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2019 is coming to an end, and it's Christmas soon. It is also the time to grab all data and collect statistics and a rating of the most interesting Habr's articles for this period.



In this post the best articles and best Habr authors 2019 will be presented, I also will show some statistical graphs that I find interesting or unusual.

Let's get started.

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».

On December 12, it became known from Nginx's employee Twitter that the company's office was searched due to the criminal case under Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation 'Violation of Author's and Neighboring Rights'. The claim belong to Rambler Group was, although formally the complaintant is Lynwood Investments CY Ltd, to which the rights were transferred. The last-mentioned is related to the co-owner of Rambler Group, Alexander Mamut.

The point of the claim: Igor started working on Nginx as an employee of Rambler and only after the tool became popular he founded a separate company and attracted investments.

Here is how the events unfolded.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hello, my name is Andrey Sergeyev and I work as a Head of IoT Solution Development at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. We all know there is no such thing as a universal database. Especially when the task is to build an IoT platform that would be capable of processing millions of events from various sensors in near real-time.

Our product Mail.ru IoT Platform started as a Tarantool-based prototype. I’m going to tell you about our journey, the problems we faced and the solutions we found. I will also show you a current architecture for the modern Industrial Internet of Things platform. In this article we will look into:

• our requirements for the database, universal solutions, and the CAP theorem
• whether the database + application server in one approach is a silver bullet
• the evolution of the platform and the databases used in it
• the number of Tarantools we use and how we came to this

“In 1665, Cambridge University closed because of the plague. Issac Newton decided to work from home. He discovered calculus & the laws of motion.”

We live in a truly remarkable moment. With the year 2020 and the COVID-19 outbreak employees all over the world are staying home for quarantine, trying their best to sustain the normal flow of life, which means continue working. And this is something new compared to all the previous infectious pandemics humanity has survived through — this time we have the Internet.

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.

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.

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.

Long time ago, when a mobile phone costed about 2000$ and one minute of voice call was 50 cents, pagers were really popular. Later cellular phones became cheaper, calls and SMS prices became lower, and finally pagers mostly disappeared.


For people, who owned a pager before, and want to know how it works, this article will be useful.

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.

This project is aimed at creating an experimental device for emulating RFID labels of three widely available components. I simplified the explanation of the process so that it could be easily replicated. I also developed some helpful ideas along the way, including writing a special program for converting a serial number into the transmitted data, which will definitely prove useful.

Last October, I made the first demoscene production after an almost two-decades-long break — a demo for PICO-8 fantasy console “PICOCHAK: Attack of Donuts.” This article is “behind the scenes” or PICOCHAK.

Today’s taxi market is crowded with ride-sharing apps like Uber, Ola, and Lyft. They are giving serious competition for upcoming ventures. These on-demand apps have initiated the radical shift in the taxi industry enabling the smooth transition from conventional taxi hailing to booking a cab through an app. Customers are opting for hailing taxis through the app because of its reliability to get a taxi and ensuring a much better cab booking experience. Thus, the taxi market is ripe for the taking, and this is the right time for entrepreneurs to make use of the opportunity.

Statistics on the Taxi Industry

The traditional taxi industry is still stuck with inefficient phone call bookings, competitors and they stand to lose at least $20 million on an everyday basis just because customers couldn’t find a cab. Another statistics survey tells us that almost 80% of the commuter prefer Ola and Uber over regular taxis and that Uber has completed nearly 2 billion rides since its inception. The profits soared over $20 Billion in the process. What made Uber and Ola successful ventures is the sound business strategy they employed. So if you are going to establish your venture then understanding the market is imperative.

Laziness moves the world. And today we have more and more robotic vacuum cleaners that are saving our time for something more pleasant than just vacuuming.

The robots were marketed as internet/Bluetooth/smartphone connected devices with a speaker and camera to report and explore the environment. They also have different sensors to dodge barriers and such. But that’s only some ordinary stuff everyone knows about the robotic vacuum cleaners.
But the most interesting thing about them is their software. The owners can reprogram these devices and implement different settings as well as voice acting that has a huge number of options, including funny ones. And all you need to “upgrade” your vacuum cleaner is a PC, an internet connection, and a smartphone:

Google loves easter eggs. It loves them so much, in fact, that you could find them in virtually every product of theirs. The tradition of Android easter eggs began in the very earliest versions of the OS (I think everyone there knows what happens when you go into the general settings and tap the version number a few times).

But sometimes you can find an easter egg in the most unlikely of places. There’s even an urban legend that one day, a programmer Googled “mutex lock”, but instead of search results landed on foo.bar, solved all tasks and landed a job at Google.


The same thing (except without the happy ending) happened to me. Hidden messages where there definitely couldn’t be any, reversing Java code and its native libraries, a secret VM, a Google interview — all of that is below.

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