TLDR 2019-01-30

As Apple's iPhone profits dropped 15% in a year. One reason is the price of devices in certain countries increased as their currency decreased in value relative to the US Dollar. Apple plans to identify these countries and reprice their devices to more accurately match their prices to what they were a year ago.

Google’s Gmail service experienced a major outage today. Users all over the world who tried to access their email received an ‘Error 404’ message. The issue was resolved by Google after a few hours.

A team of scientists has used neural networks to synthesize speech from brain activity. Patients who had special implants to monitor epilepsy listened to words as artificial neural networks monitored their brain activity. The network was able to synthesize understandable words from just the brain activity 75% of the time. This research may soon allow paralyzed people to communicate.

A program known as ‘Replica’ allows companies to simulate real traffic data using real-time mobile location data. While vendors like Sidewalk Labs attempt to obfuscate their data before selling it to companies such as Replica, there are still concerns about the de-anonymization of data and the regulation of data collection. Data is gathered without our knowledge or consent from devices that we carry all the time and depend on, and business models are being built to exploit this information.

Apprise is a python library that allows easy sending of notifications to most major platforms (Twitter, Telegram, Discord, and more). It includes the ability to send notifications via email and other custom notifications. Users can easily code a script that updates multiple notification services simultaneously in just a few lines.

AI Fiddle is like JS Fiddle for AI. It allows users to create, run, and visualize machine learning models within a web browser interface. There is an existing library of user-created machine learning models and users can contribute to the database.

This Hacker News thread contains discussion about working remotely, tips for gaining employment, and personal anecdotes on the experience of working for different companies remotely, with a focus on high paying roles. Several links are available to databases for companies that hire remotely and there are also links to spreadsheets for salaries of people working remotely.