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Hell or high water: history of Russian popular science literature

Reading time9 min
Views3.1K
And our homeland's pushing us For reaching knowledge higher heights.

The available and interesting literature on science is a magic wand that helps the progress not to slow down and move forward. Thanks to interesting science literature, children begin to study voluntarily and with interest, while adults expand their horizons and do not allow the brain to relax. Biology, astronomy and mathematics supplant the saga about the elves and intergalactic ships. But while Western countries' nonfiction was always in smooth progress from Jules Verne to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, then opposite it experienced both ups and downs in Russia.
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Enhancing Magento Front-end Performance With ReactJS

Reading time9 min
Views5K

Magento


Magento is an open-source PHP based platform for building e-commerce solutions. Built by the Magento company (now part of Adobe), it is used by over 350,000 developers all over the world. It enables the creation of highly customizable digital storefronts for Business-to-Customer and Business-to-Business purposes. Magento 2, the transformed version of the Magento E-commerce Platform, comes with brand new architecture, coding structure, and database design.

a) General overview

Magento’s platform is built upon PHP and MySQL. During its lifetime of 10 years (the version 1.0 released in March 2008 and the version 2.0 in November 2015, it has undergone changes in terms of structure and development patterns and is now in its second major version, Magento 2.

Magento’s structure is comprised of two main parts, one being the back-end, with the database and MySQL, and Model, Data and Service interfaces, as can be seen in figure 3. These are directly connected and used in Magento’s Blocks, Layouts, and Templates, which would be defined as the front-end of the application.
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Winning PHDays 9 The Standoff: The chronicle by the True0xA3 team

Reading time16 min
Views1.8K
This is an English-language summary of two absolutely outstanding articles written by Vitaliy Malkin from «Informzashita» whose team, True0xA3, became the winners of the prestigious black hat competition The Standoff during Positive Hack Days 9 in May of 2019.

Vitaliy has published three detailed articles on Habr, two of which were dedicated to the description of the strategies that True0xA3 team used before and during the competition to secure this team the title of the winners. I felt that the only thing that those two articles were lacking was a summary in English so that a wider audience of readers could enjoy them. So, below is the summary of two articles by Vitaliy Malkin, together with images Vitaliy published to clarify his points. Vitaliy has OKed me doing the translation and publishing it.
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SCADA visualization for IoT projects [Free Library]

Reading time6 min
Views5.5K
There’s a lot of IoT SCADA solutions for factories and other manufacturing needs. Yet, there are cases (and quite a lot), when you need to develop your own SCADA system to cover specific needs of your project.

Original article — IoT dashboard library: visualize SCADA at a snap [Free IoT library]

We often use awesome Qt framework for implementing complex IoT solutions. For a bunch SCADA and SCADA-like projects, we came across the need for quick tool for developing device dashboards. That’s why we developed super lightweight unofficial Qt library. The library is open source, customizable, and free to use under MIT license. We also share a small set of developed widgets.
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Python Vs R — Data Science

Reading time3 min
Views3.8K
When mulling over the best programming language to use for data science, Python and R ring a bell (very quickly). While there are a lot of languages like C, C++, Java, Julia, Perl, and Scala, it's protected to state that Python and R are the harbingers in data science.

While a great deal of data researchers will discuss the customary shortcomings like data wrangling in R or data representation in Python, ongoing improvements like Altair for Python or R have adequately reacted to these shortcomings.

So which one would it be a good idea for you to decide for your next data investigation venture?

R has been ruling this space for a long time now. This bodes well as this programming language was explicitly intended for analysts.
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Human pose estimation on images for iOS

Reading time5 min
Views9.2K

Human pose estimation


A few months ago I came across one interesting open source project on the Internet — Openpose the aim of which is to estimate a human pose in real-time on a video stream. Due to my professional activities, I was interested to run it on the latest iOS device from Apple to check the performance and figure out if it is possible at all. It was also interesting to see how the performance of the neural network framework for iOS has been changed in the last years.

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How Gantt Charts Simplify and Empower Project Management

Reading time4 min
Views3.7K
Whether you are a project management guru or just a beginner, you’ve definitely heard about Gantt charts. At first sight, these diagrams might seem chilling and complicated, however, they are not as mystifying as you may think.

Gantt Charts assist project managers and their teams to improve their productivity and efficiency of workflows and ensure timely tasks execution. The charts can be applied to small projects and the most complex ones. What are the secrets of the diagrams developed by Henry Gantt and what people in project management used before they were created?

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Finally, rejuvenation is a thing

Reading time6 min
Views3.3K

Preface


What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself – the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue – is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged – young – state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio, somewhere between cold, rainy Saint-Petersburg and warm, sunny Mountain View, we meet Aubrey de Grey, again! For those of you who are not familiar with him, here is a brief introduction.
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C# or Java? TypeScript or JavaScript? Machine learning based classification of programming languages

Reading time6 min
Views1.6K
GitHub hosts over 300 programming languages—from commonly used languages such as Python, Java, and Javascript to esoteric languages such as Befunge, only known to very small communities.


Figure 1: Top 10 programming languages hosted by GitHub by repository count 

One of the necessary challenges that GitHub faces is to be able to recognize these different languages. When some code is pushed to a repository, it’s important to recognize the type of code that was added for the purposes of search, security vulnerability alerting, and syntax highlighting—and to show the repository’s content distribution to users.

Linguist is the tool we currently use to detect coding languages at GitHub. Linguist a Ruby-based application that uses various strategies for language detection, leveraging naming conventions and file extensions and also taking into account Vim or Emacs modelines, as well as the content at the top of the file (shebang). Linguist handles language disambiguation via heuristics and, failing that, via a Naive Bayes classifier trained on a small sample of data. 

Although Linguist does a good job making file-level language predictions (84% accuracy), its performance declines considerably when files use unexpected naming conventions and, crucially, when a file extension is not provided. This renders Linguist unsuitable for content such as GitHub Gists or code snippets within README’s, issues, and pull requests.

In order to make language detection more robust and maintainable in the long run, we developed a machine learning classifier named OctoLingua based on an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) architecture which can handle language predictions in tricky scenarios. The current version of the model is able to make predictions for the top 50 languages hosted by GitHub and surpasses Linguist in accuracy and performance.
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How do you choose products in stores?

Reading time4 min
Views1.5K
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The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. Theodore Roosevelt

In the previous article I tried to cover the basics of pricing analytics. Now I'd like to talk about something more interesting.

Have you ever thought about why you choose certain products in stores, why you prefer them to other similar ones? Many shopping trips are spontaneous, so it's probably impossible to give a clear answer for all the times you go shopping. But the general idea is obvious: you go shopping for a specific reason (to get food, a gadget, for entertainment, to play blackjack). In this article I'm going to use available data from grocery retailers to talk about how a set of basic logical assumptions and community analysis can help us determine the way customers choose products.
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Most Popular Computer Problems We Are Facing Everyday

Reading time2 min
Views1.7K
In today’s contemporary world the private computer has become a staple of daily life.
Even those few persons who don't use computers in their daily work life can possibly have access to a computer on that they perform alternative necessary tasks.

With all of the access to info that computers permit and with all of the work they will facilitate a personal perform, this trend of a computer in every home and in each workplace of business isn't shocking.

But what may be shocking, and downright aggravating, is when the computer you are working on suddenly shuts off, goes blank, or explodes in the dreaded blue screen of death.

These and other common computer problems are among the most frequently occurring issues that one might experience with their computers.

The following may be a list of 5 common Computer issues and what may be done to mend them.
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How AI, drones and cameras are keeping our roads and bridges safe

Reading time4 min
Views931
«It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.»

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Europe’s roads are the safest in the world. Current figures show that there are 50 fatalities per one million inhabitants, compared to the global figure of 174 deaths per million. Despite this, each loss remains a tragedy. In 2017, 25,300 people lost their lives on European roads.

The cause of these accidents can vary from human error and weather conditions, to damaged structures and surfaces. While some things are beyond the realms of control, road and bridge conditions are a variable which can be governed.

As soon as a road is paved, a combination of traffic and weather conditions begin to degrade and erode the surface. Undetected cracks, abrasions or defects can quickly lead to bigger problems, such as costly repairs, major traffic delays, and in the worst cases, unsafe condition. These problems are also shared by bridges, particularly when concrete is critical in maintaining the integrity of the structure. The earlier faults are detected, the sooner they can be addressed, saving time and money, while minimising disruption. Ultimately, this helps ensure that the roads themselves are safer for those travelling on them.

The detection of these faults, however, can be very difficult to carry out manually, especially as early-forming cracks are hard to spot with the naked eye. Predicting where faults are likely to occur ahead of time so that appropriate measures can be taken in advance also possess a massive challenge. Thankfully, technology is here to help.

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The big interview with Martin Kleppmann: “Figuring out the future of distributed data systems”

Reading time25 min
Views2.9K


Dr. Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems at the University of Cambridge, and the author of the highly acclaimed «Designing Data-Intensive Applications» (O'Reilly Media, 2017). 

Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft once said: «This book should be required reading for software engineers. Designing Data-Intensive Applications is a rare resource that connects theory and practice to help developers make smart decisions as they design and implement data infrastructure and systems.»

Martin’s main research interests include collaboration software, CRDTs, and formal verification of distributed algorithms. Previously he was a software engineer and an entrepreneur at several Internet companies including LinkedIn and Rapportive, where he worked on large-scale data infrastructure.

Vadim Tsesko (@incubos) is a lead software engineer at Odnoklassniki who works in Core Platform team. Vadim’s scientific and engineering interests include distributed systems, data warehouses and verification of software systems.

Contents:


  • Moving from business to academic research;
  • Discussion of «Designing Data-Intensive Applications»;
  • Common sense against artificial hype and aggressive marketing;
  • Pitfalls of CAP theorem and other industry mistakes;
  • Benefits of decentralization;
  • Blockchains, Dat, IPFS, Filecoin, WebRTC;
  • New CRDTs. Formal verification with Isabelle;
  • Event sourcing. Low level approach. XA transactions; 
  • Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Memcached, Redis, Elasticsearch;
  • How to apply all that tools to real life;
  • Expected target audience of Martin’s talks and the Hydra conference.

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Airbus reaches new heights with the help of Microsoft mixed reality technology

Reading time4 min
Views1.1K

It took Airbus 40 years to build its first 10,000 aircraft. Over the next 20 years, the aerospace giant aims to build 20,000 more—aformidable challenge that will require cutting-edge innovation.


Holographic technology from Microsoft, known as “mixed reality” because it combines physical and digital worlds, will be key to helping Airbus reach this ambitious goal.


An aerial view of Airbus jets.
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How to save $58 in 5 minutes: let’s use different prices in each country against marketers

Reading time5 min
Views5.6K
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Hello Habr! Now that is summer vacation season. Many of you will take a flight to a place far from your everyday routine at home. Before this hot vacation season starts, we should discuss an interesting and useful method on how to save money using a VPN.

One of the easiest ways to see the value in this is looking at car rentals while on vacation.
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A drawing bot for realizing everyday scenes and even stories

Reading time6 min
Views1.6K

Drawing bot


If you were asked to draw a picture of several people in ski gear, standing in the snow, chances are you’d start with an outline of three or four people reasonably positioned in the center of the canvas, then sketch in the skis under their feet. Though it was not specified, you might decide to add a backpack to each of the skiers to jibe with expectations of what skiers would be sporting. Finally, you’d carefully fill in the details, perhaps painting their clothes blue, scarves pink, all against a white background, rendering these people more realistic and ensuring that their surroundings match the description. Finally, to make the scene more vivid, you might even sketch in some brown stones protruding through the snow to suggest that these skiers are in the mountains.


Now there’s a bot that can do all that.

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Launching a taxi-hailing app in Tokyo: How Sony does it with S.Ride?

Reading time2 min
Views1.4K
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Uber, as we know, operates only in 650 cities and remains the best among all taxi apps. But have you ever imagined about other cities and their demand for taxi applications? If you did, you would have certainly come across a few regional apps like Ola, Didi Chuxing, Japan Taxi, etc. These apps are focused on fulfilling the demands of locals; and in that way, they have succeeded and generated revenue tremendously. If you search for the reason behind the success of these apps, it inevitably ends up in the kind of service it provides its customers. So, it all depends on how well you bestow your service (whether you focus regionally or globally).
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How Moovit improved its app to help people with disabilities ride transit with confidence

Reading time4 min
Views886

Alexandr Epaneshnikov, a 19-year-old Russian student who is legally blind, recently decided he wanted to be more independent by commuting on his own and relying less on his mom for rides to school. It meant taking a streetcar to a subway to his high school in Moscow, a 30-minute trip that Epaneshnikov assuredly navigates with a cane and Moovit, an urban mobility app optimized for screen readers.


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Bluetooth stack modifications to improve audio quality on headphones without AAC, aptX, or LDAC codecs

Reading time7 min
Views71K
Before reading this article, it is recommended to read the previous one: Audio over Bluetooth: most detailed information about profiles, codecs, and devices / по-русски

Some wireless headphone users note low sound quality and lack of high frequencies when using the standard Bluetooth SBC codec, which is supported by all headphones and other Bluetooth audio devices. A common recommendation to get better sound quality is to buy devices and headphones with aptX or LDAC codecs support. These codecs require licensing fees, that's why devices with them are more expensive.

It turns out that the low quality of SBC is caused by artificial limitations of all current Bluetooth stacks and headphones' configuration, and this limitation can be circumvented on any existing device with software modification only.
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