fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Create high-quality chatbots by making use of agent validation, an out of the box review feature.
By: Lee Boonstra
Tags: Machine Learning, Chatbots, Dialogflow, AI, Programming

Create high-quality chatbots by making use of agent validation, an out of the box review feature. Lee Boonstra Follow Mar 30 · 5 min read

Dialogflow provides a validation feature. Agent validation results are available automatically whenever agent training is performed and completed. You can access the results of validation from either the Dialogflow Console or the API.

When you are building a chatbot which becomes a little bit more advanced, you will easily end up with lots of intents and entities. Maybe, you are even working with a team within your Dialogflow project. Various ux designers working on various intents. Where people work, mistakes are made. This can become a problem when you are training your Dialogflow model.

Common mistakes that can be made in Dialogflow are:

No, or not enough training phrases in an intent.

The intent has training phrases which are too similar to each other, or to training phrases of other intents.

Variations of entities are not used enough in training phrases.

Text is annotated within some training phrases but not in others.

No negative examples for the fallback intents.

What’s good to know is that Dialogflow has an automatic validation feature built-in the Dialogflow console or API. The results are available whenever the agent training is completed.

The agent validation feature is by default enabled. Should you not be able to find it, you can enable the Agent Validation toggle setting in the Settings > ML Settings tab.

Once you click Validation in the Dialogflow menu (and the agent has been trained), you will see the results of the validation:

The validation results provide a list of warnings and errors that you should correct to improve the quality and performance of your agent. It can find issues on (global) agent level, in intents or in entities. If your agent has warnings or errors, you can choose to ignore them and launch your agent. It’s for informational purposes only, but you would rob yourself from Agent Quality by not using this feature, basically this is a Dialogflow Agent Review out of the box, for free!

Issues can represent various levels of severity. Only Info, Warning and Error messages are shown in the Validation screen. The settings Critical and Unspecified are available in the SDK (or on the specific intent / entity pages).
From Pile to Smile
By: Katie Mccurdy
Tags: Patient Experience, Design, Design Process, Data Visualization, Healthcare

From Pile to Smile

Insights from transforming a friend’s big stack of medical records into a visual story

I recently worked with a friend to help her put together a visual health history. That’s what I do as part of the company I’ve started, Pictal Health, and she was the 21st person I’ve worked with thus far.

Bonnie came to me with a request. After about 30 years of ongoing health issues, some of which were mystifying and for which she felt she had no answers, she was in the process of gathering her medical records (both from traditional medical systems and alternative practitioners) into one place. She asked me to help her make sense of this vast amount of information so that she could start preparing for yet another upcoming new doctor visit.

Let’s take a look at what we did and the many things we learned.
Classifying Online-Shop Customers
By: Andreas Stöckl
Tags: Machine Learning, Web Tracking, Classification, Online Shopping, Visualization

Classifying Online-Shop Customers

A visual approach with different machine learning classifiers

In this article, I would like to show how different machine learning methods can be used to classify customers into buying and non-buying using tracking data from an online shop. With features aggregated from the raw data, such as number of visits and number of page views, forecast models are trained and visualized.

Special attention is paid to the visual presentation of the forecast models with the help of 2-D plots and coloring of the decision boundaries. The peculiarities of the different methods become apparent as well as situations with under- and over-adjustment of the models. To make visualization possible, I consider very simplified models with only two features.

Data import

Let’s load the raw data from a CSV-file. These are from the Kaggle data set https://www.kaggle.com/mkechinov/ecommerce-behavior-data-from-multi-category-store. It is the same data source I used in my article about segmentation and visualization:

https://towardsdatascience.com/segmentation-of-online-shop-customers-8c304a2d84b4

For the presentation and analysis, I use only a part of the data.

Tracking data from an online shop

These are 1,000,000 data records on product pages of an online shop with characteristics such as product category, brand, price, user session id, and more.

For further processing of the data, we form a data frame which aggregates the data of individual anonymous visitors and calculates the number of page views and visits to the online shop. Furthermore, the number of purchased items is calculated for each visitor, and thus a label is created whether the customer is a buyer or not.

To simplify the presentations in the following, the data of some visitors was removed from the analysis.

Aggregated data for online shop users

This provides us with data from 121 visitors to the webshop.

Graphical representation of the data

Before we start the analysis, let’s look at a 2-D plot of the visitors, which uses the number of visits and page views as axes. Whether a buyer or not is represented by a color code. The library “Plotly” (https://plotly.com/) is used for the plots.

Feature space for online-shop users

The red and green dots are mostly concentrated in certain areas of this “feature space”. In the following, we try to create classification models that correctly identify visitors as buyers based on their position in the features space.
Facebook & Instagram — Nunca mais erre o tamanho das imagens
Tags: Dicas, Facebook, Imagens, Infográfico

in In Fitness And In Health
Join My Java Facebook Group: “Java Software Development Group”
By: Adrian D. Finlay
Tags: Programming, Java, Technology, Tech, Software Development

Log into Facebook | Facebook

Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.
How To Sing
By: Darryl Willis
Tags: Music, Poetry On Medium, Poetry

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash | Free Photos

Everything begins with breath.

Focused force; sound flows

to and through the top of your head

a small imaginary hole.

Push sound, soul and spirit through:

like a pregnant woman pushing

new life through her body.

Sound and breath birthing art.

Breathe, don’t forget to breathe:

deep, slow, steady. Breathe.

Everything begins with breath.
The Sound of Software — Visual Loudness
By: Thiyagaraj T
Tags: UI, Design, Software Development, UX, Design Thinking

RAD Colors

Why do you need loudness?

Software in 21st century doesn’t come with user manuals. They are most likely self installed on a mobile device. Nobody teaches how to operate an app.

Some apps just are just POP & provide natural way-finding. There is no art behind this, its just quantitative analysis. Loudness needs to be tuned across the interface to help the user navigate & take actions.

Loudness is in your head!

You don’t need to make noise(literally) to be heard. You can visually evoke loudness in the mind. Colours, contrast, position & motion help digital interfaces communicate loudness. The craft is to understand how to weigh this loudness & set the nudges for the user across the interface.

See from left to right & notice how the colours shifts your attention

Colours play a very important role in adding visual loudness naturally. In general warm colours are used infrequently which stands out among other cooler colours. Position as well matters. The corners are usual suspects for primary actions & often louder places. To go one step ahead, a little animation can lift the loudness to the next level. These techniques can be built into systems through the use of links, buttons, & promotional call-outs.

A loudness guide illustrated in https://www.viget.com/articles/visual-loudness/

You need a scale to measure

Visual loudness without a scale can be disastrous. Any quantitative analysis needs a scale to measure. For visual loudness, there are no standard but there are suggested techniques & parameters on which you can build your own loudness scale. You can classify components in terms of volume, frequency & use. Volume can be . Frequency can determine if the volume assigned is appropriate, you don’t want a lot of noise a more frequently appearing component. The Use is more suggestive of justification for the cost of volume.

A good example — A Confirmation Button can have very high volume given that frequency is low & the use is more encouraging . A bad example will be a Cancel Button with high volume -though the frequency is low, but the use is not encouraged (From the perspective of the Software designer).

Having a scale really helps in setting up the inventory of components used across & fix the volume to bring out the POP effect.

Ana Okuntseva illustrates a Loudness Scale for Buttons

So next time you use your favourite app, try to intercept how well loudness has been tuned & observe how smartly the app nudges you to do what it wants you to.

Stay tuned & follow for more stories brewing just for software lovers ❤️.

This is an article of a collection -The Sound of Software 🎻

Sources —
Holocron Module Composition
By: Ruben Casas
Tags: Holocron, One App, React, JavaScript, Micro Frontends

In my previous article, I introduced Holocron, a new way of creating Micro Frontends in React. Now, here is the deal…

“How do you assemble all the jigsaw pieces in a Micro Frontend architecture puzzle? the answer is… NOT using Iframes!”

Most of the examples that you find on the internet on how to create a Micro frontend based application mention the usage of iframes, but let’s be honest, Iframes are bad ☹️… And they are by no means the elegant solution that the modern web is used to these days… so my question again is:

Is there a secure way to assemble dozens of React modules on a single page, preserving a small page load, Server Side Rendering and loading just parts of the frontend experience as they are required?

With One App and Holocron, the answer is YES!… all of the above is possible and much more!

Module Composition with Holocron

Holocron modules are loaded in memory and get updated dynamically whenever The One App Server polls the module map that contains the URLs to the Module bundles (e.g. my-module.browser.js ). When a new HTTP request arrives, the One App Server renders one or more modules on the page becoming a single experience to the user. Similar to how components in React work, modules are composable, meaning that a single module can load and reuse other modules.

The Root Module

The first or “top-level” module is called The root module. This is module is the entry point for your application. You can compare it to the top-level component of a React application where all the other components are rendered as children underneath. As well as rendering the children modules, the root module is in charge of the App configuration, like the Content Security Policy, CORS origins, and the Routing.

Children Modules

These modules are the true definition of what micro frontend is in practice. They are self-contained Web Experiences that consist of React Components, Redux Reducers, and Actions as well as Routes. They are independent of other modules, load all the data / make all the API requests they need to render, and can be reused across the application with a configurable API via props.
Bitcoin holds a legal future?
Tags: Future, Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Cryptocurrency News, Bitcoin

In recent years, Bitcoin has turned the world upside down as it goes main stream! Where on one side, investors have high hopes that its volatility will one day make its rates hit a peak and on the other side, its growth graph has surely shook the govt. of various countries along with many established organizations dealing in fiat currencies.

Out of 1300 cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency which has had a great impact (both positively and negatively) on people. Bitcoin’s historical rates have shown a huge difference from time to time. No one could ever predict where its rates would go, seeing its extreme highs and lows.

Many govt. authorities have either restricted the use of crypto currencies or completely banned its use, seeing the violations that Bitcoin is or would make. While there are a few who don’t mind its growth seeing its bright future.

Legal Status of Bitcoin in various countries is as follows:

Status-

Legal/Neutral: 99 countries (40% of the world)

Restricted: 7 countries (3% of the world)

Illegal: 10 countries (4% of the world)

No information: 130 countries (53% of the world)

Eastern countries appear a lot more closed off to Bitcoin than their Western counterparts. Russia is currently the largest country to illegalize Bitcoin. However, China and South Korea are the latest two countries to step up their scrutiny and regulation of Bitcoin use. This has led to the recent sell off across the cryptocurrency market, as China and South Korea are two vital hotspots that have historically contributed a lot of trading liquidity to the emerging market. However, South Korean citizens are not going down without a fight. A recent petition to stop the cryptocurrency ban and fire government officials has exceeded 100,000 signatures.

North American and Western Europe are the most accepting regions for Bitcoin. The Middle East appears to be very divided on the topic of Bitcoin. Interestingly enough, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey are legal Bitcoin markets, while Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have varying degrees of restrictions on the cryptocurrency.

Overall, a majority of the world still has yet to comment on the legality of Bitcoin. The emerging industry is still not fully understood by global regulators, which may explain why some countries have yet to comment on the movement. As time passes, countries that have remained on the sideline will eventually come out with a set of regulations that either approve Bitcoin’s use or Illegalize the activity. Bitcoin’s rise in popularity continues to exceed expectations, but not all countries will see cryptocurrency in a favorable light.

Content Source: howmuch.net

Featured Image Credits: Fine art America
Scrapbooks Connect The Treasures of The Time
By: Marjorie J Mcdonald
Tags: Lifestyle, Creativity Tips, Creativity, Inspiration, DIY

The pictures of the events of the previous year can also give you help with time management. When evaluating your circumstances, you can see where you spent your time.

· That gives you the awareness to adjust the activities.

· In the new year, you will be able to effectively spend time on the activities that will provide you with the highest return financially. And satisfaction with the work that you have done and the time you have spent doing it.

In your resolutions for the new year, you can decide if an activity area should have more or less time invested in it. As part of your new year strategy, those decisions will help you make wise choices for the time and energy investment you will make in the new year.

The scrapbook of the previous year gives you a perfect road map for the new year. That way, you can plan your new year’s events to achieve the critical goals for you more easily.

Your scrapbook lays out your road map for your trip through the next year.

· Taking a road trip requires planning to reach your destinations along the way and your final destination on time.

· Your scrapbook road map from last year will show you destinations you wanted to stop at that you drove on past.

· Those destinations are easily added to your road map for the next year if they are essential to you.
How Pinterest, Yelp and Dropbox drive growth at scale
By: Pinterest Engineering
Tags: Growth, Engineering, Pinterest, Yelp, Dropbox

John Egan | Pinterest engineer, Growth

We recently hosted a meetup to discuss how companies drive growth at scale. More than 100 engineers joined to hear speakers from Dropbox, Pinterest and Yelp. Below are recaps of the talks, and you can also check out a recording below.

Using machine learning to drive growth at Pinterest

At Pinterest, we surface personalized recommendations to 100M+ Pinners to help them discover new ideas related to their interests. In this talk, growth engineer Utku Irmak covered how we use machine learning to decide the types of notifications to send and how often based on signals like engagement.

Building a Growth team at Yelp

Yelp has been building its Growth team from scratch over the last year and a half. In this talk, growth engineering manager Alex Haefner shared how Yelp approached building the team, the challenges they faced along the way and lessons learned. Check out the video for experiment case studies and more.

Growth Platform at Dropbox

In this talk, Ruchi Varshney, Dropbox growth engineering manager, and Aditi Jain, growth product manager, discussed scaling communication from the Dropbox platform to its half a billion users across channels such as email, mobile/desktop notifications and in-app surfaces for onboarding, engagement and monetization.
Outlier — Szukamy prelegentów. Tłumaczenie Outlier — Apply to Speak!
By: Mollie Pettit
Tags: Conference, Dataviz, Data Visualization, Community, Outlierconference

Sign up for The 'Gale

By Nightingale

Keep up with the latest from Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society Take a look
Winning wars with statistics
By: Tds Editors
Tags: Neural Networks, Careers, PyTorch, The Daily Pick

And we can have a better intuition about why and how neural networks work

By Angela Shi — 5 min in Neural Networks
New Things: Cee Lo, “You Promised Me Love,” Also a Super-Earth
By: Edith Zimmerman
Tags: Music, Aliens, Outer Space

Spiralbound editor. Formerly at The Hairpin. Also now making a newsletter: https://drawinglinks.substack.com

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Bulls-eye marketing: Finding the sweet spot
By: Paul Dughi
Tags: Sales, Business, Growth, Advertising, Marketing

To maximize the effectiveness of your advertising, you have to place it squarely in the target for consumers.

You already know it’s not enough to have a great product. It’s not enough to assemble your unique selling proposition — what I call your Weapon of Mass Distinction. It’s not enough to have a great advertisement. It’s not enough to place it on the highest rated TV program or website. It takes all of these things working in concert consistently.

If you’re selling motorized wheelchairs, you probably don’t want to be advertising on the X-Games. Don’t waste your money selling women’s cosmetics during basketball.

You have to have the ads’ Content, Creative, and Placement all mixed together in the funnel to hit the target. Promotion and Marketing guru Jim Hart calls it the “Promotion Intersection” where you can achieve maximum impact.

Is your commercial counter to the style, tone, or likely attitude of the audience that’s watching? The more you can mirror the target audience of the program and their sensibilities, the better chance you have of sending an effective message.

You wouldn’t sell a car to a 22-year old who just got a first job the same way you would to a 52-year old doctor with a family of four. And you probably wouldn’t advertise it on the same website.

Match your creative to your placement. Make sure your content sells your Weapon of Mass Distinction in a way that will appeal to the audience.

If it sounds like it’s too complex and difficult to understand, that’s not the idea. Media sales professionals understand this stuff. It’s their job to do it for you. We’re just trying to arm you with information so you can make sure they’re doing their job and a way for you to ask a few more questions to make sure they know you know.

The right ads, in the right places, are priceless.
Just a song
Tags: Peace, Music, Poetry, Life, Joy

This isn’t a list

to tell you how to live your life

This isn’t a piece

to profit from the strife

It’s just a song

to say I hope you’ll be okay,

for the winds to wrap you gentle

til the coming of the day

This isn’t a list

to tell you how to choose your life

This isn’t a piece

to profit from the strife

It’s just a song

to say I think you’ll be okay,

for the swells to soothe you gentle

til the coming of the day

This isn’t a list

to tell you how to save your life

This isn’t a piece

to profit from the strife

It’s just a song

to say I know you’ll be okay,

for the hills to hold you gentle

til the coming of the day
Mom Dilemma.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Children, Family, Motherhood, Society, Covid 19

Mom Dilemma.

To School or Not to School.

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Keep the kids home, and lose income. Work from home, right. See how well that went last time.

Let the kids go to school, and they could get sick. They could bring it home and get you sick. Your partner. Your mother.

They could get that crazy disease the kids get…the one you’re trying really hard not to look up.

Keep the kids home, and be accused of being a bad mother. Why don’t you want your kids to play? Aren’t you worried they will be socially…weird?

Keep the kids home, and hire a nanny. Pay your nanny so much that you…might as well not work. Keep a bit of mental sanity with the extra help, but feel judged. Who are you, that you can hire help? Really?

Keep the kids home, and quit your job. Be accused of being privileged enough to quit…as you struggle to pay bills, as you cash out savings, as you sell your jewelry.

Be judged. Always. No matter what.

Let the kids go to school twice a week, and stay home the rest of the time. Try to work out the schedule with your job. Know…without being able to prove…that they’re passing you over for promotions. Know…without being able to prove…that you’re a problem.

A Mom.

Not committed enough.

Post your decision on Facebook, and be attacked. Don’t you want what is best for your kids? Everything you have picked is wrong. Be ridiculed by the community that is supposed to support you.

Have another child, and be attacked. How could you have a kid right now?

Use birth control, and be attacked. Don’t you want to bring joy to the world?

But you know what?

It’s another dilemma. It’s just another bit of nothing, another bit of fuck you.

You’ve had so many, starting with who you decided to have kids with…if you decided to even have a partner…to how, to when, at what age, to breast-feeding or not, adoption or not, to education, to which TV shows, which juices, which diapers, which cleaners —

It’s another dilemma. It’s just another bit of nothing, another bit of fuck off.

Because you already know you’re stronger than you ever thought possible. You’ve experienced so much — so many complications. You’ve had to prove you’re a worthy mother, over and over, when the rules kept changing. You kept having to prove your legitimacy, over and over.

It’s another dilemma. It’s just another bit of nothing, another bit of fuck this.

Because you know survival is all that matters. You have your core, your strength. You’ve built so much from nothing, and you know creating is harder than destroying.

You’re responsible for other lives, for keeping them alive.

It’s another dilemma, added to the long list of what it means to be a Mom.

And you, you already know you can do it — A master of the fuck you, your existence is defiance.

You’re raising the future. You’ve dealt with unfairness. And while everyone else screams and whines, you are already used to things not going according to plan.

You’re a Mom — and that’s, strangely, your secret weapon, your secret strength.
How a Thriving Industry Stands on the Verge of Ruin
By: Sarah Paris
Tags: Economy, Life Lessons, Restaurant, This Is Us, Society

My restaurant background

I have spent more years than I care to admit working in some aspect of the restaurant industry. In my twenties, bartending, cocktail serving, and managing encompassed my world. My co-workers and regulars became like family. Rightfully so, as we spent the majority of our waking hours together.

We worked up to sixteen-hour days. Holidays and weekends were our busiest times. We broke up bar fights and intervened when drunken men harassed women. We saw each other through break-ups, shameful drunken nights, sobriety, weddings, divorces, and deaths. Our staff shared so much life that we hold a place in each other’s hearts a decade later.

Social mentality dictates servers and bartenders as “down on their luck” or uneducated. Society assumes that because front-of-the-house restaurant and bar workers survive off of tips, these workers must barely survive at all. Most of my co-workers held college degrees. They were pursuing creative professions that took time to produce financial success. They were saving money for adventure and travel. They were passionate about the restaurant industry or were trying to figure out their paths in life.

A flexible schedule, fast-paced nights that never bled into our home lives, and the ability to exhibit some control over our salaries drew us into the lifestyle. We had fun, and we had each other’s backs. In my most financially successful year as a bartender, I earned close to six figures.

The back — or heart-of-the-house — workers held the strongest work ethic and pride in their work of anyone I have met since. The cooks worked eight to twelve-hour shifts without a break. And they took pride in their work.

Kitchens often ran with three to four cooks or chefs on a given night. The kitchen staff was relied on to produce hundreds of quality meals, on time, within a short time window. They are hard workers who receive none of the perks or glory of a front-of-the-house staff. Many of these “career” industry professionals have been out of work since March. For those who managed to hold onto their positions, drastically reduced hours followed.
Membuat Game Dengan Vuejs
By: Haidar Afif Maulana
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Game Development, Front End Development, Vuejs

Easy read, easy understanding. A good writing is a writing that can be understood in easy ways

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Flutter Login Tutorial with “flutter_bloc”
By: Felix Angelov
Tags: Mobile App Development, Software Development, iOS App Development, Flutter, Android App Development

If you’re working on a Flutter app, odds are you’re going to need to implement login.

In this article we’re going to walk through one possible way to implement a login flow which will end up looking something like this.

Login Flow that we’ll be implementing

The first thing we’re going to need to do is add flutter_bloc as a dependency to our new flutter project. Our pubspec.yaml should look something like:

Next, we’re going to need to determine how we’re going to manage the state of our application and create the necessary blocs (business logic components).

bloc high level architecture

In this context, a bloc simply takes a stream of events as input and transforms them into a stream of states as output.

Events are the input to a Bloc. They are commonly UI events such as button presses. Events are dispatched and then converted to States .

States are the output of a Bloc. Presentation components can listen to the stream of states and redraw portions of themselves based on the given state (see BlocBuilder for more details).

Check out the bloc package if you haven’t already.
Monitoring Your Email Bounces and Bounce Rate using Amazon SES, Lambda, SNS, and DynamoDB
By: Serhii Zahranychnyi
Tags: AWS Lambda, Tutorial, AWS, Aws Ses, Aws Dynamodb

Monitoring Your Email Bounces and Bounce Rate using Amazon SES, Lambda, SNS, and DynamoDB Serhii Zahranychnyi Follow Nov 11 · 3 min read

When using Amazon SES, a situation may occur where your Account status in the Amazon SES Reputation Dashboard changes from HEALTHY, causing Amazon to stop the ability to send emails. To prevent this, it is better to start monitoring your Reputation right after going into production.

An adequate bundle of services for this includes AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Amazon SNS will get events to form Amazon SES and trigger Lambda.

The Lambda function will store data to DynamoDB and do other things that you want — for example, remove an email address from a subscription list via an API, or send a message to Slack/Telegram/Messenger.

Firstly, in the Notifications settings of your domain, add Amazon SNS Topics for the Bounces, Complaints and Deliveries events.

SES → Domains → Notifications → Edit Configuration

You can use 1 topic for all events, separating is optional. For example, if you want to send Complaint events to Lambda and the email of the administrator, it is better to separate.

In the next step, we should create a Lambda function.

Let’s name it ses-notification-nodejs.

Use Node.js 12.x Runtime with default settings — it is enough for this task.

Creating a Lambda function

Then we should create a DynamoDB table. Let’s name it mailing. The primary key will be UserId.

Default settings will be enough for a start. You can fine-tune it later.

DynamoDB table

Now you need to go to IAM and add a permission to the Lambda role.

The best option for this is to add the permission to exactly one table.

You can read more about this here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference_policies_examples_dynamodb_specific-table.html

or here:

https://aws.amazon.com/ru/blogs/security/how-to-create-an-aws-iam-policy-to-grant-aws-lambda-access-to-an-amazon-dynamodb-table/

After you update your role permission your code will look like this:

Code example for Lambda:

You can also find examples with the telegram notification in my repository for this feature.

That’s it, now you can monitor all Bounce and Compliant events from your SES service and keep your Amazon SES in a healthy state.

You can find more useful information about technologies, startups and IT in our Edicasoft blog.
Easy Database Access
By: Ella William
Tags: Analysis, Data Science, Data, Information Technology

Get more citations to your research

by enabling easier access to research

and get more credit for your work

Blackcoffer handles the maintenance updates hosting etc.

So your research is easier to understand

and gets cited often

We reduce the friction in publishing research

BY making it easy to play with data.

Example 1:

Read More
Creating a Dictionary in Python
By: Joseph Hart
Tags: Python, Python Programming, Programming, Software Development, Python3

Creating a dictionary in python is a useful tool that can be applied to machine learning hyper tuning and grid searching. In this blog, I’ll go over how to create a dictionary, go through it, and add items to it.

First, start by creating a variable name for your dictionary. In my example, I called it dict1. You cannot use the name dict because that name is a built-in python function. Dictionaries take squiggly brackets, unlike lists or tuples.

As seen below, Groceries is my first item in the dictionary called a key. It is composed of three elements called values: apple, orange, and pear. I also have a dictionary called Cars. It also has three elements: toyota, honda, and ford.

If I want to see what is in my dictionary, I simply call on my variable.

This is fairly easy to read because we do not have a lot of information. What if Groceries had more than 3 values and we could not see if any other keys existed in our dictionary. We want to know what is in our dictionary to pull all the information we need. To see what keys exist in our dictionary, we type the following:

Typing list in front helps for legibility but is not necessary. Here is what the output looks like without using the list function.

If we want to see the values of the key Groceries, type the following.

Or if you just want the first key

You can also add values to your existing keys. Let’s say I forgot butter in our list of groceries. To add it I would type:

And to check it:

And now I see I have butter.

You can also use a for loop to iterate over your values.
Modern Agile: How to Always learn about your software process
By: Robertson Novelino
Tags: Software Development, Modern Agile, Agile, Software Engineering

The original point of this piece was writing a blogpost about how we at Vinta created our own software process. It focused on the idea that companies shouldn’t be implementing the full package of scrum, crystal or any other methodology. The idea was that even scrum is too much for some companies and that upholding the principles is more important than doing the practices out of the box. Then we caught wind of the growing discussions around Modern Agile.

We unknowingly already upheld the 4 principles here and think that it’s really amazing that someone gave a name to it and formalized the knowledge. Joshua Kerievsky, one of the creators of this 4 principles of modern agile, gave an amazing keynote which you can check here where he amazingly explains that the agile principles are great, but historic, the bar has been raised and we need to strive for even higher goals. Then we at Vinta decided to make a blog series about each of the 4 modern agile principles: Make People Awesome, Deliver value continuously, Make Safety a Prerequisite and Experiment and Learn Rapidly. On this first one, we will talk about Experiment and Learn Rapidly, or how do we experiment and learn as fast as we can about how to manage the development of software.

A very important point to empathize is: It doesn’t take an expert agile manager to iterate and learn rapidly about your agile process. Some techniques might be too advanced or rely on experienced programmers to work, but the whole process isn’t. To build, measure and learn you only need enough knowledge about your goal to see if you are getting closer to it or not and a commitment to stay with the validated output, even though your ego was in another option.

Here is how we chose to implement the four principles and how some of our processes look today, after a few iterations: Sprints are 1-week size. We believe they are the building block of the agile process, the idea is that deliveries and deploys should be made in small packages and built upon week after week. In our experience, if they last for 2 weeks or more, the client can stay too long without a delivery. Also, it’s easier to slack off a little in the first week and run like crazy in the second, that would difficult measurement and learning after every feature delivered. That is a lightweight process aligned to “Responding to change over following a plan”. We also use of Trello as the main management tool and the single source of truth. There, we align expectations. We believe aligning expectations is one of the most important things in project management. Trello is a very good tool for that because non-technical people can communicate with us over cards, checklists, and documents. This is to emphasize the “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” principle.

Enjoying the discussion? see the whole blog here
4 Ways Traveling is Harder as a Black Woman.
By: Vera Laurent
Tags: Travel, Society, Women, Equality, Race

1. Research

For many, research before departure consists entirely of the best locations for photos, restaurants, and beaches. In contrast, researching for a trip as an African-American woman feels much more daunting.

Before any trip, there is always extensive research. Questions googled may include: safest countries for Black people/women, racism in [insert country here], Black women in [insert country], etc.

Even with all this googling, we may still decide to travel to countries that are not considered the safest. Though having this prior knowledge is necessary for our peace of mind.

2. Loneliness

While traveling alone as a woman can be a very scary experience, traveling alone as a black woman maybe even more jarring. We are not seen as the same as other female travelers and are irrationally expected to be more independent and strong. Which, in turn, makes us more vulnerable to those in a society supposedly there to protect us.

We are often taught when traveling to “mind our business” and not involve ourselves with those who aren’t already reaching out to involve us. This can lead to a rather isolating experience, especially when solo traveling. It can be even scarier to put yourself out there when one bad interaction targetted at your race can dampen your emotional and mental health for the rest of the trip.

3. The Stares

Every country is different, but some people have never seen a black person in real life. This can lead to awkward staring and sometimes even more awkward questions for photos. Or even worse uninvited hair touching or shoulder-grazing simply because we seem “exotic”. While this may seem intriguing for those reading this, getting called out and treated like a prop is not fun.

I experienced this personally while traveling in China and staying in a smaller city. I was constantly making eye contact with others who simply wouldn’t look away. I even experienced this from a taxi driver, who wouldn’t stop looking back at me through his rearview mirror as though he couldn’t believe someone who looked like me was in his taxi.

4. Unpredictable Situations

As most of you likely now know, interactions with law enforcement at any time anywhere can be deadly for black people. When traveling abroad these same fears carry along with us and can impact what we decide to do and when.

Getting drunk and making split-second decisions might sound fun while traveling, but it can be dangerous for Black women. It can also be scary to make decisions to go to places with people whose intentions we do not know. Taking in to account the multitude of dangerous situations one wild night out could lead to, sometimes it’s just not worth the risk.
Content Creators Can Defend Their Autonomy With SPOKKZ
Tags: Bitcoin, Alex Jones, Cryptocurrency, Google, YouTube

When a person has more than 2 million subscribers on their YouTube channel, it would be hard to call them “unpopular”. But gaining followers, and building up a funding base for new content are very different things. Major online media platforms like YouTube are great for distribution, but making money from a YouTube channel isn’t easy.

The thing is, even though platform like YouTube or Apple create a great way to deliver media to fans, they hardly give the creatives a fair cut of the advertising revenue that creates their yearly profits. Streaming services like Netflix are great platforms for established creatives, but they are very difficult to break into if you haven’t made a million-dollar movie yet.

Here at Spuul, we want to see family-friendly content get the funding it deserves. Instead of becoming popular and learning that the next step is next to impossible, our SPOKKZ platform helps creatives find their audience, and then helps them fund their next project!

SPOKKZ Changes the Online Media Market

The SPOKKZ token is about a lot more than delivering media. Because SPOKKZ is blockchain-based, and allows fans to connect directly with creatives, it is a very different system. Great media relies on funding, and that is exactly what our new SPOKKZ token will deliver to content creators.

Did you know that the Hollywood blockbuster “Lost in Translation” was produced for just over $4 million USD?

It’s true, and if they had used our SPOKKZ token to crowdfund the production, all of the fans that supported the project would have gotten to share in the $115 million+ USD payday that Lost in Translation created.

Spuul has built a successful Over-The-Top (OTT) media platform that relies on delivering the content that our users want to see. We don’t get in the way, and we don’t judge creatives and fans. The message is what matters, and we want to see great media shine.

Great Media Needs Independence

Whenever an established media-machine is in control of the entire creative process, ideas that fall outside of the mold probably won’t get the funding they need to thrive. Here at Spuul, we are tired of seeing innovative creatives at the mercy of the studio system, and we are making things change for the better.

The SPOKKZ token is the answer to this problem. Over the next year, we know that SPOKKZ will begin to change the way that media is distributed, and funded. Not only does SPOKKZ encourage the open sharing of information, it helps creatives get paid for their hard work!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Translation_(film)
Apple Silicon: The Dev Tools That Work and Don’t Work (Yet)
By: Donovan So
Tags: Programming, Software Development, MacBook, Macos, Apple

Apple Silicon: The Dev Tools That Work and Don’t Work (Yet)

A useful checklist for software engineers on macOS

Photo from Apple’s November 2020 event.

The new Apple Silicon Macs have been out for a while now. The machines have shown drastic processing power and battery improvements while being at the same price point. As a result, most tech reviewers have no issue recommending them to people for everyday use.

However, the story is different for software developers.

There are currently two main concerns with the new lineup. First, there’s limited external monitor support. The new M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro only support one external monitor via Thunderbolt 3. The Mac mini, which does not have a built-in monitor, supports two external monitors via a Thunderbolt 3 port and an HDMI 2.0 port. For people who require more external monitors for development, this could be a dealbreaker.

Secondly, and more importantly, people are concerned about the availability and performance of development tools on the new ARM-based machines. Personally, I am not worried about their performance. Apple tools, such as Xcode, run amazingly, but even x86-based applications running on Rosetta 2 have been shown to outperform the current Intel-based MacBooks. My real concern is that many popular development tools simply do not work on the new MacBooks.

To help you to decide whether or not you should make the switch, I have compiled a list of tools and their status below:

Disclaimer: I do not currently own an M1 MacBook. This is just information I have gathered online.
Building a Digital Clock using Python
By: Behic Guven
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Software Development, Python, Programming

Designing the Application Window

In this step, we will first define the window panel using Tkinter package. And after that, we will define the text design that we want to use for the digital clock.

Define the Window

As mentioned earlier, we will use Tkinter package. Tkinter is can be defined as Tk. And after defining it, we will customize it.

app_window = Tk()

app_window.title("My Digital Time")

app_window.geometry("350x150")

app_window.resizable(0,0)

Understanding the code:

Defining the Tkinter function.

Giving a title to our application window.

Defining the size of our video, for example in my case, it’s 350pixels width to 150pixels height.

The window is not resizable, because the text values are not responsive design. And we don’t want our design to look weird when the window size is changed.

Perfect, our application window is ready! Now, let’s work on the clock design.

The Label Design

The cool step of the program is this one. Because you can put your own preferences into the design. This step will make your work different from others. If you love designing things, it’s time to show off your skills.

There are four elements that we will customize:

The font of the digital numbers.

The background color of our digital clock.

The color of the digital numbers, make sure it is not the same color as your background. 😉

The border width of the text.

Here are the values that I used for my design:

text_font= ("Boulder", 68, 'bold')

background = "#f2e750"

foreground= "#363529"

border_width = 25

For colors, feel free to use RGB values or hex values. In my case, I used the hex values of the colors. I use google’s color picker that is available on the browser. Just search “Color picker” on google search. And you will see it.

Now, let’s combine the elements and define our label. Label function is the text that will show our time.

label = Label(app_window, font=text_font, bg=background, fg=foreground, bd=border_width) label.grid(row=0, column=1)

If you want to learn more about the attributes of the Label function, here is a nice page I found.
https://www.thewhitewinecameupwiththefish.com We already knew David Fincher’s upcoming film Mank looked great, but now we can hear that it sounds great too. Aside from the opening notes of the music…
By: M.G. Siegler
Tags: Trent Reznor, Mank, Music, Netflix, David Fincher

We already knew David Fincher’s upcoming film Mank looked great, but now we can hear that it sounds great too. Aside from the opening notes of the music on this website — The White Wine Came Up With The Fish — you probably would not imagine this was a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score. But it is! And it sounds great.
線上銷售到線下體驗：中國是全世界新零售概念的實驗場？
By: 侯智薰 Raymond Ch Hou
Tags: Retail, Business, 中文, Marketing, China

Cement Pot

Our Cement Pot is the perfect little planter for your kitchen window sill or bathroom counter! Plant some greenery in…
This Week’s Prompt: 7–11.12
By: 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊.
Tags: Short Story, Inspiration, Energy, Newsletterandprompts, Creativity

Beautiful people of Know Thyself,

There are 92 of us sharing our voice on this publication and we are rapidly approaching 100, a number which represents energy that’s self-determined, independent and has infinite potential. A highly self sufficient number attuned to and effective at exploring new ideas and new approaches to existing ideas.

I wanted this week’s prompt to be a little different and celebrate this amazing milestone with 5 days of journaling our thoughts, emotions, experiences.

Now, I know this sounds challenging and not all of you may want/be able to write for 5 days in a row (please note, this week you can only submit your prompted articles until Friday instead of Sunday). If that’s the case, then please choose one day (or as many as you want) based on the prompt/s that resonate/s best with you.

Feel free to write in the form of a journal entry/poem and be as creative as you wish.

Here are the prompts (questions) for each day:

Monday: What do I need to get off my chest today?

Tuesday: What makes life feel complicated right now?

Wednesday: What doubts do I currently have?

Thursday: What’s overwhelming me right now?

Friday: What thoughts have I been repeating in my head lately?

That’s it folks! I hope these prompts trigger some deep reflection within you. I will commit to writing something in response to each one of them everyday. Won’t be easy but I am sure it will be highly rewarding!
5 Things You Should Know Before Creating A Website
By: Intisar Mahee
Tags: Coding, SEO, Entrepreneurship, Website, Programming

5 Things You Should Know Before Creating A Website

Your struggle of making a great website ends here.

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

Not everyone can afford a team to make a personal website or any new startup's website. Most of the entrepreneurs make their own ventures website within a very short budget and with limited help.

Making your website perfect is crucial when you’re in that position. You’re on a budget, not have a team to assist you but you want the best output.

Recently, I’ve launched my personal venture’s website. The first challenge I faced that I didn’t have any coding knowledge. Then I found the Programming Hero app that helped me a lot to know the basics. Within a week, I became ready to start my website. Trust me, coding is not a tough job, it’s easier than I thought.

Making a website can be easy but there are tons of factors you need to focus on as an entrepreneur. These things may seem silly but they’re impactful. They can directly impact your website. So, if you’re someone new who is going to make a new website, this is the right article for you. Let’s get started!