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Hi, my name is Mikhail Emelyanov, I’m a Python programmer and I would like to show you my pet project — Flywheel, a micro-platform for learning foreign languages, a mixture of Duolingo and Anki, an application that can teach you to properly write in Spanish (or any other language you’re studying). Flywheel’s source code is available on GitHub.

As you may know, generalized knowledge of a foreign language can be broken down into four relatively independent components: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Unfortunately, training one of these abilities has no direct effect on the other components, so, for example, by developing our reading skills, the effect on our writing skills is quite indirect. Flywheel is a ‘sharpener’ specifically for written Spanish.

If you’ve ever used Duolingo, you should have some idea of the format in which you’ll be studying. The formula is simple: here’s a phrase, translate it into the other language; the app will remember the last time you translated a phrase and how successful you were at it; and depending on the accuracy of your answer, it will determine when you should do the same phrase again. In my opinion, Duolingo and its approach are brilliant. However… There are certain aspects that somewhat spoil the learning experience, and Flywheel was specifically designed to address them.

I have been working in Agile since 2017 in several projects.
And I would like to note here a couple of moments from real experience through the eyes of developer role in project.
Hope it will be helpful for you!

Hello, my reading friends!

My previous post (rus) on Habr was about how the Business Continuity Management function started, as well as about its relations with other corporate functions. In fact, it was quite theoretical.

This time, I’d like to tell you about some practical vectors of procedures and tools implementation as regards to Business Continuity Management, or BCM, along with Operational Resilience, or OpRes. Plus some real initiatives that can follow the BCM & OpRes implementation in a company and the associated with it investigation of the corporate landscape and procedures.

In this article, I will cover basic work with MapView (and MapFragment) markers, learn how to implement marker clustering, i.e. group markers located close to each other, and display dynamic icons in the markers, i.e. load by url and display remote images. Ultimately, we will create such map with clusters and dynamic image loading (in background).

Solution of the day.
LeetCode 956 (Hard). Tallest Billboard.
Swift. DP. O(n).

The code uses dynamic programming to solve the problem. It maintains a dictionary dp, where the keys represent the possible height differences between the two billboards, and the values represent the maximum sum of heights achieved for each height difference.

Recently, The BCI, one of the leading institutes working in the field of organizational resilience and business continuity, issued its regular report BCI Operational Resilience Report 2023 in collaboration with Riskonnect, who work with risk management solutions.

One of the questions they asked the respondents was if there was a difference between organizational resilience and operational resilience. As the answers demonstrated, for most respondents (and in most companies) these terms were used as synonyms. Having studied the report, the colleagues brought up another matter – The BCI introduced the new term of "organizational resilience" in addition to "business continuity" and "operational resilience".

If we search Habr for "Business Continuity", "DRP", "BCP", or "BIA", we’ll find quite enough posts by my colleagues (I’ve met some of them face to face and worked with the others) about data system recovery, data system testing, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and some other things. Yet, hardly any of them explain where all of it has come from, how it is changing, where it is heading – and why.

I thought the time has come to change the situation for the better and answer some of the questions like where business continuity provisions and operational resilience has come from, how they are changing, and where this trend is heading and why. To share my thoughts about development of the industry and its current de-facto state in case of a mature (or not too mature) introduction level – some things I’ve stated for my own use.

Openjob is a distributed and high-performance task scheduling framework that supports multiple cronjob, delay task, workflow, lightweight distributed computing, unlimited horizontal scaling, with high scalability and fault tolerance. Also has perfect permission management, powerful alarm monitoring, and support multiple languages

Hash, salt, SHA-1, SHA-2, std::hash.. To a non-programming person that may come up as some kind of a recipe that just does not seem to add up. In a sense, this is indeed supposed to be a gibberish to any third party and a strong, helpful mechanism for us, programmers. 

At the start of writing this article, I had one clear idea to get across the table: to finally unveil this mystery of hashing in C++ for beginners. I, a beginner myself, also wanted to solidify my knowledge in this area; so let’s get started.

3.What's an ugly smiling face?

It's the cat from curved space.

V. Komen, I. Tikhonenkov

Here we are discussing in general the majority of metrics for a stationary gravitation fields in one dimension. The only accepted approach so far to apply the equations of field (A. Einstein):

Today I would like to discuss the games Chess and Go, the world's champions, algorithms and Al.

In 1997, a computer program developed by IBM Deep Blue defeated the world Chess champion Garry Kasparov. Go remained the last board game in which humans were still better than machines.

Why is that?

Chess is primarily distinguished from Go by the number of variations for each move. Chess, the game is more predictable with more structured rules: we have value for each figure (e.g bishop = 3 pawns, rook = 5 pawns -> rook > bishop), some kind of openings and strategies. Go, in turn, has incredibly simple rules, which creates the complexity of the game for the machine. Go is one of the oldest board games. Until recently, it was assumed that a machine was not capable of playing on an equal footing with a professional player due to the high level of abstraction and the inability to sort through all possible scenarios - exactly as many valid combinations in a game on a standard 19×19 go-ban are 10¹⁸⁰ (greater than the number of atoms in the visible universe).

However, almost 20 years later, in 2015, there was a breakthrough. Google's Deep Mind company enhanced AlphaGo, which was the last step for the computer to defeat the world champions in board games. The AlphaGo program defeated the European champion and then, in March 2016 demonstrated a high level of play by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the strongest go players in the world, with a score of 4:1 in favour of the machine. A year later, Google introduced to the world a new version of AlphaGo - AlphaGoZero.

lsFusion platform is designed for rapid development of business applications. It is distributed under the terms of a Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3). The source code of the platform is available on Github.

lsFusion is best suited for creating complex systems with large numbers of entities and forms, where users need to input and process large amounts of data. However, the platform can also be used to quickly create simple applications instead of spreadsheets when Excel’s functionality is not enough.

At the same time the use of the platform will not give a great advantage when developing applications aimed at interaction with a large number of “external” users or without the need for any complex calculations. You should also take into account that the web interface is a single page application using JavaScript. Therefore, the lsFusion platform is not well-suited for creating websites, for example.

This article aims at explaining the mathematical sense of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in practice.

In my previous article, I showed you how to deploy your project to Firebase and use it for free. Now, let’s explore additional benefits of Firebase. In the upcoming article, I will show you how to set up a custom domain name for your project and utilize a free SSL certificate from Firebase.

Faced with the situation when calling Mono::block leads to deadlock - in debug I can just see how it stands on Unsafe::park and no more movement at all.

V. Komen, I. Tikhonenkov

In the previous post we've considered a model example of a motion of a free particle within a uniform gravitation field where a coupling to the field is defined by an observed inertion mass (see eq. (2) in https://habr.com/en/articles/739714/). The equation of motion was:

Yes, we need IT

The foundation of our civilization is tools. We didn't just evolve to a state that allowed us to use them, we began to improve them ourselves. The tools are becoming more intricate, more efficient and more perfect. It can be a hammer, an industrial robot, or a monetary relationship. 

Some of our tools are difficult to grasp or comprehend, they are more like an element or a subject of study: the Internet, the media, the transport system. It is even difficult to call them tools, rather it is a reflection of our activities. For simplicity, we will call everything that people do with their own hands a tool, meaning that they speed us up, make our life easier and more comfortable.

Why do we need tools? On the one hand, they help to solve emerging problems, on the other hand, they raise the standard of living. We enjoy creating tools. I would say it's one of our instincts. 

For the functioning of our body, we need some amount of mathematics. The processes in our head reflect this math into our language. We can write the language in the form of symbols. With the help of symbols, we can convey the discovery of one person to another or a thousand others. This allows us to build more and more complex tools. And most importantly, we really like it: the brain encourages us every time we invent or achieve something. Therefore, our tools are developing with us. The mechanisms of their development and improvement are sewn into us.

Migratory birds fly south in autumn, north in spring. It's their instinct. Ants build an anthill — it's their instinct. If people are left in satiety and peace, they begin to encode secret messages in the Bible, create complex etiquette, form mathematics, experiment with materials.

1 Playing Diplomacy

1.1 What this work is about

1.2 A puzzle for the talented and brave (Eccentrics are welcome: 🎶)

Hello, everyone! I’m Yaroslav Fomenko, Doubletapp iOS-developer. Since the end of May, my department colleague and I have been working on implementation, improvement, and scaling of CI/CD for our projects. In this article, we want to share a guide on preparing the Xcode project and setting up runners, scripts, and configs, as well as explain how CI/CD helps us.

To learn how and why we decided to use a Mac mini for CI/CD, click here.

Hey, Habr! I’m Yaroslav Fomenko, Doubletapp iOS-developer. After our IOS department deployed our CI/CD on a Mac Mini, we got an idea of scaling and encapsulating it. So we started researching ways to do it. First we thought of Docker, but there was neither enough info about it nor any other possible ways. In this article, we’ll look at all possible solutions we found for the deployment of Gitlab CI/CD on a device and in the cloud.

Hi Everyone,

I would like to draw your attention to some key insights from two comprehensive reports, shedding light on the importance of fraud prevention as a burgeoning field with substantial job prospects. The original reports can be accessed through the link provided at the end of this message.

Firstly, let's consider a couple of significant events from the previous year that remain highly relevant. Retail e-commerce sales surged to a staggering $5 trillion, with projections indicating a further increase to $8 trillion by 2026. Furthermore, the percentage of shoppers making cross-border purchases rose from 69% in 2019 to an impressive 76%.

These statistics affirm that online shopping is not a passing trend, as consumers are willing to make purchases from international vendors, even if it means enduring longer delivery times in exchange for lower prices. From a fraud prevention perspective, this highlights the escalating number of non-domestic payments and the rise in the use of lost or stolen cards for purchasing goods that can be resold in the future. Notably, refund fraud is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, many businesses have adapted their protocols to accommodate these emerging challenges. One such positive development is the gradual disappearance of restrictions on using payment methods that do not match the account country.

As cross-border purchases continue to proliferate, alternative payment methods are also on the rise. Current global statistics indicate that an average of four payment options are now available on merchant platforms. Additionally, open banking payment transactions are projected to surpass $330 billion globally by 2027, leading to a greater diversity of alternative payment methods. As companies embrace these methods, they are also becoming more aware of the associated risks. For instance, direct banking payment methods present unique challenges as they lack refund capabilities, while Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options introduce their own set of risks.