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Bitcoin miners can have some cheer as their earnings from bitcoin mining increases after hitting 18-month lows according to a new report from Diar. The blockchain research company in its weekly newsletter dated March 4 confirmed that the revenue from bitcoin mining is actually on the rise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Today, at the press event dedicated to the beginning of the exhibition of mobile technologies MWC 2019 in Barcelona, we presented to the world HoloLens 2.



Read more below.

Introduction

In the modern world, new technologies become important factors of the development of financial sphere of world economy. Emergency of such cryptocurrency as Bitcoin is connected with both great opportunities and certain risks for the users of this cryptocurrency. The aim of the present work is to determine the main factors which affect the price of Bitcoin.

A version how people transported megaliths in Stonehenge.



They started their work in summer.

They prepared road for transportation. They needed a clean and glade road without stones and other irregularities. (No.4 on picture)
Perhaps they cut the topsoil and covered the road with clay. (No.3 on the picture)
On each side they made curbs ( 5-10 cm). (No.2 on the picture)
They used clay because they wanted to hold water inside the road.
In autumn rains filled road with water. It looked like a big puddle. (No.5 on the picture)

In winter road froze. Then they got a smooth ice skating rink slightly wider than a megalith.

Megaliths (No.11) were transported in winter.

Mechanism and vehicles for transportation were prepared in summer.

Mechanism consisted of three parts.

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.