The last decades the world economy regularly falls into this vortex of financial crises that have affected each country. It almost led to the collapse of the existing financial system, due to this fact, experts in mathematical and economic modelling have become to use methods for controlling the losses of the asset and portfolio in the financial world (Lechner, L. A., and Ovaert, T. C. (2010). There is an increasing trend towards mathematical modelling of an economic process to predict the market behaviour and an assessment of its sustainability (ibid). Having without necessary attention to control and assess properly threats, everybody understands that it is able to trigger tremendous cost in the development of the organisation or even go bankrupt.

Value at Risk (VaR) has eventually been a regular approach to catch the risk among institutions in the finance sector and its regulator (Engle, R., and Manganelli S., 2004). The model is originally applied to estimate the loss value in the investment portfolio within a given period of time as well as at a given probability of occurrence. Besides the fact of using VaR in the financial sector, there are a lot of examples of estimation of value at risk in different area such as anticipating the medical staff to develop the healthcare resource management Zinouri, N. (2016). Despite its applied primitiveness in a real experiment, the model consists of drawbacks in evaluation, (ibid).

The goal of the report is a description of the existing VaR model including one of its upgrade versions, namely, Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). In the next section and section 3, the evaluation algorithm and testing of the model are explained. For a vivid illustration, the expected loss is estimated on the asset of one of the Kazakhstani company trading in the financial stock exchange market in a long time period. The final sections 4 and 5 discuss and demonstrate the findings of the research work.

In this post I’d like to talk about our background music choices for writing code. The developer soundtrack, if you will. To narrow it down, I’m going to discuss one specific genre, ambient music.

Homo laborans and music

Today the effect music has on all living creatures, humans included, is a fairly well-researched topic. It’s been common knowledge for a while that classic music helps people to calm down and relieves stress, while high-energy tunes of various genres can make your workout results way more impressive.

Plenty of scientific papers have been published that explore this phenomenon, especially by medical researchers and psychologists (use of music as a part of treatment plan, the way different organs respond to it, etc.). Naturally, many of those you gotta take with a grain of salt as there’s always the risk of crossing the line into pseudoscience, but there’s no shortage of reliable sources that confirm that link.

You don’t need to go further than Habr to find plenty of insightful articles that talk about the influence music has on a working environment and attention span of the workers. But this particular one has a slightly different intent.

^{Source: The online counterfeit economy: consumer electronics, a report made by CSC in 2017}

Over the past 10 years, the number of fake goods in the world has doubled. This data has been published in the latest Year-End Intellectual Property Rights Review by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2016 (the most current year tracked). A lot of the counterfeiting comes from China (56%), Hong Kong (36%) and Singapore (2%). The manufacturers of original goods suffer serious losses, some of which occur on the electronics market.

Many modern products contain electronic components: clothes, shoes, watches, jewellery, cars.
Last year, direct losses from the illegal copying of consumer electronics and electronic components in the composition of other goods were about $0.5 trillion.

How to solve this problem?

In the late 1930s, two Stanford students, William Hewlett and David Packard, were inspired by their professor’s plea to turn the Bay Area into the national capital of high tech. Operating out of the cheapest property they could find — a garage in suburban Palo Alto, they built their first commercial product, the HP200A oscillator. Now a private museum and a California Historic Landmark, this place is a living monument, commemorating the birth of the Silicon Valley startup culture.

This event preceded the similar and widely publicized success stories of Microsoft and Apple by more than 30 years. But it nonetheless perfectly defines the startup culture as we know it today. How come?

Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.

A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers

Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.

At my agency we work a lot with international candidates and German companies. So, I wanted to write a small essay about the visa issues because often they will influence your chances of landing a job heavily. Since I work mostly with German market, I will talk about the processes in Germany, the processes may and probably are different in other EU countries. Hopefully the information will be helpful and will give you some clarity.

As all of you know, nowadays there is a big demand for experienced IT professionals in almost all EU countries. When I say experienced I mean 3+ years of experience. Companies are adjusting their teams to accept English speaking colleagues from around the globe, coming up with different perks to smooth up the relocation process and in general the IT world is becoming predominantly English speaking. Germany government understanding the demand by the industry has made the process quite fast and straightforward. I expect even easier process to be implemented in the upcoming year or two.

Visa sponsorship

Companies in Germany do not sponsor visas like in other countries, there is no such a term here. Companies either hire non-EU candidates or not. The decision is strictly an internal decision and is not influenced by any quotas, permissions etc. If you get a job contract from a German company (be it a big conglomerate or a small startup) you have a right to apply for the work visa.

Do I need a university degree?

What do you get when you cross an IT department, a faulty Sprint review, determination, and pizza? Greatness, that's what.

A completely routine tech support ticket has uncovered unexpected bans of IP addresses of Protonmail — a very useful service for people valuing their Internet freedoms — in several regions of Russia. I seriously didn’t want to sensationalize the headline, but the story is so strange and inexplicable I couldn’t resist.

TL;DR

Disclaimer: the situation is still developing. There might not be anything malicious, but most likely there is. I will update the post once new information comes through.

MTS and Rostelecom — two of the biggest Russian ISPs — started to block traffic to SMTP servers of the encrypted email service Protonmail according to an FSB request, with no regard for the official government registry of restricted websites. It seems like it’s been happening for a while, but no one paid special attention to it. Until now.

All involved parties have received relevant requests for information which they’re obligated to reply.

UPD: MTS has provided a scan of the FSB letter, which is the basis for restricting the access. Justification: the ongoing Universiade in Krasnoyarsk and “phone terrorism”. It’s supposed to prevent ProtonMail emails from going to emergency addresses of security services and schools.

UPD: Protonmail was surprised by “these strange Russians” and their methods for battling fraud abuse, as well as suggested a more effective way to do it — via abuse mailbox.

UPD: FSB’s justification doesn’t appear to be true: the bans broke ProtonMail’s incoming mail, rather than outgoing.

UPD: Protonmail shrugged and changed the IP addresses of their MXs taking them out of the blocking after that particular FSB letter. What will happen next is open ended question.

UPD: Apparently, such letter was not the only one and there is still a set of IP addresses of VOIP-services which are blocked without appropriate records in the official registry of restricted websites.

In autumn, we announced we were going to expand our IT team from 49 to 250 developers. And immediately we were buried under an avalanche of questions — mostly, people were interested why a pizza chain needs so many software engineers. How did we come up with such a number? So now I want to answer that.

A few months ago I worked with a customer on how a team should evaluate the security of their Azure implementation. I had never done a pentest(extensive security testing)on an Azure application before, so these ideas were just the thoughts off of the top of my head at that time based on my experience in security.

Matt Burrough’s book, Pentesting Azure Applications, goes even deeper and it is a must-read for security experts focused in Cloud Computing, I’m reading it right now.

Below I share with you these pre-book thoughts, and will compare them in a future article with the ones I will learn — or confirm — after reading Matt's book.

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.

Most people assume that I studied computer science in university and that I’ve been coding since I was young. They’re usually surprised when I tell them that in fact I studied Marketing and Spanish and that although my brother taught me how to build a very basic web page in the early 2000s, I didn’t really start to learn to program until I was an adult with a job.

The truth of the matter is that my story isn’t unique. It’s simply not true that you have to be a whiz kid who’s been coding since they were 6 years old in order if you want to be able to program as an adult. There are tons of examples of people who also don’t have a technical background who either became full time programmers or just learned a new skill they enjoy using.

In this post, I’ll give you some advice that has served me well on my journey. My path is by no means the only path and depending on the situation you’re in might not be practical or right for you, but it is certainly a path, and I hope it helps you on your path to learning to computer.

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 often rail at technologies I find inadequate, and in response I receive (along with arguments) sheer anger and pain. Sometimes physical.

Developers take critique of their favorite technologies very personally for some reason. This “cult of the tool” is such a strange phenomenon I can’t explain it logically. Some say everyone’s prone to it, because a coder’s thinking processes intertwine very deeply with his programming language. Some say it’s a junior’s fallacy — you write something for the first time, it works, and you start treating your language like something divine.

Whatever it is, I never understood it.

I always considered cultists as imbeciles. But I always try to understand why imbeciles became them, why I’ve avoided that fate. I start thinking and bam! — it turned out I’m also an imbecile. I’m a cultist who worships F#. And, of course, there’s a story behind it.

Once upon a time there was a guy on my team so weak that he was going to be fired (a developer! Fired!). Every comment of mine was another nail in his coffin. I could almost hear the bang of the hammer every time I clicked “Submit review”. He was a nice person and I almost felt bad for him, but it didn’t stop me from tearing his work to shreds. I had an inalienable right to criticize his work, right? I’m a better developer, therefore I’m right. No one wants to say that bad code is good, right? He was eventually fired, not before leaving him without the customary bonus for a couple months.

I said to myself: “I’m not going to do his work, right? He was taking the place of a more talented developer. I did everything right”. But then I received another pull request for a review, and something changed. Drastically.

How’s your work week going? I took some time off publishing new articles and consulting clients to look at «The Hero and the Outlaw» by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark. It’s a guide to leveraging the power of archetypes for your brand, and I think there’s much to learn from it.

Archetypes are properly defined as «universal constructs of the human psyche». In layman’s terms, these are images we all recognise because they’re built into our subconscious mind. One such example is the archetype of the hero  —  a good guy who triumphs over evil and saves the day.

“Sometimes it happens that a man’s circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.”

David Hilbert

“When I thought I had hit rock bottom, someone knocked from below.”

Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Preface

Does a programmer need a higher education? The flow of opinions on this undoubtedly urgent topic has not dried up, so I have decided to express my view. It seems to me the general disappointment in education is due to the numerous processes and changes in the profession and it needs serious study. Below I will discuss the most common misconceptions, myths, and underlying causes of the phenomenon.

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.

You can always count product manager’s strategy skills like innovative thinking, blue ocean approach and others. But on daily basis we use more practical tools and approaches. This article is about working with feature requests and product requirements.

The main axiom of managing requests is that feature requests from customers, partners and internal teams are not requirements to the product. This is because every request can be split into several requirements or, otherwise, several requests can be combined to a single requirement.

Hi. My name is Michael Kapelko. I've been developing software professionally for more than 10 years. Recent years were dedicated to iOS. I develop games and game development tools in my spare time.

Overview

Today I want to share my experience of teaching kids to program. I'm going to discuss the following topics:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans