fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Working For Pennies A Day
By: Floyd Mori
Tags: Writing, Money, Poetry, Success, Hope

Working For Pennies A Day

Sometimes you have to do it

Photo by Dan Counsell on Unsplash

There are not very many jobs

where a person would be willing

to work for pennies a day.

Then why do so many people

who are trying to be writers do it?

What is the lure that keeps

people trying to write

and keep at it continually

when the returns are minimal?

It’s called HOPE.

Maybe SUCCESS will come.
Phuse’s General Wordpress Guide: A one-stop reference for Wordpress basics
Tags: Development

At Phuse, our client relationships are built on three core values: Authenticity, Collaboration and Transparency. In the spirit of these values, we provide clear, detailed and personalized user guides that allow clients to easily manage their site content post-launch.

Wordpress is by far our most requested content management system. While the Wordpress support forums, Stack Overflow and Google searches are all good resources, we saw a need for a single resource that clearly and concisely touched upon all the basic Wordpress administration tools.

To address our clients’ most common site and content management questions in one place, we created a General Wordpress User Guide available to all of our clients (and the web at large) that covers out-of-the-box, native content management methods and tools.

Created using couscous.io, hosted on Github Pages and complete with annotated images for visual reference, the guide is a one-stop-shop for content management basics in Wordpress — from creating new posts and pages (and the difference between the two) to uploading media to a post and formatting text.

We invite you to have a look around and let us know what you think. Like what we’ve done? Feel there’s anything we missed? Let us know in the comments below!
Feature Store for ML Monthly Newsletter
By: Nathalia Ribeiro Ariza
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Feature Store, Machine Learning

Feature Store vs. Data Warehouse

An often asked question is “what are the main differences between a feature store and a data warehouse?”. In fact, this was the topic of a hot debate on hacker news this month.

Some think that feature stores are just a buzzword-friendly name for a Data Warehouse (we’re looking at you, Snowflake!), but there are many important differences that data scientists and data engineers are not always aware of. Since the differences are intrinsically related to the value of feature stores, we decided to make this the topic of this month.

Read the full article here to gain a fuller understanding of the differences, but the table below provides a short summary.

Feature Store Blog: Your Must-Read List

Read the latest articles and discussions on innovations in data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and, of course, feature stores. Here are the highlights from October:

Deploying Machine Learning models to production

Time-series chaos? Use a feature store

Feature Stores: The CEO’s Guide

The Importance of Having a Feature Store

We welcome and encourage everyone to submit your content!

Global Feature Store Meetup Group

The Global Feature Store Meetup Group is a forum for the international community of users and developers of Feature Store platforms and tools to share ideas and learn from each other.

This is a space to promote discussion of best practices, new approaches, and emerging technologies for feature engineering, feature management, and feature usage for model training and model serving.

If you’re interested in giving a talk, you can submit your talk proposal here.

Job Positions

Software Engineer: Join the Hopsworks team at Logical Clocks in Stockholm, Sweden.

Software Engineer, Backend: Join the Feature Studio team at Kaskada in Seattle, USA.

Senior ML Engineer: Join the Content Demand Modeling team at Netflix in Los Angeles, USA.

Engineering Manager: Join the Machine Learning team at Etsy in New York, USA.

Get in Touch!

Visit our website to access a list of all feature store platforms available. Feel free to reach out to us at featurestoreorg@gmail.com, if you have feedback or want to take your role in our community to the next level.
Pictures Of Courage
By: Megan Minutillo
Tags: Self-awareness, Personal Growth, Courage, World, Poetry

Pictures Of Courage

A poem.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Courage.

The dictionary tells us it’s

the ability to do something

that frightens one. It tells us

that it’s strength in the face

of pain or grief.

The world tells us it’s fighting

the bad guys. And laughing in

the face of evil. And standing

on a ledge of what’s deemed

right and true, even if you’re

standing out there all alone.

But perhaps there’s a different

picture of courage, too.

Sometimes, courage is found

at the moment when you get

out of bed in the morning, when

all you really want to do is stay

hidden under the covers.

Doubt creeps in, and despair

creeps in, and you’re suddenly

overwhelmed with what the day

ahead holds. You start to believe

that you are incapable of facing

it all. You start to hold onto the

thought that it’d be better if you

just faded away, under your covers.

But that would be a tragedy,

for the world needs you in it.

You have it in you to keep

breathing all day long. You

are capable of putting one

foot in front of the other.

You can face whatever or

whoever is waiting for you

on the other side of that door.
Support The Haven
By: Page Barnes
Tags: Humor, Satire, Life, Funny, Writing

Support The Haven

The Haven Has a Patreon!

Photo by fran hogan on Unsplash

Throw The Haven a few bucks to demonstrate your love. But you still need to stay off my lawn. Seriously. No walking on my lawn.

https://www.patreon.com/havencomedy

Thanks!
25 Things I Stopped Doing at 25
By: Amanda Spiller
Tags: Mental Health, Self Help, Empowerment, Young Adulthood, Healing

How I transformed my mental health

Three months into my 25th year, I was sitting on the rooftop of company housing, crying into my journal. I was steeped in dread and falling victim to my bad habits. I didn’t trust myself to make good decisions, so I wasn’t.

Image from Canva

I was frustrated with myself and how I was living my life. I decided that I wanted to be more intentional; to cut out the things that weren’t serving me anymore and craft a life based on my dreams. So I stopped doing some things.

Here’s a list of 25 things I stopped doing in 2020.

Drinking lots of alcohol Having sex with people I don’t trust Having hair

4. Eating lots of sugar

5. Spending all my mental energy thinking about boys

6. Singing in secret

7. Believing I’m too old to learn music

8. Doubting myself

9. Wearing uncomfortable shoes

10. Wearing uncomfortable bras

11. Thinking I could be anti-racist without actively doing the work

12. Putting off my writing

13. Putting myself down

14. Working until burn-out

15. Basing my worth on my productivity

16. Making self-love conditional on factors like my weight

17. Confusing self-discipline and self-punishment

18. Doing things that disempower me

19. Prioritizing everyone else’s happiness over my own

20. Judging my grieving process

21. Judging my emotions

22. Ignoring my boundaries

23. Avoiding time alone

24. Doing what I “should” do

25. Believing I wasn’t enough

These are the things that changed the game for me. They didn’t all happen at once, though. My transformation this year is the result of many journaling sessions, conversations with mental health professionals, and work with my life coach.

Sometimes, there’s no way out but through. Never forget, you can always wake up and be someone new.
GOP Officials Rebuff Trump
Tags: Covid 19, Economics, Elections, Politics, Coronavirus

1. Trump’s coup attempts

Trump has repeated calls for GOP leaders to undemocratically overturn election results in states that Joe Biden won. Trump, as usual, ranted on Twitter and in lawsuits devoid of evidence:

“…Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, enough to “flip” at least four States, which in turn is more than enough to win the Election? Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have…. ….the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself. THE WORLD IS WATCHING!!!…”

Just before Thanksgiving, Trump called into a meeting of Pennsylvania’s GOP legislators, and demanded that the election, where Biden also won, be overturned. Trump falsely claimed:

“…It’s a very sad thing for our country to have this and they have to turn over the results. It would be easy for me to say, ‘oh, let’s worry about four years from now.’ No. This election was lost by the Democrats, they cheated, it was a fraudulent election….”

The week before that attempt, Trump called Michigan’s GOP state legislators into the White House to pressure them to overturn valid election results, which also went to Biden.

This latest tweet follows weeks of failed legal challenges claiming widespread voter fraud without any evidence.

The Washington Post quotes several fascinating exchanges between state judges and Trump’s lawyer’s attempts to overturn election results. The following quotes are between a Pennsylvania judge and Trump’s lawyer Jonathan S. Goldstein:

THE COURT: In your petition, which is right before me — and I read it several times — you don’t claim that any electors or the Board of the County were guilty of fraud, correct? That’s correct? GOLDSTEIN: Your Honor, accusing people of fraud is a pretty big step. And it is rare that I call somebody a liar, and I am not calling the Board of the [Democratic National Committee] or anybody else involved in this a liar. Everybody is coming to this with good faith. The DNC is coming with good faith. We’re all just trying to get an election done. We think these were a mistake, but we think they are a fatal mistake, and these ballots ought not be counted. THE COURT: I understand. I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer. Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots? GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no. THE COURT: Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots? GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.

No. There was NO undue or improper influence, there was no voter fraud. There was no case.

Yet Trump continues to not only legally challenge valid election results — but to explicitly call for GOP officials to overturn those results in states that Biden won.
SaaS margins — where they should be
By: Sammy Abdullah
Tags: Startup, Software, Venture Capital, SaaS

The general rule of thumb for spending in SaaS is 40/40/20. In other words, 40% of operating expense should be on R&D, 40% should be on sales and marketing, and 20% should be on G&A. Rules of thumb are just generalizations, so we wanted to see what the data really is. 28 SaaS companies have gone public from 2018 to today and below are their margins. Perhaps the rule of thumb should be 30/50/20. The data is below.

30/50/20. On median, 30% of opex is R&D, 47% is on sales and marketing, and 22% is on G&A. The rule is therefore “30/50/20” may be more accurate.

There are outliers. Rules of thumb are just general guidelines, and sure enough there are significant outliers. 45% of Dropbox’s spend was on R&D while only 13% of Zoom’s spend is on R&D. Similarly, 73% of Zoom’s spend was on sales & marketing, Dropbox spent only 37% on S&M, and Bill.com spent 28% on S&M. Snowflake spent a whopping 130% of revenue on S&M and indeed their EBITDA margin is the worst of the bunch at -192%.

Don’t let G&A be the outlier. Obviously you should minimize spend on G&A. Building product and selling it should be the priorities. Cloudflare, Sendgrid, Snowflake, and Palantir I’m looking at you (they spend 36%, 34%, and 37%, and 43% of opex on G&A).

COGS isn’t 20%. The other rule of thumb that needs to be debunked is that COGS is 20% of revenue. As you can see, the median and averages are 25% and 27% respectively.

Where is the profitability? We put together simplified EBITDA calculations based on the data (Revenue — COGS — R&D — S&M — G&A). Only 3 out of the 28 companies have positive EBITDA. Not only that, but the median and average EBITDA margins are an anemic -28% and -34%. Even more alarming, the average EBITDA margin of the last 6 companies to go public was -74% (if you exclude Snowflake, it’s still a very bad -50%).

Indeed, software is forgiving: so long as you’re growing fast, have excellent retention, and marquee customers you’re allowed to burn cash as recurring revenue that doesn’t churn is an annuity with tremendous value.

Overall we found the data to be really compelling: 30/50/20 is the new 40/40/20 for more established SaaS businesses, unprofitability is ok so long as your business fundamentals are solid and you’re growing, and COGS is allowed to be slightly higher than 20% of revenue.

Visit us at blossomstreetventures.com and email us directly with Series A or B opportunities at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com. We invest $1mm to $1.5mm in growth rounds, inside rounds, small rounds, cap table restructurings, note clean outs, and other ‘special situations’ all over the US & Canada. Feel free to connect with Sammy Abdullah on LI.
WAZIHUB Presented at East West University in Bangladesh
By: Wazihub Iot
Tags: IoT, Big Data, Bangladesh, Waziup, Education

On January 23rd 2018, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of East West University organized a seminar on “IoT and Big Data for Sustainable Development”.

Dr. Abdur Rahim Biswas, who is a senior research staff in smart IoT group at CREATE-NET, Italy and project co-ordinator of WAZIHUB, was the key speaker of the seminar. The seminar was chaired by Dr. Ahmed Wasif Reza, Associate Professor and Chairperson of CSE department.

Dr Abdur Rahim presented the Wazihub project and the Waziup technology to a group of 100 students and faculties that attended the seminar and made it a success.
The sound of footsteps behind me
By: Melissa Brown
Tags: Self-awareness, Personal Growth, Perspective, Personal Development, Self

“Average pace: 11 minutes, 4 seconds.”

The running app in my ear let me know that I was slowing down. I switched to a podcast to take my mind off the 5 miles I planned to conquer.

Between quotes from a divorced father who found creative ways to stay present in his son’s life, I heard my feet thumping on the dirt path along the riverside.

I thought I was alone, but another set of thumps followed right behind me.

Wanting to keep up, wanting to win, I picked up my pace.

“Average pace: 10 minutes, 14 seconds.”

I continued to push myself just a little bit to stay ahead of whoever was behind me and continued to hear their footsteps following closely.

Until, I was faced with a big puddle that required a balancing act on some rocks along the edge of the path.

I stopped, expecting someone to pass me.

But the footsteps behind me stopped too.

I looked back — no one was there.

Puzzled, I passed the puddle, and resumed my mile.

I heard footsteps behind me again. They pushed me to run faster.

“Average pace: 9 minutes, 11 seconds.”

The podcast episode ended.

All I heard were footsteps.

The sound of footsteps behind me motivated me to run faster. Push harder. Be better.

Then, I stopped. And they stopped too.

I glanced back, but saw no one.

The sound of footsteps were my own.

Inadvertently, I was racing myself.
Working With Sitemaps in Nuxt.js
By: Mikhail Starikov
Tags: Nodejs, Programming, Software Engineering, JavaScript, Nuxtjs

Sitemap for a Multi-Language Website

Here, the only detail to worry about is not to set the hostname so the domain will be taken from the request that will come to the Nuxt server.

Also, in case your domain hosting is via CNAME or Load balancer , then the request that will come to Nuxt will not be HTTPS, but simple HTTP.

In that case, you need to make sure that your x-forwarded-proto is set to HTTP in a request. Then, the module will recognize that the original request was HTTP and it will put an HTTPS link to the sitemap.

On clusterjobs.de we have that option, when we need to have a multi-index sitemap that is dynamic and responds to each language domain. And, in the end, that module comes quite handy. I started using it a year ago, only with the routes and static routes options and it grew a lot.

Hopefully, it was useful and it improves your Nuxt application or encourages you to use this incredible framework!
Why is Everyone Going to Iceland?
By: Stephen H. Kim
Tags: Travel, Analytics, Programming, Python, Data Science

I try to understand the rise in tourism in Iceland with public data sources.

Halló aftur! (Hello again in Icelandic). In my free time, I enjoy watching videos on YouTube on topics ranging from photography, cinematography, soccer, comedy, etc. I recently started following Johnny Harris’ channel after watching his video on building a dream studio and stumbled upon his analysis on why tourism in Iceland has risen dramatically (link below). I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland with my photographer friend Pablo because of the country’s beautiful scenery.

In this post, I decided to try to decipher why Iceland has such a meteoric rise in tourism using public data sources. The video itself does a good job explaining the sudden spike/surge of tourism and gives a few good reasons. My point here is not to refute his arguments but rather use data to see what I learn from it. I find public data sources, clean the data, visualize it, and make predictions with Facebook Prophet.

Data Sources

For my investigation, I started just as I would back in college when writing a research paper: google searches. I was querying to find relevant, public datasets that I could download and analyze. I settled on three main datasets which I have attached the links here:

Visitors to Iceland Through Keflavik Airport : this is the main hub for international transportation. I didn’t find stats for all visitors from all transportation hubs but I figured this would be a good sample from the entire population.
Pallet Story #2 — How we build and scale our design system
By: Gauthier Casanova
Tags: Product, Product Design, Design, Design Systems, Transport

Despite being a 3-year-old-only company, we have invested a lot of thoughts and efforts into our Design system that we have named ‘Pallet’. Get it? Pallet! We try and improve our design system during every project tackled from our roadmap. So, let me detail our workflow and how we contribute every day to the growth of our design system.

Component design is done while building a project. For example, when redesigning our navigation system, we needed tooltips. We created them on this occasion and so on. Once the design is validated on the project by front-end engineers and designers, we import it into Pallet.

To build and maintain our design system, we leverage several software:
JavaScript Internals: What Actually Happens When You Call Console.log?
By: Jashan Preet Singh
Tags: React, Angular, JavaScript, Programming, Nodejs

What Happens When You Call console.log?

It’s always good to keep in mind that we work on the shoulders of giants, even when calling the most seemingly basic line of code. So, let’s dive deeper taking V8 — the JavaScript runtime and WebAssembly engine written in C++ that powers Chrome and Node.js — as an example.

It will first call a utility function WriteToFile

void D8Console::Log(const debug::ConsoleCallArguments& args,

const v8::debug::ConsoleContext&) {

WriteToFile(nullptr, stdout, isolate_, args);

} https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/4b9b23521e/src/d8-console.cc#L52-L55

After pre-processing internally, the JavaScript values will call fwrite

The function fwrite is part of the libc , which is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ANSI C standard. As we all know, the C Standard Library has several implementations on different platforms. Let us take the example of musl , a well-known implementation on the Linux platform written in C:

It will internally call a utility function ( __stdio_write ) after a bit of indirection, which will then make a call to an operating system call ( writev ):

The syscall symbol is a macro that will expand to __syscall3 after a lot of pre-processing. System calls differ between operating systems, and the way to perform them differs between processor architectures. It usually requires you to write (or generate) a bit of assembly. On x86–64, musl defines __syscall3 as following:

This sets up the system call number and arguments. On x86–64, the instruction for making system calls is called syscall .

After the syscall is made, the control transfers to the kernel (Linux, in this case). But that’s a whole other story…

The syscall will trap into the kernel. The kernel will preserve a bunch of information about the process and the context of the syscall. In the simplest scenario, the kernel will put that process in a queue of processes to be served and move on to handle another waiting process (someone else who made a syscall or a hardware interrupt, for example). The kernel will then continue serving the highest-priority requests/processes before eventually returning to our process that called console.log . The kernel will see that this process is blocked and waiting on a syswrite. It will take the arguments and other data that it previously stored and write to the file via a kernel-specific implementation. It will then mark the process as “ready” and return it to a ready queue to allow control to return to the calling process when its turn to run comes up.

They stopped after the syscall because it’s really tough to say exactly what happens after. It’s totally dependent on the OS kernel and its implementation details.
A Very Famous Designer Was Nice To Me and I Still Think About It
By: Jon Bell
Tags: Design, Twitter

A Very Famous Designer Was Nice To Me and I Still Think About It

It said more about him than me

My first week at Twitter overlapped with his last week or two, back in 2014. I was in the corner of the design studio in the morning, unpacking my stuff and he came over. He said something along the lines of

“You know, it’s easier to leave the team when I know people like you are joining it.”

And I’m not saying this out of modesty, or trying to humblebrag, but I’m pretty sure he had no idea who I am. Really! I think he actually came over to say that to a new person on the team, because he knew it was a kind and supportive thing to say, without actually having seen my portfolio. Or being in my interview loops, or having talked to me. And I’m certainly not famous.

It was just a really awesome thing to say, and an awesome way to pass the torch. I think of that quote often, and try to come up with ways to make other people feel as welcome and supported as he did.
Formulate Effective Ways of Working for Your Agile Teams
By: Ardy Dedase
Tags: Product Management, Management, Agile, Software Engineering, Leadership

Formulate Effective Ways of Working for Your Agile Teams

A non-exhaustive but essential set of principles that you need to establish with your agile teams

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Why Are “Ways of Working” Important?

When running your team’s day-to-day operations, having an agreed manifesto of Ways of Working will help keep the engine running as smoothly as possible. Codifying this in a readily available document makes it handy to remind the team what the agreed ways of working are.

The agreed “Ways of Working” manifesto should be readily available to remind the team how to work effectively together. It will be a living document that has to be updated continuously based on your team’s situation. Ways of Working usually are initiated during an agile team’s kickoff. Ideally, during sprint retrospectives, health checks, and team refresh sessions, the updates to Ways of Working are best discussed.

As an engineering manager or lead, you need to help your team/s in establishing ways of working early on, ensuring that the team is set up for success in their sprints — these ways of working need to align with your organization’s engineering principles and production standards.

The team in this context refers to the smallest unit of a group of people in an organization. For example, if you are using the tribes and squads model, then the squad is the equivalent of a team in this write up.

Let’s cover the essential Ways of Working principles in the next sections.
Microfiction Tips: Microfiction Defined
By: Stevie Adler
Tags: Creative Writing, Microfiction, Writing, Writing Advice, Writing Tips

Microfiction is a story in 300 words or less (not including title).

This is the definition we choose to define Microfiction, there are others.

Every Story

Has a beginning, middle and end.

Has Conflict.

Has Character(s).

Has a change in the Main Character (character arc).

300 words or less

Microfiction is squeezed into 300 words or less. It is not just a short story written in fewer words. This is a severe restriction and most description can be removed.

Additional techniques

It can employ many additional techniques to pack more information in fewer words. Every word fights for existence and must advance the story in some way, so writing Microfiction needs a different skill set to writing short stories. It’s mantra is CUT, CUT, CUT. Extreme brevity is the order of the day.

No fluff. Like any skill, it takes time to acquire and master.

Title

One technique overlooked by most storytellers is choosing a good title.

The title can be used to set the scene or set the mood for zero word count.

An effective title starts the story early. For instance the title Twister! might evoke all you know about hurricanes and immediately set the scene before the story begins.

Character Naming

It is possible to use “loaded” names: Names that are pre-loaded with meaning.

Scrooge — suggests a miser.

Donald — bumbling duck or leader of the western world.

Prince Charming — think about it.

You can have a great deal of fun getting the right name for your characters.

Others

There are many other techniques utilised to get more meaning from less words.

Genesis of Story “Perfect Day” — process I employed to write microfiction

Microfiction on Medium

Medium is a collection of bite sized pieces where very short stories seem to be the ideal fiction form. If you are able to craft these stories up to 300 words known as Microfiction, you just may fit right in.

A Couple of Microfiction Stories on Medium:

Portal

Frog or Prince

Chopsticks
Why should you build a UI Component Library?
By: Galaxy Weblinks
Tags: UI, Design Process, Design, Best Practices, Component Libraries

The challenge that often arises -

How to develop a user interface that can be used across platforms while maintaining the right look and feel?

By using reusable components that have become a part of so many real-world design systems.

Design systems like Airbnb Design, Shopify’s Polaris, and Google’s Material Design have been using components as the building blocks for creating a user interface and reusing them for creating applications.

Building a component library is an optimized way to reduce the overhead that comes with maintaining multiple repositories for multiple components.

A component library is a single repository or a file or folder that consists of all the styles and components used in an app, a website, or software. This includes buttons, input fields, icons, text, a UI kit, etc., and manages source code for these UI elements, often leveraging CSS and JS frameworks.

This blog will go over the benefits, and the practices to build a component library for your design system that will facilitate tighter integration between design and development.

But before that let’s understand what would a component library mean to -

Developer: A reusable set of components helps

Standardize front-end development across different projects

Provide easier onboarding for new team members

Reduce maintenance overhead

Saves time building new apps

Designer: A set of reusable master components and a predefined style guide enables consistent design. It helps a digital product to scale effectively without requiring frequent additions or rework of design assets and files while maintaining a consistent UI system.

User: A successful component design system means less confusion, better navigation of your products, warm brand-familiarity, and enhanced user experience. For your business, this would imply better results.

In essence, using a component library helps standardize UX/UI and development across multiple teams and products. This is why great teams like Uber, Airbnb, IBM, Shopify, and many others work so hard to build it.
An Introduction to the Python Range Function.
By: Indhumathy Chelliah
Tags: Python3, Programming, Python, DevOps, Data Science

An Introduction to the Python Range Function.

Let’s learn about the python range function in detail.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Range:

The range type represents an immutable sequence of numbers and is commonly used for looping a specific number of times in for loops.

range(stop)

range(start,stop,step)

start

The value of the start parameter (or 0 if the parameter was not supplied)

stop

The value of the stop parameter

step

The value of the step parameter (or 1 if the parameter was not supplied).

If the step is 0, it will raise ValueError.

The arguments to the range function should be integers. (either built-in int or any object that implements the __index__ special method)

Example 1:Only the stop parameter is given.

range(10)

start by default will be 0 and step by default will be 1

by default will be and by default will be stop is given as 10 .

is given as . stop value is excluded. It generates value until 9 only.

It will return a range object containing numbers starting from 0 to 9 .

. We can convert the range object to list using list() constructor.

constructor. We can also iterate using for loop

r=range(10)

print (r)#Output:range(0, 10)

print (type(r))#Output:<class 'range'>

print (list(r))

#Output:[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Example 2:Only the start and stop parameter is given.

range(1,10)

step by default will be 1

by default will be It will generate a sequence of numbers starting from 1 to 9.

r=range(1,10)

print (r)#Output:range(1, 10)

#Converting range object to list

print (list(r))

#Output:[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Example 3:start, stop and step parameter is given

range(1,10,2)

It will generate a sequence from 1, increment by 2, and will stop at 9.

r=range(1,10,2)

print (r)#Output:range(1, 10, 2)

#Converting range object to list

print (list(r))

#Output:[1, 3, 5, 7, 9]

Example 4:We can also decrement step by mentioning a negative number.

range(10,1,-2)

It will generate a sequence of numbers from 10 , decrement by 2 , and stop at 1 .

, decrement by , and stop at . Iterating through range object using for loop.

r=range(10,1,-2)

print (r)#Output:range(10, 1, -2)

for i in r:

print (i)

'''Output

10

8

6

4

2

'''

Example 5:

r=range(0)

print (r)#Output:range(0,0)

print (list(r))#Output:[]



r1=range(2,2)

print (list(r1))#Output:[]

Example 6: step is given as 0. It will raise ValueError.

r=range(1,10,0)

print (r)

#Output:ValueError: range() arg 3 must not be zero

Example 7: start, stop, and step can be negative numbers also.

r=range(-10,-20,-2)

print (list(r))

#Output:[-10, -12, -14, -16, -18]

Example 8: start, stop, and step is given as variables a,b,c.

a=1

b=5

c=2

r=range(a,b,c)

print (list(r))

#Output:[1, 3]

Example 9: range() function doesn’t support float numbers.It will raise TypeError.
A Tool for useEffect Dependencies in React
By: Nick Harder
Tags: JavaScript, React, Reactjs, Nodejs, Programming

A Tool for useEffect Dependencies in React

Triggers give you the power to determine execution time

Does this look familiar? Photo by the author.

React Hooks provide a convenient ecosystem for functions to run based on operations made on said function’s dependencies. In a sense, useEffect is a similar idea to a database Hook. A database Hook allows you to perform actions after a database operation.

Say you’re building a game, and whenever a player’s score updates, you also want to update the high score if necessary. You could do this before writing to the database with some regular business logic, but it arguably bloats the update function. In my opinion, it also loosely breaks several best practices. Specifically, a function should have one purpose and minimal side effects. And once written, its functionality should be extended upon but not modified.

An alternative route would be to have a post-update Hook. This Hook listens for changes to the player’s score, and if that score is greater than the high score, it performs a separate update with the new value.

How is useEffect like a database Hook? It allows us to subscribe a function to one or more variable changes that are identified in the dependency array.

Anytime score or highscore change in the previous snippet, the function inside the useEffect will run. Notice that this can actually run two times. It always runs when score changes. It will run a second time if highscore is updated. You can see now that this is conceptually similar to a database Hook.

This is a relatively simple idea, but once understood, it’s powerful!
Highlights from Product Marketing Summit New York 2019
By: Rebecca Geraghty
Tags: Product Management, Marketing, Startup Lessons, Product Marketing

Macro Theme: Product Marketing as a Strategic Function

Another thread that reappeared throughout the sessions was just how strategic of a role product marketing is.

Now, it’s obvious that a lot of projects we handle as product marketers have strategic elements to them — messaging and positioning, buyer personas, market and competitive intel, etc are each broad-reaching topics. But on even deeper level, the strategic aspect comes into play through our role as guardians of the overarching story.

All day, speakers kept coming back to the fact that product marketing owns the narrative and story. Not just on a marketing level, but on a company and product level.

This involves thinking through some big picture questions — much larger than a series of campaigns, or even an integrated marketing plan. It’s about grappling with some of the most fundamental questions of identity –“Who are we? What do we stand for? And where are we heading?”

While you might think that this responsibility falls to the Strategy team, or the C-Suite, the consensus is that product marketers are an important driver here.

For instance speakers from:

Spotify explained that a big part of the role is looking at the overall narrative, and synthesizing as many views as possible of what that story is going to look like to help other groups understand the way forward

explained that a big part of the role is looking at the overall narrative, and synthesizing as many views as possible of what that story is going to look like to help other groups understand the way forward Cockroach Labs summed it up as: “Product Marketing is the process of building and delivering a core narrative. This is what we do.”

summed it up as: “Product Marketing is the process of building and delivering a core narrative. This is what we do.” Conductor argued that even the product roadmap is essence a narrative and story, and product marketing has a big role to play in helping define the “why” behind feature that’s being developed and the value it brings

It can’t be said better than the Ben Horowitz quote cited by one speaker that says: “If we have the right company story, we can take over markets.”

These questions are the fundamentals that come before anything else. Before you can execute, you have to have a starting point — what is Point A where we are today, and what is Point B that we’re trying to get to ? And does everyone understand fully understand this direction?

That’s where we bring value. Focused on the story — and seeing it as the underlying purpose of our role.

So when we wake up to a day filled with To Do Lists and booked calendars, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that the biggest contribution we may make that day is to help others see the big picture strategy. If for nothing else it might be the difference in taking over a market one day soon.
Science-Backed Ways to Help Calm Your Mind in Uncertain Times
By: Eva Keiffenheim
Tags: Advice, Mental Health, Anxiety, Self Improvement, Mindfulness

1. Focus on What You Can Influence

Often, we’re so consumed by our worries that we forget what’s inside our locus of control. We spend large amounts of our brainpower on things we can’t improve and feel helpless because there seems nothing we can do.

We can’t control, for example, whether others follow the rules of physical distancing, whether hospitals have enough intensive care beds, whether the global health care systems are ready for a second or third COVID wave, and how long this entire pandemic will last. By worrying about these things, we waste precious energy.

We don’t help anyone if we talk ourselves down and worry about factors outside of our control. Instead, we should try to focus on the things we can influence, like our attitude, our beliefs, our thoughts, and our energy levels. We can regain a sense of stability if we live by the principle of philosopher Epictetus, who wrote:

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control. And some are not.”

How to do it:

Place a blank page on your table and write down everything you worry about. For the next 24-hours, add whatever strikes your mind. Tomorrow, use two different colored pens to highlight what you can and can’t influence. Feel free to add controllable aspects you haven’t thought about, like your mental and physical health.

Then, commit to focusing on everything inside your control. For example, you can decide to get high-quality sleep, decrease your screen time, eat good food, move your body, check in with your loved ones, and be kind to the people around you. Allow yourself to do everything that makes you feel good without breaking COVID regulations. By focusing on the things you can control, like your thoughts, words, actions, choices, attitude, and reactions, you can create a better environment.
Best of the Week — November 30/December 6
By: Dario De Santis
Tags: Java, Programming, Software Development, Coding

Hi guys! Here we are with another appointment of the “Best of the week”, reviewing best articles from the previous week. Let’s see them.

Most Viewed Articles

Recommended Articles

Resource Articles
What are the Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
By: Vinicius Monteiro
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Alphago

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement learning consists of an agent interacting with the environment and learning from trial and error — the agent is the learner. The environment is anything that the agent interacts with.

The interaction between the two is dynamic — the agent observes the environment’s state and takes action based on it. Then the environment produces a reward (good or bad) and changes its state based on the action.

This goes on and on in a loop with the intent of accumulating the maximum number of rewards to achieve an end goal in the best way possible. Figure 1 illustrates this process.

Each loop is made of a sequence of State (S), Action (A) and Reward (R) — such sequence can be called an episode or the trajectory. [2]

Figure 1 — Agent-Environment interaction [3]. Adapted by author

It’s quite intuitive. We humans follow this process naturally; we don’t even think of the entities and elements involved. In general, terms, what we and RL systems try to solve, is the problem of decision making [1].

It’s an area that sits at the core of other fields as well, not just Machine Learning [1]. Engineering and Neuroscience are two examples. A different name may be used, for example, Optimal Control in Engineering and Reward System in Neuroscience. Still, the idea is the same — how to optimize a sequence of actions to achieve the best result.

In the case of Neuroscience, it studies the ‘reward system’ region of the brain, which contains neurons that produce dopamine to evaluate rewards and consequently make decisions. [1]

RL is different from Supervised or even Unsupervised learning. Supervised learning is when the algorithm is fed with data that is labelled. Such data is called the training data set. For example, a Spam filter — it’s something that all email applications have today, you rarely need to flag whether it’s spam or not. The algorithm learned from the training set, which contains emails labelled as spam or ham (ham=not spam). From these input data, it learned the pattern of both types and based on it, can recognise. [2]

Unsupervised is the opposite of supervised (really?). The training data set has no information on the solution; it’s unlabeled. It’s like trying to play a sport without ever having a coach or even watched somewhere. An example: imagine an algorithm that tries to find communities within the data from a social media website — but solely based on the person’s connections and their connection’s connections — without any information on what school the person went, the gender, or anything. [2]

But how RL is different from Unsupervised learning? The answer is more subtle than if you compare RL with Supervised. While in both RL and Unsupervised, there is no supervisor, the behaviour of each type of learning is different. In Unsupervised, the intent is to try to find the hidden information/label from the data. In RL, it’s about summing up the rewards to achieve the end goal. [3]
She Brings a Silent Spirit
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Relationships, Mental Health, Love, Poem, Ninjabyob

N.b. — I know it’s blank verse. Mostly. I wanted to step away from rigid meter for this one. It mostly failed.

Get my Sestina-O-Matic and jump into writing poetry!

Zach J. Payne is, to borrow the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, “a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive Payne”. He is a thespian, poet, and writer for young adults. He is the #2 Ninja Writer. A native of Whittier, CA, he currently lives in Warren, PA.
Edie’s Three
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Medium, Writing, Top 3, Procrastination, Writers On Writing

“Top 3 is a publication where Medium writers support other Medium writers by promoting each other’s work. Medium members are encouraged to post three stories from other writers that they enjoyed reading.” — Daryl Bruce

Are You Addicted to Writing?

By: Zita Fontaine

Hello, my name is Edie, and I’m a writing addict.

It’s true — I am absolutely addicted to writing, and so much of what Zita writes in this piece hits me right in the gut. I think most of you who are writers will be able to say the same as you read through.

The symptoms described me to a T — from letting other hobbies (and friends) fall off to the wayside, forgetting to eat (among other things, shh!), and losing interest in the every-day things that don’t have anything to do with writing. But I’ve been making an effort, somewhat, to remedy that.

Doing a sit-up, showering, making toast…you know, all that annoying stuff that gets in the way of writing! But, I kind of like this addiction, and I’m not sure I’m ready, or willing, to give it up…

5 Unusual Ways To Make Your Writing Standout

By: Jun Wu

From writing on this platform for a few months now, I’ve read many articles on ways to make my writing better, more appealing, stronger… and yes, although the tips in this particular article are things that I technically already “know”, they’re also things that I tend to overlook too often.

I think we can all use a reminder once in a while — and especially now, a month into this new system, we can see that it’s going to take a little more effort to reel readers in and keep them engaged. I’m all for anything that will help me do that!

Take The First Step

By: Ryan Fan

I am a self-proclaimed queen of procrastination. I will wait and wait until the last possible moment (sometimes too late) to do things. The problem is that these ‘things’ are usually the important kind as well…this is not an attribute I’m proud of. It’s not a quality, and ‘fault’ has such negative connotations — so let’s just go with ‘attribute.’ Kay? Kay.

I’ve tried day-planners — I keep buying them, and they keep collecting dust. I’ve tried to-do lists — they work for a few days and then end up as crumpled bits of paper at the bottom of my bag.

I love this idea, and I think it could definitely work for you…meaning all of you who are not me. The reason I say that is because I’ve also tried this method — I’ve got draft folders filled with ideas and headlines; many of them already also have a photo. You would think that would help me. Alas, I think I’m hopeless in this department. But you don’t have to be!
A Little Worry, a Little Doubt, a Little Fear, and a Lotta Joy!
By: Marilyn Flower
Tags: Covid 19, Life Lessons, Mental Health, Joy, Christmas

I’m more spiritual than religious, and I do love this song!

I wake early this melodious morn,

To Christmas calling me with song —

Joy to the world, the Lord has come

Let earth receive her king…

Let every heart prepare Him room,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven and heaven and nature sing!

Joy?! Are you kidding?

You’ve no time for singing

such silly saccharine songs.

You have calls to make, articles to write…

You have way too much to do!

Besides, you don’t have a clue.

Nonetheless, I let the song respond —

Joy to the world the Savior reigns

Let men their songs employ

While fields and floods, rocks hills and plains

Repeat the sounding joy

Repeat the sounding joy

Repeat repeat the sounding joy

So there! Take that! And that!

Joy, shmoy! Have you looked outside lately?

You could die stepping outside your door,

or inside if the electrician is contagious.

And it ain’t going away any time soon.

Be scared. Be very scared.

For your family if not for you!

Nonetheless, the song insisted, persisted,

lyrical lusciousness lighting my heart —

He rules the world with truth and grace

And makes the nations prove

The glories of His righteousness,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders wonders of His love.

So there! Just this once

I let love have the last word,

continuing to sing this Joyous Hymn

to the steamy suds adorning my sleepy self

in my nice hot shower.

Thanks for listening and witnessing. It means a lot to me!
Three Simple Suggestions for UX Authors and Presenters
By: Louis Rosenfeld
Tags: User Experience, Presenting, UX, Writing

I + You = We

I’ve been using this dopey equation for a year or two, but it really works.

As the journey you’re crafting is a conversational one (see my suggestion above), you’ll want to create a sense of We with your audience as soon as you can. Because We are going on this journey together, and the sooner we’re all part of a common We, the sooner that journey can begin.

Get to We by first establishing the I in the story: who are you, the narrator, and why should anyone care about your take on things? Is it something about your experience, your creative genious, your unique perspective, or your brilliant success? Or maybe how you’ve survived some godawful and painfully embarassing failures?

Next, who is the You? Explain who you think your audience is, and the challenges you imagine they face. By showing them that you know them, you can show your empathy for them: make clear that you’ve been where they’ve been, have felt the same pain, and— through your shared journey — can help them reach the promised land.

Once you’ve connected I and You, you’ve achieved the We that can get started on that journey together. And you’ve created a term that will serve as useful shorthand through your book or talk: anytime you use the word We, readers or audience members will immediately pay attention, because they’ll know you’re talking about them.