Posts

The fruits of web scraping — using code to harvest data and information from websites — are all around us. People build scrapers that can find every Applebee’s on the planet or collect congressional legislation and votes or track fancy watches for sale on fan websites. Businesses use scrapers to manage their online retail inventory and monitor competitors’ prices. Lots of well-known sites use scrapers to do things like track airline ticket prices and job listings....

The effects of COVID-19 and the world’s economic downturn have forced many to adapt to the new normal. Now, freelancers make up almost 40 percent of the U.S. workforce, nearly 59 million workers. And most aren’t working menial labor jobs either. In fact, many professionals now working for themselves are making $80,000 or more a year serving as their own boss. One area where freelancers have been thriving for years is in web development, building apps and web experiences that take advantage of their unique skill sets....

Being a certified Salesforce administrator is more than just knowing how to use Salesforce’s extensive web of customer relationship apps. The real skill is in implementing that system. A certified Salesforce admin is someone equipped to stand back and see how all aspects of a business are working together in concert. These individuals are perhaps in the best position to fix what ails a company. They also optimize operations for sales and marketing to production and customer satisfaction....

The feature is available to the most recent models, the Wyze Cam v2 and the Wyze Cam Pan smart home cameras, and is activated via a complementary firmware upgrade. Person detection is powered by computer vision software from Xnor – a Seattle-based vendor of AI computing services, which specializes in edge computing. Crucially, the Wyze Cam does the heavy computational lifting on the device, rather than on a remote, cloud-based server....

As per a report by the Wall Street Journal, Xerox is considering buying personal computers and printer manufacturer HP in a cash-and-stock deal. The report notes Xerox, valued at $8 billion, has backing from a major bank to take over HP, valued at $27 billion – almost three times more than the former. Sources told WSJ the deal will end up saving $2 billion in costs for both corporations. Just to remind you, HP is now a different company from Hwellet Packard Enterprise, which sells servers, data storage, and services to companies....

History, art, English, the humanities: These are the backgrounds of approximately half the people I’ve worked with at both Etsy and Slack. My co-workers have been creators, analytical thinkers and researchers. They look at complex problems and find novel solutions, taking products to a whole new level. Even Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder, was a philosophy major with aspirations to one day become a professor. But something has changed. Only 5 percent of college graduates earned liberal arts degrees in 2018, according to PBS....

Fake emails that try to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, such as send money, run dangerous programs or give out passwords, are known as phishing emails. Cybersecurity experts often blame the people who receive such messages for not noticing that the emails are fake. As a cybersecurity researcher, I’ve found that most people are good at almost all of the skills that computer security experts use to notice fake emails in their inboxes....

However, I believe this is actually the perfect time to be having this conversation — and for corporate leaders to be paying even more attention to the foundation of any workplace culture: ethics, respect, and inclusion. Over the next 12 months, amid numerous rounds of layoffs, we’ll hear many stories where businesses failed to operate with ethics, respect, and inclusion. We’ll hear about financial misreporting to make numbers look better than they really are or conflicts of interest as people get desperate and focus on self-preservation....

A few months ago, YouTube introduced the ability to easily create video chapters by simply typing some timestamps in your video’s description. The company is building on this feature today by adding a list view with thumbnails for every section of the video. This should make it easier to get to the relevant part of a video and makes chapters a little more prominent than they were before. The company is also adding a variety of gestures to make the playback experience smoother....

With the holiday season already shaping up to be a strange one for many, consider this idea — be the person who gives the most strangely cool gifts. Like a record player that spins while the record lays flat. Or reusable paper. Or earbuds that translate foreign languages like you’re in Star Trek. Right now, all those options and more are on sale as part of TNW Deals’ early access to loads of cool holiday gift ideas at Black Friday pricing....

This article was originally published by Built In. In 2016, I recognized that I wasn’t achieving my goals, learning new skills, meeting new people, getting in shape, or focusing on my mental health not because I wasn’t motivated, but because I wasn’t tracking it. Peter Drucker said “what gets measured gets managed.” This maxim became the cornerstone that I used to transform my life. With that quote in mind, I decided to outline my goals and then break them down into simple habits that I could achieve in bite-sized amounts daily....

A catalyst for new music — Kate Walker Fortunately for me, I visited the Apple store in London and used some highly persuasive language (threatening to buy an Iriver and never supporting Apple again.) This resulted in a free replacement even though I was two months out of warranty, and I still have it to this day. Because I had lost all my music, I ended up collecting music from lots of different people I met traveling for the next eight months....

No matter what the problem, I’ve got three changes that will help you get unstuck so you can achieve your goals. Number 1: Pass the 3-second test Credit: Stevenpressfield.comSteven Pressfield’s website is for people that want to be writers. Note that the word “aspiring” appears twice in the text. He’s even made his page so you can’t help but scroll down further. That arrow makes any writer or artist want to keep scrolling....

The Paralympics features athletes with a diverse range of abilities, competing in a wide range of different categories. Many competitors use prosthetics, wheelchairs, or other specialized components to enable them to perform at their best. One interesting question is whether 3D printing widens or narrows the divide between athletes with access to specialized technologies, and those without. To put it another way, does the widespread availability of 3D printers — which can now be found in many homes, schools, universities, and maker spaces — help to level the playing field?...

You may be surprised to learn that law enforcement officials in the US routinely mine Google’s location data in criminal investigations. The tactic has sparked fears of privacy violations and false arrests, but it’s also led to a range of arrests. Here are five of the criminals caught on Google Maps. 1. A convicted kidnapper A 2017 kidnapping and sexual assault case was solved when police used a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Google....

Fast forward to the present, I now work on the data infrastructure for our IoT platform and train fullstack engineers and product managers in the company about data science to analyze our massive IoT data. This article is a compilation of all the resources I used and the tips I learned over the years of growing my own career in data science/engineering. Whether you’re an engineer looking to break into the data industry or a recent grad preparing for your new role, I hope you find my tips useful....

What is jargon, anyway? In a literal sense, jargon is simply a word or phrase that requires specialized knowledge for the reader to understand. For our purposes — which include helping people at technical companies write clearly about their offerings — that definition isn’t practical. Most of us only think of the word “jargon” in a negative sense. It’s something we’re supposed to avoid in our writing at all costs....

I’ve been working remotely for three years now, with another four years spent working in-office for a remote-friendly company, and I’ve seen a lot of good (and bad) advice about how to thrive. A lot of folks are tempted to make declarative advice, or to assign a particular positive or negative value to various choices, e.g. “don’t have snacks on hand, because you’ll eat them” — but I love snacks, and work best when I have them available....

In COVID-19 times, the signs point to one thing: we’re heading towards another recession. And as a developer, you might be wondering what this means for your job. Here are 5 tips on how to survive (and thrive) in an economic downturn. Unemployment is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, the stock market is taking a blow, and companies are starting to cut corners to save money. All the signs point towards one thing: we’re heading towards another recession....

Figuring out how your local government can help you — as well as where to start — can be daunting. We spoke with Bas Beekman, the Director of StartupAmsterdam, on how companies can tap into their city’s resources, from government grants and funds to networks and workspaces. 1. Seek out entrepreneurship organizations A startup city will undoubtedly have organizations that are dedicated to helping startups meet the right people, gain new skills, scale, and grow....