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Mukhammad Fayzoda | VK

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- VK is one of the most visited platforms on the Russian internet. We create products that we, our friends, family and 97 million other people use every day. We believe that it’s important to share our experience, support talented specialists and develop IT education in Russia. - VK’s mission is to connect people, services and companies by creating simple and convenient communication tools. - We set and achieve ambitious goals. We demand a lot of ourselves since the result of our work is used by our friends, family and millions of others. Every day brings new challenges, and we welcome these because they help us grow. - We create products that we're proud of. It's not easy, but that's what makes it interesting. We're always on the lookout for specialists who are ready to take on challenges, go above and beyond and think about others, from users to their colleagues. - The VK Team is based in three cities: Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Sochi, with regional representative offices in Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kazakhstan. - Our headquarters is located in the Singer House, a historical landmark in the heart of Saint Petersburg. Among ourselves, we call the building "Zinger" and "Zee". When people ask, we usually just say that it’s the "House of Books". The Singer House is where we meet to discuss the most important decisions. - VK also has offices in the U Krasnogo Mosta business center, where the product and technical teams are based. - Since mid-2020, we have been building teams that work fully remotely from anywhere they want. This makes it possible for people from cities without VK offices to join the team.

VK.com

Howdy Hackers! I’m German Tebiev, the Software Development Process Architect @ . Devexperts First off, I’d like to express my gratitude to the staff, and all other beautiful humans of HackerNoon, for nominating me for a 2022 Noonies award!☺️ I’ve been nominated for the following category, and if you think my writing offers good value, please take some time to check out these award pages and vote for me: HackerNoon Contributor of the Year- PRODUCTIVITY As a writer in the tech industry, I believe that the most significant enhancements we can make in our industry are non-technical. Our software development processes are rather basic and we also try to solve everything with software. I firmly believe in the following words by Peter Drucker: The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the twentieth century was the fiftyfold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the twenty-first century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker. Learn more about my views on productivity, IT management, and my tech industry journey via the interview below. 1. What do you currently do, and what’s your favorite part about it? What I do has a well-known name: management. Unfortunately, quite a few people would be happy to hear something about management. In books and articles covering the topic, you can regularly find something like: be a leader, do not be a manager. I can understand this request. The major problem is that overwhelmingly, ones with the management title often try to achieve the system’s (e.g., the team’s) goals violently. You have been there: long hours, poor requirements, no explicitly set expectations, and no learning. There is the opposite way, based on the knowledge of Deming, Drucker, Ohno, Goldratt, and many other diligent people. This way is about continuous learning, empathy, statistics, systems theory, and more. In the end, it is about making systems so capable that they surmount yesterday’s challenges with much less effort. Now I try to apply all my knowledge of scientific management to software development. I like that we are at the beginning, with so many things to do. 2. How did you get started with your Tech Career? I entered my first university to get a bachelor’s degree in management in 2009. After the first year, I thought, well, I enjoyed this, but how can I be helpful to the world? There was no answer, and I started looking into programming. I started with the markup language in the vk.com social network. Then I switched to learning HTML and JavaScript. These days, I was trying to write down my lectures in HTML to receive some practice. After a few years and a few trials of running a project with my friends, I decided it was time to go in-depth. I entered for the second bachelor’s degree in computational mathematics and cybernetics. Seven months later, I was on my first job creating educational games for children. 3. If Utopia were a color what color do you think it’d be and why? I like green. Especially when green trees fit into our cities’ landscapes.🙂 4. If everything about HackerNoon changed drastically, what is one detail you’d like to keep exactly the same?  OR What’s your favorite thing to do with HackerNoon and why? My favorite thing about HackerNoon is the editorial support you provide. It gives a pleasing sense of teamwork.☺️ 5. Tell us more about the things you write/make/manage/build! I write on two topics: personal productivity and IT management from the perspective of several praised theories. These two topics are of the most significant interest to me as I feel they are where we can gain the most important win as a programming community. I also have several articles on technical topics in . The funniest ones I find there are about monorepos and polyrepos. the Uploadcare blog 6. What’s your favorite thing about the internet? The fact that here we can meet people whom we would never meet otherwise. 7. It’s an apocalypse of ‘walking dead’ proportions and you can only own a singular piece of technology, what would it be? I would take what we now know as a kanban board with flow analytics attached to it. With these two things, we can restore civilization. Here is an example of what we can achieve knowing the flow-oriented approach: In fact, the antecedents of a focus on efficient flows can be traced to the sixteenth century, more precisely, to the Venetian Arsenal in Northern Italy, which was the most powerful and efficient shipbuilding enterprise in the world. The arsenal was capable of producing a fully equipped merchant or naval vessel in less than a day. Elsewhere in Europe, it could take months to produce a vessel of a similar size. 8. What is your least favorite thing about the internet? Good things sometimes are hard to discover. 9. If you were given $10 million to invest in something today what would you invest in and why? First, I would need to invest in discovering something that would provide a constant cash flow, as I’m not sure that $10 million would be enough. Then I would invest in the giant books graph, containing all the references between all ever written books. It would provide us with some insights into the structure of the knowledge of humanity. 10. What’s something you’re currently learning or excited to learn? Currently, I read about the evolution in Richard Dawkins’s “The Blind Watchmaker”. It has rather interesting logic, quite different from what we are used to. 11. Would you rather travel 10 years into the past or 10 years into the future? Give reasons for your answer. I would instead discover opportunities to help me feel good in 10 years and later.🙂

Our Most Significant Enhancements are Non-Technical: Interview with Noonies Nominee German Tebiev

Soviet architectural heritage is very disgusting and romantic at the same time. In every city, from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, there are the same plattenbau buildings. This makes a lot of people feel this panel architecture a part of their cultural code and nature — depressing and chthonic. Here in Russia, we even have a popular slogan “Russia’s for Sad” (which is also wordplay with right-wings “Russia’s for Russian”). People produce a lot of sad content (music, footage, art) based on these architectural references. So once I thought: what if a neural network would be trained to paint this Sad Russia. What if a soulless algorithm may draw landscapes that are soul pleasure for a generation of Russian doomers. That’s how the was born. project Neurussia Part 1: Data mining The choice of a data source fell on the largest Russian social network — VK. And here is why: VK has a post suggestion mechanism, where people can suggest their own content to be published in large groups. This leads VK to contain a lot more thematic visual content than other social networks. For example, contains around 200 thousand images! Here is what I got initially from VK: the largest group about the aesthetics of Russian ghettos For data scrapping, I used a . In case one would like to reproduce my pipeline, , and below is an example of how to download images from the latest group post. python wrapper for VK API here are API methods descriptions os vk_api urllib.request ( )
    key = input( ) captcha.try_again(key) code = input( ) (code, ) attachment post[ ]: attachment[ ] == :
            photo = attachment[ ] size photo[ ]: size[ ] == imres:
                    url = size[ ]
                    filename = ( .join(url.split( )[ :])).split( )[ ]
                    urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename)

phone = input( )
password = input( )
domain = sess = vk_api.VkApi(phone, password, captcha_handler=captcha_handler, auth_handler=auth_handler)
sess.auth()
api = sess.get_api()

posts = api.wall.get(domain=domain, count= )[ ]
save_post_pictures(posts[ ], ) import import import : def captcha_handler (captcha) print f"url: \n" {captcha.get_url()} "Enter captcha code: " return : def auth_handler () "Enter 2FA code: " return True : def save_post_pictures (post, imres) for in 'attachments' if 'type' 'photo' 'photo' for in 'sizes' if 'type' 'url' '_' '/' -2 '?' 0 "phone " "password " 'yebenya' # vk.com/yebenya 1 'items' 0 'z' # https://vk.com/dev/photo_sizes - z max size To filter downloaded images I used and . The idea of using a NN detector is to find all objects that it can find and throw out those images leaving only landscapes footage. Natural Language Toolkit helped me to filter out posts by their captions using . Finally, I got around 10k images of Russian landscapes. EfficientDet NLTK stemming Part 2: StyleGAN training I used the famous Nvidia architecture StyleGAN2 with discriminator augmentations. Authors claim that augmentations allow better results on small datasets (under 30k images). the official code, and my “duct tape” modification for Colab training and video generation (will expand on it below). Here is here is The official paper implementation uses the .tfrecord format to store data for training (how to convert images to .tfrecord is described ). When running on Colab this feature can drastically reduce the number of images that you could process because the official code doesn’t use any compression in tfrecords. here However, that uses compression and probably should allow you to work with larger datasets on Colab (I didn’t try it yet). there is another modification On Colab, each epoch is taking about half an hour for a dataset of 10k images in 1024 resolution. Fun fact: on the very first epochs the colormap has rapidly transformed from random bright colors into 50-shades-of-gray (above picture). After a few epochs, I got something like this: Part 3: Video generation When the first impressive results have achieved an idea to create a music video for my friends-musicians emerged. But how to make the video at least a bit consistent with music? Here the latent space of the generative model may help. The thing is, during training, the neural network has learned how to describe a whole picture with a vector of dimensionality 512. And all the parameters of the final painting are embedded in this vector. So one may find a combination of those parameters that correspond to, for example, time of day, or height of the building, or the number of windows. This may be a complex task itself (however, ), so for my purposes, I decided to simply interpolate between images keyframe-to-keyframe using their latent vectors. For this purpose, I changed only a few lines of code in to make it read a list of keyframes with corresponding latent vectors and generate N intermediate frames linearly interpolating between them with 60fps. there are some approaches generate.py Conclusion With the advent of such approaches as StyleGAN, generative art received a new round of growth. Some are even without writing a line of code. Also, Colab drastically reduces the entry-level and the amount of time to make something interesting work. Hope that this article also will help someone to expand their creativity using modern AI methods. selling generative art on Christie’s auction Resources StyleGAN2-ada VK API wrapper StyleGAN2 modification for Colab Neurussia on instagram https://ferluht.medium.com/neurussia-neural-network-paints-depressing-russian-cityscapes-1052aeb51ae3 Also published on:

This Neural Network Paints Depressing Russian Cityscapes

Exploring a business model where startups are challenging the whole governments to heal the world faster than charities. What my Internet looks like Hi, my name is Pyotr. I’m from Russia. I use VPNs so you can easily reach me on LinkedIn and Reddit. You can also text me in Telegram because I’m using it’s proxies. I have a sophisticated system of passwords. I prefer pin-code for my phone over touch id. My disks are encrypted. I’m hiding all sensitive data with double bottom to protect it from thieves and (more importantly) from those who swore to protect me from thieves. Yes I’m a bit paranoid, but… People are getting . So I guess I do have a real danger of being arrested for the kind of shit I’m going to discuss here. Nothing will stop then an officer to “use” my finger (no, no, not separately from me, not that bad) to unlock my phone and get evidence against me. jailed just for likes and reposts With all these measures I’m still risking. But I value freedom and truth more. Telegram proxies I’m not unique Not at all. In Russia — and I believe in many other countries with authoritarian leadership — almost everyone who deals with Internet (meaning everyone) feels a bit constrained. The only way to feel free is to use some or all of the means described above. From one side it’s getting worse. Services get banned. Telegram, LinkedIn, archive.org, deviantart.com and many other seemingly random websites, like PornHub and the new design of Reddit (old.reddit.com is fine — try figure out the criteria!) are all unavailable in Russia. From the other side there is a technological response. Startups are already helping. There are literally billions of people who want to use services unavailable in their countries. Citizens armed with unstoppable technology are starting to oppose their own governments. I believe a huge market is hidden here, underestimated both by entrepreneurs (in terms of income) and governments (in terms of threat). In this post I would like to explore its opportunities from an entrepreneur’s point of view. Telegram example This year’s telegram story in Russia is a good example of Tech vs Gov fight. The fight which made Telegram way more advanced, brought an army of new users to it and made them super-loyal. It shifted Telegram in peoples minds into another dimension, now associating it with resistance, freedom and hope. On October 2017 FSB (Russian federal security service) to hand over users’ encryption keys. Company declined, payed $14,000 fine and found itself in a half-year-long futile debates. asked Telegram FSB is above Constitution. They don’t care for free speech and the right for anonymous communication. They just need the encryption keys. FSB is above logic. They don’t care end-to-end encryption means Telegram even doesn’t have the keys. They just need the encryption keys. Or they will shut down Telegram in Russia. On April 10th 2018 seeing argumentation is useless, Durov steps back and decides to send the “keys” in an “official” response to the FSB head: The joke originates from a . But as Telegram team , it became the only “official” response Russian Internet community is aware of. third party helped to promote it Less than a week after another Russian bureaucracy beast — media watchdog RosKomNadzor — started blocking Telegram. The fight had begun. RosKomNadzor blocking millions of IPs every day, Telegram creating even more. During the first couple of days over . The number of Telegram users in Russia is . Four million less than that! Another fact — 17 mln is 0,5% of all in the world! 17 mln ip-addresses were blocked 13 mln possible public IPv4 addresses One just cannot shut 0,5% of Internet down without consequences. First, a lot of “good” Russian websites hosted at Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean and other foreign hosting services were down. Second, Google, Viber, Facebook — all started to have blackouts but stayed more or less available. Then Asana (task manager), Dashlane (password manager), Trello, npmjs.com were down. This was the point when I started to use VPN just to continue work on my . After that came the total collapse. The Internet became useless. And not only Internet. People complained on . At an apogee RosKomNadzor charity blockchain project ATMs and credit card terminals not working even blocked itself! RosKomNadzor logo community revised 2 weeks after businesses were to lose $2 billions. RosKomNadzor finally listened to major Russian media companies, begging it to calm down. The Internet gradually became usable. I still can’t imagine myself without a VPN though. estimated From Durov’s official vk.com profile As it was often heard those days RosKomNadzor broke the Internet. But had it broke Telegram? Well, I couldn’t access Telegram for around 2 hours one day. Shame. Aftermath of this battle I believe by starting this battle Russian government made one of the most crucial mistakes in it’s modern history. They broke the Internet, damaged or destroyed business, wasted tax money. All for the battle with some phantom terrorists (but perceived as a battle for control over masses). Which is more important — they’ve lost this battle. Unsurprisingly it lead to protests and made the already growing antagonism of us vs them even stronger. and flew them into the air through out the country demanding Telegram blocking to stop (the protest was organized through Telegram). People made paper planes REUTERS/Tatyana Makeyeva. Not only in Russia Technology evolves so fast that no government is capable of keeping up with it. The smartest ones cooperate and those who try to fight technologies fail. Startups have more competence and will always by ahead. Durov understands this asymmetry. He had a competence to see the robustness of his app. He saw no positive outcomes of negotiations with the officials. He saw the opposition leadership vacuum in Russia. And he exploited the situation, mocking the officials with “keys”, organizing the paper planes campaign, promoting provocative artwork and urging people for “digital resistance”. Durov Digital Resistance logo. proposes A young smart outcast fighting the whole government. Can you imagine a better pr campaign? Having poor competence in technology Russian government had only succeeded in creating an important precedent. It showed that WE’ve got something THEY can’t fight with — the unstoppable technology. How can other entrepreneurs benefit? A feature that helped Telegram survive is it’s MTProto proxies. It allows anyone to create a telegram proxy and invite advertisers. Advertisers in turn can add their chat to user’s chat list. While using proxy a user cannot unsubscribe from this chat. This way users are paying with their attention to get freedom of communication. Telegram gets unlimited source of new proxies. Notice the Proxy Sponsor mark at the very first chat. The check-marked shield at the top means the proxy is active. A foreign company providing a service to resists the current regime. The regime can’t do anything about it. People are willing to pay for it. Providing basic human rights with unstoppable technology from an unreachable jurisdiction — sounds like a business model! For convenience of further conversation let’s coin a term for it. Freedom as a Service is too pessimistic as it suggests that you’ve already lost your freedom. Revolution as a Service is closer, but too romantic and suggests lost freedom too. What comes before you lose freedom and have to regain it through revolution? You resist. I’d suggest Resistance as a service (RaaS) is the best candidate. Let’s keep the definition simple and broad enough not to limit our further thinking. RaaS — a service providing access to basic human rights. Now that we have a term lets explore the business model further. We are still looking from an entrepreneur’s perspective. We need to understand opportunities and maybe generate ideas. Demand is growing and self-generated. Have a look at by country at Wikipedia and try to estimate the number of people in those countries. There are literally billions of people. The demand is already huge. Internet censorship and surveillance And demand is growing. Any government has to defend it’s sovereignty. Foreign influence is a threat. Defense lines are trenched through means of communication. But these are the same means people and businesses operate on. Push too little and you’ll probably lose power letting foreign ideas to leak in. Push too hard and you’ll find yourself slowing down economy and depressing people. Which may lead to losing power in a more dramatic way. some all A pragmatic solution would be to relax and stop fighting. Redirect huge fighting budgets into social programs. Doing good is the most cost effective strategy as one cannot influence a happy nation. But the most important goal of power — is to keep the power. Oppressive countries tend to deviate into fighting. The more they fight the more the demand to resist the more they fight the more the demand to resist… This is what we see in Russia — positive feedback loop. The demand for resistance is self-generated. More of unstoppable technologies are coming. RaaS is possible with existing VPNs, torrents, and a variety of peer-to-peer techs. But true unstoppable technologies are just about to come. IPFS Consider blockchains. With decentralization, trust, security and sometimes privacy out of the box blockchains got a crucial success driver — incentivization. People can actually make money by keeping the system secure. is the simplest example. Telegram with its MTProto proxies created a platform where advertisers met proxy providers. Blockchains will unleash all kinds of unseen interactions like that. Durov is already there by the way with his . Mining Telegram Open Network Credits: Project Loon Consider satellite or stratosphere Internet. It might be very close as , and are competing hard to deliver it. Today governments can only stop digital resistance by hurting themselves. In the nearest future there will be no chance at all. Unless somebody is considering shooting 650 satellites. Starlink Project Loon OneWeb Add up open hardware DIY devices and you have a fairly good primordial soup of technologies to play around. This mix of technologies is so powerful that frankly it scares me. I can imagine a world where governments are helpless (or even useless). No matter how liberal you are you don’t want a government to collapse. Let’s just gradually replace its functions. Competitors. There are no pure RaaS solutions. There is a which advertises uncensored Internet as its main feature. There is , which is a peer-to-peer networking tool and (“unblocking” twitter) powered by it. There is petitions platform . These may be considered pure RaaS solutions. VPN Lantern FireTweet change.org But usually censorship circumvention and RaaS come as a byproduct. Or a service qualifies as a RaaS only for a specific group of people. Depending on where you are and what you are doing. You can use Torrents or IPFS to download free music and videos, or you can share a book prohibited in your country. You can avoid ads with network, or you can build a censorship resistant opposition website. You can use VPN to stay safe on public WiFi or you can reach out to somebody on Facebook from China (or enjoy the new design of Reddit from Russia!). Tor The mere fact that there are so few of pure RaaS is an opportunity itself. Created with photofunia.com Ideas. RaaS is wider than just an Internet access. We have determined RaaS as a service providing access to basic human rights. This may sound a bit obscure, especially if you need no effort to receive these rights. Here are some example situations for you to figure out what human rights are ready to be outsourced (maybe a better definition of RaaS is outsourcing government functions?). Sorry for the long and pessimistic list: a huge bully keeps beating bar visitors and security is afraid to stop him because he is from police a women tries to get medicine under sanctions for her son and (happy end story, thank God) end up in prison as a drug dealer all the money you’ve earned the last month now worth less than a loaf of bread 40 children and no official is punished (damn it hurts). killed in a shopping mall fire you return from a war and find somebody occupying your house, there is no record proving it belongs to you you don’t trust elections (or you’ve got no choice) you’ve got no identity you’ve got no Internet access (no device, no line) These are still unsolved problems in many areas of the world. With technology and competence solutions may be simple and even profitable. This may sound cynical, but maybe it is the fastest way to make people happy. Maybe RaaS can solve problems which cannot be solved by charity and non-profits. Maybe it is worth trying to figure out a solution in terms of for-profit? Try asking new questions. How can we provide basic human rights as a service? Or — another way of thinking — how can we outsource government functions? Can RaaS be more efficient and even more ethical than charity? These questions may bring a lot of ideas. Demand is huge and growing. Resources are in abundance. Competition is little. And most importantly there is a great chance to make the world a better place. Resistance never dies If you are an entrepreneur in a safe place, have a cup of coffee and think about it. You probably got skills and resources to help a lot of people. to , that on and . Bad men need nothing more compass their ends than good men should look do nothing — John Stuart Mill If you are a citizen of an oppressive country. Remember after one hope is gone there is always another one. Resist.

Resistance as a Service

painting of me by , commissioned by a scammer Elena Malva Software is eating the world, but blockchains are kicking the asses of scammers. If you haven’t heard about by now, you’re likely living under a rock. Blockchain ICOs make Silicon Valley bros wet their pants and it’s like a new religion has been created overnight. the blockchain Very few people understand what a blockchain is, let alone what a blockchain can do in the real world, but the story I’m about to tell you will hopefully illustrate it. This is a crazy story I’m about to tell you. It involves art, multiple identity thefts, the Ukraine, the Steem blockchain, myself and Sherlock Holmes. Well, it’s not the Sherlock Holmes, but an account in named @sherlockholmes. real Steemit Here goes: A number of weeks ago, a user named painted a very detailed portrait of myself. I didn’t know this user as she was not my friend at the time in Steemit. Here’s the portrait she painted of me (as my Steemicide Hotline character). It’s quite detailed and pretty good: Steemit @elena2017 art by Elena Malva I upvoted her post which resulted in her gaining some Steem, reputation score increases and also name recognition in the community. After she painted my portrait, I began supporting and sharing more of her posts in Steemit. She began attracting more followers because her artistic talent was pretty impressive. Here’s one of my favorites of hers: art by Elena Malva Fast forward several weeks….. Yesterday, a user named appropriately, , revealed his shocking findings about the account, @elena2017: it was a total fake. And he had the evidence to prove it. @elena2017 had stolen the identity of a real artist from the Ukraine named and had been posting her photos, paintings and drawings on Steemit for months. But how was my portrait painted, and who painted it? Who was the person holding the portrait of me? Someone painted my portrait, but who? @sherlockholmes Elena Malva This is where the story gets super weird. The scammer had contacted the real Elena ( ) and paid her $15 to create a portrait of me. The scammer had also requested that the real Elena take photos of herself holding the portrait of me. Here is a photo of the real Elena holding the portrait of me: Elena Malva Elena holds painting of me After the scammer had paid the real Elena to paint a picture of me, she posted it on Steemit and milked this thing like no tomorrow. The scammer wrote several posts that glorified me as “Steemit’s Best Blogger” and other stuff like that, which I naturally upvoted. A quick visit to the real reveals the disturbing reality of being smack in the middle of an identity theft. She clearly states that she has never joined Steemit, and that someone has stolen her identity and is posting her artwork for monetary gain on Steemit: Elena’s Facebook page Sherlock Holmes had also posted another update to his earlier post about Elena. It revealed that was not the only artist who was being impersonated. The scam ring extended to 4 other Ukrainian artists, and Sherlock was untangling the story behind each one. All of the identity theft artist accounts were tied to , which is a real person. Sherlock had reached out to @annart both on Steemit and on (Russian Facebook) but unlike the artists whose identities were stolen, this person never responded back to Sherlock. Elena Malva @annart vk.com https://vk.com/id57240151 You can read @sherlockholmes’ full story here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@sherlockholmes/case-6-busting-annart-s-ukrainian-fake-artist-ring It was at this time I decided to do a little searching on the blockchain, just to ensure that all this information was correct. Since I had never heard of @sherlockholmes until recently, I wanted to make sure his evidence was rock solid. How Money Flows In And Out of Steemit It’s important to know how money flows in and out of . In order to withdraw your Steem from , you need to set up an account at one of the cryptocurrency exchanges, like . Since this scammer used Bittrex, let’s go over how that works. Steemit Steemit Bittrex.com Every Bittrex account for Steem has a memo identification associated with it. So, each time you withdraw Steem from Steemit into your Bittrex account, you have to use your memo id. If you don’t use it, Bittrex will not know where to send your Steem, and you will lose your money. The memo id is like your personal address in Bittrex. It’s your identification. These memo id’s show up in everyone’s account, and because Steemit runs on a blockchain, this data is available for everyone to study. This also means that everyone can see everyone’s account, as all wallets and money transactions are transparent. In fact, you can see all activity on the Steem blockchain, even deleted comments. So, I took a look at @annart’s transactions on the Steem blockchain in order to find a memo id connected to her withdrawal to Bittrex: @annart’s Bittrex memo: (notice the memo id: 462ccc1af1f64901aa8) If you’ve never seen a blockchain before, here’s your chance: And here’s even a more in-depth look at the blockchain structure, when we click on the raw block data: Next, I wanted to find a Bittrex memo id from the other accounts which Sherlock had accused of being run by @annart. Here’s a transaction from @elena2017 and sure enough, the memo id is exactly the same as @annart’s. (notice the memo id: 462ccc1af1f64901aa8) This means the money from these two Steemit accounts is going into the same Bittrex account. In fact, all the fake accounts: @elena2017, @nellyhandmade, @katrinart and use the exact same memo id, , as @annart does. The money from all 5 Steemit accounts is going into 1 Bittrex account. @juliyahandwork 462ccc1af1f64901aa8 The expression, “Follow The Money” applies very well in this case. Sherlock went the extra mile and hunted down all the artists on legacy social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, VK.com) whose identities were thought to be stolen to confirm that they were not on Steemit. All the artists in question told him they were not on Steemit. The @annart account was the only one which never replied to him. It became crystal clear that an elaborate scam ring involving 4 identity thefts was being run by @annart. I did a little extra investigating and discovered that all these accounts tended to upvote each other, too. This was to be expected since getting noticed in Steemit requires upvotes and comments. After using the blockchain to confirm Sherlock’s evidence, I began flagging the posts made by these accounts, thereby taking away any monetary rewards they had made. I tend to avoid flagging people in Steemit unless it’s absolutely necessary, as in this case of an actual identity thief. But my voting and flagging power doesn’t last forever. After flagging more than 15–20 different posts by @elena2017 on top of a regular day’s voting for authors, my voting strength was nearly wiped out. The algorithm that controls this voting strength behavior was created intentionally to prevent abuse from individuals. In my case, because I’ve worked very hard for over a year in Steemit and gained the trust of many in the Steemit community, I wrote (whales in steemit are those who have large accounts and the ability to remove monetary rewards plus lower the reputation of others.) After the news was spread that a scammer had been busted, others swooped in and began flagging the 5 accounts. a post requesting the help of other whales Without the blockchain, none of this fraudulent activity would be possible to know Having access to this immutable blockchain data makes it possible for ordinary citizens to investigate suspicious activity. for certain. This is the real reason why everyone is wetting their pants about right now. the blockchain This has never been possible before, because money transactions have always been hidden away from ordinary citizens…… until now. But make no mistake, the blockchain does not do the work of busting up a scam ring by itself. The blockchain is only a tool. The blockchain is a tool for humans. The blockchain is a tool that can be utilized or ignored. The blockchain is only as useful as the person using it. If the world, and all the people in it stop giving a crap about deception, identity theft, scams, and corruption, guess what? Blockchains become useless. Moreover, if all of us don’t take responsibility for ourselves and society, and always think: “Let someone else take care of it,” blockchains will become useless. One of my Facebook friends remarked after reading about the Ukrainian scam ring: “Scammer from Ukraine? This stinks because there is no system there that will deal with her. Hope your Steem Team blast her!” I answered: “Scams exist everywhere but since all our transactions are transparent on the blockchain, frauds can easily be caught. There is a system: it’s called a passionate community.” A passionate virtual community means people actually giving a shit what happens to people. I never had a tool like the blockchain before and I admit that this is a brand-new powerful combination: Giving a shit + the blockchain = radical change to make society better. It’s quite possible that someone like Trump wouldn’t even be able to coexist in the future world of blockchains. The best part of this story is that Sherlock and I reached out to the real Elena to let her know that her scammer is being punished will soon become a non-entity in Steemit. Furthermore, I have personally invited Elena to Steemit, and hopefully, when she joins, I’ll introduce her to the Steemit community, so people will know that she’s the real deal.

What I Learned About The Blockchain While Helping To Bust An Elaborate Scam in Steemit

Here I’m going to share my experience on creating a SaaS webservice with a simple LAMP stack and making it earn $3700 per month (actually it made around $7000 before the Russian currency had tanked). This story has nothing to do with investors, the Silicon Valley gold rush, and über modern technology. Just a simple story from an indie developer about making a profitable SaaS anyone could have built. I developed this webservice for the Russian domestic market, so I’ve translated everything into English and USD for convenience. Otherwise, this experience is pretty general and could be adopted anywhere. It’s a blueprint. Three years ago I decided to tap into social media and the easiest way to do that seemed to start my own group in a niche and to try to grow it. Facebook was already getting competitive, so I started my test group on its Russian counterpart, Vk.com. I picked a very popular niche because all I wanted was to learn, not to dominate the market. marketing To add some context I should note that Vk.com had and still has a flourishing ecosystem of these groups which is profitable for marketers. The market that Facebook choked a long ago. So this bazaar was a perfect environment to learn and experiment. An example of a group on VK.com Okay, back to the group. The first issue I came across when developing my group was sourcing and generating new content. It was an image plus some text mostly, and most groups just copied content from their competitors, who in many cases had also copied it from somewhere else. Usually, it was the content of authors that were difficult to track and attribute the work to. Sometimes it was blatant plagiarism. Anyway, I always hated manual labor and decided to make a little tool to help me scrape the posts of my competitors (who had scraped them from elsewhere anyway) and publish them to my group on a regular basis. Vk.com had a neat API so everything was super easy to setup. I scraped a lot of posts and designed a little interface that helped me go through them and remove inappropriate content, like the posts with links, obscene language, and very few likes. I’d also removed the posts that were obviously copyrighted. The tool for scraping and processing posts for my group I ended up with a scraping and publishing tool with its own database of high-quality posts relevant to my niche. Having this, I could spent zero time on content issues and could focus on marketing, which was my primary objective. Although I tried to keep everything under the radar, one of my competitors noticed unusually stable and consistent flow of high-quality posts in my group and decided to ask me about it. I explained the system to her and she offered me something like $200 for it. I turned the offer down and asked her to pay me monthly instead. She agreed. That was the inception. Building an MVP My crude tool lacked everything a mature web service should have, except the core functionality itself. It had one big advantage, though—it had already been validated, so I could invest heavily in its infrastructure because apparently Vk.com wasn’t the only social network I was going to be asked to support. Also, from my previous , I knew that I need a sophisticated statistics and logging system to track down and fix all sorts of bugs as promptly as possible. I realized that I’m going to have a lot of them because when your project depends heavily on other services, their bugs, become your bugs. startup I made a brief list of features for my MVP. It was quite long because I decided to include some stuff I usually avoid in the minimum viable product, like automated payments and all the additional interfaces. Here is what I needed and what I had had eventually: Since the startup was supposed to operate on the Russian market I picked one of the most popular gateways there, Robokassa. It would have been Stripe but they didn’t work in Russia and still don’t, and bothering with setting up a Delaware company was pointless, not financially viable and too much hassle. The payment gateway. Robokassa fees Robokassa fees were far from optimal, and I’ve already replaced it with Yandex.Checkout but it was okay enough to start with. I decided to start with just the three most popular niches and working from there. These included: business and motivation, male-oriented general content, and female-oriented general content. For this, I had created a spicy mix of public domain content, some supposedly copyrighted content from unknown authors, and the posts from the groups that gave me their permission in exchange for me including their logo watermarks. That was enough to start. Content classified by niche. Vk.com was the first and probably the biggest (remember, we’re not in the global market) social network I had to support. However, I realized that I’ll also have to support Facebook, Twitter, and Ok.com (the Russian Classmates.com copycat), so I needed to implement some sort of stubs for them. Eventually, I just made a single function that called the API methods of the uplink social network for each group ready to be serviced, and added it to a CRON job. The CRON job fired up every 15 minutes. The publishing engine. Here is the mock up of the function: Yes, that’s a super crude and unprofessional approach. Perhaps, I’d better have used some existing queue solution, but as I always say, I don’t consider myself a developer and not knowledgeable about modern implementation. I do all programming myself at the beginning because it’s fast and gives me the opportunity to react to user feedbacks with supersonic speed. After that, I happily delegate this job to someone smarter than me. In my previous projects, everything usually went haywire precisely because of the lack of data to analyze trends and errors. This time I didn’t want to make that mistake and decided to collect as much data as I could from the beginning. Comprehensive statistics and logging. The monthly stats after a year and a half of work; rows represent the days of the month. When it comes to statistics and logging it’s tough to overdo it. In order to make informed decisions, you need to have tons of data of every single part of your service, especially if it’s the pricing. Some of the uplink social networks (yes, I’m looking at you, Vk.com and Ok.com) were unreliable, so I decided not to use the subscription model and opted out for charging users on a per-post basis instead. This way I didn’t have to worry much if I couldn’t deliver the content to my customers if there were some issues with the social networks. The billing. When I had everything set and ready, it was high time to think about how to generate the first customers. Launch At the time I had very limited budget and to spend it on paid advertisement was insane. So I had to figure out ways to acquire users for free. The objective boiled down to this: I needed to find a way to contact group owners and not get blocked for being spammy. Clearly, direct messaging wasn’t an option. However, I noticed that groups had an interesting feature. Anyone could suggest a post to a group that after a review allowed the owner to re-publish. This feature had already been profoundly abused but if done properly, it could still work. I picked a bunch of groups in the niches (that’s what I called the service) had content for and started to suggest them posts like one in the screenshot below. Postio One of this promotional posts (just an example) As I was a group owner myself I knew how to compose a compelling post that would pass the watchful and experienced eyes of most moderators. Results were quite impressive, nearly 70% of the owners I’d suggested posts to, signed up to Postio. Around 60% of those who had signed up topped up their balance in the system. Some of them even reached me on social networks to thank for making such a product. Those were the most satisfying moments, I guess. Beside doing this post suggestion trick, I also published a post in my own group and offered Postio to the group owners subscribed to it. I knew that many of them had been reading groups of each other to monitor trends, posts, and the ecosystem in general. That generated some additional sign ups and paying customers. At the end of the month, I had these stats. Top-ups and Revenue are in USD That was nice, but I still hadn’t figured out how much I’m going to charge my customers. It was time to fix it. Pricing I had no idea of the exact price that users were willing to pay for this sort of job, so I’d just set it to $0.01 per post. However, as I said many times in my previous articles, this random approach to pricing is quite costly. Even the slightest mistake (whether it’s undercharging or overcharging) can easily cost you a fortune in the long run. So I decided to apply my usual approach and to figure out the price that would bring the highest revenue. I assigned a random price from a predefined set to each user upon the sign-up and monitor all activities associated with each price. Here is what it looked like in code. By scattering the method across the code I could collect all metrics for a particular price I needed. incTestValue After a while, I had these stats on my hands. Remember that the original currency wasn’t USD so this is why the fee column expressed in dollars looks strange. This split-test had revealed some pretty interesting points: The one cent price had the biggest number of published posts. The two cent price was the most profitable. It’s pointless to test prices bigger than two cent per post at the moment. People with the two cents price topped up their balance twice more often. That could mean that they were satisfied with their first attempt to use the service and had made extra top ups. Anyway, two cents per post was the most profitable price at this stage so I went with it. That didn’t necessarily mean that it would always be the case. It’s probable, as Postio evolves users will be willing to pay more but it’s subject to another test later on. Now, as we have our hard earned data-driven price, let’s scale it a bit. Scaling up features Besides increasing the number of niches and social networks my service supports, there were some other things I could do. A few customers asked me for some tool for processing the images that they attach to their posts. Features like rounding the corners, adding some effects, and placing watermarks. It was a perfect opportunity to upsell. I had implemented a simple interface that allowed users to set their own image preferences. Each effect had its separate price and was added up to the base price of a post. Here’s what it looks like. I’d say it was quite barbaric and stupid to charge users like that, but hey we all were young once. The algorithm that processed these effects was pretty straightforward. It was just a function with a lot of arguments and some Imagemagick-based code inside. I added extra columns to the stats table indicating what effects users applied and how often they did it. This feature gained momentum quickly. An example of the stats is on the left and the growth dynamic is on the right Also, I added a lot of other features like pauses, custom posts upload, and support for multiple accounts, but these details aren’t interesting so let’s fast-forward a bit and see what I did with traffic. Scaling up traffic I had a very limited budget of something like $500, so buying traffic directly wasn’t an option. However, I noticed search traffic was organically growing to the main page which had keywords that were related to my niche but didn’t belong to it directly. After quick traffic volume analysis of those keywords, I decided to invest the whole budget into two areas: writing articles for the most popular search requests, and buying promotional posts from bloggers in my niche. I collected the list of keywords that my users asked in search engines the most and hired a copywriter to create articles based on them. We produced “how to make a vk group”, “how to make a menu in a vk group” and others. After the articles had been published in Postio’s help section, I negotiated special prices with the most promising bloggers in my niche and they made several posts about the service. All this hustle had increased search engine traffic like this: By the way, the majority of this traffic landed on one article about making a menu for a Vk.com group. That lead to the making of my another SaaS that I’ve described in . Take a look at it, it’s fun too. this story To put the cherry on the cake, I’d also implemented an affiliate program. It was pretty simple: users had a unique link that they used to invite other users and receive 10% affiliate fee of their spendings. Nothing fancy but this source accounted not only for like 15% of all sign-ups but also got Postio some high-quality backlinks from various mediums. Which obviously didn’t hurt its search engine rankings. It took 14 months to reach $3700 ($7000 back then) monthly profit and the only major loss was the depreciation of the currency this service worked with. Conclusion Making a profitable SaaS is never easy and it’s impossible to explain every aspect of it in a small article like this. But It’s entirely doable by almost any developer. You don’t need a partner, an investor, or even a great idea. Just start doing something and you’re inexorably going to stumble upon some issue ready to be solved. Nothing is perfect, and that’s good news. I hope this story was of any help and as usual I’m open to any questions either here or on my Twitter. Thanks for reading!

I used LAMP to make a SaaS with $3700/mo profit. Here’s how.

TL;DR: This tutorial is about building a small, profitable SaaS webservice , Menumake , from scratch and making it earning $1000 per month. This has nothing to do with multibillion unicorn startups, I’m just describing my experience. It’s about a useful, robust, and profitable tool that anyone can make. And the last point, this webservice has been made for the Russian domestic market, so I’ve translated everything into English and USD for convenience. Otherwise, this experience is pretty general and could be adopted anywhere. It all started with my other SaaS webservice called , which I built to make it easier for people to find and publish content to their social accounts and groups. As a part of its , I had bought and published a dozen articles on various subjects targeted at the webservice’s audience on its blog to get some extra traffic from search engines. Postio marketing strategy Then, all of a sudden, Postio started to get a relatively large amount of traffic from Google and Yandex (a Russian search engine) with keywords that have nothing to do with Postio itself. Google Analytics stat on organic daily traffic acquisition This is where the actual story begins. Identifying a pain point Clearly people were having real issues with this menu thing. A short research showed that a lot of group owners on Vk.com (the Russian Facebook) use a graphical menu fixed at the top of a group to redirect their audience to the most important parts of the group, such as testimonials, pricing, and an order form. Here is what a menu usually looks like You see, groups in this social network eventually become some sort of shop that many people use to start a business, without having the hassle of setting up a standalone website. So it wasn’t just a bunch of some random groups about kittens (although there definitely was a lot of this type), but small businesses with some pain point that could be solved, more or less, automatically. Obviously they needed a solution so badly that they Googled it quite often. But here’s the best part. In order to make this menu, they had to create it in an image editor, cut it, and then build the menu with a sort of wiki-style mark up. This was definitely too much for them, and outsourcing this job at a price of about $20 a piece was quite common. The usual process of creating a menu was something like this: In an image editor, create an image of the menu and place some buttons on it; Сut it into separate parts so that it would be possible to re-assemble it, with the buttons becoming links; Upload all these images to an album in the group or in the owner’s account; Create a wiki-page in the group and put a markup with the images and links; Publish a post with a link to the menu page in the group; Pin it so it stays on top all the time. Not bad, eh? Now, let’s find out what we can do to alleviate the problem. Making an MVP First, I had to explore the possibilities of the API of the social network to determine what actions could be automated, and to what degree. It turned out that the API could do anything I needed, with the exception of pinning a post. But it’s too much for an MVP, so I decided to cut down these features: Authentication. Menu customization. Instead, a user could choose from a dozen predefined templates. Payment processing. I could do this manually. Automatic wiki-page creation. A user could do it themselves and then paste the wiki-markup that my app generated. Automatic post publishing. Again, a user’s manual labor. So basically, what I had to make was an image generator and an uploader. So here is what it looked like after two to three days of development. Main screen Ugly, I know. But it was enough to test whether users would be willing to pay for this automated solution. The menu creation dialogue was also um… pretty imperfect. Menu creation screen Yeah, I too used to be a perfectionist. Now I ship. Validating the idea This was relatively easy in my case because the existing traffic was what I started with. So all I had to do was just put a couple of buttons here and there in the article and wait for visitors to come. This is what it looked like: The first 10 days of the real launch Without even looking at the sales stat we can see that users were pretty much interested in the service. Mind you, this was just the hey-you-have-a-problem-we-have-a-solution type of traffic, with a really lousy landing page based on a free template. Now, here are some raw stats served fresh (okay, not so fresh) from the DB: Turnover and deposits are in USD Not a massive success, huh? But it worked, and users were willing to pay for it. There were a lot of abandoned, unpaid menus though ( vs ). But anyway, it’s just a (very crude) MVP. menus_created menus_paid As you can tell by the stats, I tinkered a bit with the price, changing it from $6 to $4 per menu, trying to get some insights on pricing. Now that we know our MVP is viable, it’s time to figure out what price users are willing to pay for our service. And it should be data-driven, no more guesstimating. Estimating the price Let me digress a little and explain why I chose to charge on a per-menu basis instead of a standard monthly approach. The API of the uplink social network is pretty much unstable, so the subscription model would be a disaster because I had to constantly refund the users who had been affected by bugs in the API. So, back to the price. Split testing is the easiest way to identify the most profitable price that users are comfortable with. Basically, I set a random price for each user upon signing up, and I then tracked every action associated with the price. The price grid looked like this (yes, I also added a price for updating a menu and a lot of different features, like fine tuning the design of menu items): The format is array(creation_price, update_price) I also removed email from signing up and made it one-click to get more sign ups (and stats) from users. After a month or so I got this: What do these stats tell us? Pretty interesting stuff: $1, $2, and $3 for menu creation and $0.5 for updating it are the most profitable prices; $1 has twice as many menu creations as $2 and three times as many as $3; The $1 / $0.5 combination is the most profitable in terms of ARPU. Even though the $2 price appeared to be much less hassle for the same revenue, I decided to stick with $1 because I wanted users to create as many menus as they wanted, as every menu had a little viral mechanism. I’ll explain this in a future article. Evolving After I made up my mind on the price, I then had to add more features that users needed. Let me show what the menu creation page eventually looked like: Still messy and crude but it did its job well. And it really had nothing fancy under the kimono, just some PHP and Imagemagick. It took me two nights to build and the process was a lot of fun, as ever since I was a teenager I’ve always enjoyed working with image generation. I still remember those sleepless nights spent learning ray tracing and 3D programming with Delphi. Ah, the good old days. Marketing First I wanted to leverage what this webservice had started with — the existing SEO traffic from the article. Actually, this had been done already, so all I had to do was to enlarge the CTA button a little and make it more noticeable. This simple action got me about 150 visits per day. But when I did this, I noticed that the webservice itself started to get attention from search engines, so the total traffic was around 200 visitors per day. That yielded an average of 100 sign ups per day. Okay, no more boring text, here are the final stats for November 2016: Please note that simply reflects the number of users that signed up on the date, not the total number of users participating in activities in the webservice. The latter is much bigger due to recurring actions from earlier users. Users Conclusion Is this story a massive success? Hardly — but I hope it will be useful for someone who is still in doubt about making something small and profitable. There are a lot of things here that haven’t received the attention they deserve. What would you like me to elaborate on in future articles? I’m going to share a lot of trick and stories like this, so if you enjoyed the article, please follow me here on Medium or on . my Twitter

How I made a SaaS webservice earning $1000 monthly profit

A is for because it’s traffic we cite, although I don’t know how accurate it is. We could google it. ALEXA.com ( ranking in parenthesis ) B is for because they power the majority of China’s 4b monthly search queries, and that’s just the beginning of their business. BAIDU.com (4th) C is for because the news is the news of the owner’s interest and seeing a site for what it is isn’t popular. CNN.com (89th) D is for because digital storage will forever be a challenge and starting a site with the “duh” sound isn’t popular. DROPBOX.com (72nd) E is for because they convinced the average citizen they could make money on the internet. They used to rank much higher. EBAY.com (32nd) F is for because it’s the back-hole that controls a billion identities on the internet. FACEBOOK.com (3rd) G is for because our clicks on it fund the Alphabet, and it’s now the verb we trust to end any argument. GOOGLE.com (1st) H is for because I am evaluating pros and cons to “likeminded sponsorship” in the age of internet journalism. HACKERNOON .com ( 6,358th ) I is for because it filters the mundane and they take no shame in the . INSTAGRAM.com (16th) stories of stealing digital products J is for because why not connect China with the world’s consumers. So few sites start with “j.” JD.com (337th) K is for because it’s a Russian movie site, and the only .club to be #1 ranked site for it’s letter. KINOGO.club (256th) L is for because we like to pretend that doesn’t have a monopoly on googling things. LIVE.com (12th) GOOGLE M is for because it ranks higher than it’s parent but lower than its brother MSN.com ( 42nd ) MICROSOFT (44th) (LIVE, 12th). N is for because they set the market rate for the cost of streaming . NETFLIX.com (50th) entertainment O is for because we mustn’t’ forget that eyeballs are made to let our fingers know which ads to click on. ONCLICKADS.com (31st) P is for because if there’s a better way to organize images, it’ll be acquired into this alphabetical world. PINTEREST.com (45th) Q is for because who doesn’t love consuming their Chinese news via endless rows of font 8 headlines with no pictures? QQ.com (10th) R is for because no site structure was ever more perfect for the specific nature of the internet than upvote/downvote. REDDIT.com (25th) S is for because wow another Chinese media site… No matter the government, traffic monetizes. SINA.com (19th) T is for because maybe someday I’ll write a letter home saying, “Hey Mom, you won’t believe it, they verified !!” TWITTER.com (8th) me U is for because Portuguese is a beautiful language and this is the largest internet portal for Portuguese speakers. UOL.com.br (126th) V is for because Facebook does not own Europe! This St. Petersburg based social network has 369,000,000+ users. VK.com (15th) W is for because it’s re-writing any term beyond the dictionary. It’s .com redirects to it’s .org, only one on the list! WIKIPEDIA.org (5th) X is for because porn is the driving factor behind much of the internet’s innovations. XVIDEOS.com(74th) Y is for because all video in the history of the world should be on one site owned by , right? YOUTUBE (2nd) GOOGLE Z is for because questions and answers are the light and dark of the internet. Other than the URL, this site is not in English. ZHIHU.com (135th) Editor’s Note: Each site is the top Alexa ranked for the letter it starts with, except for and because the internet! “A” “H” “AH,”

VK.COM

vk.com

1K-5K employees

Since 2006

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VK.COM

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VK.COM

vk.com

1K-5K employees

Since 2006

COMPANY RANKING

VK.COM

EVERGREEN INDEX #11256

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