fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
🎉Shareable Asset App Launch Free Investment Reward Event 🎉
By: Jazmin Shim
Tags: Shareable Asset, Blue Whale Global, Reward, Fintech Startups, Fintech

👉[SA App Launch Rewards Event]🎉

Download the app here and be the first to get the Free Investment Credits of 3GBP immediately.

👉Download here: https://saind.page.link/app

👉SA Reward Program: https://www.shareableasset.com/promotion

👉How to participate in the event: https://bit.ly/2ZnjOnq

[Shareable Asset featured on Media]

Shareable Asset is featured in media to lead the democratisation of global asset ownership with real estate tokenisation.

With Shareable Asset platform, all investors will be able to easily manage their own investments in real estate anywhere, anytime.

👉Business Insider

https://bit.ly/3bidoZF

👉Asia One

https://bit.ly/3csVRyq

👉Yahoo Finance

https://yhoo.it/3bseOAQ
Reduce Credit Card Risk on the Internet with a “Throwaway”
By: Bill Myers
Tags: Life Lessons, Planning, Credit Card, Internet Risk, Money

Photo by Paul Felberbauer on Unsplash

Money, Risk

Reduce Credit Card Risk on the Internet with a “Throwaway”

Have a plan for the small chance that your card gets hacked. Hopefully, you’ll never need it.

The detective story’s main character used a “Throwaway” cell phone to contact his research expert, the only number it would call or receive calls from. It was totally isolated from other internet contacts and phone numbers.

I thought, “Why not get a throwaway credit card just for internet purchases?” Many sites, like Amazon, keep your card on file. Also, your connection might be vulnerable.

Internet-only card

If your card gets hacked, it takes time to close it, challenge fraudulent charges, and get a replacement. A debit card is worse. It’s a direct pipeline to your bank account.

I asked my bank for a second card with a low limit. Then, I would have a Main card for in-person and large purchases, a Backup used only for gasoline purchases just to keep it active, and the Internet card.

They sent one with a $7,000 limit! I called and asked for a much lower limit.

The representative said, “We don’t increase limits on new cards.” She sounded like nobody ever asked for a lower limit before!

Conclusion

Now, we feel safer and in more control with small purchases over the internet.

If you do this, always pay the full balance every month. Don’t get one if you have heavy credit card debt.

Finally, don’t forget the points. We put everything on point cards and have received thousands of dollars back over the years.
Introducing Modern Web
By: Thomas Allmer
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Web, Testing, Open Source

The Goal for Modern Web

“Our goal is to provide developers with the guides and tools they need to build for the modern web. We aim to work closely with the browser and avoid complex abstractions.”

Modern browsers are a powerful platform for building websites and applications. We try to work with what’s available in the browser first before reaching for custom solutions.

When you’re working with the browser rather than against it, code, skills, and knowledge remain relevant for a longer time. Development becomes faster, and debugging is easier because there are fewer layers of abstractions involved.

At the same time, we’re aware of the fact that not all problems can be solved elegantly by the browser today. We support developers making informed decisions about introducing tools and customizations to their projects in such a way that developers can upgrade later as browser support improves.
Visualizing the Rates of Change in a Codebase Over Time With git-log(1)
By: Noah Sussman
Tags: Github, Command Line, Data Visualization, Git, Programming

Comparing the Rate of Change of Two Arbitrary Filesets

At the beginning of this article, I acknowledged that not everyone’s project is arranged into a codebase and testbase top-level directory structure.

Fortunately, no matter how a codebase and testbase are laid out, you can always visualize the Git history of both distinct sets of files — both filesets— by using find(1) to filter your source tree. This works because git-log(1) can take more than one path as an argument.

So it’s just a matter of using find(1) to make two collections of paths: one for the codebase and one for the testbase.

For instance, if your test files are stored side by side with your code files, then you can extract the paths of just your test files with find(1) , as shown in the shell script below. In this example, I assume that all test filenames end with Test.php , so all test files are named something like exampleTest.php .

Here’s how to find all files ending in Test.php , regardless of where that file is located within the Git repository’s filesystem:

This will produce output similar to that shown above, except in this case only the history of the testbase is shown:

1 2020-01-13

3 2020-02-12

1 2020-02-25

1 2020-03-05

As before, this time series represents the total number of commits to all Test.php files over the past three weeks. And you can change the time window to whatever you want by changing the --since parameter on line 4 to some date other than three weeks ago.

Now, let’s move onto printing out the history of the codebase so it can be compared with the history of the testbase.

Assuming all your application files have a common extension, say .php , then you can collect the paths of all your codebase files (all of the files that could potentially be under test) with find(1) as follows:

find . -name "*.php" -not -name "*Test.php"

This will print out a list of all the files that end in .php except for those that end in Test.php , which will be omitted from the list.

Like the script we used to look at testbase files, this script would produce a time series showing days when commits were made to codebase files, something like the following:

1 2020-01-13

1 2020-02-12

1 2020-02-25

1 2020-03-05
Web Scrapping practice-Michelin Taipei(1)
By: Emily Chen
Tags: Web Scraping, Data Science

In most of the situation, it is unlikely that we get a cleaned CSV or excel file at the beginning of the data collecting process. Therefore, web scraping is an essential skill for companies who would like to retrieve data automatically.

In this practice, I’ll demonstrate how to scrap basic data from Michelin website. To make things more simple, I only focus on scrapping data from restaurants in Taipei. In the website interface, there’re 20 restaurants listed on one page.

1–20 stores listed on the first page

The first 20 restaurants are listed in the first page. Therefore, the homepage url(https://guide.michelin.com/tw/zh_TW/taipei-region/taipei/restaurants?lat=24.1506212&lon=120.6433008) and the first page url(https://guide.michelin.com/tw/zh_TW/taipei-region/taipei/restaurants/page/1?lat=24.1506212&lon=120.6433008) are identical.

If we want to check for the 21–40 stores, we could simply change the page number to 2(https://guide.michelin.com/tw/zh_TW/taipei-region/taipei/restaurants/page/2?lat=24.1506212&lon=120.6433008)

Before scrapping, we should follow the robot.txt file for a website. According to ScrapeHero, robot.txt has specific rules for good behavior such as how frequently you can scrape, which pages allow scraping, and which ones you can’t. In the robot.txt file(https://guide.michelin.com/robots.txt), we could see there’re a couple of thing that we can’t get access to.

Micheline robot.txt file

Also, to avoid being blocked by website manager, there’re a few way to prevent. In this exercise, I choose to spoof a user-agent, a way listed in the ScrapeHero website.

Set user-agent to a common web browser: Google Bot

The basic rule of scrapping is to find the HTML tag of the website. For example, if we want to know the first store list is under which class, we can move our mouse to the store, right click it, and choose inspect(Ctrl+shift+I), we’ll then find the HTML tag.

In the next paragraph, let’s start to retrieve data from the HTML tag.
Career Paths Within Data Science
By: Derek Leung
Tags: Ucsd, Job Hunting, Career Advice, Data Science, Data

Big data is pervasive, in industry and beyond. A grocery chain keeps track of all the different types of food they sell, as well as how much and the price per good. A bank keeps track of its customers, each account they open, how much money is in each account, how much debt they own and much more. Is all of this information useful? Well, I’d like to think that some of it is so this whole thing wasn’t a waste of time.

Even the more obscure jobs which people don’t normally associate with data science could use big data: hippotherapists use horse riding for physical, occupational, and speech therapy. Here, data can be collected on each patient and each horse to create models for what horses, what exercises, what speeds, what heights, ect. will help patients with certain problems based on data from past treatments.

Due to the various ways different industries handle data and put it to use, there have been many different job titles created for those who use data on different levels. Here, we’ll go through each of the primary job titles and their descriptions in salary order according to Glassdoor (we all got into this, at least a little, for the money).
It’s Not Just Driving or Running — Simply Existing While Black Can Kill You
By: William Spivey
Tags: George Floyd, Minneapolis, Police Brutality, BlackLivesMatter, Racism

It’s Not Just Driving or Running — Simply Existing While Black Can Kill You

George Floyd was in agony and was no threat to anyone. He was murdered anyway.

Photo: Offices of Ben Crump Law

The list of unofficial criminal offenses that Black people can be killed for continues to grow. We can’t drive while Black (Philando Castile), jog while Black (Ahmaud Arbery), or sleep while Black (Breonna Taylor). And now, with George Floyd, we can officially add breathing while Black to that lineup of senseless violations.

It’s a never-ending demoralizing loop marked by a distinct pattern. If it’s a police-involved murder, the names of the officers are seldom released immediately. Local police unions step in and make a statement without verified evidence to present to the public. The officers usually get paid administrative leave. When it’s all over, there is no justice. Never any justice.

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police is literally too close to home. The incident happened at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, a block from Phelps Park, where I played growing up. Like Eric Garner in New York, Floyd’s “I can’t breathe!” cries were captured on video:

Please, please, I can’t breathe. Please, man, please. I can’t move. Everything hurts. Give me some water or something, please. I can’t breathe, officer. They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me, man.

Floyd was right; they did kill him. An officer, Derek Chauvin, had his knee on Floyd’s throat for eight minutes while the man begged for his life. Witnesses begged the four officers involved to let him up. As people got closer, one officer threatened the crowd with a can of mace. Onlookers yelled that Floyd’s nose was bleeding, that he wasn’t resisting arrest, and that he couldn’t breathe.

An officer responded: “He’s fine!”

Floyd, who had recently been hospitalized after contracting Covid-19, was allegedly arrested for “attempted forgery.” And as punishment, he was murdered by police in front of a crowd. In handcuffs. A full-grown man kneeling on his throat. “He survived corona and couldn’t survive going to the store,” said Vanita Williams, a witness who knew him.

If history repeats itself, police and reporters will pry into every detail of George Floyd’s life, looking for justification for his murder. That’s what happened in 2016. About 10 miles from where Floyd was killed, a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop after Castile notified the officer that he had a legally registered handgun; at the time, conservative media leaped to falsely depict Castile as an armed-robbery suspect. With Chauvin hiring the same attorney who represented Castile’s killer — who was subsequently acquitted of manslaughter charges — it certainly seems like the same script is gearing up again.

No justice. No justice. Never any justice. It’s a narrative as old as time — and we’ll see if it remains true in my hometown yet again.
How To Install An Older Homebrew Package
Tags: Homebrew, Github, Software Development, Mac, Programming

How To Install An Older Homebrew Package remarkablemark Follow Nov 5 · 3 min read

Did you know it’s possible to install an older version of a homebrew package or formula?

Previously, you would do this by installing an older formula URL:

brew install <FORMULA_URL>

However, this no longer works:

Error: Calling Installation of <FORMULA> from a GitHub commit URL is disabled! Use 'brew extract <FORMULA>' to stable tap on GitHub instead.

Now, you need to replace the core or cask formula before installing:

# copy formula code

pbpaste > $(find $(brew --repository) -name <FORMULA>.rb)

brew install <FORMULA>

Example

The following steps outline how to install composer version 1.10.15 .

Prerequisites

Uninstall composer:

brew uninstall composer

Update brew:

brew update

Find the Formula

Find the formula in homebrew-core or homebrew-cask:

The formula filename should be composer.rb .

Open the file and click History:

Browse through the history and find the commit you want:

Go to the commit, click the ellipsis next to the file, and click View file:

Click Raw to open the raw file:

Replace the Formula

Select and copy the raw formula:

Open the local formula on your machine:

find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb

Paste the copied formula so it replaces the local formula:

pbpaste > $(find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb)

Install the formula:

brew install composer

Once that’s done, undo the changes to the formula:

cd $(find $(brew --repository) -name composer.rb -exec dirname {} \;)

git checkout .

Pin the formula to prevent accidental upgrade:

brew pin composer

Resources

Homebrew documentation:
How Can I Approach My Pastor about His Weakness in Addressing Politics?
By: Cody Libolt
Tags: Social Issues, Evangelicalism, Christianity, Ethics, Politics

How Can I Approach My Pastor about His Weakness in Addressing Politics? Cody Libolt Follow Oct 23 · 2 min read

Question:

How can I approach my own pastor about his weakness in addressing politics?

Answer:

Find a pastor who is at least as good at moral reasoning as you are.

Move if necessary.

Alternatively, find a pastor who is strongly committed to the Word and who chooses not to address current controversial social topics and who merely teaches what the Bible says without attempting to offer specific application.

This is somewhat common in churches that hold to the regulative principle of worship.

I don’t think it is the ideal policy, but if the pastor is able to show in personal conversation that he understands the basic political issues rightly and yet he chooses not to address them from the pulpit, this is at least better than pastors who publicly teach wrongly.

I would almost never suggest trying to change a pastor’s mind about anything.

The change that will come to the church will come by replacing the current pastors, not by changing them. That is how it always works.
Day 14 with Bitconnect
By: Alex Muresan
Tags: Investing, Bitcoin, Bitconnect, Cryptocurrency, Crypto

Today I’ve earned $13.82, reaching a total of $196.48 money earned in 14 days.

Day 14

Bitconnect offers the opportunity to reinvest your gains through the capitalization of the earnings from the daily interest, so that you start receiving the daily interest for a bigger amount of money.

I haven’t reinvested until now, because I was working on developing a strategy that allows me to reach ROI in relatively short period of time while in parallel to maximize the capitalization funds (active investment).

Initial active investment $1280 + $100 reinvestment

I mentioned above about achieving ROI in a short period of time…why and what does that mean?

At this point in time, we have all heard about the Bitcoin bubble. While Bitcoin doesn’t equal all cryptocurrencies, recent trends in the marketplace highlight a generic inflation of the value of crypto assets. In short, I see it as an overall bubble.

So my first suggestion to everybody is invest responsibly.

Bitconnect is a platform that allows you to reach ROI within 3.5 months of the initial investment, without making any reinvestment from daily interest earnings. There are many out there who believe it’s a scam, but there are just as many that believe this can make you a millionaire (50% — 50%).

My pragmatic thinking has concluded that I won’t become a multi millionaire out of this, but also that the bitconnect with is business model are here to stay at least 1.5 years from now.

Now ask yourself this:

- do you have a 9 — 5 job?

- do you have any passive income (job is not considered a passive income)?

- would you mind $1000 per month extra income? For some of you this means above 10%, for others below 10% from your current revenue. So again I ask. Would you mind getting extra money without lifting a finger

Yeah .. yeah… money doesn’t grow on trees, we all know that, but this is a wave. You either ride it or simply watch it from a distance.

That being said, I will come back with the detailed strategy, that I’ve chosen, in a future post.
26/07/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere
Tags: Bitcoin, Currency, Citizenship, Cryptocurrency, Regulation

by BlockEx

1. Korean Crypto Regulations In The Works

We covered a couple of days ago the South Korea Financial Services Commission (FSC) setting up a department tasked with policymaking the blockchain industry. It has now been reported that there are plans for the country’s first crypto and blockchain legislation to be passed as soon as possible. The regulatory framework has already been drafted and widely covers businesses and projects. The body hopes to facilitate the supervision of the booming industry through regulation. Furthermore, analysts believe that regulatory clarity will enable for “smart money” to be introduced to the market.

2. Antiguan Barbudan Citizenship Can Be Purchased With 12 BTC

The minimum amount necessary to purchase the Antiguan Barbudan citizenship is an investment of 100,000 US dollars, which is now possible to make using Bitcoin, 12 in this case. They will then be converted into US dollars on a daily basis due to volatility. This is due to the country’s parliament amending Antigua and Barbuda’s Citizenship by Investment Program Act to expand the payment methods allowed to cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin included. Hon. Gaston Browne, the islands’ Prime Minister and Minister of Finance & Corporate Governance & Public-Private Partnerships, was the one to make the announcement. The country hopes to help people who would only be able to make the payment with cryptocurrency, but more importantly, to attract a new segment of customers.

3. Venezuela To Issue New National Currency Tied To Petro

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has revealed that the country will issue a new national currency and it will be tied to the oil-backed Petro, a cryptocurrency whose launched we previously covered. The current currency, the Bolivar Fuerte (VEF), will be replaced with the Bolívar Soberano. The move is a strategy to tackle the growing inflation which many believe will reach one million per cent this year. The ‘economic reconversion’ is expected to begin on August 20th with the issuance and circulation of the Bolívar Soberano. It has also been reported that the country will remove five zeros from the Bolivar rather than the previously planned three.

4. Iranian Central Bank Is Working Towards Cryptocurrency

The central bank of Iran is working towards the development of a national cryptocurrency with the help of local companies. The news might come as a surprise to some considering that earlier this year, the central bank banned financial institutions from dealing with cryptocurrencies. However, we previously reported on Iran disliking Bitcoin while planning the launch of a state-owned cryptocurrency. At the time, the Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi stated that the cryptocurrency would be issued in collaboration with the state-owned bank Post Bank.

This news roundup was brought to you by BlockEx.
Trump Storm
By: Liza Donnelly
Tags: Storms, Politics, Trump, Hate

I drew this on a rainy, stormy day. It’s not that I don’t like storms, or rain. I do. It’s just that I was thinking about Trump and how darkness follows him. And how he creates darkness. He perpetuates hate and mistrust, suspicion and bias. He fosters unkindess and malice wherever he goes.

So this is what I drew. Sometimes, drawings are just feelings.
The Power of Saying ‘I Choose To’ Instead of ‘I Have To’
By: Christian Pow
Tags: Self Improvement, Self, Mindfulness, Success, Mindset Shift

The Power of Saying ‘I Choose To’ Instead of ‘I Have To’

A simple mindset shift can help you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters.

GIF made by Author

There are two types of people in this world: those that take one step in twenty directions, and those that take twenty steps in one direction.

What separates them is a simple mindset shift. One camp automatically thinks that they have to do things. The other automatically thinks that they choose to do things.

“Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.” — Benjamin Hardy

Feeling like you have to do things is to be helpless. We need to figure out how to unlearn helplessness.

This happens because there are so many choices out there for us to sort through, and the added weight of social media and the comparison trap makes it feel like we have to follow these trends.

We have to work hard for promotions at a good job, try that hip new restaurant, drive a nice car, go on vacations, buy those new clothes, take great photos and upload them, turn our passions into side-hustles, and spend as much time as we can with the people we love.

As a student entering their final year of university, I definitely feel that pressure to do these things as well.

One time a co-worker told me this:

“As long as you’ve started a career, got a place, and started financing a car by the age of 25, you’re successful.”

That one conversation has stuck with me for a long time. Why 25? Why a career and rent and a car? Is this a universal definition of the term “success”?

If I accepted that statement by my co-worker as absolute truth, I’d be forgetting my ability to choose:

“The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away — it can only be forgotten.” — Greg Mckeown

As someone about to make a huge transition in life after school, this really makes me ask these questions:

In a world where there are so many choices, how do I really harness the power to choose what would be most essential to us?

How do I cut through the noise and avoid the comparison trap to take those twenty steps in one direction instead of one in twenty directions?

What does success actually mean to me?

Read on to see what’s helped me be able to answer these questions.
US Sanctions Russian Government Center for Creating ‘Triton’ Malware
Tags: Sanctions, Cybersecurity, Russia, Malware, Technology

The US Treasury Department is also linking the creators behind Triton with scanning and probing at least 20 US electric facilities for vulnerabilities.

By Michael Kan

The US is sanctioning a Russian government research center for allegedly developing Triton, a malware attack capable of disrupting IT systems at factories and power plants.

On Friday, the US Treasury Department sanctioned the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (also known as CNIIHM or TsNIIKhM) on claims the Russian center had a hand in creating Triton.

The malware grabbed headlines in 2017 for hitting a petrochemical facility in Saudi Arabia in an apparent act of industrial sabotage. According to security researchers, the attack initially arrived via a phishing email. Triton can tamper with a facility’s industrial controls, causing the systems to ignore hazardous conditions or shut down a power plant.

“Researchers who investigated the cyber-attack and the malware reported that Triton was designed to give the attackers complete control of infected systems and had the capability to cause significant physical damage and loss of life,” the Treasury Department added in today’s announcement.

The Russian research institute CNIIHM (Credit: Google Maps)

In 2018, security firm FireEye then released a report connecting Triton to a professor employed at the Russian research institute CNIIHM. An IP address used at the Russian institute was also found monitoring coverage of the Triton malware and scoping out potential targets.

The Treasury Department didn’t elaborate on how US officials are linking the Russian government lab to the malware. But the department also claims the creators behind Triton were scanning and probing at least 20 US electric facilities for vulnerabilities back in 2019.

In response, the Treasury Department is prohibiting all US persons and businesses from engaging in transactions with the Russian research institute. “Moreover, non-US persons who engage in certain transactions with TsNIIKhM may themselves be exposed to sanctions,” the department added.

The US announced the sanctions days after the Justice Department charged six Russian military officers for allegedly unleashing the NotPetya ransomware outbreak in 2017, and for using malware attacks to shut down the power grid in Ukraine. The US is hoping the indictments will cause Russia’s state-sponsored hackers to adopt a different profession. However, the Russian government has denied any involvement with the cyber attacks.
If I peeled a lemon, as well as you did, I would squeeze every drop of juice out of the fruit into…
By: Yohanan Gregorius, Please Call Me Greg Or Yg
Tags: Food, Poetry, Shortform, Lemons

If I peeled a lemon, as well as you did, I would squeeze every drop of juice out of the fruit into a cup, add honey and seltzer water for a deliciously fizzy ade; I would caramelize the rind while melting dark chocolate in a double boiler and then cover the rind with the melted chocolate, let cool, use a little as garnish and yum yum the rest.

Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash
The Pagan Ritual Teens Now Play for Fun
By: Kyrie Gray
Tags: Fiction, Horror, Spirituality, Digital Life, Humor

How do you play The Midnight Man?

First, everyone who is playing gathers together in the same house. You can’t play the Midnight Man outside. Then, because whoever wrote the game didn’t fret about transmitting disease, each person signs their name on a piece of paper and marks it with a drop of their own blood. This in my opinion is the scariest part of the game.

When it gets close to the starting time, go to the wood door you’re using and tape the paper to it. Turn off all the lights and light your candle. Then, at the stroke of 12, you will knock on the wood door 29 times. I don’t know why it has to be wood. Once again, imagine those pagan origins. If you are summoning what amounts to an old god, they were probably connected to the forest. Once you finish knocking, blow out the candle, and open the door.

Congratulations! You’ve just let in Tthe Midnight Man. Now get ready to avoid a supposedly very painful death.

Quickly light the candle and start moving. Always keep moving. In this game the Midnight Man follows you around the house, trying to catch you. Throughout the game, he is said to give you horrific visions. He wants to throw you off your candle game so you let it go out.

If your candle were to go out you’re in trouble because it’s keeping you protected somewhat. Take that lighter you were carrying and light it real fast, within ten-seconds. If you fail, know that the mass of darkness is closing in. Take your salt, make a circle around yourself, and then hunker down. You’ll be there until the game ends

There are rules to the game, but mostly it all boils down to, “Don’t cheat.” Don’t be that arrogant person who thinks you can turn on all the lights or run from the house. If there is anything that will make this ancient entity angry, it’s not playing the game you invited them to play correctly.

You must either keep your candle lit while moving or stay in the salt circle until 3:33. At that moment the game is done and you are free to turn on the lights and go online to exaggerate about your experiences.

Of course, I don’t recommend playing this game. Primarily because I fear tripping with a candle and causing a fire. But if you choose to, make sure you do your research and are prepared. Otherwise, the Midnight Man might get you.
Finding Your Tribe
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Purpose, Friends, Find Your Tribe, Life, Values

Not everybody is your friend

Finding Your Tribe

The life-long process of discovering your people

How often do we refer to someone as ‘my friend’ when speaking about them, when they don’t really fit the definition? Is it just because it’s easier than saying ‘that guy I know from such-and-such place’?

You know you do it. I do it. I think most of us are guilty of it at one time or another.

“I was talking to my friend Bob about…”

Or…

“I was talking about this guy Bob I know from the writer’s Meetup I go to once every three months and…”

‘Friend’ is just easier. But using it so carelessly, unfortunately, also dilutes the meaning of the word. Now we’re lumping this guy we barely know in with friends we’ve had since preschool and people we really care about, just for the sake of saving a few sentences or an explanation. Is it worth it?

And then we’ve got our 1342 Facebook friends. Those are real friends, right? I mean, it says so right on the button with the little checkmark, so it must mean it’s true. And all those people you’ve ‘followed for a follow’ on Instagram, some of who will send you a private message once in a while or react to your story. They’re your friends too, aren’t they?

Of course, you can meet real friends on social media, even if you haven’t met them in person. I’ve met a handful that way myself, and actually, a few of them have become some of my favorite people and I honestly couldn’t imagine my life without them in it in some capacity.

But unless they’re someone you have regular conversations with and you’re actually getting to know one another on a more personal level than “girl, those eyebrows though!”, you can’t in good faith consider them your friends.
Digital identity through humanistic personalization
By: Tds Editors
Tags: The Daily Pick

credit Chris Yates (Unsplash)

You just got a new drone and you want it to be super smart! Maybe it should detect whether workers are properly wearing their helmets or how big the cracks on a factory rooftop are.

By Augustin Ador — 12 min read
7marketz CEO Yagub Rahimov became the Key Advisor of Serenity Financial
By: Serenity Financial
Tags: ICO, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum, Finance

Serenity Financial keeps on growing and getting empowered by the day. We are honored to introduce our new Key Advisor, Yagub Rahimov, Co-founder and CEO of 7marketz Inc Group. He has assisted a number of successful ICOs to reach their goals and has been investing in cryptocurrencies since 2009. Yagub brings expertise from Financial Markets and Blockchain perspective, empowering the Serenity team.

«I have been nominated and awarded Best Trader of the Year title a number of times since 2005. During this period, I believe I could have achieved more if my counterparty (brokers) were more transparent with their pricing. I’m confident that Serenity Financial has the potential to become the solution I wished for. Imagine, you are entering a position and your broker gives you a massive slippage. You naturally send a complaint, expecting the broker to return your loss, but in return the broker replies — ”your order was filled in by the market price”, providing no proof at all. Alternatively, like in many cases a trader submits a claim and although the answer does not satisfy them, the broker would not be at fault. For scenarios like this, both traders and brokers need a middle party to operate as an arbitrator. Serenity Financial will become that missing piece of the puzzle for the Financial markets».

Short Bio:

Yagub Rahimov is the CEO and a co-founder at 7marketz Inc., the parent company of AtoZForex.com, FintechEvents.Center and NewsOgram AI. From 2005 he has founded a number of companies in 18 countries that specialize in alternative investment channels and machine learning.
Data Cleaning 101
By: Jeffrey Ng
Tags: Data Cleaning, Web Scraping, Regex, Regular Expressions

Now that I have my data, I examine it and realize it is somewhat rough on the edges. I examine its structure. The data is organized into a list of list of strings. I call the first element of the list and see that it is made of 60 strings each holding the price, living area, address, etc separated by a ‘

’ in one entire string. This is definitely unusable at the moment.

I import regex and use re.split( ‘

‘, string) which will break the string into individual elements. Regular expressions is an invaluable and necessary tool in string splicing and cleaning. I do the same thing for the rest of the 334 elements on the list and iterate through with a nested for loop. I call the finished object z.

I import pandas and df= pd.DataFrame(z[i] for i in range(len(z))). I then rename the columns with appropriate column names. I call the data frame again and see my rows and columns configured neatly.

The next step of data cleaning involves observing your data. Unless your data is from an organized database or curated dataset, extensive data cleaning is often necessary. Data cleaning maybe another step even with organized data such as replacing nan values, or outliers. We may impute these values with a specific category, or use the mean, median, or mode. We may drop them out of the data completely if we aren’t losing too much information. If the data frame has too many columns that aren’t required for EDA, we may drop them too. We may choose to engineer certain columns to better organize our data. Data engineering is a final step that is put into data pre-processing. This stage also requires skill and experience from a data scientist.

To sum up in this brief blog, data can come to us in a variety of ways and when we aggregate it, it can sometimes be messy and unusable. Strategies we must use to convert our data include examining our data’s structure. It can be in a form of a .json, a .csv, and or just lists of lists, a list of strings, or list of dictionaries. Some tools we can use are built-in python methods and regex.

Correctly organizing the data takes experience, knowledge of data types, and general coding know-how. Many times for EDA, we must get our data into a pandas data frame. Once in the data frame, we need to examine it to see if it makes sense. We replace nan values, outliers, and make small tweaks such as imputing the mean, median, or mode for certain missing values or outliers. We may also drop columns or rows or rename columns into more informative descriptions. Engineering columns or features that may help our model may be done as well, but this is towards the end of data cleaning and is sometimes mixed in with data pre-processing.

This post was written more for me than you, the reader. However, I hope readers can enjoy my insight into data cleaning. It is often stated that a data scientist spends 50–60% of their time on data cleaning and data pre-processing. There is no exact method and no data sets are built equally! Each is unique with their own identity and challenges. Happy coding everyone!
⭐️ PEP Network is highly rated ⭐️
By: Katherine Romaniuk
Tags: Blockchain, ICO, Token Sale, Cryptocurrency, Technology

in In Fitness And In Health
Day #10 with Cloud Workflows: accessing built-in environment variables
By: Guillaume Laforge
Tags: Workflow, Google Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Serverless

Google Cloud Workflows offers a few built-in environment variables that are accessible from your workflow executions.

There are currently 5 environment variables that are defined:

GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_NUMBER : The workflow project’s number.

GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT_ID : The workflow project’s identifier.

GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION : The workflow’s location.

GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_ID : The workflow’s identifier.

GOOGLE_CLOUD_WORKFLOW_REVISION_ID : The workflow’s revision identifier.

Let’s see how to access them from our workflow definition:

$ gcloud beta workflows deploy w09-new-workflow-from-cli \

--source=w09-hello-from-gcloud.yaml \

--service-account=workflow-sa@workflows-days.iam.gserviceaccount.com

We use the built-in sys.get_env() function to access those variables. We’ll revisit the various existing built-in functions in later episodes.

Then when you execute this workflow, you’ll get an output like this:

“workflows-days 783331365595 europe-west4 w10-builtin-env-vars 000001–3af”

There’s one variable I’d like to see added to this list, that would be the current execution ID. That could potentially be useful for identifying a particular execution, when looking in the logs, to reason about potential failure, or for auditing purposes.
DEx.top Bi-Weekly Report (9.15–9.28)
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Ledger, Decentralized Exchange, Progress Reports

The DEx.top team has been keeping busy for the past two weeks, with a number of major conferences going on around the world as well as partnerships that we hope will be both exciting and useful for our users. Here’s what we’ve been up to!

1. Product Updates

Ledger support is now online!

Tutorial: https://support.dex.top/hc/en-us/articles/360009821493

DEx.top available on SafeWallet

Tutorial: https://medium.com/@cmsafewallet/

Upgrade to DEx.top 3.0 is under development

To create a better user experience, the exchange webpage will undergo a full upgrade.

2. Recent Activities

Trade to win Ledger & ETH!

Promotional period: Sep 27th 16:00 (HKT) — Otc 8th 13:00 (HKT)

Activity details: https://dextop.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009722494

3. External Partnerships

DEx.top attended the recent SG Blockchain Week, which included major events such as Consensus Singapore.

The DEx.top team was also at the World Digital Mining Summit in Georgia, where cofounder Martha Zhang gave a presentation on the Future of Decentralization.

September 28, 2018

DEx.top
✎ Drink water, protect your energy
By: Whitney O Banner
Tags: Twitter

Hi, I’m Whitney. This is a newsletter full of tweets from my feed. Tap the tweet to view its thread.

It’s been a few weeks but we’re back. Twitter gets toxic sometimes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here are non-toxic tweets to cleanse your timeline. Starting with a joke: The United States of America.
Tardigrade
By: Joy Scrogum
Tags: Tardigrade, Inspiration, Haiku, Biology, Poetry

This haiku is about some of my favorite little Earthlings, the tardigrades, aka water bears or moss piglets. They’re so ugly they’re cute in my opinion. There are multiple species of tardigrades, all of which are water-dwelling micro-animals which can survive almost anything — extreme temperatures, pressures, radiation, dehydration, and even the vacuum of space. They’re not extremophiles because they didn’t evolve to exploit extreme conditions — they just are completely capable of enduring a wide variety of situations that would be lethal for most other organisms. Plus, one of their natural habitats is within moss (hence one of their common names, the moss piglet), and I adore moss. When I tend the moss in my backyard (and yes, I am weird enough to tend, and even transplant moss in an effort to get it to spread), I like to imagine all the chubby little superheroes roaming free range about my property.

They can be found pretty much anywhere on Earth, including Antarctica, and in addition to moss and lichen, some live in mud volcanoes, hot springs, sand dunes, leaf litter and marine sediments among other habitats. They’re pioneer species in developing habitats and serve as prey for many other creatures. Tardigrades can suspend their metabolism and become nearly completely dehydrated. They can survive in this suspended state for 30 years or more, rehydrate, and then go about their business as if nothing happened.

They’re sometimes tied to theories of panspermia, or the notion that life on Earth could have been seeded accidentally by microbes hitching rides on comets, meteorites or other galactic debris. The concept conversely allows that microbes from Earth could inadvertently contaminate or colonize other worlds. This is one of the concepts that fascinated me back in the days when I thought about a career with NASA studying exobiology. These little squirts are kind of my heroes.

To learn more about them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade, or this cute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H0E77TdYnY (it’s fun, but wrong about them being extremophiles). A 2016 article from Science Alert discusses the science behind their seeming indestructibility: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-finally-reveals-how-water-bears-have-become-so-damn-indestructible. In an interesting lesson for humans (if they’d ever listen), even these tough organisms might not survive climate change: https://www.sciencealert.com/tardigrades-are-practically-indestructible-but-climate-change-could-be-their-weak-point.

I think the tardigrades are great mascots for our current times, and fodder for parables related to times yet to come. When you feel like you can’t endure all the crazy uncertainty and odd restrictions in your world right now, remember the lowly tardigrades, and channel their spirits.
20 Modern Instagram Growth Strategies That Work in 2020
By: Justin Cruz
Tags: Social Media Strategy, Instagram Marketing, Instagram, Lessons Learned, Social Media Marketing

20 Modern Instagram Growth Strategies That Work in 2020

Your complete guide to growing brand new accounts quickly

Building your Instagram account can be quite intimidating.

You spend a bunch of time thinking of great pictures to take and stories to share, coming up with witty captions, and editing your photos perfectly. Excited to get all sorts of social media exposure for your brand, you make your first few posts and…

Nothing happens. Each post gets a handful of likes, you can’t get over a few followers, and it seems that maybe Instagram isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Well, let’s take a step back. Instagram in 2020 is insanely popular. There are over 100 million posts made per day. With that kind of volume, it’s tough to stand out in a crowd.

Fortunately, there are plenty of modern Instagram growth strategies that work in 2020. I have personally used these methods to grow accounts to over 1,000 followers in the first ten posts.

Check out these 20 unique Instagram growth tactics to find out how to make your account stand out among the masses and reach your target audience.
Fitting in and finding home
By: Carmel Delshad
Tags: Immigration, Family, This Happened To Me

By Carmel Delshad

I lost my father to cancer in August. He was 75. His story isn’t a Hollywood rags-to-riches tale of an immigrant making it big in America; he died with few possessions. But his death taught me a lot about the meaning of home and what it means to finally find comfort in yourself.

My father spent his early life floating around the Middle East, without an anchor and without a place to call home. He was uprooted from his family home in Haifa in 1948. His parents relied on the support of charities to get staple items like flour and sugar after losing their wealth from their successful jewelry business. They died within years of each other, and my father was left an orphan as a teenager. He used to tell me stories of how he went fishing as a teen just to be able to eat. It was a sudden and dramatic change of circumstances for a man who grew up playing with diamonds as if they were marbles on the floor of his father’s jewelry store.

Years later, he ended up in Egypt, where he met my mother. After spending more than a decade there as a successful business owner, the “American Dream” came calling, and my dad, desperate to make it in the world, left for the U.S. in the 1980s. It’s a common beginning to many immigrant stories.

It seems fitting that he ended up working in the hotel industry. How many times did someone check into his little hotel, looking for a place to call home, even if just for one night?
“At the time of our wedding, I didn’t realize that the Houmas House Plantation was previously one…
By: Momentum Blog Team
Tags: Plantation, Plantation Wedding, History, Race, Weddings

Photo: valliegurl/Getty Images

“At the time of our wedding, I didn’t realize that the Houmas House Plantation was previously one of the largest sugarcane plantations in the South and that hundreds of enslaved Black people built it and its grounds.”

That’s from an essay by Lauren Salles, who wanted to show Momentum’s readers how she came to have a big fancy plantation wedding and why now — years later — she regrets the choice of location. Plantations are big money nowadays. They remind some folks of a genteel, more civilized time when men wore suits and women wore dresses and everyone stayed in their place. The only problem is that plantation chic and those genteel memories have abusive and bloody histories. Salles dives into it in one of Momentum’s most-shared stories of the year.
Blalen tal-gellewz inkaljat (Roasted hazelnut balls)
By: Olivia Darmanin
Tags: Christmas Sweets, Desserts, Recipes, Cibus, Mother

This is a Christmas recipe taken from my Mother’s diary where she recorded recipes from our childhood days. The flavor, smell and texture of these hazelnut balls bring so many nostalgic memories and instil in me the warm spirit of Christmas. Hope they work this way for you too!

Ingredients:

400g flour, sifted

300g butter, cut into cubes

2 tsp baking powder

200g roasted hazelnuts, peeled

1 egg

2 tblsp fine sugar

2 tblsp anisette liqueur

Using your fingertips rub in the butter with flour together until the mixture resembles fine crumbs. Add the remaining ingredients and knead into soft and smooth dough. Form bite-sized balls and place them on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper. Bake in a 150º Celsius, preheated oven. Remove from the oven once the hazelnut balls are firm. Roll them in icing sugar when they are still warm.
7 Masalah terbesar yang dihadapi oleh visualisasi data saat ini
Tags: Data Visualization, Dvsintl, Dvsintro

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