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How to catch and optimize problematic queries in PostgreSQL

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time8 min
Views658

If you work with PostgreSQL, you've likely run into performance issues at some point — especially as your database grows. Things may have been running smoothly at first, but as your client database expanded, queries started slowing down. Sound familiar? Here's a guide to help you identify and fix problematic queries, so you can get your PostgreSQL database running at peak performance again.

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The Armenia Opportunity: EDA, ASIC, FPGA + connections with USA, China and Russia

Reading time9 min
Views1.9K

Armenia is a lucky country. Back in the 1990s somebody lobbied Synopsys, the #1 leader in the Electronic Design Automation market, to create a division there. It was joined by Mentor Graphics / Siemens EDA, another EDA leader, then NVidia. Synopsys Armenia became the largest Synopsys division outside the US Silicon Valley and Boston, although the Taiwanese may tell you otherwise. Since Synopsys and Mentor make software used by chip designers in Apple, Samsung, AMD and all other electronic companies, Armenia has an unfair advantage over all their neighbors in Caucasus and Central Asia.

In addition, Armenia has friendly relations with Russia, and most Armenians speak Russian as well. This has facilitated the move of many Russian companies to Armenia, for example, a RISC-V semiconductor IP provider Syntacore. Finally, as we can see from the recent conference EDA Connect, Armenia is attracting the attention of electronic and EDA companies from China.

EDA Connect featured not only academic and industrial papers but also a hackathon on FPGA design, attended by local students from Yerevan State University, the American University of Armenia, the Russian-Armenian University, the French University in Armenia and others.

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How to Bypass Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA – or Bypassing Cloudflare at Varying Levels of Difficulty

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time18 min
Views2.5K

As part of my scientific and research interests, I decided to experiment with bypassing complex types of CAPTCHAs. Well, by “experiment” I mean testing the functionality and verifying that my electronic colleague can write code on my behalf. Yes, there was a lot of extra stuff—follow ethical norms, blah blah blah… But the simple fact remains: dude, I’m doing this solely as part of research, and everyone agreed.

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Get Started with Gemini Code Assist in VS Code — Easy Tutorial

Reading time3 min
Views1.8K

Have you ever heard of Gemini Code Assist? It’s an AI-powered coding assistant from Google that helps with writing, completing, and debugging code. The best part? It’s now free for individuals, freelancers, and students!

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up and use Gemini Code Assist inside VS Code. Whether you’re new to coding or an experienced developer, this tool can save you time and make coding easier. Let’s get started!

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The State of Caravel: the First Look [Мучения в проектировании чипов из-за Докера и Питона]

Reading time47 min
Views2.1K

Написал лонгрид на английском о текущем состоянии открытых средств проектирования ASIC-ов. Заодно познакомил англоязычных читателей с практиками шаманов Сибири и фигурой Ивана Сусанина. Упомянул планируемые семинары в Мексике и Армении.

A text on the current state of Open-source ASIC design tools. Includes side discussions of the upcoming hackathons in Mexico and Armenia, Docker and Python, Static Timing Analysis and RISC-V, Siberian shamans and treacherous swamps in Belarus.

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Puppeteer CAPTCHA bypass by Token or Clicks: Which is Faster? A Practical Comparison

Reading time4 min
Views1.2K

In my work, I often encounter various services designed to simplify tasks across different areas. I’m not talking about tools like GSA or A-Parser but about Zennoposter or BAS. I am no professor in automation, so I’ll explain in layman's terms: these services are essentially complex, multi-layered platforms that allow the creation of bots and scripts to perform almost any task without human intervention—a sort of “basic neural network.” By the way, such services existed long before neural networks became mainstream for everyday use.

While exploring BAS, I encountered a situation where many developers creating BAS scripts (ironically, developers developing) idealize CAPTCHA solving using clicks.

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How can a manual tester understand an automation tester, and vice versa?

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Views1.1K

When we go abroad for vacation or meet a foreigner on the street who doesn’t speak Russian but is trying to ask, “Where is the restroom? How do I get to…”, we wonder how to explain things to them in Russian in a way they would understand.

I asked myself a similar question when trying to explain something to a colleague using SQL while they were working with Java. The main goal of my work was to create a quality test model. Without it, there would be no proper regression testing later on.

I started by building a framework filling it with test cases. We held a meeting where we discussed priority of positive and negative test cases briefly. When developing the test scenarios, I used the incremental model, but as practice showed, this approach also required an iterative method. For example, it is like having the outline of the Mona Lisa first, then adding colors, painting the background, and so on.

It’s better to maintain the checklist in Excel format to add columns, write notes, and more. And let’s not forget that, as we take on the role of Leonardo da Vinci, we use different colors and get creative.

I am a manager by profession specializating in Production Management. My motivator is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) methodology, which focuses on identifying and managing the key constraint of a system to determine the efficiency of the entire system as a whole:

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The Implicit Reparameterization Trick in Action: Python Library for Gradients Computation

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time3 min
Views714

The explicit reparameterization trick is often used to train various latent variable models due to the ease of calculating gradients of continuous random variables. However, due to its peculiarities, explicit reparameterization trick is not applicable to several important continuous standard distributions, such as mixture, Gamma, Beta and Dirichlet.

An alternative method for calculating reparameterization gradients relies on implicit differentiation of cumulative distribution functions. The implicit reparameterization trick is much more expressive and applicable to a wider class of distributions

This article provides an overview of various reparameterization tricks and announces a new Python library, irt.distributions, for sampling from various distributions using the implicit reparameterization trick.

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Advanced CAPTCHA Bypass Techniques for SEO Specialists with Code Examples

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time11 min
Views1.4K

Every SEO professional has encountered CAPTCHA. If not, they are either not professionals, misunderstand the term SEO (possibly confusing it with SMM or CEO), or are very new to this challenging field.

One could endlessly deny and argue that CAPTCHA is overrated and does not deserve significant resources. But these arguments end the moment one needs data from a search engine result page, like Yandex, without knowledge of XML requests… Or, say, a client wants to scrape the entire Amazon (just because they do) and offers good pay...

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GSN and dApps: A Novel without gas obstacles

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time8 min
Views891

Imagine: you've just created an incredible decentralized application, and it's so cool that even your grandmother wanted to try it. But once users are faced with the need to pay a commission, the entire UX (User Experience) rapidly slides down like a ball down a slide. Blockchain promises a bright future in which decentralization, transparency and security are our best friends, and it makes us pay for daily operations. Imagine if you had to pay every time you like on social networks or send a message in a messenger. It's terrible, isn't it? But dApps users face something like this every day.

But now, like a prince on a white horse, GSN (Gas Station Network) appears. With its help, developers can make their applications gas-less, and users will finally be able to forget about commissions like a nightmare.

In this article, we will look at what GSN is, how it works, and how to implement it into your projects to please users.

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Cloud Communications: Understanding UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Views1.4K

In today's world, where businesses increasingly rely on effective communication, cloud technologies offer a wide range of solutions to optimize interactions both within the company and with customers. Three of the most popular options are UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS. While they all fall under the umbrella of cloud communications, their functionality and applications differ significantly. Let's delve into the details.

UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service)

UCaaS unifies various communication channels, such as voice calls, video conferencing, messaging, and email, into a single platform. This allows employees to easily communicate and collaborate with each other, regardless of their location.

Benefits of UCaaS:

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How to bypass CAPTCHA: Breaking Down a Complex Process in the Simplest Terms

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time7 min
Views4.3K

CAPTCHA is not just a single word that can be defined; it's an acronym consisting of nine words (and two prepositions): Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. This mouthful was shortened to the concise CAPTCHA to avoid creating yet another hard-to-pronounce term. Translated into Russian, this abbreviation sounds like "Полностью автоматизированный публичный тест Тьюринга для различения компьютеров и людей" (Fully Automated Public Turing Test to Differentiate Computers and Humans).

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15 quotes about artificial intelligence from world famous people

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time7 min
Views2.8K

Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has become one of the main topics in the media and many famous people have expressed their thoughts on this topic. But if you start searching on the Internet for collections of quotes about AI, you will mostly find quotes from CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies, futurists and scientists conducting research in this field. Moreover, these collections are so similar to each other, which sometimes gives the impression that they were compiled by AI. In this article, I have collected quotes from world famous people who are usually not included in such collections of quotes:

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Python Clean Code: Stop Writing Bad Code — Lessons from Uncle Bob

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Views10K

Are you tired of writing messy and unorganized code that leads to frustration and bugs? You can transform your code from a confusing mess into something crystal clear with a few simple changes. In this article, we'll explore key principles from the book "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin, also known as Uncle Bob, and apply them to Python. Whether you're a web developer, software engineer, data analyst, or data scientist, these principles will help you write clean, readable, and maintainable Python code.

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Ladybird Browser: First Impressions & Easy Installation Guide

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Views7.6K

In this article, I would like to introduce a new web browser called Ladybird. This ambitious open-source project aims to revolutionize the browsing experience. Although it hasn't been officially released, I had the opportunity to test it on Ubuntu. In this article, I'll show you what it looks like and explain how you can run it on your computer.

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Data labeling – training on cats

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time8 min
Views561

At some point while diving deeper into automation processes you are faced with the need for data labeling, although just a couple of weeks ago, the phrases data labeling and you were standing at a party called "Earnings on the Internet" in different rooms. Or it would be better to say that you were standing by the pool, and the data labeling was on the third floor, smoking on the balcony with experts in the field of machine learning. How did we meet? Probably, someone pushed it off the balcony into the pool, and I helped it out, soaking my clothes along the way.

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CacheBrowser experiment: bypassing the Chinese firewall without a proxy by caching content

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time7 min
Views1.2K

Today, a significant portion of all content on the Internet is distributed with the use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). At the same time, there is no research on how various censors extend their influence on such networks. Scientists from the University of Massachusetts analyzed possible methods of blocking CDN content using the example of the practices of the Chinese authorities, and also developed a tool to bypass such blocks.

We (specialists from proxy service) have prepared an overview material with the main conclusions and results of this experiment (translate of this material).

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How to deploy Next.js to Firebase hosting quickly in 2024: a beginner's guide

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time2 min
Views724

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to deploy a full-stack JavaScript web app into Firebase. We’ll deploy a Next.js application to Firebase hosting. I’ll show you a quick and efficient process that can be completed in 5 minutes. 

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