TLDR 2025-04-09
How Elon saved X π°, TikTok's failed deal π€, Apple's iPhone stockpile π±
How Trump's TikTok Negotiations Were Upended by China and Tariffs (5 minute read)
The Trump administration believed it had a plan to save TikTok last Wednesday, but the Chinese government would not let the deal proceed due to new tariffs on Chinese imports. President Trump extended the deadline for a TikTok deal into mid-June in response. ByteDance was reportedly comfortable with the new suggested plan, but even before the tariff announcement, there was no guarantee that China would approve of any deal. The talks about TikTok are likely to become even more complicated as the trade war between the two countries escalates.
How Elon Musk Rescued X From the Brink (7 minute read)
Late last month, Elon Musk announced that he was merging X with xAI in a deal that valued the newly combined company at more than $100 billion. This article reveals the string of events that helped Musk announce the deal before Trump's tariffs effectively closed the market for deals. The deal moves Musk closer to his longtime goal of turning X into an 'everything app'. The combined company will initially focus on more tightly embedding xAI's Grok chatbot into X, making it more central to the app experience.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
Inside the EV startup secretly backed by Jeff Bezos (8 minute read)
Slate Auto, which could start production as soon as next year, is an EV startup that has been quietly operating since its founding in 2022. It has hired hundreds of employees, many of whom came from Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, and Harley-Davidson. The company is aiming to build an affordable two-seat electric pickup truck for around $25,000. It raised at least $111 million in a Series A round in 2023 that Jeff Bezos participated in. It is unknown how much Bezos put into the company.
Altman-Backed Praxis Scouts Kyiv, Athens for Tech Utopia (4 minute read)
Praxis is a self-described 'sovereign network' funded by Silicon Valley investors looking for at least 10,000 acres somewhere in the world to build its first city. Its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Dryden Brown will visit several candidate sites in a world tour kicking off in May. The locations include Nuuk in Greenland, Buenos Aires, Rome, Athens, Auckland, Marrakesh, Tokyo, Kyiv, and the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Once a location is announced and the host country's support has been secured, Praxis will dispatch a small delegation of supporters to move into 250 to 1,000 modular houses.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
LaunchDarkly introduces Guarded Releases to take the risk out of every release (Sponsor)
What if you could detect application errors and performance problems before your customers do? Guarded Releases lets you embed
proactive risk mitigation in every release. Set and monitor performance thresholds, track metrics during critical release windows, and use auto-rollback to remediate instantly if something goes wrong.
Get a demo.Introducing the Evals API (1 minute read)
OpenAI has released the Evals API for developers. The API enables developers to programmatically define tests, automate evaluation runs, and quickly iterate on prompts. It allows developers to integrate Evals anywhere in a workflow. Evals are still available in the dashboard.
Apache ECharts (Website)
Apache ECharts is an open source JavaScript visualization library. It features flexible chart types, a powerful rendering engine, elegant visual design, and a healthy community. The library can automatically generate chart descriptions and decal patterns for accessibility. It provides easy ways to add intuitive, interactive, and highly customizable charts to commercial products.
Ask HN: Do you still use search engines? (Hacker News Thread)
More and more people are using large language models instead of search engines, but many developers are finding that the technology is not well suited to finding factual information. Search engines are still better at finding specific links and real information. Large language models can be helpful for many things, like helping someone unfamiliar with a topic better refine their searches by getting the terminology correct and exploring research topics. Search engines are still required for many things as large language models get lots of very important things wrong.
How Apple stockpiled iPhones to avoid tariffs and keep prices low for a while (2 minute read)
Apple shipped five flights worth of Apple products in three days to the US in the last week of March to stock its warehouses. This is usually a time of the year when the company starts winding down its current-year products and starts manufacturing its September releases. The reserves that arrived at a lower duty will temporarily insulate the company from the higher prices it will need to pay under the revised tax rates. Apple is expected to take a $33 billion hit due to the Trump Administration's newly instated tariff plan.
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