fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
How To Turn a $12k Investment Into $1 Million
By: Ras Vasilisin
Tags: Innovation, Investing, Money, Entrepreneurship, Startup

How To Turn a $12k Investment Into $1 Million

When Albert Einstein once said that humanity’s greatest invention is “Compound interest.”

The biggest excuse for not investing I hear is: “I have no money to invest.”

Part of the reason why people think they should hold back from investing until they have more money is that they think it’s risky.

They don’t know when to buy, what to buy, or sometimes how to buy.

Here is the main issue with that.

Nobody knows when a market goes up, down, sideways. Anyone who tells you they do is either lying, foolish, or both.

And having tons of cash will not give you that kind of expertise.

Solution?

Instead of striking one magical moment, buy regularly and consistently over a long period.

The fancy name for this is “compound interest.”

When Albert Einstein once said that humanity’s greatest invention is “Compound interest.”

He also called compound interest the “eighth wonder of the world” and stated that “He who understands it earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”

Compound interest is basically “interest on interest.”

It simply means saving early and letting investment compound over a more extended period.

It’s quite a liberating strategy, and it takes the pressure off needing to pick the right instant to buy.

In my view, it’s as close to financial magic as you can.

And on top of that, with this strategy, you are almost sure to put $1 million in your pocket.

The magic is in the simplicity of this strategy. It’s all about investing repeatedly and long enough to ignite the miracle of the compound effect.

For example, assume you put $100 per month into Bitcoin.

In 10 short years, your $12,000 invested will be worth $1.163 million. Yes, that’s million, with six zeros. Check out the compound calculator and play around with the numbers for yourself.

But are these expected returns realistic?

Based on historical data, they sure are.

Cathie Wood and her ARK is the most successful fund in the last five years. According to their research, Bitcoin’s return in the previous seven years was 90 percent. It’s one of the best-performing assets in a decade.

Yes, it’s that simple.

And you don’t need a big pile of cash to invest. With this strategy, you can dip your toes into the water and learn as you go.

This passive form of investing means you don’t try to buy or sell based on your research. Also, you never panic when the market crashes, but you’ll only lock in your temporary losses.

The magic is not in the complexity; the magic is in the doing of simple things repeatedly and long enough to ignite the miracle of the compound effect.

But as Jim Rohn would say, “What’s simple to do is also simple not to do.”

You have to take action. You’ve got to invest money to make money.

Because the biggest difference between successful investors and unsuccessful investors is successful investors are willing to do what unsuccessful avoid.
10 Practical Tips for Effective Cross-Team Collaboration
By: Ardy Dedase
Tags: Startup, Technology, Leadership, Productivity, Programming

10 Practical Tips for Effective Cross-Team Collaboration

Actionable tips that you can apply to your multi-team projects

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

It is not easy to be part of a project requiring multiple teams to work together to complete. If mismanaged, it can cost you and your organization valuable manhours and resources.

Throughout my career as a senior software engineer and engineering manager, I’ve had the privilege to lead the development of medium- to large-scale software that needs coordination between multiple teams and stakeholders. The ups and downs that I’ve experienced along the way have taught me a lot about leading cross-team initiatives — and I took notes and journaled about what I’ve learned. I thought it would good to share the common themes and what we did to minimize the chances of project delays and failures.

The tips here are not limited to teams within the same company. They could also apply to working with third-party teams; for example, your team needs to work on API integration with a team from a software service provider.

You don’t need to follow all the tips here. Pick and choose what you will need depending on the nature of your project. By the way, in this article, the word “project” could refer to a new product feature, a third-party integration, or any large piece of work that multiple teams in a company need to complete within a specific timeframe. Let’s get started.
The Brave Writer Submission Guidelines
By: Maria Angel Ferrero
Tags: Writing Tips, Write For Us, Self Improvement, Writing, Marketing

How to become a writer?

When your post is ready, submit via this form.

We will add you as a writer within 48 hours or so. Requests to contribute via email, Facebook message, or any other means will be ignored.

Once added as a contributor, you will be able to submit your drafts to The Brave Writer directly from your Medium Profile. If you don’t know how to do it, read Medium guide here.

If you don’t hear back from us within three business days, please assume that we kindly passed on your submission.

How can improve my chances of getting approved as a writer?

Other than following these guidelines, you can also take a look at our Editor’s Notes Column.

In this column, our editors share their advice on how to edit your pieces, how to pitch your stories, and how to improve your chances of having your work accepted for publication.

Check it out here.
SaaS Leaders’ Top 9 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2017
By: Drew Beechler
Tags: Digital Marketing, Marketing, Venture Capital, Startup, SaaS

Sangram Vajre

8. Storytelling and the Value of In-Person Connections

In-person events and conferences

I have a renewed appreciation, value, and understanding for what in-person events can do for companies. And it doesn’t need to be on the scale of Dreamforce — companies should be doing their own events whether there are 20 attendees, 200 attendees, or 20,000 attendees. At Terminus, we have put on the FlipMyFunnel roadshow conference almost 10 times and created a massive conference with over 25 sponsors and 35 speakers in Atlanta last December. We focused entirely on thought leadership and the concept of FlipMyFunnel and account-based marketing (ABM), not on pitching Terminus products. We focus on the problem and attendees know where to find a solution.

We were able to do all of this with a small marketing team and when Terminus was still very young. I can’t stress enough the importance of being in-person with your customers and the people you want to be your customers.

Storytelling

Every 5 years, we have seen a major shift in the marketing landscape. 2000 was the year of email marketing and marketing automation became the new shiny object around 2005. In 2010, we started to have lead overload, so predictive lead scoring became the new thing. Now in 2017, you look at all of this innovation and we’re still engaging with people over email and phone calls. ABM has become the new marketing technology and strategy because we now know what accounts to go after and we are being smart about engaging people “on their terms” through traditional and emerging channels.

I believe in the future, though, we will go back to the Mad Men era of marketing that focused on storytelling. Your marketing is not going to work if you’re not putting the right message in front of the right person with the right story.

Storytelling will become the main job of the marketer.

Sangram Vajre

CMO & Co-Founder, Terminus
Halloween in New York
By: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
Tags: Hilary Campbell, Nonfiction, Comics, Halloween, New York

Cartoonist for the New Yorker among other places. I love my mom and white wine. My graphic memoir MURDER BOOK out in 2021. Follow on Insta @CartoonsbyHilary!

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Make Your Unconscious Conscious To Win
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, News, Podcast, Science

Make Your Unconscious Conscious To Win Mission Follow Mar 17 · 3 min read

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate.” –Carl Jung

So now that we’re on a path to empathize and heal our intergenerational traumas, let’s take a look at the “Core Language Approach.”

This is an approach developed by the It Didn’t Start With You author, Mark Wolynn, and can help us verbalize (make conscious) and then attack these challenges. The four steps:

The Core Compliant

The Core Descriptors

The Core Sentence

The Core Trauma

Let’s start with “The Core Compliant.”

This is the foundation of getting at our central mind and body block.

What is your deepest fear? It could be a feeling or situation. What do you find yourself worrying about again and again?

Write it out on paper. Try writing it again and again if you find yourself not being completely honest. Remember, you can throw away the paper later!

Once you see the words, read them out loud. Mark recommends analyzing them and asking questions like:

“What words… have an urgent quality to them?”

“What words may not fit entirely in the context of your life experience?” (i.e. might these be the fears of your parents or grandparents?)

And the most shocking:

“See if you can listen to what you’ve written as though you were listening to someone else. Perhaps the words do in fact belong to someone else, and you have merely been giving them a voice. Perhaps the words belong to someone in your family who was traumatized and couldn’t speak them out loud. Maybe through your complaints, you are telling this person’s story…”

Does this terror campaign you’re waging against yourself belong to you?

Chances are some of it is, but not all of it. Consider looking back and seeing where this came from and how to release it back into the past. Fears from the past will never serve you in the present.

Tomorrow we’ll look at “The Core Descriptors.”

– Chad Grills, Mission Founder and CEO
“Don’t think of it as a conference. Think of it as binge-watching powerpoints for 10 hours straight, 4 days in a row.”
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Tweet, Prooductivity, Product Design, Design, Startup

Sign up for The UX Collective Newsletter

By UX Collective

A weekly, ad-free newsletter that helps designers stay in the know, be productive, and think more critically about their work. Take a look
Why Data Science might just not be worth it
By: Dario Radečić
Tags: Programming, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Python

Note from the author: This is an opinion piece, so it’s probably biased to a degree. Jobs in your country and with your skillset may vary. We don’t see the world through the same eyes. Please leave your thoughts and experiences in the comment section.

If you’re doing anything software related you’ve probably considered the option of switching to the field of data science. And why shouldn’t you, the jobs are supposedly everywhere, salaries are generally higher than in software development, and having the word “scientist” in your job title would make your mother proud.

Well, maybe not the last one, but you get the point.

After being in the field for a while now, exploring a good bit of libraries and other cool stuff, writing around 80 data science-related article, whilst in the same time exploring other options (like web and mobile development) on the side, I find my self to be qualified enough to break down the good and bad things about the field.

The focus today will primarily be on the bad things because the Internet is full of “why you should become a data scientist” and “learn data science in a month” type of articles.

With that being said, the ideal reader is someone who knows what will be the benefits from enrolling in the field but would also want to know what are the possible drawback. Also, someone who’s already in the field for a while might also find these points useful too.

Okay, without further ado, let’s begin with the first one!
UX Read-A-Long #2
By: Meg D-K
Tags: User Research, UX, Books, Design, Ethnography

UX Read-A-Long #2

Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries

Heya Bookclubers — It is high time for another UX “read-a-long”.

Cover of “Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries”

This time we will be reading Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve Portigal. The book offers “personal accounts of the challenges researchers encounter out in the field, where mishaps are inevitable, yet incredibly instructive.” You can also read a sample chapter of the book on UX Matters.

The Discount

The lovely people at Rosenfeld Media have provided us with a discount code to give our followers and read-a-long participants.

Discount code:TheUXBookClub

This code will get you 20% off your order at Rosenfeld Media. Feel free to use it for any of their books that you’d like to read. (We suggest adding The User Experience Team of One and Validating Product Ideas to your shopping cart.)
9 Paid Technical Writing Programs for Developers
By: Yaser Basravi
Tags: Technical Writing, Programming, Writing, Developer, Development

9 Paid Technical Writing Programs for Developers

Get paid to write tutorials and blogs about frameworks and languages

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

As a developer, you’re working on some framework (if you are a JavaScript developer there is a good chance you are working on many!). You encounter a problem. The problem may be related to installation or integration of framework within your project, or it was running on a local machine but when you deployed it on the server it showed an error.

So you Google it. Google throws a bunch of solutions to you. You go to the first solution, you read it, and apply it to the problem. The bugs are not resolved. So you try another solution. Still, the bug is not resolved. You read the documentation of the framework. As soon as you start to read, you realise that the documentation is not properly written. You curse the writer. Then you go to another solution. After repeating this cycle, you finally resolve the problem.

All developers go through this process.

The good news is, you can now monetize this process by writing about it. There are many writing programs that pay you to write how-to tutorials or blog posts for them.
Charge Yourself Before You Hit 0%
By: Emma Scoble
Tags: Productivity, Mental Health, Self, Work, Mindfulness

“Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

I couldn’t tell you the last time my phone went flat. Completely dead, no battery, black screen.

I can recall a few instances. A day trip to the city where none of us remembered a power bank. Dinner at Nanna’s where my cousins and I realized that Nanna lived right next to a Pokestop and promptly drained our batteries. A road trip in a friends old car that had no aux cord and no charger — we actually had to use CDs to listen to music.

I can’t tell you which was the most recent because my phone dying is a rare occurrence. For the most part, I don’t allow it to happen.

I have two chargers, one that lives in my bedroom and another that lives in my handbag, along with a power bank (just in case). At work, there’s a charger at our lunch table. In the living room, we have a veritable HUB of chargers for all kinds of devices. The car, the kitchen, the office — chargers everywhere.

Because a dead phone is useless. So, we avoid letting them die.

Simple. Them’s the rules.

And yet, we struggle to apply that same rule to ourselves.
If God Doesn’t Exist …
By: Zachary Phillips
Tags: Therapy, Mental Health, Psychology, Philosophy, Religion

If God Doesn’t Exist …

When Truth and Agnosticism Clash

Image Credit: Olly

*The following is a passage of writing therapy. The views expressed are an expression of my mood at the time of writing. As such, they don’t represent the entirety of my thought on the matter.

If God doesn’t exist, there can be no objective truth.

With nothing above us, we are all free to make our own morals. Free to choose what is right or wrong. Free to act how we like.



There are no consequences beyond our own creation. No threat of an afterlife of eternal punishment. Nothing but our conscience to guide us.

But what is our conscience, but a product of our environment and genetics? Put me in a different time and place and I would believe vastly different things. Place me in a different education system or with different parents and I would be on a completely different path.

If God doesn’t exist, my truth is based on nothing random environmental factors. And so is yours. And so is everyone’s.

Without something above us to guide our morals we are all free to act how we like. But that freedom is in fact a false freedom. I was not free to choose my parents, nor the time and place of my birth, nor my classmates, my teachers, nor any other factor.

I am limited by my environment. I only have finite options that I could realistically take. Thus if God doesn’t exist and I act ‘immorally’ am I really to blame? Is anyone?

In a Godless world, criminals are only breaking human law. And will only receive human punishments. In that world, the atheist is free to choose what laws they will follow and the moral standards (if any) they will adhere to.

If they feel that human laws are unjust, they are free to break them. There is no objective truth holding them back. No God to guide their actions. Just themselves; which is just what the randomness of their environments created.

But what do I know? I’m just a depressed agnostic.

~ Zachary Phillips

Website: zachary-phillips.com | Social @zacpphillips
4 Habits to Let Go That Help You Beat Anxiety
By: Sanjay Priyadarshi
Tags: Anxiety, Mental Health, Psychology, Advice, Habits

According to Wikipedia Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry. Anxiety is your body reacting to stress. Ordinary anxiety is completely normal because each of us copes to some degree.

The problem arises when ordinary anxiety begins to interfere with our daily life.

General anxiety symptoms includes

Thoughts you can’t control.

Increased heart rate.

Having difficulty falling asleep.

You cannot concentrate.

Increased breathing rate.

I have made this list of four habits that helped me reduce anxiety in my life. After you put these habits aside, you can reduce anxiety in your life.

1. Not Appreciating What We Have

Did you ever think that all we have today was once a wish? We always wanted that phone we use today. We always wanted the clothes that we wear today.

All the people we have in our life were once desired by us. Most of the time we don’t appreciate what is in our lives today.

As human beings, we set ourselves goals and once we achieve them, we set other goals to achieve. In the race to pursue goals, humans have forgotten to appreciate what we have in our lives.

If a person has a sports car, he wants a private jet. A person who has a bicycle wants a sports car. So every human being in this universe wants something more in their life.

The clothes we wear today are not appreciated until the day we cannot afford them.

The food we eat today is not appreciated until we have the money to buy it.

Parents who are always supportive of us are not appreciated until one day we lose them.

You never know, what you have in your life today may disappear tomorrow. To release anxiety, we must begin to appreciate what we have in our life.

The more grateful we are, the happier we will be.
How An Unstable Childhood Can Damage Your Love Life as an Adult
By: Kathrine Meraki
Tags: Dating, Mental Health, Self-awareness, This Happened To Me, Relationships

How An Unstable Childhood Can Damage Your Love Life as an Adult

How to your break toxic relationship patterns.

I attracted emotionally unavailable people over and over again. I accepted crumbs and took what I could get because I thought it was normal.

I thought being caught in a push and pull dance meant love.

When we don’t know what a secure relationship looks like, we flounder about and get hooked on the emotional highs and lows and mistake it for love.

I was unconsciously addicted to the rush I got when people I liked would push me away, and come back. I truly believed this push-pull behaviour meant love and passion.

When I changed my attachment style to secure, I realised it wasn’t even close to what a healthy relationship was.

And maybe you don’t know what this looks like either.
The CVE-2018–10299 Vulnerability
By: Roman Ischenko
Tags: ICO, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Development, Startup

For the last few days, the crypto community has been discussing a new vulnerability in the Smart Contracts of tokens based on the ERC-20 standard. We have also studied this case with great interest.

This is not an ERC-20 vulnerability

This error is often called a vulnerability in the ERC-20 standard. This is not the case, and the batch processing block in which the error was detected is not part of the ERC-20. In the examples mentioned in the articles, the batchTransfer is described as an additional functionality designed to transfer the same number of tokens to multiple recipients (for example, in the case of airdrops).

“Production” of Errors

As it usually happens, the error is obvious if you know where to look. In this case, it is even a case of several errors.

The first of them is ignoring the already established de facto Safe Math library in critical cases (no one will argue that balancing verification is a very critical case). In particular, if instead of simple multiplication a function like the one below would be used:

In this case, the vulnerability would not have occurred.

The second error is the absence of restrictions on evoking such packet transfers. Obviously, such a scenario is rarely required and most often should be used by a limited number of users (such as contract owners or founders).

The third common mistake is the thoughtless replication of written code without critical revision. This is what usually makes such vulnerabilities so widespread.

Cheers

^_^
Embracing the Sacredness of Your Weekend
By: Shannon Hennig
Tags: Life, Mental Health, Productivity, Work Life Balance, Life Lessons

The weekend was once a time where I was able to let go of everything from the previous week and enjoy doing something other than work. There wasn’t a pervasive sense of guilt that I carried if I indulged in an all-day movie marathon or stayed up past 1am and didn’t get anything done.

That changed when I started my Master’s degree while working full time. Saturday and Sunday quickly became my main time to work on my courses, and my freedom started to erode.

My intention was always to get back to a place where weekends were a time for sleeping late, mindlessly enjoying a bottle of wine with my husband and spending more time doing creative work.

That didn’t happen. As soon as I was done my degree I filled up that time with a side-hustle. In fact, I was spending even more time now on evenings and weekends doing work than I had been before.

It’s been over the last two years that I’ve come to realize how short-sighted this approach to living has been.

The time we have each weekend is so limited and so precious, that filling it with tasks and activities that are “productive” is something of a fool’s errand. Despite this, we all continue to over-schedule ourselves all in the fear of missing out.

What we give up are the few fleeting moments that we have where life actually happens. Those spontaneous, beautiful moments where you laugh until you cry, engage in deep and meaningful conversation over a long and lazy cup of coffee and connect with those that mean the most to you.

It’s been my goal to reclaim the sacredness of my weekends and get back to a place where I start my new week feeling like I actually took a break. While this might be easier said than done, I’m committed to the process and even more so to the results.
ETF Partners Capital, Sustainability through Innovation
By: Kevin Hart
Tags: Innovation, Startup, VC, Vc Funding, Sustainability

We talk with Rob Genieser, a partner at ETF Partners Capital.

PetaCrunch: What’s your investment strategy in a single tweet?

Rob Genieser: Sustainability through innovation — backing great entrepreneurs who want to achieve commercial success and make the world a better place.

PC: How did ETF Partners Capital start?

RG: We wanted to focus on the environmental revolution, that we believed would follow the software, communications and internet revolutions that preceded it. We also thought Europe would be great for these types of “green” entrepreneurs, as Europe leads in many of these areas.

PC: What do you look for in founders and their start-ups?

RG: Great people make great companies. Founders have to possess a tremendous passion, and have the focus and dedication to make it happen.

PC: What’s the most exciting start-up you have funded recently and why?

RG: Our most recent investment was in Eagle Genomics, that is helping large organizations understand the microbiome. Billions of dollars are now spent in this area, and huge datasets are being created…but someone needs to offer the software platform that helps you curate all that information and draw understanding from the data. That is Eagle.

PC: What’s the most common error founders/start-ups make?

RG: The best founders listen well, and leverage the support of others. I think the biggest mistake is to go alone, when others are willing and eager to help.
Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: Programming, Docker, Web Development, Typescript, React

Dockerizing React App With NodeJS Backend — Typescript Version

Learn How to Dockerize and make it a deployable image

Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplash

Docker is an enterprise-ready container platform that enables organizations to seamlessly build, share, and run any application, anywhere. Almost every company is containerizing its applications for faster production workloads so that they can deploy anytime and sometimes several times a day. There are so many ways we can build a React App. One way is to dockerize the React app with nodejs backend and create a docker image so that we can deploy that image any time or sometimes several times a day.

In this post, we look at the example project and see the step by step guide on how we can dockerize the React app with nodejs as a server.

Introduction

Example Project

Dockerizing the App

Running The App on Docker

Summary

Conclusion

Introduction

Nowadays, it’s very common to dockerize and deploy the Docker image in the production with the help of container orchestration engines such as Docker Swarn or Kubernetes. We are going to Dockerize the app and create an image and run it on Docker on our local machine. We could also push that Image into Docker hub and pull it whenever and wherever we need it.

Here is the complete guide on how to develop a React app with nodejs as a backend server. If you are not familiar with the process or you want to know before studying this guide, I would recommend you going through it.

Javascript Version

Prerequisite

As a prerequisite, you have to install Docker for Desktop (whatever your OS is). Please follow this link to install Docker on your laptop. Once installed you can check the Docker info or version with the following commands.
What makes strong branding and how does it influence a company’s success?
By: Michelle Chiu
Tags: Marketing, Branding, Design, UX, Tech

In its simplest form, branding is the practice of influencing and controlling a set of associations with a company to help the business’s performance. Done successfully, an organization’s identity will be tied to select attributes—promoting its image or popularity.

While absolute control over a brand is not possible, it can be influenced through deliberate design, advertising, and marketing. By these means, companies can clearly communicate the principles they stand for to target audiences. Considering the power of this practice, it’s crucial that an organization masters the pillars of creating a strong brand to get ahead.

What is strong branding?

A strong brand adds value to your product.

It differentiates you from competitors by helping you achieve recognition and clarifies expectations for customers. The key is in highlighting the contrast between what you can offer and what already exists in the market.

Effective branding elevates a product or organization by adding unique character and promise. In crafting an emotional resonance, the brand forms a lasting image in the minds of consumers.
Plot with Plotly. Its like Matplotlib… But better
By: Dorjey Sherpa
Tags: Plotly, Visualization, Beginner

Plotly logo from Plotly.com

Regardless of what we are learning or doing, we start with the basics, the foundation, the core. Then we learn more tools and techniques, skills and shortcuts — we learn to do things better and make it more “advanced”.

Today, we will be looking at another tool to “advance” our data visualization skills.

What is plotly? Why should we use it?

Plot is a free and open source graphing library that makes amazing interactive graphs. It does everything that Seaborn and Matplotlib does, but makes it more fun for the viewer.

Data: All the articles and author data are extracted directly from Towards Data Science from 1/1/2020 until 10/31/2020.

How to get started?

In order to visualize with plotly, you need to have a good understanding of Matplotlib and Seaborn.

How to import :

import plotly.graph_objects as go

You will also see: import plotly.express as px . This wrapper allows for simpler syntax but at the cost of control over the graph. plotly.graph_objects has a wider control over what you are creating. Additionally plotly.express is still fairly new with a few bugs.

top_ten_authors = df["author"].value_counts().keys().tolist()[:10] #selecting top 10 number_published = df["author"].value_counts().values.tolist() # num of pub correspoding to the top 10 authors trace = go.Pie(labels = top_ten_authors, #assigning label

values = number_published, #assigning values

marker = {'line': {'color': 'white', 'width': 1}}, # generating the lines

#hoverinfo="value"

) data = [trace] layout = go.Layout(title="Top 10 People With Most Publications in 2020");

pie_fig = go.Figure(data=data, layout = layout);

pie_fig.show()



x = df['author'][:25]

trace = go.Bar(x = x ,

y=df['claps'],

text = df["reading_time"])

data=[trace]

#defining layout

layout = go.Layout(title='Claps Vs Authors Scatter Plot',xaxis=dict(title='Authors'),yaxis=dict(title='Claps'),hovermode='closest')

#defining figure and plotting

bar_fig = go.Figure(data=data,layout=layout) bar_fig.show()

Being able to interact with the graphs is great for the viewer. They get to explore further into the data by zooming in and out and panning across the visualization.
5 Pairs of Magic Methods in Python That You Should Know
By: Yong Cui
Tags: Programming, Technology, Data Science, Python, Artificial Intelligence

4. Context Manager: __enter__ and __exit__

When we deal with file objects in Python, the most frequent syntax you may have come across is probably something like this:

with open('filename.txt') as file:

# Your file operations go here

The use of the with statement is known as the context manager technique. Specifically, in the file operation example above, the with statement will create a context manager for the file object and after the file operations, the context manager will help us close the file object such that the shared resource (i.e., the file) can become available to other processes.

So, in general, context managers are Python objects that manage shared resources, such as open and close, for us. Without them, we have to manage them manually, which can be error-prone.

To implement such behavior with a custom class, our class needs to implement the __enter__ and __exit__ methods. The __enter__ method sets up the context manager that prepares the needed resource for us to operate on, while the __exit__ method is to clean up any used resources that should be released to make them available. Let’s consider the following trivial example with the previous Product class:

Context Manager

As you can see, when the instance object is embedded in a with statement, the __enter__ method is called. When the operation is completed in the with statement, the __exit__ method is called.
Perfect Circle
By: Talk To Warlock
Tags: Sex, Psychology, Yoga, Science, Poetry

Perfect Circle

When falling tears rise

When blue ocean cries

When out is in

When Without is within

And within is without

And every One loud

Forms…the darkest cloud

When right is left

When left is right

When you have no food

And you take a bite

When it is dark

When dark is white

Cease or Exist

When far is near

When time is now

When its all here

Peace and fear

Becomes clear

No stone is the same

No breath is the same

Nothing has a name

Without no’s still the same



Ultimate
The Every Day Novelist: RESOURCES
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Writing, Reading, Resources, Publication, Books

I attended AWP 2019 — a writer’s conference. It had an expo that was literally packed full of booths full of small presses seeking submissions for writers, writers programs, and workshops. I thought the best way to share the information I picked up might be to write a little information about each press and collect them here in The Every Day Novelist publication. Each publication or workshop will get its own post and I’ll collect them here.

Broadsided Press is a non-paying market for poetry and prose. They also offer opportunities to become grassroots publishers.

December Magazine is a paying market for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and visual art. they host annual contests for poetry and prose.

Hippocampus Magazine and Books is a paying market for creative non-fiction. They also host an annual conference for creative non-fiction writers.

Minerva Rising Press is a paying market for fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, and art. They also host a blog that accepts submissions, and three contests (poetry, fiction, memoir.) They offer book development services for a fee.

Pacifica Literary Review is a non-paying market for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, visual art, and photography. They also offer contests.
Pause
By: Ann Litts
Tags: Balance, Mindfulness, Ocd, Self-awareness, Writing

Back when it was optional

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

July 2017

For the last thirty days or so, I wrote every day. Two days ago I hit the pause button and took a break just to check in with my internal guidance.

You see, I have OCD tendencies. I’m a list maker. The kind of person who will put something on a list after they’ve done it simply for the satisfaction of then crossing it off said list. I wanted to make sure my creative pursuit wasn’t falling into this same trap. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t becoming a compulsion rather than an outlet.

So I paused. It was good timing. I have been interviewing for a real-life career change and it wasn’t as though I had a lot left over to put down in black and white anyway. This past week had left me drained dry and the ability to step away, not think, and completely collapse at the end of My Day was a gift I gave to myself.

Balance is tough. In All. The. Things. Even those you love. Maybe especially those you love. Like eating candy or binge-watching your favorite Netflix show.

Moderation is key.

Rest and recuperation from all aspects of Life can give a fresh perspective. Learning to sit with your own company and listen to your inner wisdom is a skill set.

The moral of this story: balancing My Real Life with my creative life with my spiritual life with my personal life seems to be the path to wholeness.

Thanks for walking awhile with me.

Namaste.
35,000 views. 82 cents. When Going Viral Doesn’t Pay.
By: Linda Caroll
Tags: Writing, Advice, Inspiration, Marketing, Ideas

Sometimes, going viral is a good thing. Especially when all those views drop dollars in the bank like you just hit the jackpot. Because while writing is fun and soothes the savage beast, getting paid to write makes it even more fun.

The reality of writing is that writers often struggle…

We all know that content mills don’t pay. Pretty hard to make a living on sites that pay $10 or $20 for 2500 words. Researched and edited, of course.

But the truth is, it’s not much better here. For every piece that hits $500 or $1000, there’s 20 more that didn’t even make $20. Or $10.

If you did the math, you’d probably find that flipping burgers pays better.

I mean — how long does it take you to write an article? If you take 2 hours to draft, edit, find a photo and publish to earn $20? It’s just math.

Math, and a little bit of random luck.

Often, the pieces that pay are the ones that took off like you breathed some kind of magic while you were typing and you have no idea how or what you did to make the magic happen. You can read all the “how to” tips and they can’t tell you how to replicate the magic, either.

Dumb luck, sometimes.

A lot of writers think more views will pay off…

You see it in the FB groups all the time. People talking about how many views they’re getting while everyone else watches wistfully, imagining that those views must surely translate to dollars.

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t always work that way.

But no. Let me show you.

I messed up so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

My #1 viewed story — 44K views — $93

If you were to google “story of two wolves” or even just “two wolves” you’d find this piece stapled to the top of page one. That was the problem. 96% of the views are external and we only get paid for internal views.

The only reason it made anything at all was likely that it was curated. The 4% internal views were likely driven by curation. Without curation, it likely would have earned even less.

And honestly, the 4 minute read time didn’t help. If it had been a tad longer, it may have paid a little better for the few internal views it got. See?
Natural Language Processing with spaCy — Steps and Examples
By: Dhilip Subramanian
Tags: NLP, Data Science, Python, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

Reading a String

Text preprocessing is an important part and crucial step in natural language processing. It transforms the raw text into a number where Machine learning algorithms can perform better.

In the below text example,

Code

text = """ The Republican president is being challenged by Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden, who is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president but has been in US politics since the 1970s.As election day approaches, pollingcompanies will be trying to gauge the mood of the nation by asking voters which candidate they prefer.""" #Passing the text to nlp and initialize an object called 'doc' doc = nlp(text) #Checking the type of doc object type(doc)

Output

When the above text is passing to ‘nlp object, spaCy first tokenizes the text to product ‘doc’ object. Then the ‘doc’ object is then processed into several steps such as tagger, parser, ner,etc.. This is also called a processing pipeline. The type of doc object is tokens. We are going to see the steps involved in the pipeline one by one.
Learning, Story telling and the Origin of the Universe
By: The Physics Connection
Tags: Storytelling, Education Reform, Lifelong Learning, Science, Physics

There once was a violent unstable cloud of dust that turned into a planet full of life

Some scientists suggest that what made our species special, and what caused it to explode and dominate the planet is our ability to understand and tell stories. I heard this while watching this lecture on artificial intelligence last week, it did not make immediate sense to me. However now after reflecting on what a story is and what we do when we interpret the world, I think that we are constantly looking for stories out in the world, we want to find the stories and tell other people about them.

Take for example Cosmology, when we try to understand the origin of the universe, we are trying to tell a story about the entire universe, who/what caused it and how did it evolve over the course of it’s history, how important characters like galaxies and black holes started to play a role, and how we came out of a cloud of gas. If you have the answer to these question, you would have the urge to tell everyone about them in story form, and few people would be so uninterested that they wouldn’t want to hear the story of our entire world! (except if their schools made them associate too much pain to hearing things like that).

The key take away point I’m making is that our brains are wired in certain ways: We are social creatures and we understand things in story form, which suggests re-designing some of the things we want to teach in story form to put the learners in a position to understand even the hardest topics, and make a switch in their head that this is an interesting thing and not a boring thing.

It would be a great story for civilization, if more people got together to re-design learning material in more captivating form, If more people started to learn and help each other learn. We will be happier, more reasonable human beings, more capable of advancing civilization, we will understand each other better and more importantly the story of our species will be one were we end up exploring the universe, spreading love and understanding who we are.

That’s the story I wanna be a part of!
Reasons Why You Make Bad Decisions, According to Science
By: Desiree Peralta
Tags: Life Lessons, Psychology, Advice, Education, Science

Our Mind Suffers from Cognitive Fatigue

Our mind works like a muscle. So we are training it with it all the cognitive processes associated with it, such as willpower, decision-making, and even just our way of thinking.

And as happens with the muscles of the body, when we use them over and over again without giving them time for their proper recovery, they tire and end up underperforming.

On a cognitive level, with every decision we make, no matter how minimal, we are consuming a portion of our mental energy.

When our mental energy is almost depleted it is much easier for our brain to go into a “survival” mode in which “no” by default is the easy option. From that cognitive survival mode, it is much easier to start making bad choices that require less effort (even though we know perfectly well what the good choices are).

Let's consider an example. In a research study conducted by Columbia University, a group of research psychologists examined 1,112 trials over a 10-month period.

These trials considered matters of probation, conducted by a specific commission appointed to personally evaluate the case of a convicted criminal and determine whether he was granted parole. Naturally, you would expect the judges of this commission to make their decision based on considerations such as the type of crime committed or what laws had been violated when making a decision.

But what the researchers found was something very different. In fact, they saw that the judges’ decisions had nothing to do with what was happening in the courtroom or with the type of case.

Instead, they were determined by the hours of the day it took for them to make a decision.

Their research indicated that in trials undergone at the beginning of the morning, a criminal had up to a 65% chance of having a favorable judgment. But as the morning progressed and the judge became “worn out” by continual decision making, those odds rapidly decreased to zero.

They found this clear trend after analyzing more than 1,100 cases over a period of 10 months. Regardless of the type of crime committed, it didn’t matter if it was rape, robbery, or embezzlement. A criminal was much more likely to be granted parole if his trial was the first in the morning, or the first after lunch, than at other times of the day.
Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP
By: Mark Rittman
Tags: Oracle, Oracle Cloud, Data Lake, Analytics, Big Data

Oracle Big Data Cloud, Event Hub and Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition pt.3 : Spark-Powered Data Flows, Automated Machine Learning and Thoughts on Sparkline SNAP Mark Rittman Follow Jun 2, 2018 · 1 min read

In this series of three blogs on Oracle Analytics Cloud Data Lake Edition I’ve setup an object store data lake in Oracle Cloud using Oracle Big Data Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud, and ingested streams of real-time event data from IoT and social media sources into Oracle Cloud’s object storage service using Oracle Event Hub Cloud Service.

Read more at the new home of the MJR Analytics blog.
Ego: Self-Discovery Oracle Card
By: Jordin James
Tags: Mental Health, Psychology, Spirituality, Self, Inspiration

Your ego is the roundtable of children within you doing their very best to meet your needs.

You may have been taught you must destroy your ego, but there is no part of you that requires destruction. Yes, your ego makes terrible masters, but they do make fantastic servants.

The children that make up your ego are the parts of you that only ever want to feel loved and helpful. Don’t shame them even more in your attempt to destroy them.

Rather, help them grow up. Treat the children inside of you better than you were treated.

In return, you will co-create a mature ego; one that helps you move with grace and power, always and forever affirming confidence in your worth.
How To Win Your Next Opportunity in a Progressive Organisation.
By: Escape The City
Tags: Startup, Job Hunting, Entrepreneurship

What makes them a progressive company?

One of the elements that stands out about Oppo is that they take their ingredients seriously. That goes for both their product, which took 24 months to develop, but also the attention they give to creating the right formula for a happy and healthy work environment — free ice cream included. Due to the changing work of work, growing organisation in the 21st century need to look and behave differently to their predecessors in order to thrive. Oppo does this in three ways:

They are mission-led.

Oppo has a vision to eradicate terrible food choices and provide an alternative that isn’t bland or boring. They believe that “food that isn’t healthy and tasty is broken”. Oppo keeps this mission at the heart of their choices, making them an authentic voice in the health food industry. However not only do they seek to improve their product, but they apply the same principles to developing their team. They hold ‘round tables’ where they encourage blue-sky thinking, personal audits and aim to put in place new practices to set their team up for success. A progressive company looks to combine their mission with the success of the individual in order to sustainably achieve growth and employee satisfaction.

They value autonomy.

At Oppo every team member has a turn taking ice cream samples to pitch at retailers which is a huge part of their success. The team member who currently has ownership of this area did so off the back of this test. By discovering that she’s the best at it (and that she enjoys it) now gives her the freedom to succeed in a way that aligns her talents with the company mission. And she is free to run with it however she chooses.

The team is intimate and well balanced; there are no middle-managers. They also have ‘on-boarding co-dating’ where you will grab a drink or a coffee with each team member and get to know them personally before becoming involved professionally.

They are growing responsibly.

With great growth comes great responsibility, and this rings true for the stage Oppo is currently at. They’ve even been known to ‘err on the side of conservative’ when it comes to predicting their sale success rate in-store, which significantly separates them from existing money-hungry-growth-stage counterparts. They care about their culture, their work environment and the quality of their product and are determined to maintain that commitment despite their growth. Authentically demonstrating consideration for people, purpose and profit shows that Oppo is testing out what it means to be a progressive company in a way that is right for them.