TLDR 2019-11-21

Businesses can now sign up to play licensed music in their retail locations through Apple Music for Business. Apple will provide human-curated playlists and even custom recommendations matched to fit the culture of the store. A special iOS app will be provided for businesses to control the music being played. Different licensing terms for businesses means that they need to make deals with special providers to get legal in-store music. Spotify and Apple have both started to address the retail audience. Harrods department store has been using the service for a few weeks now and it gets an affiliate commission if customers sign up to the Apple Music service.

PayPal has announced that it will acquire Honey Science Corporation for $4 billion in mostly cash. Honey makes a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application. The acquisition will make PayPal part of the deal discovery process. PayPal will add Honey's product discovery, price tracking, offers, and loyalty features to its products. Its merchants will gain the ability to offer targeted and more personalized promotions to customers. Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies have entered the payments market in recent years. With Honey, PayPal shifts the battle away from the checkout page to the shopping experience.

Starship, SpaceX's next-generation rocket, partially burst apart during ground tests in Texas. SpaceX was conducting some pressure tests with the vehicle. The explosions were not completely unexpected, according to SpaceX. There were no injuries and the incident is not a serious setback for the Starship project. Starship will transport cargo and people to deep space destinations like the Moon and Mars. Elon Musk planned to test the vehicle in low altitudes within the next couple of months. A new prototype of the vehicle has been planned that has a different flight design to the prototype that burst.

The four known fundamental forces in our Universe are gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear interactions. Physicists may have observed a fifth physical force emerging from a helium atom. If its existence is confirmed, it could help scientists solve the dark matter problem. The force was first discovered after an anomaly was observed in the way beryllium-8 emits light as it decays. The direction that the energy moved was inconsistent with the law of conservation of energy. In order for this to be possible, a new kind of fundamental boson had to be involved. While the particle still hasn't been observed, experiments have shown that it is very likely it exists. The latest study has yet to be peer-reviewed, and many experiments will still need to be conducted to confirm the existence of X17.

Sourcetrail is an open-source cross-platform source explorer that helps developers become productive with unfamiliar source code. It indexes code and gathers data about its structure, then it provides a simple interface that allows developers to search code, display the structure of the source code, and view the source locations of currently selected code snippets. It supports C, C++, Java, and Python. Sourcetrail can be connected to many popular IDEs.

Shopify changes 40 times a day. It uses a trunk-based development workflow and around 400 commits to master are merged daily. There are many challenges with collaborating with a large team of over 1,000 developers. To solve these issues, Shopify upgraded its Merge Queue tool so it integrates with GitHub, runs continuous integration (CI) before merging to master, removes pull requests that failed CI, and maximizes deployment throughput of pull requests. Masters must always be passing CI, stay close to production, and emergency merges must be fast. By upgrading its tools and integrating these rules, Shopify was able to overcome their issues with scaling.

Google has added new tools to Google Earth that allows users to build personalized tours of areas right on top of the Google Earth map. The tools allow users to set landmarks, draw lines from place to place, add media, and present the tour, step by step. Users can capture specific camera angles for landmarks. Pre-made tours, called 'stories', are available. Users can invite others to collaborate on tours. Tour creation is only available on the web, but tours can be still viewed in the latest iOS and Android apps.