TLDR 2018-11-14

Waymo (Google's self-driving car division) is launching the world's first driverless car service in early December. It will use a separate name and will compete directly with Uber and Lyft. The service will launch only in the suburbs of Phoenix at first, but it shows how far ahead of the competition Waymo is. GM (who acquired self-driving startup Cruise) is probably in second place and analysts believe they're at least a year away from launching something like this. When the program launches there will be backup drivers in the cars to ease customers in, but they will be phased out eventually. The pricing will be competitive with Uber and Lyft.

Snap is being investigated by the DOJ and SEC because shareholders are suing the company for misleading the public about how much competition from Instagram had affected their growth prior to their IPO. The lawsuit also says that Snap misrepresented its use of notifications and other growth hacks to pump up usage numbers prior to IPO. Snap says that the lawsuit is "meritless" and that its pre-IPO disclosures were "accurate and complete."

Discourse is an open source forum software company started by Jeff Atwood (co-founder/former CEO of Stack Overflow). Discourse started giving free hosting to a few open source projects a couple of years ago. Now, any project that has at least 15 contributors and a need for a discussion forum can apply to get a free hosted Discourse forum. If you're involved in any open source projects, this might be worth taking a look at.

Funny hacker news thread with lots of stories about horrific code bases. The top post is hilarious, evidently some company worth over $500 million has a customer facing dashboard in which each tab is a separate web app using different web technologies (React, Angular, jQuery, and Angular 2).

China has created an "artificial sun", a nuclear fusion reaction that reaches 100 million degrees Celsius. The reaction is completely under control and can be turned off at any time. The project is the result of a collaboration between 35 countries including China, Russia, and the US. The scientists working on the project will continue to work on maintaining a stable fusion reaction for a longer period of time and at an even higher temperature.

Google is absorbing DeepMind's Health division into it's Google Health division. DeepMind currently has an app called Streams, which helps manage patients in hospitals in the UK. Google will be turning Streams into an "AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors". DeepMind will continue to work on a number of ambitious research projects applying AI to healthcare, such as using AI to spot eye disease.

This is a nifty tool that lets you choose a series of emojis, and a time interval (between 0 and 5 seconds), and it will create a gif toggling between the emojis you've chosen at the speed you've chosen. Fast, no signup necessary, there's a lot to like here!