We are pleased to announce that the April 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.

In this release we made a series of improvements that are listed in our changelog, closing a total of 84 issues including:

• Variable Explorer and Data Viewer
• Enhancements to debug configuration
• Additional improvements to the Python Language Server

Keep on reading to learn more!  

Everyone uniquely perceives texts, regardless of whether this person reads news on the Internet or world-known classic novels. This also applies to a variety of algorithms and machine learning techniques, which understand texts in a more mathematical way, namely, using high-dimensional vector space.

This article is devoted to visualizing high-dimensional Word2Vec word embeddings using t-SNE. The visualization can be useful to understand how Word2Vec works and how to interpret relations between vectors captured from your texts before using them in neural networks or other machine learning algorithms. As training data, we will use articles from Google News and classical literary works by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.

We go through the brief overview of t-SNE algorithm, then move to word embeddings calculation using Word2Vec, and finally, proceed to word vectors visualization with t-SNE in 2D and 3D space. We will write our scripts in Python using Jupyter Notebook.

Couple of years ago my team (compliance in one of Swiss banks) and I had an interesting task to implement — we had to generate a huge random graph of financial transactions between clients, companies and ATMs. Moreover, we wanted this graph to contain some money-laundering and other financial crime patterns alongside with nodes description such as names, addresses, currencies etc. Obviously, all data should be randomly generated from scratch as long as we could not use any real data for obvious reasons.

As a solution we wrote a generator that I’d love to share with you. This article explains why we needed it and how this generator is working, but if you don’t want to read and want to try it on your own here is the code: https://github.com/MGrin/transactions-graph-generator. I hope that our experience will be helpful to any of you.

With the recent progress in Neural Networks in general and image Recognition particularly, it might seem that creating an NN-based application for image recognition is a simple routine operation. Well, to some extent it is true: if you can imagine an application of image recognition, then most likely someone have already did something similar. All you need to do is to Google it up and to repeat.

However, there are still countless little details that… they are not insolvable, no. They simply take too much of your time, especially if you are a beginner. What would be of help is a step-by-step project, done right in front of you, start to end. A project that does not contain «this part is obvious so let's skip it» statements. Well, almost :)

In this tutorial we are going to walk through a Dog Breed Identifier: we will create and teach a Neural Network, then we will port it to Java for Android and publish on Google Play.

For those of you who want to see a end result, here is the link to NeuroDog App on Google Play.

Web site with my robotics: robotics.snowcron.com.
Web site with: NeuroDog User Guide.

Here is a screenshot of the program:

It is a new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications.

0_0

0_0 is a totally valid Python expression.

I’m going to have a guess and say that everyone whose friends or family have ever flown on a plane, have used Flightradar24 — a free and convenient service for tracking flights in real time.



In the first part the basic ideas of operation were described. Now let's go further and figure out, what data is exactly transmitting and receiving between the aircraft and a ground station. We'll also decode this data using Python.

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that has become one of the leading names in the programming community. It ranges in the ability from developing simplistic applications to carrying out complex, mathematical calculations with an equal level of ease.

Being one of the leading programming languages means that there is no scarcity of great frameworks and libraries available to toy with. A programming language library is simply a set of modules and functions that eases some specific operations using the programming language.

So, here are 6 essential Python libraries for Python programming that every Python developer or aspirant must know about:

There is a Russian Broker — Tinkoff Bank. Now here is the problem: the broker doesn't support take profit and stop loss orders. At all. If you want to feel more convenient while trading, then you need some workaround for this situation, until Tinkoff Bank developers finally release those orders as the killer feature. In the article, I will show you my workaround.
update:2019-03-22, the Broker published platform 3.0.0 (a major update) in Google Play. The changelog features take profit/stop loss orders

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications.

Structures comparing

Sometimes you want to compare complex structures in tests ignoring some values. Usually, it can be done by comparing particular values with the structure:

For Russian speaking posted translated version here.

This is how Alex Viscreanu’s talk on Moscow Python Conf++ named. Now it's two weeks till before the conference, but of course, I've already heard what Alex will speak about. Find below some spoilers and talk preparing backstage: what kind of an open source Zoo developed in Kiwi, how it tests Python code and what’s the difference between The Zoo and for example mypy.

— Tell us a bit about Kiwi, yourself and what is your work within a company?

Kiwi.com is an online travel agency based in Czech Republic. We aim to make travelling as simple and accessible as possible. The company was founded in 2012 as Skypicker, and since then it has become one of the five biggest online sellers of airline tickets in Europe. It was renamed to Kiwi.com in 2016.

The special feature that we, at Kiwi.com, offer is the virtual interlining, which allows us to connect flights from companies that don’t usually cooperate together, and we are covering the possible connection issues caused by delayed flights.

Some of the numbers that we manage at Kiwi.com include 90 000 000+ daily searches, 25 000 seats sold daily, and a total of 15 000 000 000+ flight combinations available.

Hi everyone!

Winter has arrived, and so I had to check the thermal insulation of my out of town residence dacha. And it just turned out a famous Chinese marketplace started to sell cheap thermal camera modules. So I decided to DIY it up and build a rather exotic and useful thing — a heat visor for the home. Why not? Especially since I had a Raspberry Pi lying around anyway… The result is down below.

Hi all!

Every person is using barcodes nowadays, mostly without noticing this. When we are buying the groceries in the store, their identifiers are getting from barcodes. Its also the same with goods in the warehouses, postal parcels and so on. But not so many people actually know, how it works.

What is 'inside' the barcode, and what is encoded on this image?



Lets figure it out, and also lets write our own bar decoder.

I came up with idea, that it would be cool to edit cell tags with help of IPython magic instead of mouse clicking and interacting with tags or metadata toolbars. So, now I can do it by typing this code directly into the cell input area:

%tags foo bar baz

Long time ago, when a mobile phone costed about 2000$ and one minute of voice call was 50 cents, pagers were really popular. Later cellular phones became cheaper, calls and SMS prices became lower, and finally pagers mostly disappeared.


For people, who owned a pager before, and want to know how it works, this article will be useful.

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications:

• December 2018

If you are working with Kubernetes environment then you probably make use of several existing templating tools, some of them being a part of package managers such as Helm or Ksonnet, or just templating languages (Jinja2, Go template etc.). All of them have their own drawbacks as well as advantages and we are going to go through them and write our own tool that will try to combine the best features.

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

This is a short article about understanding time series and main characteristics behind that.

Problem statement

We have time-series data with daily and weekly regularity. We want to find the way how to model this data in an optimal way.

Did you ever think that one day you had got into PHP web programming too quickly?
Several years have passed already, you have gained a lot of experience and can’t think of any other ways to work with web but PHP. Perhaps, you sometimes doubt the choice you have made, but are unable to confirm your doubts here and now. At the same time, you need real examples; you want to understand the changes that may occur in particular aspects of your work.

Today I will try to answer the following question: "What if we use Python instead of PHP?".

I have asked this question myself many times. I have been using PHP for 11 years already and am a certified PHP specialist. I have mastered it so it works just the way I want. I was really puzzled by several articles that criticized PHP severely (PHP: a fractal of bad design). However, when chance came, I switched to Ruby and then to Python. Eventually, I chose the latter. Now I will try to explain how we Python guys live out there.