The Daily Index — Friday, April 5, 2024 · TLDR Index

Across today’s newsletters

Today’s Index

TLDR

ALPHABET REPORTEDLY WEIGHING OFFER FOR HUBSPOT, SENDING SHARES IN THE $32 BILLION MARKETING COMPANY UP 5%

Alphabet is in talks with advisors as it considers making an offer for marketing software company HubSpot. It has yet to determine how much it should offer. It is unclear whether antitrust officials will greenlight the deal. No official offer has yet been submitted.

cnbc.com · 1 min

TLDR AI

LAMBDA ANNOUNCES $500M GPU CLOUD EXPANSION

GPU provider Lambda has a special debt financing deal for $500m to expand its GPU cloud offering in addition to the $230m Series C earlier this year.

businesswire.com · 4 min

TLDR Web Dev

HOW WE’VE SAVED 98% IN CLOUD COSTS BY WRITING OUR OWN DATABASE

HiveKit, a company focused on tracking vehicles and people, faced a scaling problem where storing billions of location updates per month became prohibitively expensive with conventional databases. To overcome this, the company built a custom database specialized for its write-heavy load. It also optimized storage by storing delta updates instead of full state for each update. These changes, combined with moving from AWS Aurora to EBS, reduced the company's cloud storage costs by 98%.

hivekit.io · 6 min

TLDR InfoSec

SURVEYLAMA ALARMED OVER DATA BREACH OF 4.4 MILLION USERS

SurveyLama, a survey rewards platform, has disclosed a data breach impacting over 4.4 million users' personal information, including email addresses, names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, IP addresses, and hashed passwords. The incident occurred in February but came to light recently through its addition to the Have I Been Pwned breach notification service.

techtimes.com · 3 min

TLDR Crypto

PAYPAL ENABLES PYUSD FOR XOOM TRANSFERS

PayPal has launched a new feature that allows U.S. customers to make international transfers using the PYUSD stablecoin without incurring transaction fees. This service, available through Xoom, PayPal’s international payments platform, enables U.S. clients to convert PYUSD into USD and send it to recipients in ~160 countries. PayPal’s recent move aligns with the company’s broader strategy to increase the adoption of digital currencies and build its reputation in the digital asset space.

theblock.co · 2 min

TLDR

ELON MUSK BOOSTS AI ENGINEER PAY IN ‘CRAZIEST TALENT WAR’

Tesla is raising its compensation for artificial intelligence engineers to ward off poaching from other companies. Elon Musk says that the competition for AI engineers is the craziest talent war he has ever seen. Tech companies are offering million-dollar-a-year compensation packages and accelerated stock-vesting schedules. Layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech.

wsj.com · 2 min

TLDR

10 YEARS AFTER FACEBOOK BOUGHT OCULUS, WHAT'S NEXT FOR META'S VR PLANS?

Smartwatches weren't even mainstream yet when Facebook bought Oculus 10 years ago. VR is still not massively adopted in 2024, but it has gone mainstream several times. This article contains an overview of where Meta is heading next with the Quest 3, AI, smart glasses, and AR glasses. Meta is bringing its own generative AI features to its Ray-Ban smart glasses later this month. The glasses will use their onboard cameras to recognize things in the real world.

cnet.com · 6 min

TLDR

PHYSICISTS TAKE A MAJOR STEP TOWARD MAKING A NUCLEAR CLOCK

Scientists were recently able to use a tabletop laser to bump an atomic nucleus into a higher energy state, a feat that paves the path towards creating the first nuclear clock. Nuclear clocks keep time based on the inner workings of atomic nuclei. They could be more simple and portable than atomic clocks. They could also be used to test fundamental physics theories in new ways. Nuclear clocks are based on different physics than atomic clocks, so comparing the two types of timepieces could allow for new studies of fundamental physics.

sciencenews.org · 3 min

TLDR

ANATOMY OF A CREDIT CARD REWARDS PROGRAM

Credit cards earn money in multiple different ways. One important method is interchange, a fee paid by card-accepting businesses. The fee is split between various parties in the credit card ecosystem for marketing. Credit card issuers offer rewards cards so customers use their rails and then compete with each other for 'share of wallet' by bidding with interchange. Not every card is a reward card due to different card applications and features, regulations, collusion, and other reasons. This article explains how credit card rewards programs work and the systems that work together that make them profitable.

bitsaboutmoney.com · 26 min