I like PHP for development speed and excellent portability. It's great to have such a tool in your pocket, always ready to solve problems.

For me it was quite sad that there was no Waves Platform SDK for PHP when i first met this nice blockchain. Well, I had to write such kit.

Curiosity has taken over the crypto space. Every enthusiast and potential trader wants to know when the next crypto bull run will start. The digital currency reached an all-time high in December 2017 and since then, it has been stuck in a crypto winter.

As well all know, Bitcoin, is the highest rising digital asset of all time. This is partly because of Bitcoin’s speculative nature, unlimited potential, and its built-in difficulty adjustment designed to throw off the elements of supply and demand to create a balance. This increases the Bitcoin price against the USD in return. It is a major reason why the leading digital currency can potentially initiate the next crypto bull run.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD

A few years ago, when I was using Jabber, all of a sudden the centralized IMs that glue your account to your phone number became popular. I was skeptical towards them for some time, but then there was a temporary illusion that the Telegram developers were trying to do something bigger. Unfortunately, over time it was becoming clearer and clearer that they were not actually going to do anything that was different in any way from what other centralized IMs had to offer.

Dmitry Pichulin, known under the nick «deemru», won the game Fhloston Paradise, developed by Tradisys on the Waves blockchain.

The winner of Fhloston Paradise was supposed to be the player paying the very last stake during a 60-block period, before any other player could pay their stake and reset the counter to zero. The winner would collect all stakes paid by other players.

Dmitry's winning recipe was the bot Patrollo, which he created. The bot paid just eight 1 WAVES stakes for Dmitry and eventually won him 4,700 WAVES ($13,100). In this interview, Dmitry discusses his bot and prospects of blockchain games.

Video surveillance has long been used to solve various problems. In the 1950s and '60s, these were analog closed video surveillance systems, the name CCTV (closed circuit television) reveals the meaning of the concept.

SXSW is a festival of culture and technology held every spring in Austin, Texas. It’s a global phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands attending the event every year and millions more following the media coverage. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve certainly felt its influence on our culture.

But it wasn’t always that way.

There is a Russian Broker — Tinkoff Bank. Now here is the problem: the broker doesn't support take profit and stop loss orders. At all. If you want to feel more convenient while trading, then you need some workaround for this situation, until Tinkoff Bank developers finally release those orders as the killer feature. In the article, I will show you my workaround.
update:2019-03-22, the Broker published platform 3.0.0 (a major update) in Google Play. The changelog features take profit/stop loss orders

Fiber-optic cables are a great way to bring high-speed Internet right to your home or office. But even in large cities not everyone can enjoy the benefits of it, since apartments far away from everyone, or low-population districts far from downtown, are very reluctantly served by ISPs.

And then there’s small towns and villages, far away from the main Internet “highways”. In poorer countries, Internet is often slow and expensive even in large population centers, while villages are often left without a connection for years. To connect them to the World Wide Web takes the resources of not just normal ISPs, but telecom giants. Solar-powered drones with networking equipment, weather balloons, satellites and other similar projects are not just science fiction, but a reality today (or in the near future). But who’s closer to launch and who’s lagging behind? Let’s find out.

I’m an active user of Google Chrome. That’s why I’ve come up with this list of useful extensions that will help English learners to enhance writing, spelling, listening skills, and extend their vocabulary.

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.

In this report, Bitfury shares analysis completed by its Crystal Blockchain Analytics engineering team on the movement of bitcoin from the Zaif exchange, Bithumb exchange and Electrum wallets.

I made the “electric” designer of… cardboard. Alas, the project still remains at the prototype stage, not developing into an industrial “physical” look and is waiting for its time (and investor).

But I decided to go further — once we started making cardboard, we’ll bring the situation to its logical conclusion — we’ll make a complete cardboard board game, but with an electric setting and a learning effect. There were a lot of options — starting from a simple “walker” and ending with Ameritrash from a zombie with electron movement and vicious short circuits and swollen capacitors.

As a result, I decided to dwell on a logical abstract, since the schematics of electrical circuits are very suitable for it. Said and done — as a result of the first iteration, the game “Circuit” was born.

Нажмите здесь, чтобы прочитать русскоязычную версию

Every old hardware enthusiast has a fetish. In the eastern Europe it's often a clone of Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as they were extremely popular there, as well as in Britain and Spain though. Unfortunately, ZX Spectrum left very little legacy. IBM PC 5150 is a different beast. Many love this computer for its heritage. For it has eventually became an ultimate PC. The PC. But although the history of this computer is very well known, surprisingly enough not many people know what was under the bonnet of the very first IBM PC.

A while ago, Starbucks announced that it was entering into a partnership with the United States cryptocurrency-based platform, Bakkt. Two days ago, new details about the partnership revealed that Starbucks, the United States coffee giant, may start accepting Bitcoin Bakkt payments because of the equity deal. The news was initially reported by The Block, a cryptocurrency news outlet.

Bitcoin Bakkt Payments On Starbucks

In August last year, Starbucks became one of the founding partners of Bakkt. Now, the coffee giant will install the Bitcoin Bakkt software that will allow customers make payments for their products in Bitcoin. The report from The Block stated that even if the payments will be made in cryptocurrencies, no Bitcoin will be left on the chain. They will be converted into fiat instantly.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Today – BTC / USD



The entire cryptocurrency industry has been waiting for the release of Bakkt which is currently in its final stages. The platform is expected to support the massive adoption of cryptocurrencies around the globe. The platform will most likely be launched this year. Among other things, it is going to provide issuance for physically-delivered Bitcoin futures contracts. Right now, the main thing that is holding the platform back is regulatory approval from the CFTC. As soon as the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission gives its approval, the platform will go live. This is expected to happen later this year.

Somewhere in an alternative Universe, based on MWI, I became a genius in physics. But in our Universe, I just read professional publications in physics, trying to keep myself up to date, meanwhile working as pizza delivery guy as DBA. Because of a slightly deeper knowledge of the subject it is almost impossible for me to watch the Discovery channel and other popular TV shows and the YouTube videos. I see nothing but oversimplifications, lies, and half-truths and can’t enjoy the shows.

I decided to compile a list of the most popular misconceptions. And the winner is...., or course, this one:

The Big Bang

Usually it is pictured like this:

A lot of world’s leading companies experiment and implement IoT solutions for diverse operational areas. The growth of demand for IoT in both consumer and industrial uses is evident.
Internet of Things (IoT) provides gigantic scope of possible applications for:

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.