fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Fine Line Between Smart and Creepy Online Marketing
By: Junie Rutkevich
Tags: SEO, Online Marketing, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing

3. Random Comments

Another way to increase your website rankings is to pop in on hundreds of blogs and websites around the net, and leave random comments at the end of each post — all with a link back to your site.

Genius?

THINK AGAIN!

Imagine for a moment you are walking down the street and “drop in” on every person you pass who is talking to someone else. Without listening or understanding the conversation, you randomly say “Rhinoceros”, or “I want shoes like yours. Where did you get them?”

You can expect more than the odd look. Generally people will think you a pest and tell you to go away (or they will just find you creepy and take great pains to avoid you). These sorts of comments will not have people racing towards you to buy your services.

The online world is the same.

Adding value to quality conversations is great for your reputation.

Dropping spam comments on random conversations is creepy and damages your reputation and even your rankings.

Many business websites are now finding that the cheap SEO company they outsourced their work to, used a random comment (or link spam) process to generate links and their website has now been penalized by Google.

The business owners now have to work with reputable SEO company to send out thousands of requests to sites around the world to have these spam links removed.

Cheap has definitely turned into creepy and nasty.

I’m serious… it will give you more damage than good.

As a rule of thumb, if you don’t know how to do it properly, hire somebody who can do the job and don’t go cheap.

Trust me, it will be worth every penny.
Parsing REST API Payload and Query Parameters With Flask.
By: Ahmed Nafies
Tags: Https, Json, Python, Web Development, Flask

Intro

For a very long time Flask was my first choice of framework when it came to building micro-services (until python 3.6 and async/await came to life). I have used Flask with a different number of extensions depending on the situation. flask-restful , flask-restplus , webargs .. etc. All of these extensions were great until I needed to parse the request payload or query parameters, it gets painful and the reason is they are all built on top of marshmallow .

Marshmallow

Marshmallow is probably the oldest python package for object serialisation and parsing and probably most of the flask extensions are built of top of it.

here is an example of marshmallow

from datetime import date

from pprint import pprint



from marshmallow import Schema, fields





class ArtistSchema(Schema):

name = fields.Str()





class AlbumSchema(Schema):

title = fields.Str()

release_date = fields.Date()

artist = fields.Nested(ArtistSchema())





bowie = dict(name="David Bowie")

album = dict(artist=bowie, title="Hunky Dory", release_date=date(1971, 12, 17))



schema = AlbumSchema()

result = schema.dump(album)

pprint(result, indent=2)

# { 'artist': {'name': 'David Bowie'},

# 'release_date': '1971-12-17',

# 'title': 'Hunky Dory'

The Pros

Stable and provides a lot of complex functionality

The Cons

Can be confusing sometimes when you use dump vs load. It is old and not using python annotations. Documentation is terrible and ugly

Pydantic

Another package for object parsing, validation and serialisation which is more intuitive and uses python type annotations.

The Pros

Uses python type annotation Documentation is fabulous, check here No dump or load Can be used for settings management as well

The Cons

It is new and is not yet battle tested like marshmallow There are not much flask extensions/packages built on top of it

The same example written using pydantic

from datetime import date

from pprint import pprint



from pydantic import BaseModel





class ArtistSchema(BaseModel):

name: str





class AlbumSchema(BaseModel):

title: str

release_date: date

artist: ArtistSchema bowie = dict(name="David Bowie")

album = dict(artist=bowie, title="Hunky Dory", release_date=date(1971, 12, 17))



schema = AlbumSchema(**album)



pprint(result.dict(), indent=2)

# { 'artist': {'name': 'David Bowie'},

# 'release_date': '1971-12-17',

# 'title': 'Hunky Dory'

Here is the same exact example written in a much more intuitive way.

Webargs

Webargs is a popular Python library for parsing and validating HTTP request objects, with built-in support for Flask built on top of marshmallow

from flask import Flask

from webargs import fields

from webargs.flaskparser import use_args

from marshmallow import Schema, fields app = Flask(__name__) class user(BaseModel):

name = fields.Str()

@app.route("/")

@use_args(user(), location="query")

def index(args):

return "Hello " + args["name"]





if __name__ == "__main__":

app.run()



Luckily there is another webargs package which is using pydantic now, called pydantic-webargs
Infogram Insights: Startup Failure Rates
Tags: Business, Startup, Startup Lessons, Data Visualization, Infographics

The challenges faced by successful businesses are as diverse as the entrepreneurial landscape itself. And sometimes, a simple series of unexpected pitfalls and unwary mistakes can shatter dreams of becoming “the next big thing.”

‘Infogram Insights’ offers a deeper look at relevant, newsworthy topics — visualized with Infogram. Every week we explore the data that is forever changing our world.

Do you have a story you’d like to tell with data? Infogram features beautiful templates, 36+ chart types, 200,000+ icons, and 200+ regional maps.
One Percent Better
By: Laura Mcdonell
Tags: Ironman, One Percent, Triathlon, Improvement, Productivity

One Percent Better

A New Approach To Improvement

I Was Inspired by 1%

Last weekend Chris Nikic became the first person with down syndrome to complete an Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run completed in under 17 hours). His story of how he set a goal and then focused on getting 1% better each day has inspired me to improve in a new way.

It’s about a commitment to manageable growth and a refusal to be complacent over time.

Is 1% Each Day Possible?

Depending on the starting point, there comes the point where improving by 1% each day might be a challenge. What if one 1 % represented improving by doing one thing better each time. Today maybe it’s running one minute longer, and tomorrow perhaps it’s hanging on the pullup bar for 5 seconds more than usual or speaking words of encouragement to one more teammate.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Gui Programming : Any Kid Can Code
By: Laxman Singh
Tags: Python, Python For Beginners, Kids And Tech, Gaming, Kids

What is GUI?

GUI means Graphical user interface. Any software which has visual components where actual user can interact with that software comes under GUI. e.g, User type with keyboard, press mouse button, etc.

In games, we have an interface, where we can use different inputs to play it. That is GUI which is allowing to interact in the game.
Growing Dreams Into Sprouting Nightmares — Beyond Senses Known
By: Greg Prince
Tags: Storytelling, Creative Writing, Fiction, Short Story, Horror

She spoke out one too many times. Robyn’s inquisitions about the relationship between the moon and the earth infuriated Mr. Cavendish. When Ms. Edwards, the science teacher, finished her presentation on our solar system and left the classroom, Mr. Cavendish tensed then frowned at Robyn.

“Ms. Mwezi, see me after class! You will be on detention until further notice.” His loud words dripped with unkind and unpleasant portent.

Robyn’s confusion moistened her eyes, but before a tear fell, she recovered her composure and said, “Yes, Mr. Cavendish.”

“That’s yes, Sir from you, young lady,” Mr. Cavendish said.

“Yes, Sir,” Robyn said back with a snap and irritation. Mr. Cavendish pretended not to notice, but the reply scared him. She had an unexpected firm and confident tone that sent chills trembling along Jim Cavendish’s spine.

After class, Robyn approached her teacher’s desk, and he ignored her for 5 minutes while he organized his class tests and assignments. Her silent, dead stare disturbed Mr. Cavendish, but he didn’t betray his unease.

Finally, he jolted out of his seat and said, “Come to the board now. You will write, ‘I will be quiet and listen,’ 100 times before you can walk home.” Then, he grabbed Robyn’s hand and pulled her close.

“You will not speak in my class unless you’re spoken to from now on. Do you understand me?”

Robyn felt his hot breath on her forehead. She focused her eyes into a fierce glare and yanked her hand from his. Robyn’s Mom showed her how to break a strong grip. She twisted in a fast jerk and pulled with all her energy while turning her hips and stomping on the floor.

Robyn slammed her foot on Jim Cavendish’s toe. Her heel felt like it went right through his patent leather shoes and pierced the tile underneath. Mr. Cavendish screamed in pain.

He grabbed her by the hips, stood, and pushed Robyn to the marker board. His body pressed against hers. Her anger overcame the sick, nauseous thought of him touching her. It was more than wrong, and Mr. Cavendish was assaulting her. Robyn remembered the school safety meeting about predators.

Before he left her at the marker board, he whispered in her ear, “I’ll be watching you until you’re finished, so don’t think about running away.”

Mr. Cavendish turned and tripped over his desk chair. He fell on the floor, and his nose slammed into the tile. But, he didn’t say anything and dabbed at his blood, then placed the soiled cloth on his desk.

The elementary school vice principal knocked at their classroom glass door, and Mr. Cavendish met with her in the hall. Robyn grabbed Mr. Cavendish’s bloodied cloth and stuffed it in her backpack.
Wool Weekly — Volume 13
By: Emma Cookson
Tags: Startup, Digital, Manchester, Tech, Digital Marketing

It has been a very busy week at Wool Digital; we have pitched for new projects, conducted interviews, and attended some insightful networking events. Find out more about what has been happening this week here.
Could CA’s Internet Privacy Law Help Save Journalism?
By: Save Journalism
Tags: Privacy, Big Tech, News, Journalism, Local News

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Journalists and internet privacy activists are speaking out in the wake of a recent hearing on big data and privacy in Washington, D.C., arguing that tech companies’ ad practices are hollowing out the news business and even threatening democracy.

They contended the problem is that companies like Google and Facebook use people’s personal data to control 60% of the digital advertising market. Brian O’Kelley, who invented the back-end system that supports digital ads, said big tech can out-compete news sites for ad dollars because they monetize users’ every move online.

“Google and Facebook specifically are really aggressive with how they use our personal data,” O’Kelley said. “And one reason they can make so much money in advertising is because of the data they have that the fragmented, local newspapers and news stations just don’t have.”

Thousands of journalists have been laid off nationwide this year, and a University of North Carolina study found more than 1,800 local newspapers have closed since 2004.

The Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union Tribune have both seen waves of layoffs in recent years. Perhaps ironically, both papers got a lifeline when tech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased them in 2018.

Data privacy activists who would like to loosen big data’s grip urged Congress to pass a federal version of California’s Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. The law forces tech companies to tell people what kinds of data they are collecting, and delete it on request. It also allows users the right to opt out of having personal information collected, with no penalty.

Laura Bassett, a freelance journalist formerly with the Huffington Post, said she wants Congress to break up — or at least better regulate — Facebook and Google, so news companies can recapture the ad revenue to fund their reporting efforts.

“We create the content, write the stories. Facebook takes that content for free and posts it on their site and then takes all of the advertising money that would otherwise be going to us,” Bassett said. “And suddenly, we’re not getting paid for the work that we’re doing, and having to lay off journalists and unable to financially survive.”

Bassett pointed out a vibrant press helps ensure a free society by investigating corruption, explaining the impact of government policies and fostering a sense of community.
DeepMind AI Predicts Traffic on the Roads
By: Mikhail Raevskiy
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning

Making models generalise through customised loss functions

Conceptual Idea

The idea behind DeepMind traffic prediction is mostly in making models generalise though custom built objective functions.

While the supreme goal of DeepMind system is to reduce errors in travel estimates, they discovered that making use of a linear combination of multiple loss functions with weight greatly increased the generalization ability of the model.

Specifically, we formulated a multi-loss objective making use of a regularising factor on the model weights, L_2 and L_1 losses on the global traversal times, as well as individual Huber and negative-log likelihood (NLL) losses for each node in the graph. By combining these losses we were able to guide our model and avoid overfitting on the training dataset. While our measurements of quality in training did not change, improvements seen during training translated more directly to held-out tests sets and to our end-to-end experiments.

Future Research

Now DeepMind is focusing on examining of possible application of the MetaGradient approach for altering the composition of the multi-component loss-function during training, using the reduction in travel estimate errors as a guiding metric.

This work is inspired by the MetaGradient efforts that have found success in reinforcement learning, and early experiments show promising results.

Read More

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They
By: Tyrone Graham
Tags: Writer, Life, Poetry, Poem, Writing

bring people together

and sooner or later

groups will form

and true to form

they will dispute

every foot

and come to blows

until one group bows

because no two clans

share the same plans

though each will consider

the other a bother

fit only for the work

they themselves would shirk

its them and us

at the heart of a fuss

whatever it happens to be

same as in history

though leveled fingers

and ideological crossfires

have been known

to have borne

compromise now and then

with all men

full of smiles

for a while

especially when common sense

dictates an alliance

against some other

up and coming power

(which could also offer

weight to their coffers)

in any conflict

someone has to merit

blame for the war

and the law

of self preservation

demands the crucifixion

of a suitable oddball

pleasing to all

and the sputum

in the vacuum

will be the weakest

in the nest

the rising sun

is a phenomenon

when you see

the infallibility

with which they

find a way

to duck all blame

and consign to the flames

someone less adroit

and you can bet on it

that they

will always say

it wasnt them

and that in any system

there has to be

someone handy

who will always

have to pay

the price

of avarice
Portraits of Life
By: Beth Bruno
Tags: Poetry, Life, Writing Life, Poem, Writing

Painting pictures with a jigsaw of words

Photo by Trevor McKinnon on Unsplash

Words come to me in a jumble.

500, 1000, 2000 pieces,

lying together in the box of my mind,

waiting.

I open the lid.

I pour them out into a pile.

I begin to sort through them.

The edge pieces first.

I look for the structure,

the frame, the outline that

encompasses my thoughts.

I am working quickly.

I do not want to lose

the shape of the puzzle,

it’s borders.

Then I slow down.

Now I begin to mindfully choose,

turning the words this way and that

until they snap together with a pleasant

snap.

I am absorbed in my work.

Head bent over the puzzle of my words,

a woman enthralled.

I move them around.

I try them first here, and then there,

wondering what I will create.

I force some words into the wrong slots.

They seemed to fit,

but now I have to pry them out

where I have wedged them in.

I move them around some more.

Suddenly I see the places they belong,

fitting neatly beside their neighbor.

I stand back to inspect my work.

I can see I have created a picture

from the pile of words.
If You Only Read One Article Today to Improve Your Writing, Make It “An”
By: Grin Spickett
Tags: Humor, English, Grammar, Authors, Writing

Like boxing, writing is a dance of the familiar and the unexpected. Using the right mix of articles such as “a” and “the” is useful for staying on rhythm while waiting for just the right moment to strike and knock out your reader’s expectations.

Tactical use of the 3rd article, “an,” provides a powerful punch. Less common than either of its siblings, “an” is worth examining up close and in our faces.

Legendary writers, which are mostly Hemingway, withheld their “an’s” for just the right moment — such as in front of a noun that starts with a vowel!

So, today, if you read only one article to improve your writing, let it be “an,” your new secret weapon for a surprise reader takedown!

Read on for three daring, Hemingway-approved uses of “an.”
Letters.
Tags: Poetry, Writing

why do i feel like i don’t own you?

your words, phrases that once echo my soul now seem like an

abyss abandoned by its

invisible being.

why do all of you appears new to me?

…that every time i roam my eyes on your entirety, i barely remember a thing.

tell me,

had i written you?

did i spend hours to fulfill

my fixation upon you?

why does it feels like

everything is brand new?

…like i am back from the

start where it’s all scraps

and full of trash.

i am lost yet to find.
How to Deploy a Dockerised Application on AWS ECS With Terraform
By: Andrew Bestbier
Tags: Containers, AWS, Programming, Docker, JavaScript

Step 3. Push the Node App to AWS ECR

Now it is time we pushed our container to a container registry service — in this case, we will use AWS ECR:

Instead of using the AWS UI, we will use terraform to create our repository. In your directory create a file called main.tf . Populate your file with the following commented code:

Next, in your terminal, type:

terraform init

terraform apply

You will then be shown an execution plan with the changes terraform will make on AWS. Type yes:

We will be using the terraform apply command repeatedly throughout this tutorial to deploy our changes. If you then navigate to the AWS ECR service, you should see your newly created repository:

Now we can push our Node application image up to this repository. Click on the repository and click View push commands. A modal will appear with four commands you need to run locally in order to have your image pushed up to your repository:

Once you have run these commands, you should see your pushed image in your repository:

AWS ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service. AWS ECS is a fantastic service for running your containers. In this guide we will be using ECS Fargate, as this is a serverless compute service that allows you to run containers without provisioning servers.

ECS has three parts: clusters, services, and tasks.

Tasks are JSON files that describe how a container should be run. For example, you need to specify the ports and image location for your application. A service simply runs a specified number of tasks and restarts/kills them as needed. This has similarities to an auto-scaling group for EC2. A cluster is a logical grouping of services and tasks. This will become more clear as we build.
Dr. Guillotin— The Enlightened Executioner
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: France, Death, Salsa, History, Writing

Dr. Guillotin— The Enlightened Executioner

Head chopping machine named after man who hated corporal punishment

It was 25th April, 1792. A spring day. A crowd had gathered to marvel at the new executioner’s toy. A sharp blade that would swiftly descend in one motion severing a head from its owner’s torso.

Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier was to be the first recipient of the guillotine. He had been found guilty of killing a man during a highway robbery. Or he may have raped, robbed and assaulted. Nobody knew for sure, the Judge just knew he was guilty.

All around the Place de Grève the mob had grown restless. Nasty Nic, resplendent in a frilly red shirt for the occasion, matched the blood red color of the guillotine. Within seconds of positioning, Pelletier’s head was decapitated. Blood soaked the newly erected scaffold.

The crowd, unsure of what they had just witnessed, weren’t pleased. Boos began to ring out. The spectacle was too clinical and anticlimactic to satisfy the bloodlust of the crowd.

“Give me back my wooden gallows,” members of the mob chanted. This was no way to spend a Saturday afternoon at an execution.

Where was the drama? Where was the drawn-out death? Where was the suffering and cries of anguish? If any of the crowd had paid, they would’ve demanded their money back. Instead, they began to lob rotten fruit at the humane killing machine.

It wouldn’t be long before the mob realized just how good the guillotine was. They began to appreciate it’s swiftness and capacity for multiple deaths in a single day.

The following year in Lyon, December 1793, the guillotine recorded 209 victims. More blood than the crowd had ever seen before.
Follow
By: Indira Reddy
Tags: Chalkboard, Follow, One Line Poetry Prompt, Poetry, Writing

Follow

A one-line poem prompt

He left a trail of crumbs,

Knowing I’d follow

And despite the prison

I knew awaited

I still followed, addicted

Your Turn

Please share your own one-line poem on the word “Follow”. Either as a response to this post, or if you prefer to write it as a stand alone piece, just make sure to leave a link to it in the response section below.

FYI: Responding to a prompt adds you to the notification list. Join us — we are a creative group!
UX & Product designer portfolios for inspiration
By: .Dsgnrs. Team
Tags: Design, UX, Product Design, Portfolio, Web Design

Stories from .dsgnrs. team, The place where designers become top designers www.dsgnrs.io

Follow
A Little Phil Spector Trivia
By: William, Dollar Bill
Tags: Phil Spector, Music Business, Nonfiction, Memoir, Culture

A Little Phil Spector Trivia

Watch out for the Hell’s Angels

Pixabay — Pexels

For almost anybody familiar with popular music, Phil Spector is an iconic figure worthy of admiration. And any backstory or gossip about Phil is of interest. Well, because I played behind a couple of acts he discovered and popularized — and my father worked with Phil back in the olden days when he was current — I have some good anecdotes.

Like daddy used to tell me: “Ya know…you hippies didn’t invent marijuana.” Milly Vanilli and company didn’t invent having one individual sing on the record — and another do the live gigs! Phil had his A-list singers for the records…and his B-listers to hit the road.

When I was with The Shirelles, I asked Beverly (one of the originals) how she became part of the group. I was curious — because really…she could barely sing at all. If talent had anything to do with becoming a teen idol, Beverly shouldn’t have been within 1000 miles of a hit record!

She responded that Phil Spector went to (I believe it was) Paramus High School to find girls to form a group. And at age 14 — with not very much talent and obviously no experience — Beverly became a recording star! Some 13 years after all their hits, I was hired to lead the backup band and came to discover that of the three originals still touring, only one could actually sing!

The situation was similar with The Crystals. Of the 4 girls fronting the act, only one (Dee Dee) was an original, and she did not sing lead for our shows! That job was handed to a ringer many years her junior! More than a decade later, Dee Dee still wasn’t ready for prime time, though I saw a video on You Tube today with her doing an excellent job on a recent version of Da Do Ron Ron — a much better job than she could have done 35 years ago.

Anyway…my old man had the best Phil Spector story. Back in the early 60’s, the rock and roll business was much smaller and more independent than it is today. Most of the hits came out of indy record labels with offices at 1619 and 1650 Broadway. And almost everybody in the biz knew everybody else. Given that my old man was writing arrangements for almost all those artists (including Phil’s), he knew Spector and related a story that the legend had confessed to my old man.

Phil’s first hit was “To Know Know Know Him,” and he himself went on the road as one of the singers for The Teddy Bears, the act who’d recorded the hit.

One night while they were touring — playing some dive or other — Phil went to the bathroom to take a leak. And while he was draining the lizard, a bunch of Hell’s Angels walked in and upon seeing the diminutive singer, whipped it out and pissed on him!

Now, how’s that for the downside of being a rock star? Popsicle had no attitude about Mr. Spector when he related the tale…so I assume it’s true.

I guess the moral of the story is thàt if you’re a little guy in a rough bar and you have to take a leak? Use the stall and pretend you’re taking a dump. Then you won’t get pissed off for getting pissed on!
New family on the block: a novel group of glycosidic enzymes
By: Tokyo University Of Science
Tags: Eukaryotic Dna, Carbohydrates, Science, Enzyme

New family on the block: a novel group of glycosidic enzymes

Scientists discover a candidate for a potential new “family” of enzymes that break down carbohydrates

A group of researchers from Japan has recently discovered a novel enzyme from a soil fungus. In their study, they speculate that this enzyme plays important roles in the soil ecosystem, and then describe its structure and action.

A group of researchers from Japan has recently discovered a novel enzyme from a soil fungus. In their study published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, they speculate that this enzyme plays important roles in the soil ecosystem, and then describe its structure and action. They also think that once the usefulness of the main product of this enzyme is better understood in the future, this enzyme could also be exploited for industrial purposes. The researchers state, “Our study sheds light on the fact that new enzymes are still being discovered. It possibly lays the foundation for further research to identify new enzymes that yield carbohydrates that were once thought to be extremely difficult to prepare.”

Carbohydrates are probably the most versatile organic molecules on the planet, as they play various roles in organisms. Accordingly, the functions and structures of enzymes related to carbohydrate are just as diverse. Glycoside hydrolases (GHs) are enzymes that break “glycosidic bonds” in carbohydrates or sugars. GHs are the largest known group of carbohydrate-related enzymes, and the group keeps expanding. A novel family, GH144, was identified by the same research group in the past from a soil bacterium Chitinophaga pinensis and called CpSGL.

The enzyme endo-β-1,2-glucanase (SGL), a member of the GH family, is involved in the metabolism of β-1,2-glucan, which is a polysaccharide (sugar chain) composed of β-1,2-linked glucose units. β-1,2-glucan serves as an extracellular carbohydrate that plays important roles in the symbiosis or infectivity of some bacteria. However, the role of SGLs in eukaryotic cells and their relationship with bacterial SGLs are not well understood.

This group of Japanese scientists from different universities and a research institute, working on a collaborative project led by Masahiro Nakajima, has discovered a novel SGL enzyme from a soil fungus, Talaromyces funiculosus. The enzyme, hereafter called TfSGL, showed no significant sequence similarity to other known GH families. However, it showed significant similarities to other eukaryotic proteins with unknown functions. The researchers thus propose that TfSGL and these related GH enzymes be classified into a new family, which they call GH162.

Usually when scientists find a novel protein — in this case, an enzyme — they further clone the gene containing the sequence that encodes it to better understand its functionality. This clone is called a “recombinant” sequence. The recombinant TfSGL protein (TfSGLr) was found to break down both linear and cyclic β-1,2-glucans to sophorose, a simpler and smaller carbohydrate.
Scarcity in Sneaker Culture (UX)
By: Kyle Osborne
Tags: Fashion, Sneakers, User Experience, Design, UX

Solutions

Adidas

Option #1 — Transition So Users Know they Can Pick a Size

I think that an excellent way to remedy the transition from queue to size selection would be a transition — a fade in, a fade out, anything to make it more apparent that you are transitioning from queue to size selection.

Option #2 — Break Uniformity

Mock up of what the new size selection screen can look like

Break the uniformity of the site and change the layout. Move the size selection to the centre of the screen so it’s obvious that this is a different stage of the purchasing process.

Changing the User Flow

Adidas’ current user flow is something like this

Queue -> Size Selection -> Checkout

I would suggest something like the Nike user flow

Size Selection -> Queue -> Checkout

Pros

Reduces user frustration, they don’t have to wait in line for hours to find out their size sold out

Reduces resellers purchasing whatever size is left over, they have to commit to a size

Cons

Could lead to more bots, add to cart bots could select the size and then enter into the queue for the bot user

Nike

Use a Captcha Before You Can Pick a Size

Make users enter a captcha before they can even select a size, add to cart bots will get stopped at the captcha and won’t be able to enter into the queue for the user/reseller.

Put Some Instructions at the Countdown Timer

I think this is pretty self explanatory, put some instructions on the product page if there’s a timer so users don’t have to look through the FAQ page for the waiting in line feature.

Pros

Reduce the number of bots and resellers purchasing

Make the procedure to purchase more streamlined and educate the user

Cons

The captcha before the size selection may break and not allow real users to select a size

Conclusion

Adidas has a high quality product and wants to make sure it gets to the consumer and not resellers. Their queue system is made to combat bots, but a large amount of shoes still get picked up by bots and the user is left frustrated. The adjustments I suggested should help with this and make the user experience much less confusing and frustrating.

Nike has a much more user friendly queue system, but it is much more prone to bots. They would benefit from stopping bots before they can select a size.

Scarcity in sneakers is a double edged sword as it benefits the consumer by allowing them to get a high quality low supply piece of merchandise and it allows the retailer to sell a high volume of product in a short amount of time. The downside is when resellers purchase all of the limited product and flip them at a premium leading to frustrated customers who may give up on buying the item.

Decided to take two things that I’m really interested in, sneakers and UX, and put them together. Constructive criticism is appreciated

-Kyle
How to fall in love with reading
By: Michael Lim
Tags: Self Development, Books, Habits, Reading, Self Improvement

1. Read what you enjoy, not what you think you should be reading.

Read anything that interests you.

Fiction, crime, young adult, comics, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey.

I don’t care.

Read whatever captures your attention and curiosity.

Through social pressure, many people feel they need to read books on the top 10 bestsellers. Don’t feel the pressure to read what society says you should read.

Everyone has different music preferences and food taste.

Books should be treated no differently.
I’m Doing Better As a Writer on Medium Than The Local Newspaper Who Turned Down Hiring Me Five Years Ago
By: Brian Brewington
Tags: Writing, Creative Writing, Publishing, Life Lessons, Life

Though I’ve always written, in one form another from the time I was twelve or so — I never had any plans on applying to write for a major publication.

It just wasn’t who I saw myself as, maybe I didn’t take myself seriously enough and for good reason probably. Sure I could write an essay deserving of an A but I preferred to write rap lyrics in a notebook and not tell anyone. So that’s basically what I did. However, every so often, something I had to write for school would stand out above that of my peers and a fuss would be made of it by teachers and such. Still, writing wasn’t something I saw myself doing professionally. I guess I just didn’t think it was possible.

However, five years ago, a family member of mine who had nothing but the best intentions and just wanted to be of help to me, suggested I apply as a writer to my local newspaper. A friend of hers is an editor there and she offered to reach out. Though, I knew it wouldn’t have been the kind of writing I actually enjoy, I figured I had nothing to lose and applied.

Not to my surprise, the writing samples I sent in “weren’t what they were looking for” and I was let down lightly — most likely as a courtesy to my family member — by her friend. I’m almost positive I would have been otherwise ignored. The truth is, I wasn’t upset because I didn’t want to work there in the first place. My history with the publication has mainly comprised of seeing people I grew up with listed in the “Northeast’s Most Wanted” section. Though, I once read a letter to the editor they published in 2005, by some old miserable soul who wrote in to question the character of my deceased friend, who had been tragically killed saving her infant daughter, weeks earlier.

Besides, it’s a paper they distribute for free every week in my neighborhood, what would they have possibly paid me to write for them?
How to generate lat and long coordinates of city without using APIS in Python.
By: Prabhat Pathak
Tags: Maps, Pandas, Google, Data Science, Data Visualization

How to generate lat and long coordinates of city without using APIS in Python. Prabhat Pathak Follow May 17 · 3 min read

Easy codes to understand

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

if anyone would like to plot map graphs using geographical coordinates (The latitude and longitude which define the position of a point on the surface of the Earth .A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude.

Photo by oxana v on Unsplash

Latitude lines run east-west and are parallel to each other. If you go north, latitude values increase. Finally, latitude values (Y-values) range between -90 and +90 degrees

But longitude lines run north-south. They converge at the poles. And its X-coordinates are between -180 and +180 degrees.

Cartographers write spherical coordinates (latitudes and longitudes) in degrees-minutes-seconds (DMS) and decimal degrees. For degrees-minutes-seconds, minutes range from 0 to 60. For example, the geographic coordinate expressed in degrees-minutes-seconds for New York City is:

Latitude: 40 degrees, 42 minutes, 51 seconds N

Longitude: 74 degrees, 0 minutes, 21 seconds W

We can also express geographic coordinates in decimal degrees. It’s just another way to represent that same location in a different format. For example, here is New York City in decimal degrees:

Latitude: 40.714

Longitude: -74.006

Read more here if you like to understand more deeper.

Let’s get started

I am using Jupyter notebook to run the script in this Article.

First, we will be installing Libraries like Nominatim and geopy using PIP.

pip install geopy

pip install Nominatim

now the code is really easy we just need to run this

Case 1: Where only City name is mention

from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim address='Nagpur'

geolocator = Nominatim(user_agent="Your_Name")

location = geolocator.geocode(address)

print(location.address)

print((location.latitude, location.longitude))

after running above code this is the output we will get.

Nagpur, Nagpur District, Maharashtra, 440001, India

(21.1498134, 79.0820556)

Case 2: Where both Country and City name is mentioned.

We can run another code as well if we have Country name and city name .

from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim

geolocator = Nominatim() city ="Agra"

country ="India"

loc = geolocator.geocode(city+','+ country)

print("latitude is :-" ,loc.latitude,"

longtitude is:-" ,loc.longitude)

output is :

latitude is :- 27.1752554

longtitude is:- 78.0098161

Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash

Conclusion

we can generate lat and long using googlemaps APIs as well, but for APIs you have to pay some charges.

I hope this article will help you and save a good amount of time. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

HAPPY CODING.

Sources :

https://gisgeography.com/latitude-longitude-coordinates/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system/
Esteghlal (Taj)
By: Pendar Yousefi
Tags: Iran, Design, Graphic Design, Esteghlal, Soccer

When it comes to Football in Iran, two clubs have more fans than any other. The blues of Esteghlal — formerly named Taj — are one of them (Persepolis, covered in this series earlier, are the other). In addition to two Asian club championship trophies, Esteghlal have eight Iranian league championships and six cup wins to their name.

Taj in early 70s. Photo from http://takhtejamshidcup.com/

Initially founded as a cycling club in 1945 by an army general, the club was originally called The Cyclists. It soon changed its name to Taj. While the Persian word Taj literally translates to crown in English, the word is also used as a term of endearment and respect.

Despite this, the symbolic association of the crown with the Iranian monarchy meant that the club was forced to change its name after the 1979 revolution. Esteghlal — independence in English — was chosen as the new name. However, to this day many fans still use the Taj in their chants.

Logo

The club’s founding logo was a man on a bicycle, fitting for a cycling club. After the first name change to Taj, the club sported a new logo with 4 interconnected rings (presumably symbolizing their history as a cycling club) and a crown in the middle.

The next name change Esteghlal (independence) had its roots in popular revolutionary slogans, and with it came a new logo that broke with continuity and introduced new elements. This logo was used throughout the 80s, a decade that saw Iran fight a bloody war with Iraq.
I’m Starting A Writing Retreat for Worn-Out Women, The Likes of Which You’ve Never Seen
By: Jennifer Barnett
Tags: Witchcraft, Feminism, Fantasy, Essay, Writing

I’m Starting A Writing Retreat for Worn-Out Women, The Likes of Which You’ve Never Seen Jennifer Barnett Follow Nov 18 · 3 min read

You are all invited.

Do you prefer turrets or gables?

I’m starting a writing retreat for worn-out women. There is no application process, and everyone is welcome. It will be modeled after Jenny’s shingled Fisher Island home in The World According to Garp but it will be a gothic estate with a hedge maze and a glass conservatory. It will be the Lilith Fair of writing groups.

The house will be worthy of haunting when you die, and you are welcome to take up permanent residence with the sister spirits who already reside within. Sylvia Plath enjoys sunning herself on the wrap around porch. We will conjure the spirits of your idols, who will serve as mentors for your great work. There will be a wood burning fireplace in every room as well as a bathtub with feet. Every room will have a view of the sea. Disparate design schemes will flow organically, from the tasseled curtains to the Queen’s Gambit patterned wallpaper. There will be an infinite supply of candles and they smell exactly the way you desire them to smell. There will be misty moors and a nearby forest. The weather will be sunny yet moody at exactly the same time.

I will serve you tea and magic pancakes and nourish your body and spirit. You will rest and come back to life. You will heal. We will be a collective force for good, however if it is revenge you seek, you will find collaboration in your endeavors and will be victorious as revenge is a maligned concept — an overlooked virtue. You may each bring a familiar or one will be provided for you. There will be dancing in the moonlight, there will be sleeping naked in the sun. You’ve never seen so many bespoke caftans in all manner of materials — the luxury is unsurpassed. Your body hair will cease to exist (unless you prefer to keep it, it’s entirely your choice), yet the hair on your head will burgeon like climbing vines, but thicker and impossibly lustrous.

You will begin to feel your creativity coursing through your veins, flowing from within, channeled through your fingers to the page. Your imagination will race, your ideas will be brilliant, you will remember every passing thought and bind it on paper, the words will come faster than you can type, but you will capture them all. Everyone in the house will inspire you and see the talent that you’ve always had, and bring out your best, challenging you to dig deeper. You will hone your craft. You’ll hear whispers. “Spellbinding.” You will create your best Dorothy Chandler Pavillion-level work and the Academy will receive your thanks.

Welcome, sister writers. Your room has been prepared, and we are awaiting your arrival. I can’t wait for you to get here.

Xox
The Wilderness Will Wait
By: Ema Dumitru
Tags: Forest, Poetry, Poem, Scuzzbucket, Writing

And like the forest

I see myself lined up

and waiting for nobody.

My breath stops short in the air

Drop of light at the edge of the knife

It goes nowhere.

The void has settled over

the impaled trees

Guides of the dead.

They speak through me

with one another.

I am at loss

But I’m reassured

In the end,

wilderness will defeat time

and its incarnations.
Extracting Speech from Video using Python
By: Behic Guven
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Programming

Getting Started

As you can understand from the title, we will need a video recording for this project. It can even be a recording of yourself speaking to the camera. Using a library called MoviePy, we will extract the audio from the video recording. And in the next step, we will convert that audio file into text using Google’s speech recognition library. If you are ready, let’s get started by installing the libraries!

Libraries

We are going to use two libraries for this project:

Speech Recognition

MoviePy

Before importing them to our project file, we have to install them. Installing a module library is very easy in python. You can even install a couple of libraries in one line of code. Write the following line in your terminal window:

pip install SpeechRecognition moviepy

Yes, that was it. SpeechRecognition module supports multiple recognition APIs, and Google Speech API is one of them. You can learn more about the module from here.

MoviePy is a library that can read and write all the most common audio and video formats, including GIF. If you are having issues when installing moviepy library, try by installing ffmpeg. Ffmpeg is a leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created.

Now, we should get to writing code in our code editor. We will start by importing the libraries.
Empyrean beats
By: Miguel Adrover
Tags: Astronomy, Black Holes, Science, Poetry, Stars

Beating to the rhythm of gamma-ray beats

Bound to a black hole 15,000 light years away,

Mass’ violence — its unfathomable yen —

Saps stars…we grasp gamma music.

Beating stars take lifetimes to die;

Their swan songs are vast funeral pyres.

Their verb reverberates violently,

Sometimes hunted by singularities.

Gas clouds bigger than a solar system

Learn the stellar cries of decay;

They relay space cadences,

Spent starlight dances with our senses.
How Instagram Queen Makes $1M In A Day With This 1 Ecommerce Hack
By: Joel Ong
Tags: Grettavanriel, Marketing, Busineß, Ecommerce, Instagram

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Gretta van Riel

15 Million+ Followers on Instagram & Counting, at the tender age of 25, she skyrocketted from zero dollars in revenue to $600,000 in under six months.

Gretta breaks down the different strategies to uncover your ecommerce brand — whether you choose to work with an agency or do it yourself.

She’ll cover The Four V’s (vision, values, voice, and visuals) as well as brand positioning and unique value propositions (UVPs).

If you want to know more about how to strategically position yourself and your business, and have customers flock to you instead of having to chase them, I have a FREE report of 8 ways you can do that.

Click here to get it for free before it gets taken down.
Reflections
By: Ravyne Hawke
Tags: Mental Health, Essay, Spirituality, Prompt, Self Reflection

What makes life feel complicated right now?

My schedule is out of whack. I’ve been up when I normally sleep and sleeping when I am normally awake. Part of this is because of the depression, but another factor is that my spouse changed work schedules. He was on an 11–7 shift and now he is on a 3–11 shift. Nighttime has always been my writing time. As a writer, I function best between 11 pm and 6 am. Then I will do cleaning, cooking, etc. until noon-ish and go to bed until 8 or 9 pm. All of this has changed now that my spouse is on a different schedule. He comes home around 11:30 pm and is chatty or noisy. He doesn’t settle down until around 5 or 6 am. Then I have to make sure he is awake by 1 pm. By the time he is finally out the door, I am exhausted and want to sleep, but I have things I must do before I can. So normally, I am not in bed until around 4 or 5 pm and sleep until he comes home. See my problem?

He says, “just close the door and I will know you are writing and won’t disturb you unless it is urgent.” And yet, he either disturbs me anyway or is so noisy I cannot write. So I get frustrated and snarky with him. Then he gets snarky back and we have an argument. My only solution is to take sleeping pills and make the world go away.

Another complication is our internet service. It is up and down at will. Sometimes it goes down for a few minutes and other times it is down for hours upon hours. We’ve replaced our box, had the techs out to check lines and add new cables, but still it goes up and down. For the most part, this is merely inconvenient. If I am in the mood to write (which I haven’t been), I can do it on Word or a notepad and transfer wherever when the ‘net is back up. Still it is annoying. And when I am annoyed, I sleep. So again, I’ve been sleeping a lot.
PHP: fix Faker image returns false
By: Thomas Dutrion
Tags: Software Engineering, PHP, Faker, Symfony, Laravel

When generating fixtures on an open source project (Community Event Manager), I encountered an error while generating random images with Faker.

Turns out, Faker uses Lorempixel as a backend to generate image, probably to be able to fetch nice images and avoid having GD or similar extensions to generate an image. In my specific case, Lorempixel was down or very slow for a few days, which makes the code unusable.

According to https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/using-faker-to-fake-images-always-returns-false, you just need to edit the image provider and change it to another provider as you please. Problem is, this provider is part of your vendor… So you probably do not want to do that!

Lucky for us, Faker just loads providers on a last in first out basis, meaning the last image provider (i.e. class that extends base provider and has a image method) will be used. Therefore, we just need to override the existing provider with our own. This one is highly inspired from the existing one, and throws exception whenever the option is not available on the generation site.

Last step is to register this new provider.