Month: June 2017

I wonder how the situation with quadcopters will evolve. Look, everything is progressing towards batteries lasting for days, and the operator can be at any distance from the drone. Essentially, it all comes down to the batteries. In five or fifteen years, there will be plenty of them.

This means that from that moment on, privacy in the open air will cease to exist. You step into your kitchen, and there’s a camera hanging outside the window watching you. There are no real means to counter this: it’s not like you can shoot at them with a pistol. And even if you knock it down, the data has already been sent to the network, and the owner has lost a hundred bucks.

Legally banning them is also pointless: it’s impossible to identify the owner with powerful batteries in place. Overall, with a sufficiently smart payload, a drone can easily escape if it is small, can move in any direction, and can do so swiftly and unpredictably.

What do you think, will this change people’s lives? Option #1: everyone ignores the lack of privacy and just lives honestly and openly (I doubt it). Option #2: People will start hiding what’s interesting to capture better. Option #3: Some form of countermeasures will be developed. Example: combat automaton drones that launch when an “intruder” approaches. We would then observe occasional drone fights 🙂

However, there is also a fourth option. Only a small group of people who already do not need drones will be able to afford them. And the rest will quietly plant rice and solve completely different problems.

The guys next to me are fine-tuning an automated watering system for window plants on a Raspberry PI, and they are having some issues with the humidity sensors. They don’t work very consistently. Well, the reason why is quite clear. I just suggested an idea to them – to place the plants on scales and water them when the weight drops below a certain value (meaning that the soil is drying out).

And from there, an interesting discussion ensued. What contributes to a plant’s mass? After all, trees grow, taking mass from somewhere. Where from?

There are few options: soil, water, carbon dioxide. What decreases and in what proportion? If a plant gains a kilogram in weight, by how much should the soil get lighter?

PDF on the topic http://www.eurohydro.com/pdf/articles/gb_plant-food4.pdf

Even after reinstalling the system, I continue to experience the same problem with Word: sometimes it seems like the last pressed key (like backspace or space) gets stuck, after which I watch helplessly as characters are deleted or added (and I can’t do anything), followed by Word completely freezing.

So, I found a workaround. As soon as I notice the “jitter” and instead of one letter, two or three are added, I must urgently move the cursor with the mouse to another part of the document, and then nothing will happen. If I do not do this, the aforementioned will occur, 100%. Here it goes again, I’m trying to recover the document

This is a perfect example of how to implement faceted navigation on a website (search and catalogs). Several interesting ideas. Take note, for example, of how the selection of facets that didn’t fit was handled. Or the horizontal facets?

https://www.myntra.com/*?userQuery=true

Exploring the topic of NLP, I stumbled upon an interesting e-commerce search project – @[484147038414629:274:AddStructure] https://www.addstructure.com/ Queries in natural language, support for contextual search, transparent facets. Cool, well done guys. Looks like a breakthrough. But who are the clients?..

Today, I discovered OpenNLP—a Java toolkit for text processing based on machine learning methods. Spent the entire evening getting it to work with SOLR. Someone had started it, but it was feeble and did not work. I finally got it running properly. Now, when I search for a red IKEA table, I can show not just anything red from IKEA, but all tables, primarily red ones, secondly from IKEA, and then just tables. Without this tweak, one of these three options would lead, making it not so easy for the store owner to achieve any one strategy.

I’ll polish it up; an article is coming soon. Right now, I’m as pleased as punch.

What do you think, how in demand is a local ad server, such as Revive Adserver (ex-OpenX) or OrbitSoft Ad Server, in online stores? As an addition to CMS?

If anything – I know the anonymous candidate X quite well, the guy is very sharp, and I highly recommend him to anyone building large e-commerce systems from scratch. Worked for many years in major e-commerce. Grab him (just in case: the photo is of Sergey, and the post is from him, and you should contact him, but remember, this isn’t about Sergey, who is also great, but about the anonymous candidate)

Google knows everything

Live a century — learn a century. It turns out, René Descartes devised the Cartesian coordinate system for Russia, but for the rest of the world, it’s called Cartesian. Because Descartes’ name (Descartes) translates to Cartesian. Gradually recalling the philosophy from university days, there was indeed Cartesianism