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Manifest of Smart Home Developer: 15 principles

Reading time12 min
Views4.1K
Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.

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Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:
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Total votes 29: ↑27 and ↓2+25
Comments1

Chemistry lesson: how to expose a microchip's crystal for photography

Reading time6 min
Views2K

Introduction


If you have dabbled into microchip photographing before, then this article will probably not offer much to you. But if you want to get into it, but don’t know where to start, then it’s exactly for you.


Before we start, a fair warning: while the procedure is quite entertaining, at first it’ll probably be physically painful. The chemicals used during the process are toxic, so please handle them carefully – that way it’ll still hurt, but less so. Also, if you have even a slight amount of common sense, conduct the procedure in a fully-equipped chemical laboratory under supervision of trained professionals: we’ve had to deal with people who tried to do it at home immediately after reading the guide. And finally: if you don’t know whether you need to pour acid into water or water into acid without a Google search and don’t realize what this lack of knowledge will entail – stop reading this immediately and go to a chemistry 101 course in a local college or something.


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Total votes 25: ↑24 and ↓1+23
Comments0

Teaching kids to program

Reading time6 min
Views2.3K

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
Total votes 20: ↑19 and ↓1+18
Comments2

“I can tell you about the pain every iOS developer has in the ass” — 10 questions to a developer, episode 2

Reading time7 min
Views3.5K


Seems like everyone enjoyed the pilot episode, and we’re still sure that people “behind the scenes” can be as exciting as IT celebrities we all know and love. And maybe even more, because they talk about real problems and real solutions. This week we asked 10 questions to a person behind the development of Yandex.Maps for iOS.
Total votes 28: ↑26 and ↓2+24
Comments0

Time management in real life

Reading time3 min
Views4.8K

no problems


Have you ever noticed that you were busy all day, however, you've done nothing or at X-mas evening you experience an epiphany that nothing was done during the year? If your answer is "yes", you should improve your time management skills. According to Wikipedia, time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. Nevertheless, how can we deal with it?

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Total votes 19: ↑18 and ↓1+17
Comments0

A small notebook for a system administrator

Reading time21 min
Views161K
I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

Figure to attract attention
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Total votes 91: ↑88 and ↓3+85
Comments57

How to learn English

Reading time4 min
Views14K

One one hand I don't want to be the final authority, but on the other hand, I'd like to share my point of view on how to learn English. The English language is not secret knowledge; it is just a lot of hard training. One of the most important bullets is constantly improving English. You should do it from day to day if you want to approach result. It must not loathe torture for you, It means that you should find out something interesting in that process.

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Total votes 17: ↑16 and ↓1+15
Comments17

The authoritative guide to Blockchain Sharding

Reading time12 min
Views1.3K

Hi, I'm one of the developers of the sharded blockchain Near Protocol, and in this article want to talk about what blockchain sharding is, how it is implemented, and what problems exist in blockchain sharding designs.


It is well-known that Ethereum, the most used general purpose blockchain at the time of this writing, can only process less than 20 transactions per second on the main chain. This limitation, coupled with the popularity of the network, leads to high gas prices (the cost of executing a transaction on the network) and long confirmation times; despite the fact that at the time of this writing a new block is produced approximately every 10–20 seconds the average time it actually takes for a transaction to be added to the blockchain is 1.2 minutes, according to ETH Gas Station. Low throughput, high prices, and high latency all make Ethereum not suitable to run services that need to scale with adoption.

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Total votes 15: ↑14 and ↓1+13
Comments0

Android Robotics up to 2019: The real story; in 5 parts; part 1

Reading time23 min
Views4.2K
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Quite a long time ago, seven years ago to be precise, i wrote a series of posts describing the state of android robotics in the world. At the time i was a high school student, with a keen interest in android robotics, who absorbed a bit of knowledge from English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian internetz and wanted to spill it somewhere.

While the posts were not too professional, and not to my standards of today, they were worthy enough to get stolen and even get translated by unapproved English Habrahabr mirrors, and to this day, appear in searches.

After those posts were written, Habrahabr got split. Removal of everyone outside of pure coding who were considered «not cake enough» to Geektimes felt like an insult and so i left the platform. Yet, the website was reunited last year, and much to a personal surprise, fairly recently an English version of Habrahabr was released.

During all these years i managed to be kicked from one university, finished another with a thick thesis on «Usage of Robotics in Disaster Conditions», lived in the Republic of Korea for half a year, and most importantly, not only expanded my knowledge of android robotics in such ways that the Robotics folder on the main hard drive is now more than 300GB in size, but also expanded the knowledge via journeying and personally meeting projects of the past and present, creating quite a decent archive on Youtube and met not only with the robots, but the engineers and scientists as well.

While i am still nowhere to be a robotics engineer, (and in the daily life i attempt to be a traditional slice-of-life artist), i feel that my tiny gigabytes of knowledge might be worthy of sharing, and today on Habr i'm publishing the real story of Android Robotics from the beginning up to 2019.
Total votes 18: ↑17 and ↓1+16
Comments1

$10 million in investments and Wozniak's praise — creating an educational computer for children

Reading time14 min
Views2K
We interviewed Mark Pavluykovskiy — the creator of the Piper educational computer. We asked him about immigrating from Ukraine to the US, how he almost died in Africa, graduated from Princeton, dropped out of a doctorate in Oxford and created a product that deserved a praise from Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak.



In mid-October the Sistema_VC venture capital fund hosted a conference called Machine Teaching, where creators of various educational startups assembled to talk about technical advancements.

The special guest was Mark Pavluykosvkiy, the creator of Piper. His company created an educational computer — a children’s toy that, using wires, circuit boards and Minecraft teaches programming and engineering to children. A couple of years ago Mark completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, got a couple of Silicon Valley investors on board and raised around $11 million dollars in investments. Now he’s a member of Forbes’ “30 under 30” list, while his project is used by Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak, among others.

Mark himself is a former Princeton and Oxford student. He was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US with his mother when he was a child. In various interviews Mark claimed that he doesn’t consider himself a genius, but simply someone who got very lucky. A lot of other people aren’t so lucky, however, and he considers it unfair. Driven by this notion, during his junior year he flew to Africa, where he almost died.
Total votes 28: ↑27 and ↓1+26
Comments0

System in Package, or What's Under Chip Package Cover?

Reading time7 min
Views5.1K
Transistor feature size is decreasing despite constant rumors about the death of Moore’s law and the fact that industry is really close to physical limits of miniaturisation (or even went through them with some clever technology tricks). Moore’s law, however, created user’s appetite for innovation, which is hard to handle for the industry. That’s why modern microelectronic products aren’t just feature size scaled, but also employ a number of other features, often even more complicated than chip scaling.


Disclaimer: This article is a slightly updated translation of my own piece published on this very site here. If you're Russian-speaking, you may want to check the original. If you're English-speaking, it's worth noting that English is not my native language, so I'll be very grateful for the feedback if you find something weird in the text.
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Total votes 38: ↑38 and ↓0+38
Comments0

Progress and hype in AI research

Reading time19 min
Views4.6K

The biggest issue with AI is not that it is stupid but a lack of definition for intelligence and hence a lack of formal measure for it [1a] [1b].


Turing test is not a good measure because gorilla Koko [2a] and bonobo Kanzi [2b] wouldn't pass though they could solve more problems than many disabled human beings.


It is quite possible that people in the future might wonder why people back in 2019 thought that an agent trained to play a fixed game in a simulated environment such as Go had any intelligence [3a] [3b] [3c] [3d] [3e] [3f] [3g] [3h].


Intelligence is more about applying/transferring old knowledge to new tasks (playing Quake Arena good enough without any training after mastering Doom) than compressing agent's experience into heuristics to predict a game score and determining agent's action in a given game state to maximize final score (playing Quake Arena good enough after million games after mastering Doom) [4].


Human intelligence is about ability to adapt to the physical/social world, and playing Go is a particular adaptation performed by human intelligence, and developing an algorithm to learn to play Go is a more performant one, and developing a mathematical theory of Go might be even more performant.

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Total votes 24: ↑24 and ↓0+24
Comments3