Another year of our blog: the results of 2018

Well-dressed New Year's fractal ( c )

Corporate week ends, you need to pause. And the next issue of the series “Results for the year”, traditional for each company, is on the air. Well, it's a tradition, you understand. This year we released 254 publications, and selected the top 10, so you can re-read in front of the main winter holiday.

Games in which you need to write code (part 2)

Games and programming - this symbiosis helps beginners to learn the basics of coding, and experienced developers - to refresh themselves and distract from difficult everyday tasks. It seems to be having fun, but at the same time with a benefit for the brain. We offer you the second part of the selection of games in which you need to write code. If you missed the first part , we also recommend you see, there are a lot of interesting things.

Soviet Maglev: the future that did not happen

In 1979, two countries at once - West Germany and the USSR - launched experimental samples of passenger maglevs. Maglev (magnetic levitation) - a magnetic-cushioned train that hovers in the air while moving, without touching any support. The Germans made this a real advertisement - a maglev drove visitors to the International Transport Exhibition IVA along a short route. With us, advertising has always been bad, so the first Soviet maglev TP-01 traveled along the factory 36-meter highway.

The evolution of traffic jams rendering in MAPS.ME

Last year we launched traffic jams in our app. We have been preparing for a long time to launch, and in the course of this preparation, our views on solving problems associated with traffic jams changed. Rendering of traffic jams has come a long way from the first prototypes to the first implementation, and today I want to talk about the evolution of rendering jams on the way to release.

Four ways to deceive the deep learning neural network

Neural networks are already widely used. Chat bots, image recognition, speech-to-text conversion, and automatic translations from one language to another are just some of the applications of deep learning that are actively supplanting other approaches. And the reason is mainly in the wider possibilities of generalization when processing large amounts of data.

What about targeted attacks? Is it possible to use the features of the work of neural networks and create such data that will be classified erroneously? In this article, we will look at several ways to complement data that delude deep learning neural networks. And what is even more interesting, this data for a person looks unchanged.

Go: Good, bad, angry

Go has some great properties that the “Good” section is about. But when it comes to using this language not for creating APIs or network servers (for which it was developed), but for implementing business logic, I consider Go too clumsy and inconvenient. Although even within the framework of network programming, there are quite a few pitfalls in the language architecture as well as in the implementation, which makes Go dangerous, despite its apparent simplicity.

I decided to write this article after applying Go in one of the minor projects. I actively used this language in a previous project when writing a proxy (HTTP and TCP) for the SaaS service. I liked working on the network part (I was learning the language along the way), but the accounting and billing parts were hard for me. My minor project was a simple API, and it seemed to me that using Go I could quickly write it. But, as you know, many projects turn out to be more difficult than expected. I had to implement data processing for calculating statistics, and again I ran into the disadvantages of Go. This article is a story about the troubles I have experienced.

How to make a moonwalker

If you didn't have a bike as a child, and now you have a Bentley,
you still did n't have a bicycle as a child.

It so happened that in my childhood there was no moonwalker . And then there was a child born. In general, I thought, and decided to make a toy for both of us.

HTTP (S) traffic balancing

Good afternoon,% username%. My name is Anton Reznikov, I am working on the Cloud Mail.Ru project. Today I want to talk about traffic balancing technologies, illustrating with a story about the development of a social network. All the characters are fictional, and the matches are almost random. Article review, compiled in the wake of the report on Highload Junior 2017. Some things may seem elementary, but the experience of interviewing shows that this is not entirely true. Something will be controversial, not without it.

Lisa Alert: life-saving volunteers

The search and rescue squad " Liza Alert " has been around for 8 years. This is a volunteer association, a community of caring people who are looking for missing people, effectively interacting with the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Lisa Alert collects applications for missing people, conducts various training events, organizing searches and the search operations themselves. The detachment does not conduct any commercial activity, does not have a settlement account and does not accept monetary donations.

Recently, Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions provided Lise Alert for free with a platform for hosting services that are actively used in search and rescue operations. We decided to talk with Sergey Chumak, senior IT director at Lisa Alert, about how volunteer rescuers work and how high technologies help them.

Russian AI Cup 2018: CodeBall. Spectacular 3D competition

Since 2012, the Russian AI Cup competition has been held annually to write artificial intelligence and bots, who are fighting fiercely in the virtual world instead of their owners. Over all past championships on the platform, more than 40,000 users registered, who sent us more than 150,000 different solutions. Each new championship is a new game task with its own rules, laws and mechanics. We try to constantly introduce new ideas and features so that the games from year to year become even more interesting and entertaining, developing our engine under the hood of the project and doing everything to the glory of our community.

This year is no exception. Mail.Ru Group in collaboration with Codeforces.com officially announce the dates of the Russian AI Cup 2018 Championship, called CodeBall.

Apple Metal in MAPS.ME

In the world there are a huge number of applications on OpenGL, and it seems that Apple is not quite agree with this. Starting with iOS 12 and MacOS Mojave, OpenGL has been rendered obsolete. We integrated Apple Metal into MAPS.ME and are ready to share our experience and results. Let us tell you how our graphics engine refactored, what difficulties we had to face and, most importantly, how many FPS we have now.

That's all. The editors of the blog goes into the drinking bout for the holidays, which is what you want. Spend time with benefits, actively relax, Olivier, chicken, shampusik, cake, tangerines.

Holiday greetings!


Fractal yolki ( c )