fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Meditative Walking
By: Randy Shingler
Tags: Self-awareness, Mindfulness, Meditation, Walking, Poetry

Spiritual bliss, walking meditation,

Observing only what is present now

Absorbing unique scenes passing by,

Calming hurried extraneous thoughts

Concentration on nature’s presence.

Listening to creek’s rhythmic flows

Melodious sounds of rushing currents

Watching forceful power of its shoals,

Verdant trees nestled along its banks

Occasional squirrels scamper around.

See bounding deer buck on far bank

Sharp pointed antlers exude his pride

Behind him comes doe with two fawns,

Continuing my walk across wooden bridge

Rising high above rapid flowing creek.

Embracing nature’s own unique glory

Gratitude for its diverse primal facets

Soothing balm for weary human souls,

Spiritual bliss felt, meditative walking.
Accessible UX design in crypto products: review of BRD wallet
By: Antonio Van Der Weel
Tags: User Experience, Cryptocurrency, Design, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Good User Experience is rare in the crypto world. Most projects are very technology driven and lack attention on user experience. Something which is, unfortunately, holding back mainstream adoption of crypto applications beyond crypto as an investment.

Luckily there are some exceptions of projects that are more focused on ‘normal’ users instead of crypto experts, and invest proper attention to the UX design of their products.

One of my favorite crypto wallets is BRD. Their app is both technically strong as decentralized wallet where you hold your own keys, and has accessible UX design for users that are new to using crypto.

BRD wallet UX design review

Let’s have a look at some of the core flows in the BRD app and what are some of the good and bad UX design decisions.

Wallet setup and seed key backup

The setup flow of decentralized wallets require the user to write down a backup seed key, by which users can access their wallet if they change devices. The first time an user sets up a wallet (and it doesn’t have any funds yet) the urgency to store this seed key in a secure place is little felt. Making this a very challenging part of the user experience to do right.

● Fair explanation why users need to backup a ‘paper key’’. But no explanation what a ‘safe place’ is. Most users might use an unsecure text file on their desktop computer to store this. Examples and graphics would help here.

✔︎ At the end of the flow the app checks if you really wrote down the seed key by asking to input two words you wrote down.

✔︎ Easy to login on your phone with a 6 digit password, instead of a very long private key.
Integrating Standard Bounties
By: Vivek Singh
Tags: Open Source, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Writing

Integrating Standard Bounties

Bringing security, interoperability, and a richer feature-set to Gitcoin’s smart contracts via Bounties Network

Moving money is easier than ever before. This trend is likely to continue with the rise of virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Ether. It is becoming increasingly clear that we’ll be living in a future where “moving money is as easy as sending an e-mail is today.”

“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” — Paul Graham

In the future of fast transactions, we’ll want to govern the movement of money well. This is especially true for complex transactions, where human judgement is still required. Figuring out when money should move is still hard. Think about the below examples:

UX Design: Did the final interface meet the requirements the issuer specified?

Did the final interface meet the requirements the issuer specified? Software Development: Was the feature built, tested, and successfully merged based on the requirements outlined?

Was the feature built, tested, and successfully merged based on the requirements outlined? Content Marketing: Did the article written discuss the appropriate topics, was it descriptive enough, and did it follow through on the intended scope?

To see the rest of this article visit: https://gitcoin.co/blog/integrating-standard-bounties/
Building a Spring Boot REST API — Part 3: Integrating MySQL Database and JPA
By: Salisu Wada
Tags: Spring Boot, Programming, Java, Rest Api, Jpa

Converting Blog to Entity (@Entity)

In the previous tutorial, we created a blog class, Blog.java , with the fields of our table. As you know, each instance of Blog.java is supposed to be an entry in our table (i.e. a row).

To tell spring that Blog.java is an entry, we need to add a @Entity annotation to the class.

From our table structure above, the id column is the primary key and auto-generated field. To tell Spring that id is a primary key, we put the annotation @Id to the field.

@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO) tells Spring that the field is auto-generated and will not be provided by the user, rather, it will be generated by the database.

We also add another constructor to the class with “title” and “content” only. This constructor will be used when we supply form data to the controller.

As the id will be auto-generated, we don’t need to supply it. Hence, the exclusion from the constructor.

Another annotation we can add to the class is:

@Table(name = “Blog”)

This is required if your table name is different from the class name.

We can also add column annotation to our fields if the field’s name differs from the table column’s name.
Importance of SVGs in Web Development
By: Melih Yumak
Tags: Design, Software Development, JavaScript, Programming, CSS

Benefits

Scalability

SVGs are resolution-independent, so we can use them whatever their size is. Increasing and decreasing their sizes is very easy. Unlike JPG or PNG, SVGs retain their quality no matter what size of screen or resolution is used to show them.

Different scalabilities with the same file would be very helpful on responsive web pages. As a developer, you can use the same file source everywhere with just a quick adjustment of the scale.

File size

Unless they’re sized on a big screens, the file size of SVGs is very small compared to PNG or JPEG files:

As you can see, the PNG is nearly ten times larger. When you need to use a lot of images on your website the difference in size is huge.

Note: The size of an SVG can be increased without any file-size increase.

Performance

As you can see above, the sizes of SVG and PNG vary widely. When you’re developing a website with many graphics and images there will be a huge difference between using SVGs instead rather than JPEGs or PNGs.

If we have 30 images and icons on our landing page, we can easily reach up to four to five MB using JPEGs or PNGs. With SVG it would be just 100–200kb. The difference is huge!

Believe me, no one wants to wait an extra 15–20 seconds when they first land on your webpage!

Style control

There’s another great benefit of using SVGs. While coding you can change their properties just as you want, with a single file source.

Chane fill, stroke color easily

Change sizes with their properties

Easily change the over color for different purposes. (You no longer need different images or sprites for hover effects)

Example svg code

<svg height="100" width="100">

<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" stroke="black" stroke-width="3" fill="red" />

</svg>

This SVG includes height , width , cx , cy , r , stroke color, stroke-width and fill properties. These values can be easily changed using the single file source.

As you can see below, using the same file you can add a hover effect for the icon:

Fast websites

SVG will definitely increase the speed of your website — a factor that has a very powerful impact on your audience.

How many of you have waited more than 30 seconds to load a single page? These days, most people will assume they’ve lost their connection after just five seconds.
When you don’t know what to write, just write
By: Joseph Emmi
Tags: Personal, Discipline, Habits, Writing, Journal

I’m not sure how many times this year I’ve had to say this to myself. I also don’t know how many times this year I’ve written similar pieces that reflect this on going struggle, always turning out in the same way. Just sit and write. Write about writing.

Turns out it works.

It works, because no matter how many grand ideas to write about I might have, ultimately, all I want to do is write, and when the first alternative is not available or does not seem to come out naturally, the only thing left to do is the one that can get you closer to it.

Practice. Repetition. Discipline. Time. Focus.

I know that the more I write, the easier it becomes. I know that by the fact that I’ve done it so much so often, that I was able to see my mind and skills changing for the better. They get sharper, ideas flow regularly. Everything is an opportunity for a new post.

It’s that repetition what I’m trying to achieve and struggling to get back to. It’s making the time and regaining the discipline to do it every day. To make it a daily practice again.

Creativity is a skill, one that thrives on repetition, discipline, and giving yourself the time to think and create. That’s why, the more you do it, the more it will flourish. It becomes natural. The default way of thinking and acting.

But it also require focus. The focus of knowing, at least roughly, what you want to do. Where do you want to go. Otherwise you might yourself in the same spiral as myself. You know you want to do it, just not sure the direction.

Yes, any writing is better than no writing at all, but at the end, we all want to perceive a sense of progress, not only the improvement of the craft, but the notion of movement towards something. That’s why focus, or a rough notion towards it, is so important.

Because creativity is not different than sports, work or life. One thing (the craft) is not enough and will only take you so far. It is a matter of all of the above, in similar or different measure, depending who you are and what you want out of it, but ultimately, where you want to be. Why are you doing it?

Start with why?
Index Your App Content With Core Spotlight
By: Avi Tsadok
Tags: Development, Search, Spotlight, Programming, iOS

Define the Item Attributes — CSSearchableItemAttributeSet

This is the first and most important step to index your content: define its attributes.

We create a CSSearchableItemAttributeSet instance and then start filling its properties.

When we initialize the instance, we need to pass its content type. Content type needs to be some sort of UTI from the type of string.

After instantiating the attributes set, you can start filling its properties, such as subject, title, description, creator kind, and many, many more.

There are several extensions to this class, such as:

CSSearchableItemAttributeSet_Places

CSSearchableItemAttributeSet_Events

CSSearchableItemAttributeSet_Documents

and more.

They hold different sets of attributes for the object.

Try to fill as many attributes as you can — rich attributes sets will be translated better to search results and better user experience. Also, the search algorithm Apple uses prioritize richer results.

Some of the attributes are related to phone numbers, addresses, and locations.

This means that, whenever the search results contain items with those attributes, a call/navigate action button will appear next to the search item result and will let your user get a quick response to the search result.
The Data Painter and the Data Poet
By: Guillaume Meigniez
Tags: Data Humanism, Data Visualization, Data Art, Design, Art

In the digital society, flows of data have to be transformed continuously into flows of information along the way from the sensors to our eyes. Thus the filed or data visualization grew as fast as the need for optimal understanding of that data.

As a reaction to the ubiquity of these data visualizations and their pervasive rationality, a new form of art called data art is appearing. Its base material is not the pigment or the word but numbers, lists or files.

Yet data have, as well as words, a special status. They can have a significance. And this significance is a bridge to reality. But unlike the word, the datum disappears in the sea of data. While in the English language there are about 505,000 different words, every human being creates on average 1.5Mo of data a second. As meaningful as it can be, each piece of data’s meaning is being erased by billions of billions of other pieces of data. Just like the poets who eventually invented symbolism, the data artists realize that their base material is significant and that this significance fades away.

Data look more like pigments than words in the way they are represented. Each piece of it is rarely discernible from the whole. The bars of a bar chart are drawn just like a painter makes brush strokes on a canvas.

Therefore data artists face a duality in their material. They have to choose how much weight to give to the significance of data. If they decide to ignore it, they get closer to the painter. And if they embrace it and question it, they get closer to the poet. Just like the symbolists, data artists place themselves in-between their freedom of creation and the natural fading of the material.

At one end of the spectrum, data painters create sensorial impressions disconnected from the meaning of the data they use. They emancipate from the reality that lies into the material and make room for the expression of their artistic freedom. Nevertheless, the data and its meaning still impregnates their work. Their intention is elsewhere but their creation is still the result of the abstraction of real phenomenon. Refik Anadol and his Data Paintings or Kirell Benzi are good examples of this way of creating. They are still unjustly accused sometimes of using the data as a trendy marketing strategies.

At the other end of the spectrum are the data poets. Their art subject is our relationship to data and their meshing with reality. They give up a bit of freedom in the creative process, and accept limitations imposed by the meaningfulness of their material. They “show” the data and invite to a discussion upon their shapes. For example, data poets can address topics such as the nature of data, privacy in the digital communities, manipulation of representations, data literacy or the gap between data and reality.

Regardless of the position the data artists choose on the spectrum, they all seem to share the same doubt of the scientific codes established by the data visualization and data science communities.
If You Want to Use Short Form, This is How You Can Go Viral
By: Tom Handy
Tags: Writing Tips, Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Writer, Writing

If You Want to Use Short Form, This is How You Can Go Viral

This one additional step could see your article go from good to great.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Medium decided to introduce short form recently and writers are going crazy over its use.

There are pros and cons to short form as well as adding it to your writing arsenal. The new change is trying to mimic Twitter. On Twitter, the limit is 280 characters. This is equivalent to what a person can read in a minute.

These days people have short attention spans as they from one item to another. Look at users of Instagram, Tik Tok, and other social media platforms where you flip through images you want to see.

The length of your short-form article

Numbers will vary on the length of your short-form article. If you add images, then you need to use fewer words.

Then you have to consider some people read faster than others. In general, people read approximately 250 words per minute according to Wikipedia.

Use images

Personally, I have used short form but not like everyone else before short form even came out. I like my version of the short form. In articles I have written, I always include an image. Many people are visual learners.

From my experience in the Army, I used PowerPoint. Many people in the Army are visual learners. The images you use for your audience says a lot. Take the time to pick out the best image for your short-form article.



Inc. published an article and identified 65 percent of people are visual learners.

If your reader is a visual learner, you could be missing out on a lot of reads. The reader could decide to pass your article if you do not include an image.



Then make sure the image fits and attracts people to your short-form article. Spending a few more minutes will pay off for you and your reader.

Actions that will help you publish viral short-form articles
A Liberating Productivity Insight
By: Dr. Mckay Caston
Tags: Spirituality, Christianity, Productivity, Religion, Grace

The Principle

Here is a principle I want you to seriously consider. It can set you free. You may push back. So, read this carefully and be honest.

Although I may be able to do several things at once, I can only focus on one thing at a time.

Cooking dinner. Talking on the phone. Driving to the store. Listening to an audiobook. Following the stock market. Walking and chewing gum. :)

We can do many things at the same time. But we, as finite humans, cannot truly multitask. That is a capacity reserved for God alone.

This is not a downer principle. Trust me. Facing our limitations is really good news.
React styling made easy with Styled Components
By: Jessica Salbert
Tags: Styled Components, React, Programming, Web Development

I understand the notion of “cascading” style sheets and how they ought to work. But as my projects get bigger, I find it difficult to cleanly organize my style files. Most of the time I find myself tangled in a CSS web, hesitant to change things and inadvertently break throw off styles elsewhere in my project.

Cue: React Styled Components. This library allows you compartmentalize your CSS by creating modular style components. The CSS for one component is completely isolated from that of another, in its own styling sandbox. This makes it really easy to play with different components or sections of your page without worrying about unintended side effects. Getting started is a breeze:

npm install --save styled-components

I like to organize my components/containers in folders along with a style file for each. The style file will (obviously) hold the styled components.

You can certainly add your styles in the same file as the component’ JSX, but I find it helpful to separate concerns.

I’ll start with some extraordinarily simple JSX to show you how it’s done. Instead of using traditional JSX to wrap your text/image/input, you will replace the JSX with pre-styled components that are wrapped in a variable name.

Say I wanted to create a component that simply returned an h1 with blue text. Instead of wrapping my text in an <h1>, I define a variable called “Header” which I will assign to be an <h1>. I declare CSS properties like normal within that Header component variable, then I wrap my text in that component like so:

Take care to import and export your files appropriately, the same way you would do with any the react component. The output from the above code is a a blue <h1> tag, just as expected. The beauty is that we’ve now compartmentalized the styling for that particular tag.

Here I’ve added a bit more code. You can see that I had two sentences wrapped in <p> tags that I wanted to have different styles. I created two different components and styled them entirely differently.

One important rule (that cost me a lot of time) — as with regular React components, variable names for styled components must be capitalized.

You can nest additional styles inside of your styled component, just as you would with vanilla CSS.

Note how I was able to target different elements within the <Coding> component. The styles listed at the bottom (color and font-size) will be applied throughout the entire component, unless an element has been more specifically styled. I fully recognize that the code and styles here is silly, but I’m sure you can imagine the utility of being able to isolate styles this way.

These are the basics — it’s really that easy! Styled components won’t make you a CSS wizard (unfortunately), however the modularity of them should make your next project a little bit more manageable.

Check out https://styled-components.com/docs for more info! (But tbh it couldn’t be simpler — just do what I told you 🤪).
6 Types of Neural Networks Every Data Scientist Must Know
By: Ramya Vidiyala
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Technology, Education, Artificial Intelligence

DEEP LEARNING, NEURAL NETWORKS

6 Types of Neural Networks Every Data Scientist Must Know

The most common types of Neural Networks and their applications

Neural networks are robust deep learning models capable of synthesizing large amounts of data in seconds. There are many different types of neural networks, and they help us in a variety of everyday tasks from recommending movies or music to helping us buy groceries online.

Similar to the way airplanes were inspired by birds, neural networks (NNs) are inspired by biological neural networks. Though the principles are the same, the process and the structures can be very different. This is as true for birds and planes as it is for biological neural networks and deep learning neural networks.

To help put it into perspective, let’s look briefly at the biological neuron structure. Figure 1 shows the anatomy of a single neuron. The central part is called the cell body, where the nucleus resides. Various connections pass the stimulus to the cell body, called dendrites, and a few connections send the output to the other neurons called axons. The thickness of the dendrites and axons implies the power of the stimulus. Many neurons with various cell bodies are stacked up and form a biological neural network.

Figure 1: Anatomy of Single Neuron (Image by author)

This same structure is visible in deep learning neural networks. The input is passed through an activation function (similar to the nucleus) with weighted edges (similar to dendrites). The generated output can be passed to another activation function. Many of these activation functions can be stacked up, and each of these is called a layer. Apart from the input layer and the output layer, there are many layers in the interiors of a neural network, and these are called hidden layers.
Blue
By: Kat Morris
Tags: Mental Health, Sadness, Depression, Poetry, Poem

Image Source: Unsplash

Tonight I feel

Really fucking low

I feel down, I feel blue

I’ve used every word and phrase

For sadness, for depression

I’m down in the dumps

I’m not myself

I feel stressed out

Blue, miserable, fed up –

Tonight I feel blue

Tonight I feel blue

Tonight

It is just one night

I have to remember

When I think I can’t keep going through

This shit show time and again

That it passes

It always passes

Tonight

It is just one night

Everything could change by the next morning

And I won’t know

Until I wake

I feel really low

Really down, really blue

But I can make it until morning

Tonight, just one night

I can make it

I won’t know until

Blue night turns into blue morning
Initial Impressions Of The iPad
By: The Team W
Tags: User Interface, iPad, Review, Design

My (long awaited) iPad arrived last Friday, and I’ve had a few days to start my relationship with it. I have the wireless plus 3G version. Here are my initial impressions, from a user experience point of view:

Fingerprints, fingerprints, fingerprints — I am beginning to understand the use of fingerprints in forensic science… certainly they are all over my iPad! Luckily they are easy to clean off with a little windex and a soft cloth.

It doesn’t replace anything — I’ve read some critiques of the iPad saying it can’t replace your iphone (doesn’t have a phone) and it can’t replace your laptop (not enough storage space etc.) My take is that it isn’t meant to replace anything… it is its own device in its own right. I don’t think that is a bad thing. The iPad is different.

The iPad apps are what it’s all about — As soon as I got the iPad I started downloading apps. Most of them are free, a few cost from .99 to 9.99. The apps are great, and I find myself scanning my 3 news sources more than I do on my laptop. I’ve started reading books. I know, it’s not a Kindle, but I like reading books on the iPad. Apps for the iPhone “work” but essentially are useless… they look bad and show up tiny on the screen.

Small differences have huge results — The user interface for calendar, and email (both ical and gmail) is subtly different than on a laptop, but the difference in the interface makes a huge difference in the experience. Although a keyboard is important for composing an email, perusing emails, reading them, deleting them, looking at your calendar is all much more intuitive on an iPad than on any other device I’ve used. Having said that, you need to add the keyboard (I got the wireless one) if you are really going to type anything. I find I use my laptop when I really need to type, and the iPad when I don’t. I am going to experiment with using the iPad and the keyboard while travelling in place of my laptop.

The iPad is my new pet — Maybe I’ll be able to articulate this better as time goes on, but in the few days I’ve had the iPad I’ve become attached to it. It’s something about the size, the shape, the speed of response, and the user experience of using your fingers to navigate rather than a mouse and keyboard… all of these things make me feel attached to the iPad. It’s like a pet. I want it near me, I reach for it first thing in the morning and often during the day.

It’s not perfect, and I’m sure the whole concept will evolve over time, but there’s a new device in town that I believe is here to stay. Maybe I’ve just got the glow of a new relationship. I’ll let you know if it lasts!

Do you have an iPad? Want one? Don’t want one? Write a comment with your opinion.

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3 to read: Saying No to Trump | Censorship factories | Tips to deal with disinformation
By: Matt Carroll
Tags: Journalism

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Jan. 12, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

Why networks should say No to Trump: The president addressed the nation about immigration last week. Margaret Sullivan at the WaPo argues convincingly that the networks should turn away from Trump, next time he wants to use free air time to spread “propaganda.” In his talk, the president offered up no news, but did repeat again and again exaggerated and false information. So what’s the point?, she asks. A good read.

A peek inside China’s ‘censorship factories’: China is big on censoring news, whether it’s about certain political issues or an ominous empty chair. No news there. But the NYT provides a glimpse of what’s like to work inside one of the “censorship factories,” where low-paid people work to scrub the words of 800 million daily users. It’s a fascinating take.

5 lessons for reporting in an age of disinformation: Good tips from Claire Wardle at First Draft News about how to train reporters from being manipulated. Some ideas: Train your newsroom in disinformation tactics and techniques; do more reporting that helps explain the issues that are often the subjects of disinformation campaigns.
Knowledge is an Obstacle to Knowledge!
By: Devansh Mittal
Tags: Philosophy, Spirituality, Buddhism, Psychology, Religion

There are oysters that live at the bottom of the ocean. A little bit of the light we enjoy up here is able to reach down there somehow. But the oysters have no chance to see the blue ocean; for them the blue ocean doesn’t exist. We human beings are walking on the planet. When we look up we see the constellations, the stars, the moon, the blue sky, and when we look down we see the blue ocean. We consider ourselves to be much superior to the oysters, and we have the impression that we see everything and hear everything. But in fact, we are a kind of oyster. We have access only to a very limited zone of suchness.

Our perception of something tends to be based on the ground of our precious experiences. We have experienced something in the past and we compare it with what we encounter in the present moment and we feel that we recognize it. We paint the information with the colors we already have inside us. That’s why most of the time we don’t have the direct access to the reality.

Often it is our own knowledge that is the biggest obstacle to us touching suchness. That is why its very important to learn how to release our own views. Knowledge is the obstacle to knowledge. If you are dogmatic in your way of thinking it is very difficult to receive new insights, to conceive of new theories and understanding about the world. The Buddha said, “Please consider my teaching to be a raft helping you to the other shore”. What you need is a raft to cross the river in order to go to the other shore. You don’t need a raft to worship, to carry on your shoulders and to be proud that you are possessing the truth.

The Buddha said, “Even the Dharma has to be thrown away, not to mention the non-Dharma”. Sometimes he went further. He said that, “My teaching is like a snake. It is dangerous. If you don’t know how to handle it, you will get bitten by it.”

One day in a meeting, a Zen master said this: “Dear friends, I am allergic to the word ‘Buddha.’ You know, he is a Zen master, and he talks about the Buddha like that. “Every time I am forced to utter the word ‘Buddha’ I have to go to the river and rinse my mouth three times.” And many people were confused, because he was a Buddhist teacher. He was supposed to praise the Buddha. Fortunately there was one person who understood in the crowd. She stood up and said, “Dear teacher, every time I hear you pronouncing the word ‘Buddha’, I have to go to the river and wash my ears three times.” This is a Buddhist example of a good teacher and a good student!

References:

Buddha Mind, Buddha Body — Thich Nhat Hanh (Book)

See Also:
7 Fantastic Resources for Tech Interview Prep
By: Michael Vinh Xuan Thanh
Tags: Coding, Programming, Interview, Software Development, Startup

7 Fantastic Resources for Tech Interview Prep

Prepare well and nail your next interview

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

The software interview is quite honestly one of the most challenging aspects of getting a job.

Even after wading through years of college or months of boot camp, you still have to triumph over the interview process before you can start earning that sweet money.

I gathered a list of my favorite resources that have helped me immensely in the past with interviewing for jobs. I hope this helps you!
Watson Speech-to-Text Services — tl;dr need not apply
By: Kati Venturato
Tags: API, Speech Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Ibm Watson, Tutorial

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

In consideration of today’s too long; didn’t read (tl;dr) mentality, my desire to tell you EVERYTHING about Watson’s Speech-to-Text Service is directly confronted.

Being a writer, I personally enjoy writing in full description and meaningful explanation. Long prose can be satisfying in a way — a somewhat cathartic baring of the subject at hand, exposed for all to read and know.

Oh, the stories I could tell about the various uses of our services, like:

A call center transcribing audio conversations between customers and agents to analyze common call patterns and issues.

A medical service provider creating an application for doctors to dictate patient diagnoses and treatments directly into their files.

A retailer servicing its customers through an online conversational application with transcription for real-time logging.

But today, first thing’s first.

Today, I simply want to remind you of what our speech-to-text services can do, in a way that is exactly the opposite of tl;dr.

How? With a CHEAT SHEET!

Dive into our documentation and you will find so many golden nuggets of detail in there, conveying the many features of our speech-to-text service and the flexibility at which you can work with it.

But tl;dr, right?

Hence the cheat sheet below.

This cheat sheet is meant to be a quick reference to our feature set, so you can know in just a matter of seconds what our services can do.

And, for the readers among you — I conveniently hyperlinked my cheat sheet to our correlating technical documentation in case you want to dive in for more details. I mean, being the writer that I am, I cannot not* refer to our thorough worth-reading-all-the-way-through documentation. It’s just that good!

(*double-negative noted, for emphasis and creative flair!)
The Conversation We Refuse to Have About War and Our Veterans
By: Benjamin Sledge
Tags: PTSD, Mental Health, Veterans, War, Military

I went to the market

Where all the families shop

I pulled out my Ka-bar

And started to chop

Your left right left right left right kill

Your left right left right you know I will

-Military cadence

“You can shoot her…” the First Sergeant tells me. “Technically.”

We’re standing on a rooftop watching black smoke pillars rise from a section of the city where two of my teammates are taking machine gun fire. Below, the small cluster of homes we’ve taken over is taking sporadic fire as well. He hands me his rifle with a high powered scope and says, “See for yourself.”

It’s the six year old girl who gives me flowers.

We call her the Flower Girl. She hangs around our combat outpost because we give her candy and hugs. She gives us flowers in return. What everyone else at the outpost knew (except for me, until that day) was that she also carried weapons for insurgents. Sometimes, in the midst of a firefight, she would carry ammunition across the street to unknown assailants.

According to the rules of engagement, we could shoot her. No one ever did. Not even when the First Sergeant morbidly reassured them on a rooftop in the middle of Iraq.

Other soldiers didn’t end up as lucky.

Sometimes they would find themselves paired off against a woman or teenager intent on killing them. So they’d pull the trigger. One of the sniper teams I worked with recounted an evening where he laid up a pile of people trying to plant an IED. It was a “turkey shoot,” he told me laughing. But then he got quiet and said, “Eventually they sent out a woman and this dumb kid.” I didn’t need to ask what happened. His voice said it all.

I often wonder what would have happened if the Flower Girl pointed a rifle at me, but I’m afraid I already know. The thought didn’t matter anyway. There was enough baggage from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq that coming home was full of uncertainty, anger, and confusion — and not, as I had been led to believe, warmth and safety.
Mailchimp Is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)
By: Jared A. Brock
Tags: MailChimp, Newsletter, Email Marketing, Marketing, Email

Mailchimp Is Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)

There’s a new 800-pound gorilla in the email marketing jungle, and its name is Amazon

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Until now, Mailchimp may have been the 800-pound gorilla in the newsletter-delivery ecosystem, but there’s a new silverback Alpha that’s about to chop down the whole rainforest.

When email marketers discover the true potential of this new challenger, the established providers can kiss their current business models goodbye. Mailchimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, MailerLite, CampaignMonitor… if they don’t respond to what’s coming, they’re all toast.
Zerobank Update: The first version of MVP is launched on schedule
By: Zerobank - Your Local Currency
Tags: Startup, ICO, MVP

During the last few weeks, ZeroBank team has been gathering up speed and working with full capacity. Now, we proudly inform you that the very first version of our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) will be launched on schedule, within the next 7 days — on August 15th, to be exact.

After the launch next week, this MVP version will be released for the internal testing purpose. Regarding the release, we hope to show our team’s determination to build a genuine product according to the previously-agreed roadmap and to fulfill our promise of building a revolutionizing money exchange and remittance ecosystem.

For our community, our CTO, Dr. Ly Van Bao, will share some exclusive features of ZeroBank application on the MVP release day.

Save your date and stay tuned for more updates on the project development!

Stay updated on our channels:
3 Steps to Get Your Stories Curated
By: Aryan Gandhi
Tags: Finance, Curation, Growth, Success, Writing

3 Steps to Get Your Stories Curated

I promise, no clickbait

Photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash

So if you still decided to click on this story, you want to know how to get your story curated.

Now, I am not an expert but I do have some steps that will increase your curation chances quite significantly.

I will use my own articles that have been curated to show you some key features.

I spent over 2 and a half weeks working on this article.

I kid you not, I thought this was going to be my holy grail article, the one that would net me hundreds of dollars.

Well, I was wrong, by far.

The article wasn’t curated.
How To Host an Angular Static Website on Azure
By: Bhargav Bachina
Tags: Angular, Programming, Web Development, Azure, Cloud Computing

How To Host an Angular Static Website on Azure

A step by step guide with an example project

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

There are a number of ways you can build a website with Angular such as Java with Angular, NodeJS with Angular, NGINX serving Angular, etc. For the single-page applications, all you need to do is to load the initial index.html. Once you load the index.html the Angular framework kicks in and do the rest of the job like loading component, calling API calls, etc. What if there are no backend calls and you want to build a static website with Angular?

Azure CDN with blob storage is one of the options which provides low cost and highly reliable static website hosting solution. These static sites have only CCS, HTML, JS files, fonts, etc. In this post, we can see how we can build a static website with Angular and host that on Azure.

Example Project

Prerequisites

Host Static Website With Azure Blob Storage

Deliver With Azure CDN

Summary

Conclusion

Example Project

Here is an example project which we can put in the Azure blob storage for static website hosting. This is a simple profile page with a header and some sections.



git clone // clone the projectgit clone https://github.com/bbachi/my-profile.git // install dependencies and start the project

npm install

npm start

You can clone the project and run it on your machine. Here is the demonstration when you run it on your localhost and the port 4200.
Java Generics as Assortment Box
By: Gene Zeiniss
Tags: Backend, Generics, Code, Java, Programming

What is Generics?

Java is a statically typed language, which means, you must declare a variable with its type before using it. Generics allow types to be parameters.

I will try to explain this saying in terms of the spices assortment box. I’m not a good cook and I don’t particularly understand spices. However, this one image immediately associates Generics with spices to my non-cooking mind.

Let’s try to create a “non generic” assortment box list and then let’s add paprika to the list.

Actually, IntelliJ is too smart to let you fall in that. It will warn you about raw use (call to type without any type argument) of a parameterized class. And will suggest you to “generify” Generics.java. I will suppress “rawtypes” warnings, just so we can see what happens.

So, you have a list of spices and now, you want to retrieve the paprika spice from the list:

Bang! Error! Tastes like cumin! 😖

We have two ways to fix it:

Specifically cast to Paprika:

2. Change spice type to Object (because most Java collection classes receives and return parameter / argument of type Object under the hood):

Or, just listen to IntelliJ’s suggestion and generify Generics. I told you, it’s smart! (As you, probably, already noticed, I use (and love) IntelliJ, that’s why all the praises belong to it).

By adding the diamond operator <> containing the type, you narrow the specialization of this list only to Paprika type. Don’t you ever try to add some other spice to the defined list, you will deal with compilation error.

Error! The compiler will suggest you to change the assortment box type to List<Cinnamon> .

As you can see, similar to the formal parameters used in method declaration, type parameters provide a way to reuse the same type (List, in our example) with different parameters (Paprika / Cinnamon).

The difference between type parameters and formal parameters is:

inputs to formal parameters are values;

inputs to type parameters are types.

In small programs, this might seem like unnecessary sugar (a condiment, not a spice), after all, it’s your code and you are aware at any given moment to entities you are handling. However, in larger programs, this can add significant robustness (and flavor) and makes the program easier to read.

Much the way the Java objects has generic types, you can create your own generic objects (classes, interfaces and methods).
Python *args and **kwargs — Data Science Edition
By: Dario Radečić
Tags: Machine Learning, Data Science, Python, Towards Data Science, Programming

*args

Let’s say you want to declare a function for summing numbers. There’s one problem with this function by default — it only accepts a fixed number of arguments. Sure, you can get around this by using only a single argument of type list — and that’s a viable alternative. Let’s explore it for a bit.

Down below we have your regular function for summing numbers, expecting a single argument of type list:

def sum_numbers(numbers):

the_sum = 0

for number in numbers:

the_sum += number

return the_sum

We can use it to find the sum:

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

sum_numbers(numbers) >>> 15

But what if you don’t want to use a list? *args to the rescue:

def sum_numbers(*args):

the_sum = 0

for number in args:

the_sum += number

return the_sum sum_numbers(1, 2, 3)

>>> 6 sum_numbers(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

>>> 15

Yes, I hear you — this isn’t the best use case since we can use lists as a replacement. But we have a couple more examples under our belt — the first being unpacking.

List unpacking

The idea of unpacking is to, well, unpack any iterable object. The single asterisk * is used to unpack any iterable, and the double-asterisk ** is used only for dictionaries. You’ll quickly get the gist of it.

Let’s say we have the following list:

num_arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The process of unpacking it is straightforward — and already covered by our nifty sum_numbers() function:

print(*num_arr) >>> 1 2 3 4 5

In a minute or so we’ll talk about dictionary unpacking — for now, let’s wrap this section with list concatenation.

List concatenation

Another useable aspect of *args is list concatenation. Let’s say we have two lists:

nums1 = [1, 2, 3]

nums2 = [4, 5, 6]

How would we concatenate them into a single list? If your answer is somewhere along the lines of iterating through both and storing values to the third list, then you’re not wrong (per se), but there’s an easier and more elegant option. Take a look at the following code:

nums = [*nums1, *nums2]

nums >>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

And that’s how easy it is. Let’s move along to **kwargs, something a bit more applicable to your everyday data science tasks.
A World of Fairy Tales
By: Thomas Gaudex
Tags: Life, Nature, Stories, Travel, Writing

After this first meeting with the lakes of the region, I go to Gérardmer to start my second loop. It takes about 1h45 to go around this second lake, so I decide to have my lunch break right after to rest my legs and regain strength before continuing my walk.

As I walk along the trail that borders the west side of the water body, turning my back to the city, I hear the clink of my metal canteen in my backpack. That’s all it takes to throw me back twenty-five years or so as I climb the stony paths of the Vercors mountains, with my father in the lead and my mother and sister closing the march.

When we would go hiking for the day, or even for the week with two donkeys — my best memories — we would take turns carrying the water bottles, which we would fill when drinking water sources were available. In addition to a large blue plastic water bottle, we also had two smaller ones made of metal, including a dented orange one that must have seen more countries than any experienced hiker.

I can still hear the sound of that canteen hanging on my belt, the characteristic click of its closing system. I remember us taking breaks to drink and catch our breath before resuming our assent. I remember my dad studying his IGN map to make sure his family doesn’t get lost en route and gets safely to their destination.

I hear him again telling me to be careful where I set foot and to look ahead while walking. I can see again his big brown leather hiking boots with big red laces. My dad, solid as a rock, helping me through difficult passages by supporting me with his steady hand.

All these images suddenly come back to me, without me expecting it.

Halfway around the lake of Gérardmer, I stop to nibble on a cereal bar on a small rock by the water’s edge. Two ducks approach me and deliver a charming tirade that makes me happy. I regret not speaking their language.
Critical Point of Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing
By: Madhawa Chandrasiri
Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Digital Marketing, UX, Qr Code

The internet is quickly changing the world as we know it. For the first time in the history, a single businessperson can compete on equal footing with large, multinational firms. Anyone can sell something, collect the money for the item, then go purchase it and sent it to the buyer. Today, armed with nothing more than information and a little bit of know-how, people are becoming millionaires

There are many facets of traditional marketing and examples might include tangible items such as business cards, print ads in newspapers or magazines. It can also include posters, commercials on TV and radio, billboards and brochures.

The world of digital marketing continues to evolve and as long as technology continues to advance, digital marketing will as well. Examples of digital marketing include things like websites, social media mentions, YouTube videos, and banner ads. Specifically, digital marketing is similar to traditional advertising, but using digital devices.

Nearly half of all smartphone users have used their phones while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores — 40% of them to compare the competition’s prices. Statistics for who’s scanning QR codes and with what device appear to be mixed, although most data places iPhone users at the top, with the user age range being 25–34. Japan and the U.S. are currently leaps and bounds ahead of other countries in QR code scans around 60% with Canada and the U.K. trailing dozens of percentage points behind.

Now creative digital advertisers are use it for innovative promotions and give new life to boring places. Famous angry birds and Instagram create a display advert for their offline promotions with QR code shape Designs and Both QR codes take you directly to download the app, and are a great showcase for both ad creativity and self-explanatory promotion of the apps themselves.

Sukiennice Museum in Poland has added a whole new effect to their paintings to turn each one in to a story with QR code. Visitors can scan QR code for particular painting, and get the inside scoop direct from the YouTube video.

Still, QR code creation jumped a whopping 1,253% in 2011, with two million of them created in less than three months. By far, most were used to lead users to a web address, but they can also store vCard details, Google Maps info and even YouTube video links.

If you haven’t seen them in your favorite newspaper or magazine, it’s called a Quick Response Code or a QR code. In short, let’s just say, it’s like a bar code but better.. The difference is that a “QR CODE” will take you instantly to a web page when scanned by a smartphone. It’s one of the latest cool technologies that helps bridge the virtual world and the physical world.

My conclusion is QR CODE, the critical point of Digital and Traditional marketing.