data Analytics
By: Charlie Byatt
Tags: Python, Data Analysis, Matplotlib, Data Visualization, Football

Python for FPL(!) Data Analytics

Using Python and Matplotlib to perform Fantasy Football Data Analysis and Visualisation

author’s graph

Introduction

There are two reasons for this piece: (1) I wanted to teach myself some Data Analysis and Visualisation techniques using Python; and (2) I need to arrest my Fantasy Football team’s slide down several leaderboards. But first, credit to David Allen for the helpful guide on accessing the Fantasy Premier League API, which can be found here.

To begin, we need to set-up our notebook to use Pandas and Matplotlib (I’m using Jupyter for this), and connect to the Fantasy Premier League API to access the data needed for the analysis.

#Notebook Config

import requests

import pandas as pd

import numpy as np

%matplotlib inline

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.style.use('ggplot')

url = '

r = requests.get(url)

json = r.json() #API Set-Upurl = ' https://fantasy.premierleague.com/api/bootstrap-static/' r = requests.get(url)json = r.json()

Then, we can set up our Pandas DataFrames (think data tables) which will be queried for valuable insights — hopefully. Each DataFrame (_df) we create relates to a JSON data structure accessible via the FPL API. For a full list of these, run json.keys(). We’re interested in ‘elements’ (player data), ‘element_types’ (positional references), and ‘teams’.

elements_df = pd.DataFrame(json['elements'])

element_types_df = pd.DataFrame(json['element_types'])

teams_df = pd.DataFrame(json['teams'])

By default, elements_df contains a number of columns we aren’t interested in right now (for an overview of each DataFrame, see David’s article). I’ve created a new DataFrame — main_df — with columns I might want to use.

main_df = elements_df[['web_name','first_name','team','element_type','now_cost','selected_by_percent','transfers_in','transfers_out','form','event_points','total_points','bonus','points_per_game','value_season','minutes','goals_scored','assists','ict_index','clean_sheets','saves']]

It’s important to note that elements_df uses keys to reference things such as a player’s position and team. For example, in column ‘element_type’, a value of “1” = goalkeeper, and in column ‘team’ a value of “1” = Arsenal. These are references to the two other DataFrames we created (element_types_df, and teams_df)

If we preview element_types_df, we’ll see that each ‘id’ number here corresponds to a position:
Stop Thinking You Need to Dumb Down Your Articles for Medium
By: Jennifer Geer
Tags: Creativity, Writing Tips, Ｍedium, Writing Advice, Writing

Stop Thinking You Need to Dumb Down Your Articles for Medium

I analyzed the top 10 popular articles for the day, and this is what I discovered.

Photo by Christian Perello on Unsplash

If you read Medium articles on how to succeed at writing on Medium, you likely have seen the popular advice that you need to keep your writing level around a 6th-grade reading level.

The argument here is that the average American has around a 7th or 8th-grade reading level. Also, online reading is quite different than printed pages. When people read articles online, they tend to scan rather than read every word.

Now, writing at a 6th-grade reading level doesn't mean your writing is meant for 6th graders. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote at a 5th-grade reading level much of the time, and his works are not taught in grammar school.

However, I question the need to write at a 6th grade level for the Medium audience. For one thing, many Medium readers are also writers. Writers tend to read a lot. People who read a lot naturally read at higher levels than those who do not. Further, not every popular article on the internet is at a low reading level. The New York Times articles, for example, average a 10th-grade reading level.

But what about Medium? Do we really need to be shooting for 6th-grade reading levels to get more claps and reader engagement?
Weekly Pentina Prompt: It’s Artificial
By: J.A. Taylor
Tags: AI, Pubprompt, Artificial Intelligence, Writing Prompts, Prompt

The above images are not real. They are not actual people, works of art, or cats. They are not photographs. There is no copyright or attribution required to use them because a computer made them up on the spot.

These images are computer generated on the fly by a form of artificial intelligence known as a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which has been trained by lots of actual images to create these inhuman hybrids. If you use it, you will never get the same image as I do and never the same image twice. You might even find some freak occurrences with half-missing glasses, unusually large earlobes, or eyeballs in the wrong places. Don’t believe me? Stop reading this right now and go try it.

How long did you spend on there? No matter. Now that you understand robots are going to take over the internet and use it to control our weak minds, it’s time to write a story. So, head back over to thispersondoesnotexist.com and start generating some very real-looking fake images until you find one that inspires a Pentina.

At least this week, the picture part of your story is easy. Your prompt is to generate an interesting face (or work of art, or cat) using this mind-boggling tool and write a 50-word story about that image.

Be sure to save your image and use it as the featured photo for your Pentina. Just don’t try using an image of a horse — those still need a little work ;-).
Poker? Done that. Now the next challenge…
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: AI, Poker, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

IMAGE: Yuriy Davats — 123RF

Poker, as has previously happened to chess and Go, has joined the games that a set of algorithms is already capable of playing better than the human champions can manage. On January 31, after twenty days of Heads Up, No Limit Texas Hold ’em, four people considered among the best professional poker players in the world were defeated by an artificial intelligence machine, Libratus, the product of the work of researchers of Carnegie Mellon directed by Tuomas Sandholm.

Twenty days watching computer screens, playing about 120,000 hands, and meeting at night in their hotel rooms to coordinate joint strategies were not enough to beat an algorithm that quickly understood the strategies employed by humans and it soon overcame them.

The game was clearly dominated by Libratus from the first moment: the human players were not even close to winning at any time. The aim of keeping the championship going to the end was to achieve a victory that could be considered statistically significant, that is to say, winning 99.7% of the time is hardly the product of chance.

What really matters here is that the algorithms used were not specific to the game of poker, nor did they try to exploit the mistakes of the Libratus’s opponents. They simply took the rules of the game as their inputs and focused on improving their own strategy by taking into account the cards dealt, those on the table and the bets placed by each player. Texas Hold ’em, with its unlimited betting and the uncertainty of two hidden cards on whose potential values player speculate, offers a very good example of imperfect information play, and serves as an appetizer for other non-gambling activities such as negotiation, cybersecurity, finance, or even research on antiviral treatments (taking the mutations of the virus, whose genetic sequence is known, as uncertain variables that allow it to survive certain drugs).

There are plenty of areas similar to poker: we’re no longer speaking about a machine that can learn the rules of a game and apply computational brute force to calculate. What Libratus’s victory means in simple terms is that artificial intelligence is better at making strategic decisions based on uncertain information than humans are.

If you thought that a machine was only capable of repeating what it had been programmed to do, think again: a machine has been able to analyze 120,000 poker moves and, given the cards dealt it, the cards already on the table and the bets of each of its opponents, consistently won on a statistically significant number of occasions, enough to rule out luck or chance.

So next time you sit down to play a hand of poker, remember that no matter how well you do, there is a machine out there that will always beat you.

And from now on, that won’t just apply to card games…
The Mixtape for Indie Rock Lovers Vol. 1
By: Katy Velvet
Tags: Inspiration, Culture, Ideas, Creativity, Music

The Mixtape for Indie Rock Lovers Vol. 1

Rewind. Record. Repeat.

As a late 80’s kid, the joy of discovering new music through hand-crafted compilations were easily shared through mixtapes. And even though I missed a portion of that era, I still remember running to my cassette player to hit record only to find out later that the first 30 seconds were missing.

When cassette tapes became a thing of the past — CD burners made its way to the music scene and of course, I was pretty stoked in making my first mix. There was an art to crafting our own playlists that we could hand out to our friends, and accessing music through Spotify just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi.

Before we get started, I just want to let you know that I spiralled down a black hole trying to define the term indie rock — which lead me to creating a lengthy article explaining the history behind it. Despite the slight distinctions in origins, calling this an “alternative” playlist could have been a better option. But in retrospect, creating my own sub-genres was a more exciting idea.
Denoising Noisy Documents
By: Chinmay Wyawahare
Tags: Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Data Science, Neural Networks, AWS

Numerous scientific papers, historical documentaries/artifacts, recipes, books are stored as papers be it handwritten/typewritten. With time, the paper/notes tend to accumulate noise/dirt through fingerprints, weakening of paper fibers, dirt, coffee/tea stains, abrasions, wrinkling, etc. There are several surface cleaning methods used for both preserving and cleaning, but they have certain limits, the major one being: that the original document might get altered during the process.

I along with Michael Lally and Kartikeya Shukla worked on the data set of noisy documents if from the UC Irvine NoisyOffice Data Set. Denoising dirty documents enables the creation of higher fidelity digital recreations of original documents. Several methods for denoising documents like — Median Filtering, Edge Detection, Dilation & Erosion, Adaptive Filtering, Autoencoding, and Linear Regression are applied to a test dataset and their results are evaluated, discussed, and compared.

Median Filtering

Median filtering is the simplest denoising technique and it follows two basic steps: first, obtain the “background” of an image using Median Filtering with a kernel size of 23 x 23, then subtract the background from the image. Only the “foreground” will remain, clear of any noise that existed in the background. In this context, “foreground” is the text or significant details of the document and “background” is the noise, the white space between document elements.
The Tragedy Of Poetry Appreciation
By: Dale Biron
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Poetry

A poetry appreciation class is to poems, what applesauce

is to apples. We eat applesauce at room temperature,

no chewing required, and in a mouth that breeds sadness.

Similarly, we teach poetry appreciation in tame, extra-credit,

cage-like places where eyes dart for the clock, pleading

how much longer? Applesauce is a consolation prize. It is

a bland, formless, disappointing mush that they once served,

small white bowls with thin green stripes around the edges

in elementary schools. To be clear, apples themselves are

delightful, delicious, succulent gifts from the happiest gods.

They include thousands of varieties. My taste buds

dance the Bossa nova in anticipation of sinking my teeth

into one of those magnificent manifestations of nature’s bounty.

But let’s talk about poems, how those little engines of magic,

pump their ideas, feelings, and wisdom deep into broken hearts

and souls’ infrastructure. Let’s talk about how even well-meaning

poetry appreciation classes strain the muscle, fiber, and power

from poetry. Striping away its lightning, its rolling thunder,

its winds and storms and aching hearts. Why can’t we just let

poetry appreciation simply slip away like applesauce?

It may still exist in a faraway tepid and tasteless cafeteria,

but thanks to a merciful God, we no longer have to eat it.
How I Built Grotesk, a React Component (and CSS Library) That Makes Web Type Simple
By: Kartik Nair
Tags: CSS, Programming, Design, React, JavaScript

How I Built Grotesk, a React Component (and CSS Library) That Makes Web Type Simple

Typography styles, simplified

What’s Grotesk?

Grotesk is a CSS library and React component that aims to make web typography simple.

The reason I built it is because I’ve noticed I start almost every static website off with the same set of themes or typographic rules, so I decided to build a tiny library I can just plug into my next project easily.

Since I mostly only work on React applications and plain ol’ static websites, I made a React component and a CSS library.
Benchmarking API Endpoints With TypeScript Decorators
By: Michael Chi
Tags: JavaScript, Web Development, Typescript, AWS, Programming

Publishing CloudWatch Metrics

With the API set up, I want it to send metrics to CloudWatch so we can use it later. But first, I will quickly go through some basic CloudWatch concepts if you’ve never used them before. If you want to dive more into it, I found this post by Mathew Kenny Thomas which explains each concept in more detail.

CloudWatch is a monitoring service offered by AWS. There are namespaces in CloudWatch that serve as containers for the metrics that we publish. Usually, each application publishes metrics with a unique namespace within an organization.

You can think of these metrics as sets of data representing the value of a variable over time. For example, this variable can be the CPU usage of an EC2 instance and the data points represent the percentage utilization of CPU over time.

You can also define your own custom metrics and publish them to CloudWatch, and then you can retrieve statistics about them by creating a dashboard.

That’s what we will be doing here. I created a utility class for it:

A metric in CloudWatch has dimensions, which are name/value pairs that are part of the identity of a metric. We can associate a maximum of ten dimensions to a metric. On line 34, I added a dimension to indicate the environment of the API, to distinguish testing metrics from production.

In addition, a metric has properties like the metric name, the value, and the unit of the data point. This type is defined by MetricData type on line 3.

The _metricsQueue is used to batch metrics together to reduce AWS request calls. Each API call to use putMetricData costs money, and we can avoid that cost if we send multiple metrics in one go. Luckily, this method allows us to do that. The parameter of putMetricData is as follows:

MetricData.member.N The data for the metric. The array can include no more than 20

metrics per call.

This means the MetricData parameter that we pass into putMetricData can be an array of metrics, and each item has the type MetricData . So our class maintains a queue that stores up to ten metrics. When the queue is full, we publish all of them at once with namespace My API on line 57. We return the promise of the sdk call and let the controller handle the result.

This is a very simple implementation of batching, but there is a more powerful library to handle this if you are looking to save some AWS costs. Mixmax made a blogpost showing how they saved a decent amount of operating cost by batching up metrics: “Batching CloudWatch metrics.”

Now we have a utility that publishes metrics to CloudWatch, let’s see how we can use it inside a TypeScript decorator.
Hilma af Klint and Yayoi Kusama: Tapping spirituality and visions into art
By: Michelle Chiu
Tags: Design, Culture, Creativity, Visual Design, Art

Hilma af Klint and Yayoi Kusama: Tapping spirituality and visions into art

The lives, work, and legacy of these creatives who dabbled in transcendental expression

Group IX/SUW №12 by Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint

Deemed the first modern artist of the Western World, Hilma af Klint was a Swedish creative who credited her creative abilities to a divine, spiritual authority. Her abstract paintings in the 20th century reflected bold, imaginative aesthetics—carrying an essence the world had yet seen before.

Because of this nature, she kept her work incredibly private and only permitted their release twenty years following her passing: a collection totaling 1,200 paintings, 100 texts, and 26,000 pages of notes. Only over the subsequent three decades post-1986 have her paintings and works begun to receive serious attention for their distinctive qualities.
What Every Developers & Programmers Need to Read in June 🔥🔥
Tags: Programming, Development, Coding, Software Development, Software Engineering

What Every Developers & Programmers Need to Read in June 🔥🔥 Keyul Follow Jun 10 · 2 min read

Hello Readers,

Staying at home gives you extra time. You have to utilize this time in the right direction. During this time, spend maximum of your time in learning new programming, tech stack or tool, build various projects, improve your overall skills.

You keep reading the amazing posts written by our developers & programmers. These are the best blog posts we have picked for you this month.

via — unsplash

Special thanks to our contributors Alyssa Atkinson , Raouf Makhlouf , Elvina Sh, Karthick Nagarajan, Tommaso De Ponti, Madhuresh Gupta

If you like this, please forward this email to your friends to share QuickCode publication or tweet about it. Help us to reach out to 10K members milestone. Thank you.
12 Ways the World Will Change When Everyone Works Remotely
By: Kristin Wilson
Tags: Work, Freelancing, Business, Startup, Future

Workplace studies in 2019 have reached a common conclusion — remote work is here to stay. Once people try working remotely, up to 99% want to continue, while 95% would recommend the practice to others.

But that’s not all.

A Zapier survey revealed that 74% of workers would quit their jobs for the ability to work from anywhere. Two in three believe that the traditional workplace will be obsolete within the next decade.

Source: Buffer State of Remote Work Report

They’re right.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people working remotely has been rising for the past ten years. Meanwhile, UpWork projects that the majority of the workforce will be freelancing as soon as 2027. Globally, one billion people could be working in a remote capacity by 2035.

Whether people become remote employees, online entrepreneurs, freelancers, or other gig workers — one thing’s for sure — life will be nothing like the current 9–5. The world will change and reflect this new reality.
Apple Is Killing A Billion-Dollar Ad Industry With One Popup
By: Anupam Chugh
Tags: Technology, Marketing, Advertising, Apple, Business

Apple Is Killing A Billion-Dollar Ad Industry With One Popup

The new iOS 14 privacy feature spells trouble for advertisement agencies and promises to end an era of personalized ads

Photo by Tobias Moore on Unsplash

When Apple’s WWDC 2020 digital-only Keynote event kickstarted, all eyes were on the new mac OS Big Sur and the ambitious Apple Silicon chips.

But, from the perspective of advertisement agencies, it was the new iOS 14 privacy-based features that sent shockwaves in their industry and became the major talking point.

For the uninitiated, a lot of apps today use an Advertising identifier (IDFA). It allows developers and marketers to track activity for advertising purposes.

Plenty of marketing agencies backed by Google and Facebook run campaigns to record purchases, usage time, user actions, and subsequently serve personalized ads.

Over 100K apps on the App Store today have the Facebook or Google SDK integrated which tracks and sends your data to the tech giants and third party brokers.

But iOS 14 is all set to change that by being upfront and transparent with users about how their data is used for ads.
Shitting Like Tim Ferriss
By: Ryan Dejonghe
Tags: Humor, Creativity, Health, Self, Tim Ferriss

Enter Tim Ferriss and the Mental Ward

So, if depleting my body of all animal products and saturated fat caused me to shake hands with God, Shiva, and the gang, then surely doing the exact opposite would work, right?

Wrong.

(Quick side note: I didn’t see Elvis there. Meaning, he’s either still alive or in the “other place.” Or, maybe the other place is the same as being alive? I digress.)

I read all the books and articles that I could find to improve my mind, body, and soul. I was all in, baby! Again.

Among my pile of books, I had copies of James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Tim Ferriss’s books about getting a 4-hour body and a 4-hour workweek. At this point, I’d settle for any habit, atomic or not. Whatever I could do to improve!

Do you know what happens when you try to tackle 27 daily habits back-to-back? You go crazy. Legit.

It was 11 p.m. on Saturday, and I was calling the Veterans Crisis Line (if anyone needs it: 800–273–8255). The lady on the phone was nice; the cops that showed up, not so much. Maybe it had to do with me being a former Marine and being 6'2" that they decided to cuff me and cart me out.

Don’t worry, I’ll write about the whole experience later (ex: “7 Life Lessons I Learned While Locked Up in the Loney Bin”).

Long story short: a week after living in a locked-up hospital ward with bolted-down furniture and “Medicine time” nurses, I realized something: I was taking things too far. I needed balance. I needed self-compassion.
Designing for the Discovery of Big Data
By: Jamie Gibson
Tags: Design, Big Data, Data Visualization

Spain is the number one country for tourism in the world. With sights like the Museo del Prado and Royal Palace of Madrid, it is hard to see how such spectacular beauty could ever be overlooked.

To assist in visualising the majesty of this European gem, Vizzuality and CartoDB are proud to announce our latest release: an interactive tool to analyse tourist spending in Spain during the summer of 2014. Using BBVA Data and Analytics, you can see how tourists of different nationalities spent their time in Spain. Take a look at this UN-BBVA-LIEVABLE visualisation!

With anonymised data, on 5.4 million credit card transactions, we worked out how to visualise tourist spending effectively while optimising the speed and performance of the application. Equipped with our unique blend of pioneering design principles and innovative coding, we delivered “a piece of artwork” — almost fit for the Prado!
Animations with Matplotlib
By: Parul Pandey
Tags: Data Visualization, Matplotlib, Python, Programming, Towards Data Science

Animations with Matplotlib

Using the matplotlib library to create some interesting animations.

Animations are an interesting way of demonstrating a phenomenon. We as humans are always enthralled by animated and interactive charts rather than the static ones. Animations make even more sense when depicting time-series data like stock prices over the years, climate change over the past decade, seasonalities and trends since we can then see how a particular parameter behaves with time.

The above image is a simulation of Rain and has been achieved with Matplotlib library which is fondly known as the grandfather of python visualization packages. Matplotlib simulates raindrops on a surface by animating the scale and opacity of 50 scatter points. Today Python boasts of a large number of powerful visualization tools like Plotly, Bokeh, Altair to name a few. These libraries are able to achieve state of the art animations and interactiveness. Nonetheless, the aim of this article is to highlight one aspect of this library which isn’t explored much and that is Animations and we are going to look at some of the ways of doing that.
Software Engineer of Tomorrow Manifesto
By: Aiforse Community
Tags: Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Software Development, Data, Data Science

Collaborate to apply Artificial Intelligence Methods for developing Advantageous Conditions to increase Intensity and Efficiency of Software Engineering

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Cómo clasificar obras de arte por estilo en 7 líneas de código
By: Jaime Durán
Tags: Data Science, Computer Vision, Español, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence

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Serious back door Vulnerabilities spotted in TikTok
By: Faisal Khan
Tags: Privacy, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Future, Cybersecurity

Serious back door Vulnerabilities spotted in TikTok

The security flaws were identified by a cybersecurity firm Check Point, which the company claims to have fixed

TikTok has broken all barriers of popularity, achieving 1.5 billion global users in just over two & a half years. The immense growth can be gauged from the fact that the app is available in 150 markets & used in 75 languages globally. Even more important is the niche that it serves — Generation Z which utilizes the app to create short video clips — mostly lip-synced of 3 to 15 seconds & short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds.

Having achieved all these laurels, however, the application has been under fire from a lot of quarters for the potential risks identified within the application recently. A Cybersecurity firm Check Point pointed to multiple vulnerabilities that its researchers uncovered. Although the security firm made Tik Tok aware of these security flaws on November 20, 2019, which the latter claims to have addressed by December 15, 2019, as confirmed by Check Point — the damage is done.

The problems were brewing for Tik Tok, even before the report of these vulnerabilities surfaced. With its strong Chinese connection — the parent company ByteDance based in Beijing, the app was under intense scrutiny in the United States. Although the decision by American authorities to scrutinize Chinese technology like Tik Tok was considered more of a trade war by-product by some, that notion seems to be quelled with the recent revelations.
4 Science-Backed Ways to Get You Feeling Energetic
By: Benjamin Ebuka
Tags: Health, Inspiration, Science, Life Lessons, Self Improvement

4 Science-Backed Ways to Get You Feeling Energetic

These tactical approaches will improve concentration and alertness

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Raise your hands if you struggle to get out of bed, even when you’ve technically gotten enough sleep, constantly begging your alarm to give you just 5 minutes, and you rely on several pints of coffee to get you through the morning — and probably all through the average working day?

It’s common to feel tired in our fast-paced modern world. It’s never a new thing to find yourself running from one activity to another, even when you’ve planned out a day to gain balance, and soothe your soul.

Whether it’s the emotional fatigue from all the weird things going on in the world, trying to juggle your passion and talent with the job you find yourself in, or having your sleep routine thrown off by a change in schedule, it seems virtually everyone is struggling with morning tiredness and wondering how to get back their energy to make their mornings more reasonable.

Tiredness is one of the UK’s top health complaints — figures from Healthspan show a worrying 97% of us claim we feel tired most of the time, and doctors’ records reveal 10% of people who book an appointment are looking for a cure for their tiredness.

Before I proceed, I do want to mention that I’m not talking about conditions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and SEID, which affect several million people here in the US alone and are very hard to cure.

What I am talking about is a general state of tiredness that affects many, many more people (both children and adults) and can be prevented by evaluating your habits and changing those that are draining your energy.
Tug of war.
Tags: Struggle, Mental Health, Mindfulness, Creativity, Poetry

The morning coffee that awakens the mind,

weakens the foundations of the shrine, that is the body.

That which is forceful against the wills of the mind,

the mind that remains powerless as the limbs keep pushing on,

as though chasing that sun until it reaches the horizon.
Anti Bar chart, Bar chart Club
By: Benedict Aryo
Tags: Data Science, Bar Chart, Data Visualization, Exploratory Data Analysis, Visualization

Inspiration, knowledge, and anything about data science by Make-AI

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Radio #LatentVoices. 001 — A Glimpse of Another World.
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: Art, Artificial Intelligence, Latentvoices, Music

Radio #LatentVoices. 001 — A Glimpse of Another World.

AI-driven musical storytelling

Eerie and fantastic at the same time: Exploration of AI-driven creative tools is full of surprises and discoveries. It’s like entering an Unsupervised Machine Dream — everything is new, unique, unexpectable.

For me running JukeBox for the first time was an ethereal experience.

Can you remember that scene from DEVS, a brilliant mini-series about a group of scientists who were guarding a secret? I don’t want to spoil the show, just this experience to scan another dimension — bit by bit, sound by sound, where pixelated obscurity becomes a clear vision… JukeBox provides you with a similarly overwhelming experience-

My first soundscape was this one. I’ve just run it per default settings. Sometimes the most usual can become the most surprising.

I’ve got this noisy soundtrack with somebody speaking:

After several iterations and around 8 hours of work, AI provided me this clean sound:

A poetic but unknown language. A man, speaking with silent bitterness about something, vanished. About life, about death. You cannot understand this language, but compassion and empathy are inundating your soul.

And then you hear heavenly musical instruments and a female voice, singing an ethnic song. You almost remember the transience of the nameless world you’ve experienced for a minute through an AI-portal. But it’s so familiar, full of past and missing future.

And yet — it’s all present.

The world of Unknown. Which you never will be able to recreate. Like a dream fading away.
Rivian Has Become a Top Dog in the Electric Vehicle Battle
By: Dylan Hughes
Tags: Transportation, Climate Change, Environment, Sustainability, Electric Vehicles

Rivian Has Become a Top Dog in the Electric Vehicle Battle

Amazon will drive 10,000 Rivian vans in 2022, 100,000 in 2030

Photo by Amazon/Rivian

While Tesla holds a massive lead in consumer electric vehicle sales, another company has a firm grip on the delivery market: Rivian.

If you’ve never heard of Rivian, that’s OK: they’re rather lowkey. Founded in 2009, the company didn’t reveal its first two products — an electric pickup truck and SUV — until 2017.

In 2019, Rivian received $1.55 billion in funding from three companies: Cox Automotive ($350 million), Ford ($500 million), and Amazon ($700 million). Due to factors relating to COVID-19, Ford terminated its contract with Rivian.

Amazon didn’t leave, however, and will start seeing returns on its investment quite soon.

Not long after Cox’s investment in September 2019, Amazon announced a purchase of 100,000 Rivian vans for its delivery fleet — the largest delivery EV order to date.

Amazon plans to run on 100% renewable energy by 2030, and the Rivian fleet will play a large role in that. The company initially planned to have all 100,000 EV delivery vans on the road by 2024, with some hitting the roads in 2020, which is now unlikely with COVID-related delays.

A recent announcement did say that 10,000 Rivian vans should be delivering Amazon packages by 2022.

The two companies have yet to reveal specifications for the van but did say it will have 150 miles of range (which would be class-leading) and a 360-degree view of the exterior. This view will be shown on a center-stationed monitor display.

Rivian is expected to announce its battery supplier for the Amazon project by the end of this year.

This project will put Amazon in contention as the largest at-home delivery fleet in the world. Currently with about 30,000 vehicles, the company is behind the likes of FedEx (78,000), UPS (125,000), and United States Postal Service (200,000).

The Amazon/Rivian partnership is not a unique one aside from the size of the commitment, though. UPS has ordered 10,000 EVs (with an option for 10,000 more) from startup Arrival and will begin rolling those out worldwide within the next few years. FedEx made an order for 1,000 electric vans at the end of 2018, while companies are currently battling for a large fleet contract from the USPS.

Companies such as Tesla and Nikola are building electric semi-trucks meant for large-freight hauling to retailers. It would not be surprising to see either company jump into the smaller-scale delivery game down the line, however.

The development of electric vehicles (specifically with batteries) comes slowly but surely, which is why prices are still high and delivery fleets aren’t already 100% electric.

In an industry where things do move so slow, the latest reveal of Rivian’s van gives us some tangibility that we don’t always get.

Thanks to Amazon’s commitment, Rivian has a large lead over all other hopeful EV suppliers. From a delivery standpoint, at least.
How I made the switch to AI research
By: South Park Commons
Tags: AI, Naturallanguageprocessing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

In 2015, I wanted to help with AI research, but taking the first steps felt daunting. I’d graduated from MIT then spent eight years building web startups. I’d put in my 10,000 hours, gotten funding from Y Combinator and grown a company to thirty people. Moving to research felt like starting over in my career. Was it really a good idea to throw away years of work?

A friend told me about South Park Commons (SPC), a new space for people who were taking the first steps on a new path, and introduced me to Ruchi, the founder. Ruchi is super impressive, she was one of the earliest Facebook engineers, and had founded and sold a successful company. She also has a high-bandwidth and disarmingly direct communication style that I found refreshing.

Over lunch, Ruchi described South Park Commons as a community in which everyone is starting over. Starting over is in fact the main thing that unifies the group. For example, two current Commons members are Jason, the maintainer of a popular open-source project Quill, who’s been learning to do enterprise sales, and Malcolm, a successful infrastructure engineer who’s starting a fund Strong Atomics to invest in nuclear fusion companies.

I joined South Park Commons, blocked off three months to see if I could make progress, and made a plan to teach myself machine learning. Several other SPC members were interested in the space, so we started going through a curriculum of courses and organized a paper reading group. As soon as I got over the fear and took the plunge, things got vastly easier. Six months of focused work later, I had a position at OpenAI.
Quickly
By: Kelly Neuer
Tags: Self-awareness, Meditation, Poetry On Medium, Culture, Society

Quickly

Read this quickly, faster, faster…

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Read this quickly

Faster

Faster

Hurry up

Get in

Sit down

Don’t think

Just do

Early bird

Don’t break

Don’t stop

Keep going

Faster

Get it right

Make room

Wind it up

Never slow

Never stop

Outta time

Outta this

Outta that

Not enough

Need more

Give ’em more

In a hurry

Faster still

Never still

Can’t breathe

Can’t move

Can’t decide

CRASH!

…breathe…

Slow

It

Down.

Feel your life.

Look around.

Capture it with an open palm.

And let it wash your spirit.
Serverless ETL using Lambda and SQS
By: Simon-Pierre Gingras
Tags: Python, S3, AWS, AWS Lambda, Serverless

AWS recently introduced a new feature that allows you to automatically pull messages from a SQS queue and have them processed by a Lambda function. I recently started experimenting with this feature to do ETL (“Extract, Transform, Load”) on a S3 bucket. I was curious to see how fast, and at what cost I could process the data in my bucket. Let’s see how it went!

Note: all the code necessary to follow along can be found at https://github.com/PokaInc/lambda-sqs-etl

The goal

Our objective here is to load JSON data from a S3 bucket (the “source” bucket), flatten the JSON and store it in another bucket (the “destination” bucket). “Flattening” (sometimes called “relationalizing”) will transform the following JSON object:

{

"a": 1,

"b": {

"c": 2,

"d": 3,

"e": {

"f": 4

}

}

}

into

{

"a": 1,

"b.c": 2,

"b.d": 3,

"b.e.f": 4

}

Flattening JSON objects like this makes it easier, for example, to store the resulting data in Redshift or rewrite the JSON files to CSV format.

Now, here’s a look at the source bucket and the data we have to flatten.

Getting to know the data

Every file in the source bucket is a collection of un-flattened JSON objects:
AWS Lambda Event Validation in Python — Now with PowerTools
By: Ran Isenberg
Tags: Validation, Python, AWS Lambda, Software Development, AWS

How can you improve on the already excellent Pydantic validation?

Recently, I had the pleasure of contributing a new parser utility code to an amazing and relatively new project on Github: AWS Lambda Powertools.

This repo, which started as Python oriented (but now supports other languages such as Java and more to follow) provides an easy to use solution for lambda logging, tracing (with cloud watch metrics), SSM utilities and now validation and advanced parsing for incoming AWS Lambda events.

The new parser utility, will help you to achieve next level validation. It’s based on Pydantic and it’s marked as an optional utility. In order to install it, you will need to specify it like this:

pip install aws-lambda-powertools[pydantic]

For other non parsing usages for the libraries such as logger, metrics (and more) see this excellent blog post.

Validation with Pydantic

Well, currently, if you followed my guidelines in my previous blog post, you had to write (and now maintain) a handful of AWS Lambda events such as Eventbridge, DynamoDB streams, Step functions and more. Basically, a schema for each AWS event that a lambda receives.

You found out how to write these Pydantic schemas by either looking at the AWS documentation or by printing the event JSON.

It’s an important process it can get tedious quickly.

Let’s take a look at an Eventbridge event:

The detail field is a dictionary which describes the user schema, the actual message that we would like to extract, validate and parse.

In order to achieve that, the following Pydantic schema can be used:

The lambda handler which parses the event will look like this:

It works. You have to write a little bit of code but it works.

The problem in this solution is that you need to maintain an AWS event schema which might get changed by AWS at some point. When it does, this validation schema fails and raises a validation exception in runtime. Not ideal to say the least.

However, it can get better, much better!