fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How to Automate Design Tokens in a Design System
By: Tom Buyse
Tags: Development, Design Systems, Programming, Front End Development, Web Development

How to Automate Design Tokens in a Design System

Colors, spacing, font weights, and font sizes are all design tokens

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash.

In a design system, there is traditionally a distinction between the design and the code. We have designers working on what the components will look like and developers who will implement these components. However, some effort is required to keep both of them in sync.

So when I started a new design system, I wondered if it would be possible to eliminate some of this friction. The idea became to create an automated process that would keep design tokens of the design tool in sync with the code behind it.

Design tokens are what keep our design system consistent: Colors, spacing, font weights, and font sizes are examples of tokens. In an ideal world, they follow a sequence (4px, 8px, etc.) and are always chosen from this sequence.

What’s the benefit of this automated process? Well, let’s say we don’t have any automation in place and a designer makes a change to the color blue. They would have to communicate with developers to make the same change in the code. Can you see how this can result in an out-of-sync problem? By contrast, in the workflow of the automated process, the designer makes a change and it’s automatically reflected in the code.

In this article, I will take you along the process of how to set up an automated process for keeping design tokens in sync between design and code.
Take Your First Step into the Quantum Realm
By: Sara A. Metwalli
Tags: Information Technology, Technology, Computer Science, Science, Quantum Computing

You’re Thinking So Classically

Take Your First Step into the Quantum Realm

An Introduction to Quantum Gates and Quantum Circuits

By Author using Canva

Getting started with quantum computing may seem intimidating and just plain puzzling if you looked online where start, you were probably lead to the same results I did when I first started getting into quantum computing. Everywhere I looked said, to get started, I need to have some good knowledge about quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and basic linear algebra. Once I did, I needed to learn how to use Qiskit (Python library to program quantum computers) or another programming tool to start building quantum circuits and implementing quantum algorithms! And don’t let me get started on needing to learn how quantum algorithms work!

Things got very complicated very fast, which can be quite discouraging! 😖

But…

What if I told you that you could start building quantum circuits, with only basic knowledge of basic quantum gates and without any kind of coding?

Yes 🤩

You read it correctly; we will build quantum circuits without using any code what so ever.

The way to do that is by using special tools called quantum circuit simulators. To use any of those tools, you only need to know the definition of the three basics of quantum computing, qubits, superposition and entanglement, and what some basic quantum gates do.

We will start with the basics of quantum computing:

Qubits: The basic unit of data in quantum computing. A qubit can be either in state |0⟩ or state|1⟩ or a superposition of both states. Superposition: A term that refers to when a physical system exists in two states at the same time. Entanglement: When two or more qubits share a special connection.

You can find more in-depth information about qubits, superposition, and entanglement in my article “The Three Pillars of Quantum Computing.”

Now that you know the fundamentals of quantum computing, we can start talking about basic quantum gates and then start building some circuits using them.
Have You Written Your Life User Manual Yet?
By: Aline Müller
Tags: Self-awareness, Self, Philosophy, Personal Development, Self Improvement

Have You Written Your Life User Manual Yet?

On the search for meaning in life

The floor is made of intercalating black and white tiles and the temptation to not step on the white ones is too big. Even as grown-ups we can make games out of daily components of our lives — or keep playing the ones we have since we were kids. And what is a game but a set of rules with a purpose? Step on the white one, game over.

Our ability to make sense of things, be it for work, or be it for sheer playfulness, is immense. As we play an instrument, our ears know right away if the next key we play fits in or sounds weird.

Life is rich; it offers us the possibility of intrinsic and extrinsic meaning. These can be separated or combined depending solely on our individual perspective.

Dancing, listening to music, humor, the pleasure of togetherness can all be an end in themselves, for they are joyful. By intrinsic here I mean anything that is not an instrument to accomplish something else.

I could use my dance to impress the cute guy across the dance floor, to burn calories and/or to win a dance competition — all extrinsic. I can do my analytical work to make money and pay the bills (extrinsic), to solve a social problem that needs analytical support (extrinsic), or/and because I actually enjoy solving puzzles (intrinsic). All meanings can co-exist.

Note that the extrinsic meaning of something can be created by me or created by the outside world. Let’s say I am hungry and eat my greens. Sure I need nourishment, but society keeps telling me to eat my greens because it is good for me. Maybe I don’t even enjoy them as I eat them while looking at my phone. Maybe I didn’t consciously choose to eat greens from within, as much as because “I know I should”.

I am not saying everything needs to be joyful and fun. I am still to find out how putting out the trash could possibly be fun. No.

It’s about alignment.

Every extrinsic meaning created by myself (without bullshit) is potentially fulfilling.

However, beware of meaning created by someone else. If I don’t fully believe in something, by default it does not resonate with my heart and, sooner or later, it will crack. Every “should”, “have to”, “must” has a trace of conditioning derived from a belief system.

We accept social conventions with our minds, but the final judge is our hearts.

What does not come from our hearts, sooner or later gets us frustrated. We can try to deceive ourselves as much as we want, but if the point is not given in full honesty with our hearts, they won’t satisfy us. It’s like when we are just playing along. They will be a weight on our shoulders, a tick-box to be checked, an energy drain, a joy killer.
High Noon
By: Nidhi Agrawal
Tags: Astrology, Creative Writing, Poetry, Lifestyle, Writing

High Noon

Confrontation with the new moon

I

Is your sun in Leo?

Every time I hurt your pride,

you hide behind the clouds.

II

Your gazes are enough,

don’t touch me with your hands.

Your laughter is magic,

my shadow needs the royal seal of

your overflowing spring.

III

When your silence speaks,

my nerves emit light.

When my silence speaks,

your nerves head to the darkness.

Can we have a dialogue when our nerves sleep?

IV

My lover is

Ever giving,

Ever warm,

Ever funny and

Utterly inextinguishable

only when he cannot see his

shadow.
What We Have May Not Amount To A Hill of Beans
By: Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto
Tags: Mindfulness, Love, Poetry, Entrepreneurship, Life

This May Make SuperHeroes Of Us All

What We Have May Not Amount To A Hill of Beans

But this is Our Hill, and these are Our Beans!

The world is flat, the world is flat.

That’s what I’ve always been told

To suggest otherwise would be far too bold.

We listen and learn, and yearn to earn

Are we ever sure our ideas won’t just burn?

Some say the time has come to start a blog,

But who can focus when others just hog.

The toilet paper in supermarkets now runneth over

So why is it most, are still not touched by clover.

The government has been visible, compassionate and strong

But one wonders, did they really not know, all along?

R Kelly believes he can fly, believes he can touch the sky

So why is it this song makes everybody want to cry.

Our world has changed, so many things to rearrange!

A house with many rooms, but still no space

Is this what’s become of the human race.

We long for a time when we’re were one

Yes, one for all, and all for one.

Brothers, Sisters, and Grandma too

We huddle together with a good brew.

Zoom Zoom, please take us to the moon

To interact with friends and foe, or even, any average Joe.

We are not alone, We are not alone

We still have our subscription iPhone!

So it’s not all sadness, or sorrow or lament

But what good is sentiment, if you can’t pay the rent.
DETOX \ RETOX
Tags: Detox, Mindfulness, Retreats, Party, Wellness

In this day and age of moon juices and sun potions, paleo and keto diets, intermittent fasting and CrossFit regimes, wellness and health has catapulted to fame and we want in. For the longest time, the dream has been sex, drugs, and rock‘n’roll. Now, we want to live a great healthy lifestyle and party like a rockstar.

Not everyone has the luxury of taking 168 hours off life for a retreat in a remote part of India. Or not everyone has the willpower to do so. Before you make that massive decision that could be minted by your friends and family as the brave new age of irrationality, we bring to you a weekend retreat with all the wellness benefits — without having to leave town.

Kick the day off with HIIT at LEVEL gym, a high intensity workout that will make you wonder why you even possessed an inertia in the first place. Stretch out your muscles with a mind-balancing yoga + sound session as you immerse yourself in a studio designed for optimum reverberation — the perfect sanctuary for sound healing. Then, slowly emerge into reality as you take a silent walk from Robinson Road to Nanson Road. The day of solitude will culminate in a breathing meditation session that is believed to unlock unlimited reserves of energy, creativity, and ideas through frequent practice.

source: Splacer

In the undercover of the night as the sun goes down, indulge in a family-style dinner prepared by Executive Chef Colin Buchan. The menu is a burst of colours and flavours that will make meal time a pleasure for everyone.

To start, we will be serving our famed watermelon salad — a crowd-pleaser from Day One that has made a roaring comeback, alongside grilled baby artichokes and prawn toast. To regain your energy levels, relish in the low-calorie whole red snapper that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t pass over the wok fried rice with shiitake mushrooms and shiso leaves, your body will thank you for replenishing your fuel. While nutrition rules have gained notoriety for being fickle, one thing’s for certain: sweet finishes are the way to go. As you reach out for impossibly delectable madeleines swaddled in white linen like baby birds in a nest, treat your tastebuds to refreshingly delicious ice creams and sorbets. Raise your glasses of wine — full of antioxidants — for a toast, to a promising Saturday.

We take your well-being very seriously.

DETOX\RETOX Wellness Retreat

Saturday, October 20th

2pm — 8pm

$138 (early bird, register by October 10th)

$188

More details for RSVP here.
Gamma Function — Intuition, Derivation, and Examples
By: Aerin Kim
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Generative Model, Artificial Intelligence

1. Why do we need the Gamma function?

Because we want to generalize the factorial!

The factorial function is defined only for discrete points (for positive integers — black dots in the graph above), but we wanted to connect the black dots. We want to extend the factorial function to all complex numbers. The simple formula for the factorial, x! = 1 * 2 * … * x, cannot be used directly for fractional values because it is only valid when x is a whole number.

So mathematicians had been searching for…

“What kind of functions will connect these dots smoothly and give us factorials of all real values?”

However, they couldn’t find *finite* combinations of sums, products, powers, exponential, or logarithms that could express x! for real numbers until…
How Presenters Hook Crowds With Cialdini’s 6 Principles
By: Reuben Salsa
Tags: Persuasion, Sales, Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Ideas

How Presenters Hook Crowds With Cialdini’s 6 Principles

Are you being sold the 10x dream? Find out by learning about the psychology of convincing large groups of people

Photo by Kaleb Nimz on Unsplash

I sat in the auditorium aghast at what I was hearing. Beside me, my friend was pumped. Not just pumped, he was super-charged.

We had arrived together at the Big Event™ and were eager to see some of the bigger names in entrepreneurship in action. I had won two free tickets and was curious to see what went on at this type of conference.

We were five speakers deep when I sensed trouble. The first few didn’t manage to excite the crowds, but this new speaker was different. He was enigmatic. He had the patter to convince you to sell your own mother for a quick profit.

Being broke, I didn’t have the cash to invest and wasn’t buying into the promise. My friend, however, was being drawn in.

I turned and gasped as I watched my mate’s eyes glaze over with dollar signs. He was fully invested. The adrenaline had begun to pump through him and beads of sweat were congealing on his shirt. He was becoming red as his neck muscles grew taut and the vein on his forehead throbbed in time with the over-enthusiastic clapping.

“ARE YOU READY?!” shouted the host. “WHO WANTS TO BECOME A MULTIMILLIONAIRE?!” he enthused.

The crowd screamed back at him. My friend resembled one of those 60’s teens weeping at the sight of the Beatles as they tore their panties off in the vain hope that Johnny would catch them.

We looked at each other. His grin was manic.

“I’M IN! OH. MY. GOD. I’M SO FUCKING IN!” He was intense. Wired.

Behind me, a random suited man stood up and screamed, “ME!” and raced to the back of the hall. Everybody was shouting in caps lock. Every spoken sentence was an exclamation to the glory of money and how many dollars they would all make.

More and more people jumped up and raced to the back. Literally fighting each other to be there first.

“Sign up now!” Mr. Evangelical continued. “Save thousands! This course is the biggest investment you’ll make in your life!”

My mate began to rise. I reached out and grabbed him.

“What’cha doing?” I hissed. There was no need to whisper. The room was charged, as the mob swayed in time to the loud, repetitive beats of cash tills played at high volume.

“I want to invest! I’m going to be rich!” he said, fueled by the rush of a promise.

“Just calm down. We haven’t even got to the main speaker.” I appealed to his logical side. “There may well be a better offer.” He stared back, then looked over his shoulder at the stampede. Pens glinting in the harsh light. Arms were raised and waving as the crowd jostled to be the next super-entrepreneur.

He sat down agreeing with my logic, desperately fighting the urge not to miss the unmissable opportunity of a lifetime.
Getting Your Hands Dirty
By: Julie Artz
Tags: Writing Tips, Editing, Gardening, Writing

At this time of year, there’s always a bit of garden dirt underneath my nails (and likely in my hair, on my jeans, maybe even on my face). That’s usually because I’m spending a lot of time doing this:

Not bad for an early May haul from the garden!

And doing that leaves me looking like this:

Me and my dirty fingernails

But you know me, this article, just like my last post, Late Season Blooms, isn’t really about gardening. It’s about writing. Or, more specifically, about revising. About digging in and getting your hands dirty in your creative life the same way you might in the spring garden.

Almost every writer I’ve ever met can write a beautiful sentence. They can create a metaphor (like getting your hands dirty), craft an image of a radiant sunset behind majestic cedars or the smell of fresh-turned earth on a warm spring day. A smaller number of those writers can not only write a whole manuscript, but revise it to make it something that works not just at the sentence level, but as a whole.

To do that, you’ve go to revise. Shannon Hale describes her writing process this way, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” The building of the castles? That happens in revision.

I don’t want to mix too many of these metaphors, so I’ll adapt Shannon’s idea to the garden. Writing may be putting the shovel, and even the seeds, into the soil, but the watering, fertilizing, weeding, and pruning are all a part of revision.

I’ve been in the revision cave for what feels like forever (in truth, it has been almost ten months) trying to craft some fairly intricate flower beds and the Siren song of a new story idea calls to me each time I lose focus. Because when the flower bed contains more weeds than flowers, it feels a whole lot easier to work somewhere else in the yard than it does to go through the pain and boredom of pulling out those weeds.

But weed you must. And prune. And fertilize. And drag the hose. Because that is what it takes to make a beautiful garden as surely as it takes revision to make a beautiful book.

So tomorrow, I will sit back down at my desk, open my story, and work through this revision. Even though the sun is shining and there’s a flower bed out there just begging for me to come out to play. I’ve got a different kind of digging in to do. And it’s going to make something just as beautiful as my flower beds.

My tulips were stunning this year, which made up for all the work I did last fall digging holes for bulbs, fertilizing, and, yes, weeding.

Additional Resources

Ready to dig in? Check out these resources for revision inspiration:
How To Limit Artificial Stupidity?
By: Seyma Tas
Tags: Siri, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning Ai, NLP, Data Science

How To Limit Artificial Stupidity

A quick overview of Human-Learn Library

What Is Artificial Stupidity?

Artificial stupidity is a new term that is used as the antonym of artificial intelligence. However, it has two opposite meanings:

Machine learning algorithms make stupid mistakes while learning from the data. Artificial intelligence is dumbed down to make mistakes and look more human.

It can be appealing and clap-rewarding to write about the second meaning, but I want to introduce you to the first meaning of artificial stupidity and the fascinating Human-learn library by Vincent D. Warmerdam.

An Interesting Example Of Artificial Stupidity:

There are many examples of the first meaning of artificial stupidity in recent years. One of the most amusing ones was discovered by Ciaran Maguire and introduced on Twitter. An insurance company’s algorithm was calculating different costs for people according to the day they were born. As you can see on the tweet below, when the date of birth was changed by one-day, price changes a lot. How did the algorithm come to this calculation? What about the programmers testing the accuracy of the algorithm? How did they miss such a bizarre outcome?

My assumption was that there were severe outliers in the data set which affected the weights of the model drastically. Still, there could be other causes for this error.
How to Set Up a Deployment Pipeline on AWS
By: Dmytro Khmelenko
Tags: Continous Deployment, Software Development, Programming, DevOps, AWS

How to Set Up a Deployment Pipeline on AWS

Continuous delivery with GitHub Actions

Photo by Samuel Sianipar on Unsplash.

CloudFormation is a service on Amazon Web Services. It allows you to describe Infrastructure as code. You can define necessary services and dependencies between them in template files in .yml or .json format.

If we choose to store template files on GitHub, we would like to have an automatic deployment to AWS with every new commit in our repository. It is possible to achieve this with GitHub Actions.

To build a pipeline, we can use an official GitHub Action from AWS available on GitHub Marketplace. Even though it has a good description, there are still some challenges you might face while integrating it. Let’s go through each step in detail.
Feature Engineering in Machine Learning
By: Ramya Vidiyala
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Education, Data Science

Feature Engineering in Machine Learning

Making data model-ready

To work on a machine learning problem, we can’t just grab data provided and apply the algorithm on it i.e, .fit(). We need to first build a dataset first.

The task for converting raw data into a dataset is called Feature Engineering.

For example, let the business problem be predicting if a customer sticks to the subscription for a particular product. This would be further useful to enhance the product or the user experience, which will help for business growth.

The raw data will contain details of each customer such as location, age, interests, average time spent on the product, the number of times the customer has renewed the subscription. These details are features of the dataset. The task of creating a dataset is to understand the useful features from the raw data and also, create new features from the existing features that have an impact on the results or, manipulating the features such that they are model ready or can enhance the results. This entire process is simply called Feature Engineering.

There are various methods to achieve this. Based on the data and applications, each of these is used.

In this article, we will understand why to use feature engineering and various methods to perform feature engineering.
How to Write a Great Follow-Up Email After a Meeting
By: Patrick Ewers
Tags: Leadership, Communication, Productivity, Meetings, Email

Why Most People Fail to Consistently Send Follow-up Emails

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve thought about sending follow-up emails. In fact, it probably isn’t even the first time you’ve tried to make this practice into a habit.

And the first couple days of your initial attempt probably went really well. But then something happened; a crisis arose. You invest all of your time and energy into resolving the crisis and, as a result, forget about sending follow-up emails.

The crisis ends, but the emails don’t begin again. Sound familiar? It’s the classic story of well-intentioned habits being crushed before they’re fully-formed.

If you’re ready to commit to this habit again, here’s a quick tip to streamline the process and make it easier to remember to send those emails, no matter what happens: Create a follow-up email draft before the meeting.

Obviously this draft can’t be too specific or detailed since it’s being written before the meeting is taking place, but that’s okay. You can always flesh it out after the meeting. Here’s an example of what this email draft might look like:

Obviously this draft can’t be too specific or detailed since it’s being written before the meeting is taking place, but that’s okay. You can always flesh it out after the meeting. Here’s an example of what this email draft might look like:

“Hi Sachin, Thanks for meeting with me today. I enjoyed our meeting very much and look forward to meeting you again. Cheers, Patrick”

Once you’ve got this email sitting in your drafts folder, it’s hard to forget to send it. All you’ve got to do is personalize it once the meeting wraps up. Speaking of which, let’s talk about …
The Summer of Covid
By: Jennifer Hammersmark
Tags: Horseback Riding, Mental Health, Outdoors, Camping, Hiking

Every cloud has a silver lining. For me, it was grabbing as much outside time, adventure and fun as one can during a pandemic. Please enjoy my collage timeline of ‘Getting Outside for Your Mental Health’.
The Magic Data-Driven Journalism Formula
By: Amr Eleraqi
Tags: Journalism, Data Journalism, Infotimes Blog

Designed by Infogram

There are many ways to think about data-driven journalism. Some view it as a set of tools that enable journalists to collect, arrange, analyze, and design data.

Others view data-driven journalism as an equation: DDJ= C+C+D. Data-driven journalism equals content, plus context, plus design.

Let’s break down each component individually.

1) Content

They say content is king. In this case, the content is your data. Data is the raw material journalists use to weave their stories together. If you have data, you have options for multiple stories, but the process isn’t as easy as it looks. Turning data into insightful stories takes effort, and data isn’t always readily available.

There are three cases of data availability:

Some countries don’t make data public, so it’s not available to journalists. In this case, the government may legally punish anyone who publishes data they aren’t supposed to have access to.

Sometimes data is available, but it isn’t machine readable and therefore can’t be transferred easily. If data is saved as a PDF, for example, journalists have to take the time to convert the numbers and input them manually. This is almost impossible with big data sets.

When data is available, clean, and machine readable (which is rare in Egypt), the next crucial step is data verification. Journalists need to determine the validity of the data they have found.

2) Context

Content may be king — but without context, content doesn’t have any value. That being said, context without content means nothing. It’s a two ways street. The value of data is only highlighted when it is arranged within a certain context — helping to tell the story and explain what the data means. Context is the frame in which journalists can tell their story.

Let’s use rainfall in the Amazon as an example. Average rainfall across the whole Amazon basin is approximately 2300 mm (or ~7.5′) annually. This statistic alone doesn’t tell a story without also explaining rainfall in other parts of the world, previous Amazon rainfall data, and how the Amazon rainforest impacts the world.

3) Design

Data can be displayed in multiple ways. Spreadsheets don’t attract a reader’s attention, which is why data visualization is so important. Dataviz is a great way to for journalists to get their data’s message across. While some people still love reading text, what people really want to see is visuals.

But, flashy visuals shouldn’t be the end goal for journalists. It is more about transforming that excellent content into an engaging image. There are helpful online tools like Infogram that help journalists do just that!

Main image by Infogram
SaaS customer profitability
By: Sammy Abdullah
Tags: Venture Capital, SaaS, Startup, Software

Bill.com recently went public. Their software automates complex back-office financial operations for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). One of the charts in their prospectus shows the revenue growth and contribution margin of customers acquired in 2017; it’s a very nice illustration of the first three years of a SaaS customer in a healthy SaaS business. The chart is below.

In the first year, you lose money. Generally speaking, the first year of any customer in a SaaS business is an unprofitable one. That’s because the sales & marketing expense to acquire the customer is incurred in year 1. As you can see for Bill.com, for fiscal 2017, the 2017 Cohort represented $6.7 million in revenue billed to these customers, $11.8 million in sales and marketing costs to acquire these customers, and $2.3 million of cost of sales representing a computed contribution margin of -108%.

In the 2nd year, you start becoming profitable. Since you never incur sales & marketing expense again to acquire the customer, the only cost in any SaaS business is just the “cost of sales”. In fiscal 2018 and 2019, the 2017 Cohort represented $14.2 million and $17.3 million, respectively, in revenue billed to these customers and $3.9 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in estimated costs related to retaining and expanding these customers, representing a computed contribution margin of 73% and 76%, respectively.

The revenue grew. Note that revenue in year 1 was only $6.7mm. In years 2 and 3, it was $14mm and $17mm respectively, meaning the cohort grew. Indeed, good SaaS businesses have cohorts that grow over time, as upgrades in the customer base outpace downgrades and churn.

Payback is fast. According to Bill.com, “for customers acquired during fiscal 2018, the average payback period was approximately five quarters.” Good SaaS businesses recover the cost of acquiring the customer within 1.5 years.

Bill.com’s customer cohort is a nice example of what a good SaaS business will experience: i) you lose money on the customer in year 1; ii) in year 2 the customer becomes very profitable and you recover the cost of acquiring the customer; iii) over time, your customers buy more product from you rather than less. Maintain these same attributes in your own SaaS business and you’ll be on your way to joining Bill.com as a public company.

Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email us directly with Series A or B opportunities at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com. We invest $1mm to $1.5mm in growth rounds, inside rounds, small rounds, cap table restructurings, note clean outs, and other ‘special situations’ all over the US & Canada.
This Month In Chirp — October. Welcome to our monthly Chirp bulletin
By: Jamie Tringham
Tags: Python, API, Kotlin, Embedded, Data Over Sound

🚀 Explorer Board

Last week we announced our Explorer Board, the first IoT prototyping platform that’s tailor-made from the ground up to explore the possibilities of acoustic data transfer.

Built around the powerful Arm Cortex-M4 CPU with inbuilt DSP for optimised audio processing, it allows developers to quickly and easily integrate data-over-sound technology into embedded scenarios.

You can check out more details, and express your interest for the board, which will ship by the end of the year here
Market trends bulletin — Insights 2.0 Vol 15
By: Team Koinex
Tags: Finance, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Analysis, Bitcoin

Market trends bulletin — Insights 2.0 Vol 15

Market Analysis:

Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading at 6451 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 11.11 IST) with the rise of 0.03 % in last 24 hours. From the sentiment’s analysis point of view, the global crypto community is neutral.

Now let’s take a look at the technical analysis of bitcoin and few other altcoins. The probability expressed for altcoins depends partially on the bitcoin trend.

Bitcoin (BTC):

As per daily timeframe, BTC has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. A symmetrical triangle chart pattern represents a period of consolidation before the price is forced to breakout or breakdown. A breakdown from the lower trendline marks the start of a new bearish trend, while a breakout from the upper trendline indicates the start of a new bullish trend. From the chart, we can see that BTC tested support level 1 (6371 USDT) and closed successfully above it. The daily candle is closed as “Bullish Takuri Line” candle pattern and bulls dominated last 24 hours session with high volume. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per the daily timeframe.

Ethereum (ETH):

ETH is currently trading at 212 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 12.19 IST) with the fall of 0.18 % in last 24 hours. As per the daily timeframe, ETH also has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. From the chart, we can see that ETH tested support level 1 (209 USDT) and closed multiple candles successfully above it. The daily candle is closed as “Bullish Hammer” candle pattern but bears dominated last 24 hours session with high volume. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per the daily timeframe.

Bitcoin cash (BCH):

BCH is currently trading at 519 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 11.17 IST) with the fall of 2.97 % in last 24 hours. The daily closed candle represents bears dominated last 24 hours session. Bulls will come back into the game if it holds support level 1 (521 USDT) with some bullish confirmation candle else we can see a continuation of downtrend till support level 2 (483 USDT).

Ripple (XRP):

XRP is currently trading at 0.51010 USDT (as of 12 November 2018, 12.42 IST) with the fall of 0.02 % in last 24 hours. As per daily timeframe, XRPUSDT also has formed a symmetrical triangle pattern. From the chart, we can see that it has tested support level 1 (0.49818 USDT) and closed multiple candles successfully above it. As per the daily closed candle interpretation, bulls dominated last 24 hours session in spite of heavy selling pressure. There is a high probability of uptrend than downtrend as per daily timeframe.
A short review of Joe Abercrombie’s ‘Best Served Cold’
By: Thomas Jenkins
Tags: Books, Reading, Fiction, Fantasy, Book Review

A short review of Joe Abercrombie’s ‘Best Served Cold’

A good, if slightly underwhelming, return to the world of ‘The First Law’

Joe Abercrombie is a prolific fantasy author (and a pretty interesting person to follow on Twitter, too). He’s best known for his First Law trilogy, but he has also written a few young-adult books, a follow-up trilogy to First Law, and a set of spinoff books set in the same universe. Best Served Cold is one of those spinoffs. It’s about a mercenary in Styria, a nation geographically close to Adua (where much of The First Law is set.

I chose to read this book because I liked The First Law a great deal and think Abercrombie’s writing style is great. Earlier this year, I also read A Little Hatred, which is the second book in his sequel trilogy. While I waited for book two in that series to come out (it released in September; it’s on hold in my library right now) I decided to give Best Served Cold a try.

Much like The First Law, Best Served Cold follows multiple protagonists, starting with just one perspective and then gradually expanding as the story develops. The two “main” characters are Monza (the mercenary out for revenge) and Shivers (a minor character from The First Law who is also present in the sequel trilogy). There are a few others, but the majority of the chapters come from one of these two people and it’s clear that they form the centerpiece of the story.

The book’s greatest strength is the characters themselves. Every single character has some kind of fatal flaw. A few of them have some good qualities too, but Abercrombie seems most interested in telling a story with no clear “good guy.” The myriad ways that each character interacts with everyone else are the best reasons to pick this book up. Everyone is out for their own interests, and the broader story unfolds through their betrayals, plots, and schemes.

Best Served Cold falls short in its pacing. It’s a lengthy book, and some of the chapters in the second half don’t carry the plot forward as much as their earlier counterparts. The central story of revenge and plotting is solid, but I think Abercrombie could have purged some of the less-central parts of the plot and ended up with a slightly shorter book.

Best Served Cold falls short of the high standards set by The First Law trilogy, but is still a perfectly enjoyable book on its own. Abercrombie is a really good character writer, and the dialog and interactions in this story more than make up for the pacing shortfalls. As we wait for his second trilogy to conclude, fans of his work could do a lot less than checking Best Served Cold out.
Masks of Loneliness
By: Thalia Dunn
Tags: Self-awareness, Poetry On Medium, Loneliness, Relationships, Poetry

Loneliness

sits in the vacant spot,

cuddled close

in an empty church pew

to the weary faced man

who buried his wife last month.

Loneliness bumps shoulders

with the teen-aged girl

in her sparkly dress

as she stands

alone

while the music plays on.

Loneliness slides

through the screen door left ajar

as the old lady shuffles through

with grocery bags

of single serving meals.

Loneliness seeps

into my thoughts like black mold

creeping into crevices around floor tiles

sniffing around

the perimeters of life,

waiting to snare another.
Pass data or events from a parent component to a child component in both functional and class components.
By: Manish Mandal
Tags: React Native, Components, React, Reactjs

Pass data or events from a parent component to a child component in both functional and class components. Manish Mandal Follow May 11 · 3 min read

I still remember the day when I gave an interview in one of the reputed MNC in India. In the first round, the interviewer was a lady and she has asked me at least 50 questions from React, HTML, and CSS. I gave most of the answers correct and selected for the next round. In the next round, there was a guy who took my interview. First, he asked me to rate my skill out of 5 in React HTML and CSS. I gave 4 to HTML 4 to CSS and 2 to React😅. And you know what happened next he started asking me the question only from React 😁. Ok coming to the point he asked me a simple basic question of React. How to pass an event from a parent component to the child component without using any external library. And I didn’t know that answer 😞. But now I know 🙃. So here is a clear explanation of how to pass data or events from child component to parent component in different ways.

First Method — Functional child component to Parent functional component

Create a child component and put the below code inside that component.

import React from "react"; export default function Child({data, onChildClick}) {

return (

<div className="child">

<button onClick={onChildClick}>{data}</button>

</div>

);

}

here we have created a child function and inside that, we are creating a simple button whose text data and onclick event will be coming from the parent component. we have passed data and onChildClick props as an object argument to the child function.

2. Now we will import the child component to our parent component.

import Child from './Child'

3. Then inside your parent function create another function to run our desire event and pass the child component to return.

import React from "react";

import "./styles.css";

import Child from './Child' export default function Parent() {

function clickAlert(){

alert("I am working")

}

return (

<div className="App">

<Child data="Click here" onChildClick={clickAlert} />

</div>

);

}

here you can see that we have passed Click here as data and onChildClick event from parent to the child. Now when we click on the button it will run our clickAlert function which will basically alert “I am working”.

Here is the live example
Kalman Filter in a Nutshell
By: Shuo Wang
Tags: Python, Kalman Filter, Data Science, Statistics, Programming

Drop a Tennis Ball

So let’s get started with our example.

I am dropping a tennis ball from a helicopter (or maybe my airship), I would like to predict its position in the air until it hits the ground.

Tennis Ball Dropping (Image by Author)

You would think this is a very simple problem, right? After all, we’ve got our equations of motion:

Equations of Motion

Where g is acceleration due to gravity (9.81 meters per second squared).

Well, unfortunately the real world is not that simple. If you are dropping a lead ball I suppose the equations of motion are all you need, but for something light like a tennis ball, it’s trajectory might be affected by all sorts of things.

For example, there might be a really strong wind blowing.

Wind Blowing (Image by Author)

Or a really hungry alligator might be near by…

Hungry Alligator (Image by Author)

The real world is complicated.

So, if your prediction solely comes from the equations, it might be really off by the time the ball reaches the ground.

Let’s take a closer look.
Fragmented Cities/Towns in Time: (Inner-city) London, Leicestershire and Aberystwyth
By: Lexus Ndiwe
Tags: Memories, Home, Cities, Travel, Writing

The stereotypes and poster children of London are The Queen, Big Ben and red post boxes. But what if I told you that there is another side of London. Away from the glitz and glamour of the capital’s centre lies dark alleyways and numerous corner shops. And somewhere amongst all of that is where I grew up.

Somewhere in inner-city London

Dog sh*t and sitting pigeons. Pavements and lumpy roads. Underlying all this is the minor details. The worn roads and the weeds overgrown. The industrial landscape infested with concrete homes. The smell of weed and cigarette smoke. The small patches of grass, struggling to stay alive, underneath a polluted sky.

Photo Credit: Shakeb Tawheed for Pexels.

Moving away from home at varies stages in my life, I was excited to breathe in the fresh air of opportunities. Little did I know that I would miss my home as quickly as I did.
7 Traits of Successful Developers
By: Shubham Pathania
Tags: Programming, Coding, Software Development, Learning To Code, Software Engineering

1. Coding Is Not the First Priority

Generally, most programmers have this habit of rushing towards coding once they get a problem. When I started my professional career, I was always excited to code. Whenever I used to get a task, I immediately rushed to my editor and started coding.

For this reason, most of the time, my code was buggy. I wasn’t writing the wrong code but writing it without aptly analyzing the requirements first.

One of the most important aspects of programming is not just how you add the code to an application but how you make sure that it won’t break the existing functionality.

One of my senior developers once said, “Programming is an art. Coding is merely 20-30% part of it, and the rest is analysis.”

Even a mediocre programmer can code if they know the answers to what and where. If you give 80% of your time to the proper analysis of the problem, then you will find it easier to code in your remaining time.
Learning to Live with Impermanence in the Age of COVID-19
By: Ron Emmons
Tags: Buddhism, Impermanence, Covid 19, Letting Go, Coronavirus

Had to change your plans lately? The escalation of the coronavirus pandemic and the spike in cases of COVID-19 is causing us all to revise our aims for the immediate future, against a background of global unease that is verging on global panic.

Every day we learn of more government restrictions, stock market slumps and other scare stories. As we try to adapt to working from home, cancelling social engagements and the sight of health workers sealed in plastic, it’s not surprising that we’re getting a bit anxious about the future. So what can we do to keep our cool?

Activities such as cooking, sewing and gardening can help, as well as sweeping, since these repetitive diversions help to soothe the mind.

Yet to understand how we get caught up in the fear and hysteria, it’s worth taking a look at the three characteristics of Buddhism — suffering, non-self and impermanence — to help our brains cope with, and hopefully detach from, the onslaught of information that is often conflicting.

A crash course in Buddhist concepts

The notion that ‘all existence is suffering’ is anathema to hedonists, who feel that life can be fun too, and yet the idea is not as depressing as it sounds. If you substitute ‘suffering’ with ‘discomfort’, it’s easy to see how many of our actions are aimed at relieving discomfort, or avoiding suffering.

Try this experiment: as you read on, keep a part of your mind aware of any shifting of your body — crossing your legs, folding your arms, leaning forwards or backwards. These instinctive movements have a simple purpose — to make us more comfortable and relaxed. When we break up a destructive relationship or quit a boring job, we are acting on the same instinct to avoid further suffering.

‘The self is an illusion’ is another tough concept to get our heads around in this selfie-saturated era. Most cultures bring kids up to take pride in who they are, to be socially popular and to show off their skills to the world. Yet much as we would like it to be so, our own self-image is never quite the same as others see us, and most people, including world leaders, have as many detractors as supporters, showing the elusive nature of the concept of self. If we could all be more selfless and humble, imagine how pleasant a place this world could be.

‘Impermanence’, or the notion that nothing lasts, should be an easier concept to grasp, since everything has a beginning and an end, like today. I write ‘should’, but the reality is that most people on this planet strive constantly to achieve stability, constancy and continuity, especially in their work and relationships.

This flies in the face of the observable reality that all things and people that come into being, including you and I, also expire. A flower’s blossom, a flaring sunset, a new taste for the palate and a surprise birthday party are all ephemeral, though fortunately so are bodily wounds, job rejections and arguments with loved ones.

A personal history of impermanence
10 Best Literary Villains You’ll Love to Hate And Hate to Fall For
By: Nusrat Nisa
Tags: Book Recommendations, Villains, Books, Personality, Reading

10 Best Literary Villains You’ll Love to Hate And Hate to Fall For

Villains are my weakness…literally and figuratively.

Photo by JJ Jordan from Pexels

I have noticed a strange thing about myself: while reading a long book series, I don’t particularly love the main characters. The story spends so much time with them that they feel slightly boring.

So I find myself waiting for someone else to show up in the story, which is most of the time the bad guy. If written well, the baddies have the power to make us feel more than the good guys. The villains make us support the main characters, we want to cheer them on just because we don’t want the bad guys to succeed. For example, being inside Harry Potter’s head felt somewhat tiring at times, and I impatiently waited when Draco would come and throw an insult. You won’t see me admit it in broad daylight, but I liked reading about Malfoy’s character arc more than Harry’s.

Similarly, so many times I feel amazed by the villain’s backstory, disgusted by their characters, grudging respect for their cunning. So, here is a list of perfect villainous characters in literature you would hate with a passion, or secretly love despite yourself.