fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Breaking the Stereotypes of Men With Enlarged Prostates (BPH)
Tags: Health, Men, Prostate

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

When it comes to men and their enlarged prostates (BPH), these are the stereotypes they face:

Men don’t care about their health.

Men don’t like going to the doctor.

Men ignore their health issues and keep mum about them.

Men would do anything to avoid a digital rectal exam.

Men don’t talk about their prostates.

Only men’s wives care enough to buy their husband a prostate supplement.

Men care more about their cars than their own health.

Although some of these may be true for some individual men, we can’t lose hope that there are men out there who do care about their health and want to improve their BPH condition. Maybe that’s why you’re reading BPH blogs and joining men’s communities to discuss common issues. Although we do need men to do their part and care for their health, men’s health is a community effort, too. If those who live and interact with men don’t know about men’s health problems, it could be difficult to sympathize or offer support.

Enlarged prostate (BPH or benign prostatic hyperplasia) is a health condition that occurs with age and the prostate's natural growth. As it gets bigger, it can make the urethra (tube leading urine out of the body) narrow to make urination more difficult. It could also push against the bladder, creating urinary urges at the same time.

What men need to know is that they’re not alone in what they’re feeling. It is highly likely all generations of men have felt and will feel the effects of prostate growth at one point in their lives. As more research goes into the prostate, we may find ways to make the prostate exam less uncomfortable. We may provide more support for men’s mental health and distress during the frustrations of BPH.

We may raise awareness so that men can start to prepare earlier in their life to support their prostates. We may create an environment to talk about the prostate in a less stigmatized environment. Many conversations online about the prostate involve adult jokes that may make men shy away from the topic. However, it is important to make the context of health heard and normalized.

If you have seen your doctor and been diagnosed with BPH in the mild stages, you may be able to reduce the negative impact of BPH with healthy nutrition, more physical activity, voiding techniques, water intake during the day, warm baths, and community support from family, friends, and fellow BPH patients. Despite the pandemic, the online community is still offering support for men around the world.

Are you guilty of these stereotypes? Perhaps it’s time to reconsider some of these habits, so you can better manage your BPH and live a better quality of life!
Dark Winter
By: Robert Trakofler
Tags: Poetry, Photography, Art, Winter, Coronavirus

Spoken word audio link by Robert Trakofler

I watched my footprints withdraw in the snow

As the Flurry displaces my passage

And how I arrived I’ll soon not know

Though blustery and cold, it knows no passion

An inclement starkness of heedless bestow

In this our dark winter’s pandemic storm

Drifting the trees in a glistening tableau

Drafting the prosaic to enchanted

Cloaking my ambition strides undergo

To longing for past seasons romantic

For the touch of the ones we let go

And on this our longest nights dark frantic

My heart searches for the path to my home

To brace in the ease of a warm hearths glow

To bolster my course from the chill of panic

For even in the darkest of nights throw

The faintest glimmer can beam so lambent

To carry our plod in promises flow

In a new vision of hope decanted

For the spring thaw of resplendence granted

And that sight shall be a most splendorous show

So my friends near, and across the Atlantic

Take solace this season will end… our forego

© 2020 Robert Trakofler

A poem, a song, a painting or a photograph are nothing without a witness and for yours I am always grateful thank you for reading me.
Here’s The True Secret To Happiness
By: Jay Michaelson
Tags: Success, Creativity, Self, Life Lessons, Work

This story is also available in video form. Click here!

Stop wasting your time building other people’s dreams.

I don’t mean that tired line that seems to be on every third photo on Instagram about “build your dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” A job is a good thing, a rewarding thing, a valuable thing. If you have a job, you are doing well. You have succeeded in some way. Many others are not so fortunate.

I mean, stop letting others define what success and a good life mean to you. Stop letting other people, who you don’t know, on the Internet, tell you that their life should be the measure of your life. Your success is no one’s business but yours. To claim otherwise is intellectual slavery.

Say it with me: I am not bound to anybody else’s version of success.

By all means, live your life, and no one else’s.

The simple fact is that nobody but you can define what a successful life means for you.

Not all the gurus, experts and lifestyle consultants out there.

Not motivational writers like me.

Not the Kardashians, the Real Housewives of Wherever, or your neighborhood bartender.

You are the master of your fate: you are the Captain of your soul

We’re all put here on this Earth to make something. Each of us has a legacy to leave. The problems come when we look to others to define our legacy for us. That’s when we chain ourselves to another person’s dream.

We chain ourselves to strangers’ social media accounts, dreaming of living their life.

We measure ourselves by strangers’ accomplishments, thinking that if we achieve what they have achieved, we will feel the happiness they (seem to) feel.

We cling to the hope that this time, our goals will pan out (side note: that phrase “to pan out” comes from one of the most famous examples of delusional hopefulness in recent history, the California Gold Rush!) and we will be considered a success by those whose opinions of us count.

We harness ourselves to the dreams, desires and expectations of other people, and then wonder why we feel empty within.

We’ve got to stop trying to be filled by another person’s ambition and expectation.

Live your life, and no one else’s. Build your own castle, and no one else’s. Find what matters to you, and pursue it with everything you’ve got.

That is the secret to a lifetime of happiness.
Guide to the POMprompts
By: Christina M. Ward
Tags: Pomprompt, Creativity, The Pom, Prompt, Poetry

Welcome to the official guide for POMprompts.

Here we’ll cover what POMprompts are, how to participate, and a keep a running list of the POMprompts so you can come here for POMprompt ideas anytime you wish. There is no time frame on any of the POMprompts.

If you want to know more about The POM publication and Christina M. Ward who writes and hosts the POMprompts you can check out these links:

What is a POMprompt?

A POMprompt is a poetry prompt created by the EIC of The POM publication. At first these her idea of inspiring and generating group participation, promoting creativity, and inserting mini-poetry lessons. The prompts were later opened up for anyone to participate, not just the POMpoets.

The prompts generate creative thought, inspire new works of poetry (or even other creative writing genres or essays published outside the POM), and to press poets to exercise unfamiliar areas of expertise, and try new things with their work. The prompts usually begin with a bit of story and then explain the writing prompt. Writers and poets can read the POMpromts and then decide if they’d like to participate. Again, there are no time constraints on any of the POMprompts. It is not a competition but a prod toward creative expression.

How do I participate? What are the rules?

It’s simple and yes there are TWO rules:

Read the prompt. Write your poem or piece. Submit your work, adhering to the following two rules:

RULES

Use the tag POMprompt ad one of your 5 available tags on your submission

Put a link to the prompt at the bottom of your post to give credit.

Where can I publish my POMprompt response?

Publish your piece wherever you choose. (The POM only accepts poetry and poetry-related articles so if you write a flash fiction or other response, publish in another pub or self-publish.)

If you choose to post in The POM: MUST have the link for the POMprompt somewhere in the post and use the correct tag (POMprompt) so that your post will appear in the POMprompt tab. Otherwise, your post will appear only on the front page until other new posts take their spots on the front page and push your post out of view. Using the correct tag will ensure more eyes on your work. #POMprompt

POMprompts List

POMprompt #1: Reveal

POMprompt #2: Tell Me About Why you Write

POMprompt #3: Inanimate Object

POMprompt #4: Intrusions

POMprompt #5: It’s All in the Pictures

POMprompt #6: Evolution

POMprompt #7: Bring on the Nostalgic Winter

POMprompt #8: Symbiotic Relationship

POMprompt #9: Big and Small

POMprompt #10: Beneath the Surface

POMprompt #11: Abstract Art

POMprompt #12: Pandemic

POMprompt #13: Um, Cheese

POMprompt #14: Tricky Combinations — Poetry Mashup

POMprompt #15: What Day is It???

POMprompt #16: What is the ‘Song of You’

POMprompt #17: A Trip Down Poetry Lane

POMprompt #18: I don’t belong here

POMprompt #19: Things that go ‘bump’ in the night

More POMprompts coming soon…
Enough! A Comprehensive List of Things Which Really Piss Me Off
By: N.J. Edwards
Tags: Society, Humor, Culture, Life, Lifestyle

People are annoying. Like sometimes really annoying.

You know it, I know it, there is no use in feeling guilty about it. Have you been outside? Have you seen the people?

Having a positive mindset all the time is an unrealistic aspiration. Sometimes we need to release all that negative emotion. Well, in the appropriate safe space and without the use of violence of course.

There is a lot of advice on Medium and 90% is total crap. I know, I’ve written some of them.

‘7 ways to be amazing’

‘How to build the life you always wanted’

‘How I made $10000 in my first 3 months on Medium’

Whilst there are some brilliant and talented writers on this platform, it is becoming increasingly clogged up by generic self-help rubbish.

The one piece of advice I can give to immediately improve your mood is this — grab a pen and some paper and make a list of all the things that really annoy you.

Nothing beats a good old-fashioned rant. Here is my list.
How To “Seed” With Ruby on Rails. This article aims to help people who…
By: Kubilay Çağlayan
Tags: Ruby on Rails, Seeding, Software Development, React, Mvc

Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash

This article aims to help people who want to learn about the seed feature in Rails. After this article readers will be able to quickly populate their database with the predefined records.

In a standard Rails project, we have the seed file at db/seed.rb .

This file is triggered by the rails db:seed command and runs in the Rails context. Which means all the model structure will be available within the file.

It is also triggered by the rails db:reset and rails db:setup commands.

As it is obvious from the name, the main purpose of this file is to seed the database.

This is a very useful feature especially when you are in the learning stage where you are resetting the database many times in a day.

In such situations, you don’t want to add records to your database manually but instead, you would have them ready in the db/seed.rb file.

In Action

Let’s imagine we have a Rails application with a User model in which we can create users with name attributions.

If we want our database to be ready with two users after initialization, we can simply create those records in the seed file.

# db/seed.rb puts "Seeding..." User.create(name: 'Matz')

User.create(name: 'DHH') puts "Seeding done."

We have three options to activate this file:

When the database already created rails db:seed would be the best option. When the database is not ready yet, in other words, we want to create the database first, then we can go with rails db:setup to first run migrations and then seeding. And the last option is when we want to reset the database, rails db:reset will drop the database, create again, and seed the application.

All of the options above will seed the database with those two records.

Seeding CSV

On some occasions, we may want to seed the applications with thousands of rows of records.

Imagine we want to transfer data as comma-separated-values, from a different database to the Rails application.

Then we may have a directory to keep the .csv files. Let’s say it is in the db/data/users.csv .

# db/data/users.csv name, age

Matz, 55

DHH, 41

In this case, I also prefer to use an isolated file to keep the “CSV to model mapping”, like db/user_seeding.rb .

In the db/user_seeding.rb we can create the mapping from CSV to our model and create records one by one with the help of CSV class in Ruby. This logic will be encapsulated in a method and be called in the db/seed.rb file.

db/user_seeding.rb ⏬

When you are ready with the db/user_seeding.rb , you can call it in the db/seed.rb ⏬

Seeding Heroku

You can also use seed commands on Heroku by starting with heroku run .

Example: heroku run rails db:seed

Conclusion

Knowing how to seed will help you a lot especially at the development stage.

Ready-to-populate data should always be in your seed files. This way you can focus more on improving the main parts of the application rather than spending your time structuring the initial database state.

Acknowledgments

Thank you for reading 😊

kubilaycaglayan.com 👋
What’s New in iOS 14's UIMenu and ContextMenu
By: Anupam Chugh
Tags: Software Development, Design, iOS, Swift, Programming

What’s New in iOS 14's UIMenu and ContextMenu

Out-of-the-box integration with UIControl, a new UIDeferredMenuElement, and Context Menu enhancements

Photo by Yogi Purnama on Unsplash

UIMenu was introduced in iOS 13 to allow easy creation of menus and submenus, which is really handy when building context menus.

iOS 14 brings more customization to UIMenu by introducing out-of-the-box support for UIButton and UIBarButtonItem through the menu property and initializers respectively.
5 Best Practices to Fast-Track Your Developer Journey
By: Ann Adaya
Tags: Programming, Software Engineering, Software Development, Work, Web Developer

5 Best Practices to Fast-Track Your Developer Journey

You are your environment — make sure it serves you more than it consumes you.

“People do not decide their future, they decide their habits and their habits decide their future.” — Matthias Alexander

Don’t just focus on your to-do list, create a routine instead

And a very strict one.

I didn’t know about this until I’ve experienced it myself, the reality is that we are all so excited when we are about to start a new quest, but then again eventually when the excitement starts to lay down, our inspirations and motivations will fade.

That is where we start to lose interest, we start making excuses, and soon enough that momentum will start to fade, so I say stop clinging to it, stop looking for inspiration especially if it comes from an external source like other people’s validation, whether we like it or not, sometimes, people want to see you do good but not better than them.

It sucks but all you can do is to get over it and focus on your goal.

I recommend you instead create a routine and stick to it until it becomes part of your daily life, trust me, this thing works.

I never thought about this until I had to experience it myself.

The hardest part of building a habit is the first 100 days — you keep doing almost the same thing every day just to build up that muscle, then things start to get easier until it becomes part of your everyday life.

Your success in life can be measured by your ability to self-discipline.

Everyone has their own opinion on everything, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to this, your self-discipline, if you can understand that then everything else will be just be noise.

And whenever you are having a hard time dealing with temptations, just remember to always choose what’s best in the long run, because that choice is what will make you proud.

Choices can either make you or break you, no matter how small and simple, your choices will always shape your future.
😷Doctor, Doctor😷
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Humor, Health, Life, Comics, Cartoon

H U M O R

😷Doctor, Doctor😷

Your Tuesday cartoon

Cartoon by Rolli

Cartoonist’s Note №1

🍪+🍩+🍰=❤️

Cartoonist’s Note №2

Like this cartoon? You can now buy the print — or get it on a t-shirt, coffee mug, etc.

Cartoonist’s Note №3

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

Cartoonist’s Note №4

Neat — Medium CEO Ev Williams has started blogging again. And plenty of screwed-over folks seem to be replying to his new post to let him know what a bang up job he’s doing. How thoughtful…

Cartoonist’s Note №5

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

Cartoonist’s Note №6

You might like these cartoons, too:

Cartoonist’s Note №7

According to the Knights Templar, the following strange, ancient cartoon contains clues that point out the precise location of a buried treasure of inestimable value:

Cartoonist’s Note №8
InfoTimes Offers Financial Support to Arab Data Journalists
Tags: Journalism, Data Visualization, Infotimes News

InfoTimes is intended to support data journalism in the Arab world by offering fund to produce data driven stories. Funding including financial and technical needs.

Journalists from North Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine can apply for fund during 2016 by filling the below form. http://goo.gl/forms/s0sj1F8H8U

InfoTimes team will review the submitted pitches, contact the successful applicants to discuss and develop the pitch and agree on the details of implementation.

Every pitch should be based on rich collected and documented data and attached with organized data spreadsheets to be considered.
Forgive me, Father, but you are a fake
By: Prickly Pam
Tags: Society, Spirituality, Christianity, Self, Religion

The first kind of pastor gets a degree at a college or university, then goes on to get a graduate degree from a seminary.

At seminary, they learn about the world’s great religions. They learn Greek so they can study ancient Bible texts. They learn the context of scriptures along with different interpretations of Bible verses. My daughter spent three fucking years at seminary. It was damned hard work.

These pastors learn to do pastoral counseling. As part of a Master of Divinity degree, they’ll complete several clinical internships. These courses require counseling practice under the supervision of experienced pastors. This experience is crucial for someone who will be doing pastoral counseling.

This Master of Divinity degree “is required by most denominations for pastoral ordination.”¹

I’ve been blessed to work with several of these well-qualified pastors. Three of them had Master of Divinity degrees and another had a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry degree. They could discuss Bible texts from multiple perspectives, and they preached to inspire, not to condemn.

These are the only kind of pastors I trust. These folks are real pastors. God bless them.
A Generative Approach to Classification
By: Rahul Agarwal
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Visualization, Programming

I always get confused whenever someone talks about generative vs. discriminative classification models.

I end up reading it again and again, yet somehow it eludes me.

So I thought of writing a post on it to improve my understanding.

This post is about understanding Generative Models and how they differ from Discriminative models.

In the end, we will create a simple generative model ourselves.
Olin College of Engineering
By: Pito Salas
Tags: Engineering, Higher Education, Teaching

I don’t know if I mentioned that I’m teaching Engineering Entrepreneurship at Olin. What a cool school! While the two course have existed at Olin, I was asked to re-invent them so to a great extent they are new.

Here’s a blurb that appeared in the Boston Globe today that illustrates how different Olin is from many other colleges. It describes a course called “Engineering for Humanity”:
Public, Private, and Protected — Access Modifiers in Python
By: Sarath Kaul
Tags: Python, Data Science, Python Programming, Programming, Software Development

Private Keyword

The private members of a class are only accessible within the class. In Python, a private member can be defined by using a prefix __ (double underscore).

Output of private- access modifier

So, in the private modifier’s case, we cannot access the attribute. So is a private modifier the way ahead?

The answer would be No

Python performs name mangling on private attributes. Every member with a double underscore will be changed to _object._class__variable .

Output of private attribute modified

Therefore, this proves Python provides you with access-modifiers functionality, but it can’t be compared to classical languages like C++ and Java. This practice entirely depends upon the programmer.

So a responsible programmer, upon seeing an attribute with such a naming convention, would refrain from accessing it outside its scope. This also wouldn’t be good to use in cases where fellow programmers aren’t aware of such naming conventions.
Reflecting on my past year as an insurance salesman.
By: Silas Mahner
Tags: Self Discovery, Business, Motivation, Leadership, Self Help

Well, aside from the fact that I have helped many families to protect themselves in the event of a sudden accident or death, I have proven to myself that I CAN! I can do anything I put my mind to, I can successfully sell a product, I can successfully deal with angry clients, I can market my services, I can make big deals. I can and I have. Now with an entire year to prove these things I have started to think about expanding my thinking, and to really figure out, who do I want to be? If I really can do anything that I set my mind too, what do I want to do? What am I passionate about? This is such a hard question, because there is no simple answer and it takes a lot of self reflection. In fact I still haven’t discovered exactly what it is that I want to do, I have a good idea of it, but that is not the point of this story. The main subject of this story is as follows…

Now that I am starting to take control of my personality and who I am rather than just letting my childhood continue to drive me on autopilot, I have noticed something. My boss doesn’t want me to think about anything else, other than selling insurance. Every time I have these other ideas he tells me to just stop being so scatterbrained, then he goes on to plan out my life, telling me how I can be rich if I just follow his advice. Well as of just yesterday I finally realized what is happening; my life is being planned out by someone else.

My message to all young people is, have a mentor, however use caution. Make sure that your mentor encourages you to think outside of the box, and to learn more. If you have a tendency towards a different line of work, it’s okay to look into it. To paraphrase what Gary Vaynerchuk says, don’t be the guy who works for a company getting paid a sh*tload of money if you hate it. Be the guy who does what he loves, and makes however much he makes doing it. Because you need to love the grind. You need to make your work your hobby. Money doesn’t matter as much as happiness. Because if money equaled happiness then all poor people would be depressed and sadder than hell. I can tell you from my experience that being poor isn’t all that bad.

For the last six months of my childhood I lived on my aunt and uncles farm in the north-woods of Wisconsin, and I didn’t have much at all. We worked hard, prayed hard, and played hard with the small amount of spare time we had. But let me tell you something pal, that was the most peaceful time of my life, and the most fullfilling time too. During this time you have to also know that, everything that I had been raised with up to that point was stripped from me when I went to live there. All of my friends who lived over an hour away, I almost never saw, I also no longer had the opportunity to make a few bucks on the side due to the circumstances. However, despite all of that, I was so happy. I go back to that farm at least once every six months to thank my aunt and uncle for the chance to live there and experience real, true happieness.
5 Practices to Help You Become the Best Developer That You Can Be
By: Ann Adaya
Tags: Software Development, Software Engineering, Developer, Work, Programming

5 Practices to Help You Become the Best Developer That You Can Be

I started with nothing but some extra time and big dreams — so can you

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

“There is no right time, there is just time and what you choose to do with it.” — Alex Karev, Grey’s Anatomy

I’ve been writing several articles for months now, trying to share as many as I can, especially to all the self-taught developers.

Most of my writings were based on personal experiences — things I’ve learned the hard way. No one told me all this stuff. I never looked up at any other self-taught developers when I started because I didn’t find any at that time.

Today, there are many self-taught developers out there, though I can only count a few that I know. To tell you the truth, I would probably spend most of my morning reading stuff like this because these are real gems.

The technical stuff we can just learn online and practice to understand them. But the journey isn’t just about the technical side, it’s also important to know what’s out there, instead of learning stuff the hard way. It would be a lot easier if we could avoid the unnecessary ones if we could.

I wish someone existed four years ago and wrote these writings, it could have saved me time and tears, and a little inspiration could help us kick the day ahead.
Dad Blinked
By: Harper Thorpe
Tags: Satire, Milk Carton Haiku, Humor, Poetry, Music

Dad Blinked

Call to action — busy signal!

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

Early today

Wife said “No foreplay.”

Her objection?

Kids homework may

Block parents pathway

to affection.

Kids led astray.

My sly sleep-time play.

Misdirection.

Approached doorway

Saw through négligé.

Sheer perfection!

I stepped her way

Was about to say

Nice selection.

When son’s waylay

Stopped-cold hot headway

Disconnection.

“Dad, my essay

If not filed Friday

School rejection.

To wife’s dismay

Kids needs still outweigh

Love connection.

Sighing “OK.”

I quick put away

My excitement.

©2019 HHThorpe. All rights reserved.
Why is Omega-3 so popular?
By: Alexandra Iulia Soare
Tags: Nutrition, Food, Health, Omega 3, Fat

Why is Omega-3 so Popular?

How to Get Famous in the Nutritional World

The answer has to do with the natives of the frozen North. Known before as Eskimo which means “eater of raw meat”, this word is considered today offensive and many prefer the name “Inuit,” which means “the people” or “real people.” That is why in this article I am referring to this population as Inuit.

In 1970 one of the first research made on the Inuit population resulted in a paradox. For centuries this population was having a high-fat, high-protein diet without presenting developing cardiovascular disease. This made the scientist arrive at the conclusion that the Omega-3 present in the fish was the protective factor. From that point on this nutrient became popular.

Now, this scientific study was full of flaws. In reality, many Inuit have a low life expectancy (less than 60 years) and they do suffer from cardiovascular diseases. Plus the scientist didn´t take into account the genetic differences. Overtime the Nordic population developed a gene called CPT1A which helped them deal with a very fat diet but came at the price of higher infant mortality.

What is Omega-3?

Do you remember the basics of fats?

Basics: Fat is a chain of fatty acids that is divided into saturated and unsaturated fats.

Advanced: If you have only one double-bond it is called MUFA (Mono-unsaturated fatty acids), if you have two or more it is called PUFA (Poly-unsaturated fatty acids).

Expert: Omega-3 is an unsaturated fat because it contains double-bonds in the chain. Because the first double-bond starts with the 3rd atom, then this fat is called Omega-3.

If the double-bond starts with the 6th atom, the fat would be called Omega-6.

Why is this fat healthy?

As you may have guessed, it depends on the double bond. While the normal bound C-C makes the molecule be more rigid, the C=C double-bound helps the fat be more flexible and rotate more.

Also.. the extra bound make the molecule a strong anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory. But how?

Some unhealthy foods (but also some normal processes in our body) release free radicals. there is no way around it. The free radicals wonder in your body looking for electrons and they have no mercy. They would take this electron from whenever they can (even from DNA).

Here is where the unsaturated fats, especially Omega-3, play a role. When they meet the free radical, they “calm” him down by “donating” the extra bond (-) they have. You could say that he is like a generous heart that gives to others what he has in abundance.

How to integrate Omega-3 in your diet?

According to experts, women should get 1 gram of Omega-3 per day. While men should aim for half a gram more per day, 1.6. Save this list for later. This way you can always make sure you reached your weekly omega-3!
Trending AWS-Related Libraries for JavaScript
By: Chameera Dulanga
Tags: Programming, AWS, JavaScript, Amplify, Serverless

1. aws-sdk

Photo by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash.

aws-sdk is the official JavaScript development library provided by Amazon Web Services. It has more than 5 million weekly downloads. aws-sdk is available for browsers, mobile devices, and Node.js back ends. You can use this library to integrate your application with AWS services such as S3, EC2, IAM, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, etc.

You can you aws-sdk with your front-end projects, Node.js projects, and mobile projects easily. Also, if you prefer TypeScript to JavaScript, aws-sdk supports you with a very small configuration change.

Installation

For browsers, add the following line to your HTML pages:

<script src="https://sdk.amazonaws.com/js/aws-sdk-2.678.0.min.js"></script>

For Node.js and JavaScript projects, use:

npm install aws-sdk

If you are developing an Angular application, you might face some issues when compiling due to the SDK’s reliance on Node.js typings. To resolve these issues, either add "types": ["node"] to the project's tsconfig.app.json file or remove the "types" field entirely.

Overall, this library is a bit heavy since it supports various AWS services. But I highly recommend you to use it instead of other third-party libraries because this is the official library provided by AWS. Also, you won’t face any compatibility issues with this library.
What to say when you meet an Atheist
By: Kesh Anand
Tags: Society, Life, Atheism, Religion, Life Lessons

What to say when you meet an Atheist

Atheists are not a monolithic group — but a broad church of thinkers

When getting to know someone, the question invariably pops up: “So, what religion do you follow?”.

Often the answer is “Oh! I am a Buddhist/Christian/Jew/Hindu/Muslim”.

This may result in further conversation about that religion but importantly — it also gives you insight into their broad set of beliefs and values they might hold, and how they may respond to various social and political happenings.

It’s a fantastic question to get to know someone a little better; further building your mental model of them.

Two peeps getting to know one another

Sometimes, however, the person responds that they’re an Atheist. The topic then ends somewhat abruptly and awkwardly moves onto something else.

An interesting and meaningful conversation that never was

Not only do you miss out on the richness of a conversation, but you don’t really build out your mental model of the person much further.

The thing is though:

Atheism isn’t one homogeneous monolithic grouping of people. It is a broad church composed of people with all sorts of different value systems.

Types of Atheists

Some Atheists have not really thought about the existence of a god, let alone which god. They are apathetic to philosophical enquiry in general and whether there is a meaning of life.

Some Atheists believe in a soul or spirit separate from the body — which lives on after your physical body dies. They may also believe in auras, chakras, lifeforce and other mystical concepts — which strictly speaking do not conform to a religious system or existence of a supreme being — God.

Yet some other Atheists have thought long and hard about the meaning of life. They’ve read Nietzsche, Camus and Satre. They’ve considered Atheistic philosophies such as Absurdism, Nihilism, and Existentialism. They’ve built up a way of deriving meaning from life.

By not ending the conversation when a person answers as an “atheist”, you have an opportunity to inquire further into their philosophical outlook — learning more about it, them, and perhaps — even yourself.
Loneliness is a special place
By: Daria Krauzo
Tags: Life Lessons, Inspiration, Life, Creativity, Solitude

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

You can make a wonderful use out of your loneliness. There are activities, such as writing, creating, painting, or simply thinking, that all require you to be alone — and to feel comfortable while being so. I learned who I was when nobody was around. Some nights I’d lay in bed with my book and think of how nice it would be to have a boyfriend there. Looking back, I realize how nice it was that I didn’t.

Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.

I believe that there was nothing more important to my personal development and growth than my lonely time, solitary travels and quiet evenings all by myself. Rather than view my loneliness as a wound that requires the immediate cure of someone’s attention, I have always tried to fill it with action. With books, art, research, writing. Whatever moves you. Instead of getting sad and thinking that I will end up alone, having a lot of cats and a vegetable garden, I try to embrace my solitude and simply get to work.

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. — Franz Kafka

Baños, Casa del Arbol, surely my favourite swing in the world

I had learned how to truly like myself, how to turn my loneliness into something productive. I learned to love my solitary routines — aromatic coffee cups in the favourite café around the corner with my pen and notebook, morning runs along the river and quiet evenings with open windows and wonderful books. Those rituals became the perfect expression of my identity, that I learned to discover and embrace all by myself. This was necessary to become a whole me, to feel that I reached an integrity as a human being, and only in this state, I would be potentially able to share my life with somebody else.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

Without a doubt, the times I’ve spent living, travelling, and hiking alone have been the most formative of my life so far. These experiences are a result of immense privilege; a privilege I know many people — women in particular — do not have. But if you do, you should and must embrace the opportunities to be alone. You don’t have to go living in a forest in a self-made house or study insects in the jungle, but you do need to challenge yourself sometimes.

Maybe a lonely hike for few days, or just a quiet day in your secret spot. It’s not about wasting time, it’s about listening to your inner silence, even if only for a second.

And you’ll be surprised how much there is to listen to.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ― Aldous Huxley
Creating Beautiful Animations in React Native
By: Krzysztof Kwieciński
Tags: React, React Native, Programming, JavaScript, Mobile

Animations

scroll holds the current value of the scrolling y-offset. It is an Animated.Value , and with it, all the animations are driven.

For instance, the translateHeader is an interpolation of the scroll . The interpolation is done from the range [0, X] into [0, -X] . That simply means when we scroll down, the header goes up, and when we scroll up, the header goes down (I bet you guessed that). If the scroll value exceeds the specified ranges, the translateHeader value is “clamped” to stay in bounds.

In the code above, there are two more variables that have not been mentioned so far:

translateHeaderText is a multiplied translateHeader . 1.5 multiplier means that the text moves faster than the header, and the - sign means that the text moves in the opposite direction.

is a multiplied . multiplier means that the text moves faster than the header, and the sign means that the text moves in the opposite direction. fadeOut is very similar to the translateHeader . It is also an interpolated scroll , but the interpolation takes place in different ranges.

The two variables just described are used for two animated texts inside the animated header.

Let’s break it down:

They are both Animated.Text components — this is a precondition for using the Animated library.

components — this is a precondition for using the library. headerText is being translated on the y-axis.

is being translated on the y-axis. fadingOutText has animated opacity (so it magically disappears).

If you are curious about what the animations look like, scroll down a bit.
對長輩來說，哪種輪椅最適合？
By: Tony Zeng
Tags: 輪椅, 健康, 輔具, Health

in In Fitness And In Health
Digital vs Analogue, an Ethical Conversation
By: Mac Daniels
Tags: Future, Technology, Ethics, Economy, Culture

This piece is devoted to things of a slower nature — a less frenetic pace, analogue speed — as opposed to keeping up with the plethora of new, digital interfaces when I’ve yet to master the analogue ones I was born with.

Engineers say that, for all our amazing technological achievements, we’ve only just begun. It’s hard–and a bit tedious–to critique these breathtaking advancements; they’re coming so fast and furious who has the time to stop and think? That time is taken up with learning new digital skills and platforms just to keep up, all under a cloud of looming cyber-security issues and privacy woes.

The technological race for convenient data sharing has a powerful inertia akin to a stampede; this process has ethical issues worth considering, were we to stop for a moment to consider them. But the cult of speed has a large following, and there’s no time to dally. For those who would dally, this piece is for you.

Being a Luddite vs Being Aware

I’ve been meaning to write something on this subject but just didn’t have the words. Words came to me today; I was listening to a song from the old days, when I was a boy, when beautiful songs would come out of my AM transistor radio. I took it for granted that it would always be that way.

Today, music fidelity is much better on little portables but, as the sound improved, the songs themselves got progressively worse. The content was traded for the quality of the sound. No net gain. Modern music pales in comparison to the old music. With rare exception, there is no comparison. This phenomenon of high def / shallow content is present in other media, as if it’s a business model in its own right. My HD TV looks great but often there’s really nothing to watch.

As for good songs, one of Paul McCartney’s songs struck an expansive chord inside me at an early age. Its simple charm, its message — though it always seemed to me to be more the work of Lennon, or Harrison — resonated once again as I was holed up in my office, slaving away over Google Analytics when, the thought came: The modern world is widening the gap between itself and the ‘Fool on the Hill’. He’s only getting more foolish as I get more digitally wired in. Only a fool–who lived on a hill–would not want to be wired in. Everybody’s doing it. But exactly what is everybody doing? And what was he doing on that hill?

“ …. But the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning ‘round.”​

Long ago, that song put a question in my head; the question is still there: philosophically speaking, what would prompt someone–other than a fool–to live on a hill, or a mountain, with nothing to do all day but watch the world spin around? Think of all he would miss, all by himself on that hill … maybe he’d like to come down sometimes and sit on a beach and watch the tide come in and go out? Or maybe he prefers the view from up there, with such a perspective … may be he is somehow familiar with T. S. Eliot’s Still Point of the Turning World ….
Detecção de fraudes em cartão de crédito com Machine Learning
By: Wesley Watanabe
Tags: Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Fraud, Python

scikit-learn

"We use scikit-learn to support leading-edge basic research [...]" "I think it's the most well-designed ML package I've…
What Are NPM’s Optional Dependencies and When Should We Use Them?
By: Ali Kamalizade
Tags: JavaScript, NPM, Software Engineering, Continuous Integration, Programming

What Are NPM’s Optional Dependencies and When Should We Use Them?

Speed up your builds and reduce used disk space

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash.

Many JavaScript projects rely on a lot of third-party packages. Some of them are required (e.g. a component library like Bootstrap), while others are only useful for developing (e.g. tooling like ESLint). Many packages depend on other libraries that are often referenced in famous memes about the node_modules folder being way too big sometimes. After all, some projects include dependencies that are barely used (e.g. for one custom NPM script), but they are still installed every time.

Meme from Reddit.

Not only can bigger projects consume a lot of disk space, but as a consequence, the installation times can be longer. Some popular packages like Puppeteer or Cypress may download large binaries in order to work. As long as you are not resetting your development environment every day and you have enough disk space, this may not be a problem at all.

However, on a continuous integration tool like GitLab CI or GitHub Actions, this could be a more pressing problem:

If you have many developers and automations (e.g. Dependabot for creating pull requests for dependency updates) pushing code, you could exceed your usage quotas. Many CI/CD tools have usage quotas (e.g. 2,000 minutes per month), and if you exceed them, you need to pay for additional usage or wait until the next month.

Installing the dependencies of a project is typically the prerequisite for doing a bunch of tasks like building, linting, and testing your application. The longer it takes, the longer you need to wait to find out about potential issues in your code.
A/B Testing Platforms: Build vs Buy
By: Graham Mcnicoll
Tags: A B Testing, Data Engineering, Data Analytics

However, there are also many problems with existing 3rd party platforms. Usually they use their own event tracking, meaning that it’s impossible to test against your existing metrics or data warehouse (Growth Book, by the way, does let you do this). It also means yet another place you’re sending your user data, which might lead to you being out of compliance with the various privacy laws. The kinds of metrics you can test against are typically limited too, with most only supporting binomial events (yes/no, or clicked/didn’t click).

If you open up the platform for many of your team to start tests, you can end up with interfering tests and make the results meaningless. You also run the risk of running it like the wild west, where the tests make no sense, are out of your design style guide, or lack strategic direction.

Front end testing can cause pages to flicker as they load as the payload is injected into the page. Flickering text or buttons can cause the results to be meaningless, as it either slows the page down, or causes users to notice flashing parts more. Deeper code integration for back end testing is harder to implement as it can be a round peg into a square hole. Often the back and front end analytics are not talking to each other.

The biggest impediment to buying, as with most things, is the cost. Many A/B testing platforms charge in a way that increases the more you test. Since you want to be testing a lot, this can mean that things get very expensive. Other solutions, like Google Optimize, are free as long as you stay under their usage limits, but once you go over the limit, then it’s $150k. It is also quite limited in terms of the tests you can run. It’s not uncommon for a medium-sized site to have the cost of the A/B testing platform be equivalent to one quarter to half of a full-time developer’s salary.

Conclusion

To build vs buy can be a hard decision. A/B testing platforms have come a long way over the recent years, and are adding enough features that you should think really hard about building yourself. The costs of building and maintenance are probably much higher than you expect.

By the way, we built Growth Book based on our experiences with exactly this decision — and it addresses almost all the negatives addressed above (we are built for back end tests, and currently don’t support a front end admin). We tie into your existing data infrastructure, are built to make a seamless developer experience, and have tools to encourage a culture of experimentation. We have years of experience doing experimentation and building these tools. We offer all the advantages of building your own system, without the negatives of buying. Spend your time on products that add value for your users. Contact us and let us show how we do A/B testing better.
Google เตรียมแสดง “Mobile-friendly” ในหน้าผลลัพธ์ของ Mobile
By: Suranart Niamcome
Tags: Highlight, News, Google

SiamHTML

The collection of articles for front-end developers
Let’s Hear It for the Boy
Tags: Blue Insights, Culture, Songs, Artist, Music

Blast From The Musical Past

Let’s Hear It for the Boy

- A song by Deniece Williams

My baby he don’t talk sweet, He ain’t got much to say, But he loves me, loves me, loves me, I know that he loves me anyway…

And maybe he don’t dress fine, But I don’t really mind, Because every time he pulls me near, I just want to cheer… Let’s hear it for the boy…. Let’s give the boy a hand, let’s hear it for my baby, You know you go to understand….

1984 was the year for this hit song. Still fresh and groovy like when I first heard it. Lots of time has passed like it all happened in a flash and I’m still loving this song. Evergreen! Everlasting musical magic always happens and echoes forever when the right melody meets the right lyrics and they fall in love and get married in a beautiful song. Awesome!

Check it out and have fun!