Tech roundup 21: a journal published by a bot

Read a tech roundup with this week’s news that our powerful bot has chosen: blockchain, AI, development, corporates and more.

Gooooooood morning, Inhabitants!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

Blockchain and decentralization

  • Tether Says Stablecoin Is Only Backed 74% by Cash, Securities
  • Distributions vs. Releases: Why Python Packaging Is Hard
  • IPFS-Deploy – Zero-Config CLI to Deploy Static Websites to IPFS
  • Ethernet MDIO / MMD Design for FPGA Open Source Network Processor
  • Redesigning Trust: Blockchain for Supply Chains
    The ChallengeBlockchain has the potential to revolutionize sectors and ecosystems in which trust is needed among parties with misaligned interests. It is precisely within these contexts, however, that deploying such a new and complex technology can be the most difficult. Providing increased efficiency, transparency and interoperability across supply chains has been one of the most fertile areas for blockchain experimentation, illustrating both the opportunities and challenges in realizing the transformative potential of this technology. Many of these experiments have focused on ports as the intersection of diverse and vital supply chains. In most cases, projects have come about as the result of the efforts of one or two parties focused primarily on their own interests, without taking into consideration unintended consequences or downstream effects on other parties or on the system as a whole. The result is a fractured system that leaves behind parts of the sector while capturing economic efficiency gains for certain actors. In fact, the hyper-focus on efficiency gains can reinforce existing mistrust or competition and undermine or even block the transformation that blockchain technology has the potential to bring about.The OpportunityThis project will convene a broad, multi-stakeholder community to co-design governance frameworks to accelerate the most impactful uses of blockchain in port systems in a manner that is strategic, forward-thinking, and globally interoperable; and by which countries across the economic spectrum will be able to benefit. Since systemwide blockchain deployment will likely be accompanied by significant disruptions across industries, the deployment of this technology requires careful consideration of unintended consequences, as well as measures to ensure that narrow, un-scalable, or bilaterally-designed solutions do not dominate the marketplace. The frameworks developed will ensure that diverse stakeholders can utilize the unique qualities of blockchain to create trust in an environment that is prone to mistrust. They will be prototyped and piloted with relevant stakeholders, iterated based on learnings, and then disseminated broadly for international adoption. The frameworks can be applied to create a systematic global approach to the deployment of blockchain that allows for variability, but is not tied to a specific port system, and that helps to ensure that the needs of all players in the ecosystem are considered as the system transforms.
Woman computer scientist of the week
Nalini Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She is known for her work in effective management and utilization of resources in the evolving global information infrastructure. Her research interests are Multimedia Computing, Networked and Distributed Systems, Internet technologies and Applications, Ubiquitous Computing and Urban Crisis Responses. Dr. Venkatasubramanian’s research focuses on enabling effective management and utilization of resources in the evolving global information infrastructure. She also addresses the problem of composing resource management services in distributed systems.

Cloud and architecture

Development and languages

Quote of the week

A notation is important for what it leaves out.

        — Joseph Stoy

Enterprises

  • Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips
  • Alaskan halibut provides a glimpse of Amazon’s strategy with Whole Foods
  • Google Staffers Share Stories of ‘Systemic’ Retaliation
  • Anti-vaxxer leaflet found inserted in book sold by Amazon
  • Tesla Model 3 vs. BMW M3
    It’s the super-saloon fight we’ve all been waiting for: Tesla Model 3 Performance vs BMW M3, electric vs petrol. We head to Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California to apply some Top Gear science.
  • WeWork Files for IPO
    The company initially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December, according to a memo to employees.
  • Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2019 Results
  • Google Advertising Revenue Growth Slows, Triggering Share Slump
  • Google Shows First Cracks in Years
    Google’s once-untouchable online-advertising operation took a body blow, hurt by mounting competition and struggles within its increasingly high-profile YouTube unit.
  • Profitable Giants Like Amazon Pay $0 in Corp Taxes. Some Voters Are Sick of It
    In Ohio, where companies like FirstEnergy and Goodyear pay no federal corporate taxes, Democrats haven’t figured out how to leverage anxiety over income inequality to defeat President Trump.
  • Google has added “unsupported browser” warnings for Edge Chromium on Google Docs
  • Teen Suicide Spiked After Debut Of Netflix’s ’13 Reasons Why,’ Study Says
  • Microsoft Build Accelerator – open-source build engine for large systems
  • Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors
    “After 18 years of board mtgs, I’m following coach Bill Campbell’s legacy & helping the next generation of talent to serve. Thanks to Larry, Sergey & all my BOD colleagues! Onward for me as Technical Advisor to coach Alphabet and Google businesses/tech, plus…..”
  • Amazon S3 Batch Operations
  • ‘Math Doesn’t Lie’: Musk Can’t Dodge Tesla Cash Woes Any Longer
  • CallJoy – A cloud-based phone agent for small businesses
    Every day, local small businesses receive 400 million calls from consumers. CallJoy’s phone technology helps them answer with intelligence.
  • The Uber IPO Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley
  • Epic Games Is Acquiring Rocket League Developer Psyonix
  • Supreme Court seeks Trump administration views on Google-Oracle copyright feud
  • Google employees are staging a sit-in to protest reported retaliation
  • Small retailers who sold through Amazon are facing a tax time bomb
  • Tesla is raising up to $1.5B through convertible note and share sale
    Tesla is raising up to $1.55 billion through the sale of notes and shares, according to a filing made by the EV maker today. The document outlines that Tesla will sell up to $1.35 billion in convertible senior notes. The number could increase further: Tesla is giving underwriters the chance to buy …
  • Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
    Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote. We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.

    Stripe will hire over a hundred remote engineers this year. They will be deployed across every major engineering workstream at Stripe.

    ## Our users are everywhere. We have to be, too.

    Our remotes keep us close to our customers, which is key to building great products. They are deeply embedded in the rhythms of their cities. They see how people purchase food differently in bodegas, konbini, and darshinis. They know why it is important to engineer robustness in the face of slow, unreliable internet connections. They have worked in and run businesses that don’t have access to global payments infrastructure.

    Stripe has had hundreds of extremely high-impact remote employees since inception. Historically, they’ve reported into teams based in one of our hubs. We had a strong preference for managers to be located in-office and for teams to be office-centric, to maximize face-to-face bandwidth when doing creative work.

    As we have grown as a company, we have learned some things.

    One is that the technological substrate of collaboration has gotten *shockingly* good over the last decade. Most engineering work at Stripe happens in conversations between engineers, quiet thinking, and turning those thoughts into artifacts. Of these, thinking is the only one that doesn’t primarily happen online.

    There was a time when writing on a whiteboard had substantially higher bandwidth than a Word doc over email. Thankfully Google Docs, Slack, git, Zoom, and the like deliver high-bandwidth synchronous collaboration on creative work. The experience of using them is so remarkably good that we only notice it when something is broken. Since you write code via pull requests and not whiteboards, your reviewer needs to have access to the same PR; having access to the same whiteboard is strictly optional.

    While we did not initially plan to make hiring remotes a huge part of our engineering efforts, our remote employees have outperformed all expectations. Foundational elements of the Stripe technology stack, our products, our business, and our culture were contributed by remotes. We would be a greatly diminished company without them.

    ## Stripe’s new remote engineering hub

    We have seen such promising results from our remote engineers that we are greatly increasing our investment in remote engineering.

    **We are formalizing our Remote engineering hub.** It is coequal with our physical hubs, and will benefit from some of our experience in
    [scaling engineering
    organizations](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/scaling-eng).
    For example, there will be dedicated engineering teams in the Remote hub that exist in no other hub. (Some individuals report to a team located in a different hub, and we expect this will remain common, but the bulk of high-bandwidth coworker relationships are within-hub.) We also have a remote engineering lead, analogous to the site leads we have for our physical hubs.

    **We are expanding the scope we will hire for remotely**. In addition to hiring engineers, we plan to begin hiring remote product managers, engineering managers, and technical program managers later this year. (We will continue hiring remote employees in non-engineering positions across the company as well.)

    **We intend to expand our remote engineering hiring aggressively.** We will hire at least a hundred remote engineers this year. We expect to be constrained primarily by our capacity to onboard and support new remote engineers, and we will work to increase that capacity.

    **We will continue to improve the experience of being a remote.** We have carefully tracked the experience of our remote employees, including in our twice-annual employee survey. Most recently, 73% of engineers at Stripe believe we do a good job of integrating remote employees.

    Great user experiences are made in the tiny details. We care about the details to a degree that is borderline obsessive. A recent example: we wrote code to attach a videoconferencing link to every calendar invitation by default, so that remotes never feel awkward having to ask for one.

    ## More to come

    There are still some constraints on our ambitions. In our first phase, we will be focused primarily on remote engineers in North America, starting with the US and Canada. While we are confident that great work is possible within close time zones, we don’t yet have structures to give remotes a reliably good experience working across large time zone differences. And though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually, our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support remotes just yet.

    Most engineers working at Stripe are full-time employees, with a full benefits suite. There is substantial organizational, legal, and financial infrastructure required to support each new jurisdiction we hire in, so we have to be measured in how quickly we expand. We can support most US states today, and plan to expand our hiring capabilities to include jurisdictions covering more than 90% of the US population as quickly as possible. We intend, over the longer term, to be everywhere our customers are.

    We will continue encouraging governments worldwide to lower barriers to hiring. Our customers, from startups to international conglomerates, all feel the pain of this. We think making it easier for companies to hire would produce a step-function increase in global GDP.

    ## We want to talk to you

    We would love to talk about our Remote hub or [remote positions at
    Stripe](https://stripe.com/jobs/search?l=remote). Our
    CEO and co-founder, Patrick Collison, and I will host a remote coffee on May 22, 2019;
    [sign up to be invited](https://stripe.events/remote-coffee) to it. We are also, and always, available on the internet.

  • Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance
  • Google Will Soon Let You Automatically Scrub Your Location and Web History
    It’s a plus for privacy.
  • Tesla Model 3 Effect – Chevy Dealers Discount 2019 Bolt by Almost $10k
  • BBC admits iPlayer has lost streaming fight with Netflix
  • The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most devastating membership program
  • DeepSwarm – Optimising CNNs Using Swarm Intelligence

Other news

Suscríbete al blog por correo electrónico

Introduce tu correo electrónico para suscribirte a este blog y recibir avisos de nuevas entradas.

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas

Thank you very much for sharing whatever you're going to publish

Este sitio usa Akismet para reducir el spam. Aprende cómo se procesan los datos de tus comentarios.