PopSci

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.

Dmitry learned the language of business but I think about the world as an engineer. He works with tech brands to create content and promote corporate culture at scale. Apart from it, he is one of the veterans at Techstars Startup Digest, and he is acting as an advisor for the SXSW tech festival.

Here is his interview with the LAMA app platform.

I once had a discussion with a founder of an Israeli startup developing a GPU-based database with a focus on speed. The work stack included Haskell and C++, among others, and the founder was complaining about how hard it is to find competent programmers. Which was part of the reason he came to Moscow.

I carefully asked if they considered using something more popular and new. And even though the answer was rather polite and well-supported with arguments, it still sounded like “Come on, don’t even bring up these toys”.

Until then, all I heard about Haskell could be summarized as “be VERY careful in dealing with it”. To get to know Haskell programmers better, I came to a topical Telegram chat with some questions. I was quite afraid at first, and, as it turned out, I was right.

Haskell doesn’t lend itself to popular explanation, and people seemingly don’t even try. If the topic is ever brought up, it’s only talked about in full depth and as objectively as possible. Someone wrote to me: “One of the defining features of both Haskell itself and its community is that they didn’t try to achieve any kind of mainstream recognition. Instead, they focused on building a logical, principal way of solving real problems over trying to appease the widest audience possible”

Nevertheless, a couple of people did tell me about their experiences, which are shown below.

Once I put on true wireless headphones and all the cables after that (even if it's a flexible headband on a “wireless” headset), became annoying. So I’ve tried a lot of AirPods-like earbuds in order to find the best ones. In 2018 aside from the AirPods themselves I tried: Jabra Elite 65+, Samsung IconX 2018 and Sony WF-1000X. The result was a neat table with all the objective data. Everything else — my personal opinion — let's discuss in the comments.

When you are sitting in your comfy chair in your cool modern office, anything distracting you from your favorite routine is really annoying. Some may call it a sign of sloth, but in fact, it relates to optimization of workflows. Our computers and smartphones provide us with many opportunities to do a lot without leaving our place. Software as such cares about our control over the physical world by just clicking and tapping. Indeed, the digitization advances: what people have had to do with their muscles for centuries in the past, could be done with either a voice command or a text message today thanks to numerous remotely controlled gizmos. And the IoT plays a crucial role in all this for a reason.

It’s More Than You Imagine…

The possibility of acquiring more profit through a chat app solution is gaining popularity than adopting to monthly plans based chat platforms

With the rise of instant conversation among the users, it's not surprising that the global mobile messaging app is estimated to reach around 2.1 billion active users by 2020. When the communication lies as the significant action in nature, then in fact the underlying tool “messaging application” also acquires the same importance. Thus, every chat platforms like WhatsApp demand a great market value according to the features and functionalities listed. Most of the business professionals and enterprises are urged to rely on subscription-based plans to avail such messaging platform.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PF:K for short) is a role-playing video game created by Owlcat Games, released in Fall 2018 on Steam and GoG. Inspired by classic Bioware games, this project uses a popular board game system ruleset, combat takes place in Real-Time with Pause, follows an isometric camera, and has a non-linear story with multiple unique endings.

In this article, I will share a little about how we worked on designing the audio throughout the game’s development including task management, the search for inspiration, and troubleshooting. An experienced specialist may not find anything particularly groundbreaking in this recap, but beginners and enthusiasts will definitely discover some points of interest.

Tech journalist Igor Oskolkov of 3DNews.ru has recently tested publicly available version of the evaluation board or, as the vendor calls it, the developer software-hardware complex, under the code name BFK 3.1 with the Russian SoC Baikal-T1 based on the MIPS P5600 Warrior architecture. Here goes the English translation of his text, that was first published in Russian by servernews.ru.

The very paradigm of automation where IoT solutions play a key role is based on a presumption that machines can act in both autonomous and intelligent manners. And what enables them doing so is a capability of handling tremendous flows of collected data.

The collectible data includes those various signals that both animate and inanimate object can send to the IoT systems. Hence, the objects should have some highly specific signal-generating devices to share information within the IoT.

I’m going to hazard 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.



But, if my friends are any indication, very few people know that the service is community-driven and is supported by a group of enthusiasts gathering and sending data. Even fewer people know that anyone can join the project — including you.

Let’s see how Flightradar and similar other services works.

Origins

Several years ago I wrote a Pascal compiler. The motivation was simple: as a teenager, I had learnt from my first programming textbooks that a compiler is a very sophisticated thing. This claim eventually became a challenge and required to be tested by experience.


ha.art.pl

First, a simplistic PL/0 compiler came into being, and later an almost fully-functional Pascal compiler for MS-DOS has grown from it. My source of inspiration was the Compiler Construction book by Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal language. I don't care if Wirth's views are now considered obsolete and have no direct connections to the IT mainstream, or if the compiler design fashion has changed. It is enough to know that his techniques are still simple, elegant, and — last but not least — bring much fun, since it is more appealing to parse a program source with a handwritten recursive descent parser and generate the machine code, rather than to call yaccs, bisons and all their descendants.

My compiler's fate was not so trivial. It has lived two lives: the first one in my own hands, and the second in the hands of computer antiquarians from Poland.

“Come on, baby, what’s wrong? Tell me what you need,” my uncle Nicholas was shredding up his old car’s engine, which totally refused to start. Being a schoolboy back then, I was absolutely sure that any exhortation my uncle voiced was powerless against a dumb ton of metal. Talking to a car was just a psychological trick that probably helped my uncle cope with exasperation. Moreover, neither me nor my uncle believed in a possibility to communicate with “dead metal” sometime in the near future. That was in the mid-1980s. When I reached the age of my uncle, the situation changed radically.

Zero-knowledge proofs/arguments are an emerging cryptographic technology that promises to bring us closer to the Holy Grail of blockchain: providing data privacy and auditability.

Potential applications for zero-knowledge include, but are not limited to:

• Inter-bank transfer systems (see a research paper by Narula et al.)
• Privacy-focused management of digital assets (see a proof of concept by J.P. Morgan and zCash)
• KYC (see a proof of concept by ING)
• Self-sovereign identity (see an attribute-based credentials EU project)
• Voting (see a proxy voting prototype by Russian National Security Depository)

Another application for zero-knowledge proofs is helping blockchains scale. ZKPs allow for the “compressing” of computations for blockchain transactions without sacrificing security.

In this article, we describe how zero-knowledge (specifically, Bulletproofs) can be applied to build a privacy-focused service using Bitfury’s Exonum platform.

Microsoft’s Quantum team is excited to announce the Q# Coding Contest – Winter 2019! In this contest you can put your quantum programming skills to the test, solving quantum computing tasks in Q#. Winners will receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt!

Quantum computing is a radically different computing paradigm compared to classical computing. Indeed, it is so different that some tasks that are believed to be classically intractable (such as factoring integers or simulating physical systems) can be performed efficiently on a quantum computer. In 2017 Microsoft introduced the Quantum Development Kit which includes the Q# programming language. Q# can be used with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code or the command line, on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

20% of efforts produce 80% of the results. And the other 80% of efforts produce only 20% of results.

In other words, you have to spend only 20% of the total time to learn something new and the last 80% you spend to become an expert. To learn touch typing you spend only one week of your life to achieve the same speed which was before. It becomes easier to type and you are getting faster and faster every next day. In this post, I will tell you how to start and give you the basic tips and tricks to make your learning process easier. Challenge yourself to become more productive.

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.

Hey Habr! Today I would like to talk about ethics, namely ethics in the professional field. It will be a question of services that perform 'fake' (automated human-like) activity and of those doubts in which they can result both the ordinary ordinary user, and the professional of development sphere.



So, let's start. What I mean by the phrase «fake activity» is not difficult to guess: it is the manipulation and compromising of the data that are responsible for the indicator of your activity, or more simply, of actions on the Internet. With this, of course, every one of you who used social networks at least once came across: Facebook, Instagram, and so on.

I will describe this scheme on the example of Instagram: each person has his own account, and for developers API access is provided. And what did we do? We started to launch bots that can perform all sorts of activity through a person’s account (such as like, subscribe, comment on other people's posts, or even independently manage their (or owners) page, for example @neuralcat ). And soon this opportunity began to be actively used in the business sphere. Attracting a new audience by targeting according to certain criteria and carrying out activity on their page. Everything would be fine, but over time it went beyond all limits. Every day dozens of incomprehensible accounts like your photos, leave spam comments, tag you on advertising posts and so on.

Bot activity has gone beyond all limits of prudence that today Instagram closes its API, and here is one of the reasons: “Most of the services that work with auto-posting, likes and OML-like likes — do it through private api — login / password, but not through the official API.”

Source: eeNews Europe

I'm glad that Habr got brand new English version. And my first post in English is about new MIT project. Researchers designed an ultra-low capacitance and ultra-low resistance Schottky diode capable of switching at GHz frequencies. This diode is able rectify and convert random WiFi signals into DC electricity.

MoS₂ «rectenna» (this is how scientists called their invention) could become the main element of roll-to-roll process to cover a huge areas. To be fair antennas capable transform radio signals in to electricity is not a new thing. The main achievement of MIT engineers is creation of soft rectenna made from special alloy.

Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new tools and possibilities to develop their businesses and enrich their knowledge. One of the ways of doing this is visiting themed events — meeting colleagues in real life, exchanging experiences, and communicating with potential investors.

In fact, there are thousands of tech-focused events taking place annually. The important thing is to pick the best, most useful and easily accessible ones to optimize your time and expenses.

Techstars Startup Digest solves this problem by sending its subscribers an email newsletter with a curated list of relevant and reasonably priced events for entrepreneurs. Currently, Startup Digest consists of more than 700 curators, is approaching 700K subscriptions, and is available in more than 300 cities all around the world. Today, I’d like to share its history, how the founders came up with the idea, what it looked like in the initial stages, and what it’s going through right now.

Known now as a «motherboard speaker», or just «beeper», PC Speaker has been introduced in 1981 along with the first personal IBM computer. Being a successor of the big serious computers for serious business, it has been designed to produce very basic system beeps, so it never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device in numerous entertainment programs of the emerging home market. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly served as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retro computing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.