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Putting theory to practice: juggling work and study at the Department of Photonics and Optical Information Technology

Reading time4 min
Views1.4K
Master’s degrees are really useful. Postgrad education allows BA holders to put their new-found skills into practice, and secure great jobs further down the road. But students often need help assessing this choice, particularly if they majored in uncommon subjects — like photonics.

To set the record straight, we talked to the people behind, and the graduates of our MA programs in photonics and optical computing. In this article you’ll learn about part-time work available for photonics students, graduates’ job-hunting prospects, and the academic career options that open up.

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Total votes 9: ↑9 and ↓0+9
Comments0

Free API Moscow Stock Exchange (MOEX) in Google Sheets

Reading time2 min
Views9.4K
Last year the number of private investors at Moscow Stock Exchange (MOEX) has doubled and reached 3.86 million: about 1.9 million people have opened accounts at MOEX in 2019. The Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange which specializes in trading of foreign company shares has seen its accounts increase three times from 910,000 to 3,06 million over the past year.



This means that almost 2 million newbies without any actual trading experience and lacking any specialized software for trading/position analysis have entered the market.
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Total votes 4: ↑4 and ↓0+4
Comments1

Making a demo for NES — HEOHdemo

Reading time26 min
Views5.3K
There is a lengthy history of computer arts festivals, also known as demo parties, held in Russia over the last quarter century. For decades, once in a while people from all over the country gather together to compete in their ingenuity at getting what was once deemed impossible out of the old or new computer hardware and mere bytes of code. A few leading annual events has been established in the early years. One of them, creatively named CAFe (an acronym for Computer Art FEstival), was held in Kazan from 1999 to 2003. It went under the radar since, making the way for the everlasting Chaos Constructions (1999 — now) and DiHalt (2005 — now). After so long hiatus, the last year CAFe made a loud comeback, returning in full glory — at least by the number of prods released, if not in the scale of the event itself. Presentation of the compo entries went far into the night, with the last demos being shown at 6 AM to the popping eyes of the few hardy ones. There was my demo, too, and this is the story of its making.

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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1+11
Comments0

Full disclosure: 0day vulnerability (backdoor) in firmware for Xiaongmai-based DVRs, NVRs and IP cameras

Reading time6 min
Views92K

This is a full disclosure of recent backdoor integrated into DVR/NVR devices built on top of HiSilicon SoC with Xiaongmai firmware. Described vulnerability allows attacker to gain root shell access and full control of device. Full disclosure format for this report has been chosen due to lack of trust to vendor. Proof of concept code is presented below.
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Total votes 19: ↑18 and ↓1+17
Comments15

PHP Best Practices to Follow in 2020

Reading time10 min
Views35K


Web development trends seem to be heading more towards server-side scripting languages over client-side scripting languages. And it can be difficult to decide where to start and what to choose.

This year W3techs.com, a web technology survey portal, released a list of the five most in-demand server-side programming languages for web development.

Here is the list:
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Total votes 4: ↑0 and ↓4-4
Comments3

Post-cyberpunk: what you need to know about the latest trends in speculative fiction

Reading time5 min
Views2.7K
Cyberpunk has become an integral part of our pop culture. Everyone is familiar with at least some works in the genre and their particular flavour of dystopian technologically advanced universes. But science fiction is always evolving. In this piece, we’ll be taking a look at cyberpunk’s successors and the futures they envision — from pan-African empires to shopping culture gone amok.

Total votes 8: ↑6 and ↓2+4
Comments0

Making a demo for an old phone — AONDEMO

Reading time13 min
Views3.7K
I wanted to make a demo ever since I saw the classic Polish mega demo Lyra II for first time in 1997. I also wanted to do something for the largest Russian demo party Chaos Constructions for a long while, but have never gotten around that, being occupied with other duties. Finally, in 2018 the time has come, and I fulfilled both desires at once, Van Damm's double impact style — made a demo called AONDEMO that entered ZX Spectrum 640K Demo compo at Chaos Constructions.


I bet the red thing you've just seen does not look much a Spectrum to you. Here's the story.

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Total votes 13: ↑11 and ↓2+9
Comments0

How to Wrap Up a Software Development Project the Right Way

Reading time3 min
Views2.8K
Does the New Year have you scrambling to wrap up last year’s software development projects? Don’t archive your Jira tickets and Trello boards too quickly!

A good rule of thumb in software development is that your next software project should always be better than your last. Why? Because the lessons you learn and take away from each project should be continuously documented and applied in future projects.

In the words of Rachel Green, every good project should end with closure.

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Follow this quick and easy 6-step guide to ensure that you wrap up your software project efficiently and effectively.

6 Steps for Successfully Wrapping up a Software Development Project


1. Document future needs

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Total votes 6: ↑6 and ↓0+6
Comments0

Weekend Picks: light reading for STEM majors

Reading time4 min
Views1.3K
The weekend is upon us, and so is the paralysis that comes with having nothing to do. Fear not, our editorial team picked 9 books on science and tech worth picking up on a cold winter day. You’ll learn about the history of space exploration, join a physicist on a surprisingly science-appropriate hike, and more.

Total votes 14: ↑14 and ↓0+14
Comments0

Writing a laptop driver for fun and profit, or How to commit to kernel even if you're not that smart

Reading time5 min
Views2.6K

Where it all began


Let’s start with our problem statement. We have 1 (one) laptop. A new, gamer laptop. With some RGB-backlight on its keyboard. It looks like this:

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Picture taken from lenovo.com

There’s also a program installed on this laptop. That’s the thing that controls our backlight.

One problem – the program runs under Windows, and we want everything to work on our favourite Linux. Want LEDs to flash and those pretty colours to blink on and off and such. A natural question arises, can we do all that without reverse-engineering and writing our own drivers?

A natural answer arises, no. Let’s open IDA and get cracking.

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Total votes 5: ↑5 and ↓0+5
Comments0

Smart house with Xiaomi on the example of a sauna

Reading time12 min
Views3K
There are quite a few reviews and videos on the Internet about building smart houses. There is an opinion that all this is quite expensive and troublesome in the organization, that is, in general, the fate of geeks. But progress is not standing still. Devices are becoming cheaper and more functional, and design and installation are quite simple. However, the reviews mainly focus on 1-2 examples of use, practically not covering nuances and not creating a complete picture. Therefore, in this article I want to make an overview of the finished project, demonstrate the use cases and pitfalls encountered in building a smart home with Xiaomi devices on the example of a sauna. The described ideas with small variations can also be applied to the automation of the apartment.

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Background or why all of this is necessary


For starters, a little background so that the context can be understood. In the early autumn of 2018, the sauna was finished and put into operation. The sauna is an autonomous capital structure with year-round heating and water supply.

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Total votes 6: ↑5 and ↓1+4
Comments0

Machine Learning in Static Analysis of Program Source Code

Reading time27 min
Views2.9K

Machine Learning in Static Analysis of Program Source Code

Machine learning has firmly entrenched in a variety of human fields, from speech recognition to medical diagnosing. The popularity of this approach is so great that people try to use it wherever they can. Some attempts to replace classical approaches with neural networks turn up unsuccessful. This time we'll consider machine learning in terms of creating effective static code analyzers for finding bugs and potential vulnerabilities.
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Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0+2
Comments0

What is Slack and How Does It Work?

Reading time4 min
Views2.7K

Slack is the best inbox organizational tool in the market now. It is used by many huge companies ranging to average-sized and small companies as well. You can make and manage the business conversations through this app and can keep a record of them too.


Slack was initially released in August 2013, when there was not its single competitor out there in the market. Yes, there were many other messaging platforms but not for the business. Usually, the business websites give a boring idea of faded colors and take all the charm and drive away to use that website or app. But Slack did something different.


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Total votes 6: ↑3 and ↓30
Comments2

Top 10 Mobile Application Development companies startups can partner with in 2020

Reading time6 min
Views1.7K

In the current business landscape, it is important for small and mid-scale organizations to adopt modern app development strategies in order to win the race. Innovative mobile application development solutions provided by top mobile app development companies are the success fruits for any business.


As per Statista, mobile app programmers have developed apps for various business verticals viz. sports games, ride-hailing, taxi-apps, and video apps in the year 2019. There are about 2.46 million apps available in the Google play store as of Q2 2019.


But finding a company that can deliver cost-effective mobile application services could be a daunting task for many business owners as they have to pour their time as well as their efforts. Keeping this in mind, I have encapsulated a list of top 10 mobile app development companies that would surely help grow your business.


The list given below is prepared by taking care of various parameters like google search, company's portfolio, reviews of the clients, ratings from firms like Clutch, Goodfirms, and Youtube.


Find the list below:


1) Mobcoder


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Project Cost: $5,000+


Locale: Seattle, WA


Rating on Clutch: 5.0


It is a leading app development company providing useful mobile application development solutions to its clients since 2014. Hire mobile application developers from this company as they build solutions, map a strategy and elevate product experience with their amazing product delivery. They work on all the latest technologies including Flutter, Ionic, Kotlin etc. Hence, they build innovative mobile application development solutions for their clientele.

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Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0+1
Comments1

App ideas to generate revenues for startups in 2019 & beyond

Reading time4 min
Views1.1K
Every other person is establishing a startup these days. Is it easy to make it work? Do you know what is the success rate of startups? You would be shocked to know that out of the total startups launched in the year 2014, only 56% of them could make it to the fifth year, i.e. 2018.

Every entrepreneur starts a business with a vision to take it to exceptional heights. The bitter truth is, no matter in which industry domain you are working, you cannot survive for long if you do not perform extraordinarily.
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Rating0
Comments0

Future economics for physicists

Reading time7 min
Views1.7K

Annotation. This article gives an analogy between the forces of nature and various types of money. A justification for the "money conservation laws" is made. Explanation of the IT-money phenomenon by analogy to physics laws is given, as well as gold and currency money. The transition from the gold and currency to the gold-currency-computing economy is considered. A reasonable assumption is made that the fourth type of money after gold, securities and IT money will be so-called "citation indices" or "ratings", which are similar in their properties to stock indices.


What is money?


This article is an attempt to understand what money is from the physics and econophysics points of view. Econophysics (economics and physics) is an interdisciplinary research field, applying theories and methods originally developed by physicists to solve problems in economics, usually those including uncertainty or stochastic processes, nonlinear dynamics and evolutionary games.

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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1-1
Comments0

How Ecommerce Fueled By the Pillars of AI Technology

Reading time4 min
Views818


At present, we see artificial intelligence is implemented across the corridors of business operations and also the way we shop and trade online. To hit a home run in the retail game, genius AI applications, PIM solutions, and e-commerce development tools are now offering smart solutions: predictive analysis, recommendation engines, inventory management, and warehouse automation to create a more profitable shopping experience for consumers.

Now more than ever, e-commerce is an AI innovation game


Artificial Intelligence often sometimes seems complicated to newbies but in reality, it is simple in use and gives you the ability to predict customer needs. This paves the way for e-commerce companies to become a “big brand” or “big business” with revolutionary AI tools.

Now that AI algorithms making way for consumer acceptance of AI like never before, how can you use it to create more profitable outcomes in e-commerce?

Interesting E-commerce Stats:


With an estimated global population of 7.7 billion, 25 percent of people shopping through e-commerce stores. According to Statista, 52% of e-commerce stores will have omnichannel capabilities by 2020 which means they can communicate and sell with their consumers via multiple channels. For example, they can use their e-commerce website, Facebook e-shop, email account, and Instagram account.

Examples of AI tools and PIM software for e-commerce businesses that can help them have a high bar on customer service and marketing:
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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1-1
Comments0

Review of WCS 5.2 — WebRTC Server for Webcast and Webcam Developers

Reading time13 min
Views2.6K


Alice is an experienced full stack developer, who is capable of writing a SAAS project framework on her favorite framework using php in a week. As for frontend, she prefers Vue.js. 


A client contacts you via Telegram, asking you to develop website that will be the meeting place for the employer and the employee to conduct an in-person interview. In-person means face-to-face, a direct video contact in real time with video and voice. «Why not use Skype?» some may ask. It just so happened that serious projects – and each startup undoubtedly considers itself a serious project – are trying to offer an internal communications service for a variety of reasons, including:

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Total votes 3: ↑2 and ↓1+1
Comments0

Creating a taxi booking business in Dubai: How to launch customer-centric taxi app like Careem & Hala?

Reading time4 min
Views1.6K


Dubai has been an extra-ordinary territory when it comes to adopting technology and the offshoots of any innovation. It might be surprising for everyone to know that Dubai, which today stands as an epicenter of modernity had just 13 registered cars in 1989.


Dubai is quite an oxymoron. In spite of its global image, Dubai has an affinity for homegrown Brands. This mindset is not just confined to the Emirates but to the whole of the Middle East, stretching right from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan.

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Total votes 4: ↑3 and ↓1+2
Comments0

Testing Water Melon using Neural Networks: Full Dev. Cycle from prototyping to the App. at Google Play

Reading time7 min
Views698

The beginning


It all started when I found an app. on Apple market, that supposedly was able to determine the ripeness of a water mellon. A program was… strange. Just think about it: instead of knocking using your knuckles, you were supposed to hit the water mellon with your iPhone! Nevertheless, I have decided to repeate that functionality on an Andtoid platform.
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