TLDR 2019-04-10

Google’s Cloud Services Platform for managing hybrid clouds, renamed Anthos, has come out of beta and will support third-party clouds, including AWS and Azure. Companies will be able to manage and deploy workloads across clouds without having to worry about different environments and APIs. Anthos is based on the Google Kubernetes Engine as well as other open source projects. It can run on any hardware, so companies do not have to invest in new servers. Google has launched Anthos with more than 30 major hardware and software partners.

Tesla made the decision to cut costs and close down some of its retail locations back in February, and now dozens of staff in three locations have been laid off. The teams affected were known as ‘inside sales’ and their responsibilities included taking inbound calls, helping with deliveries, and the washing and detailing of vehicles. Tesla still has stores open at these locations. All areas of sales and marketing are being evaluated within Tesla as they focus their efforts on producing a cheaper Model 3, as well as the launch of new models next year.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has launched the world’s first commercial air-delivery service in Canberra’s northern suburbs. The company is called ‘Wing’ and it has been trialing the delivery of burritos, coffee, and medication by drone to a suburb in Canberra for the last year. Approval has been granted by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to expand the area that Wing can service. More than 1,000 deliveries were completed in the trial without any safety incidents, even though some residents complained about the noise. Wing will now service five suburbs, delivering goods such as gelato, chocolate, bread, and golf gear.

China’s state planner has released a draft list of industrial activities that it is planning to stop, and it shows that the government is seeking to put pressure onto the cryptocurrency sector. The draft stated that cryptocurrency mining did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, was unsafe, wasted resources, and polluted the environment. It called for cryptocurrency mining to be phased out immediately. A large portion of the bitcoin network is in China and a shutdown would raise the average cost to mine bitcoin. Chinese companies manufacture a large amount of the world’s blockchain hardware, accounting for 45% of global sales by value in 2017.

Codextended is a suite of extensions that aims to make Swift’s Codable API easier to use. While Codable is great, it becomes increasingly verbose once customization is introduced into the project. Codextended simplifies the code required and it is completely compatible with vanilla Codable code. Only one file is required for Codextended to be added to an Xcode project.

This repository contains a curated list of resources for practicing Data Science. It includes libraries, tutorials, code snippets, blog posts, talks, and more. Links are followed by a short description and organized according to topics.

Mozilla will be launching its Recommended Extensions program in the next few months, and it will contain a curated list of extensions that meet certain criteria. All extensions will be evaluated for quality, user experience, their relevance to a wide audience, and security. Developers who participate in the program will need to make a commitment to actively continue to improve their extensions. Recommended extensions will be highlighted on Firefox’s add-ons page, and will be given preference in search results.