Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions (13 minute read)
While hundreds of millions of customers own Alexa-enabled devices, Amazon's bet that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on its platform by talking to the voice assistant hasn't paid off. Customers mostly use Alexa to set alarms and check the weather. Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business. The company will launch a paid tier for Alexa as soon as this month as part of the plan to reverse these losses.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
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China unveils world's 1st meltdown-proof nuclear reactor with 105 MW capacity (4 minute read)
Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have successfully demonstrated a meltdown-proof nuclear fission reactor. The twin reactor design can generate 105 MW of power each. It can cool itself down without an external power source, reaching stable temperatures around 35 hours after shutdown. Construction of the facility started in 2016, with commercial operations beginning only in December last year. One drawback of the technology is that it can't be retrofitted onto existing nuclear reactors.
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We're building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real (23 minute read)
Powering spaceships using compact reactors could cut down Mars transit times by more than half. The technology also has military applications, with DARPA requesting a nuclear rocket demonstrator in June 2020. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project aims to create space-based assets that can move quickly within space to deter strategic attacks by adversaries. This article discusses the DRACO project and the technologies that make it possible.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
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Maestro (GitHub Repo)
Maestro is a general-purpose workflow orchestrator that can schedule millions of jobs every day and operate with a strict SLO even when there are spikes in traffic. It is highly scalable and extensible and provides a fully managed workflow-as-a-service. Maestro serves thousands of data platform users at Netflix for various use cases.
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Jiff (GitHub Repo)
Jiff is a datetime library for Rust. It provides high level datetime primitives with reasonable performance that are difficult to misuse. Jiff supports automatic and seamless integration with the Time Zone Database, DST aware arithmetic and rounding, formatting and parsing zone aware datetimes losslessly, opt-in Serde support, and more. Its minimum supported rustc version is 1.70.0.
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Why technical cofounders reject you (7 minute read)
There are many reasons technical cofounders will reject a startup. This article discusses some of these factors, such as unrealistic expectations from founders, putting too much value on an idea, or a lack of understanding of the market. Building a compelling case for a technical cofounder to want to join a founder involves providing proof that the idea or product will work and that the founder is able to bring the idea to life. Founders need to prove that they will be successful and that the train is departing.
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TinkerBird (GitHub Repo)
TinkerBird is a Chrome-native vector database with a query engine written in TypeScript designed for efficient storage and retrieval of embeddings.
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