fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
People for People, City for City
By: Axel Holene
Tags: Culture, Business, Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship, Design

People for People, City for City

A “dugnad” for local businesses in Norwegian cities.

dugnad subst. m

voluntary (community) work, bee (am.), collective voluntary effort

Health professionals across the globe are saving humanity these days. Let’s save society as well.

These are strange times.

Norway, as we know it, has basically been shut down. Our nation has new heroes; nurses and grocery store workers (and many more!) are finally getting the appreciation they deserve, doing their share to help the nation’s wheels turn.

People are told to physically stay away from other people. Not just large crowds, but individuals. What happens when people are not allowed to socialise, hang out and interact like they usually do? Culture offerings bleed. Restaurants suffer. Small shops and niche establishments dry out. People working in what are now considered non-critical occupations such as physiotherapists, waiters, hotel employees and airline stewarts have basically lost their basis for existence — overnight. In just eight days, NAV, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, received more than 170,000 unemployment benefit applications due to lay-offs, resulting in the highest unemployment rate in Norway since the Great Depression in the 30’s.

How might we help reduce the massive economic impact this crisis has brought upon our nation, and most importantly, its people?

We are Idean

We are a design agency. We believe in using design as a tool to improve society. So we use our superpowers to put humans at the center. At this point in time, user centricity — human centricity — is desperately needed. Governmental decisions that are made on an hourly basis have a tremendous effect on people’s lives and humanity in general.

With this in mind, we wanted to find a way to contribute. We wanted to help the local businesses and communities that are adapting to this new situation.

Buy local!

The “dugnad”

In Norway, we have a word called “dugnad” that celebrates the idea of communal service, of people coming together, helping each other out and embracing the spirit of togetherness. That’s why a team of designers in Idean Bergen decided to take matters into their own hands. Idean Bergen swiftly created BergenforBergen, and in a few days Idean Oslo and Idean Stavanger followed suit.

The People for People platform initiative had started, creating a digitally accessible place for our local “dugnad” in Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger.

Here, you find local vendors that can showcase their service and product offerings, adapted for our new reality. Bergen currently has about 73 local vendors in their list, Oslo is at 25, Stavanger has 17, and they’re all growing.

So, what are you waiting for? Help out your local coffee corner shop, sport store, or burger joint by buying their products. Better yet, help us to help others: spread the word about this initiative.

These times are truly strange. And strange times bring out some good stuff in people. Embrace it.
AWS — Deploying React App With Java On ECS
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: AWS, Java, JavaScript, Programming, Web Development

AWS — Deploying React App With Java On ECS

A step by step guide with an example project

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

AWS provides more than 100 services and it’s very important to know which service you should select for your needs. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS lets you launch and stop container-based applications with simple API calls, allows you to get the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features.

In this post, we are going to deploy React application with the Java environment. First, we dockerize our app and push that image to Amazon ECR and run that app on Amazon ECS.

Example Project

Prerequisites

Dockerize the Project

Pushing Docker Image To ECR

Deploying On AWS ECS

Accessing Webapp in the Browser

Cleaning Up

Summary

Conclusion

Example Project

This is a simple project which demonstrates developing and running React application with Java. We have a simple app in which we can add users, count, and display them at the side, and retrieve them whenever you want.

Example Project

If you want to practice your own here is a Github link to this project. You can clone it and run it on your machine as well.
Running productive distributed teams
By: Callum Adamson
Tags: Remote Working, Health, Distributed Teams, Future Of Work, Future

At Distributed we manage distributed teams that deliver work in hard-to-hire-for and expensive areas of digital marketing and tech on behalf of our clients. From content creation, through API design and analytics integrations and all the way up to the development of Artificial Intelligence.

We deliver this work at a higher quality, in less time, and at a lower cost than centralised agencies.

It’s not been easy building Distributed, but it’s working incredibly well, and we’re now in a position to scale and add a few more clients to our roster.

I’m not going to bore you with the story of how we built Distributed over the past 5 years, if you want to read more about us please check out this post that I wrote a little while back, I am however going to detail a few of the lessons we’ve learned about building and running distributed teams and hopefully offer some valuable insights that may help you reap the benefits of building your own distributed team.
We Write To Be Read
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Life Lessons, Writing, Art, Creativity, Life

The movie touches in on the other aspects of writing: the misery, the rejection, the joy of writing of creating characters and losing yourself in them. The passion of taking this story, writing this thing that you urgently want to say, and putting it out there in the world.

You enjoy writing it. You love the process, even as hard and difficult and painful as it is. But, for most writers, the putting it out there for others to consume is the main purpose. Writing for yourself is definitely a thing — as is talking to yourself — but writing (and speaking) is something you do for other people to hear you.

And it’s okay to want to be heard.

I picture it the same way as I do putting on a theatrical production. You work on developing the show, pour time and energy and passion into creating this show. And then you put it on a stage, in front of an audience. That’s the point of doing all of the work, the purpose of the passion and the pain: to share that with an audience, to get a group of people who are invested and who want to hear what this playwright (and the actors who are delivering their words!).

Getting the audience’s reaction, the audience’s energy, is a part of the process. And it’s a crucial one. As an actor, I’ve fed off the energy of the audience. It makes the work better. The audience’s engagement lets the actors be more engaged. It lets them know that what they’re doing matters.

There’s a reason that the silver-haired Sunday matinees are usually the hardest for actors (at least at the school/community level. I’m not going to speak for Broadway). There’s a smaller audience — or, occasionally, no audience — and the audience tends to be older and less engaged.

(Also, a Sunday matinee is the only time I’ve ever been interrupted during a show. Halfway during Act III of You Can’t Take It With You a woman answered her phone and had a loud conversation. She wasn’t engaged; she didn’t care.)

Just as I act for an audience, I write for an audience.
Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ Experiment Is a Lesson in Marketing
By: Binit Acharya
Tags: Marketing, Art, Business, Money, Music

The Purpose of This Experiment

This experiment is not analogous to opening a shop and putting a sign “pay what you like.” This is because music is very different than other regular things you buy.

First, you pay for the products you use because you need to. Music is always available for free from third parties. You can always get music despite all the attempts to protect it from piracy. For other physically available things, you’d have to physically steal them.

Second, let’s say we’re in a perfect world where piracy doesn’t exist, and there exists a sophisticated system of protecting it that ensures it isn’t leaked or stolen. Would this experiment be stupid now? No, because Radiohead would earn more or less the same anyway.

Music is not a necessity like food. Many people don’t buy music because they simply can’t. Even if they can, they’d have to cut some corners which makes it harder. So people pirating music is not just because they lack morality.

Not to mention the people outside of developed countries who have no official way of buying most of the things available digitally because their countries have not developed a way to make those transactions. I live in one of them, and no matter how much I like any band, it’s pretty hard for me to pay what they deserve. While still possible, I’d have to look for other ways to pay for these things.

In this case, the 38% of people who paid for the album are the people who would have also paid for a regular album release. And most of the people in the 62% would have found other ways to download it.

In that 38%, there might be a small percentage of people who would pay much more than average and much more than you’d expect, and that’s what balances everything.

With a fixed and compulsory price, even if 12% more people paid for the album, the resulting amount of money may still be less than the money raised by the 5%–6% of people who paid a lot of money for the album.

In Rainbows made more than its preceding album just with the digital sales, so it is possible that In Rainbows could have earned even less with a regular release.
How to Train Your Artist.
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Art History, Ai And Creativity, Art

Well, I don’t want to torture you here anymore, so here comes the solution:

When? The questioned painting was created 1 hour ago.

Where? Here is its whereabouts (not a museum, but a folder on my hard disk):

Who? And the Author of this painting is — I bet you know it already, as frequent reader of my blog — Deep Learned Neural Networks.

Artificial Intelligence.

Art-i-ficial for “making art”?

Well, to be honest, the whole preparation work was made by _C0D32_ over at reddit. Here is what he did: he trained the StyleGAN on around 24k images (from dataset on kaggle). And the he thankfully provided Notebook on Google Collab —to try it out.

Now it’s up to us — we can let AI generate ART.

Changing various parameters in the notebook produces very different styles, images, atmospheres.

Here, for example, we see an Impressionist landscape at spring. Trees are turning green and reflect in the calm lake. Far behind we can suspect mountain range. The style is even Pointillist, with roundish stokes, colourish points of interest.

And then… this graphic architectonic image. Is it ruins? Is it a new building aiming high? Something between Gothic arcs and modernist skyscraper — and in some way very herbal. Urban flora? Florist urbanity? But why so grey? And where all the people? Are we missing a crucial part of the story?

And here you see a depiction of an aristocrat family — in best style of a Diego Velázquez. The faces are distorted in a Francis Bacon way. In the wall opening behind the group a way is leading to the next castle.

And what about this Spanish torero, being caught short before the bull run him down. You already see the bull’s hoofs behind the gracious, dandy-alike figure of the pathetic Matador, who doesn’t know about his own fate being about to change.

OK, and now somebody Not Safe For Work may appear, so be prepared for obscenity of an abstract painting.

I don’t know, what the characters of this painting do. Probably I overinterpret it. Something between Dalí, Max Ernst, Ballmer — bodies without indications. Skins. Grins.

And here is a mysterious cabin in the woods. Something happens here. Are these people sitting out on the porch? Or rather bedclothes being ventilated outside, in fresh morning air?

As you see, a variety of styles, motifs and qualities is generated here. Learned by the Art History.

But unlike in an Art School, AI has to fend for itself. No history backgrounds. No style insights. No Academic intertextualities, no scholastic connections. AI has to fight through the vast of art by itself as a lonesome Visitor, being catapulted into the Alien World and looking for orientation.

What a great achievement! I’ll follow its way across the World Art — in our FridAIs as well (now, after two week pause).

And what’s the prize, you will ask?

Follow this link and you will be able to produce your own AI generated art! Just don’t forget to save it into your Google Drive.
Shine
By: Cynthia Marinakos
Tags: Creativity, Poetry, Haiku, Nature, Writing

About haiku

A haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry. It’s made up of 3 unrhymed lines with 17 syllables, 5–7–5.

Haiku forces us to be creative and concise to convey the essence of a specific moment in only a few words. This efficiency with words can help us share messages more powerfully in other types of writing. It’s also a great way to kickstart a writing session.

Common themes written in haiku are nature and human nature, though other themes can also be explored.
10 Python Skills They Don’t Teach in Bootcamp
By: Nicole Janeway Bills
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Python, Software Engineering, Software Development

Data science bootcamp is a ton of fun, but they don’t have time to teach you everything.

The bootcamp experience is like showing up at a theme park. (Except some of the strangers there will become your best friends.) When the ride kicks in, it demands total concentration. Between bouts of intensity, you’ll have the chance to take a breath — trading stories, recommendations, and ideas.

Recapture the thrill of learning new things with this collection of 10 Python skills they don’t teach you in bootcamp.
Have You Ever Faked Creativity (Be Honest)?
By: Lucy King
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Creativity, Ideas, Design

Have You Ever Faked Creativity (Be Honest)?

We all know great ideas are elusive at times.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Have you ever faked creativity?

Go on, be honest. We all know creativity is elusive at times.

You can set the right mood with music, lighting and comfortable seating. Yet despite all the coaxing, inspiration fails to strike.

It’s maddening, right?

Whether you’re a writer, artist or designer, there is a natural ebb and flow to any creative process. Sometimes you feel stuck or uninspired. Other times the ideas flow freely.

I work in a creative industry. Everyday I am expected to come up with ideas and insight on demand. Some days I am more creative than others. When I am less inspired, I dig deep. I rely on my technical training to push through blocks. Yet deep down I may not be satisfied with the quality of my output.

Deep down I know when I am faking creativity.

No one knows for sure how creativity works.

Everyone knows the left-brain versus right-brain thinking. This type of binary brain theory is considered overly simplistic and passé by neurological experts.

New brain theory suggests creativity occurs when the brain connects between three different networks.

When we daydream or brainstorm we use our brain’s default network. When we carry out complex problem solving we use our executive control network. The salience network detects environmental stimuli and switches between the other two networks.

It’s the synchrony between these three large-scale brain networks that seems to be important for creativity — Roger Beaty, Neuroscientist

In other words: people who think more flexibly and come up with creative ideas may be better able to engage regions of the brain that typically don’t work together.

Is it possible to spark brain connectivity to boost our creativity?

Now that is the multi-million-dollar question!

We are scratching the surface of the possibilities of brain science. Will we determine if brain network connectivity can be modified or improved? And if so, would that impact or enable us to be more creative?

Only time will tell.

For now when creativity stagnates, your best bet is to — trust in your process. My creative process based on design thinking is outlined in this article below.

Thank you for reading!
5 The Most Exciting AI & IoT Trends of 2021
By: Elena Beliaeva-Baran
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Internet of Things, Technology Trends

Technology Trends

5 The Most Exciting AI & IoT Trends of 2021

… holographic meetings sound pretty cool

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

Every industrial revolution is a change and an upgrade of traditional/ industrial practices.

The 1st industrial revolution has brought us mechanization, steam and water power. The 2nd one — mass production and electricity. The 3rd revolution has brought us electronics and IT systems and was the starting point of automation. The current industrial revolution is in the process of bringing cyber-physical systems.

Each of these revolutions bears a global societal transformation at large. Even from the 1st industrial revolution, the new technologies have reformed society. It has changed not only how we work and how we live. It also reshaped the way we think, rest, communicate and how we perceive ourselves as human beings.

In the next year, we will see more and more Tech For Good applications that will bring more purpose and value to technology. Here I would like to cover 5 of the most exciting AI and IoT trends and innovations that will drive 2021 and the fourth industrial revolution.
Matplotlib Kütüphanesi İle Histogram
By: Mert Alabaş
Tags: Python, Histograms, Matplotlib, Veri Görselleştirme, Data Visualization

mertalabas - Overview

Sign up for your own profile on GitHub, the best place to host code, manage projects, and build software alongside 40…
Designing the UI of Google Translate
By: Pendar Yousefi
Tags: Case Study, Google, Translation, Design, UX

The design story behind making Google Translate’s camera feature and real-time conversation mode more discoverable

Humans have been fascinated with magical creatures or devices that break language barriers for as long as languages have existed. At Google Translate, we have the opportunity to work on a product that helps us get one step closer to realizing the magic.

Discovering the magic

Google Translate’s instant camera translation and real-time conversation modes never cease to amaze our users. But beyond their wow-inducing nature, they are extremely useful as well, helping language learners, students, tourists, and all sorts of people who need to break through language barriers.

The problem

Unfortunately, many of our users did not know these features existed. We first got a hunch this is true when we noticed people asking for features we already had during user research interviews. We confirmed that by running a survey which showed 38% of our users did not know we had these tools.
Everybody Is Welcome(d) To Thinking UP!
By: Jean-Marc Buchert
Tags: Intelligence, Thinking, Creativity, Writing, Self Improvement

Everybody Is Welcome(d) To Thinking UP!

A new Medium Publication that promotes intellectual creativity

Today we live in a world where drastic changes are the norm.

Every day new technological, economic, social and political innovations impact the way we interact with our environment, our relationships and our subjectivity.

Caught up in such a movement, we find ourselves reduced to two choices: to follow the movement, or to make a stop and risk being overwhelmed.

There is, however, a third path : that of artistic, intellectual, emotional and social creativity enabling us to empower ourselves and to turn the evolution of society in our favour.

What this new publication aims to achieve is to make intellectual and creative resources accessible to an audience that has a sincere desire to make its mark in this world.

Perhaps a number of you, like me, have been fortunate enough to be nourished by a deep intellectual culture (scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic) found mainly in books. It has certainly enabled you to nourish yourselves day after day with new models of thinking and to adopt a new vision over everyday problems.

Unfortunately, these cultural resources are often too much preserved by an intellectual and academic elite more concerned with procrastinating in the sum of its knowledge than with making it applicable to our ways of acting, creating and deciding. And God knows that our actions, decisions and emotions make more sense with thoughts that are worthy of them.

My publication is open to all types of writers who wish to share their own creative and intellectual discoveries to change the world around them.

Simply submit your draft article at thinkingup655@gmail.com, and we will take care of bringing your insights to an audience.

Take yourself to another level by subscribing and joining us !
Jay-Z Would Say You Can Work For Yourself — Just Not Yet
By: Joel Leon.
Tags: Life Lessons, Business, Music, Entrepreneurship, Life

It’s great to be your own boss, but don’t need to rush the process

“If you can’t buy the building, at least stock the shelf (word)

Then keep on stacking ’til you stocking for yourself, uh” — Jay-Z, “Entrepreneur”

Talk to me, maaaan! We back at it with another installment of your soon-to-be-favorite Medium column, “What Would Hov Do?,” where I guide you through the pitfalls of life with the help of Jay-Z’s discography. The feedback has been love. I’m throwing up the Roc sign as we speak.

Another week, another question. Our anonymous reader asks:

“I resigned from my job in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic because I wasn’t feeling it. Now what do I do — look for another job or start my own business?”

This is a really good and fair question. The pandemic has forced many of us to re-evaluate the systems that we’ve adopted as normative, right? Before the whole globe shut down, getting your boss to approve remote work (if you’re even in a privileged enough space and industry to do so) was like battling them dragon-vampire-dogs on Lovecraft Country. We’re all looking at how we can be less reliant on the corporate machine to provide for ourselves and our families, including our rescue dogs. But with that, some of us have opted not to wait for that deluxe apartment in the sky from a brand, a company, or a pyramid scheme. We are venturing out on our own.

Hov knows all about this. But what’s interesting is on the Pharrell-produced “Entrepreneur,” the man who once told us boldly, “I am not a businessman, I’m a business, man” tells us that it’s okay to work for the man while working to become the man (or woman, or just becoming). I bring up the example of The Infatuation a lot, the restaurant recommendation and messaging site started by two former music execs. They worked on the platform while holding down their jobs. They didn’t leave their 9 to 5 until they felt comfortable enough financially to leap into being full-time entrepreneurs leading the company, which recently bought out Zagat and is now estimated at $33.3M in funding.

All that to say — you don’t need to make your major decision now. You can actually do both, homie. Seek another job, and maybe find one that allows you to somehow leverage whatever work you will eventually put into your own company. It’s a lot more work, but I will always advocate for getting grounded enough so that your company has a solid foundation to build. Who’s to say your next gig won’t connect you with the folks who will be able to help your company in some way? You can still work for someone else while working on and for yourself. And then, when it’s time to dip, you chuck the deuces in a way that is more viable and healthy for you.

Bet on yourself, but don’t gamble it all to reap the fruits of your labor — Hov’s orders.

For the newbies out there, feel free to get familiar with some of my previous Medium work here. And here. Oh, and here too.
Will face masks be the next big thing?
By: Murto Hilali
Tags: Neuroscience, Business, Mathematics, Psychology, Economics

Well, according to my calculations…

It depends on the number of people.

Information cascades occur when people make decisions sequentially, even if it goes against their own private information, based on the observed decisions of other people.

Let’s assume we have a group of people (N) who can decide between adopting or rejecting the fashion face mask trend. Everyone can observe the decisions of people in front of them, but not their private information.

We can build a mathematical model for what decisions they’ll make, based on the following components:

States of the world: The world randomly exists in either of two states, one where wearing face masks for fashion is a good idea (G) and one where it’s a bad idea (B) — individuals will try to figure which one is true. Signals: Everyone has private information, or a private signal, that gives them a clue about whether accepting is a good idea or not — maybe in this case, it’s your existing knowledge of fashion.

Signals can be high (H), meaning accepting is a good idea, or low (L) meaning it’s a bad idea. If it is, in fact, a good idea, then high signals will be more frequent than low ones.

Mathematically speaking, the probability of getting a high signal given it’s a good idea (denoted by Pr [H |G], or q) will be greater than 1/2. Pr [L | G] will therefore be 1 — q. The same applies for the opposite:

Created by Murto Hilali

As a rule, the first person will follow their signal, as will the second. (Proof can be found here).

If Person 1 and 2 make different decisions, person 3 is indifferent and will follow his own signal.

If they make the same decision (accept or reject the trend) person 3 will follow suit regardless of their private information.

This speaks to a trend that governs information cascades:

If the number of acceptances exceeds rejections by two, it starts a cascade of acceptance.

If the number of rejections exceeds acceptances by two, it starts a cascade of rejection.

Screenshot by Author | Cornell

This means three matching signals in a row will always cause a cascade. Let’s split N up into chunks of 3 consecutive people: the probability that they all get the same signal is:

By the same reasoning, the probability none of them get identical signals (i.e. no cascade happens) is

As N approaches infinity, this value starts to = 0.

That means the more people there are in the sequence, the likelier a cascade is to form. This could be a cascade of acceptance or rejection — if you want to get the former, encourage the first few people to all accept, and the rest will follow suit.
The Essence of True Marketing
By: Beacon Social Media
Tags: Marketing, Business, Social Media Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Social Media

Originally published at www.beaconsocialmedia.com on April 27, 2018.

Anna McCormack — Founder — Beacon Social Media

At the core of every society is people. At the core of every person is heart. We are flesh and bone….each of us, sensitive beings who feel much more than we care to admit. Many of us spend a lot of time denying this fact or doing our utmost to numb ourselves to it, but alas, no amount of denial and or numbing can take away the fact that, we are and always will be incredibly sensitive. We feel it all!

Why such an introduction in an article about marketing?

It’s simple. The Marketing Industry has lost sight of this all important truth. Instead it is focus driven on increasing sales, meeting targets, pushing this way and that to achieve so called ‘success’ in business. The sad part is that we, the people, have allowed it.

These days when we attend events that are well intentioned to support businesses to ‘grow and prosper’, rarely is the subject of relationships within business discussed. Why is this? Should relationships not be one of the first topics of conversation when we discuss success in business?

True success in business comes from the daily interactions we have with our colleagues, clients and customers. No monetary value can be placed on this.

Lived in its truest sense this approach to business is magnetic.

The thing we all want the most in a business is real integrity…..not the half hearted kind, not empty words, but deeply felt to the core integrity, and there is nothing more appealing in business then the person who places people before profit.

The funny thing is that when we do this, everything tends to take care of itself. Things just start to flow and we are supported from every angle possible. And yet, it is so easy to fall back into the fear or wanting that can lead to a less then human approach to business.

So long as our skills are sound, and we are smart with our business planning and budget, all we need is to make it about people first. Its not rocket science at all….in fact we don’t even need a degree for this part — and yet it is indeed the most valuable part.

When we approach business in this way marketing becomes simple. A simple practice of sharing your business out into the community, be it online or off — all you need is the practical know how to do this.

True marketing is any form of marketing that genuinely holds people at its core.

And at the risk of putting myself out of work, it is through this practice that you will discover you need very little marketing at all for a business that is true. For ‘true’ business has an undeniable magnetism that will see people coming from far and wide.
3 different ways to Perform Gradient Descent in Tensorflow 2.0 and MS Excel
By: Pak Long
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Artificial Intelligence, Gradient Descent, TensorFlow

Gradient descent in Tensorflow 2.0

Before we start, make sure you have Tensorflow 2.0 installed.

Please visit here to know more: https://www.tensorflow.org/install

Set up

The first function fu is with input x1 and x2 and return a value. Please note that x1 and x2 here refer to x and z in the previous part.

The second function fu_minmizie is identical, but without input value, the reason will be covered later.

The third function reset is resetting the initial value of x1 and x2 to (10, 10).

Way 1: minimize()

Doc for minimize() can be found here:

https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/optimizers/Optimizer#minimize

Code:

Sample output

First I reset x1 and x2 to (10, 10).

Then choose the SGD (stochastic gradient descent) optimizer with rate = 0.1.

Finally perform minimization using opt.minimize() with respect to the function fu_minmizie without input values , since opt.minimize() would refer to the provided var_list as the variables to be updated.

opt.minimize() updates x1 and x2 for each step.

Way 2: tf.GradientTape() and apply_gradients()

Doc for GradientTape() and apply_gradients() can be found here:

https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/GradientTape

https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/optimizers/Optimizer#apply_gradients

Code:

Sample output

First I reset x1 and x2 to (10, 10).

Then choose the SGD (stochastic gradient descent) optimizer with rate = 0.1.

Then calling the function fu with input (10, 10) under tf.GradientTape() , so that we can call tape.gradient(y, [x1, x2]) to get the gradients, which is (8.3, 8) in the first iteration. The reason why we need to use the function fu but not the function fu_minimize is that tf.GradientTape() need to watch to process inside the function, so as to compute the gradients, that’s why we call it “tape”.

Then update the x1 and x2 using apply_gradients() .

Note that processed_grads perform no transformation to the gradients so as to adhere to gradient descent theorem, you can try out different transformation for the gradients in this line of code, for example divided by two, square root, plus two, etc.

Way 3: tf. GradientTape () and assign() (No optimizer)

Doc for assign() can be found here:

https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/Variable#assign

Code:

Sample output

First I reset x1 and x2 to (10, 10).

Then calling the function with input (10, 10) under tf.GradientTape() , so that we can call tape.gradient(y, [x1, x2]) to get the gradients, which is (8.3, 8) is the first iteration.
Building resilient services at Prime Video with chaos engineering
By: Adrian Hornsby
Tags: Software Development, Amazon, Chaos Engineering, Open Source, AWS

Large-scale distributed software systems are composed of several individual sub-systems-such as CDNs, load balancers, and databases-and their interactions. These interactions sometimes have unpredictable outcomes caused by unforeseen turbulent events (for example, a network failure). These events can lead to system-wide failures.

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent events. Chaos engineering requires adopting practices to identify interactions in distributed systems and related failures proactively, and also needs implementing and validating countermeasures. The key to chaos engineering is injecting failure in a controlled manner.

In this post, we present a simple approach for fault injection in systems utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and its integration with a load-testing suite to validate the countermeasures put in place to prevent dependency and resource exhaustion failures. A typical chaos experiment could be generating baseline load (traffic) against the system, adding latency to all network calls to the underlying database, and then validating timeouts and retries. We will explain how to inject such failure (addition of latency to database calls), why validating countermeasures (timeouts and retries) under load is essential, and how to execute it in an Amazon EC2-based system.

We will start with a brief introduction to chaos engineering, then dive deep into failure injection using the AWS Systems Manager. We will then present our open source library, AWSSSMChaosRunner. This was inspired by Adrian Hornsby’s “Injecting Chaos to Amazon EC2 using AWS System Manager” blog post.

Finally, we will provide an example of integration and explain how Prime Video used this library to prevent potentially customer-impacting outages.
The Best of Better Programming (August 24–28, 2020)
By: Zack Shapiro
Tags: JavaScript, Software Development, Programming, Startup, Python

Hey everyone!

I hope you had a good week. I’m Zack Shapiro, Editor of Better Programming, with the first installment of Better Programming’s Best of the Week Newsletter to help you get inspired and coding this weekend.

Without further ado, here are the 11 best-performing articles that we published this week!
How Obsessing Over Productivity Is Making You Unhappy
By: Thom Gallet
Tags: Business, Mental Health, Self, Productivity, Life Lessons

How Obsessing Over Productivity Is Making You Unhappy

And four tips for breaking this toxic cycle.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Everywhere we look, we see people spouting trendy productivity hacks, informing us how to optimize every single minute of our lives. We read articles about how to read a book in a day and hear people bragging about finishing their to-do lists in record time.

We embrace this insane productivity culture because we assume the more things we do, the happier we become. If we’re happy when we finish one book, then we rationalize that finishing thirty books will make us thirty times as happy.

However, this way of thinking fails to recognize why finishing a book, brings us joy in the first place.

We don't get joy from simply checking it off our reading list. No, finishing a book makes us happy because of the journey it took us on, the lessons we learned, the investments we made, and the anticipation of wondering what the next chapter will bring us.

Our obsession with productivity robs us of these experiences, as we no longer take the time to appreciate them.

All we care about is efficiently finishing our one thing, so we can move onto the next.

If you’re nodding along, I hope you find comfort in the fact you’re not the only one with this problem.

The good news is if we can recognize a problem, we can also address it. So, here are some suggestions to help you break free from this relentless productivity mindset that has dominated our personal lives.
The best examples of bad code I’ve come across production mode.
By: Soso Gvritishvili
Tags: Engineering, Software Development, Development, Developer, Programming

P.S.

I also have a lot of bad codes.

I have found this in my project, but I don’t understand what the hell is — Set language function )))))
The Incredible Power of Being “Onto Something”
By: Corey Mccomb
Tags: Self, Creativity, Life Lessons, Motivation, Personal Development

Some things in life come along and make you forget about everything else. Forget the lows, the stress, the why-didn’t-they-call-me backs. And then there are other things. Things that come along and make everything worth remembering. Things that shoot electricity and meaning into the vein of everydayness. These things are trying to find us. Trying to get our attention. Waiting, desperately, to add color to our fields of black and white.

It might not feel as dramatic as a nearsighted boy who is given sight, but these moments of inflection are available to us all. Many people droll about, unaware or indifferent to the fact they aren’t seeing the whole picture. They haven’t found — or they’ve overlooked — the one outlet that feeds electricity into everything. They haven’t found miraculous little windows to see the world through.

Have you found yours?

Do you keep it close?

Did you lose its signal amongst the static on your line?

If you’re someone still waiting to hear The Call, first be aware of the possibility. Never forget or doubt that there is something great waiting for you. There is an outlet waiting to feed electricity into everything you do. Waiting to raise the water and part the sea. Waiting to stir the deepest depths of your creative well.

And if you’ve found yours, hold it close. Never allow the static of everydayness to blind you to its importance. Limiting beliefs, external noise, fears of missing out — it will all attempt to derail and shovel dirt over your path. We all must be vigilant in curiosity and our hunger to be, onto something.

Life can be spent waiting for death or searching for truth. Find what is meant for you. What makes you feel alive. What makes you human.

Continue the search until you feel the veil pulled from your eyes and can say with enthusiasm of a young Theodor Roosevelt, “I never knew how beautiful the world was until…”
Tutorial: Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) with RAPIDS on AWS SageMaker
By: Miro Enev
Tags: Hyperparameter Tuning, Python, Machine Learning, AWS, Sagemaker

This video tutorial will show you how to combine RAPIDS and Amazon SageMaker to accelerate hyperparameter optimization (HPO) and find the best version of your model before serving it to the world. HPO can take an exceedingly long time on a non-accelerated platform. When we combine the power of GPU acceleration within a node using RAPIDS and parallel experiments running across multiple nodes using AWS SageMaker, we can get impressive results. For instance, we find a 12x speedup in wall clock time and a 4.5x reduction in cost when comparing GPU and CPU EC2 Spot instances on 100 XGBoost HPO trials using 10 parallel workers on 10 years of the Airline Dataset hosted in an S3 bucket.

Learn how to spin up a SageMaker instance and quickly launch a demo notebook from the official sagemaker-examples repository.

We’ve built in lots of flexibility into the workflow. We invite you to explore the many configuration options as well as to plug in your dataset.

RAPIDS HPO now integrated into the SageMaker Examples UI

Tutorial Chapters:

1 — Introduction and Concept Overview

2 — Spinning up a SageMaker Instance

3 — Notebook Walkthrough with Description of Key Choices

For more details on getting started, check out the code repo as well as the RAPIDS cloud & RAPIDS HPO webpages. Find us on Slack or file a GitHub issue with suggestions.
The Chemical Rush of Creative Work Leads to Soul-Soothing Satisfaction
By: Corey Mccomb
Tags: Personal Growth, Self, Inspiration, Creativity, Writing

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting madness.” -Franz Kafka

It’s the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and Darren Aronofksy is on stage interviewing fellow filmmaker, Clint Eastwood. He tells him, “You make it seem so easy — and for me filmmaking is pain. I’m in pain the whole time. I’m in pain writing. I’m in pain shooting, and I’m in pain editing, and I just — how do you do it?”

Eastwood lets Aronofsky’s question hang in the air before answering with his slow, signature draw, “Well, if it was that painful, I would consider myself somewhat of a masochist.”

Everyone has their own sliding scale of pain and pleasure when it comes to making things, but the act of turning inspiration into action is rarely luxurious. The on-demand dopamine machines in our pockets don’t make it any easier. We can get a little high off other people’s work anytime. Why spend hours or years wrangling creative ghosts that promise nothing and might take everything?

The answer is simple: On the other side of creative agony is soul-soothing ecstasy.

Each hour of effort is a click, click, click of a roller-coaster cart climbing. Climbing higher and higher until it reaches its apex and rolls into a freefall of fulfillment, satisfaction, and pride. Even creative “masochists” like Aronofsky know that once the rewards of creativity hit the vein, the pain disappears. And then it’s time to get back in line and ride again.

Humans have had 200,000 years and a million reasons to evolve into industrious and creative beings. It should come as no surprise that when we put our ingenuity to use, our minds race with a primal reassurance that we’ve earned our place in the world. The chemical rush of doing creative work is what keeps people like Aronofksy on the hunt for more. Because once you get a taste of that evolutionary high, the withdrawals can be a real killer…
The Non-Treachery of Dataset
By: Vlad Alex, Merzmensch
Tags: Published Tds, Ai In Discourse, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Art

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Creating Visualization for Influence in Power BI
By: Sarah Mason
Tags: Probability, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Power Bi, Data Visualization

Photo by Samuel Clara on Unsplash

Data can be complex, which often results in multiple data types: character, binary, numerical, and more to describe a set of facts. Familiarity of dealing with repositories is an association. However, having a small amount of data in a spreadsheet and checking semantics to gauge response in slices is a viable way to analyze data with efficiency producing meaningful results. Once an analysis is completed on a small set, the same method can be applied at scale in a larger framework.

Semantics: meaning of words, language. This is a common term in Artificial Intelligence for Natural Language Processing to describe the inference relationship of communication, typically speech.

Slice: is a thin piece cut from a larger piece. Definitions often include that this term is only with food items. For our purposes, and in analytics, slice is not edible. It is data.

Objective

Show example of data mining with Power BI and output a hierarchy of results based on inference of data. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique in Power BI, we will understand where heart failure if more likely to occur and by what amount showing geographical influence of a diagnosis projecting probability of health outcomes.

Description of tools in Power BI

Analytics for language processing like semantics, image detection, and integration with Azure Machine Learning recent additions. Visuals now include slicing for AI features to represent results in hierarchy within Power BI not requiring integration for analysis of locally stored low feature data. Power BI is an application from Microsoft that is a more powerful analysis tool than Excel and a unique portfolio of capabilities.

Example

This example uses a dataset of Medicare claims. The claims are analyzed to find where an event is most likely to occur. Within Power BI, go through data import for the claims file. Selecting the visualization tab on the left of the window, select “key influencers”. This will slice the data to find the most likely places of heart failure, or the places where heart failures are more common as reasoned by Medicare claims.

The conclusion are the three states with highest rate of heart failure are Colorado (CO), Mississippi (MS), and New Hampshire (NH). This shows where this event is more common and likely to occur.

The Finish

This is a sample and solution can be changed to scale from the spreadsheet to linking database for big data analytics data to mine semantics for reliable outcomes. Try it and find slicing to be a great visual for telling a story with data.

Data available at : https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/center-for-medicare-medicaid-services-cms-medicare-claims-data
Insights and My Experience From My Interview at Facebook
By: Kriti Joshi
Tags: Programming, Facebook, Women In Tech, Interview, Engineering

Onsite Interview

Facebook AR/VR division office. There are two more Facebook offices in London.

Facebook’s interview process is pretty quick. I heard back from the recruiter within two days and flew to London for my onsite round. A total of four interviews were scheduled

Coding interviews (x 2)

Two questions are asked which need to be solved within 45–50 minutes. Areas covered were binary trees, string, stack, and list. Discuss the solution first with the interviewer and then write your code on the whiteboard.

Tip: There are always edge cases that need to be tackled in the code, and it’s not easy to take care of them while coding under pressure. One technique that has helped me get through this is the test run. Immediately after coding the solution, I tell the interviewer that I am going to test-run my solution on a generic example and debug myself first. The obvious mistakes in code are brought out by the first test run itself — better to find them yourself than to have them pointed out by the interviewer. Running through these test runs provides the time to think about edge cases which can then be incorporated into the code.

System design interview

This is an interesting round new for entry-level software engineers. The aim is to design a system from scratch. The problem statement usually looks like this:

Design an existing product like WhatsApp, Facebook, Google search, etc. Design a particular feature of one of these applications; say, implement a timeline in a Facebook app. Design a completely hypothetical scenario; say, create a system to store logs of three servers situated far apart.

This interview definitely requires a special kind of preparation, and the most famous aid is Grokking the System Design Interview.

The good part is there are no correct answers. You should be able to justify your design choices and know the tradeoffs you have made.

Behavioral interview

This is the easiest of all, but do not take it lightly because any red flags raised in this interview can cost you your selection. The questions revolve around non-technical experiences like leadership skills, team spirit, how you tackle disagreement, etc. This set of questions is almost fixed, hence answers can be prepared.

Tip: A day before the interview, go through the list of popular behavioral questions and think about anecdotes from your professional life that support your answer to the question. Use this interview to relax in between the series of technical interviews. The confidence boost from this round helps in raising morale.