fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Untold History Of Glasses
By: Jl Matthews
Tags: Culture, Science, Technology, History, Innovation

One of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone is “Time Enough at Last.” It’s a story about Henry Bemis, a book addict who never has the time to read.

However, Mr. Bemis is handed some good fortune when an atomic war wipes out all of humanity, while he survives unharmed in an underground vault. Finally, no one will bother him; he’ll be able to read for as long as he wants.

Except —

Just as he’s sitting down to enjoy a lifetime of uninterrupted reading, he breaks his thick-lensed glasses.

Unable to repair or replace his glasses, Mr. Bemis never gets to read all those great books.

Thankfully, the tale of Henry Bemis — sole atomic apocalypse survivor — remains fiction. Yet, for those who wear glasses, we can relate to the frustration of breaking or misplacing them.

So how did glasses become such a crucial part of modern life? Who invented them, and how long have they been around?

Let’s take a look.
Bezos and Crypto: Changing the Data Business Model (Part 2 )
Tags: API, Lightning Network, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, Bitcoin

Last week, we shared some of our thoughts around Jeff Bezos’ insight into the early advantages of the internet and how those principles apply to cryptocurrencies and data business models.

This week, we pick up on another key principle Bezos’ discusses about the decision to start Amazon: growth. The growth we are talking about here isn’t at a company level, i.e. total customers, revenue, click-throughs, and so forth. Rather, its a more global, macro perspective that looks at how big a new technology might become.

In 1994, when Jeff Bezos was considering starting a company that would sell books over the internet, he wasn’t preoccupied with how many people currently buy books online (the answer would have been zero). He may have had a notional idea of how big the market for online book sales could be, but the more fundamental data point that intrigued him was the internet and it’s potential. And specifically, the growth rate of the internet — which he approximates was roughly 2300% annually in 1994 (was around 16 million people in 1995).

Here is Bezos in his own words:

While Bitcoin is certainly not the internet — since one is connecting to network of information and the other is a decentralized and distributed ledger — we think Bezos’ focus on core technology growth is a good one and useful in assessing new technology adoption. This also allows us to logically compare and contrast it to other technological advances such as the internet and its adoption.

We could just show this chart of Bitcoin from its inception to current day with its elegant linear hockey stick growth and move on:
Want to Be Successful in All You Do? Make This Your Focus
By: Linda Smith
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons, Advice, Self, Life

Presentation

As an Etsy seller (and buyer) for years, I know this to be true: the most memorable shops put time into their packaging and presentation.

This is valid for brick and mortar stores, online purchases, and extends to areas such as food plating and even gift giving. The trivial details aren’t, in fact, trivial at all. An artfully arranged meal, cocktail or package carries a disproportionate amount of weight when it comes to how a company or event is remembered.

Surprise & delight

Intentionally engineering surprise into the experiences of our customers, clients and families is a small shift that has a huge impact. Little, unexpected touches add enormous value to all you do.

Hotels and Airbnbs know this well. Whether it’s complimentary snacks or cookies upon arrival, fresh flowers in a bathroom, or unique toiletries, they understand that the minutiae matters.

Want to strengthen a relationship? Consider organizing a small surprise. Our most treasured moments in life often arise out of the unexpected.

Branding

What exactly is it you want to be known for? Answering this question will give you a leg up when it comes to deciding on and prioritizing the details of your life. Here are a few examples.

If, as a friend, you want to be noted for your generosity and kindness, thank you notes, birthday cards, just-because texts and small gifts go a long way.

If, as an author, you want to be known for your quirky style, consider adding relevant touches to your website and business cards.

Own a business? Your attention to your brand will directly influence how customers perceive you and your products.

One way to do this is to envision your biography (or even obituary). What would you want it to say? What small details can you target to get you there?

Think about your desired legacy, and you’ll be on your way to teasing out which details to focus on to get you there.
Everything Announced At The Apple Event
By: Yash Patak
Tags: Homepod, Apple Event, Apple, Iphone12, Iphone 12 Pro

iPhone 12

5G will now be available on new iPhones. It is more advanced and has privacy and security in mind. Capacity will be significantly advanced in many stadiums, venues and airports due to Verizons ultra wide 5G capacity. 5G will reach coverage nationwide in more and more cities.

iPhone 12 — All new design with flat edges. Designed with 5G in mid.

Comes in 5 colours: Black, White, Red, Blue and Green.

Super Retina XDR display. Higher resolution with twice the amount that iPhone 11 had.

Durability — Ceramic shield screen which is tougher than any other smartphone glass. It has 4x better drop performance.

5G — Smart Data Mode will automatically switch to LTE when 5G is not needed.

Performance — A14 Bionic, which is the fasteest chip in any iPhone. Multiplayer gaming is getting better on iPhone, with popular game League of Legends, coming to iPhone.

Camera — New Dual Camera system with the ultra wide and wide camera. 7 element lens delivering a 27x better performance in low light. Computational photography brings out all of the details.

MagSafe for iPhone — Improves wireless charging with Belkin also making MagSafe compatible products.

Environmental products — 100% carbon neutral by 2030. !00% recycled rare materials used in all magnets. Power bricks and lighting headphones will be removed to help tackle the problem of e waste. The iPhone box will now be much smaller to help remove packaging. USB C to lightning cable will be included in the box.

iPhone 12 Mini — Smaller and lighter with a 5.4 inch display. Compatible with 5G.

The iPhone 12 mini starts from $699. The iPhone 12 will start from $799.

iPhone 12 Pro

4 new finishes: silver, gold, blue and black.

6.1 inch display for iPhone 12 Pro

6.7 inch display for iPhone 12 Pro Max

Deep fusion to all four cameras. Pro camera system with an ultra wide camera, wide camera, 52mp Telephoto camera. For the 12 Pro Max 87% better low light performance. Sensor shift allows steady video and much better photos.

Apple ProRAW for the 12 Pro and Pro Max takes advantage of Deep Fusion to make amazing edits. An API will allow third parties take to take advantage of Apple’s computational photography.

HDR video recording coming to iPhone 12 Pro to capture significantly more colours. First iPhone to record in Dolby HDR. This will be in 4K resolution and at 60 frames per second.

With a LiDAR sensor will offer improved accuracy and faster autofocus. 6x faster in low light.

iPhone 12 Pro will start from $999 and iPhone 12 Pro Max from $1099. Available for pre order 16th October. Available to buy 23rd October.
Spring Always Comes
By: Brent Manke
Tags: Hope, Poetry, Perseverance, Winter, Life

This week in Manitoba, we’re in the last throes of winter. The biting wind somehow seems much colder in March, when spring should be closer, than it does in January. It’s at this point every winter where a certain hopelessness can set in. Will spring ever arrive? After several months of cold, it’s tough to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Like Narnia, it feels like it will always be winter (and never Christmas!).

And yet we know that spring will, indeed, arrive. Because it comes every year.

We all go through “dead of winter” seasons, whether it be a personal or family difficulty, or while you’re working on a difficult project.

It’s important to remember in these seasons that one day you’ll look back and feel like spring’s arrival was inevitable. Though it feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, you’ll walk into the bright springtime sunshine eventually, if you keep going.

Because spring must come. It always does.
Machine Learning Interview Topics
By: Aman Kharwal
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Programming, Python, Data Science

In this article, I will take you through the most important machine learning interview topics that you should know before appearing in your Machine Learning interview. Before heading over to the most important machine learning interview topics you must have a look at this article to learn how to prepare for a machine learning interview.

Important Machine Learning Interview Topics

The purpose of this article is to help you navigate the entire process, from A to Z, to find and secure an interview in a machine learning position, whether as an engineer, analyst, product manager, data scientist, researcher or whatever the role you determine as a career in machine learning.

I hope you liked this article on the most important machine learning interview topics. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.
Mustard — From Monasteries to Mad Money
By: Bryan Quoc Le
Tags: Business, Food, Science, Technology, History

By Elevate on Unsplash

I regularly drive down to one of adjacent towns near the west side of Madison whenever my wife and I are craving Chinese food. There’s a wonderful place run by a Chinese painter and restaurateur, and I’m always excited to chat with her about the latest and greatest in her artistic life.

After I give her my order, I like to walk outside and look around the little plaza with all its cute shops and interesting cafes.

But one thing always stands out to me on these take-out excursions.

Just across the street is a mustard museum.

The National Mustard Museum.

Really.

Mustard and the Red Sox

The National Mustard Museum is the brain child of former Assistant Attorney General of Wisconsin, Barry Levenson. The inspiration for the museum came after a World Series loss by the Red Sox in ’86, which left Levenson in tears. Like many of us, he went on a grocery run to find solace. While pushing his cart aimlessly through the aisles, he saw it — his newfound inspiration — an endless wall full of mustard jars. He decided he needed a new hobby, and after purchasing several of the more obscure brands of mustards, he set out to collect all the mustards of the world.

By Fancycrave at Unsplash

By 1987, Levenson’s new hobby became so consuming that he once saw a new variety of mustard laying out on a leftover tray in the hotel hallway. He was on his way to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, and didn’t have enough time to return to his room, so he stowed the unopened jar in his pants.

He won the case and may be the only lawyer to have done so with a jar of mustard in his pocket. It was clear that he needed to make the career move to full-time mustard aficionado.

Today, the museum features over 6,090 mustards from around the world with 5,624 jars of prepared mustard on display. On the first Saturday of August, the museum celebrates National Mustard Day every year with fundraising efforts and community activities. And in collaboration with the Madison Area Technical College, the museum also hosts the prestigious World-Wide Mustard Competition, where hundreds of mustards from around the world are entered and judged by chefs, food writers, and other food professionals in 16 categories. Three awards are given to the best of each category and a Grand Champion award is reserved for the best of the best.

The competition is held annually as well and is currently in its 25th year.
Amazon Is Waging War With FedEx
By: Steve Levine
Tags: Amazon, E Commerce Business, Business, Retail

Amazon Is Waging War With FedEx

For the creator of one- and two-day delivery, shipping dominance is worth almost any risk

Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

E-commerce is on a tear, which means shipping is too. In the six months ending August 31, ground deliveries by FedEx surged 20% from the same period a year ago. UPS is so overwhelmed that on Monday it actually imposed a quota on six big retailers — Gap, L.L. Bean, and Nike among them — limiting how much they’re allowed to ship during the holiday.

But this is not just a shipping boom — it’s a war. Amazon, the creator of one- and two-day delivery of everything from groceries to books and furniture, is now out to dominate shipping too. At a time when U.S. and European regulators are filing more and more antitrust cases against Amazon, the e-commerce giant is getting its machine ready, talking of taking over cavernous mall spaces formerly occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney, and converting them to fulfillment centers close to customers. It has leased 12 Boeing 767s, creating a fleet of more than 80 aircraft.

This is the opposite of laying low. As David H. Freedman writes this week in Marker, Amazon, in the case of shipping, has needled what might have stacked up as an ordinary rivalry into something nasty. Reminiscent of the ruthless shenanigans that led to the Supreme Court’s watershed 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, Amazon last Christmas season banned merchants from using FedEx to ship their goods.

Does Amazon wish to be broken up by antitrust regulators — to be forced to stop replicating the merchandise sold by third-party merchants and selling it at cut-rate prices? Does it wish to be forced to do away with Amazon Prime and its cut-rate, money-losing delivery options, which almost no small merchant can hope to match?

There is dissonance in this picture: The Trump Justice Department’s antitrust division has been aggressive. The Biden Administration is expected to be as tough or tougher. The European Union is not letting up on Amazon. Yet judging by its behavior, Big Tech thinks it’s business as usual.

“What, me worry?” seems to be a highly risky strategy. But when watching Amazon, the impression is less indifference than the conviction that shipping dominance is worth almost any risk.

This is a calculus of Amazon’s own making: If it is in a fix, feeling it must always up its shipping game and now capture the commanding heights of yet another industry, it’s because it itself created unusual — and perhaps unreasonable — customer expectations. But now, if in doing so it gets tripwired by the Justice Department or the EU, it has no one else to blame.
I Praised God in the Car After a Positive COVID-19 Diagnosis
By: Quin Arrington
Tags: Jesus, Praise, God, Coronavirus, Christianity

I went to bed freezing in a hoodie while buried under the covers. I knew something was off. Sunday morning, I woke up with a throbbing headache coupled with dizziness and a dry cough. I couldn’t get out the bed. I dropped in and out of sleep for 24 hours straight. It was such a drastic change from Saturday evening.

Saturday was a perfect Kodak moment in time. We decorated the Christmas tree while classic holiday tunes including Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” and The Temptations “Silent Night” played in the background. My sweet little girl ran around the room with Christmas ornaments in her hands, trying to make sense of all the glitter and sequins.

Later on that evening, we made hot chocolate and popcorn drizzled with white chocolate, red and green M&Ms, and pretzels. We then sat down as a family and watched Jingle Jangle on Netflix as the lights from the tree illuminated the room in a magical Christmas-spirit filled way.

It was so perfect that Saturday’s festivities will go down as a family tradition in the Arrington household. But the coldness that crept in my body after the ending of such a beautiful night was not so magical. After 24 hours of sleep on Sunday and not feeling much better by Monday, I decided to be tested for Covid-19 on Tuesday. The results came back positive.

Yet, when I pulled into the driveway of my home after my diagnosis, I thanked God. I thanked God because I was feeling better than how I felt on Sunday. I praised God because I could’ve been on a ventilator. I praised God because my baby received a negative test result, although she is inseparable from her mother. I praised God because I had breath in my body to do so.

I praised God because I am not within the number of the 270,000+ souls lost due to this deadly virus. I thank God because I am in no way more worthy of living than anyone who has left this earth due to Covid-19. Yet, here I am. How can I not praise God?

So, yes I praised God in the car after I received a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. The uplifting gospel tunes that radiated throughout my car spurred my thankful disposition. I am still praising God today with a positive diagnosis and a positive spirit. I am well, despite a recurring headache and a dry cough. I am well, despite fatigue and a cloudiness of sickness. I am well, because God is gracious and worthy of car praise after a positive Covid-19 diagnosis.
You Don’t Have to Try, Just Be You
By: Hope Brakenhoff
Tags: Music

It is no secret that the media portrays women a certain way and many women feel the pressure from society to look a certain way. The ‘standard’ is everywhere women look. It’s in the magazines, the movies, songs and music videos, online. There is a constant image being portrayed to women that sets the stage for how they should look. Society wants women to all fit into a single mold and be what society believes is beautiful.

Colbie Caillat released the song “Try” in response to the pressure to the look and act a certain way that is constantly put on women. The song was released in 2014 and has been very successful, especially when it first came out. The song promotes that all women are beautiful in their own way. In the lyrics Caillat says:

“You don’t have to try so hard

You don’t have to bend until you break

You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up

You don’t have to change a single thing”

Caillat is confronting the idea that women work as hard as possible to fit into a mold that is impossible to fit into. The very first verse of the song points out all of the things women do in order to fit into the mold that they weren’t created to fit into. Caillat focuses on the fact that all women are beautiful and they should embrace who they are and the beauty that they hold. The last verse of the song is beautiful and simple.

“Take your make-up off

Let your hair down

Take a breath

Look into the mirror, at yourself

Don’t you like you?

’Cause I like you”

At the end of the day, all of the work we put into looking and acting like we are supposed to doesn’t matter if we don’t like who we are. We have to like ourselves first.

The music video for the song is also very positive to women. The music video features many different women from all different walks of life and backgrounds. They are all featured in the video as they slowly begin taking their makeup off throughout the video. At the end, they have completely removed the mask that was hiding their faces. They are being themselves and they are being proud of who they are.
Developing a DCGAN Model in Tensorflow 2.0
By: Mouhamed Ndoye
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Github, Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

In early March 2019, TensorFlow 2.0 was released and we decided to create an image generator based on Taehoon Kim’s implementation of DCGAN. Here’s a tutorial on how to develop a DCGAN model in TensorFlow 2.0.

“To avoid the fast convergence of D (discriminator) network, G (generator) network is updated twice for each D network update, which differs from original paper.” — Taehoon Kim

Prerequisites

Jupyter Notebook

TensorFlow 2.0

Access to high-performing GPU

DCGAN Architecture

The image below illustrates the generator referenced in the DCGAN paper. Essentially, this network takes in a 100x1 noise vector, labeled 100z, and maps it into the G(Z) output which is 64x64x3.

100x1 → 1024x4x4 → 512x8x8 → 256x16x16 → 128x32x32 → 64x64x3

The first layer expands the random noise by projecting and reshaping at each step

Source: carpedm20

Strides

The stride specifies the ‘steps’ of the convolution along the height and width. Here’s an animated example:

An example of strides

Input Noise

generator = make_generator_model() noise = tf.random.normal([1,100]) # shape is 1, 100

generated_image = generator(noise, training = False) plt.imshow(generated_image[0, :, :, 0], cmap =”gist_rainbow”)

Dense Layer

In Keras, you can create layers to develop models. A model is usually a network of layers, in which, the most common type is a stack of layers

Adding a densely-connected layer to the model will take as input arrays of shape (*, 100). The shape of the data will be (*, 4*4*1024) after the first layer. In this case, you won’t need to specify the size of the input moving forward because of automatic shape inference



Batch normalization functions similarly to preprocessing at every layer of the network.

ReLU is linear for all positive values and set to zero for all negative values. Leaky ReLU has a smaller slope for negative values, instead of altogether zero.

For example, leaky ReLU may have y = 0.01x when x < 0
Angular Costa Rica inició hace 7 meses
By: Mariano Alvarez
Tags: Community, Meetup, Angular

in Both Sides of the Table
Resist the Dark Forces: 12 Types of Dark Patterns
Tags: Design Thinking, Dark Design, Product Design, Ethics, UX

Edit: Wow it’s 2019, and Linkedin is still doing it! Shout out to them for somehow sending me an invite from my own account inviting me to join from my work email. Nowhere did I ever input my work email, I’m not even sure how they tracked me and it raised false security alarm with my company’s team.

That class suit was truly a light slap on the wrist.

6. HIDDEN COSTS

You get to the last step of the checkout process… only to discover some unexpected charges appeared. This commonly used as a tactic to make something appear cheaper than it is; only until you finish the flow and land on the final order screen, you are told of the additional charges you must pay.

Price went from the initial $34.99 to $52.97. Companies can be fully transparent in the beginning of the process instead of surprising you at the very last step — after you did all that work.

Hidden costs are now illegal in the UK, whether that’s an undeclared subscription, extra shipping charges, or extra items. Unfortunately, this is still a common practice in the rest of the world.

7. MISDIRECTION

The design intentionally focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from something else.

Imagine: you just found out your grandma got really sick and is in the hospital. Your mom tells you to give her a video call. Knowing this may be your last chance to see her face, the last thing you want to do is spend time reading through everything and unchecking boxes!

8. PRICE COMPARISON PREVENTION

The retailer makes it hard for you to compare the price of an item with another item, so you cannot make an informed decision. Thankfully, this tactic is mostly outdated now.

9. PRIVACY ZUCKERING

Named after the infamous Facebook CEO, it’s a tactic used to tricked you into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to.

Mark Zuckerberg even gloated about the success of this deceptive modus operandi on stage at a European conference in May — claiming the “vast majority” of users were “willingly” opting in to targeted advertising via its new consent flow. Data brokering is a $200+ billion dollar industry, and you’re not seeing a dollar of that.

10. ROACH MOTEL

The design makes it very easy for you to get into a certain situation, but then makes it hard for you to get out of it (e.g. a subscription).

A prime example of this is trying to delete your Facebook account. Not only is it near impossible to do, the only option shown is deactivating your account — which still is highly difficult to do. I’ll show you my attempt at deactivation (you must deactivate your account before deletion).

Let’s start trying to deactivate Facebook.
There’s A SiteThat Makes You Into A “Daria” Character. That’s It, That’s The Entire Article
By: Gabrielle Moss
Tags: Daria, 90s, Nostalgia, MTV

Look, I’m 100% committed to bringing you the latest thoughtful, honest deep dives on aging, art, our changing culture, sandwiches that remind me of the mid-’90s, the box of Sassys I bought on eBay, the haircuts of various men who have wronged me, and why I stopped growing emotionally shortly after the release of The Colour and the Shape. I value your time, and want to give you something of value in return for spending some of that time with me.

But folks, sometimes there is just a site that lets you make yourself into a Daria character, and that is the entire story. And it’s a fucking GREAT story.

Also, for the sake of my own dignity, I would love to say that this isn’t an accurate representation of me, but.

Also, have you noticed that Daria on DVD & streaming has weird fake background music because MTV never cleared the rights to use the music in any situation besides airing directly on MTV?
Corrupted
By: J.D. Harms
Tags: Failing, Poetry, Musing, Depression, Image

Corrupted

A Poem

Photo by Olga Serjantu on Unsplash

Axed by an indefinite period of grief, a slaughter of days weeping nights bleating from the sac warmth of sheets bed pulled into the middle of Eris-rage and the fortification

of depression isn’t escaping anything, isn’t deleting any of the attacks, scraping wedge wooden walls horror blood spikes of resistance, image of the living immortal

spread through your idea of what a person is, smacked into head intellect reviles useless stupid description without package of du Maurier or Number 7 or the bottle that hasn’t been cracked

yet, split sprayed enforced dogma shitty little fences that can be stepped over, distance put jelled organism of dishwash liquid and stepped into the crash of reviewing minds
Projekt Ilaiyaraaja Season III — 271/365 — Chinna Paya Manasu
By: Sylvian Patrick
Tags: Ilaiyaraaja, Kida Poosari Magudi, Mu Metha, Projekt Ilaiyaraaja, Chinna Paya Manasu

Kida Poosari Magudi received good reviews from the few reviewers who watched the movie but the movie didn’t do well at the box-office. Like many low budget movies, the only draw to the movie was Ilaiyaraaja’s music.

Chinna Paya Manasu is a beautiful duet by Suraj and Surmukhi that starts with strings, guitar and oboe in the background. The song is backed by a synth rhythm that never changes but Ilaiyaraaja weaves his magic with the tune especially the charanams. When I heard the song for the first time, it immediately reminded me of Pon Mane Kobam Yeno but I think it could because of the Raaga it’s based on (charanam) but the starting of the song sounds like Kaapi.

Listen to the song on a good headphones, you can identify those strings in the background in the charanam. Another gem that you might want to add to your list.

Day 271/365

Song: Chinna Paya Manasu

Movie: Kida Poosari Magudi (2016)

Singers: Surmukhi, Suraj

Lyricist: Mu Metha

Actors: Natchathira, Ramdev

Director: J Jayakumar

Video Version

Audio Version
Making Friends
By: Ellie Scott
Tags: Humor, Friendship, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Dogs

Photo by Hannah Lim

“Go on then, Jim. Go and play.”

Jim glares at Flossie.

“Don’t look at me like that. Go on! Go run off some of that excess podge. And make some friends while you’re at it.”

Jim wanders off towards a group of potential friends nearby and loiters at the edges, waiting for someone to invite him into their fold.

Flossie approaches her own pack.

“He’s not very sociable, your Jim, is he?” says a fluffy Pomeranian.

Flossie shakes her head. “I thought bringing him to the park every day would help him socialise, but he doesn’t seem to have got the hang of it.”

The pair watch as another human holds out his hand towards Jim. Jim ignores the gesture. The other human shrugs and walks away.

“My Lucy will play with him,” says a grizzly Border Terrier. “She just loves other humans. Even the quiet ones.”

Right on cue, a grinning human bounds over to Jim with her arms outstretched and forces a hug upon him. Jim wriggles out of her clutches and runs away. Lucy isn’t dejected for long, but a few of her friends have noted the interaction and they aren’t happy.

“What the fuck was that, Jim?”

“Don’t be such a dickhead!”

“If you don’t like us then why do you even bother coming over here?”

“Piss off, and don’t come back!”

Jim picks up his pace and bolts away from the mob of bellowing humans.

“I wonder what they’re all shouting at,” says the Pomeranian.

“I know,” says the Border Terrier, “I wish we could speak their language.”

“I just wish they’d all get along,” says Flossie with a sigh. “They’re all human; you’d think that would be enough for them to be friends.”
Embrace Happiness
By: Shruti Sinha
Tags: Hapiness, Poetry, Desire, Love, Fear

Let go of the negativity.

Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash

Let go of your fears, it holds you from moving ahead, the people who hurt you and are no longer with you.

Let go of the love that never was yours, your last relationship that broke you apart.

Let go of your problems, you have no control over them,

The situations that put you in a mess.

Let go of impediments that keep bothering you everyday,

The past that makes you sad, ego that stand on the way of your happiness.

Let go of avarice that pushes you towards excessive, unwanted desires,

Worries, which works as a slow poison.
A quicker heuristic analysis
By: Lance Weisser
Tags: Design, User Experience, Heuristics, Heuristic Evaluation, Design Process

A quicker heuristic analysis

Don Norman’s 7 Stages of Action and Jakob Nielsen’s classic 10 point evaluation condensed into a potent 5 point product design review.

5 point heuristic analysis

If you have ever done a full 10 point heuristic analysis as The Nielsen Norman Group recommends it, you know how long it can take to complete a full analysis and present the findings. While the results of this approach are comprehensive and powerful, sometimes we don’t need all ten. In fact, I think we can expose more crucial violations quicker if we cut the number of steps in half.

While reading Don Norman’s perennial Design of Everyday Things many years ago, I was absolutely floored by the simplicity presented by the following questions he formulated in The Seven Stages of Action and the profound implications they present when examined thoroughly…

1. What do I want to accomplish?

2. What are the alternative action sequences?

3. What action can I do now?

4. How do I do it?

5. What happened?

6. What does it mean?

7. Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal?

Excerpt From: Don Norman. “The Design of Everyday Things.” iBooks.

After a couple of years of studying and putting into practice Don’s seven stages of action and seven fundamentals of design along with Jakob Nielsen’s ten heuristics, I began asking myself, “How might we create a shortcut to a full Heuristic Evaluation by reframing the test in light of its underlying core design fundamentals?” I then started working on remixing and reducing the twenty-four stages, fundamentals and heuristics into a 5 point analysis that has been incredibly helpful for me when analyzing existing applications for heuristic violations and usability issues.

I have added two examples to the evaluation below to get you started and an email link further down which you can use to request a template of the evaluation for later use. Enjoy!
How I code React/Vue.js apps every day straight from Sketch and Figma
Tags: Sketchapp, UX Design, Product Design, Web Design, React

TLDR : Watch this short demo video 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEK_GU8Qvls

Introduction

Hello everyone. I am Côme, a UX/UI designer and Overlay CEO. With Kévin, Overlay CTO, we have been studying for two years design-to-development workflows in web projects. This article explains what we have learned and how we started solving one of its biggest pain points, as stated below.

Every design-to-code or handoff tools on the market fight the same problems.

Design integration takes time (30% to 70% of a website development project).

Designers introduce inconsistencies (wrong colors, fonts, sizes..).

Developers, mainly because of many guesswork, can make mistakes.

Most of the time, product teams use handoff tools as Invision or Zeplin to helps developers integrate design from Sketch to production, and avoid guesswork. Developers can inspect designs and traduce them into clean and reusable code using modern frameworks as React, Vue.js, or Angular. It reduce guesswork, but still, it’s a long and manual process, and doesn’t avoid human mistakes.

More recently, design-to-code tools like Anima, BuilderX, or Laska have shipped Sketch compilers to try to automate design integration. It’s great to see that designers get closer and closer to production but we rarely see these tools used in big and complex projects.

What’s missing? I asked many developers, the answer is clear: code is not reusable and quality is low.

Why developers find it hard to use code produced from design-to-code tools?

(Re)usability: everything is in position: absolute. It makes the design pixel perfect but not suitable for dynamic content or further modifications. Performance/readability: these tools produce too many lines of code. It gets hard for developers to read and understand the code, and can lower performances. Maintainability: the code is poorly refactored. Variables are hardcoded and there are many redundant classes. It makes changes very painful. Imagine changing a hundred times a background-color: rgba(32, 120, 231, 1) just to implement a new blue! Readability/naming: class names are often difficult to understand. What do understand if you read this? .u20ac 🤔.

Let’s try a famous Sketch design-to-code tool with this card component :
Python Lambda Function
By: Tanu N Prabhu
Tags: Python, Functional Programming, Programming, Python3

In this article, you will learn more about lambda functions in python. How can we use lambda functions, what is the syntax of lambda functions and why do we need them?

Image Credits: TechGeekBuzz

What are lambda functions and what are its characteristics?

Lambda functions are also called anonymous functions. An anonymous function is a function defined without a name. As you know to define a normal function in python, you need to use the def keyword. But in this case of anonymous functions, we use the lambda keyword to define the functions. Alonzo Church in the 1930s to the field of mathematics introduced the lambda functions.

Also, the whole code for this tutorial can be found on my GitHub Repository below:

The characteristics of lambda functions are:

The lambda function can take many arguments but can return only one expression. Here the expression is nothing but the result returned by the lambda function. Lambda functions are syntactically restricted to return a single expression. You can use them as an anonymous function inside other functions. The lambda functions do not need a return statement, they always return a single expression.
What I’ve learned in a year of freelancing
By: Jack Dundon
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Business, Freelancing, Productivity, Self Improvement

You get what you put in

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with salaried work. I get it — it’s stable. You get paid every pay period regardless of what you do. You can have a crap week, you can be sick, you can be on holiday, and you still get paid and enjoy relative stability.

Because of this, salaried employment is held up as the gold standard of work environments, but I’m not fully sold.

It’s great to have stability and support if you have a bad day/week/month, but what happens on the flip side? If you work like a dog for 3 months straight and produce great results, you’ll make exactly the same pay, but you’ll be producing so much more value for your employer.

Maybe I’m more risk-tolerant, or maybe it’s easy for me to be risk-tolerant because I don’t have any dependents and my wife also works, but I also did my best to bring as much stability and predictability to freelancing as possible.

I planned various self-employed ventures for a couple of years, messing up almost all of them along the way, and side hustled for 6 months part-time before going full time, to manage the risk aspect.

Since I started freelancing, I’ve quickly grown my business, but that’s because I’m offering more to my clients, with better equipment, more experience, more confidence, and a greater understanding of what I bring to the market.

As I offer more value, I bill more. Go figure.

Maybe I’ve never been at a company with a good enough bonus culture, but it’s always seemed to me to be a very inflexible “locked in for a year or two” salary arrangement, even though your value has the potential to be exponentially different within that time period.

The flip side of this which can be scary is that you can, in theory, make $0 if you don’t do anything.

No one will force you to get up and chase leads. No one will check your creative work. There’s no IT department to fix your computer when the integrated graphics on your computer breaks (why did I buy an all-in-one again?!). It’s all on you.

Even if you don’t make $0 (and you have to try quite hard to make $0), you can still make less than you planned. I got extremely neurotic about this in my first 2 months and kept panicking near the end of the month that the whole venture would crumble.

But over time, as I planned better, adapted more quickly and got into the flow of things, I felt a lot more in control, and eventually found the structure quite liberating! When I pursued new initiatives, put in the hours, went outside my comfort zone, I saw the results.

I always found as a salaried employee, if I worked beyond my contracted hours (which was always) I got nothing for it. If I responded to an urgent email at 11 pm, no one cared, and my wallet didn’t notice a thing.

If you push yourself as a freelancer, yes you can be tired, and yes emailing clients at unsociable hours because of time zone differences can be a bit destructive, but you know there’s something in it for you.
RegEx Series: (Part 3) Special Characters
By: Reina Mitchell
Tags: JavaScript, Program, Code, Regex

RegEx Series: (Part 3) Special Characters

Wildcard, Zero or More Repetition & Optional Character

Introduction

This is the final installment of my special characters post within my regular expressions series. I will mention in this post, the wildcard character, optional character, and the zero or more repetitions character.

Let’s start with the optional character as that one is my favorite. I will be using regex101.com again to create the examples. If you want to follow along, you can use that website as it is an excellent tool for testing your regex.

Optional Character

The optional character uses the ? in the regular expression. If you want to match a pure question mark for punctuation purposes, you will have to escape it like all special characters using the backslash \? .

The interesting thing about the optional character is that it pays attention to the preceding character.

For instance, I will create two test strings so that we can see what is going on. They will be “Teste” and “Tester”
New England’s Series A Deals — Part I
By: Matt Snow
Tags: Business, Fundraising, Venture Capital, Technology, Startup

Recently, The Buzz profiled the a number of market maps on the New England Venture/Startup Ecosystem including the following:

These market maps continue to be very positively received by our subscribers so we’re continuing to deliver. In a continuation of our earlier series on New England Seed Deals, we’re now covering New England Series A deals for companies since 2018. [NOTE: This will be a series of market maps]. Here’s the list:
How to Use URL Parameters and Query Strings With React Router
By: John Au-Yeung
Tags: JavaScript, Programming, Web Development, Technology, React

Define Routes That Accept URL Parameters, and Get Them

To define a Route with a path that takes an id as a parameter, we can put a colon before the parameter name.

For example, we can write:

<Switch>

<Route path="/:id" children={<User />} />

</Switch>

Then we can use the useParams Hook to get the URL parameter.

We can write a full example as follows:

In the code above, we have the Switch component in App with the Route inside as a child. The path prop is set to /:id , which means that we can use the useParams Hook later to get the route parameter.

Then in the children prop, we pass in the User component, which we want to display.

Also, we added Link components with the links that we can click to go to the URL with the given URL parameters in the to prop.

Then in the User component, we get the id from the URL parameter with the useParams Hook.

Finally, we display the id in the User route.
Discovery Beach in the Fall
By: Andy Tillo
Tags: Washington, USA

We go here to catch snails, bugs, crabs, shrimp, you name it. The girls love flipping over the big rocks. This isn’t like the SUMMER VISITS we take, the water is super cold, but still the kids have a great time!
I Leaned
By: Lisa Bolin
Tags: Poetry Writing, Poetry, Art, Creativity, Life

Blackout poetry can be wonderful — there are times when words leap off the page at you, making beautiful poems.

Other times, it’s a struggle. Then you know it’s time to turn the page, put down the book, or take a break. It shouldn’t feel frustrating.

This poem lept off the page. A declaration. A journey. Life.
What Are *args and **kwargs in Python?
By: Jonathan Hsu
Tags: Programming, Python, Technology, Data Science, Software Development

Positional vs. Keyword Arguments

There are two concepts we need to separate in order to learn what *args and **kwargs are.

The first is the difference between positional and keyword arguments. In the most basic of functions, we play a matching game — argument 1 goes with parameter 1, argument 2 goes with parameter 2, and so on.

def printThese(a,b,c):

print(a, "is stored in a")

print(b, "is stored in b")

print(c, "is stored in c") printThese(1,2,3)

"""

1 is stored in a

2 is stored in b

3 is stored in c

"""

All three arguments are required. Missing one will cause an error.

def printThese(a,b,c):

print(a, "is stored in a")

print(b, "is stored in b")

print(c, "is stored in c") printThese(1,2)

"""

TypeError: printThese() missing 1 required positional argument: 'c'

"""

If we give a parameter a default value in the function definition, then it becomes optional.

def printThese(a,b,c=None):

print(a, "is stored in a")

print(b, "is stored in b")

print(c, "is stored in c") printThese(1,2)

"""

1 is stored in a

2 is stored in b

None is stored in c

"""

Additionally, these optional parameters also become keyword-eligible, meaning you can specify the parameter name in the function call to map it accordingly.

Let’s make all three variables default to None and watch how we can still map them irregardless of order.
The Rise and Fall of Value Investing
By: Luke Posey
Tags: Finance, Stock Market, Programming, Money, Data Science

The Rise and Fall of Value Investing

Taking a data-driven approach to picking value as a factor.

Note: Nothing herein is financial advice. Please consult a licensed professional before making trading or investing decisions.

Value investing as an approach to the markets was developed by Benjamin Graham back in the 20s at Columbia. Relatively simplistic in nature, value investing is about picking stocks that are priced below their book value.

Quality is distinctly different from value, but the two have some overlap. Quality investors are willing to buy stocks at or above their book value if they see those stocks as “quality.” Quality is primarily reflected in the health of the balance sheet.

Luckily we’ve got dozens of ETFs that can tell the intro to the story behind value and quality. The individual investor may prefer to build a quality or value portfolio themself, taking a discretionary approach to leave out the stocks that may exhibit value or quality but have some other characteristic that makes them less favorable in the portfolio.

From 2009 to January 2020 Value overall underperformed the S&P.

You can find a Jupyter Notebook with all the code for the below graphs and analysis here.

During this period, we can do analysis to find the following:

S&P Sharpe Ratio: .92

Value Sharpe Ratio: .82

S&P Max Drawdown: -27%

Value Max Drawdown: -32%

Value has told a similar story during the crisis, with Value continuing to underperform.

Interestingly, quality has not told the same story. From 2009 to January 2020 Quality outperformed the S&P.

S&P Sharpe Ratio: .92

Quality Sharpe Ratio: 1.04

S&P Max Drawdown: -27%

Quality Max Drawdown: -20%

And from January 2020 through present quality has been basically even with the S&P.

S&P Sharpe Ratio: .77

Quality Sharpe Ratio: .69

S&P Max Drawdown: -34%

Quality Max Drawdown: -34%

Part of this is to inform you to be cautious when listening to the talking heads. Many of the frequenters of social media and traditional media have been spotted stating that value and quality are leading the way out of the drawdown. This isn’t quite the case.

Be careful who you listen to. As Data Scientists we shouldn’t trust every statistic and analysis thrown at us. Humans are prone to playing with axes in dishonest ways, fudging the numbers, etc. It’s even possible I did something nefarious in my own analysis; did you notice a lack of x and y axes (to be honest Plotly just wasn’t cooperating and it looks pretty clean)? And if you trusted me and ran out and made an impulsive decision it might come back to haunt you… All this to say, do your own analysis. Run your own numbers, create and test your own hypothesis.

At Spawner we’ve got indicators for measuring a company’s value based on traditional value investing metrics. You can also use the same endpoints from our API to measure Sharpe, Drawdown, and many other metrics.
Camp IHC —Summer Camp Videos
By: Camp Ihc
Tags: Children, Summer Camp, Technology, YouTube, Videos

A sleep away summer camp where the stories told are more magical than you could ever imagine.

Follow
Wash Away
By: Estrella Ramirez
Tags: Mental Health, Poetry, Change, New Beginnings, Waves

Down along the lakefront

wind whips violently,

as to say, you’re not welcome

here. Walking along the wave

soaked pier regardless —

I am unwanted everywhere.

Wash me clean.

Wash me away.

Spray from the Great Lakes

decorates my face, running

into tears I let loose when

no one is watching.

Longing to feel spray,

or the tears. Something…

anything…instead disillusioned.

Remaining stoic and as iced over

as the concrete beneath my feet

Waves crash into the

pier, one after the other.

Coming down the line like

a row of dominos, falling

one after another, and again.

Drawing me in closer,

reaching out its icy grip,

calling me home.

Finding myself at the waters

edge. Mind over heart, grasping

onto the railing when I’d

rather tempt fate, take a step

closer and let the waves

crash over me.

Washing me clean.

Wash me away.
Şiirsel ve Soyut Bir Sinema: En İyi Filmleriyle Michelangelo Antonioni
By: Ali Çalışkan
Tags: Film, Türkçe Yayın, Türkçe, Sinema, Sanat

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