A simple Python app that can give you valuable insights into just about any topic you can think of
With about 6,000 tweets being sent out per second and 500 million posted per day, the average person could not even imagine trying to parse out all this data. Unless that average person is reading this article: then you might venture to try. Now we won’t be checking every tweet, but rather tweets of a bespoke nature. We can extract tweets that mention a specific keyword or phrase and with that information measure how the ‘twitter-verse’ feels about said topic or phrase.
This tutorial will be very noob-friendly, in fact, it won’t require any prior coding experience to run and…
Lockdowns all over the country, rampant unemployment, and record-high novel coronavirus cases. Meanwhile, markets are.. unfazed.
The rapid spread of the Coronavirus and the ensuing lockdown, caused a dramatic drop in consumer mobility and economic activity however, most industries saw their prices return to pre-pandemic levels within a few short months. How did this international catastrophe that is actively disrupting all of our personal lives NOT cause an economic disruption of equal magnitude?
You might argue that it did cause such an economic disruption and I’d agree with you… if you had been exclusively talking about the Crude Oil & Gasoline Industry (see Figure 1 below). Otherwise, markets recovered remarkably quickly. The COVID-19 outbreak has taught…
A user-friendly guide to Twitter-scraping and what you can do with it.
If you’ve ever had the urge to algorithmically calculate the general publics opinion on social justice, Coronavirus or Joe Rogan or if you’ve ever wanted to build an app that tells you when to buy and sell a stock based on the general public’s opinion of it, this article might just be what you’re looking for.
I’ll be showing you how to download up to thousands of tweets in a few minutes using Python 3.8, then how to quickly analyze these tweets with VADER sentiment analysis tool. Using this data we can build a simple trading algorithm to tell us…
A lesson every programmer has to learn for themselves
A couple of years ago, I naïvely asked a couple of computer science friends how long they thought it would take for me to learn how to become a programmer? “You know if I, like, really studied hard every day.”
Their response: “Probably, like a month. You just have to write and read a lot of code, and you’ll eventually get it.”
Honestly, they were kind of right. I dove right in. It took me about a month of studying to understand programming fundamentals: functions, methods, libraries, syntax, recursion, etc.
But this understanding was illusory. …
How to quickly find emails from website domains fast
If you’ve ever searched a company’s website for an email address, any email address would do, only to navigate off the page emptyhanded, then this article will probably be the highlight of your week. The program we’re going to set up in this article is going to allow us to programmatically extract email addresses from any website. Just feed the program a CSV file with a list of the domains you wish to analyze and let it do its thing.
Googling “How to extract emails from a website” or “finding email contacts by domain”, will return countless advertisements for paid…
Learn how to expand your business programmatically
There are endless ways of leveraging code to increase productivity as a marketer, however, I’ve found a good amount of these possibilities lie within the processing of big data — big data that is often only inherent to big companies. This project is unique in that it’s more geared towards small businesses.
In this project, we are going to set up a web scraper that you can use to quickly generate leads from the Yellow Pages online directory. …
The secret of Bitcoin’s price swings.
I got into an argument yesterday with a co-worker — the argument, you guessed it, is the ‘value’ of Bitcoin. He argues that Bitcoin isn’t backed by anything; he argues that there’s “nothing behind it” because it’s not tied to anything per se, and Its price can never be justified pragmatically.
This is an open letter to anyone in his camp — anyone who believes that a digital currency doesn’t have intrinsic value.
Enter: The Network Effect
… the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products.
We…
I’m sure we’re all tired of hearing about #4…
Every time Bitcoin goes on one of its, now infamous, bull-runs, online communities, bloggers, and media outlets across the world frantically publish stories to cache in on the hype or to give their 2 cents on the digital currency. These discussions are marked by the same few critiques, predictions, and stories — so much so that each of them, have sort of become a meme in the community. We’re going to go through the 5 kinds of people you’ll hear from next time Bitcoin goes on a bull run.
1. “The Bubble Boys” (or girls)
My opinion on an exhaustingly-overused analogy and how it affects learners
“Learning to program is so hard, it’s like learning a brand new language!”
Yes, they are both ‘languages’ but, no, learning a foreign language is NOT like learning a programming language. It’s an undeniably intriguing concept — how natural languages compare to languages used for interacting with computers. However, by making this comparison, we are unknowingly encouraging unhelpful and, in fact, harmful pedagogical heuristics.
It’s easy to point out the many commonalities between learning a programming language and a natural language. Before I began my journey with the former, I (mistakenly) thought these commonalities would guide me through the process…
You don’t have to take my word for it, let this AI tell you why.
A hilariously-scathing and condescending robot tells you the music you like most is bad and you should feel bad for liking it. Sounds kind of like a fever dream you might have. But no, it’s a fun little AI-powered application built by the creatives at The Pudding.
Graham Sahagian
Learning and teaching how to do useful stuff, usually with code
