fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
In News Industry, a Stark Divide Between Haves and Have-Nots
By: Save Journalism
Tags: Facebook, Google, Newspapers, Journalism, Digital Advertising

Keach Hagey, Lukas Alpert, and Yaryna Serkez’s piece in The Wall Street Journal take a deep dive into the steep decline of local news coverage, as smaller papers fail to make the digital transition that larger players did. Now, local journalism is in danger of vanishing.

Local papers have suffered sharper declines in circulation than national outlets and greater incursions into their online advertising businesses from tech giants such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc…The shrinking of the local news landscape is leaving Americans with less information about what’s happening close to them, a fact Facebook recently acknowledged as it struggled to expand its local-news product but couldn’t find enough stories.

With more and more local outlets becoming online-only, digital ad sales seemed like a viable solution for smaller papers to stay afloat. But digital ad sales don’t come close to offsetting what’s being lost in print.

While Google and Facebook have siphoned ad dollars away from all publishers, local news publishers have been the hardest hit. The tech giants suck up 77% of the digital advertising revenue in local markets, compared to 58% on a national level, according to estimates from Borrell Associates and eMarketer.

In addition to outlining how local news coverage and advertising are linked, Hagey, Alpert, and Serkez discuss the futility of subscription solutions for smaller, local papers:

The Times converts 3.6% of its readers and the Journal 4.5%, while Gannett, which has a big audience across its local papers, is especially inefficient, converting just 0.4% of its digital audience into paying subscribers, according to the Journal’s analysis of digital audience and subscription data.

Their deep dive also explores media job losses and outlet closures across the country, and accompanying data visualizations illustrate just how steep the decline has been. What’s scarier is just how little the public is aware of the death of local journalism:

A recent Pew study found that 71% of Americans believed local news outlets were doing well financially, though only 14% actually paid for local news.

Read more at https://www.wsj.com/graphics/local-newspapers-stark-divide/.
Run C# Machine Learning Code Directly In A Jupyter Notebook
By: Mark Farragher
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Jupyter Notebook, Csharp, Programming

Artist impression of a Jupyter notebook running C# ;)

Jupyter notebooks have become the standard tool for hosting advanced machine learning code online.

A Jupyter notebooks is a fully interactive document that allows mixing of content, live source code, and program output, all in a single document. Notebooks are living dynamic documents and their embedded source code can be interactively run and modified.

This makes notebooks ideal for AI research or for teaching complex machine learning skills to IT students. But unfortunately they only support Python and R code. There isn’t any support for C#.

Until today that is!

Thanks to Microsoft’s tireless efforts we now have a fully functional C# kernel that allows us to run C# machine learning code directly in a Jupyter notebook.

And getting everything set up is a piece of cake. Here’s a quick guide on how you can run your own notebook server locally with full C# support.

Let’s start by installing Python. Yes, we do need python because the Jupyter server itself is a python application.

A great Python distribution for AI that comes bundled with Jupyter is called Anaconda. Here’s how to install it on Windows:

$ choco install anaconda3

I’m using Chocolatey, a nice package management system for Windows that runs on Powershell and makes installing new software a breeze.

Next you’ll need the NET Core SDK version 3. You can download it here.

You’ll also need dotnet try , an interactive version of the NET runtime environment that can run code interactively and which forms the core of the Jupyter C# kernel.

Type the following on the command line:

dotnet tool install -g dotnet-try

This will install dotnet try as a global tool.

Almost done! The final step is to check your start menu for the new Anaconda3 folder. Open it and run the Anaconda Powershell Prompt app. Then run the following command to add C# support to Jupyter:

dotnet try jupyter install

That’s all!

Now open the Anaconda3 menu from the start menu and click the Jupyter Notebook app.

You should see a Jupyter session appearing:
5 Quotes for Mental Balance and Clarity
By: Destiny Femi
Tags: Self-awareness, Self, Mental Health, Work Life Balance, Productivity

In our quest of trying to have the most productive day, things can quickly spiral out of control. We need to reply to emails, we’ve got deadlines to meet, our family needs our attention, on and on our day unfolds, packed full of responsibilities.

Before we know it, things become too complicated. We wish we could just shut everything down and disappear into a quiet universe where we can just be alone; but for most of us, this is not a feasible thing to hope for.

What we can do, however, is put our minds in the right place. Since most of our suffering originates from our minds, maybe what we need the most is some mental clarity — an ability to enjoy life and to create a balance between life activities and efforts.

Here are five quotes about finding balance and clarity that have proven helpful for me and can also help you too if you apply them.
How Boredom Can Be Beneficial to You, According to Science
By: Areeba Merriam
Tags: Life Lessons, Boredom, Creativity, Psychology, Science

What if I tell you that we have been thinking or taught about the feeling of boredom ALL WRONG!!!?

Well, there is no scientific definition of boredom. We experience that feeling very often but still, it’s difficult to define it. Think about it as if a person is least interested in its surroundings or as if he is indulged in somewhat repetitive tasks, then he will start catching the feeling of boredom.

Many of us think about that unknown feeling as not so beneficial but its a really important emotion that we tend to ignore very often.

The Apple co-founder once quoted,

“I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.” — Steve Jobs

Curiosity is curative to boredom. It keeps us alive by stimulating our brains.

Have not you come up with creative and purposeful ideas while taking shower or washing dishes?

“I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding, or entertaining me.” — Scott Adams

In our daily routines when we are knocked by that feeling we tend to avoid it by counter-productive things like we put out our phones, television, music, we start spending time on social sites or other social distractions.

These smartphones are real enemies of positive and useful boredom. We indulge in them because we are afraid of boredom. The more we are tapping on our phones the less we are having time to tap on the power of our brain.

Our brain is offering us that strength for free and we are not utilizing it. Try avoiding mobile phones, especially on public transport or while waiting for someone. Give space to your thoughts to be heard out loud.

“Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.” — Joseph Brodsky

Scientific researchers at the University of South California had done a research survey on teenagers who use social media while being with their friends or while doing homework. They found out them to be less imaginative, thoughtful, and creative as compared to others in the span of two years.

This is the reason why this generation is not able to focus on big problems or even about their own future.

To tell you the truth, that social media connectivity thing won’t remain cool in a couple of years.
Why Java Is Dying
By: Komal Venkatesh Ganesan
Tags: Java, Programming, Software Development, Software Engineering, Microservices

Why Java Is Dying

What does the future hold for Java?

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

To better align with the tech stack at my new job, I’ve been reacquainting myself over the last two weeks with an old friend: Java. Not too long ago, it kickstarted my software career with unmatched zeal and vigor. This journey lasted for roughly two-and-a-half years but soon diminished with the advent of containers and microservices. Fast-forward to today, and it’s been three years now since I last wrote any serious Java code. And in all honesty, I never expected it to see it again — especially in the microservices landscape.

So, what happened? The answer is simple: The pervasive wave of microservices engulfed us.

Ease of scaling

High availability

Simpler code base from not having to worry about concurrency and multi-threading

Portability benefits from containerization

All of these factors prompted us to question the efficacy of Java (more specifically, JVM), not to mention its most notorious framework, Spring.

At times, with hands immersed in tech like Kubernetes, it felt like Java’s time was almost over and that it didn’t hold up well in the ecosystem of containers and microservices (which was key to software scalability and high availability). But as a once-staunch supporter of Java — and despite having been swayed by the simplicity and elegance of languages like Python (which has now grown to become my go-to language) — I still continued to hold a reserve for some of Java’s undeniable merits.

For instance, I was well aware of Java’s powerful threading capabilities, having used them firsthand early in my career for critical banking applications. While it’s not fair to compare performance metrics of a compiled language with scripted languages, Java’s rock-solid performance was simply unmatched.

But in the world of horizontal scalability and microservices architecture, this innate performance of a language mattered too little, for one could simply spawn more containers to achieve far superior performance. Clearly, these scripting languages, combined with their ability to instantly scale up or down in the land of containers, were giving Java a good run for its money. I was fully convinced, once and for all, that Java was done (at least in the land of microservices). And I was right!

At my new job, these convictions have only further strengthened and painfully made me realize how irksome, irritable, and convoluted the language has become — partly due to anachronistic ceremonious frameworks like Spring.
How to build an MP3 Music Player with Python
By: Papa Moryba Kouate
Tags: Programming, Music, Data Science, Python, Development

Part I: Set the environment and import modules

The first step is to create a directory called environments where to store all your virtual Environments and install the python modules. In this way the program is available only within the set environment and not throughout my computer.

So, open your terminal and create a directory as below.

mkdir Environments

And be sure to be into the directory ‘Environments’.

cd C:\Users\moryb\Environments

The second step is to use a module virtualenv to create isolated virtual environments.

pip install virtualenv

Now, we can create a virtual environment named myenv. If you have installed python 3 you can easily digit:

virtualenv myenv

Inside the directory myenv there is a copy of Python interpreter, the standard library and the various supporting files.

We can activate the environment with the following command:

myenv\Scripts\activate.bat

out:

(myenv) C:\Users\moryb\Environments>

Then, we need to install Pygame. Pygame is a module that is used for creating videogames. For creating our MP3 Music Player we will use the sound component.

pip install pygame

In this second phase, I will use Atom as python editor.

So I will import the following modules.
Creating your own Chaos Monkey with AWS Systems Manager Automation
By: Adrian Hornsby
Tags: Cloud Computing, Software Engineering, Fault Tolerance, Chaos Engineering, AWS

In a recent post, I explained how to use AWS SSM Run Command to inject failures on EC2 instances. SSM Run Command is well-suited to execute custom scripts on EC2 instances, especially to inject latency or blackouts on the network interface, do resource exhaustion of CPUs, memory, and IO.

However, we need more than that. Failure injection should target resources, network characteristics and dependencies, applications, processes and service, and also the infrastructure.

We also need to have a broad set of controls and capabilities to perform chaos experiments safely. We might want to:

Execute commands and scripts directly into EC2 instances.

directly into EC2 instances. Invoke Lambda functions to run custom scripts.

Orchestrate several failure injections to form chaos scenarios.

several failure injections to form chaos scenarios. Schedule them for execution at specific times.

them for execution at specific times. Have automatic cancellations if errors are detected.

if errors are detected. Have safety measures in places with approvals.

in places with approvals. Apply velocity controls to limit the blast radius of experiments.

That is where AWS System Manager Automation (SSM** Automation) comes in. So, let’s take a look!

** Note: AWS Systems Manager was formerly known as Amazon Simple Systems Manager (SSM). The original abbreviated name of the service, SSM, is still used and reflected in various AWS resources.
The Evidence That Luke Skywalker Is Snoke In The Last Jedi Novelization
By: Brian Deines
Tags: Star Wars, Self-awareness, Psychology, Film, Writing

The Missing Third Lesson

In Chapter 11, Luke tells Rey he’ll train her. “Three lessons. I will teach you the ways of the Jedi — and why they need to end.”

Lesson One comes in Chapter 13 when Luke says, “And this is the lesson — that Force does not belong to the Jedi. It’s so much bigger. To say that if the Jedi die the light dies is vanity.”

Lesson Two comes in Chapter 17 when Luke says, “the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy. Hubris”

Luke never gives Rey the third lesson in the movie, and nowhere in the novelization does Luke say “Lesson Three”.

Will we find out the third lesson in Episode IX? Or was the third lesson implied somewhere in The Last Jedi and we just missed it?

One possibility for the missing lesson is the moment right before Rey first senses “the dark place” beneath the island, to which Luke responds, “Balance. Powerful light, powerful darkness.” That echoes Luke’s sentiment about young Ben, as well as the nature of the Prime Jedi mosaic in the Jedi Temple.

But then Rey says, “That place can show me something. It was trying to.” Was the third lesson what the dark mirror beneath Ahch-To teaches?

In Chapter 21, Rey falls through the dark portal and has her vision in mirror cave.

“Rey knew she had to go deeper — that the world inside the stone only seemed to go on forever. It was leading somewhere, and if she only had the courage to follow, that secret place would show her what she had come to see — and what she was most afraid to know.”

Rey begged to see her parents. “She saw two dark figures beneath its surface. As her heartbeat hammered in her ears, the two became one.”

This imagery evokes Jungian symbolism. That they merge into her own reflection speak to Rey’s spiritual journey to an wholly integrated Self.

The significance of the Dark Portal on Ahch-To is underscored in Chapter 23. Rey is brought before Snoke and finds his eyes, “piercing and hungry.”

“Their pull was akin to what she’d felt near the pit on Ahch-To — whispering of secrets that had been reserved for her, that belonged to her. Ancient, hidden knowledge that would destroy the weak but elevate the strong. The Worthy.”

In Chapter 26, Rey describes the feeling of Snoke entering her mind to find Luke’s location.

“Snoke’s presence felt like a pit, empty and cold and dark — as if the dark-side cave beneath Ahch-To had gone on forever.”

There is an obvious parallel to the first time Rey sensed the pit on Ahch-To during Lesson One, when it pulled her in and tried to give her something she needed. Luke was at her side, horrified that she didn’t try to fight it.

Meanwhile, Rey thought she sensed nothing from Luke. But maybe her sense of the pit and sensing Luke, were one in the same.
Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding piece exploring the implications…
By: Eliot Peper
Tags: Technology, Climate Change, Future, Science, Books

Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding essay exploring the implications of the near future extrapolated in my latest novel:

Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe — maybe both. It raises hard questions about what sorts of sacrifices humanity may have to make for the greater good and who gets to decide; questions that beg for nuanced conversations about the social, environmental, and political risks and rewards.

Yet in science fiction, geoengineering tends to get treated with all the nuance of Thor’s hammer striking a rock monster. Which is why Eliot Peper’s recent novel Veil, set on a near future Earth beset by climate crises, is such a refreshing read. This book gets geoengineering right by showing that there are no obvious right answers.
Permissionless Professors #2: Sam Parr
By: Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto
Tags: Growth, Marketing, Monetization, Startup, Entrepreneurship

We believe monetization is a hidden secret. Secrets hiding in plain sight. From the psychology of anchoring, the mathematics of power-law pricing tables, the application of demand elasticity, and the market positioning of your price — your path to better monetization awaits.

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AWS — Deploying React App With Java Backend On EKS
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: AWS, Programming, Software Development, Kubernetes, Cloud Computing

AWS — Deploying React App With Java Backend On EKS

A step by step guide with an example project

AWS provides more than 100 services and it’s very important to know which service you should select for your needs. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to stand up or maintain your own Kubernetes control plane. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

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

Example Project

Prerequisites

Dockerize the Project

Pushing Docker Image To ECR

Create a Cluster and Worker Nodes

Configure kubectl to use Cluster

Deploy Kubernetes Objects On AWS EKS Cluster

Summary

Conclusion

Example Project

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

Example Project

If you want to practice your own here is a Github link to this project. You can clone it and run it on your machine as well.
Are You A Night Owl? We Are Closer to Knowing Why
By: Michael Hunter Md
Tags: Sleep, Wellness, Health, Lifestyle, Science

Health

Are You A Night Owl? We Are Closer to Knowing Why

A surprisingly common mutation causes this sleep disorder by changing a vital component of the biological clock that maintains the body’s daily rhythms.

Photo by Mpho Mojapelo on Unsplash

Sleep shows up in several well-known films. In the 2010 Christopher Nolan heist film Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a thief who steals information by infiltrating individuals’ dreams and subconscious minds. Nolan based the movie on lucid dreaming, a state in which you are aware of your dreams and can exercise a modicum of control over them.

Have you seen the sci-fi film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? The 2004 movie features Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as star-crossed lovers. The two erase each other from their memory using the services of a fictional company. The procedure happens during sleep; Joel Barish, the Carrey character, spends much of the movie in a dream state as he has his memories erased.

Our inner clock: A brief history

During the 1700s, the astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan studied mimosa plants. He found that the plant’s leaves would open towards the sun during the daytime but closed at dusk. But what if the plant lived only in darkness? The leaves continued to follow their regular daily oscillation, seeming to possess an internal biological clock.

Similar to the plants with which we live, we humans have a biological clock that adjusts our physiology throughout the day. You probably know this adaptation as the circadian rhythm, a descriptor derived from the Latin circa (“around”) and dies (“day”).

How does our internal circadian biological clock function? We have recently made additional strides in answering this question.

Our body has clock proteins

Earth’s life has adapted to the planet’s rotation. As is the case with other organisms, humans have an internal biological clock. This time regulator helps us adjust to the daily rhythms of living. But how does such a clock function?

Today, we turn to our body’s clock proteins involved in regulating our internal clock. First, a bit of history. In the 1970s, Seymour Benzer and his protege Ronald Konopka wondered if they could find the genes that regulate the circadian rhythms of fruit flies. They found success, demonstrating that mutations in a previously unknown gene messed up the flies’ circadian rhythm. They designated this gene period.
Image to pencil sketch with just 2 lines of code!
By: Rahul Prabhu
Tags: Python, Machine Learning, Image Processing, Art, Computer Vision

Advanced Features

You can change the scale of the image to darken the image. Note that on lighter scales, the greater texture is achieved. You can change the scale in the scale parameter of the normalsketch function. Note that the scale needs to be an integer value between 1 and 10.

To tweak the scale, simply add the parameter scale to the existing code:

sketch.normalsketch(‘pathtoimage’, ‘savepath’, ‘savename’, scale=x)

The default value for the scale is 10.

Tweaking the scale parameter allows you to change the image ‘darkness’ from extremely light to dark:
It’s Not My Fault You’re Angry
By: Ellie Daforge
Tags: Mental Health, Self, Wellness, Psychology, Work

The just-world hypothesis states that if something bad happens to you, you must have deserved it. Conversely, that if you’re bad, you will one day get your comeuppance.

This leads to victim-blaming: “You were robbed? Well, what were you doing out late at night?”

“What did you do to upset him?”

In reality, the world isn’t fair. I find that people tend to transfer their anger from its source to an easy target. You see this when a boss yells at a worker, and the worker takes it without a word of complaint, then goes home fuming and yells at his or her spouse and children.

It’s interesting that people can usually control their anger when faced with an authority figure. How many people will yell at a boss, a doctor, or a police officer? Very few, because the consequences are swift. But they will certainly yell at a customer service worker, a secretary, or a teacher — people who are usually powerless to stop the verbal abuse.

This differs from an argument, in which two parties (often with similar levels of power) are locked in disagreement. Arguments happen, and the two people generally know why they’re at odds. If I caused someone’s problem, I can certainly fix it and apologize.

When I am on the receiving end of someone who walks in and flies off the handle, and then I get blamed for it, it’s not so easy.

What I almost find worse is when someone says or does something really horrible, on purpose, then tries to backtrack. They stomp their feet so hard that things fall off shelves. They raise their fists. Then when they start to see a consequence — someone getting angry back, or they get shown the door — they say a quick, “I’m sorry.”

As if that means you will forget everything. As if what they did never happened. They’re not really sorry; they’re sorry they might lose out on something. Threats and tantrums have lasting effects, and two words don’t erase that.

I read this example somewhere: Knock a vase on the ground, smashing it. Now say, “I’m sorry.” Did that fix the vase? Of course not. The damage has been done.
Create a String Reversal Microservice on AWS Lambda Using Java
By: Akshay Kumar
Tags: AWS, Programming, Java, AWS Lambda, Microservices

Server-side code

Now comes the part where we actually create our Lambda function using Java. Go the AWS Console and search for Lambda. Create a lambda function and name it whatever you want and use any Java runtime. I used Java 11 for this. Click into your newly created function and note down the ARN number on the top-right. This number uniquely identifies AWS resources such as Lambdas. Also, note down the region you are currently in as resources are specific to regions. Mine is in us-east-2.

To begin the server-side coding, create a new project (yes, we do this twice) and configure Maven again. Lambda functions handle requests. And these requests require specific handlers to be imported via AWS libraries. Therefore following these instructions, configure the aws-lambda-java-core dependency in your pom.xml file. This step is optional, but it is good practice to log information to AWS Cloud Watch — we can use gson library to help us with logging and you can declare this dependency by following this link.

Once again, to keep things simple, we will have only one class — the Handler — that will handle this request. This will reverse the string payload and return the reversed result. Following the official docs that explains how to handle requests, we arrive at the following:

service-side code that IS the Lambda function

This code sample should also be easy to follow. We define a private method down below that reverses a string. The handle request method does some logging (which is optional, but recommended), gets the payload (which is represented by the “event” parameter), calls the reverse string function; re-constructs the payload and returns the result/response.

With that our server-side code is complete. We now have to package-up this code into a JAR file and upload it to our Lambda within AWS. Make sure you’ve added the final set of Maven dependencies in your pom file, which allow you to build your code into a JAR format. When the dependencies are added:

run “mvn package” in your project directory. If the command executed successfully, you should get “BUILD SUCCESS” in the output. You can find the JAR file in your target folder within your project.

Now that we have our JAR, go to your Lambda function in AWS console and upload the file by going to: Function code -> Actions -> Upload a .zip or .jar file.

After your JAR file has uploaded successfully, set your function handler in Basic Settings -> Edit -> Handler. The first part of your handler will be your package and class name and the second part will be the method that handles the event. If you are following my code example, this was for me: “StringReversalLambdaHandler::handleRequest”.
This Is How The Brain Multiplies Problems!
By: Munawwar Goonoo
Tags: Psychology, Brain, Neuroscience, Problems

PSYCHOLOGY

This Is How The Brain Multiplies Problems!

Oh, Brain Oh! How Complicated You Are!

Photo by Tim Doerfler on Unsplash

The brain multiplies the problems as a result of a cognitive bias that leads to installation and development patterns that are then generalized or over-applied for no real reason.

This is why we may feel that the difficulties are piling up when they are not.

Many people complain that “problems don’t just happen” or that “once problems start, they never end”.

In a way, they are right, but this is probably not due to a fatality, but to a cognitive bias that causes the brain to multiply the problems.

This conclusion was drawn from various experiments.

The brain multiplies the problems because, although being a fabulous and complex organ, it also has its limits.

Such limitations arise from the fact that the mind tends to create patterns for everything, as it is a way to save energy.

But these general guidelines are misleading.

Knowing that the brain multiplies problems allows us to be critical and attentive to the functioning of thought, to put a limit where it is necessary.

Otherwise, the difficulties and the emotional expenses that they entail spread more than necessary.

We can’t solve problems by thinking the same way we did when we created them. ~ Albert Einstein

The brain multiplies the problems
Blocked
By: Sarah Lynn Terzo
Tags: Composing, Writing, Poetry, Creativity, Music

Sometimes it just grows.

Like a seedling, forcing its way up

through the crust of the earth.

Birthed from that great brown womb,

secret and strange.

Those mysterious inner depths.

Blooming, baptized by life’s storms.

I remember the pen dancing,

a living extension of my hand.

The words flowing like water,

a tapped spring, onto paper.

Every word a drop of

the unconquered, wild ocean.

I remember the dance

of mind and hand, wedded

in free, spontaneous motion

Furious rhythm and rhyme

streaming from the tip of my pen.

Why is it that now

each word is squeezed out

to trickle and fall on arid sand?

Time stumbles on as I sit

hearing no divine music,

just the beat of my pen,

tapping on empty lines.
AWS — Deploying Angular App With Java On Elastic Beanstalk
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: Cloud Computing, Java, Angular, AWS, Programming

AWS — Deploying Angular App With Java On Elastic Beanstalk

A step by step guide with an example project

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

AWS provides more than 100 services and it’s very important to know which service you should select for your needs. If you want to deploy an application quickly without any worry about the underlying infrastructure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the answer. Elastic Beanstalk reduces management complexity without restricting choice or control. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring.

In this post, we are going to deploy Angular application with java environment. There are other technologies or environments that AWS supports such as Go, Java, NodeJS, .Net, etc.

Introduction

Example Project

Prerequisites

Build the Project

Deploy on Elastic Beanstalk

Debugging and Update the Deployment

Route 53

Cleaning Up

Things To Consider

Summary

Conclusion

Introduction

If you want to deploy an application without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, Elastic Beanstalk is the solution. When you build the app and upload the app in the form of zip or war, Elastic Beanstalk would take care of provisioning underlying infrastructure such as a fleet of EC2 instances, auto calling groups, monitoring, etc.

The infrastructure provisioned by Elastic Beanstalk depends on the technology chosen while uploading your app. For example, we are going to deploy the Angular with Java backend on Elastic Beanstalk so we need to choose the Java environment. If you want to know more about Elastic Beanstalk here is the link.

Environment Setup

As you see in the above figure, we build our project and create a zip. Once we build the zip, we upload that zip on the Elastic Beanstalk environment. If you have a custom domain you can point that to the elastic beanstalk URL so that your app can be accessible to the public through that URL.
Music — Remedy. Music has the power to change the way…
By: Joseph M. Learned
Tags: Psychology, Anxiety, Depression, Music, Mental Health

Executive Producer Kanye West has had a slow decline over the past few years, in aspects other than his music. His battle with bipolar disorder is becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide from the public eye.

He has a new track feature on Playboi Carti’s album, Whole Lotta Red. I’m not a Kanye West fan by any means, but his struggles with mental health are relatable and bring to mind the creative possibilities that could come from such a terrible struggle.

I started the album off with “Go2DaMoon” (featuring Kanye West). Okay. It wasn’t great, but not worthy of the distaste the overall album was receiving.

Before listening to this album, I was in a rather neutral state. I was happy, but I wasn’t in any way anticipating anything from this hour-long musical collection.

Music (and more notably, rhythm) provides a track for the mind to follow.

The subconscious parts of our mind weigh far heavier than the parts we are able to control. Our subconscious minds have a nasty tendency of running rabid. This is why negative intrusive thoughts (like those brought on by OCD) are able to easily pierce your thoughts, and come to the forefront.
3 Engineering Mistakes That Will Botch Scale
By: Jon Mclachlan
Tags: Software Development, Business, Engineering, Startup, Software Engineering

1. Too Much Focus on What Was There Before

Legacy code haunts every engineer. We tell ourselves, “Don’t touch it, it works” as the systems grow outdated. New exploits loom darkly. Once-enthusiastic users get bored with the same old experiences. We convince ourselves to “respect” what was there because “It was the right thing to build at the time.” We lock in system invariants that produce the same old buggy behaviors. We implicity consent to the old ways. We bask in our past successes or glory. The aging systems even become cultural traditions, with senior folks explaining:

“That’s just how we do it here.”

This attitude ruins our ability to scale because it inhibits our ability to meet the growing and changing demands presented by dynamic markets. The future of the business chokes on its past. At first, it goes completely unnoticed. Inevitably, it becomes a function of success itself: Every past success increasingly damping the next future success.

Legacy code distracts us from what the system should do.

As we reverse-engineer the legacy, we forget why we were looking at it in the first place. When we finally remember, we are more willing to distort our end-goal to fit what we already have, sitting right in front of us. “It’s half-built already,” we lie to ourselves. And just like that, our past success muddies our future direction.

The quality required to break out of this toxic spiral is bravery.
How to Delete Your Carbon Footprint
By: Carbon Radio
Tags: Sustainability, Design, Life, Climate Change, Environment

You’ve got mail! It used to be so exciting and romantic to get an email. At least Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan made it seem that way. The somewhat prophetic plot of that movie was built around a corporate giant putting a boutique bookstore out of business. Since the founding of the first American e-commerce company in 1969 (CompuServe), the world has been transitioning more and more economic activity to the internet. At the same time, more and more of our hours are being spent in front of a computer consuming information and interacting with other people online. As a result, our computers, and the infrastructure supporting them, have been designed to do more for us. Perhaps the most significant capability development in the 21st century has been the ever-improving ability to store all of our information.

In the old days, when you wanted to store a communication you received from someone, you simply put the letter in a box or a drawer. Then later, if you decided you didn’t need to keep the letter, you would simply throw the letter away (recycle it). Similarly, before the 21st century, when you received a receipt, you either kept it for your accounting or threw it away (recycled it). However, today, when we receive emails and receipts, most of us just let them sit in our inboxes… forever.

This is a problem for the environment.

While the internet only represents 2% of the global emissions portfolio, the continued growth in e-commerce and streaming services will inherently mean the energy use associated with the internet will grow significantly. Companies like Google have taken on this challenge by increasing energy efficiency and renewable energy procurement. They have also deployed machine learning initiatives specifically designed to save energy. The buying power of internet giants also gives them the unique ability to influence electricity providers. So, there are clearly top down strategies to reduce the carbon footprint of the internet.

But what about the bottom up grassroots strategies? What can individuals do to reduce the carbon footprint of the internet?

It’s easy. Just clean out your inbox.
The Rule of Cool
By: Eric Pierce
Tags: Star Wars, Writing, Film, Books, Creativity

And don’t even get me started on disintegrations. Credit: Lucasfilm

The Rule of Cool

We love mysterious characters. Why then do creators feel compelled to ruin the mystique

Admit it, Boba Fett was way cooler before.

Before we knew he was the original clone, brother to 200,000, with a million more on the way. Before we knew his surname came from his proto-father Jango Fett, the clone template himself. Before we’d seen him as snot-nosed kid laughing at his dad’s jokes.

Before. When he was a masked bad ass with a rocket pack and an assortment of nifty weaponry. A savvy hunter that saw through Han’s float-away-with-the-garbage gambit. A killer so remorseless Darth Vader singled him out amid a cadre of the galaxy’s deadliest to sternly warn that disintegrations were off the table.

Not even an unceremonious end in the Sarlaac’s belly could diminish him. He was so cool we denied his death, a sentiment bolstered by comics and novels.

Boba Fett is the Elvis of the Star Wars universe.

At least, he was, back when an air of mystery draped his shoulders as tangibly as the braid of wookiee hair and the bullet-riddled half-cape.

We see this same pattern time and again in pop culture: interesting side character is introduced as part of a larger story, side character captures the imagination, creator destroys the mystique by retroactively telling their story. AKA, the dreaded origin story.

This is not to be conflated with the superhero origin story, a necessary but often masturbatory part of the genre that precedes the really good stuff. Though I would argue that Wolverine is far more interesting prior to Wolverine: Origins than he is after.

Star Wars is king at this, shining a light into the dark corners of the franchise, giving everyone a name and background.

Is Han Solo a better character now that we’ve seen how he meets Chewie, wins the Millenium Falcon, or completes the Kessel Run? Or that the Solo name came via a bored Imperial recruiter? Emphatically no. Fortunately, Han emerges with his mojo intact because the movie largely avoids recasting Han in a different light from what we’ve seen previously.

The Prequel Trilogy is the ultimate origin story, a three-movie saga conceived solely to depict Anakin’s dark side osmosis, culminating in his conversion to Darth Vader. And, just as in Fett, Vader’s dark shadow is lessened for it. The Phantom Menace establishes Anakin as a figure of prophecy, reframing his decision to throw Palpatine down the shaft in Return of the Jedi as something preordained and less a father’s final act of mercy.

The Prequels change Vader from a murderous villain redeemed by the love of his son into a misunderstood man prone to emotional outbursts and horrible decisions who finally sees the light.

Something is irrevocably lost, each time a creator goes back.
How The Pandemic Affected My Creativity
By: Mark Starlin
Tags: Writing, Music, Pandemic, Creativity, Life

In 2019, I was playing in two bands and filling in on a third. I was writing almost daily on Medium and working on a novel. I was burning the creative oil.

Then a one-two sucker punch hit me. The Medium Partner Program change and the Great Interruption (Covid-19 pandemic.)

And let’s not forget massive social upheaval and an extremely derisive, stressful Presidential election in 2020. Neither of which fostered an environment conducive to creativity.

Medium decided to switch to read-time Partner Program payments slashing earning for creative writers like me who often post very short humor, microfiction, and poetry. I was disappointed, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t take a little of the wind out of my creative sails. Since I started writing on Medium, I had the feeling that getting paid decent money to write whatever I wanted couldn’t last, but it stung anyway.

Regardless, I soldiered on. Hoping it would somehow turn around.

In January of 2020, I released two collections (books) of stories from my previous two years on Medium. Then I turned my attention to finishing my novel. I had set a goal of finishing it by my 60th birthday on July 05. And it revived my creative spark and enjoyment for a while. I got focused and I accomplished that goal. I published my novel in June of 2020.
Why “Yield” Is an Excellent Python Keyword — Generators and Coroutines
By: Yong Cui
Tags: Python, Technology, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Programming

Suspend and Resume Execution in Coroutines

Note: It’s important to know that Python is phasing out the use of generators as the basis for coroutines. Check the official documentation. However, the concept of coroutines can be easy to understand if we know that yield has the meaning of “giving way.”

In this usage, it’s applicable to yield ’s second meaning: give way. It’s pretty much like the traffic “yield” sign in real life. You temporarily stop your vehicle such that other vehicles with right of the way can go first. Applying this analog to programming, it’s the basic idea of coroutines.

As you can see, the key to coroutines is that the execution is suspended temporarily and it can be resumed later on when it’s applicable. Doesn’t this sound familiar to you? The generator function runs and yields the element (the execution is suspended), and when the next element is requested, it continues to run from where it was suspended (the execution is resumed).

Actually, we can use the yield keyword to implement a coroutine. Let’s see the following code snippet for a simple example:

We first define a coroutine function using the yield keyword. As you can see, the overall structure is similar to the generator function. However, you’ll notice that the yield keyword appears after the assignment operator (i.e. the equals sign).

keyword. As you can see, the overall structure is similar to the function. However, you’ll notice that the keyword appears after the assignment operator (i.e. the equals sign). The assignment is possible because, in addition to the typical next() function that works with a generator, generators also support the send() function.

function that works with a generator, generators also support the function. In the example, we send a string data (i.e. “Here’s the data that your requested.” ) back to the coroutine. Specifically, the data that we sent is set to the variable x , and we’re able to print the x value as expected.

) back to the coroutine. Specifically, the data that we sent is set to the variable , and we’re able to print the value as expected. The StopIteration exception is expected because the generator function has reached the end, which is consistent with the behavior of a generator (as shown in the last section).
How I Use Powerful Life Stories as Fuel for My Writing
By: August Birch
Tags: Storytelling, Self Improvement, Books, Writing, Life

Whether we write fiction or non, we need input for memorable output

Photo by Peter Kasprzyk on Unsplash

I had a life-changing moment in high school, but there was a two-year delay in the life-changing part of the experience. It was one of those typical assemblies where some guest speaker shares educational slides about how bad it is to do drugs or join a gang — the kind most teenagers tune-out and the kind administrators drool-over.

I don’t remember the assembly… because of what happened.

There was a guy next to me. I didn’t know him. The auditorium was full — elbows-deep in teenagers. My high school was huge. Bigger than my first college. My class alone had twelve hundred students. So, this guy whom I didn’t know, wouldn’t stop cat-calling and two-finger whistling.

The auditorium was silent — save for Captain Whistles.

It was clear he wanted attention and had no tools beyond being a douche. I’m not a fan of confrontation and was even less-so in high school, but I couldn’t take it anymore. After ten minutes I finally turned and shushed him.

I don’t know what I expected to happen, but being choked wasn’t on the list of possibles. Whistles picked choking anyway. Nonchalant. As if he were making a sandwich or putting on mismatched socks — the guy reached over my head in a split-second and choked me until I saw stars. He whispered kind things like I’ll break your neck right here, and I should kill you for that. Maybe a nobody tells me what to do, kind of statement.

My journalism skills for remembering quotes weren’t so good in that moment. But his pep-talk went something like that.

The guy was sweaty. I could smell him too. Being that my head was cradled in his armpit like a newborn. Somehow all that trauma, no matter how old, makes a permanent, embossed notary stamp on your brain.

I couldn’t breathe. I did my best to resist. I coughed and struggled. Then — he let me go. Like it was another Tuesday. And returned to his cat-calling. As if to show me he was still in charge. Eventually, some form of authority took him away, but no one saw the choking.

So, that happened. Standard high school stuff. Kids are horrible to each other. But the choking wasn’t the life-changing bit. The part that stopped me cold — the life-changing part, was two years later. The summer after I graduated, Whistles made the paper. Turns out, in the middle of the night the same guy choked a cab driver to death. For money. Whistles went to prison. Apparently choking people was his hobby.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. I don’t feel it therapeutic to look him up either. I still think about him choking me sometimes and I’d rather not cement the memory deeper.

As crazy as it sounds I do owe the strangler a bit of gratitude.

A cab driver died and I can’t remove the weight of that incident. A young guy went to prison, because he probably led a horrible life. But I got to walk away with a strong story. The story is mine. I can package it any way I wish and re-tell it as many times as someone will listen.

Story is currency for humans.
How Much Juice Is in the Story?
By: Jessie Van Breugel
Tags: Marketing, Creativity, Writing Tips, Inspiration, Writing

How Much Juice Is in the Story?

What I learned from messing around for 3 months — 2 proven tactics to write killer content

Photo by Lidya from Pexels

When life gives you lemons, you squeeze them. Nothing else.

Real tight, let’s see how much juice is coming out. Some lemons give you enough to make 3 liters of fresh lemonade, others are barely enough to chuck away your tequila shot.

The same philosophy applies to an idea — some are powerful enough to change the world, others barely enough to get you out of bed in the morning.

Everything in life starts with an idea. Everything you see around you started inside the mind. Someone was crazy enough to pursue the desire to materialize it. You’re currently staring at many iterations.

It wasn’t until I published more than 50 articles this year that the importance of spending adequate time with my ideas became clear to me.