TLDR 2021-09-21

DiDi's co-founder and president Jean Liu told close associates that she plans to step down as she expects the government to eventually take over the company and appoint new management. The Chinese ride-hailing giant has been facing intense regulatory scrutiny since July over its collection and use of personal data, pricing mechanisms, and competitive practices. China has been cracking down on private companies to control big data and break down monopolistic practices. DiDi is actively and fully cooperating with the cybersecurity review and claims that the rumors about management changes are false.

Google is rumored to be working on two foldable phones and incorporating foldable functionality into an out-of-cycle update to Android. The phones will be similar to Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip and Galaxy Z Fold devices. Google may launch the phones before the end of the year. The Android update will add an iPad OS-style taskbar to show frequently used and recently used apps. There is no timeline for its release, but it will probably be released with Google's foldable Pixels.

White Motorcycle Concepts has designed a motorcycle with a drastically reduced drag coefficient and an all-electric powertrain. The bike has a big hole in the center to allow air to pass through. The company aims to break the 250 mph world record next summer at the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia. A video showing a lower-powered prototype completing a test is available in the article.

SpaceX saw a significant increase in demand for private spaceflight missions thanks to the Inspiration4 mission. Pricing information for the mission has still not been released, but it is estimated that seats on future orbital flights will be less than $40 million each. SpaceX currently has three vehicles that could accommodate at least six crew flights a year, and it is considering building more Crew Dragons if there is enough demand. Starship is still under development and it will be a few years before it will be ready for human missions.

go-zero is a web and rpc framework. It features built-in middlewares, chained timeout control, rate limiting, microservice management and concurrent toolkits, and more. go-zero integrates many engineering practices to ensure stability with resilient design.

Aino is an experimental HTTP framework for writing HTTP applications in Elixir. It is built on top of elli, a web server designed for building high-throughput, low-latency HTTP APIs.

This article talks about the experience of a solo developer who decided to offer phone support for a couple of their apps in Japan. As the user base was small, the developer didn't receive a large number of calls, but most users were polite. Offering phone support allowed the developer to hear the problems that customers experienced directly and understand them more. The feedback helped them prioritize better and make better decisions. The article ends with tips on how to improve your listening skills.

Sci-Hub is a website that hosts over 87 million research papers and makes them available for free to students and academics. There have been many attempts to sue the creator of the site in the US and across Europe. The owner of the site had always responded by doing nothing. In December 2020, three academic publishing giants filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in India, the country with the second-largest number of Sci-Hub users in the world. This article tells the story of how Sci-Hub gained legal representation in India and some of the arguments in the case. The next hearing for the case is on September 21.