2,469 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2021
    1. “Useful” Machine Learning research on all datasets has essentially reduced to making Transformers faster, smaller and scale to longer sequence lengths.

      Typical type of advancement we see in ML

    2. The best people in empirical fields are typically those who have accumulated the biggest set of experiences and there’s essentially two ways to do this.Spend lots of time doing itGet really good at running many concurrent experiments

      How to derive with the best research

    3. I often get asked by young students new to Machine Learning, what math do I need to know for Deep Learning and my answer is Matrix Multiplication and Derivatives of square functions.

      Deep Neural Networks are a composition of matrix multiplications with the occasional non-linearity in between

    1. Slack is the best digital watercooler in the world but it’s a terrible place to collaborate - long winded disagreements should happen over Zoom and collaborations should happen in a document instead.

      What Slack is good for and for what it's not

    2. Even if you really love meetings, you can only attend about 10h of them per day but a single well written document will continue being read even while you’re sleeping.It’s unlikely that Christianity would have garnered millions of followers if Jesus Christ had to get on a “quick call” with each new potential prospect.Oral cultures don’t scale.

      Oral cultures don't scale

    3. Friendship doesn’t scale easily to large groups and especially not forcibly. Friendships happen spontaneously at smaller scales.

      That's why modern 20+ remote group lunches aren't making it easier to build friendships

    4. Remote work forces a writing culture. In person work encourages an oral culture
    1. He attributes his longevity to being an avid reader, his spirituality, diet, frequent exercise, steadfast persistence and discipline.

      104-year-old PhD student advices to:

      • eat a lot of fruits
      • take cold showers
      • have some time to walk around and think
      • pay attention to discipline
      • study, study, study
    1. - To biznes, eksperci i obywatele są prawdziwymi twórcami polskiego ekosystemu AI. Państwo powinno przede wszystkim ich wspierać. W najbliższym czasie planujemy serię otwartych spotkań z każdą z tych grup, na których będziemy wspólnie pracować nad uszczegółowieniem – zapowiedział Antoni Rytel, wicedyrektor GovTech Polska. - Oprócz tego, specjalne zespoły będą zapewniać ciągłe wsparcie wszystkim tym podmiotom. Uruchomimy też kanał bieżącego zgłaszania pomysłów technicznych i organizacyjnych wspierających rozwój AI w naszym kraju – dodał.

      The first steps of developing AI in Poland

    2. W okresie krótkoterminowym decydujące dla sukcesu polityki sztucznej inteligencji będzie ochrona talentów posiadających zdolności modelowania wiedzy i analityki danych w systemach AI oraz wsparcie dla rozwoju własności intelektualnej wytwarzanej w naszym kraju – dodaje Robert Kroplewski, pełnomocnik ministra cyfryzacji ds. społeczeństwa informacyjnego.

      AI talents will be even more demanded in Poland

    3. Dokument określa działania i cele dla Polski w perspektywie krótkoterminowej (do 2023 r.), średnioterminowej (do 2027 r.) i długoterminowej (po 2027 r.). Podzieliliśmy je na sześć obszarów: AI i społeczeństwo – działania, które mają uczynić z Polski jednego z większych beneficjentów gospodarki opartej na danych, a z Polaków - społeczeństwo świadome konieczności ciągłego podnoszenia kompetencji cyfrowych. AI i innowacyjne firmy – wsparcie polskich przedsiębiorstw AI, m.in. tworzenie mechanizmów finansowania ich rozwoju, współpracy start up-ów z rządem. AI i nauka – wsparcie polskiego środowiska naukowego i badawczego w projektowaniu interdyscyplinarnych wyzwań lub rozwiązań w obszarze AI, m.in. działania mające na celu przygotowanie kadry ekspertów AI. AI i edukacja – działania podejmowane od kształcenia podstawowego, aż do poziomu uczelni wyższych – programy kursów dla osób zagrożonych utratą pracy na skutek rozwoju nowych technologii, granty edukacyjne. AI i współpraca międzynarodowa – działania na rzecz wsparcia polskiego biznesu w zakresie AI oraz rozwój technologii na arenie międzynarodowej. AI i sektor publiczny – wsparcie sektora publicznego w realizacji zamówień na rzecz AI, lepszej koordynacji działań oraz dalszym rozwoju takich programów jak GovTech Polska.

      AI priorities in Poland

    4. Rozwój AI w Polsce zwiększy dynamikę PKB o nawet 2,65 pp w każdym roku. Do 2030 r. pozwoli zautomatyzować ok. 49% czasu pracy w Polsce, generując jednocześnie lepiej płatne miejsca pracy w kluczowych sektorach.

      Prediction of developing AI in Poland

    1. Elon Musk declared that we are marching towards a near future without language, in which we’ll be able to communicate directly mind-to-mind through neural links. ‘Our brain spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words,’ he said in a recent interview, ‘and there’s a lot of loss of information that occurs when compressing a complex concept into words.’

      Elon Musk on the future of talking

    2. Mute inner speech can appear as an inner dialogue as well, but its truncated form encourages us to create a ‘secret’ abbreviated language and deploy mental shortcuts. By forcing us to articulate ourselves more fully, self-talk summons up the image of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly. In this way, it allows us to question ourselves more critically by adopting an external perspective on our ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in our arguments – all while using our own speech.

      The essential difference between mute speach and self-talk

    3. Contemporary theories in cognition and the science of learning reaffirm Kleist’s speculations, and show how self-talk contributes not only to motivation and emotional regulation, but also to some higher cognitive functions such as developing metacognition and reasoning.

      Self-talk brings lots of benefits

    4. It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them.

      Symbiosis of movement and thinking

    1. Did you know that everything you can do in VBA can also be done in Python? The Excel Object Model is what you use when writing VBA, but the same API is available in Python as well.See Python as a VBA Replacement from the PyXLL documentation for details of how this is possible.

      We can replace VBA with Python

    2. You can write Excel worksheet functions in your Jupyter notebook too. This is a really great way of trying out ideas without leaving Excel to go to a Python IDE.

      We can define functions in Python to later use in Excel

    3. Use the magic function “%xl_get” to get the current Excel selection in Python. Have a table of data in Excel? Select the top left corner (or the whole range) and type “%xl_get” in your Jupyter notebook and voila! the Excel table is now a pandas DataFrame.

      %xl_get lets us get the current Excel selection in Python

    4. to run Python code in Excel you need the PyXLL add-in. The PyXLL add-in is what lets us integrate Python into Excel and use Python instead of VBA

      PyXLL lets us use Python/Jupyter Notebooks in Excel

    1. New Quantum Algorithms Finally Crack Nonlinear Equations
      • We can’t predict the weather, among many other complex issues, because computers still can’t solve nonlinear equations.
      • But this might change soon, as two different research teams created algorithms that can be used for nonlinear modelling on quantum computers.
      • Their techniques still need refining, and won’t be real-world ready for years, but these studies are another stepping stone towards truly useful quantum algorithms.
    1. 2020 is a strong year for NLP. Companies like Hugging Face 🤗 , spaCy, Rasa became stronger and also more educational which ultimately drove a huge NLP revolution (at even Industry-level which is quite hard usually).

      Up till 2020, CV had the most attention. Nowadays, it's NLP.

      Other hot topics of 2020:

  2. Dec 2020
    1. Teen dislike of physical appearance strong predictor of depression in early adulthood

      Summary of the article:

      • Teens unhappy about their looks are up to 285% more likely to develop depression later in life.
      • This finding comes from a long-term study of ~4000 children born in 1991/2.
      • At age 14, both boys and girls were mildly satisfied with their bodies, but girls were more dissatisfied.
      • Body dissatisfaction at 14 predicted depressive episodes at 18, with the boys at much greater risk of severe depressive episodes.
      • Study authors conclude that body dissatisfaction should be seen as a public health issue, and reducing it could lead to better mental health outcomes for young adults.
    1. To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers.

      Summary of the article:

      • Understanding code is neither done by language centers, nor by mathematical centers of the brain — it’s a whole different ball game.
      • This comes from a researcher who’s studying how different cognitive functions relate to language processing parts of the brain.
      • The study involved young programmers who analysed code while their brains were scanned.
      • People either say that great coders are great at language, or great at maths - neither seems to be true, and there is no single specialized area that lights up from coding.
      • The test activated the multiple demand network in participants’ brains, a wide network for performing mentally challenging tasks.
    1. blue light has been found to have the strongest impact on your natural production of melatonin, filtering it out when you’re using devices at night can make it easier to fall asleep, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. But even here, experts see a more mundane connection between devices and comfort: “Most of the negative impact of electronics on sleep and on your circadian clock is not due to the light. It’s due to the fact that these things are engineered to keep you awake and entertained and engaged in what you’re doing for an extended period of time,”

      Finding it hard to sleep might be either because of the blue light or the psychological effect of screens on us

    2. Reynolds encourages following the 20-20-20 rule: “Take a 20-second break to view something 20 feet away every 20 minutes.”

      20-20-20 rule (screen-free break technique)

    3. The American Academy of Ophthalmology asserts that dry eyes are more likely to be the result of decreased blinking. The AAO asserts that people blink 15 times per minute in normal circumstances (“normal” being relative, here) but only five to seven times per minute while staring at a screen. Solutions for preventing dry eyes can be as simple as reminding yourself to blink, or using artificial tear drops throughout your day as a preventive measure. It’s also possible that you’re blinking even less if your superclose to your screen.

      The true reason of dry eyes: rare blinking

    1. Once one has learned how to concentrate, the next thing to learn is to be able to concentrate on the right thing.

      Importance of concentration on the right thing

    1. Review your own code first Write a clear changelist description Automate the easy stuff Answer questions with the code itself Narrowly scope changes Separate functional and non-functional changes Break up large changelists Respond graciously to critiques Be patient when your reviewer is wrong Communicate your responses explicitly Artfully solicit missing information Award all ties to your reviewer Minimize lag between rounds of review

      13 best practices for participating in a code review when you're the author

    1. TFX and Tensorflow run anywhere Python runs, and that’s a lot of places

      You can run your Tensorflow models on:

    2. since TFX and Tensorflow were built by Google, it has first-class support in the Google Cloud Platform.

      TFX and Tensorflow work well with GCP

    3. After consideration, you decide to use Python as your programming language, Tensorflow for model building because you will be working with a large dataset that includes images, and Tensorflow Extended (TFX), an open-source tool released and used internally at Google, for building your pipelines.

      Sample tech stack of a ML project:

      • Python <--- programming
      • Tensorflow <--- model building (large with images)
      • TFX (Tensorflow Extended) <--- pipeline builder (model analysis, monitoring, serving, ...)
    4. These components has built-in support for ML modeling, training, serving, and even managing deployments to different targets.

      Components of TFX:

    5. Most data scientists feel that model deployment is a software engineering task and should be handled by software engineers because the required skills are more closely aligned with their day-to-day work. While this is somewhat true, data scientists who learn these skills will have an advantage, especially in lean organizations. Tools like TFX, Mlflow, Kubeflow can simplify the whole process of model deployment, and data scientists can (and should) quickly learn and use them. 

      As a Data Scientist, you shall think of practicing TFX, Mlflow or Kubeflow

    6. TFX Component called TensorFlow Model Analysis (TFMA) allows you to easily evaluate new models against current ones before deployment. 

      TFMA component of TFX seems to be its core functionality

    7. In general, for smaller businesses like startups, it is usually cheaper and better to use managed cloud services for your projects. 

      Advice for startups working with ML in production

    8. This has its pros and cons and may depend on your use case as well. Some of the pros to consider when considering using managed cloud services are:

      Pros of using cloud services:

      • They are cost-efficient
      • Quick setup and deployment
      • Efficient backup and recovery Cons of using cloud services:
      • Security issue, especially for sensitive data
      • Internet connectivity may affect work since everything runs online
      • Recurring costs
      • Limited control over tools
    9. The data is already in the cloud, so it may be better to build your ML system in the cloud. You’ll get better latency for I/O, easy scaling as data becomes larger (hundreds of gigabytes), and quick setup and configuration for any additional GPUs and TPUs. 

      If the data for your project is already in the cloud, try to stick to cloud solutions

    10. ML projects are never static. This is part of engineering and design that must be considered from the start. Here you should answer questions like:

      We need to prepare for these 2 things in ML projects:

      • How do we get feedback from a model in production?
      • How do you set up CD?
    11. The choice of framework is very important, as it can decide the continuity, maintenance, and use of a model. In this step, you must answer the following questions:

      Questions to ask before choosing a particular tool/framework:

      • What is the best tool for the task at hand?
      • Are the choice of tools open-source or closed?
      • How many platforms/targets support the tool?

      Try to compare the tools based on:

      • Efficiency
      • Popularity
      • Support
    12. These questions are important as they will guide you on what frameworks or tools to use, how to approach your problem, and how to design your ML model.

      Critical questions for ML projects:

      • How is your training data stored?
      • How large is your data?
      • How will you retrieve the data for training?
      • How will you retrieve data for prediction?
    13. you should not invest in an ML project if you have no plan to put it in production, except of course when doing pure research.

      Tip #1 when applying ML in business

    14. The difficulties in model deployment and management have given rise to a new, specialized role: the machine learning engineer. Machine learning engineers are closer to software engineers than typical data scientists, and as such, they are the ideal candidate to put models into production.

      Why Machine Learning Engineer role exists

    15. The goal of building a machine learning model is to solve a problem, and a machine learning model can only do so when it is in production and actively in use by consumers. As such, model deployment is as important as model building.

      Model deployment is as important as model building

    16. Venturebeat reports that 87% of data science projects never make it to production, while redapt claims it is 90%.
    1. It was great for three things: motivation (people used what I built!)feedback (they sent me the bugs they encountered)accountability (from the moment I tweeted about this publicly, I really felt like that I’d have to finish this project… otherwise, it would be embarrassing)

      Three positive things that might come after publishing your beta software: motivation, feedback and accountability

    2. Turning my Jupyter-compatible Python code into Flask-compatible Python code took dozens of hours. I ran into small bugs and errors

      That's how I always expected Python notebook development to be

    3. I had a proof-of-concept. It was great, because when you do a project, there’s always that small uncertainty that your idea is stupid and it can’t be done at all. But when you have a working prototype, all that insecurity is gone and it becomes much easier to go on.

      So true

    4. The point is: the initial idea should be simple—because even that will turn out to be pretty complex.

      Main point to consider when starting a new project

    5. The problem with hobby projects is that they don’t pay very well. At least, compared to real-life projects. But hobby projects have a lot of cool advantages that we tend to forget.

      With hobby projects:

      • you can learn what you want
      • you've a full control over the tech stack
      • you can add the project to your CV
    6. The user has a starting stack: 10,000 units of play money.In each round, she gets a deal. Something like “You have an x% probability to win y amount of money.”She can decide how much of her play money she wants to risk.And the goal is to win as much as she can in 50 rounds.

      Great idea for a 1st game dev project

    1. $ git log --grep "commit message search"

      git blame: searching commit messages themselves with grep

    2. $ git log -S "deleted code" -p

      git blame: way to find deleted piece of code

    3. $ git log -S "some code" -p app/models/user.rb

      git blame: limiting search to a specific folder

    4. $ git log -G "REGEX HERE"

      git blame: searching with a regular expression

    5. Find the entire history of a snippet of code with git log -S Include -p to see the diff as well as the commit messages Include --reverse to see the commit that introduced the code listed first Scope search to specific folders or files by including a path Search with a regular expression using git log -G Search commit messages using git log --grep

      Summary of git blame searching tips

    6. If you include the -p option (short for --patch) you get the full diff alongside the commit messages

      git log -S "method_name" -p <--- get the full dif with commit messages to have more context

    7. Say you want to find the first commit that introduced a particular class, method or snippet of code. You can use the pickaxe combined with the --reverse option to get the commits in reverse-chronological order so the commit where the code first appears is listed at the top

      git log -S "method_name" -p --reverse <--- get commits in reverse-chronological order

    8. git log -S (also known as “the pickaxe”) is how you take things to the next level. It lets you search for all commits that contain a given string:

      git log -S <--- search for commits with a given string

    9. git blame is too coarse: it reports against the whole line. If the most recent change isn’t related to the part of the line you’re interested, you’re out of luck. git blame is too shallow: it only reports a single change; the most recent one. The story of the particular piece of code you’re interested in may have evolved over several commits. git blame is too narrow: it only considers the file you are running blame against. The code you are interested in may also appear in other files, but to get the relevant commits on those you’ll need to run blame several times.

      Disadvantages of git blame command (it's like limiting ourselves to 2D view instead of 3D

    1. BlackArch is a Linux distribution designed for penetration testing and security research. You can think of it like Kali Linux, with the exception of being based on Arch Linux. Its official repositories contain more than +2500 various penetration testing tools, and hence it can be considered a very good option for anyone wishing to explore this field and try to hack their own phones/routers/devices during the quarantine time.

      BlackArch <--- kind of Kali Linux based on Arch Linux

    2. Redstar OS is a Fedora-based Linux distribution that was developed to empower all computers running in North Korea. Researchers from various independent teams verified that the distribution contains huge spying mechanisms and logging capability, beside some modified kernel modules to record everything done on the OS.

      Redstar OS <--- Linux distribution for North Korea

  3. Nov 2020
    1. You can have more experiences in life by simply paying more attention. What you pay attention to is going to be your life. It's so basic that it hits me.

      The point of attention

    2. Everyone hates the feeling of having wasted their time doing nothing. But, even when I am doing many things in a day, when I am on autopilot, which is to say doing something for the sake of just completing them, I don't feel fulfilled. This makes total sense because the day wasn't filled with any intentionality. There was no mind.

      Try to act with more intentions

    3. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

      Attention is really important

    1. Automation suggests that a sysadmin has invented a system to cause a computer to do something that would normally have to be done manually. In automation, the sysadmin has already made most of the decisions on what needs to be done, and all the computer must do is execute a "recipe" of tasks. Orchestration suggests that a sysadmin has set up a system to do something on its own based on a set of rules, parameters, and observations. In orchestration, the sysadmin knows the desired end result but leaves it up to the computer to decide what to do.

      Most intuitive difference between automation and orchestration

    2. For instance, automation usually involves scripting, often in Bash or Python or similar, and it often suggests scheduling something to happen at either a precise time or upon a specific event. However, orchestration often begins with an application that's purpose-built for a set of tasks that may happen irregularly, on demand, or as a result of any number of trigger events, and the exact results may even depend on a variety of conditions.

      Automation is like a subset of orchestration.

      Orchestration suggest moving many parts, and automation usually refers to a singular task or a small number of strongly related tasks.

    1. Start to parse the HTML Fetch external resources Parse the CSS and build the CSSOM Execute the JavaScript Merge DOM and CSSOM to construct the render tree Calculate layout and paint

      6 steps of how browser renders a web page

    1. If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we forget 95% of what we learn in a class. What sticks? A scattered analogy or diagram.
    2. Analogy – ? Diagram – Google Images Example – Khan Academy for practice problems Plain-English – Forums like /r/math or Math Overflow Technical – Wikipedia or MathWorld

      ADEPT learning method (Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain-English, Technical)

    3. We say i (lowercase) is 1.0 in the imaginary dimension Multiplying by i is a 90-degree counter-clockwise turn, to face “up” (here’s why). Multiplying by -i points us South It’s true that starting at 1.0 and taking 4 turns puts us at our starting point: And two turns points us negative: which simplifies to: so

      Great explanation of why \(i=\sqrt-1\)

    4. Imaginary numbers seem to point North, and we can get to them with a single clockwise turn. Oh! I guess they can point South too, by turning the other way. 4 turns gets us pointing in the positive direction again It seems like two turns points us backwards

      Imaginary numbers explained in plain-english

    5. Imaginary numbers let us rotate around the number line, not just move side-to-side.

      Imaginary numbers Another graph:

    1. Study of patients attending a hospital-based obesity service shows no difference in weight loss between those under 60 years old and those from 60 to 78 years old The University of Warwick-led study conducted at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) concludes that lifestyle changes to manage weight loss are effective in reducing obesity regardless of age Aims to dispel myths about effectiveness of weight loss in older people
      • Researchers studied 242 patients (under 60 and over 60 years old) who attended a weight-loss programme, most of them morbidly obese.
      • Results show no differences between age groups, proving that weight loss is as important for older people - even more so - as for younger people.
      • The programme was based on lifestyle-based changes - diet, physical activity and psychological support - and showed similar results regardless of age.
      • People often don’t care about weight loss in older people, and this study shows that it’s a very harmful perspective to adopt.
    1. Human ageing reversed in ‘Holy Grail’ study, scientists say
      • Clinical trial with 35 people over 64 years old shows that oxygen therapy can reverse two key indicators of biological ageing - telomere length, and senescent cells.
      • Telomeres are protective caps at the end of chromosomes, and senescent cells are malfunctioning, old cells.
      • Patients were placed in a pressurised chamber and given pure oxygen for 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months.
      • At the end, telomere length increased by 20% on average, and senescent cells were reduced by 37% - equivalent to a 25 years younger biological-cellular state.
      • The results are incomparable to lifestyle changes / exercise / diets, and researchers say it’s thanks to inducing cell regeneration through hypoxia (oxygen shortage).
    1. Comparison between pytest and unittes test frameworks

      Detailed comparison table of pytest vs unittest modules (check below)

    1. For example, suppose you want to search for the string "font-size: 52 px;" in your repository: $ git rev-list –all | xargs git grep -F ‘font-size: 52 px;’

      Searching Git repo with grep

    2. $ git show main:README.md Once you execute this command, you can view the content of the file in your terminal.

      You can view the README.md file while being in any branch

    3. Every repository has a .git folder. It is a special hidden folder. $ ls -a . … .git

      Inside the hidden .git folder, you may find:

      1. The current state of HEAD:

      $ cat .git/HEAD ref: refs/heads/master

      1. Potentially a description of your repo:

      $ cat .git/description

    4. To optimize your repository further, you can use Git garbage collection. $ git gc --prune=now --aggressive This command helps when you or your team heavily uses pull or push commands.

      You can optimise your repo not only with .gitignore file, but with Git garbage collection.

      This command is an internal utility that cleans up unreachable or "orphaned" Git objects in your repository

    5. Git, along with some Bash command piping, makes it easy to create a zip archive for your untracked files. $ git ls-files --others --exclude-standard -z |\ xargs -0 tar rvf ~/backup-untracked.zip

      Taking backup of untracked files.

      This command makes an archive (and excludes files listed in .gitignore) with the name backup-untracked.zip

    6. $ git rev-list –count master 32

      Example of counting the number of commits with

      git rev-list --count

    7. Many developers count the number of commits to judge when to increment the build number, for instance, or just to get a feel for how the project is progressing.

      Why to count the number of commits

    8. To avoid similar scenarios, enable Git autocorrection in your Git configuration: $ git config --global help.autocorrect 1

      Applying autocorrection in Git.

      When you type: git stats, instead of suggesting a command, it will run git status automatically

    1. SpaceX każe sobie zapłacić jednorazowo 500 dolarów za modem i talerz oraz 100 dolarów miesięcznie za dostęp do sieci. Musk zapowiedział, że jeszcze w tym roku po ziemskiej orbicie będzie przemieszczało się blisko 1000 satelitów Starlink. Dzięki temu, sprawność sieci ma jeszcze wzrosnąć, a użytkownicy będą mogli liczyć na download z prędkością 200 Mb/s, upload z prędkością 50 Mb/s i ping na poziomie 20 ms. Starlink ma zawitać do Europy już w marcu przyszłego roku.

      Cost of Starlink internet:

      • 500$ for modem
      • 100$/month for access to the internet

      Speed of Starlink internet:

      • generally, Starlink has a great availability
      • possible download of 200 Mb/s, upload of 50 Mb/s, pink of 20 ms
      • Starlink should be in Europe in March 2021
    1. Today, we’re excited to open up a beta of a third approach to keeping web browsing safe with Cloudflare Browser Isolation. Browser sessions run in sandboxed environments in Cloudflare data centers in 200 cities around the world, bringing the remote browser milliseconds away from the user so it feels like local web browsing.

      Cloudflare introduces sandboxed web browsing. It's like a browser inside a browser, so we can rest assured that we won't be infected by the websites we visit

    1. Solving all those complex puzzles requires a huge amount of energy. So much energy that the two biggest blockchains in the world – bitcoin and Ethereum – are now using up the same amount of electricity as the whole of Austria. Carrying out a payment with Visa requires about 0.002 kilowatt-hours; the same payment with bitcoin uses up 906 kilowatt-hours

      cryptocurrencies require A LOT of energy

    2. The fact that no one is in charge and nothing can be modified also means that mistakes cannot be corrected. A bank can reverse a payment request. This is impossible for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So anything that has been stolen will stay stolen. There is a continuous stream of hackers targeting bitcoin exchanges and users, and fraudsters launching investment vehicles that are in fact pyramid schemes.

      3rd reason for blockchain not being widely implemented: it's not safe for a general public

    3. Also, in a blockchain you aren’t anonymous, but “pseudonymous”: your identity is linked to a number, and if someone can link your name to that number, you’re screwed. Everything you got up to on that blockchain is visible to everyone. 

      2nd reason for blockchain not being widely implemented: users aren't fully anonymous

    4. Firstly: the technology is at loggerheads with European privacy legislation, specifically the right to be forgotten. Once something is in the blockchain, it cannot be removed. For instance, hundreds of links to child abuse material and revenge porn were placed in the bitcoin blockchain by malicious users. It’s impossible to remove those.

      1st reason for blockchain not being widely implemented: once something is in blockchain, it can't be removed

    5. Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte.

      Some sad statistics of blockchain

    6. It’s very slow (sometimes a transaction takes nine minutes, sometimes nine days!), a lot of hassle (try it for yourself – cutting open hard plastic packaging with scissors is more user friendly), and very unstable (its price rose to €17,000 euros; dropped to €3,000; rose again to now €10,000).

      Bitcoin transactions are slow & the currency is very unstable

    7. Not only that, but the decentralised utopia that Nakamoto dreamed about, namely avoiding trusted third parties, is still far out of reach. Ironically, there are now three mining pools – a type of company that builds rooms full of servers in Alaska and other locations way up above the Arctic circle – which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests). 

      Blockchain isn't also yet fully free from third-parties to check the payments

    8. This is pretty inefficient. And it would be a lot less complicated if you trusted someone to manage your data (a bank, for instance). But that’s not what Satoshi Nakamoto did, which is what the inventor of bitcoin calls himself. He thought banks were bad news. They can make money disappear from your account. So he invented bitcoin. And bitcoin works, it exists, and according to the latest count, there are nearly 1,855 other bitcoin-like currencies out there.

      Why bitcoin was created to replace banks

    9. At its core, blockchain is a glorified spreadsheet (think: Excel with one table). In other words, a new way to store data. In traditional databases there’s usually one person who’s in charge, who decides who can access and input data, who can edit and remove it. That’s different in a blockchain. Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.

      Simple explanation of blockchain

    1. Conclusions Draw your own. No? Fine. Good Enough: JSON? Protobuf Cap’n Proto Flatbuffers CBOR msgpack Avoid: YAML XML Thrift? BSON

      Alternatives to JSON which are well readable by humans. In short, JSON is still fine and seems like it will be for a long time

    1. There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced. The half that was being graded on quantity ended up producing higher quality pieces. By iterating and learning from their mistakes they actually ended up producing better work than the students that only had to produce one piece. Quantity leads to quality. Share your work Sharing work helps you to think and develop. The feedback you get feeds into the next iteration.

      Share your work as often as you can as quantity leads to quality

  4. Oct 2020
    1. Statistical techniques: average, quantiles, probability distribution, association rulesSupervised ML algorithms: logistic regression, neural net, time-series analysisUnsupervised ML algorithms: Cluster analysis, Bayesian network, Peer group analysis, break point analysis, Benford’s law (law of anomalous numbers)

      Typical techniques used in financial fraud classification

    2. In machine learning, parlance fraud detection is generally treated as a supervised classification problem, where observations are classified as “fraud” or “non-fraud” based on the features in those observations. It is also an interesting problem in ML research due to imbalanced data — i.e. there’s a very few cases of frauds in an extremely large amount of transactions.

      Financial fraud is generally solved as a supervised classification, but we've got the problem of imbalanced data

    3. With ever-increasing online transactions and production of a large volume of customer data, machine learning has been increasingly seen as an effective tool to detect and counter frauds. However, there is no specific tool, the silver bullet, that works for all kinds of fraud detection problems in every single industry. The nature of the problem is different in every case and every industry. Therefore every solution is carefully tailored within the domain of each industry.

      Machine learning in fraud detection

    1. Facebook AI is introducing M2M-100, the first multilingual machine translation (MMT) model that can translate between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English data. It’s open sourced here. When translating, say, Chinese to French, most English-centric multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available. Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations. M2M-100 is trained on a total of 2,200 language directions — or 10x more than previous best, English-centric multilingual models. Deploying M2M-100 will improve the quality of translations for billions of people, especially those that speak low-resource languages. This milestone is a culmination of years of Facebook AI’s foundational work in machine translation. Today, we’re sharing details on how we built a more diverse MMT training data set and model for 100 languages. We’re also releasing the model, training, and evaluation setup to help other researchers reproduce and further advance multilingual models. 

      Summary of the 1st AI model from Facebook that translates directly between languages (not relying on English data)

    1. For Decision Scientists, the business problem comes first. Analysis follows and is dependent on the question or business decision that needs to be made.

      Decision Scientists

    1. The number of hidden neurons should be between the size of the input layer and the size of the output layer. The number of hidden neurons should be 2/3 the size of the input layer, plus the size of the output layer. The number of hidden neurons should be less than twice the size of the input layer.

      3 rules of thumb while choosing the number of hidden layers and neurons

    1. Your weekly reminder that1. You should not have your development process on a centralized platform, at least not if you're doing anything that smells of copyright issues2. If you do host on a centralized platform, have regular, decentralized backups of code and issue tracking.3. Also, avoid US-centric hosting for this kind of thing. But really, refer to 1.

      3 things to keep in mind while hosting your code

    1. Junior school is great because you don’t learn to find a job. You’re at school to grow as a citizen, not to prepare to your future life, and actually you’re better not to think about your future if you don’t want to question yourself about the meaning of your existence. This is the same thing for side projects. See them as a way to discover a new topic and enlarge your horizon, not as something that you could action in your current position or to find a new job.

      Comparing school to side projects

    2. Even from a purely technical point of view, you will not really understand a library or a framework by just sticking to the tutorial or its basic features. You’ll have to dig into and to face its most painful aspects to deeply understand it.

      Way to deeply learn technologies

    3. Today, I recommend not hiding your side projects, but to not displaying them as a primary part of your identity, to not scare the recruiter and let him feel that you have a secondary plan.

      Why not to talk too much about your personal projects

    4. You can generally assume that a developer coming from a cutting-edge company has better chances to be a great developer than a developer coming from a Java 1.4 shop. He may not be smarter, but he has been hired by a company with a most demanding hiring process, and has been surrounded by some of the smartest developers.
    5. First, most recruiters don’t care about your personal projects or how many meetups you went during the year. What matters the most is your current company - and by that I mean the name of your current company.

      True in most cases

    1. suite of over 30 separate packages of React visualization primitives that fall into several categories (Figure 2). It is un-opinionated on state management, animation, and styling so it can integrate with any React codebase, and its emphasis on modularity (similar to D3) lets you keep your bundle sizes down by only using the packages you need to create your reusable chart library or a custom one-off chart.

      Short definition of visx

    2. In our research (Figure 1), we found that existing React visualization libraries are often high-level abstractions and optimized for ease of use (i.e., fewer lines of code) at the expense of expressivity. None offer the expressivity of D3 primitives and many don’t allow for the optimization we want in production because computation, animations, state management, styles, and rendering are all encapsulated.

      Comparison of data visualisation libraries:

    3. because D3 and React both want to own DOM manipulation, we’ve found that it’s best to only use D3 for the math and React for the DOM because two mental models for updating the DOM opens the door for bugs to sneak in. However, using D3 solely for math means a significant amount of its (DOM-based) functionality is not available for use: selection.join, zoom, drag, brush, and transitions. Additionally, as mentioned above, D3 has its own learning curve and we would like developers to feel like they are writing native React code with standard APIs and familiar patterns.

      You can use D3 inside a React app, but...

    4. Leveraging React and its ecosystem would provide learnability and performance, and a low-level, modular API would deliver expressivity.

      Thanks to React, visx achieved all: learnability, performance and expressivity

    5. After 3 years of development, 2.5 years of production use at Airbnb, and a rewrite in TypeScript we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of visx (formerly vx). You can find the project on GitHub and browse documentation and examples on airbnb.io.

      visx - collection of reusable low-level visualization components. visx combines the power of d3 to generate your visualization with the benefits of react for updating the DOM

      gallery

    1. Using The clamp() CSS function we can create a responsive website with only one property

      clamp()

      Example:

      h1 {
        font-size: clamp(16px, 5vw, 34px);
      }
      
      • (minimum value, flexible value and maximum value)
    1. Counterintuitively, people love reading about and engaging in what they consider "stupidity".Internet companies capitalize on this by bringing an optimized stream of stupidity for your viewing pleasure. Take a look at the front page of Reddit (logged out, default subs): Half of the content highlights stupidity of others: /r/IdiotsInCars shows the worst drivers from around the world, /r/insanepeoplefacebook shows the most bizarre clips from social media, /r/choosingbeggars highlights the dumbest negotiation attempts, /r/trashy and /r/iamatotalpieceofshit are selected stories of bad behavior, /r/whatcouldgowrong and /r/instantkarma are videos of people making bad decisions and suffering the consequences, /r/publicfreakout is videos of people fighting. Contributors hunt for the most egregious examples to post to Reddit in the hopes of getting upvotes.Twitter isn't much better: Topics spread on Twitter when they promote outrage or allow the reader to feel smugly superior to someone.If you spend your days online consuming this content day in and day out, you're going to become convinced that the world is "stupid" and getting stupider. In reality, you're simply tapping into stupidity concentrators, getting bite-sized views of stupidity so you can react in astonishment and feel superior to stupid people doing stupid things.I think COVID quarantine has worsened this, as people are getting even more of their worldview through social media feeds instead of actually interacting with people in the real world. If 90% of your insight into social interactions comes from clickbait social media sites selecting the most egregious stories and videos from around the world, of course you're going to think "stupidity is expanding". In reality, it's a sign that you need to revaluate your sources of information and move to platforms and networks where people are talking about something other than other people's stupidity.

      Worth point to consider when you think that there are more and more stupid people. tldr; you might spend too much time on the internet

    1. The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases.

      Why life can't be simpler? (HN)

    1. I see this all around me. People are fixated on careers, hobbies (FOMO), spread thin by family obligations and errands. The truth is, happiness does not derive from these things. This "busyness" is an invention. Life is simple, and happiness actually derives from having cats.

      Why life can't be simpler? :D

    1. Daydreaming at Work Can Fuel Creativity

      Summary of the article:

      • We spend nearly half of each day daydreaming, and usually think that it’s a bad thing, but it turns out that highly demanding tasks make us daydream more.
      • It allows us to turn off our surroundings, and can be a way of imagining solutions to the problem at hand.
      • To find this out, researchers did two studies of employees and managers in South America, including mainly surveys about daydreaming.
      • Daydreaming turned out to happen more when the tasks required a lot of focus - it can boost creative problem-solving as long as we’re personally invested in our work.
      • However, for people who don’t identify with their work, daydreaming was linked to worse performance.
    1. Sprawdźmy który rodzaj modelu daje najlepszą skuteczność: Python sns.boxplot(data=models_df, x='score', y='model') 1 sns.boxplot(data=models_df, x='score', y='model')

      After comparing the pipelined ML models, we can easily display a comparison boxplot.

      Well working ML models: 1) XGBoost 2) LightGBM 3) CatBoost.

    2. Przy tych danych wygląda, że właściwie nie ma większej różnicy (nie bijemy się tutaj o 0.01 punktu procentowego poprawy accuracy modelu). Może więc czas treningu jest istotny? Python sns.boxplot(data=models_df, x='time_elapsed', y='model') 1 sns.boxplot(data=models_df, x='time_elapsed', y='model')

      Training time of some popular ML models. After considering the performance, it's worth using XGBoost and LightGBM.

    3. Teraz w zagnieżdżonych pętlach możemy sprawdzić każdy z każdym podmieniając klasyfikatory i transformatory (cała pętla trochę się kręci):

      Example (below) of when creating pipelines with scikit-learn makes sense. Basically, it's convenient to use it while comparing multiple models in a loop

    1. First, you'll need to clone your own copy of the template Google Sheet by clicking here, then pressing Use Template in the top right. This will add the sample spreadsheet to your personal Google account. Once you've done that, click here to open the starter app in Autocode. Poke around the source code if you'd like, then install the app to your Autocode account by pressing the green button. When prompted to link a Google Sheet, follow the instructions in the flow to link your Google account, then select the spreadsheet you just cloned.

      Solution (Autocode) to the scalability limits of Google Sheets

    2. Queries became impractically slow around the 500,000 cell mark, but were still below 2 seconds for a 100,000 cell query. Therefore, if you anticipate a dataset larger than a few hundred thousand cells, it would probably be smart to choose a more scalable option.

      Scalability of Google Sheets. They have a hard limit of 5,000,000 cells (including blank ones)

    1. What the question does is that it creates a powerful anchoring effect. A candidate who gives this information away will typically ask for only a bit more than what she is currently getting. The human resources dude will then have a big internal smile: the candidate's expected salary is below the range that was decided for that position. He will then happily give the candidate 3.000 dollars more than what the candidate asks for.

      Why it's not worth answering "what's your current salary" question

    1. Fractal learning is ultimately about balance and flexibility. It's about: keeping the big picture in your mind even when digging into the details, whilst simultaneously paying close attention to the details even when you are just skimming choosing the appropriate level of abstraction for what you're trying to do, whilst simultaneously zooming in and out of different levels of abstraction.

      Further explanation of fractal learning

    2. When you are new to a field and trying to get an overall sense of how the field works, it might be a waste of time to fall down any rabbit holes as you don't have the experience to know which lines of questioning are relevant. So a breadth-centric approach might serve you well. In this case, you should form appropriate abstractions for the concepts you are encountering so that you can dig deeper into them later if you need.

      When you're new to a field, it's better to use the BFS (Breadth-First Search) learning

    3. Fractal learning is essentially a strategy used to make sense of complex systems without getting too lost in the details. It's about being in that Goldilocks zone of not wasting your time learning too much (you have other things to do) while at the same time getting an overall understanding of how things fit together.

      Fractal learning

    1. use code to parameterize calls:

      You can write Python code to parametrize calls:

      python -c "
      from mymodule import set_dragon_feeding_schedule, Creatures, Date
      set_dragon_feeding_schedule(
          feeding_times=['10:00', '14:00', '18:00'],
          dishes={Creatures.Tiger: 2, Creatures.Human: 1},
          start_day=Date('1020-03-01'),
      )
      "
      

      instead of:

      python -m mymodule \
          set_dragon_feeding_schedule \
          --feeding-times ['10:00','14:00','18:00'] # hopefully this way it gets recognized \
          # how will you define parsing a dict with enum to integer mapping? 
          --dishes=Creatures.Tiger:2 \
          --dishes=Creatures.Human:1 \
          --start-day=1020-03-21 # BTW bash allows no comments in multiline calls
      
    2. That’s it. Types are parsed, checked and converted. Defaults and description are picked from function itself. Even provides bash completions you can install. You wrote no code for that!

      Good example of writing CLI interfaces in Python with typer:

      import typer
      from pathlib import Path
      
      app = typer.Typer()
      
      @app.command()
      def find_dragon(name: str, path: Path, min_age_years: int = 200):
          <implementation goes here>
      
      @app.command()
      def feed_dragon(dragon_name: str, n_humans: int = 3):
          <implementation goes here>
      
      if __name__ == "__main__":
          app()
      

      later we can call it that way:

      python example.py find_dragon 'Drake' --path /on/my/planet
      
    1. NestedText is a file format for holding data that is to be entered, edited, or viewed by people. It allows data to be organized into a nested collection of dictionaries, lists, and strings. In this way it is similar to JSON, YAML and TOML, but without the complexity and risk of YAML and without the syntactic clutter of JSON and TOML.

      NestedText - new format similar to JSON, YAML and TOML

    1. Merge (|) and update (|=) operators have been added to the built-in dict class. Those complement the existing dict.update and {**d1, **d2} methods of merging dictionaries.

      From Python 3.9 it's much more convenient to:

      • merge dictionaries with the | (pipe) operator, e.g. x | y
      • update them with |=
    1. Playing video games as a child can improve working memory years later
      • Studies have shown that playing video games can lead to brain structure changes, but new study shows changes can happen even years after people stop playing.
      • The study lasted a month, and involved 27 people between 18 and 40 years old, with and without experience in gaming.
      • Those who played a lot before becoming adults performed better with working memory tasks, which require you to mentally hold and manipulate information.
      • They also did better at processing 3D objects, but after a period of video game training, non-gamers were able to catch up in this area.
      • Video games are great to strengthen mental skills, however these improvements have limited effect on activities not linked to gaming
    1. Use Streamlit if you want to get going as quickly possible and don’t have strong opinions or many custom requirements.Use Dash if you need something more flexible and mature, and you don’t mind spending the extra engineering time.

      Streamlit vs Dash

    2. Here’s a table showing the tradeoffs:

      Comparison of dashboard tech stack as of 10/2020:

    1. Tabular Comparison Between All Deployment Methods:

      Tabular comparison of 4 deployment options:

      1. Travis-CI/Circle-CI
      2. Cloud + Jenkins
      3. Bitbucket Pipelines/Github Actions
      4. Automated Cloud Platforms
    1. Today we begin the Early Access Program for Code With Me, a tool for remote collaborative development and pair programming that you have long been waiting for.

      Code With Me - new feature from JetBrains for collaborative programming. Unfortunately, soon it won't be free.

      >GIF explaining its work<

  5. Sep 2020
    1. "Dorks" are search lines that utilize the search engine different features, with targeted search strings to pinpoint results. Here's a fun list of Google searches from the exploit DB.

      Database of Google's Dorks: Google Hacking Database

    2. The internet archive, also known as the "Wayback Machine" holds periodic scans of websites all over the internet for years and years back. This is a mining field for hackers with a target. With tools like waybackcurls (based on waybackcurls.py) one can scan any target of old files. This means that even if you've found and removed a key but did not rotate it, a hacker might still find it in an old version of your website and use it against you.

      Hackers do use Wayback machine to find specific security flaws on your website

    3. Enforce MFA everywhere - Google, GitHub, Cloud providers, VPNs, anywhere possible. If it's not optional, reconsider the system in use Rotate keys and passwords constantly, employ and enforce rotation policies Scan your code regularly. Preferably as part of the release process Delegate login profiles and access management to one central system where you control and monitor

      20% actions for 80% of effect to protect your API keys/passwords/SSH encrypted keys/certificates

    1. Spending more time looking for a solution rather than thinking about it.

      Stack Overflow Antipattern:

      1. Encounter a problem you can’t immediately solve
      2. Google the problem
      3. Find a seemingly-satisfying solution (usually on Stack Overflow)
      4. Copy-paste the solution and test it out
      5. If it works, move on; otherwise, go back to step 2.
    1. DuckDB is an embeddable SQL OLAP database management system

      Database not requiring a server like SQLite and offering advantages of PostgreSQL

    1. The <output> tag represents the result of a calculation. Typically this element defines a region that will be used to display text output from some calculation.

      How <output> tag can be used in HTML5

    1. The best data scientists are just people who try to understand the ins and outs of business processes and look at problems with healthy suspicion and curiosity. The ability to explain the nuances of manifolds in SVMs is not something that comes into it outside these contrived interviews. I prefer to ask candidates how they would approach solving a problem I’m facing at that moment rather than these cookie cutter tests which are easy to game and tell me nothing

      Interesting approach from an experienced data scientist to interview new professionals

    1. What do you think the most important things we should be doing over the next year? What will get in the way of us doing that? What’s going well, i.e. what should we make sure we don’t change? Is there anything you think I should know about?

      Good questions to ask as a new PM

    1. Tribuo is a machine learning library in Java that provides multi-class classification, regression, clustering, anomaly detection and multi-label classification.

      Tribuo - Java ML library from Oracle

    1. ‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows
      • By looking closely at viking-related archeological sites, researchers uncovered that non-Scandinavian people joined the vikings as they raided Europe.
      • 442 Viking Age genomes were sequenced, showing that Vikings were more likely to have black hair, and that being a Viking was a job, not a genetic inheritance.
      • Additionally, the routes of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian Vikings were traced using DNA data, uncovering new details about where they traveled.
      • Swedes moved to the Baltics, Poland, then Russia and Ukraine; Danes headed towards England; Norwegians sailed to Ireland, Iceland and Greenland.
    1. Increase in alcohol-industry funded research is a cause for concern, study suggests
      • Since 2009, alcohol companies have been funding increasingly more research - evidenced by almost 13,500 studies funded by the alcohol industry.
      • There are many legitimate fields for research, however there’s a group of these studies that claim health benefits of alcohol, or that substance abuse is a choice.
      • Another problem is that the alcohol industry funds this research through affiliate organisations, and the funding source is often not shown in those papers.
      • Researchers believe that the alcohol industry is too deeply involved, and certain studies should be conducted by independent academics.
    1. Ten minutes of massage or rest will help your body fight stress
      • Short-term treatments like a massage, or just resting for a bit, reduce stress by boosting the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
      • Relaxation therapies show promise as a way to treat stress, but so far scientists haven’t developed a standardised method to test them - until now.
      • This study is the first standardised approach, and the results show that both rest and a massage increase heart rate variability (HRV) - higher HRV = greater relaxation.
      • Researchers say this shows we don’t need professional treatment in order to relax, even a 10-minute rest can boost our PNS and calm us down.
      • These conclusions will enable further experiments to study how different relaxation methods can help people with stress-related conditions like depression
    1. With your passport number, someone could: Book an international flight as youFootnote 2626. Apply for anything that requires proof of identity documentation with the government, e.g. Working with children check Activate a SIM card (and so get an internet connection that’s traceable to you, not them, hiding them from the government) Create a fake physical passport from a template, with the correct passport number (which they then use to cross a border, open a bank account, or anything) who knows what else, not me, bc i have never done a crime

      What can be done with out passport number

    2. I’d now found Tony Abbott’s: Passport details Phone number Weird Qantas staff comments.

      What information can be found on the "Manage Booking" page inside the website code

    1. 3.5 PEP 478 security 2015-09-13 2020-09-13 Larry Hastings

      All Python versions less than 3.6 are now EOL

    1. To be reliably able to focus on something, you need to be intuitively, emotionally invested in the outcome.

      Without emotions, you might not get the right focus level on the problem

    2. The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be:<10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired.10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises.50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.

      3 focus levels in a career

    1. What you actually need from an ML/Data Science person:- Experience with data cleaning (this is most of the gig)- A solid understanding of linear and logistic regression, along with cross-validation- Some reasonable coding skills (in both R and Python, with a side of SQL).

      Basic skills to seek for in Data Scientists

    2. deep learning is good in some scenarios and not in others, so anyone who's just a deep learning developer is not going to be useful to most companies.
    3. Having worked with researchy vs more product/business driven teams, I found that the best results came when a researchy person took the time to understand the product domain, but many of them believe they're too good for business (in which case you should head back to academia).

      Problem of PhD profiles in business

    4. Imagine what it must be like for the senior leadership of an established company to actually become data-driven. All of a sudden the leadership is going to consent to having all of their strategic and tactical decision-making be questioned by a bunch of relatively new hires from way down the org chart, whose entire basis for questioning all that expertise and business acumen is that they know how to fiddle around with numbers in some program called R? And all the while, they're constantly whining that this same data is junk and unreliable and we need to upend a whole bunch of IT systems just so they can rock the boat even harder? Pffft.

      Reality of becoming a data-driven company

    5. but companies will discover that ML is (for the vast majority) a shiny object with no discernible ROI. Like Big Data, I think we'll see a few companies execute well and actually get some value, while most will just jump to the next shiny thing in a year or two.

      As long as ROI isn't clearly visible in ML, as long it might not bring more ML positions

    1. I think a lot of educational Youtube channels aren't that great in actually teaching you anything. What they are great at is sparking the interest and planting the seed for your own work. At least my experience is that actually doing things is how I learn them. Youtube can be a great springboard for that.

      Well said

    1. "We find essentially no evidence for climate-driven extinctions during the past 126,000 years Instead, we find that human impact explains 96% of all mammal extinctions during that time"
      • In a new study, researchers found no evidence of climate-driven extinctions in the past 126,000 years—human impact explains 96% of mammal extinctions.
      • The conclusion comes from analysing a data set of fossils from 351 mammal species that have gone extinct.
      • Extinctions happened in bursts that correlated to the time when humans first reached new areas, and recently human-driven extinctions have sped up on a global scale.
      • If current trends in human behaviour and biodiversity loss continue, we might reach a level of extinction 30,000 times larger than natural by the year 2100.
      • To prevent this, we need targeted and efficient conservation strategies, but first people need to become aware of this looming biodiversity crisis
    1. This command will give you the top 25 stocks that had the highest anomaly score in the last 14 bars of 60 minute candles.

      Supriver - find high moving stocks before they move using anomaly detection and machine learning. Surpriver uses machine learning to look at volume + price action and infer unusual patterns which can result in big moves in stocks

    1. Autorzy najnowszych badań skupili się na języku i odkryli, że dzieci podczas przetwarzania języka mówionego używają obu półkul mózgu.

      In comparison, almost all adults use only the left hemisphere of the brain

    1. Analyses replicated those from past research using the PEW data, showing that beardedness was more frequent under prevailing conditions of lower health and higher economic disparity.ConclusionsThese findings contribute to evidence that men’s decision to augment their masculinity via full beardedness occurs under conditions characterised by stronger inter-sexual and intra-sexual selection.
      • Men are more likely to wear beards in countries where they have to compete with each other for women.
      • The data comes from the Pew Research Center’s World’s Muslims’ project, which collected information from 14,032 men in 25 countries.
      • The authors conclude that beards make men look more masculine, which helps them with sexual selection, but the authors couldn’t confirm if beards contributed to higher reproductive success
    1. It turns out that during a meeting, he asked them how long it would take to remove staff cars from the lot and start digging the first hole for the Boring Company tunnel. The answer: two weeks. Musk asked why, and when he gathered the necessary information, he concluded, “Let’s get started today and see what’s the biggest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, running 24 hours a day.” Within three hours, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground.

      The way Elon Musks motivates his employees

    1. An fMRI-based study of error-monitoring shows that students who are focused on monitoring their own learning process, rather than on getting right answers, learn better over time.

      The study adds evidence that education focused on correctness is less beneficial to education focused on deeply engaging with content

  6. Aug 2020
    1. Would you really forget to push your code if that triggers a rocket launch?

      Git-rocket (VS Code extension).

      Lol :D

    1. Once TPOT is finished searching (or you get tired of waiting), it provides you with the Python code for the best pipeline it found so you can tinker with the pipeline from there.

      After all, magically you get the right Python snippet (based on scikit-learn)

    2. TPOT is a Python Automated Machine Learning tool that optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming

      TPOT automates the following:

      • feature selection
      • feature preprocessing
      • feature construction
      • model selection
      • parameter optimisation
    1. The Splitgraph DDN is a single SQL endpoint that lets you query over 40,000 public datasets hosted on or proxied by Splitgraph.You can connect to it from most PostgreSQL clients and BI tools without having to install anything else. It supports all read-only SQL constructs, including filters and aggregations. It even lets you run joins across distinct datasets.

      Splitgraph - efficient DDN (Data Delivery Network):

      • connect to it from most PostgreSQL clients and BI tools without having to install anything else
      • you can queory +40k public datasets hosten on or proxied by Splitgraph
      • supports all SQL constructs (even SQL joins between tables)
    1. Fastprogress is a clean, well-designed progress bar library brought to you by the fastai family.

      Might come in handy for tracking progress of long executions:

      ! pip install fastprogress
      from fastprogress import master_bar, progress_bar
      
    2. Remote in through VSCode using SSH and ngrok
      • You can connect to Colab remotely through VSCode with SSH and ngrok
      • Benefits: terminal access, not having to reenter github password, being able to edit .py files locally inside of VSCode
      • You might want to pay $10/month to have a static TCP (ngrok pro) to prevent disconnections
    3. Don’t forget to tell Git who you are, add this cell so you don’t have to answer every time you commit during a new session!

      Authenticate yourself with GitHub:

      !git config --global user.email <YOUR EMAIL>
      !git config --global user.name <YOUR NAME>
      
    4. This will allow you to grab both public and private repos without leaving your password exposed in the notebook.

      Connecting your GitHub:

      import os
      from getpass import getpass
      import urllib
      user = 'rbracco'
      password = getpass('Password: ')
      repo_name = 'fastai2_audio'
      # your password is converted into url format
      password = urllib.parse.quote(password)
      cmd_string = 'git clone https://{0}:{1}@github.com/{0}/{2}.git'.format(user, password, repo_name)
      os.system(cmd_string)
      cmd_string, password = "", "" # removing the password from the variable
      # Bad password fails silently so make sure the repo was copied
      assert os.path.exists(f"/content/{repo_name}"), "Incorrect Password or Repo Not Found, please try again"
      

      GIF workflow

    5. Gdown is a nice library for downloading large files from drive to colab.

      Use Gdown library to download large files, if:

      • the dataset is public
      • it's more than 10 GB
      • you're downloading it multiple times a day
    6. due to weird Google Drive quota issues, you are better off copying the archive to colab and decompressing it there than you are decompressing the archive while it is hosted on your drive

      Decompress your archives on Google Colab, not on the host machine

    7. I learned and did to make it possible to do Automated Speech Recognition research on a Colab instance.

      It's possible to do Automated Speech Recognition with Google Colab.

      Notebook instance of this post

    8. It has been an open secret that you can avoid getting disconnected on Colab by opening the console and entering JavaScript to click the reconnect button for you. It gets very old pressing Ctrl-Shift-I, finding this snippet, and pasting it in every time you start a new session, but Colab gives you the ability to run JavaScript from a cell using the %%javascript magic. Add this cell before your training loop and run it when you plan to do a long training run to avoid getting disconnected mid-training.
      • You can add JavaScript to Colab with %%javascript
      • It's worth to add the following snippet before training to avoid getting disconnected:
      %%javascript
      function ClickConnect(){
      console.log("Working");
      document.querySelector("colab-toolbar-button#connect").click()
      }setInterval(ClickConnect,60000)
      
    9. As you know, Colab deletes any files you’ve downloaded or created when you end a session. The best option is to use Github to store your code(details below), and Google Drive to store datasets, logs, and anything else that would normally reside on your filesystem but wouldn’t be tracked by git.
      • That's why you might want to run the code:

        from google.colab import drive
        drive.mount('/content/drive')
        
      • After running it you'll click a link and follow a 30 seconds process

      • Afterwards, all your files will be available at /contant/drive
    10. Uploads from your computer to google drive can be incredibly slow, especially when dealing with multiple GBs of data. Download speeds are much faster, so take advantage with the command ! wget -c -P save_path url This allows you to download the data only once saving you time and saving bandwidth for the generous owners of publicly hosted datasets.

      It's more efficient to get your datasets with ! whet -c -P save_path_url rather than uploading it:

      ! wget -c -P '/content/drive/My Drive/Colab Notebooks/data/' http://www.openslr.org/resources/12/train-clean-100.tar.gz
      
    1. Towarzystwo mruczącego kota na kolanach jest niezastąpionym lekarstwem na depresję. Kot odwraca uwagę od problemu, dotrzymuje towarzystwa, okazuje uczucia bez względu na stan psychiczny właściciela i pokazuje, że jest on niezastąpiony. Ponadto pomaga człowiekowi w wyrobieniu odpowiedzialnej postawy i rytualnych odruchów, jak regularne karmienie. Co więcej, spokój kotów udziela się także choremu właścicielowi.

      Cats help with depression

    2. Obserwowali oni 40 dzieci z autyzmem. Okazało się, że te, które miały w domach zwierzęta, w tym koty, były spokojniejsze i łatwiej się komunikowały z otoczeniem, niż dzieci bez domowych pupili. Owa otwartość u dzieci ma związek ze wzrostem poziomu oksytocyny (hormonu szczęścia), która wydziela się podczas głaskania futra. Pieszczoty wzmacniają też uczucia zaufania i miłości.

      Cats help kids with autism to communicate

    3. wystarczy 20 minut oglądania śmiesznych filmów z kotami, by dostatecznie spadł poziom kortyzolu we krwi (hormonu stresu) i poprawiła się pamięć krótkotrwała u osób starszych. Ponadto śmiech wspomaga pracę serca i układu immunologicznego.

      Cats are funny (healthy) to watch ;)

    4. O zbawiennym wpływie mruczenia na poziom ciśnienia we krwi i nastrój pisało już wielu naukowców. Co więcej, koty potrafią modulować częstotliwość dźwięków od 20 do 140 Hz, a niektóre rejestry działają na ludzki organizm skuteczniej niż niejedna terapia.

      Cats get rid of your stress

    5. Naukowcy zajmujący się chorobami naczyniowymi na Uniwersytecie w Minosocie dowiedli, że właściciele kotów przejawiają mniejsze skłonności do zawałów. Przez 10 lat obserwowali ok. 4,5 tys. osób, spośród których 3/5 było właścicielami futrzaka. Okazało się, że u miłośników kotów ryzyko ataku serca było o 30 proc. niższe niż u ludzi, którzy nie posiadali żadnego zwierzęcia futerkowego.

      Cats save your heart

    1. Chattanooga most likely. My company is doing 85% base salary with no adjustment to RSUs. Tennessee is a great place to save money due to 1) no state income tax, 2) no capital gains taxes, and 3) low cost of living. I estimate I’ll be able to save ~$100k more per year than I currently am in the Bay Area. Plus Chattanooga is known for having some of the fastest internet in the country, rolled out by the city a few years ago. Signal Mountain has great schools for when my kids are older, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s a naturally beautiful place

      Chattanooga - great place for a remote work

    1. Instead of avoiding anything hard, let's turn down the difficulty dial by focusing on small steps.

      If you lack the ability to do something hard, break it into smaller steps

    2. The important part is not only to know the reason, but to feel it, to get excited about it. How to do that? Link the task to a personal goal that you want to achieve. Attach exciting reasons to the task.

      Bad example: Write a thesis

      Good examples:

      • Write a thesis to successfully complete a degree and do cutting-edge research.
      • Write a thesis to deepen your understanding of a subject and get recognized by others in your field.
      • Write a thesis to help others see things more clearly and make progress.
    3. We feel motivated when we viscerally feel how an action is meaningful, or valuable to us and when we believe we can take it

      Where motivation comes from.

      If you don't feel motivated, remind yourself why you planned to do this task

    4. According to FBM, there are three things we need to do something

      Fogg Behavior Model says that we need 3 things at the same time to do something

      • motivation
      • ability
      • trigger

    1. search the site itself for codes

      Trickt to quickly find discount codes on a website:

      site:curology.com ("coupon" | "referral code" | "affiliate code" | "discount code" | "VIP")

    2. find every email on a web page that you're on. The big kahuna - this works for every website. Inject it into a site with Chrome DevTools (more here)

      Use this code below to find every e-mail on a webpage:

      var elems = document.body.getElementsByTagName("*");
      var re = new RegExp("(^[a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+$)");
      for (var i = 0; i < elems.length; i++) {
          if (re.test(elems[i].innerHTML)) {
              console.log(elems[i].innerHTML);
          }
      }
      
    1. An Image is an ordered collection of root filesystem changes and the corresponding execution parameters for use within a container runtime

      Official definition of a container image

    1. VANDERTRAMP verbs use être as opposed to avoir when placed into the past tense.

      Devenir (to become) past participle: devenu

      Revenir (to come back) past participle: revenu

      Monter (to climb) past participle: monté

      Rester (to stay) past participle: resté

      Sortir (to leave) past participle: sorti

      Passer (to pass) past participle: passé .

      Venir (to come) past participle: venu

      Aller (to go) past participle: allé

      Naître (to be born) past participle: né

      Descendre (to descend) past participle: descendu

      Entrer (to enter) past participle: entré

      Rentrer (to re-enter) past participle: rentré

      Tomber (to fall) past participle: tombé

      Retourner (to turn around) past participle: retourné

      Arriver (to arrive / to come) past participle: arrivé

      Mourir (to die) past participle: mort

      Partir (to leave) past participle: parti

    1. heightparent’s heightwidthparent’s widthtopparent’s heightleftparent’s widthmargin-topparent’s widthmargin-leftparent’s widthpadding-topparent’s widthpadding-leftparent’s widthtranslate-topself’s heighttranslate-leftself’s width

      What % means in different CSS elements

    1. If there were no miracles, what then? Well the answer is really quite boring: notes. I would keep notes religiously of everything, detailed accounts of debugging and records of conversations throughout the day, if even a few words. If it happend I was going to have some recording of it somewhere.

      Notes are what helped the autistic developer to improve his memory problem

    1. “Blogging” has a poor brand within many high status employers, whereas “memos” and “essays” do not. Try to categorize your writing as these things rather than a blog post.

      Interesting alternatives for the word "blogging"

    1. Why [[Tyler Cowen]] still responds to every [[Email]] and loves it. He finds time for this because of what he doesn’t do: he hardly watches [[TV]], **his social life is basically the same as his intellectual life **- his social life is geared towards thinking, discussing, exploring ideas. With no TV, you end up with a lot of [[time]]. #[[unproductive internet activities]] Isn’t [[email]] a low leverage use of his time? **He learns a lot from people that email him, and has filtered his audience so it’s mostly smart people. **He does this by being "sufficiently weird". He’s not even sure it’s highly leveraged. He met [[Patrick Collison]] that way. He doesn’t care if it’s highly leveraged if he’s learning from it. #[[Audience Building]]

      By not watching TV you will have more time for activities like responding to every e-mail. You don't have to think that it's unproductive if you exchange thoughts with smart people

    2. As you get older and more successful, it’s harder to get critical [[feedback]] from people. Hang out with critical people and hope you can get benefits. It’s hard to do this. If you are around people that are above you in the hierarchy, you should be critical too. #aging

      On being critical