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The History of SXSW: How It All Started

Reading time5 min
Views1.6K
SXSW is a festival of culture and technology held every spring in Austin, Texas. It’s a global phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands attending the event every year and millions more following the media coverage. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve certainly felt its influence on our culture.

But it wasn’t always that way.

Total votes 10: ↑9 and ↓1+8
Comments0

Notifications: action required for take profit / stop loss. In case your Broker doesn't support those orders

Reading time4 min
Views1.3K
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
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Total votes 8: ↑7 and ↓1+6
Comments2

Info desk: global Internet initiatives

Reading time6 min
Views1.3K


Fiber-optic cables are a great way to bring high-speed Internet right to your home or office. But even in large cities not everyone can enjoy the benefits of it, since apartments far away from everyone, or low-population districts far from downtown, are very reluctantly served by ISPs.

And then there’s small towns and villages, far away from the main Internet “highways”. In poorer countries, Internet is often slow and expensive even in large population centers, while villages are often left without a connection for years. To connect them to the World Wide Web takes the resources of not just normal ISPs, but telecom giants. Solar-powered drones with networking equipment, weather balloons, satellites and other similar projects are not just science fiction, but a reality today (or in the near future). But who’s closer to launch and who’s lagging behind? Let’s find out.
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Total votes 7: ↑6 and ↓1+5
Comments1

The Origins of Startup Culture: How the Early Success Stories Shaped the Modern State of the Tech Industry

Reading time4 min
Views3.3K
In the late 1930s, two Stanford students, William Hewlett and David Packard, were inspired by their professor’s plea to turn the Bay Area into the national capital of high tech. Operating out of the cheapest property they could find — a garage in suburban Palo Alto, they built their first commercial product, the HP200A oscillator. Now a private museum and a California Historic Landmark, this place is a living monument, commemorating the birth of the Silicon Valley startup culture.

This event preceded the similar and widely publicized success stories of Microsoft and Apple by more than 30 years. But it nonetheless perfectly defines the startup culture as we know it today. How come?

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Total votes 17: ↑16 and ↓1+15
Comments0

Zotero hacks: unlimited synced storage and its smooth use with rmarkdown

Reading time7 min
Views23K
Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.


A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers


Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.

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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1+11
Comments6

Crystal Blockchain Analytics: Investigating the Hacks and Theft Cases

Reading time8 min
Views2.7K
In this report, Bitfury shares analysis completed by its Crystal Blockchain Analytics engineering team on the movement of bitcoin from the Zaif exchange, Bithumb exchange and Electrum wallets.

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Total votes 15: ↑13 and ↓2+11
Comments0

Board game for learning the basics of electrical circuits. Why not?

Reading time3 min
Views4.9K


I made the “electric” designer of… cardboard. Alas, the project still remains at the prototype stage, not developing into an industrial “physical” look and is waiting for its time (and investor).


But I decided to go further — once we started making cardboard, we’ll bring the situation to its logical conclusion — we’ll make a complete cardboard board game, but with an electric setting and a learning effect. There were a lot of options — starting from a simple “walker” and ending with Ameritrash from a zombie with electron movement and vicious short circuits and swollen capacitors.


As a result, I decided to dwell on a logical abstract, since the schematics of electrical circuits are very suitable for it. Said and done — as a result of the first iteration, the game “Circuit” was born.

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Total votes 12: ↑11 and ↓1+10
Comments1

The IBM 5150. Where the monopoly started

Reading time10 min
Views3.9K


Нажмите здесь, чтобы прочитать русскоязычную версию

Every old hardware enthusiast has a fetish. In the eastern Europe it's often a clone of Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as they were extremely popular there, as well as in Britain and Spain though. Unfortunately, ZX Spectrum left very little legacy. IBM PC 5150 is a different beast. Many love this computer for its heritage. For it has eventually became an ultimate PC. The PC. But although the history of this computer is very well known, surprisingly enough not many people know what was under the bonnet of the very first IBM PC.
Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0+13
Comments0

Bitcoin for Starbucks Coffee Poses Significant Tax Filing Issues

Reading time2 min
Views966
A while ago, Starbucks announced that it was entering into a partnership with the United States cryptocurrency-based platform, Bakkt. Two days ago, new details about the partnership revealed that Starbucks, the United States coffee giant, may start accepting Bitcoin Bakkt payments because of the equity deal. The news was initially reported by The Block, a cryptocurrency news outlet.

Bitcoin Bakkt Payments On Starbucks


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In August last year, Starbucks became one of the founding partners of Bakkt. Now, the coffee giant will install the Bitcoin Bakkt software that will allow customers make payments for their products in Bitcoin. The report from The Block stated that even if the payments will be made in cryptocurrencies, no Bitcoin will be left on the chain. They will be converted into fiat instantly.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD

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The entire cryptocurrency industry has been waiting for the release of Bakkt which is currently in its final stages. The platform is expected to support the massive adoption of cryptocurrencies around the globe. The platform will most likely be launched this year. Among other things, it is going to provide issuance for physically-delivered Bitcoin futures contracts. Right now, the main thing that is holding the platform back is regulatory approval from the CFTC. As soon as the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission gives its approval, the platform will go live. This is expected to happen later this year.
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Total votes 8: ↑6 and ↓2+4
Comments0

Most common misconceptions in popular physics

Reading time5 min
Views3.3K
Somewhere in an alternative Universe, based on MWI, I became a genius in physics. But in our Universe, I just read professional publications in physics, trying to keep myself up to date, meanwhile working as pizza delivery guy as DBA. Because of a slightly deeper knowledge of the subject it is almost impossible for me to watch the Discovery channel and other popular TV shows and the YouTube videos. I see nothing but oversimplifications, lies, and half-truths and can’t enjoy the shows.

I decided to compile a list of the most popular misconceptions. And the winner is...., or course, this one:

The Big Bang


Usually it is pictured like this:

image
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Total votes 20: ↑18 and ↓2+16
Comments1

Levelord, an Ordinary Moscow Resident: Interview with the Creator of Duke Nukem

Reading time20 min
Views6.2K
RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.

Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.

These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.


→ Text and video in Russian
Total votes 31: ↑30 and ↓1+29
Comments11

Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications

Reading time1 min
Views1.5K

Create your first intelligent bot with Microsoft AI


Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the digital transformation for every industry, with examples spanning manufacturing, retail, finance, healthcare, and many others. At this rate, every industry will be able to use AI to amplify human ingenuity. In this e-book, Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok from Microsoft provide a comprehensive roadmap for developers to build their first AI-infused application.


Using a Conference Buddy as an example, you’ll learn the key ingredients needed to develop an intelligent chatbot that helps conference participants interact with speakers. This e-book provides a gentle introduction to the tools, infrastructure, and services on the Microsoft AI Platform, and teaches you how to create powerful, intelligent applications.

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Total votes 17: ↑15 and ↓2+13
Comments0

We're in UltraHD Morty! How to watch any movie in 4K

Reading time3 min
Views14K
You’ve probably heard about Yandex’s DeepHD technology they once used to improve the quality of old Soviet cartoons. Unfortunately, it’s not public yet, and we, regular programmers, don’t have the dedication to write our own solution. But I personally really wanted to watch Rick and Morty on my 2880x1880 Retina display. And I was deeply disappointed, as even 1080p video (the highest available for this series) looks really blurry on a Retina display! Don’t get me wrong, 1080p is often good enough, but Retina is designed in such a way that an animation with its pronounced outlines in 1080p looks awfully blurry, like 480p on a FullHD monitor.

I decided I want to see Rick and Morty in 4K, even though I can’t write neural networks. And, amazingly, I found a solution. You don’t even need to write any code: all you need is around 100GB of free space and a bit of patience. The result is a sharp 4K image that looks better than any interpolation.


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Total votes 21: ↑19 and ↓2+17
Comments7

You Do Not Need Blockchain: Eight Well-Known Use Cases And Why They Do Not Work

Reading time9 min
Views3.7K

image


People are resorting to blockchain for all kinds of reasons these days. Ever since I started doing smart contract security audits in mid-2017, I’ve seen it all. A special category of cases is ‘blockchain use’ that seems logical and beneficial, but actually contains a problem that then spreads from one startup to another. I am going to give some examples of such problems and ineffective solutions so that you (developer/customer/investor) know what to do when somebody offers you to use blockchain this way.


Disclaimers


  • The described use cases and problems occur at the initial stage. I am not saying these problems are impossible to solve. However, it is important to understand which solutions system creators offer for particular problems.
  • Even though the term ‘blockchain use’ looks strange and I am not sure that blockchain can be used for anything other than money (Bitcoin), I am going to use it without quotes.

1. Supply chain management


Let’s say you ordered some goods, and a carrier guarantees to maintain certain transportation conditions, such as keeping your goods cold. A proposed solution is to install a sensor in a truck that will monitor fridge temperature and regularly transmit the data to the blockchain. This way, you can make sure that the promised conditions are met along the entire route.

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Total votes 24: ↑23 and ↓1+22
Comments0

Implementation of the digital mobile-only bank in Kazakhstan

Reading time9 min
Views4K
In today’s world, Kazakhstan carries out significant improvement work for the economic situation of the country. As part of a commission from Head of State, National Bank of Kazakhstan has revoked licenses of three commercial bank pursued high-risk policy (NBK, 2017). Furthermore, over the past 10 years, 7 second-tier banks have gone into liquidation as well as the liabilities of the commercial banks as a whole have increased by 70 per cent or 5.5 trillion Tenge (Hereinafter — KZT). NBK plans to continue treatment the real economy sector, withdrawal of financial institution, restructuring its assets to well-balanced entities.

On the other side of the world, the digital and mobile banks namely, Starling bank, Monzo, N26 are becoming increasingly popular among society in the United Kingdom. As a vivid illustration, Starling Bank has increased considerably the number of customers for 8 times (up to 400 000 people) at the end of the 2018 year (Starling Bank, 2019). At the same time, one million clients have joined and used Monzo’s services (Monzo). Such tendency establishes substantial competition for all players including high-street banks in the payments market.

In consequences, the main object of the paper is identification the advantages of digital bank and illumination capabilities to deploy analogous mobile bank in Kazakhstani real financial sector.
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Total votes 17: ↑14 and ↓3+11
Comments5

Cryptocurrency market valuation to hit $1 trillion this year -Cryptocurrency Predictions 2019

Reading time2 min
Views803
Cryptocurrency market valuation to hit $1 trillion this year. The market cap of cryptocurrency seems to just increase. Even though some of the individual ones are falling but cumulatively, the market cap seems to increase year-on-year.

According to the CEO of Kraken, Jesse Powell, cryptocurrencies would see accelerated growth. They would be able to pull back from the bottom to new highs.

According to him, there are many businesses revolving around cryptocurrencies now. Also, there are many people in the know-how of cryptocurrency is no
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Total votes 24: ↑21 and ↓3+18
Comments1