TLDR 2021-05-06

Facebook is rolling out a new feature called Neighborhoods in four US cities and Canada. The tool will allow people to find neighbors with common interests, discover local groups and businesses, and interact with others in their communities. Users will have to share location information to get matched to a neighborhood. Every neighborhood has moderators to make sure people are staying within guidelines. Eligible users will be notified in-app.

SpaceX successfully launched the 15th prototype of its Starship rocket in a test flight that landed upright as planned. A small fire broke out shortly after landing but it was contained. It is the first prototype to land intact. A 16-minute video showing the test launch is available in the article.

The army's new Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binoculars are a huge upgrade from traditional night vision goggles. They use white tubes that produce better contrast and brighter images. The goggles offer stereo vision and can see through obstructions like dust and smoke even with zero illumination. Augmented reality enhancements allow the goggles to enhance and outline objects, and they can wirelessly communicate with an electronic scope so soldiers can aim without exposing themselves. Images of the goggles are available in the article.

Blue Origin will soon open up ticket sales for suborbital sightseeing trips on its New Shepard spacecraft. It is aiming to launch its first flight on July 20. One of the tickets on the first flight will be sold through an online auction. The New Shepard rocket is designed to fly six passengers into suborbital space. Ticket prices are still a closely guarded secret.

Vulture finds unused code in Python programs to make it easy to clean up code or find errors in large codebases. It complements pyflakes and supports Python 3.6 and above. Vulture can be customized with whitelists.

Raylene Yung was an engineering manager at Facebook in 2011, starting from a team of three. She left in 2015 as the youngest engineering director at a public company with over 10,000 employees and joined Stripe where she built the product management team, defined career growth and recruiting frameworks, ran the core Payments business, and created the company’s global engineering hub. In this interview, Yung discusses career growth for engineers. She shares a collection of career lessons, discusses career tracks, and talks about specific career roadblocks.

A remote attack discovered last year allowed hackers to take over a Tesla's infotainment system by exploiting two vulnerabilities in the internet connection manager. The attack allowed hackers to perform any task that a regular user could from the system. It could be mounted on a drone, allowing hackers to unlock vehicles from up to 100 meters away without any user interaction. Tesla patched the issue with an update pushed out in October.

A study on the genome of people who live beyond 105 years old found that those individuals have bodies that are more efficient at repairing DNA. The study involved comparing the genomes of Italian people of different ages. People who aged over 105 years had fewer age-related mutations. The most frequently seen genetic changes were associated with cell repair, communication between the cell nucleus and mitochondria, and the elimination of dangerous reactive oxygen species.