PopSci

sukhe Jan 29 2019 at 16:02

A small notebook for a system administrator

21 min

158K

System administration *Prototyping *Design Gadgets Laptops

I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

+85

ultral Jan 29 2019 at 08:32

How to learn English

4 min

13K

GTD *Learning languages

Tutorial

One one hand I don't want to be the final authority, but on the other hand, I'd like to share my point of view on how to learn English. The English language is not secret knowledge; it is just a lot of hard training. One of the most important bullets is constantly improving English. You should do it from day to day if you want to approach result. It must not loathe torture for you, It means that you should find out something interesting in that process.

+15

SkidanovAlex Jan 29 2019 at 07:21

The authoritative guide to Blockchain Sharding

12 min

1.3K

High performance *Distributed systems *Cryptocurrencies

Hi, I'm one of the developers of the sharded blockchain Near Protocol, and in this article want to talk about what blockchain sharding is, how it is implemented, and what problems exist in blockchain sharding designs.

It is well-known that Ethereum, the most used general purpose blockchain at the time of this writing, can only process less than 20 transactions per second on the main chain. This limitation, coupled with the popularity of the network, leads to high gas prices (the cost of executing a transaction on the network) and long confirmation times; despite the fact that at the time of this writing a new block is produced approximately every 10–20 seconds the average time it actually takes for a transaction to be added to the blockchain is 1.2 minutes, according to ETH Gas Station. Low throughput, high prices, and high latency all make Ethereum not suitable to run services that need to scale with adoption.

+13

CorneliusAgrippa Jan 28 2019 at 18:40

ASML takes over Mapper Lithography after the bankruptcy

1 min

12K

Manufacture and development of electronics *Nanotechnologies

ASML, a Dutch company, the largest supplier of photolithography systems for semiconductor industry, takes over another Dutch company Mapper Lithography.

+25

starodubcev Jan 27 2019 at 04:57

cyberd: Computing the knowledge from web3

1 min

1.1K

Website development *Open source *Algorithms *Browsers Artificial Intelligence

The original post has been updated based on community input in order to remove confusion.

Final version of the whitepaper is available here:

https://github.com/cybercongress/cyber/releases

+15

ultral Jan 26 2019 at 06:58

Arithmometer Felix M review

1 min

Gadgets Old hardware

Translation

felix

I was putting things in order in a garage, when I found an arithmometer Felix M. It is old school iron gadget, there are no electronics inside.

+22

Vokabre Jan 22 2019 at 15:35

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 5

6 min

4.1K

Robotics History of IT

This post is a continuation of the first, the second, the third, and the fourth parts of the real story of Android Robotics describing the field from the beginning up to 2019.

+13

Vokabre Jan 22 2019 at 15:35

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 4

12 min

7.6K

Robotics History of IT

This post is a continuation of the first, the second, and the third parts of the real story of Android Robotics describing the field from the beginning up to 2019.

Vokabre Jan 21 2019 at 14:54

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 3

11 min

4.8K

Robotics History of IT

This post is a continuation of the first and the second parts of the real story of Android Robotics describing the field from the beginning up to 2019.

+13

Vokabre Jan 21 2019 at 14:54

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 2

7 min

Robotics History of IT

This post is a continuation of the first part of the real story of Android Robotics describing the field from the beginning up to 2019.

+13

Vokabre Jan 21 2019 at 14:54

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 1

23 min

3.9K

Robotics History of IT

Quite a long time ago, seven years ago to be precise, i wrote a series of posts describing the state of android robotics in the world. At the time i was a high school student, with a keen interest in android robotics, who absorbed a bit of knowledge from English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian internetz and wanted to spill it somewhere.

While the posts were not too professional, and not to my standards of today, they were worthy enough to get stolen and even get translated by unapproved English Habrahabr mirrors, and to this day, appear in searches.

After those posts were written, Habrahabr got split. Removal of everyone outside of pure coding who were considered «not cake enough» to Geektimes felt like an insult and so i left the platform. Yet, the website was reunited last year, and much to a personal surprise, fairly recently an English version of Habrahabr was released.

During all these years i managed to be kicked from one university, finished another with a thick thesis on «Usage of Robotics in Disaster Conditions», lived in the Republic of Korea for half a year, and most importantly, not only expanded my knowledge of android robotics in such ways that the Robotics folder on the main hard drive is now more than 300GB in size, but also expanded the knowledge via journeying and personally meeting projects of the past and present, creating quite a decent archive on Youtube and met not only with the robots, but the engineers and scientists as well.

While i am still nowhere to be a robotics engineer, (and in the daily life i attempt to be a traditional slice-of-life artist), i feel that my tiny gigabytes of knowledge might be worthy of sharing, and today on Habr i'm publishing the real story of Android Robotics from the beginning up to 2019.

+16

arttom Jan 17 2019 at 17:13

$10 million in investments and Wozniak's praise — creating an educational computer for children

14 min

IT-emigration Development for Raspberry Pi *DIY Games and game consoles Interview

We interviewed Mark Pavluykovskiy — the creator of the Piper educational computer. We asked him about immigrating from Ukraine to the US, how he almost died in Africa, graduated from Princeton, dropped out of a doctorate in Oxford and created a product that deserved a praise from Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak.

In mid-October the Sistema_VC venture capital fund hosted a conference called Machine Teaching, where creators of various educational startups assembled to talk about technical advancements.

The special guest was Mark Pavluykosvkiy, the creator of Piper. His company created an educational computer — a children’s toy that, using wires, circuit boards and Minecraft teaches programming and engineering to children. A couple of years ago Mark completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, got a couple of Silicon Valley investors on board and raised around $11 million dollars in investments. Now he’s a member of Forbes’ “30 under 30” list, while his project is used by Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak, among others.

Mark himself is a former Princeton and Oxford student. He was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US with his mother when he was a child. In various interviews Mark claimed that he doesn’t consider himself a genius, but simply someone who got very lucky. A lot of other people aren’t so lucky, however, and he considers it unfair. Driven by this notion, during his junior year he flew to Africa, where he almost died.

+26

amartology Jan 17 2019 at 17:01

System in Package, or What's Under Chip Package Cover?

7 min

4.7K

FPGA *Circuit design *Manufacture and development of electronics *Computer hardware CPU

Transistor feature size is decreasing despite constant rumors about the death of Moore’s law and the fact that industry is really close to physical limits of miniaturisation (or even went through them with some clever technology tricks). Moore’s law, however, created user’s appetite for innovation, which is hard to handle for the industry. That’s why modern microelectronic products aren’t just feature size scaled, but also employ a number of other features, often even more complicated than chip scaling.

Disclaimer: This article is a slightly updated translation of my own piece published on this very site here. If you're Russian-speaking, you may want to check the original. If you're English-speaking, it's worth noting that English is not my native language, so I'll be very grateful for the feedback if you find something weird in the text.

+38

brylevkirill Jan 17 2019 at 13:08

Progress and hype in AI research

19 min

4.6K

Machine learning *Artificial Intelligence

From sandbox

The biggest issue with AI is not that it is stupid but a lack of definition for intelligence and hence a lack of formal measure for it [1a] [1b].

Turing test is not a good measure because gorilla Koko [2a] and bonobo Kanzi [2b] wouldn't pass though they could solve more problems than many disabled human beings.

It is quite possible that people in the future might wonder why people back in 2019 thought that an agent trained to play a fixed game in a simulated environment such as Go had any intelligence [3a] [3b] [3c] [3d] [3e] [3f] [3g] [3h].

Intelligence is more about applying/transferring old knowledge to new tasks (playing Quake Arena good enough without any training after mastering Doom) than compressing agent's experience into heuristics to predict a game score and determining agent's action in a given game state to maximize final score (playing Quake Arena good enough after million games after mastering Doom) [4].

Human intelligence is about ability to adapt to the physical/social world, and playing Go is a particular adaptation performed by human intelligence, and developing an algorithm to learn to play Go is a more performant one, and developing a mathematical theory of Go might be even more performant.

+24

svosin Jan 15 2019 at 19:17

Receiving shortwave faxes with your PC and an off-the-shelf receiver

3 min

5.3K

DIY

Tutorial

One of the many botched faxes

This is a (rather freely) translated version of this article.

When most people hear «fax», they remember those clumsy hybrids of a telephone and a printer straight outta 80s (unless you're in Japan, of course — they're still common there). But did you know that a similar technology is used to provide ship crews with weather data when there's no Internet connection? And Kyodo, a Japanese news agency (they sure like faxes, huh), still broadcasts news like that. And we can decode all this stuff, too — given a receiver, an audio cable and some software.

So, how does it look?

+19

alextavgen Jan 15 2019 at 18:34

How to Painlessly Unite Art with Java, JavaScript, and Graphs or The Story Behind Creating an Interactive Theatre Produc

9 min

1.3K

Programming *Java *System Analysis and Design *VueJS *Cyberpunk

Last year 2018, a theatre production series called Tale of the Century was launched in Estonia. Throughout the year, 22 local theatres presented their interpretations of the past hundred years of Estonian history to the audiences. In the draw, the Russian Theatre was assigned the topic of the future of Estonia.

+16

arttom Jan 15 2019 at 16:05

Creator of while True: learn() on programming in game development, VR issues and machine learning simulation

22 min

4.1K

Game development *Machine learning *Game design *AR and VR Interview

Translation

A few years ago I had a feeling that Oleg Chumakov (then working at the game studio Nival) was the most famous programmer in the game development industry. He was giving speeches, hosted Gamesjams and frequently showed up on the podcast How games are made.

When VR hit the market, Oleg was chosen to lead the company’s new department — NivalVR. But, as you probably know, VR didn’t quite take off as much as people expected.

I kind of moved to other to other things in life and stopped keeping up with game development for a while, but after getting into it again I noticed that things were looking up for Oleg’s team. Now it’s called Luden.io, and their machine learning expert simulator, while True: learn() became a huge hit in its admittedly small niche. Lots of cool stories are happening around the game and the team.

We decided to do an interview with Oleg, but I couldn’t stick to one topic — his life up to this moment has been, for the lack of a better word, “interesting”. He’s seen it all. And, to ensure that a programmer could talk about programming without fear of looking too “nerdy”, the interview was conducted by my friend, colleague and an experienced developer of its own fillpackart.

+10

arttom Jan 15 2019 at 15:05

How to milk cows with robots and make an industrial startup of it. The history of the R-SEPT development

10 min

2.4K

Machine learning *Robotics development *Start-up development Robotics DIY

Translation

In 2017, the media heard a very interesting story about a startup that robotizes milking cows on industrial dairy farms. The company is called R-SEPT, and back then it received 10 million rubles of investment. But a year has passed, and there's still no news on what happened further. We contacted Aleksey Khakhunov (AlexeiHahunov), the founder of the startup, and discussed the development. It turns out that the whole year his team was getting the prototype of the robot into shape, and just a week ago they conducted their first field test on the farm.

Under the cut there's a story about a robotics student who grew up on his parents' farm, turned the University diploma into an industrial startup, as he collected the first manipulators with his friends, and then scaled up to the level of state programs for the robotization of agriculture. And the most important is how the iron hand of the robot and the machine vision are better than a living milkmaid.

Читать дальше →

+24

marks Jan 15 2019 at 12:38

Info Desk: «Internet Archive» — history, mission and subsidiary projects

6 min

1.8K

History of IT

Translation

Probably, there are not so many users on Habr who have never heard about the «Internet Archive», a service that searches and stores the digital data that is important for all mankind, whether it be the Internet pages, books, videos or other type of information.

Who manages the Internet archive, when it appeared and what is its mission? Read about it in the today's «Inquiry».

+21

arttom Jan 15 2019 at 12:37

I am a useless idiot, so I want to quit my job: 10 questions to a software developer, a pilot episode

7 min

Interview

Translation

Hi there, Habr!

Remember the story of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie? Without any intention to rekindle the debates or moralize on the subject, let’s face the truth: thousands of stellar techies live in the shadow, while their own stories are hidden in a dusty cupboard.

We, the Habr editorial team, are keen to tackle this injustice. From now on, we will regularly interview people who keep a low profile in media and social networks. So if you have anything to tell about yourself, get ready.

To give you an idea of what this will look like, we will lead the way. Click below to see 10 general questions we will ask every guest. For our pilot episode, the first guest to answer the questions was fillpackart. (This month I’ve had several quite good interview sessions with him, see articles one, two, three). Please read them, and if you make up your mind on telling your own story in a similar way, just send me or baragol a message.

+24

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