Pull to refresh

PopSci

Show first
Rating limit
Level of difficulty

Why I need RSS 3.0

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 6 min
Views 505

In the past 5 years, I moved across 3 countries and 2 continents. It was not a short tourist travel or vacation, but a full immigrant experience with 1+ year experience minimum. I had to adapt to new cultures, new languages, new people, new food, new weather, new everything. One of the pains was to adopt new online services and information sources.

The problems I have faced were not obvious and interesting at the same time. I tried to analyze what was missing and required to make life easier.

Read more
Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 1

Trade bot python setup (using Binance API), Vol 1

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 5 min
Views 2.7K

Trading robots are conquering the Wall Street! Learn how to create your first automated python trading bot.

We present a fully functioning trading bot pipeline on python using the Binance API. Starting with the general introduction, we provided a comprehensive overview of main API calls and their implementation on python. After this we show a fully functioning python code presenting a basic trading bot with core features using static channel breakout strategy.

Read more
Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 0

Toward the January meetup on portable SystemVerilog examples in Silicon Valley

Reading time 4 min
Views 953

The team developing a set of portable SystemVerilog examples decided to organize the first event in Silicon Valley on Sunday, January 14 from 2PM till 5PM at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. If the first event is successful we are going to make it recurrent. You can register for the event on Meetup or LinkedIn.

The current directions of the group:

Read more
Total votes 9: ↑8 and ↓1 +7
Comments 0

The first Silicon Valley meetup on portable SystemVerilog examples for ASIC and FPGA

Reading time 3 min
Views 810

Need to start your career or hobby in digital design and verification of silicon chips or reconfigurable hardware? Explore multiple FPGA toolchains and open-source ASIC tools? Design your own RISC-V CPU or ML accelerator? Prepare for an interview in SystemVerilog? Come to our first Silicon Valley meetup on portable SystemVerilog examples for ASIC and FPGA.

Read more
Total votes 4: ↑3 and ↓1 +2
Comments 2

Interview with Stephanie Planque from Covalent Bioscience

Reading time 8 min
Views 343

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself – the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue – is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged – young – state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio, somewhere between cold, rainy Saint-Petersburg and warm, sunny Huston, we meet Stephanie Planque! For those of you who are not familiar with her, here is a brief introduction.

Stephanie Planque was awarded the PhD in 2009 by the University of Texas-Houston Medical School for her advances in applying electrophilic analogs of proteins to decipher the beneficial and harmful functional effects of catabodies. She then expanded her focus to vaccination and therapeutic catabody identification using proprietary electrophilic target analogs. Her work was published in 49 peer-reviewed scientific articles, she has numerous national/international conference presentations. She moved fulltime as a co-founder to Covalent Bioscience in 2018 to focus on rapidly translating their electrophilic vaccine/catabody technologies to clinical reality.

Read more
Total votes 5: ↑4 and ↓1 +3
Comments 0

SHA-256 Reversing in Bitcoin Systems as a Neural Machine Translation Problem

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 15 min
Views 826

Bitcoin is a digital currency created in January 2009 due to the housing market crash. It is designed to have lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms. Each Bitcoin transaction is recorded in a public log, but the identities of buyers and sellers remain anonymous. While this privacy feature allows users to conduct transactions without being traced, it also facilitates the buying and selling goods and services without leaving a trail. Bitcoin is built on cryptographic evidence, avoiding weaknesses inherent in trust-based models.  Cryptography is critical to the Bitcoin system as it maintains data secrecy and prevents unauthorized spending from another user's wallet. Advancements in cryptography have led to the development of various hashing algorithms to secure sensitive data. The SHA-256 hash function is widely recognized as a robust and extensively used cornerstone. However, the reversibility of hash functions remains a critical issue in cybersecurity. In the following essay, we propose that one-way cryptography processes based on hash functions can be reversed using neural networks in machine translation. Assuming this hypothesis is true and considering some quantity algorithms to decrypt certain types of hash functions, we will highlight their effects on the Bitcoin system.

Read more
Total votes 8: ↑8 and ↓0 +8
Comments 0

Empowering Digital Artists: Building a Royalty-Enabled NFT Marketplace

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 5 min
Views 459

As NFTs spread across the world, users spent millions of dollars to buy digital assets to prove their uniqueness. Many creators and artists showcase their beautiful products, such as artworks, music, etc., in the NFT marketplace. What if a creator can profit from their work even after selling it to another business? This is where royalty comes in; it is a recent addition to the NFT space. Owing NFT royalties can benefit artists and creators from succeeding sales to the business. 

Once NFT royalties became a hot topic and gained popularity among artists and creators. Later, arguments were evolved to remove royalties that had swayed other NFT creators. DeGods, the popular Solana's NFT project, has moved its royalty model to 0%. However, creating a royalty-based NFT marketplace attracts many creators around the world. In this article, we will delve into the development process of NFT marketplace royalties and how it benefits enthusiastic artists from secondary sales. 

Read more
Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
Comments 1

Exploring VALID/READY protocol, pipelines and experimenting with flow control using an HDL training tool

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 1 min
Views 660

Ссылка на русскую версию / link to Russian version

Understanding valid/ready protocol is extremely important for every microarchitect.

Valid/ready is one of the main protocols used to organise flow-control inside a logic block as well as on inter-block (SoC) level.

In the last lesson, we explored FIFO buffer using hdlgadgets - human-in-the-loop HDL training tool.

This time we will take two FIFO buffers (which form a pipeline with valid/ready handshakes) and will experiment with it by changing flow-control logic of the pipeline.

We will show that valid/ready is not only a mechanism for transferring data from one FIFO queue to another, but also a method for organizing various kinds of logical functionality between queues.

If you have not worked with valid/ready protocol before, you will be surprised how easy it is to achieve desired functionality of the design by simply writing couple of lines of Verilog code in the handshaking logic block between two FIFOs.

Read further and watch the video
Total votes 6: ↑6 and ↓0 +6
Comments 0

Game economy design of Premium games through the example of a 4X strategy on PC

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 9 min
Views 811

How to design an economy for your game? The answer to this question might require a series of lectures or articles. The fundamental difference in the approach is based, first of all, on monetization model: F2P or B2P. The second thing that defines the approach to developing an economy system is game genre. This article reviews the case of designing the game economy for a B2P (premium) game, which doesn’t involve earning on microtransactions.

Read more
Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 0

A (more) accurate camera sensor dynamic range measurement

Reading time 7 min
Views 726

Hello, everyone! In this post, let's talk about how to (more) accurately measure the dynamic range of a camera sensor and what can be done with these measurements.

Of course, I am not an expert in computer vision, a programmer or a statistician, so please feel free to correct me in the comments if I make mistakes in this post. Here my interest was primarily focused on everyday and practical tasks, such as photography, but I believe the results may also be useful to computer vision professionals.

Read more
Rating 0
Comments 2

2. Information Theory + ML. Mutual Information

Reading time 11 min
Views 517

In Part 1, we became familiar with the concept of entropy.

In this part, we will delve into the concept of Mutual Information, which opens doors to error-resistant coding, compression algorithms, and offers a fresh perspective on regression and Machine Learning tasks.

It is an essential component that will pave the way, in the next section, for tackling Machine Learning problems as tasks of extracting mutual information between features and the predicted variable.

Here, there will be three interesting and crucial visualizations.

The first one will visualize entropy for two random variables and their mutual information.
The second one will shed light on the very concept of dependency between two random variables, emphasizing that zero correlation does not imply independence.
The third one will demonstrate that the bandwidth of an information channel has a straightforward geometric interpretation through the convexity measure of the entropy function.

In the meantime, we will prove a simplified version of the Shannon-Hartley theorem regarding the maximum bandwidth of a noisy channel. Let's dive in!

Read more
Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0 +2
Comments 0

1. Information theory + ML. Entropy

Reading time 10 min
Views 827

I've long wanted to create educational materials on the topic of Information Theory + Machine Learning. I found some old drafts and decided to polish them up here, on Habr.

Information Theory and Machine Learning seem to me like an interesting pair of fields, the deep connection between which is often unknown to ML engineers, and whose synergy has not yet been fully revealed.

Let's start with basic concepts like Entropy, Information in a message, Mutual Information, and channel capacity. Next, there will be materials on the similarity between tasks of maximizing Mutual Information and minimizing Loss in regression problems. Then there will be a section on Information Geometry: Fisher metric, geodesics, gradient methods, and their connection to Gaussian processes (moving along the gradient using SGD is moving along the geodesic with noise).

It's also necessary to touch upon AIC, Information Bottleneck, and discuss how information flows in neural networks – Mutual Information between layers (Information Theory of Deep Learning, Naftali Tishby), and much more. It's not certain that I'll be able to cover everything listed, but I'll try to get started.

Read more
Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
Comments 0

Exploring FIFO principles using an HDL training tool

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 1 min
Views 511

Ссылка на русскую версию / link to Russian version

FIFO is a key concept in hardware design. Understanding of FIFO is necessary for understanding the valid/ready protocol, which in turn is necessary for organisation of flow-control within a design.

Unfortunately, there are very few books on this topic, and to be fair, microarchitectural concepts are quite difficult to master from books, since understanding of these concepts are coming with practice. In other words it is more about developing hardware intuition.

The idea of the HDL training tool is that it can help develop a hardware intuition, providing the opportunity to explore ready-made scenarios in a step-by-step interactive way. The tool also provides detailed visualization of a simulated scenario.

Since the tool is a front-end for the HDL simulator, the real, synthesized SystemVerilog is executed on the simulator itself, which can be viewed and even modified.

So, the video of exploring FIFO on the training tool is here:

Watch the video and continue reading
Total votes 4: ↑4 and ↓0 +4
Comments 0

How to conduct UX brainstorming sessions effectively: tips and methods that work

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 6 min
Views 835

Brainstorming is a popular working method which is commonly used by UX design teams. It involves a group of designers meeting (whether offline or via video call) and generating as many ideas as possible to find the best solution to a specific problem or come up with creative design ideas. Brainstorming sessions are usually held at the start of a UX project so that designers could use the ideas they think are the best later in the process of product creation. These sessions can vary in duration and form depending on which problems need to be solved, how many people participate and how many ideas need to be generated. 

Read more
Rating 0
Comments 3

ATM security analysis 3.0: PHDays 12 in review

Reading time 8 min
Views 675

 Python, Java, C++, Delphi, PHP—these programming languages were used create a virtual crypto ATM machine to be tested by the participants of the $NATCH contest at Positive Hack Days 12. The entire code was written by ChatGPT and proved to be exceptionally good. This time, we had reviewed the contest concept and decided to use a report system. In addition to standard tasks (kiosk bypass, privilege escalation, and AppLocker bypass), this year's participants faced new unusual tasks. Read on below to find out which ones.

Read more
Rating 0
Comments 1

Let's kill all frameworks at once

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 14 min
Views 6K

The general trend of technology development is characterized by surges and declines. Consider, for instance, the mass movement of human bodies. Initially, horses and wagons were used, which gradually evolved into a distinct industry. Then trains appeared abruptly. Horses were quickly forgotten, and the focus shifted to a new avenue. Steam became an object of study and evolved into a complex science. Diesel and electricity developed concurrently. At a certain point, steam engines became obsolete, and everyone transitioned to diesel and electricity. Similarly, we are now transitioning to electric cars that require significantly fewer fluids.

Technologies evolve and function until new technologies completely replace them. I believe we are entering an era where framework and Electron technologies may be eclipsed by generative AI. Let's examine some examples.

Read more
Rating 0
Comments 8