fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Have you ever heard of viral audio? 🤔🎧
By: Henrik Ståhl
Tags: Social Media, Audio, Anchor, Facebook, Podcast

Have you ever heard of viral audio? 🤔🎧

The future of podcasts and audio journalism

Marc Biskup about the future of audio journalism.

In the latest episode of #CheckYourFacts, we discuss the magic world of audio. Podcasts, Anchor 2.0, Christian Bale, Facebook Audio, and so on.

We’re not entirely satisfied with the audio quality of the episode, partly due to some network interference (we blame you, Skype), but as you know, this is a work in progress. Slowly getting there. Next time, we will give Google Hangouts another try.

Anyway.

We got some really nice shoutouts and feedback lately (thank you so much for the noteworthy note in the Best in Visual Storytelling newsletter, Rachel Schallom!). Anne Peter and Nicola Wessinghage asked for links of mentioned websites, articles, newsletters et cetera in a Twitter conversation earlier this week.

And, since we are truly dedicated in our mission to be open and transparent, we’re proud to say that we’ve kept our promise!

We’ve provided links for all of our mentions (hope we didn’t forget any of them…*fingers crossed*) in the podcast description, and to all of you who want quick access through Medium, here’s the very same list — but with nice Embed.ly embeds.

We will also provide them in our next newsletter (the first we will send through Revue — thanks Nikky Hofland! 💪), so don’t forget to sign up!

Here’s the list of links

Angry caller thinks that one word is pronounced incorrectly:

Readers of BILD hate the satire magfazine Titanic (in German):

How The Economist is using Facebook for live audio:

Christian Bale flips out on the set of Terminator Salvation (not Batman… sorry!):

Audio faces unique challenges on Facebook, NPR:

S-Town podcast by Serial:

Abby Norman — Let Me Google That

Lisa Donelly — Inside Humor

Check You Facts on Anchor

Marc Biskup on Anchor

Henrik Ståhl on Anchor
#blackouttuesday
By: Jenny Lawton
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Life, Haiku

entrepreneur, mentor, advisor, mother, wife, dog parent and lover, tennis player : changing the world one woman and entrepreneur at a time

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Daughter Of Tethys
By: Sydney J. Shipp
Tags: Addiction, Poetry, Relationships, Self, Recover

Daughter Of Tethys

A Poem

by Hibeth Rodriguez on Unsplash

I came to,

barely surfacing

up through wet black

velvet rubbed the wrong way

Static sparks of lucidity —

conductivity through a current —

shocked me,

and I shuddered,

resuscitated in the River Styx

Pulled against my will

from the swamp of spirits

Fog was sucked

away with your gasp

at the sight of me

gulping the air,

floundering for fluid,

a fish out of water

suffocating in the drafts

of your disdain

for a drowned woman

in search of a drink
Testing PostgreSQL Applications From Scratch (Almost)
By: Daniel George
Tags: Technology, Postgresql, Java, Python, Docker

Quickstart

The Dockerfile contains the necessary commands to retrieve and unzip the external pg_tmp library. Here is the Dockerfile and an example test for a Java application. You can find this code in its entirety on Github.

Dockerfile:

FROM maven:3.5.2-jdk-8



ENV PATH="/usr/lib/postgresql/9.6/bin:${PATH}"



RUN apt-get update && \

apt-get install -y python-pip postgresql



COPY src /src

COPY pom.xml /pom.xml

COPY target /target



RUN mvn install -U



ADD http://ephemeralpg.org/code/ephemeralpg-2.5.tar.gz /src



RUN tar -xzf /src/ephemeralpg-2.5.tar.gz -C /src && rm /src/ephemeralpg-2.5.tar.gz

RUN pg_tmp=$(find /src -maxdepth 2 -type d -name '*ephemeralpg*') && make install -C $pg_tmp



RUN chown -R postgres:postgres /src

RUN chmod 777 /src

RUN chmod 777 /target



# Switch USER to non-root to run

USER postgres



CMD [ "sh", "-c", "java -jar /target/name-of-your-jar-with-dependencies.jar" ]

Java:

public static void testInsert() throws Exception {



try {



Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("pg_tmp -t");

p.waitFor();



BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader

(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));



String s = input.readLine();

String pg_uri = "jdbc:postgresql://" +

s.substring(s.lastIndexOf('@') + 1);

input.close();



Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(pg_uri);

Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();



stmt.execute("CREATE TABLE trees (id VARCHAR (13), " +

"common_name VARCHAR (50), " +

"scientific_name VARCHAR (50));");



stmt.execute("INSERT INTO trees (id, common_name,

scientific_name)" +

"VALUES (1, 'California Redwood', 'Sequoia

sempervirens')");



ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * " +

"FROM trees;");



while(rs.next()) {

assertEquals("Sequoia sempervirens", rs.getString(3));

}



} catch (IOException | SQLException e) {

System.out.println(e);

}

}

Summary

Lines 14–17 in the Dockerfile retrieve the external library, unzip it, and run make . In more recent versions of Postgres certain commands cannot be run, such as initdb , as the root user. It is suggested to switch users to the postgres user in the Dockerfile in line 24 before executing the file containing any database logic. We grant the necessary permissions beforehand on lines 19–21.

Here are links to this approach implemented in Java and Python.

That’s it! Now you have a lightweight PostgreSQL instance that fits neatly into a Docker CI/CD pipeline for unit and integration testing.
GoTrace to be Utilized by SMARTKAS & HBK Agricultural Project in the UAE — GoChain
Tags: Blockchain, Uae, Cryptocurrency, Farming, Food Security

GoTrace to be Utilized by SMARTKAS & HBK Agricultural Project in the UAE — GoChain GoChainGo Follow Oct 27, 2020 · 3 min read

As a key partner to HBK Department of Projects, GoChain is working with SMARTKAS by utilizing GoTrace, GoChain’s blockchain-based transparent asset tracking SaaS platform.

In late July 2020 in Dubai, UAE, SMARTKAS B.V. signed a joint venture agreement with His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, member of the Ruling Family of Abu Dhabi, UAE, and his business HBK Department of Projects. SMARTKAS’, an agricultural company based in the Netherlands, recently was awarded three prizes by main focus is to provide a smart agriculture based on zero energy; zero water and zero waste as below:

Together with His Highness, SMARTKAS aims to spend the next ten plus years transforming many hectares of desert sand into a fertile, high-tech farms. Food security is a major concern in the Gulf region, with estimates that almost 90 per cent of food items are imported. Utilizing SMARTKAS units (“smart greenhouses”), the joint venture’s goal is to ensure that food security in the GCC area (Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf-Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) will no longer be an issue

The first project will be a 10 hectare (1,000 acre) greenhouse just outside of Dubai.

As a key partner to HBK Department of Projects, GoChain is working with SMARTKAS by utilizing GoTrace, GoChain’s blockchain-based transparent asset tracking SaaS platform. GoTrace, which allows individual items, parcels, crates and shipments to be scanned, tracked and traced for transparency and provenance, will be used be used to ensure end-to-end food traceability from farm to table.

“Food security is among the top priorities for the Emirates, especially after the devastating impact of COVID-19. Our joint venture with SMARTKAS will bring about the future of agriculture in the UAE.”

— His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan

“As project promoters and investors we see the unique opportunity this collaboration brings to the table. SMARTKAS is a disruptive agtech company and together with HBK, we have our eyes on the bigger picture, which is ensuring food security in not only the UAE, but potentially the entire GCC area.”

— Mr. Anwar Hussein, Group CEO, HBK Department of Projects
Uncertainty estimation for Neural Network — Dropout as Bayesian Approximation
By: Nokknock
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bayesian Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Timeseries

This article is mainly about how I start with the Uber’s paper Deep and Confident Prediction for Time Series at Uber. Model interpretation with neural networks has not been an easy task, knowing the confidence of a neural network could be very important for business. Despite a lot of complicated proof in these series of papers, they all trying to answer a simple question

How confident is my model about a particular prediction?

Table of Content

Background

We are dealing with some forecasting problem for business, so we are researching new methods for forecasting especially new approach to neural networks. (I am aware of the LSTM/encoder-decoder/seq2seq but I have not heard a lot of exciting performance from it). There are not many public discussions about Time Series from the big company that I can find, the closest thing I can find is Prophet from Facebook, which is a purely statistical base forecasting method.

Uber has a paper Deep and Confident Prediction for Time Series at Uber that draw our attention as they are one of the industry players that put a lot resource on probabilistic programming. After some research, I find that Uber has also won the M4 competition (a well-known time series competition) The M4 competition does not only requires an accurate prediction, but also the confidence interval of it. They have also open source Pyro, a probabilistic programming library, so combining these facts, I have reasonable faith that they are doing some interesting(and practically useful) works.

I do not have a deep statistic background and the word “Bayesian” is almost meaningless to me, all I know is that it relates to conditional probability, that’s it. I try very hard to recall my STAT1000 about Bayesian vs frequentist, this fantastic thread explains it quite well.

Deep and Confident Prediction for Time Series at Uber

Uber has already written a blog post about this work, I start with the 1st paper but end up reading a few more papers (some are earlier groundworks, some are follow up works). I will not spend too many words to explain the papers, as I could not understand every derives steps. Instead, I will only highlight the important parts of my research journey and I encourage you to go through the paper.

We show that the use of dropout (and its variants) in NNs can be interpreted as a Bayesian approximation of a well known probabilistic model: the Gaussian process (GP)¹

I personally do not 100% convinced by the work, but they have shown great practical result and that is the most important part. (Like BatchNorm people have been thinking why it works for a wrong reason for a long time, but that does not stop anyone using it as it did improve model convergence)

Studied Papers:

Other Resources:

It’s useful to have a timeline when reading a series of materials.
Case Study: Unlocking The Power of a Remote UX Workshop
By: Patrycja Paterska
Tags: Product Design, UX, UX Design, User Experience Design

What we achieved with a Remote Product Design Workshop

Established a viable scope of the MVP, Split the product’s growth into actionable stages, with the digital tools used we were able to boost the workshop efficiency & reduced time spent on technicalities.

The client

Kinastic Coach promotes a holistic approach to fitness, where workout is merely a part of the equation of a much bigger picture.

This virtual coaching assistant wants to take care of your well being, offering stress relief, nutritional advice and sharing knowledge about every little aspect affecting your lifestyle in the long run.

Thanks to applied machine learning algorithms, kinastic Coach is able to direct your journey to better health and, thanks to available data, optimize it along the way.

The challenge

kinastic Coach came to EL Passion with a big and thorough plan of revolutionizing the fitness & lifestyle app market.

We needed to give this plan a tangible shape and separate it into relevant stages, supporting both the app’s future users and the client’s business goals.

An in-depth product roadmap and a quick MVP launch

We split the kinastic Coach vision into three distinct stages of product development taking into account both, building and expanding value for the user and fulfilling necessary metrics from the business perspective.

We suggested moving advanced personalisation and automation features into the second phase of development for quicker MVP push into the market.

A remote environment facilitated the workshop’s efficiency

Conducting the workshop remotely allowed us to manipulate the app’s architecture elements easily and seamlessly in real time. We were able to dive deep into the functionalities thanks to this.

Time management: solved.

Because remote workshopping is governed by slightly different rules, to eliminate the “remote meeting fatigue” we experimented with our approach switching between synchronous and asynchronous tasks for best brainstorm and best final workshop outcomes.

The well-structured workshop with EL Passion’s team gave us a valuable in-depth roadmap that we followed all the way through our app’s MVP launch. The professionalism and the critical-thinking mentality that the EL Passion’s team brought to the table, helped us visualise our priorities and goals in a manner that was easier to follow development-wise.

ANDREAS KARANTZAS, Head of Software @ kinastic Coach

The article you have just read was originally published on the EL Passion Blog.

We are EL Passion! 💚

We build digital products with stunning UX & UI design.

Find us on Facebook, Instagram & Dribbble 🏀.
Beard Attitude — Man Frontier. Women’s nowhere land and manly men’s…
By: Greg Prince
Tags: Funny, Poetry, Relationships, Gender Equality, Humor

Bart Face Man Model from Pixabay

Women’s nowhere land and manly men’s holdout to the end.

There is a place terrifying to women. A place only men will go. A zone of unshaven, often wiry and scratchy mess. The beard may be the last unique manly identifier left in the known universe.

Women can do everything a man can do and one better, producing a baby. The beard is the last bastion, the final holdout, the as of yet uncrossable frontier for women to master. (Or is it?)

Perhaps women will never decide to cross the facial hair boundary. Only time will reveal the answer.

Men, I implore you to forgo shaving every day. Grow your beards and mustaches out. Some of you will want a long or bushy beard while others need the highly manicured sharp beard lines. Many of you will opt for the goatee.

My preference is to let my stubble grow for 3 or 4 days then do a light shave. I have a close beard and mustache most of each week. I haven’t transitioned to the full beard yet but it’s in my blood.

Might a beard be lurking in the veins of every man? For each of us, the questions come: Should I? Can I? Will it be full? How will the world see me?

The answer my friends lies deep within. The adventurer, the conquerer, the nurturer, the tender, the bold, and the meek in all men will eventually experiment if not seek their inner Grizzly Adams.
Ethereum is the future of gaming — and we’d like to prove it.
Tags: Gaming, Ethereum Gaming, Ethereum, Games Built On Ethereum, Bitcoin

First — the most important question.

…Why blockchain?

Funnily enough, the centralization of gaming was part of the inspiration for Ethereum itself. Vitalik Buterin, one of its founders (and a much wiser person than I) said:

“I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring.”

… And the narrative has continued.

Players routinely spend money and time on powerful in-game items only to have them nerfed, with no refunds.

Two months ago, Valve suddenly trade-locked CS:GO skins, decimating many players’ livelihoods.

What I lost. But my armor wasn’t trimmed.

And when I was twelve, I was banned on Runescape, losing my hard-won full-rune set.

$50 billion was traded through digital marketplaces for video game items in 2018. It’s projected to triple by 2022. And in almost every single one of these games, players are buying items, skins and upgrades which they don’t truly own.

They can’t trade them for real money. (If they can, it’s in a second-hand market regulated by games companies that can be restricted on a whim).

They can’t use them on any other platforms. Ownership is locked to usage within a specific game made by that company.

They can be nerfed at anytime, without refunds or explanation. Companies often do this to up-sell a new DLC to players who are already heavily invested. There are no decentralized governance mechanisms regulating this.

Even if a company claims an item is rare, there’s no real way to prove that won’t change in the future.

Developers are the central bank in games, and right now they’re operating with impunity.

That’s why we’ve built Gods Unchained on top of the Ethereum blockchain — to bring transparency into the opaque world of in-game economies.
แอพฯที่ช่วยคุณตอบคำถาม“ กินอะไรดี🤔”
By: Fang Naruemon
Tags: Artisan, Apps, Lunch, Developer, How To

We are a full-scale digital agency based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, specializing in software development, design, and digital marketing consulting.

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Bitcoin ATMsi nedir?
Tags: Bitcoin Atms, Gobaba, Cryptocurrency, Türkçe, Bitcoin

Bitcoin ATM Map - Find Bitcoin ATM, Online Rates

Find Bitcoin ATM locations easily with our Bitcoin ATM Map. For many Bitcoin machines online rates are available.
7月の詩
Tags: 日本語, Japanese, Poetry, 日本, Japan

in In Fitness And In Health
When Google Buys Your Hometown Mall
By: Devon Henry
Tags: Cities, Hands, Los Angeles, Tech, Gentrification

When Google Buys Your Hometown Mall

Rethinking civic identity in rapidly changing Los Angeles

Photo: Clara Ciszynski/EyeEm/Getty Images

I’m at a party in Silverlake when I meet her. She’s a model-turned-filmmaker from a place where the way people greet each other isn’t “Hello” or “How are you,” but “Do you have a cigarette?” She lives in the Hollywood Hills. I am told her friends make up most of the CW casting pool.

We are congregated around the firepit outside. It is a sea of raw denim, leather jackets, beanies, and beards: a Netflix-perfect amalgamation of LA style, whatever that might be.

As she puffs, adjusting her Penny Lane jacket around her shoulders, the conversation turns to the Olympics and then to Los Angeles’ housing crisis. We don’t want the Olympics to come to Los Angeles. Nobody wants the Olympics to come to Los Angeles, except perhaps our oft-absent mayor, Eric Garcetti. It will make things worse, we reason, but we are afraid to expound upon how, lest the “worse” become real and take up residence in a $3000/month studio downtown that used to be a textile factory.

“It’s a crisis,” we say, and the beanies all nod in unison. “If we aren’t careful, we’ll end up like the Bay Area.” The Bay Area is our gentrification boogeyman. If we don’t triple-check the locks and say our prayers, predatory developers and tech giants will wait until we fall asleep, steal our homes, price them out from under us, and then rent them to a couple from Arizona. We can never be too careful. If San Francisco is our overachieving older sibling who’s finally buckled under the pressure, what hope is there for us, the screw-up art kid who wants to go to school to make pottery and arthouse films?

But the model waves her hand away dismissively, “A crisis? You can’t call it a crisis. Other people have it worse.” She does not say who or where or what she’s done to help them. Perhaps she means people in Chicago or Oakland. It doesn’t matter. The crisis exists for working and middle-class families, black and brown multi-generational residents, the low-income, the debt-saddled millennials, the mentally ill, immigrants. She will never see the crisis from her home in the hills.

Which is precisely why it’s so dangerous to say the problem doesn’t exist.

But when she waves our fear away like an errant cloud of American Spirit smoke, the circle goes silent. As the beanies turn to me I realize I am the only one at this party who’s actually from LA: the delegate from Rancho Park, the only one who didn’t buy or flip a house in a formerly low-income neighborhood when the market collapsed. Too late, they have realized, their own arrival to the city was a sign of things to come.
How I Automated WhatsApp Messages with Node.js
By: Bilal Rifas
Tags: Nodejs, JavaScript, Software Development, Programming, Web Development

Before you can send a WhatsApp message from your web language, you’ll need to sign up for a Twilio account or sign into your existing account and activate the Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp. It allows you to prototype with WhatsApp immediately using a shared phone number, without waiting for a dedicated number to be approved by WhatsApp.

To get started, select a number from the available sandbox numbers to activate your sandbox.

Be sure to take note of the phone number you choose in the Sandbox. You’ll need this later when we’re ready to send some messages.

In order to use the Sandbox, you need to opt in by sending the phone number you chose a message from WhatsApp. Send “join <your sandbox keyword>” to your Sandbox number in WhatsApp, and you will receive a confirmation that you’ve joined. Your sandbox keyword can be found in the console.

Sending a WhatsApp message with Node.js

Now that you have a Twilio account and have activated the WhatsApp Sandbox, you’re ready to dive into some code and send messages! Start by opening your terminal and navigating to the directory where you want your project to live and running the following command to initiate a package.json file for npm to install dependencies:

npm init --yes

Now install the Twilio helper library for Node:

npm install twilio@3.30.0

With that out of the way, create a file called index.js in this same directory and add the following code to it (don't forget to replace the example phone numbers with your WhatsApp Sandbox number and personal phone number respectively!):

index.js

const client = require('twilio')(); client.messages.create({

from: 'whatsapp:+14155238886',

body: 'Ahoy world!',

to: 'whatsapp:+15555555555'

}).then(message => console.log(message.sid));

Before running this code, make sure you set the environment variables TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN with their respective values from your Twilio account credentials, which can be found in your Twilio Console. The Twilio Node library will automatically look at those values, so you can avoid hard coding them in your index.js file!

Finally, in your terminal run the following command to run this code and send yourself a message on WhatsApp:

node index.js

Check your messages and you should see something like this!

Summary
B21 welcomes Samson Lee to the B21 Advisory Board
Tags: Cryptocurrency Investment, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Eos

We are delighted to announce the addition of industry veteran Samson (Sam) Lee to our advisory board as Strategic Advisor to Asia. It’s our mission to create the world’s largest cryptoasset investing community by providing a robust and easy to use mobile application, which manages cryptoasset portfolios. As part of the planning to build a local presence in key markets, we have added Mr. Lee to the advisory board.

Mr. Lee is a successful entrepreneur with a wealth of experience and knowledge and will represent B21 in the Asia region. His extensive resume includes Founder of CoinStreet Partners, Founding Executive Chairman of China (Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau) Greater Bay Area TechFin Association, Co-founder of the Blockchain Centre of Hong Kong and Chief Crypto-economic Consultant of Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange. Mr. Lee is an early adopter and visionary of the Blockchain technology, token finance and cryptoeconomics. Taking on the role of strategic advisor in Asia, Sam brings local relationships, industry knowledge and government connections (including Japan, Korea, greater China and South East Asia regions) to the B21 management team.

“We are delighted to add such a valuable executive to our team”, said Simon Pearson Co-founder and CEO of B21. As we launch our business we are planning for key regional relationships to help us grow our customer base and attract industry partnerships, Sam has the experience and connections to assist us with these key growth matters. This is the first of several key partnerships we plan to establish with industry veterans and corporates that are market leaders.”

“Crypto assets have been a very hot area for investment in recent years, but many investors find it difficult to start,” said Samson Lee, founder & CEO of Coinstreet. “B21 manages all the complicated technology and simplifies cryptoasset investing and wealth management for everyone. It also helps to expedite crypto investment to open up to the mainstream investment market.”

We would like to take this opportunity to welcome Samson Lee to the board, we look forward to working with him and are excited about the future of B21 as we expand into new markets.
Unlike what we are hearing from some quarters, Covid is a killer and has left a swath of pain and…
By: Nancy Peckenham
Tags: Retirement, Aging, Healthy Lifestyle, Ageism, Seniors

Unlike what we are hearing from some quarters, Covid is a killer and has left a swath of pain and loss as it goes. Aric D Mayer lost his grandmother and his personal memories of her will touch most hearts.

But it’s not all gloomy.

Keep reading the stories below and you will feel Jo Ann Harris’ excitement about finding love late in life as well as Julia E Hubbel’s take on dating while grey.

Other Crow’s Feet writers feel the change of seasons in the northern hemisphere and praise autumn and winter, too. Read Our Stories below.

Take a moment as well to check out the new book of Crow’s Feet essays and poems that is available on Amazon. Your reviews of the collection are eagerly awaited!

Requiem for a Matriarch. COVID sucks. By Aric D Mayer

I am Winter. A poem of aging. By Dennett

Darkness & Rest. Gifts from The Autumn Of Our Lives. By Ann Litts

Late Life Love. How Can This Be? By Jo Ann Harris

Dating While Grey. Or not, as the case is more often. By Julia E Hubbel

The Possibilities. A personal essay. By Dennett

My Body, My Friend. A thank you note. By Ann Litts

Life Looking Forward. Just Say Yes. By Max K. Erkiletian

Kata. What I didn’t know was there. By Quasimodo

When I Used To. How a Good Memory Can Rob Your Now. By Norma Bourland

Warren Nelson Fires Off a Rant. And I want you to read what he has to say. By Julia E Hubbel

Lament of the Aging Athlete. What happened to my body? By Mary McGrath

Let’s Not Give up Social Security. It’s one public program that’s working. By Jean Anne FeldeisenP

The End Of The Snow Day.Another victim of the pandemic? By Randy Fredlund

Putting It Out There. Caught between two deadly pincers. By Rkayell

Footprints. The past is a beach. By Deborah Barchi

The Death of My Friend. Rising upward… By Mary McGrath

Picking Your Providers As You Age Can Make All the Difference. How choosing the right healthcare providers for you as you age, if you have the choice, can ensure a vibrant aging process. By Julia E Hubbel

My Grandmother’s Embroidery Silks. Precious Memories. By Thewriteyard

Goodbye to My Old Car. Gone but not forgotten. By Mary McGrath

Vuyani Dies. And waits for the Afterlife. By Vuyo Ngcakani
Is it a bad job or just a bad day?
By: Nick Dewilde
Tags: Work, Career Advice, Careers, Work Life Balance, Workplace

Is it a bad job or just a bad day?

Five practical lenses to view the question of whether it’s time to leave

These days I do most of my writing at The Jungle Gym. It’s a monthly newsletter full of ideas and resources to help you think clearer and work smarter. To learn more, check out this intro post.

There it is again– that nagging feeling that something’s wrong at work. Staring at the three-sentence email you’ve been writing for twenty minutes, you wonder if it’s finally time to hand in your two-weeks notice.

But doesn’t everyone have bad days at work? And what about all the good parts? You don’t want to quit reactively and regret it. So, how can you know if today is just a bad day or if you’re truly in the wrong job?

At Tradecraft, we often have conversations like these with our alumni. Whether they’re in their first job out of the program or their third, the decision to leave is never easy. If you find yourself in a similar situation, here are five practical lenses you can use to examine whether you’re in the wrong job or just having a bad day.

🧩 The Future Alignment Lens

A good job is one that prepares you for the job you want next. To figure out if this role is aligned with your career goals, try asking yourself the following questions:

Am I helping the type of customer (individual, businesses, governments, etc.) I care about? Am I solving problems (access to information, transportation, health, etc.) that fascinate me? Does the type of solution we provide (software, hardware, services, etc.) interest me? Am I spending my time on activities (coding, designing, selling, etc) that I want to master?

Ideally, you’d want a role where you’re gaining expertise in all of these areas. If you find you’re lacking alignment in one or more of them, it might be time to think about a more serious career change.

If you aren’t sure what your career goals are, that’s okay. You can still confirm whether you want to continue down the path you’re currently on.

As a thought exercise, imagine getting a promotion.

Your boss pulls you into a conference room to share what a great job you’ve been doing lately. She’s been talking with her boss, and everyone agrees you’re ready for more responsibility and a title bump to go with it.

What’s your gut reaction?

Are you excited for the new challenge or dreading the thought of increasing your commitment? If a promotion sounds invigorating, it’s a sign that you’re on the right path. If you have no desire to take on extra responsibility, it means you’re either at the wrong company or on the wrong career path. To test which is the issue, picture yourself getting poached by the hottest employer in your industry.

How do you feel– excitement or dread?

Don’t worry if you don’t have immediate clarity on these questions. Replay them over the course of the next week and try to identify the emotions that are surfaced. These responses can you clarify your desires and goals before your rational mind catches up.
Functional Safety Concept for Self Driving Cars
By: Prateek Sawhney
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Safety, Data Science, Self Driving Cars

Functional Safety Requirements

Going back to the lane departure warning example from the previous medium article, let’s derive a couple of functional safety requirements from our first safety goal.

Our malfunction was that the steering wheel warning vibration was too strong. The malfunction led to the safety goal that the oscillating steering torque of a lane departure warning function shall be limited. For the lane departure warning system, it makes sense to define a maximum allowed torque amplitude and a maximum allowed frequency. From the safety goal, we will define two functional safety requirements for the lane warning departure system.

Functional safety requirement one.

The lane keeping items shall ensure that the lane departure oscillating torque amplitude is below max torque amplitude.

Functional safety requirement two.

The lane keeping item shall ensure that the lane departure oscillating torque frequency is below max torque frequency.

Notice again that we use the term shall, because these are requirements. So what have we done so far? We started with a safety goal requiring the vibration to be limited. We looked at the item architecture and came up with two new requirements that would meet our safety goal. We then figured out that the lane assistance item needed to limit the vibration amplitude and vibration frequency.
Money-Hungry Devil
By: J M Jackson
Tags: Flash Fiction, Short Story, Life, Fiction

Husband and father who writes about the human condition while trying not to come across too Kafkaesque at parties. He doesn't actually go to any parties.

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Positive and Negative Engineering
By: Jeremiah Lowin
Tags: Software Development, Data Engineering, Updates, Startup, Data Science

Today, Prefect is the codification of the patterns we observe in modern data engineering. We’ve worked very hard to build a system that can automatically enable best practices, even for data applications it’s never seen before. To see how this works, consider how you can immediately recognize that “the sky is blue” is right and “sky is blue the” is wrong without memorizing every combination of words in the English language. Just as your brain has broad rules for language, Prefect can detect when something is wrong even when we can’t pinpoint exactly what or why. This capability makes negative engineering much easier and saves our users unbelievable amounts of time and headache.

Prefect is an exercise in simplicity. Negative engineering problems are not always complex, or sophisticated, or difficult. On the contrary: they are often minor, annoying, and repetitive. Consequently, they fall through the sieve we use to identify major issues, even though their aggregate impact is extraordinary. At Prefect, our discovery has been that most data applications can be decomposed into a simple vocabulary, and by focusing on those basic building blocks, we can solve negative issues without sacrificing any of the power or sophistication that positive engineering demands. Our users are granted a creative license to combine those blocks in fascinating and unexpected ways, and Prefect serves as the lighthouse keeping them safe.

At our core, we provide two things. One is our open-source framework, which operates like a hardware store: stocked with all the necessary components for building great data applications. The other is our platform logic, which we think of as the store manager: guiding users to the right tools and making sure their projects are successful. With these two things working together, we can offer a compelling solution for both positive and negative engineering problems.

Fundamentally, we love to solve a problem that our users hate to have.

We’ve posted a brief technical introduction to Prefect, and can’t wait to share more very soon.

Happy engineering!
6. květen — Den vlastizrady
By: Martin Pánek
Tags: Eusoc, Topolánek, Politika, Notes

in In Fitness And In Health
InterValue Project Weekly: 20180723–20180729
Tags: Technology, Intervalue, Bitcoin, Vietnam, Blockchain

Part 1. Development Progress of InterValue.

1. Project progress

(1) We completed the development of anonymous communication capabilities.

(2) We completed the testing of local full node & light node, and fixed the bugs.

(3) We improved the consensus module functionality and fixed the bugs.

2. Whitepaper

(1) Some regular details have been modified.

3. Communities

(1) The member of InterValue English telegram groups increased to 53,840.

(2) The member of InterValue Chinese telegram groups increased to 34,827.

Part 2. Strategic Cooperation.

1. Negotiate with Fenbushi Capital, Ten8, and Rootscap for our cooperation intention.

Part 3. Media Activities.

1. VIETNAM BLOCKCHAIN DAY

On July 29, 2018, we were invited to participate in the summit by Bigcoinvietnam: “2018 VIETNAM BLOCKCHAIN DAY”. InterValue CMO Europe Clement made a great speech at the meeting.

2. Technology media wrote the “InterValue: How does Barton Chao lead a group of PhDs to accelerate blockchain 4.0 processes?” report on the InterValue project, which is reprinted by many medias.

3. We announced that: InterValue will officially release INVE ERC20 Token at the end of July.

Part 4. The Historical Process of InterValue.

(1) In August 2017, Barton Chao envisioned the positioning, vision, and functionality of InterValue.

(2) September-October 2017, planning to form an InterValue team to refine all aspects of InterValue functionality.

(3) In November 2017, the InterValue core research and development team was formally formed and started writing white papers and making the development plans.

(4) In January 2018, the first draft of the InterValue Whitepaper in English and Chinese was completed and began the development work.

(5) February-March 2018, the InterValue Whitepaper in English and Chinese was completed from 1.0 iteration to 4.0.

(6) In April 2018, releasing the InterValue v1.0 Alpha chain.

(7) In May 2018, starting the development of the InterValue v2.0 Alpha chain.

(8) In June 2018, the InterValue v1.0 testnet wallet demo is online.

(9) In June 2018, the verification of the Hashnet consensus mechanism for the InterValue v2.0 testnet was completed.

(10) In June 2018, the InterValue v2.0 testnet had reached 1,000,000 TPS.
Autism Social Situations
By: Susan Elizabeth
Tags: Special Needs, Autism, Autism Mom, Holderness Family, Social

A monthly perspective.

Photo by Craig Philbrick on Unsplash

FYI: I’m an autism mom, not a psychologist.

Pretend you’re a mature adult in your 30’s or 40’s. You’re also a parent. You come over to my house to visit for an hour or two after work on a Friday night. As you walk through the front door you say hello to my 10 year old son and he ignores you. It’s nothing new, he rarely says hello to you or to your spouse for that matter.

Would that make you mad?

Honestly.

You mad Bro?

What if you knew this boy was medically diagnosed with special needs and has been seeing therapists weekly for 4 years straight. I tell you all his struggles, how his brain works differently and that he has major challenges with communication.

Would you still be mad at this child?

Would you be mad at the parents?

I’ve seen adults get mad in this situation even when they are fully aware of the child’s medical diagnosis’s. Every time I see it happen it always feels inappropriate and I never know what to say to the adult.

For the adult, how to approach a child with special needs socially:

When you’re socializing with a child on the autism spectrum or has other special needs you’ll want to take yourself out of the equation. The way the child responds or doesn’t respond doesn’t have anything to do with you, unless you’re yelling of course. All kids want to feel that they are important, that they are being included and can tell if you are being respectful towards them.

I once heard an episode of The Holderness Family Podcast, season 2 January 14th, where Dr Emily King is a guest talking about “what not to say to someone with a special needs child”. Dr Emily describes how people interact with toddlers, how we talk to toddlers and realize “oh, this kid is interacting with me. So you stop talking to the parent holding the baby and you start talking to the baby”. She compares that interaction with toddlers to how we should interact with children with special needs. When we talk to the child we should keep the conversation going even though they may not be fully responding to us.

“When you don’t get that not verbal feedback from a young child because there’s a social or language delay you assume that they don’t want to interact or you assume that they wouldn’t benefit from your greeting. They will benefit from your greeting and you’re actually giving them a social opportunity” says Dr Emily. Everyone learns from having discussions even when the child “may not respond or it takes them a while to respond. But that parent appreciated that. That you saw them, you saw them as a person” says Dr Emily.

Another point, don’t put expectations on making eye contact or shaking hands. “You’re there to notice that they’re there too, and give them a smile and the more exposure kids get to that in the community the better” says Dr Emily.

Hear more from the podcast here:

I don’t think anyone can grow unless he’s loved exactly as he is now, appreciated for what he is rather than what he will be. — Mr. Rogers
Video: A humbled Interview with the late John Bogle: Present and future
Tags: John Bogle, Videos, Vanguard, Investing, Moviq

New Economic Thinking

A humbling interview with the late renowned Investment magnate John “Jack” Bogle who passed as recently as January 16th 2019. John was the founder of The Vanguard Group, a titan in mutual fund investment leading the way in indexing markets.

In this short cut interview John speaks of the Long term issues we face but are confronting with myopic short-term-ism. These issues are far broader humanitarian problems that we face going forward as he takes a step back from the focus markets do not seem to engage with.

An idealist by nature, his philanthropic work has been influential in influencing some of the greatest minds in finance but he argues the 2008 crisis was an “Ethical Crisis”. The growth of financial complexity and client detachment certainly points towards this, an issue identified by leading economists in the Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System (2010). This report identifies the socialised backstop to private enterprises in 2008, and how moving forward regulation should prioritise the social benefit to minimising social losses through concentrating private gains on private institutions.

An example of this is the Too Big To Fail issue we face which John refers to with Vanguard. By indirectly owning over 8% of all US companies, its economic power should follow with a great sense of economic responsibility, something RBS in the UK notoriously abused in 2008.
My Sun and My Moon
By: Christopher Madsen
Tags: Poetry, Children, Blue Insights, Divorce

Your birth changed my soul from within.

Discarding this selfish man I once had been.

I marveled at your blue pure eyes.

Then shed joyful tears I no longer held inside.

I guided your hand out our front door.

We had many adventures in this world to explore.

Then a day came when your mother and I must part.

My goodby to see your everyday broke my gaurded heart.

We now create our precious time sharing life together.

In emotions visits I wish would last forever.

You’ve grown to become a strong woman on her own.

I see now it was your innocent youth I came to morn.
Optimistic Updates with RxKotlin and ItemTouchHelper (Android)
By: Augustine Kwong
Tags: Kotlin, Android, Rxjava, Programming, Recyclerview

Maintainability

I was delighted to find that our existing code base had an excellent abstraction for handling many different list item layouts in a single list (RecyclerView). The more interesting and challenging consideration was writing readable code; readability distinguishes easily maintainable and debuggable code from giant swamps of degrading code quality.

Here is an example where I made a tradeoff between the (negligible) space complexity of modifying a list in-place with the readability of more expressive code, taking advantage of Kotlin syntax.

The purpose of the functions are the same: given a list of items, we want to insert empty placeholders or remove them from the appropriate places. E.g. two Tabs in a row indicate one of them is empty and a placeholder should be inserted. We write it as an extension function since it is always used in the context of our list of data, thus we implicitly assign it the responsibility of re-arranging itself correctly.

Disgusting. It really is. But it totally works. What’s so bad about it?

It assumes familiar knowledge of the iterator cursor. When you insert an item, where does it go? What gets removed?

Peeking ahead is impossible with our cursor, we have to advance to check the condition and retreat to perform certain actions

Nested ifs inside a switch statement inside a loop.

Overall, the problem is this: the context of each line is hard to gleam from line to line. Where are we in the list? Where is the cursor? Where do we need the cursor to be in order to remove this item? In sum, in-place relies on side-effects. Side effects are sometimes hard to keep-track of and read.

Let’s try a slightly different, more functional fold approach; though not in-place, both implementations are still O(n).

Why do I consider this implementation superior?

For those unfamiliar with the fold method, here’s a quick review. Fold is a lot like a for-each loop, except that it returns a single value. Think of it as initializing an “accumulator” variable, and for each item in the collection, you will place into it a new value. At the very end, the value inside your accumulator is returned. Here are a few examples:

With our fold implementation, we are able to leverage the Kotlin’s syntax to improve readability. As Trevor Stokvis reminded me in conversation, it’s often useful to use method names as documentation. Here, the purpose of these functions are very clear. In fact, they even clarify the context at their call-site — something that we lost with the indexing of the iterator.

Finally, we can read the code in a simpler way: we are progressing through our list, slowly accumulating certain items. We don’t have to worry about backtracking and removing elements.
Invitation to Winter
By: Jane Woodman
Tags: Free Verse, Poetry, Winter, Invitations

Invitation to Winter

free verse for the cold ahead

Winter in the author’s garden

Wander through Winter with me:

the leaves will fall soon

and we two will sway

as they dance out their lives.

Then the Moon will glow brighter

for being unmasked in the night,

and we two will shine

as she sends light our way.

Draw in and find what you desire:

everything waits for you here

and we two will listen

as hard winds blow stars around.

Stay with me through every night:

hear the songs of ice and snow

and we two will warm

as Winter glitters and groans.