Quick Byte
Setting up Miniconda instead and connecting it to Jupyter Notebook.
I remember when I started learning Python in my university days and found this “thing” called Anaconda.
To me, it was basically an all-in-one Python package that comes bundled with a lot of packages. Goodbye pip install, I can finally focus on the code instead of managing the requirements.
The problem would come a while later when I was working on a task for my Machine Learning class.
It was a pretty straightforward task, load csv dataset, do feature engineering, create some visualisations, and then train a model.
“Nice, I should be able to sleep for 8 hours tonight,” I…
Learning Machine
Hint: definitely not suitable for data science projects
For the last few days, the story linked above has ranked #1 in “Trending on Medium” list. When I first stumbled upon it, it only had less than 100 claps. Now that it has thousands of them, I feel the need to set things straight.
The key idea of the story is using PyPy instead of regular Python. This will replace the default CPython interpreter with PyPy which is supposedly significantly faster than Python “without changing a thing.”
The author then gives an example of measuring the time taken to add integers between 0 and 100,000,000 inside a loop with…
Quick Byte
You have been using it everyday without paying attention.
Throughout my journey working with data, I have discovered a tool that will help save your time and make you more productive, no matter what programming language you are using.
The shell.
When you run any program from the terminal, you are actually using shell to run it. Any command you type on the terminal, it runs on shell.
Unfortunately, most of us only learn a small amount of shell, mainly cd and ls to navigate through directories.
Other than that, maybe we learn tool-specific commands such as git and docker , and language-specific commands to compile and run different…
Quick Byte
The default MacOS terminal is not for you, or anyone really
Have you ever bought a mattress?
Let me tell you about my experience with the notorious mattress salesmen.
Salesmen would talk their way into making you buy something you don’t really need or a more expensive version of something you do need.
Personally, I like to shop in peace. That means I would prefer not having a salesman follow me while I browse. However, it is nearly impossible to find a mattress store without salesmen.
Once you heard one of the sales pitches, you realise that all of them are exactly the same. …
Quick Byte
Definitely one of the cleverest solutions I have ever come across
Are you a software engineer or data scientist? Did you ever prepare yourself for coding interviews? If you answer yes for both questions, chances are you have heard of LeetCode.
For those unfamiliar with LeetCode, it is a site filled with thousands of coding problems that people can use to train their coding skills. By the time of writing, it has 1835 problems and still growing.
I highly recommend everyone to keep practicing their problem-solving skills regardless of your specialty. …
Tech Talk
Or at least, what it thinks it knows about you
197 items. Google tagged me with a list of 197 ad groups to show me. Thirteen of them were specific advertisers such as JetBrains and Facebook, and 184 are my interests, traits, or profile.
In Q3 2020, Google generated $5 billion through its advertising service, Google Ads. This number comes from advertisers that pay Google to put their ads for display, but what makes Google ads so widely used?
Google uses AI-powered targeted marketing, which means they will only show the advertisement to relevant people. …
Learning Machine
Because not all of Sensible Vim might be sensible for you
There are 3 possible reasons why you clicked on this story. First, it pops up in your screen as a recommended story. You are not using Vim, but you are curious about Vim and Sensible Vim.
Alternatively, you have been obsessed with Vim for years and you thought “I already know all the lines inside it, but it’s an article about Vim so I will read it anyway.”
Finally, you are in the same stage of learning Vim as me and you have searched about an annotated version of Sensible but haven’t found one.
Anyway, I will give a quick…
Learning Machine
Natural emotive high-quality faster-than-real-time text-to-speech synthesis with minimal data
One beautiful Sunday morning, I saw an unexpected video being recommended by YouTube.
It was a video about Team Fortress 2, an FPS game from 2007 that I have spent 1300 hours on during my high school years.
There are 9 possible characters inside the game, each with their own unique voice lines and distinct accents. The scout has a Boston accent, the medic speaks German most of the time, the spy dons his French accent, you get the point.
I was very familiar with all the voice lines from the game, and also from Team Fortress’ official videos, so…
The Data Science Experience
Have you worked on big data or “big data”?
128 Petabytes. Not Terabytes, Petabytes. That’s how much storage space the Hadoop File System (HDFS) had when I first started working with big data.
We have all heard of the term big data, but I believe we never fully understand it before getting a hands-on experience.
I first learnt about it during my sophomore year in the university and even worked on “big data” in my first job.
I was responsible for setting up a pipeline to process 10 MB of generated data everyday. Which would amount to around 3.65 GB of data per year.
We even decided to not…
The Data Science Experience
Get to know yourself before going down the data science career path
Bzzz! My always-on-vibrate phone buzzes in my pocket as I walked along the Orchard Road in Singapore on a beautiful Saturday morning.
It buzzes a few more times in quick succession after the first one, but I thought nothing of it since I have tried to ignore messages on weekends.
I learned that disengaging from chats and social media will help you better appreciate your time with people around you.
Once I arrived back home, I was surprised to see it was from someone who had not messaged me for a very long time. I don’t really know this person…
