fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
The Scandal Around Trudeau’s Blackface Represents Our Politics Today
By: Tom Stevenson
Tags: Culture, Politics, Canada, News, World

Past Mistakes

There is no doubt that what Trudeau did was wrong. To do it once can be put down to a misjudgement, however, to do it on three separate occasions shows a lack of understanding of the implications of what one was doing.

Trudeau has come out and apologised for his actions, which is about all he can do at this stage. He will not have expected this story to come out, and it’s likely we would have forgotten all about it.

There is no doubt it is damaging to his chances of getting re-elected and it does not paint him in a good light either. This is a man who has spoken openly about his love for diversity and multiculturalism, these photos are a slap in the face to the people he has been championing the past four years.

His rival candidates have seized upon this development by tweeting their revulsion at Trudeau’s actions. This follows on from tactics from Trudeau’s Liberal party which had smeared a number of members of the rival Conservative Party.

Here is the leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May’s response:

The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh was similarly unimpressed.

While Trudeau’s main rival, Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Conservative Party was scathing in his assessment of the incident.

The condemnation of Trudeau’s past actions is to be expected from his political rivals. It is a quick win for all of them and serves to strengthen their hand against the incumbent PM.

Not to say that it is easy to condemn behaviour such as this which is grotesque and racist. However, I want to look at the scandal from a different angle.

Is the level of outrage now in 2019, appropriate for actions that took place 18 years ago? Yes, it’s unedifying to see the face of a world leader covered in black make-up, but is it relevant today?

Should every past discretion be put under the microscope, or should we take a step back and assess the whole situation before jumping to conclusions?
New Smart Contract-Powered Game Launches on Waves
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Games, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Waves

We are pleased to introduce a new game based on Waves smart contracts. It’s very simple, but only the most patient player will win all the money…

The game creators from Tradisys have been inspired by cult movie The Fifth Element and have created a game on the theme of the film. The game is completely decentralised: there are no sources of external influence and it is controlled solely by the rules of a smart contract. It uses Waves Keeper to ensure the process is safe and secure: because your SEED is never exposed to the web, you’re not trusting any third party with your funds.

To take part, you need to transfer 1.1 WAVES to the smart contract of the game. Every time a participant enters the game, the countdown is reset and records a DataTransaction with the address of the last player’s wallet on the blockchain.

To win, the counter must reach zero — with the last address to enter becoming the winner. If someone else sends a transaction and updates the counter, the previous player is eliminated. The wait duration for the counter is 60 blocks, which is approximately 60 minutes, though can be shorter or longer.

To play you need:

1. Desktop operating system (Windows, MacOs, Linux).

2. The latest version of Google Chrome or Firefox.

3. Waves Keeper installed (Chrome, FireFox).

4. A minimum balance of 1.2 WAVES.

Game instructions:

1. Click the “Buy ticket” button.

2. In the pop-up window, sign 2 transactions using Waves Keeper:

- TransferTransaction (1.1 WAVES and 0.1 Commission)

Then click NEXT

- DataTransaction

3. If the first two steps are carried out correctly, your payment will be recorded by the contract, and the counter at the top of the screen will be updated.

4. The last player to buy a ticket before the countdown hits zero will receive the entire amount held by the smart contract.

5. You can play at any time (if you’re not the last player to make a transaction, there’s no point in waiting).

6. There is no limit to the number of entries a player can make.

This is how the interface looks:
Do’s and Don’ts For Building Your Chatbot
By: Cobus Greyling
Tags: Conversational Ai, Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, Conversational UI, NLP

Do’s and Don’ts For Building Your Chatbot

Building A Natural Language Understanding Application For Unstructured Data Input

Introduction

Usually once a chatbot launched, the default approach is to just add more and more utterances to each intent, somehow hoping that this will magically improve the chatbot’s performance. Somehow we believe the more utterance examples we add to the bot, the cleverer the bot will become.

Below are a few Do’s and Don’ts that will help you in taking your chatbot in a journey of improvement and with each iteration grow in understanding and reacting to user utterances.

Do Define Distinct Intents

Make sure the vocabulary for an intent is specific to the intent it is meant for. Avoid having intents which overlaps.

For example, if you have a chatbot which handles travel arrangements such as flights and hotels, you can choose:

To have these two user utterances and ideas as separate intents

Or use the same intent with two entities for specific data inside the utterance; be it flights or hotels.

If the vocabulary between two intents are the same, combine the intent, and use entities.

Take a look at the following two user utterances:

Book a flight

Book a hotel

Both use the same wording, “book a”. The format is the same so it should be the same intent with different entities. One entity being flight and the other hotel.
Damned by the Dreams of a Lost Love
By: Tre L. Loadholt
Tags: Heartwork, Love, Prose Poem, Poetry, Life

Damned by the Dreams of a Lost Love

A Prose Poem

Photo Source: Pinterest

I have drowned myself in work — work that I love, work that makes me happy. And it is in the evening when night slithers its way in that I feel the pain of having loved so many years ago and lost. I know the heart is stronger than the credit we give it, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t take forever to free itself from pain.

And I am tired of waking up to thoughts of you, tired of feeling your lips pressed against mine, tired of wondering what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and if I still mean anything to you. I do and don’t want to be a factor. Why is it so hard? There shouldn’t be a plethora of questions on this subject. I should have a degree in broken hearts and delayed healing —

Love’s Recovery, 101.

You have moved on. You did so effortlessly and I am still steering a wretched ship that has no sense of direction without its captain. Throw out the life rafts. Man the exit points. I was bound to hit a few rocks along the way, but I am still out to sea.

Battered and unmanned.

I stare at my phone. I want to take a chance on sending you a text message but every alarm within me is set and red flags pop up whenever my fingers go searching through my contacts. Leave well enough alone.

And I do. I settle into the nightlife, ease myself into an escape route of books and words that are not my own, and remember that spells can be broken.

I am not cursed.

I am not cursed.
Happy Birthday, Bill Murray!
By: Daily Philosophy
Tags: Groundhog Day, Birthday, Life Lessons, Philosophy, Movies

Happy Birthday, Bill Murray!

The philosophy of Groundhog Day

Photo by Harald Krichel — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86623843

Without Bill Murray, who celebrates his 70th birthday today, many movies of the past 44 years would have been a lot less memorable. From Tootsie, Ghostbusters, and The Man Who Knew Too Little, to his tender portrayal of being Lost in Translation, Bill Murray has made every one of his many roles shine with his humanity and his very unique take on the glorious and melancholy fun of being alive in a crazy world.

But today we celebrate one movie specifically here, and this is Groundhog Day, perhaps the most philosophical of all his films. The story of a man who wakes up, every day, to the same day again. And again. And again. As anyone would, he goes through phases of disbelief, frustration, depression, and even tries to kill himself in order to escape from the relentless, eternal repetition of the exact same day. But then something happens. The man, trapped in this one-day life, realises that the only way to make his fate bearable is to accept it. To submit to it, but not passively: to take this one day he has been given and to transform it into something worth living for, worth waking up to, again and again. And we, the audience, along with him, learn to see our own lives in a different light.

Harold Ramis, the screenwriter of the movie, has often told the story of how the movie became a favourite of Buddhist circles, although he never intended it to. One can see why. The movie cries to be interpreted. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief are played out in the evolution of the main character: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The neverending cycle of rebirth is pictured in the awakening of Murray’s character every morning. Weatherman Phil can also be seen as an incarnation of a Bodhisattva, a perfect being, liberated from the cycle of birth and death, who stays on in the world to help rescue all the other beings and move them towards salvation. But the most important interpretation is that, which every one of us will give to the message in our everyday lives:

When the alarm clock rings in the morning, this is not just a call to repeat the same old day in the office again and again, as if time had stopped and we were caught in a deadly, timeless loop forever. Rather, every day is a new opportunity, the gift of a span of time, which every one of us has the power to transform. To change from mindless drudgery to something exciting, creative, divine, with nothing more than one’s two hands, one’s mind, and one’s heart.

One single day is all that anyone needs for salvation.

Happy Birthday, Bill Murray!
An Introduction to Automating Image Processing with Deep Learning
By: Zeeshan Patel
Tags: Convolutional Network, Artificial Intelligence, TensorFlow, Python, Keras

CNNs Step-By-Step

CNNs are most often characterized by their use of Convolutional layers and Pooling layers.

Convolutional layers convolve the input data to develop feature maps. Multiple convolutional layers are used in CNNs, and these layers include filters (often called kernels). Convolution generates a activation map of the filter, and the network learns which filters activate when a specific feature is detected. Through the use of these filters, the CNN is able to learn to detect a certain feature at a specific spatial position in the input. In TensorFlow, convolutional layers can be developed using the following function:

You can customize the parameters for the function.

Pooling layers are utilized for non-linear downsampling of the output of convolutional layers. Both TensorFlow and PyTorch provide various pre-packaged functions used for pooling, but the most often used pooling technique is Max Pooling. It creates non-overlapping rectangles that are subsets of the input image, and then outputs the maximum value of these rectangles. Max Pooling reduces the amount of computation needed by decreasing the number of overall parameters in the model, which will already have millions of parameters. Consequently, Max Pooling also helps in preventing overfitting.

Max Pooling Example

In TensorFlow, Max Pooling can be implemented as follows:

You can customize the parameters for the function.

As you can see, it is not too difficult to implement these Convolutional and Max Pooling layers. There are other layers also used in CNNs such as Batch Normalization, ReLU activation layers, concatenation layers, and transposing layers. These layers can be used to further better your network architecture or when you are using a popular architecture such as U-Net.
An Executive Curriculum
By: Itamar Goldminz
Tags: Management, Leadership, Executive Coaching

While “new managers” programs are becoming more and more popular these days, I still see a big opportunity in developing programs that are tailored to new executives — people who are going to be on the executive team for the first time, and actually, if we’re being honest, will most likely benefit many existing executives. And being a business school grad, I’m definitely not talking about what’s typically offered in their “executive programs”.

I’m making a conscious decision to stay within the existing hierarchical paradigm in my framing here, but in many ways, this is an advanced “How can we work better together?” curriculum. Cross-functional work is becoming more and more the norm in organizations but remains the exception rather than the rule for many people in many roles. That changes when members join the executive time, and for many, this is the first time where their primary, long-last peer team is truly cross-functional.

If I were to ever design a curriculum that’s meant to prepare people for doing this type of collaborative cross-functional work, these are the primary sources that I’d draw content and inspiration from:
DJI Mavic Mini เปิดตัวโดรนจิ๋วตัวใหม่ของ DJI
By: Pichaya Punyakhetpimook
Tags: โดรน, Review, Dji, Drone, Mavic Mini

in Both Sides of the Table
Jooycar, a Connected Car and Insuretech platform in Latin America
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: Insurtech, Startup, Cars, Insurance, Connected Cars

Jooycar has raised $3.2M in total. We talked with Rodrigo Labbe, its CEO.

PetaCrunch: How would you describe Jooycar in a single tweet?

Rodrigo Labbe: JOOYCAR is moving with intelligence. We re-imagined the way in which people uses car insurances for a safer and more efficient driving.

PC: How did it all start and why?

RL: Our visionary founders, María Paz Gillet and Emilio Figueroa had an extended start-up experience. They noticed the unfairness of paying more on your car-insurance when you drive well or drive just few miles. There was an opportunity to use the power of IOT in order to create usage based insurance products tailored for the LATAM market.

PC: What have you achieved so far?

RL:

Insurtech founded in 2014

+40 million miles processed by Jooycar real time platform.

Almost 20K connected cars

Successful launch of Pay how you drive and Pay as you drive products.

$3 million raised from HCS Capital.

We’ve closed strategic partnerships with insurance companies across de region in Mexico, Peru and Chile

PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2–3 years?

RL: Make Car Insurance a preventive tool to avoid accidents, not only a way to deal with them. This by achieving a million connected cars across LATAM and the US by innovating in technology and the business model approach of personal and commercial lines.
SwiftUI: Create a Tinder-Style Swipeable Card View
By: Brandon Baars
Tags: Programming, iOS, Swiftui, Mobile, Swift

How To Make It Translate and Rotate

We can use a drag gesture to get the width of our drag. In the diagram above, if the user dragged from those two points, our translation would be 200px.

Using this constantly changing value, we can offset our view by whatever x or y we want, based on how much the user has dragged their finger.

We can then determine what percentage of the screen the user dragged by using that value and width of the device or the parent view.

Using that percentage, we can say that at 0%, let’s not rotate the image, but at 100%, let’s rotate it 25 deg.

Write some pseudo-code to obtain our rotation deg:

let rotationDeg = dragPercentage * 25 .

This would give us values between 0 and 25.

Thankfully, SwiftUI does a lot of the heavy lifting for us with gestures. We just have to hold a @State value that will update our translation. Using that value, we can then process the necessary calculations.

Still within our CardView.swift , add the following variable and view modifier to our existing outermost VStack { } .

Create a private state variable that will hold our translations value. Update the offset of the view based on whatever values are in the width/height of our translation. This will move the view exactly where we are dragging it. Add the gesture modifier and specify the DragGesture() class. This class allows us to get the value of the drag in the .onChange handler. Update our translation variable to the new value of our drag as well as reset our translation back to 0 in the .onEnded . If we didn’t set it back to 0, the view would remain wherever we last left it.

As you may have noticed, our view can drag in either direction, x or y. We, however, need to restrict it to just the x direction (horizontal dragging).

Change the

.offset(x: self.translation.width, y: self.translation.height)

to be

.offset(x: self.translation.width, y: 0) .

Note: Here we do not want to update our y value based on our drag, just the x.

Rotation

Simple, let’s use our geometry reader's width to retrieve the width of the parent view, and use that as our maximum drag distance.

All we have to do is add this one line of code view modifier, after the .offset() but before the .gesture() :

.rotationEffect(.degrees(Double(self.translation.width / geometry.size.width) * 25), anchor: .bottom)

This will add a rotation effect of between 0 and 25 deg (or -25 depending on which way in the x-axis we’re moving our finger), with the anchor to be the bottom of our view.

If we hadn’t set the bottom anchor, our view would rotate around its default view of the .center . (This also would have been fine, but I think the .bottom looks better).

This is what our view should be like now:

You may be asking now, though, how do we animate it back into place when the translation ends.

Easy!
Central Tendency Analysis
By: Dilshan Pathirana
Tags: Finance, Data Science, Analysis

When working with data it’s good to have an overall picture of the data. Where it’s good to have an idea of how values in a given data set is distributed. One popular way is to find the central tendency of data using statistical methods.

Photo by Heidi Sandstrom. on Unsplash

Mean is the average value of the given data set. This method can be easily implemented using any programming language and there are tons of libraries which has the capability to get the mean.

Since mean is highly sensitive to outliers there is a possibility of giving wrong interpretation about data using mean as alone. So to avoid this problem we can use the trim mean where we trim the outliers from the data and get the mean . This trimming can be done by either using clustering or by just sorting the values in the data-set and trimming a predefined portions of data age of data. As an example we could sort the data in the data set and trim 1% of data from top and bottom. Mean is not a very good measure for skewed data.

Median is a good choice for skewed data. Median is the value of the midpoint

in a set of ordered data values. The main disadvantage of this is it requires a high computational power to get the median for a un-ordered data set.

Other than the above two methods mode is also a good to see the central tendency. Mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a data set.

If you are a python fan, pandas has predefined implementation of above all three functions.

As I stated earlier it’s good to have a idea of the distribution of data.The data distribution of a data set can be:

* Syemetric

* Skewed

* * negatively skewed.

* * positively skewed.

“Yellow and orange shipping containers stacked on top of each other” by frank mckenna on Unsplash

The following images show examples of the above three types.

Types of data distributions that can occur

The easiest way to find the skewness of data is to visualize the data and take a decision based on the perception. but there is a better way that is use the above given measurements to identify the skew ness.

If the data is symmetrically distributed:

Mean=Median=Mode

If the data is positively distributed

Mode<Median<Mean

If the data is negativity distributed

Mean<Median<Mode
New to UX Design? Feeling Overwhelmed?
By: Guy Ligertwood
Tags: Life Lessons, Productivity, Self Improvement, Design, UX

Did you read that Sidebar article about UX Writing?

Did you see the new augmented reality software that Apple created?

Have you seen Android’s new design pattern?

Did you see the latest Google I/O talks?

Have you read ‘Hooked’ ?

You been on Dribbble lately?

Did you complete that online UI course with Design Labs?

Did you see the latest intercom podcast with Julie Zhuo?

Have you joined The Designership’s Slack room, it’s such a great resource for designers?

Did you see the latest interview article with Interface Lovers?

How is your side project going?

Are you going to the meet up tonight?

Have you finished your portfolio?

Did you write that Medium article you were talking about doing?

Did you see that new prototyping tool that just came out?

arghhh…

…there’s a lot to keep up with isn’t there?

Feels a bit overwhelming?

You’re not alone 🤓
The Key to Happiness
By: Catherine Delia
Tags: Responsibility, Personal Growth, Awareness, Self, Micro Story

The key to happiness involves taking responsibility for your choices.

The path can take many detours but you can choose which ones you follow. There’s always another path, maybe there’s a dragon, but they’re easily defeated.

Don’t let self doubt or dragons creep up on you and derail your journey.
How To Integrate KeyCloak With Angular For SSO Authentication
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: Angular, JavaScript, Software Development, Programming, Web Development

How To Integrate KeyCloak With Angular For SSO Authentication

A step by step guide with an example project

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

Keycloak is an open-source Identity and Access Management solution for modern applications and services. It makes it easier to secure your applications with little to no code. It provides a lot of features such as Single sign-on, single sign out, Kerberos bridge, Identity Brokering, and Social Login, User Federation, etc.

In this post. we will see how to integrate keycloak with the angular app for the SSO.

Introduction

Example Project

Running keyCloak server on Local

Creating Realms, Users, Roles, and clients

How To Integrate Angular With KeyCloak

Running Multiple Apps With SSO

Summary

Conclusion

Introduction

Security is one of the central components of developing web applications. Single sign-on is the authentication mechanism that permits users to access different or multiple applications with one set of credentials or by logging in once. Basically, It minimizes the management of various users and passwords.

This is how SSO works with keycloak. Users authenticate with Keycloak rather than individual applications. This means that your applications don’t have to deal with login forms, authenticating users, and storing users. Once logged-in to Keycloak, users don’t have to login again to access a different application.

This also applied to logout. Keycloak provides single-sign out, which means users only have to logout once to be logged out of all applications that use Keycloak.
Trope Exploration: Dark Paranormal Romance
By: Emily Sinclair Montague
Tags: Books, Romance, Sex, Writing, Writing Tips

If I had to choose a few adjectives to describe the Dark Paranormal Romance (DPR) genre (which I do, because, well, it’s what I write), I’d probably select words like dark, lush, tense, passionate, and toe-curling.

These are the stories that meet the challenge of your deepest, darkest fantasies. They bring to life the kind of dangerous, knife’s-edge passion that so many of us dream of in secret. Taboos are no longer off-limits, and you can embrace the heart-pounding heat of forbidden love with zero guilt when you pick up a series in this category.

When we talk about genre, we’re often talking about one thing in particular: tropes. You probably don’t want to admit this fact, but it’s true. We pick up these books because we love the specific elements of the genre, and those elements are the tropiest of tropes, all done up in different forms by our authors of choice. No shame here, guys!

DPRs are no exception to the Game of Tropes, and I’ve become intimately acquainted with them over time. Here are the things that make or break this genre’s appeal to so many readers and writers.
Passion Still Speaks Portuguese
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Music, Travel, Language, Mental Health, Love

Portuguese sidewalk in the rain isn’t the ideal surface for an impromptu dance routine.

Not unless you want a Bambi on ice moment.

But I’m bouncing down the road to the corner store with Lisbon electro-pop between my ears and a giant grin on my face. “Things are going to get confusing” sings Amor Electro, providing the perfect soundtrack for what I’m experiencing. And I’m still listening as I stand in line waiting to pay for my groceries. If I trusted my intonation a little more, chances are I’d even sing along but I’m not there yet. Of course I take the earbuds out the minute the cashier rings up my items.

Some seven years ago, I had to leave my Portuguese life behind on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic. Little did I know at the time that the hole in my heart would keep growing until it became so big it threatened to swallow me.

When I immigrated to America, I then went from juggling several languages and cultures to just the one. My life shrank and my brain grew slack through lack of intellectual stimulation as depression felled me. Because I lacked the financial wherewithal to access therapy, I proceeded to silence the part of me I missed the most, reasoning that it might lessen some of the pain of being alive.

In short, I denied Portuguese even existed. Never mind that it had forever altered the course of my life and career after I fell into it by accident. With nary a whimper, I gave up what I had fought so hard to learn, nurture, and grow.

But this kind of abiding emotional attachment isn’t something you can undo any more than you can ignore it although I gave it my best shot for years. It was easy in America; I lived a very self-contained and isolated life.

Passion was a language.

And I had turned my back on it.
Designing Highly Available Container Applications on Kubernetes
By: Gaurav Agarwal
Tags: DevOps, Programming, Kubernetes, Containers, Technology

Pod Disruption Budget

Pod disruption budget is a Kubernetes object that ensures that a replicated application still maintains a certain number of healthy replicas at any given point.

For example, an application named web-app running three replicas with a pod disruption budget of 2 will have at least two instances running at a given time if there are any voluntary outages.

That is especially helpful if you want to ensure that your customers face the least disruption possible while you patch and upgrade your cluster. You can also use pod disruption budgets in applications that require a quorum to operate.

Be aware that you should specify a pod disruption budget only on applications running more than one replica. If you specify a disruption budget on an application with a single desired replica, Kubernetes will never evict the pod from a cluster in case of a planned outage.

While using a pod disruption budget is a best practice, you need to ensure that you drain nodes taking into account the pod disruption budget. That means you should not drain multiple nodes at once. Instead, you should wait for Kubernetes to reschedule the evicted pods to the new node before attempting to drain another.

There are two ways you can specify a pod disruption budget: by percentage or number of pods. For example, if you specify minAvailable to 2, then Kubernetes allows evictions if at least two pods are healthy at a time. If you specify minAvailable to 30%, that means Kubernetes will allow evictions if 30% of the desired replicas are healthy at a time.

You can either use a minAvailable or maxUnavailable flag to control this behaviour. It depends on your specific use case. The minAvailable is recommended in most use cases.

Let’s configure a pod disruption budget to an NGINX deployment and see for ourselves:

OK, now let’s create an NGINX deployment:

Let’s get the deployment status:

The deployment is up and running, and all four replicas are healthy and available.

Now let’s try to drain the gke-cluster-1-default-pool-bf356567-mrnh node, as two NGINX instances are running on that node:

If you look at the logs, you will find an error in evicting one of the pods ( nginx-5ffb5df89f-ctv4c ) because it would violate the pod disruption budget. It removes the other pod, though, and evicts nginx-5ffb5df89f-ctv4c only after the other pod is successfully scheduled and healthy on the other node.

Let’s see what we get after the pods are evicted:

As we see, Kubernetes has rescheduled the pods on other nodes, and they are up and running.
My Game, My Rules
By: Kriti Joshi
Tags: Work, Facebook, Programming, Interview, Job Interview

1. Application Process

From traditional job portals to a hidden job application link in a website’s source code, there are various channels to apply for a job. Let’s discuss the effectiveness of each channel for different companies based on my experience.

Google

Career page: Google has numerous offices worldwide, so it’s a delight to scroll through its career page full of job openings. A lot of people do get hired through Google’s careers page. You may not get a response immediately but your resume remains in Google’s database and you may get a reply after some time (2 years in my case). I would say it is a good source to apply for both internship and full-time opportunities.

Employee referral: Referral is a good way to stand out among applicants. Google sends a mail after an employee puts referral, to choose three job openings and apply. But it may take some time to hear back from a recruiter.

Response to Employee Referral (Source : Vaibhav Devmurari)

Foobar challenge: This is Google’s secret hiring channel where browser speaks to the “chosen ones.” The exact triggering condition is not known but roughly, it is based on user’s searched keywords on google search engine. Once the challenge triggers, some funky animation happens on the browser and you are presented with with five problems to solve. The interesting part is, after solving problem three you can share your details with a recruiter and opt in for career opportunities.

Note: People have come up with tricks to trigger the challenge so this channel isn’t so secret now and may not be as effective as it used to be. The video below shows one of the tricks to start the challenge.

How I triggered Google foobar challenge

Facebook

Employee referral: A referral guarantees that recruiters will look at your resume but doesn’t guarantee your progress to a recruiter call. You will receive an acceptance or rejection mail according to your suitability for the applied role.

Reaching recruiter on LinkedIn: A trick that worked for me was to write mail or message to a recruiter (Information can be found on recruiter’s LinkedIn page) on LinkedIn.

Tip: Often, recruiters mention which teams they’re hiring for on their LinkedIn profile (About and Experience section). When you contact them, include a project or your skill set aligning with team’s work in order to improve your chances of getting a reply.

About section on LinkedIn

Tip: Approach a team manager instead of recruiters if you are applying to Microsoft. They’re more responsive and get your interview process started with a recruiter. Referrals and job portals don’t work well for Microsoft.
Bokeh 0.12.11 Released
Tags: Python, Bokeh, Data Science, Data Visualization, Open Source

We are pleased to announce the release of Bokeh 0.12.11!

This incremental release has the following highlights:

New step glyph method for drawing step lines

glyph method for drawing step lines LOD downsampling works automatically on linked plots

Bokeh server made simpler to embed with less boilerplate

Ongoing fixes and improvements to layout

Plus several other bug fixes and documentation improvements. For full details, see the CHANGELOG and Release Notes. Additionally, examples for each release are uploaded to CDN. Click here to download.

If you are using Anaconda, Bokeh can most easily be installed by executing the command conda install -c bokeh bokeh . Otherwise, use pip install bokeh .

Upcoming Work

As mentioned in the previous release, we are reaching a point of relative stability with respect to Bokeh development. The major tasks for the next few Bokeh releases are these:

Continue foundational layout fixes and improvements

Allow Bokeh application components to be individually included in arbitrary HTML templates

Refactor and improve how selections are handled for data sources

Finish the work to clearly delineate and standardize all modules and APIs

With the exception of the work on selections, I do not expect any major user-facing changes. The selection architecture has badly needed an overhaul for a long time. Now that we have resources to dive into it, it must be done before 1.0 since there may be some unavoidable breaking changes necessary in some situations. (We will strive to keep these to a bare minimum and provide compatibility where possible.) Any changes will be thoroughly documented in future releases.

As we get closer to a Bokeh 1.0 release, I’d like to thank the 268 total contributors who have helped make Bokeh such an amazing project. If you’re interested in helping out, drop by the Dev Chat Channel!

Thanks,

Bryan Van de Ven
Shadowlands of an Empty Desk
By: Bradley J Nordell
Tags: Pain, Writing, Poetry, Hope, Storytelling

Shadowlands of an Empty Desk

A poem about a writer’s suffering

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

There are ghosts

in my heart,

those forgotten rhythms of hope

that madness fleeing

towards erupting lands,

volcanic thrusts

of mirrored trauma glass

revealing grotesque beauty

of my failed ways to heal

I wonder now,

where do I begin again,

with claustrophobic fears?

I can barely move,

from a life that wore my chisel

to the hilt,

and I wonder if it’s just

boulders and hills

lonely knights of romantic

plight, imagining a life

that left me behind.

Am I just Dante lamenting

my lost Beatrice?

Did I die in those shadowlands

and not realize it?

For all my wisdom

and philosophical musings

what can I bestow upon thee,

when I can barely breath

How can I be a light,

when I forget to open

the blinds.

There’s beauty in the fall

you were right all along,

I am nothing but words

and empty promises,

heroes and love stories,

to hide my pain

How do I retain,

a life when I’m all ready

a ghost?

In tears, that clean away

weeds from the garden,

sunsets soon to bloom

I know,

If I hold on

as the earth tips over

That I will find a brighter

dawn, waiting

To hold me again

I know

I know.

I know.

But the shadowlands

of empty desks

are filled with barren verses

and unfinished stories,

lost love’s and morbid jests

storylines twist and turn

like Penrose steps

paradoxes that amalgamate

Monet buds that never focus

lost in graveyard tunes,

and midnight visions

of you.

© Bradley J Nordell 2020
The Scent of Sex
Tags: Relationships, Sexuality, Sex, Lit

The Scent of Sex

Take a deep breath in

My Photo

What is it about scent that is so essential to transporting us to another place? Our connection to smell and memory is entwined in a way we’re never aware of. It’s always working in the background as we react to the world around us.

I absolutely adore the scent of those I’m with. It’s a strange need to breathe it in when we embrace every time.

I hear a sentiment repeated lately and I can’t help but to echo it:

“You smell good.”

These men tell me. All I can imagine is it’s the orange, champagne lotion I put on specifically for them. I prep my skin for their touch with exfoliation beforehand. I’ve never had men admit my scent is something to be admired.

My ex hated any scented lotion I used. It set off his allergies so I made sure my scent with him was clinically clean without any aroma.

I crave their cologne as well. I ask what exactly is my aroma to NY. There’s a pregnant pause. His eyes narrow and close. As if his nose is buried into the nape of my neck breathing it in right now.

“It’s that orange and Champagne scent, yes. But there’s something else that is just so… you. I can smell it distinctly when we tussle for a bit.”

“Is it good? Like this scent of essentially me behind the lotion?”

I ask him. I feel self conscious about this essential essence of what I am. That he can sense this other smell besides the lotion I apply. His lips turn up into a smirk.

Fingertips make a beautiful dance on my bare skin. He’s just as sensitive to touch as I am. I close my eyes to a sudden surrender of his blunt nails chasing my endless back.

“Mmm, yes, it’s addictive. Like, oh, yes that’s MD right there. But, I can’t describe it.”

“I can’t describe what you smell like. It’s deep, musky in a good way. Just… fucking delicious.”

I can’t pin point what exactly it is. Only that it stuck to my comforter. My dress held onto his scent for days after the fact. Even when I don’t prepare my skin to see these men they still whisper about my sweet scent.

I can’t help but to reply in kind. To bury my head in their skin and breathe in. It’s delicious, delectable, a certain kind of olfactory magnificence. They become a part of my memory with the breathing in of their cologne. I know the science of how it works. The truth is that their scent clinging to me is the perfect perfume.
Bloom Provides an Efficient, Affordable Platform for the Unbanked
By: Toni Reyes
Tags: Fintech, Financial Inclusion

Israel Keys talks about how Bloom is working towards financial inclusion. Established only in 2015, Bloom is already one of the top 10 fintech companies in the Philippines.

For more information, go to https://bx8.io and join the Telegram group at https://t.me/joinBX8.
Top 10 Habits that Annoy Coworkers
By: Your Workplace
Tags: Work, Annoying, Coworkers, Coworking And Coliving, Hygiene

Top 10 Habits that Annoy Coworkers

Fellow workers speak out about what irks them

Creating a progressive, thriving workplace is a massive undertaking richly steeped in reward. It is honourable work for the strong willed leaders of the charge. It is not often that these leaders come up for air, but when this press release crossed our desks, the team at Your Workplace decided to share it to remind you of how far you have come. As we strive to create and improve our workplaces to embrace our changing world, take a quick peek at the work that remains to be done… in another country, anyway.

A recent study surveying 5,224 employees confirms that workers should leave their bad habits at home. Behaviours such as taking your shoes off at work is unacceptable — this is the office not your living room, after all. There are a number of habits that anger managers and employees alike. And whilst it may seem comical, apparently it’s not.

Alan Price, Group Director for Peninsula Business Services, a U.K. employment law consultancy that commissioned this study says, “Before you take hot food to your desk think about how the smell may affect other workers. It can linger, make the air smell stale and may even transfer to coats and garments. It can also be messy so use break-out areas or eat out of the office. Such annoying habits are not to everyone’s taste so make sure that you take this into consideration.”

Price continues his rant: “Employees have just as big a part to play as their employer in ensuring such habits are minimized. Annoying office habits are becoming a serious workplace issue and, with open-plan offices on the increase, it seems more of us have to contend with the bad habits of fellow workers, and the evidence shows that it seems to be making us unhappy.”

But there is another perspective on “irks” or bad habits. What about the employees who heat wonderfully smelling food perhaps influencing workers to run out for a bowl of tasty, nutritious soup rather than skip lunch? What great role models we can be! And if your feet hurt in your shoes, take your shoes off at your desk instead of enduring the pain. It is your workspace after all. It is true, though, that if the picking of your nose is required it should be done in the bathroom, with a hand-washing afterwards.

This survey definitely proves that it is critical to match your beliefs and values with the culture of the organization where you work/want to work.

While the folks in the U.K. may not think that this topic is comical, there are many people out there who believe that a chuckle is warranted. Maybe the Brits need to chill just a little.

The Top 10 Workplace Annoyances

(Ranked in order of highest to lowest annoyance):
On My Touch
Tags: Death, Touch, Prompt, Poetry Under Cover, Poetry

I can’t help myself

When I see a soul

I get interested in

People —

Well, plants and animals too,

On my gentle touch

I get to read the thoughts,

But the brain stops

The soul travels

To the infinity,

On my touch

Many panic

But that doesn’t help

Just embrace me when

I meet you!
Some News and Submission Guidelines
By: Samantha Lazar
Tags: Nonfiction, Writing, Sky Collection, Poetry, Fiction

Some News and Submission Guidelines

Sky Collection has grown!

Author’s Image

This publication started as an experiment, when I was first learning all about how Medium publications worked. At first it was a place to hold my daily poetry in the Sky Collection Project. I began this project on winter solstice, 2019 and my intention was to publish one poem a day for this collection the whole year. My intentions were there, but I did not anticipate the difficult life events of 2020. However, so far there are 114 poems in that collection. Check it out!

Then I began thinking about specific prompts I could add to include other writers in my publication. I am always inspired by other writers’ words and so I created space for writers to find inspiration and add their voices here. There are 21 Quote Prompts so far. This has been one of my favorite writing projects on Medium.

So in less than 10 months, we have gone from party of one to 264 followers. I would say that is pretty organic growth, as I haven’t done a whole lot to promote Sky Collection. I encourage readers and writers to share this publication and the writing here with their social networks.

Because of the increased interest in becoming a writer with Sky Collection, I have new submission guidelines. If you would like to become a writer here, please email me a draft of your work at samanthalazarwriter@gmail.com. We welcome poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and all sub-genres!

Stay tuned for some new feature pages!

Happy writing and reading!

— Samantha, Editor in Chief of Sky Collection
Making Awesome Animations using Animate.css and Wow.js
By: Ezekiel Oladejo
Tags: User Experience, Tech, Coding, Animation, Web Development

Funny enough I have seen these two guys in several templates I’ve used before now, but I know now how they work, all I know is that they are in the template and what I am using the template for is working very fine.

Do not hesitate to ask people around you for help, you know not who has the answer to your biggest question!

Five months back, I don’t try to know the cause of a disease, all I wanna know is the disease and how I can get rid of it in time — metaphorically speaking of course, but in the last three months, I’ve been venturing into knowing the “why” and “how to” of a lot of things.

Believe me I asked myself first when I was asked to do this thing, that, “How am I going to bring a MS Powerpoint animation in this project?” But then I asked the next guy and he has the answer! Without wasting time I headed down to reading the WowJS documentation as well as the Animate.css’s website and Github repository.

Wow.js is very friendly with Animate.css. All you need do to use both in your project and get amazing animations for any of your items is just to include Animate.css like you do every other CSS file and Wow.js just like you do every other script.

<!-- Animate.css -->

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/animate.css"> <!-- Wow.js -->

<script src="js/wow.min.js"></script>

After including both, then you need to initialize Wow.js to be able to use it in your web page(s).

<script>

new WOW().init();

</script>

Preferably let the lines above be immediately after you included the Wow.js script and so after the initialization, you are set to go! Fire away, Titanium!

Reveal an element

In order to reveal an element, you simply need to add a “wow” class to them, this way, the element will be invisible until you scroll to reveal the section.

<div class="wow">

This is some content to be revealed

</div>

It’s that simple believe me!

Animate!

Decide which animation style you want to use and just animate right away! I’m gonna stick with rubberBand. So in order to apply that animation, all I need to write in my codes is:

<div class="wow rubberBand">

The stuffs to animate goes here

</div>

And that is about it! Simple, right?

You can choose from the numerous animation styles available at Animate.css and you can check on the Wow.js documentation to know more about using Wow.js.
New HBUS Chief Compliance Officer, Megan Monroe-Coleman, Joins Us From Intuit
By: Frank Fu
Tags: Cryptocurrency News, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain

We are excited to announce that Megan Monroe-Coleman has joined us as HBUS Chief Compliance Officer. Megan comes to HBUS with more than 15 years of experience in the regulatory compliance sector — most recently working at Intuit, following the acquisition of Mint. Previously, she served as Compliance Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Megan is an experienced product compliance specialist with a proven track record of designing and implementing compliance programs for FinTech and Financial Services companies in the U.S.

Since our launch in July, HBUS has prided itself on security and liquidity, while offering more token options and 24/7 live personal customer support for American audiences. We operate under the highest of ethical standards while committed to full U.S. compliance. Bringing Megan onto the team is a crucial step in the next chapter of HBUS’s progress as a regulated financial institution. She is passionate about contributing to the culture of trust and transparency at HBUS.

During Megan’s most recent roles at Intuit, she collaborated closely with the Product and Risk teams to implement a real-time KYC and AML compliance program for the Mint bill pay product. She had overall responsibility and oversight for product and regulatory compliance for regulated money movement products across Intuit.

Before Intuit, Megan spent seven years as a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers assisting bay area FinTech and Financial Services companies. She established and sustained strong professional relationships with PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Banking, Asset Management, and Fintech clients. Megan designed and executed SEC regulatory audit examinations to ensure legal compliance for registered investment advisor clients.

HBUS believes in the power of a blockchain future and is committed to introducing groundbreaking blockchain projects to the public. We are confident that Megan’s experience and contributions to our culture will help us become the top digital currency marketplace for the growing American audience.

Welcome, Megan!
Slackjaw’s Most-Read Stories Of 2020
Tags: Comedy, Best Of, Humor, 2020, Satire

Thanks for following along and helping us grow in 2020. We hope we brought you some laughs in a strange and dark year. See you on the stroke of midnight on December 31st, when everything about our lives will instantly change for the better.

— Team Slackjaw (Alex Baia, sarah james, Maddie Weigelt, & Molly Henderson)
CoD BO4で大型スコアストリークを呼ぶコツ
Tags: ゲーム, Videogames, Bo4, Gaming, 日本語

in Both Sides of the Table
Errare humanun est
By: Galvao Bertazzi
Tags: Story, Storytelling

in Both Sides of the Table