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This article from Esther Crawford talks about her time working at Twitter. Crawford sold her startup to Twitter in 2020. She describes the experience as both amazing and terrible. The company often felt siloed and bureaucratic and engineers had to act as politicians instead of just building. The article covers topics such as what it is like to work/interact with Elon Musk and the dangers of living in an echo chamber.
Intel's CEO was very bullish on AI during the company's Q2 2023 earnings call. The company plans to ship its first consumer chip with a built-in neural processor for machine learning tasks later this year. It plans to eventually integrate AI into everything it sells. Integrating AI into consumer chips will allow AI processing to happen at the edge rather than on the cloud, improving latency, bandwidth, and costs.
The cost of lithium has increased tenfold since 2020. Scientists from Arizona State University have proposed diluting lithium with sodium as a solution to cutting the cost of batteries. The team found that a lithium solution with up to 20 percent sodium mixed could remain stable. However, the resulting structure did not possess the properties necessary to create a viable battery.
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Google BigQuery can be insanely powerful - if it’s used correctly. Watch this on-demand Tech Talk
Overflow AI is Stack Overflow's new plan to integrate generative AI into its platform. It includes adding new search capabilities, the ability to curate and build a knowledge base in minutes, Slack integration, a Visual Studio Code extension, and a dedicated location for AI resources and responses from experts. Developers interested in helping Stack Overflow test its new AI-powered features can register to help on the Stack Overflow Labs page. Stack Overflow aims to keep its developer community at the center and ensure that the people who contribute their knowledge are recognized for their efforts.
BlazingMQ is a distributed message queueing platform. It provides a set of message routing strategies and supports a unique multi-hop network topology that leads to a distribution tree for each queue, creating network bandwidth savings for certain use cases. Using BlazingMQ can lead to significant savings in network and latency for high fan-out workflows.
Every prefecture in Japan posted a population drop in 2022. Japan's total population dropped by more than 800,000 last year. Other countries are likely set to follow Japan's lead. Japan's prime minister has called the trend a crisis, but national policies have so far failed to put a dent in population decline.
Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar recently conducted an interview where they discussed generative AI technology and Stack Overflow's strategy around dealing with it. This article analyses Chandrasekar responses in the interview. It presents the unedited transcript along with the analysis to allow the reader to interpret the original context. The analysis suggests that Chandrasekar hasn't listened to the Stack Overflow community and that their understanding of the site, its community, and culture is very surface-level.
This post covers three distinctive perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
Apple's new policy requiring developers to justify their use of certain APIs aims to crack down on fingerprinting.
This Twitter post describes how Cloudflare stores its data on 15-20 PostgreSQL clusters.
Many people have asked Twitter to preserve a light mode option even if X switches to dark mode as a default.
PeerDB is a data-movement platform that makes moving data in and out of Postgres fast and simple.
There are net-takers and net-givers - most of the richest are net-givers.
Sequoia is scaling back two of its funds as it, along with everyone else, continues to adjust to a challenging environment for crypto. The firm's crypto fund is shrinking from $585 million to $200 million, while its ecosystem fund, a fund of funds, will be pared down from $900 million to $450 million. This reallocation is part of Sequoia's continued response to the tectonic shifts in the market over the past year or so. It is also another example of the dire state of the venture and startup scene in light of interest rate hikes and concerns about the economy.
Amazon has expanded its Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) services, adding two new tools. These new tools aim, much like Amazon’s AWS business does in Web 2.0, to simplify core elements of the web3 development process. One of the tools, called AMB Access, expands Amazon’s RPC node offerings empowering developers with highly scalable node access. The other tool that is being rolled out, AMB Query, allows developers to tap into data from the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains via an API. While sentiment around the space is at a low, developments like this and Google’s recent acknowledgment of its commitment to the space show that these companies likely see a lot of potential in serving the crypto industry.
Beam has launched a self-custody wallet aimed at simplifying crypto transactions. The wallet will be built on both Optimism and Base, unifying blockchain tech with user-friendly web experiences similar to Venmo or Cash App. The platform will offer unique features like straightforward onboarding processes, stable and low fee transactions, and easy recovery methods using Twitter and standard passwords. Beam is also rolling out innovative technologies like Supersends and Beam Names to facilitate cross-chain transactions and user-friendly interactions.
Threshold Network has launched tBTC redemptions, a novel mechanism enabling what the team claims as trustless bridging of BTC to tBTC on the ETH network. This allows users to trustlessly move BTC to ETH to leverage DeFi functionality on the chain. When users want to move their tBTC back to BTC and off of ETH, they are able to do so without any reliance on or permission from centralized entities.
Smart contract development is different from software development. If you make mistakes, there can be extremely serious and immediate consequences. For this reason, the Nascent team has created a Security Toolkit that includes practical guides and checklists for smart contract development. The Toolkit aims to help organizations build secure codebases, prepare for external audits, and ultimately roll out safe smart contracts. The Nascent team likened this toolkit to a pilot’s safety checklist or a physician’s checklist before a medical procedure.
This Twitter thread explains how Worldcoin recently registered a set of "identity commitments" - cryptographic proof that one possesses a private key for one of the registered identities. This unique zkProof doesn't reveal specific identities, ensuring privacy. Along with the proof, a public message or "signal" can be attached, e.g., claiming a grant or casting a vote. Since these zkProofs are anonymous, it's impossible to trace them back to an individual. The verification of zkProofs occurs on-chain on Optimism, and Worldcoin uses the Semaphore protocol to further protect privacy.
This blog lays out how the stablecoin market has been seeing significant and sustained innovation with several projects launching new features and making considerable strides. Synthetix is rolling out v3 that could potentially drive sUSD's market cap up, and Liquity is launching its v2 offering a solution to scale stablecoins. Lybra Finance's eUSD stablecoin, a fork of Liquity, is becoming a serious contender to LUSD, with new versions promising omnichain functionality and minting via various collaterals. Meanwhile, MakerDAO's Dai and Frax are undergoing significant transformations, boosting their appeal. Last but not least, Aave's GHO and crvUSD have maintained dominant positions in the DeFi market.
Co-founders of the Solana-based NFT marketplace Tensor, Ilja Moisejevs and Richard Wu, have been promoting compressed NFTs as a cost-efficient method for digital asset creation. This new process considerably reduces the data needed to mint an NFT through "state compression", making these NFTs affordable and thus expanding the potential market. They believe one of the big unlocks of this innovation is that it allows more room for consumer apps to experiment and find novel use cases for NFTs.
Mark your calendars for August 5, when Flashbots will be hosting 10 MEV-Share challenges in 48 hours.
Last year, Paradigm’s research team attempted to build out a proof-of-concept for converting EVM to machine code to look for speed increases. They’re open to developers trying their hand at productionizing this PoC.
It’s that time of the week again. This tweet has your weekly roundup of important news and events covering DeFi, governance proposals, an outline of next week’s calendar of events, general crypto news, and tweets of the week.
Suku and Polygon collaborated on a promotion allowing users to create wallets and transfer crypto via Twitter, aiming to simplify crypto adoption. They also demonstrated 'tweet-minting' of NFTs.
In the dog days of Summer, you can’t help but take stock of things and look back. History has a way of repeating itself and everything is cyclical. We’re in another rerun of a disruptive tech cycle. Now is your chance to maximize.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t bring your attention to the latest rate hike, and more importantly, the specter of future increases. Some say we’re bouncing off this recession, with markets still hot and inflation not cooling. All of these factors affect your company’s ability to scale and raise money.
Sequoia Capital has cut the size of its cryptocurrency fund by more than 65%, from $585 million to $200 million. Talk about a pivot. We assume this is all going into AI, right?
It isn’t the heady days of 2021 (“shut up and take my money!”), but there are glimmers of hope out there. This exhaustive review of current data on each stage of investing is a must read if you’re headed out to raise this Fall.
I like to ask my team if the person they are recommending to hire would pass the “airport test” - if you were stuck in an airport for the next 8 hours, would you be psyched to chat with this person? I like Matt Blumberg’s approach as well though.
With just about every major SaaS provider raising their prices, should you take the plunge? Quick read on the things you’ll want to think through before doing so, as well as tips on how to test and roll it out.
It never hurts to study up on early-stage hiring especially in a post-AI, post-pandemic world. This is a great read that breaks down the 5-to-50 hiring tricks of the trade.
I’m an active Notion user, largely for curating interesting reads, infographics, and thoughts. In this article, Azeem Azhar unpacks how you can use AI to level up your research skills and turn Notion into a valuable database where you can store knowledge and more easily spot thematic connections and patterns.
You never know, but the formula is pretty clear if/when you get acquired. Jason from SaaStr walks us through what to expect.
We’re increasingly seeing more people want to take control of their finances. Fees charged by financial advisors, funds, and wealth managers, and valuable leaps in money tech, are encouraging people to go it alone when it comes to personal finance. Is there an opportunity for AI to take the wheel on this trend?
Marc Randolph lays out why he thinks founders shouldn’t be focused on “getting rich” but instead should be focused on solving hard problems with amazing people. What do you want to spend your time on really once your basic needs are met?
Canned water? C’mon. You wouldn’t think of canned water as a massive business, but Mike Cessario leveraged some (what are now) obvious tricks to bootstrap his now ubiquitous canned water brand.
Within all the AI hype, it’s nice to see biotech getting a spotlight.
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This article dives into how S3 works, the steps taken to build it, and how it runs today. One of the people involved in building it talks about the personal, technical, and organizational challenges he faced along the way. One of the greatest learnings and career accelerators was ownership and encouraging ownership in others. There are often multiple ways to solve a problem, and picking the right one is letting someone own the solution.
A system design tutorial on 3 consistency patterns used in distributed systems. Strong consistency ensures that all servers always retrieve the latest data, but it can reduce service availability and increase latency. Eventual consistency, which favors high availability and performance over consistency, ensures that the system will eventually converge to the same state, but it may return stale data in the interim. Weak consistency, which prioritizes high availability and low latency, may or may not return the latest data. The choice of consistency pattern depends on the system requirements and use cases.
VSCode was able to reduce their Javascript size by 20%, or 3.9MB, without actually doing any deleting or refactoring thanks to a new “name mangling” build step. This reduction not only means less code to download and store, but also improves startup time as less source code needs to be scanned before the JavaScript is run. This is a great read on how the VSCode team identified the technical problem and how they arrived at the solution.
Reviewing others’ code consistently can improve your skills and leverage your career. You can help others grow, as well as give value to the company you work with. This article delves into the benefits of reviewing code in a pull request and gives some advice on the approach to follow when doing it, like interacting with other colleagues.
This article addresses and debunks 8 of the most common myths about the engineering manager (EM) role so you can feel empowered to decide whether becoming an EM is the right fit for you. For example, it’s a myth that management is the natural next step for great individual contributors. Furthermore, you don’t have to become a manager to be a leader.
Hono is a small, simple, and ultrafast web framework for the Edges. It works on any JavaScript runtime: Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute@Edge, Deno, Bun, Vercel, Lagon, AWS Lambda, and Node.js.
CodiumAI PR-Agent is an open-source tool aiming to help developers review pull requests faster and more efficiently. It automatically analyzes the pull request and provides several types of feedback, such as auto-descriptions, PR reviews, question answering, and code suggestions.
PeerDB is a Postgres-first data-movement platform that makes moving data in and out of Postgres fast and simple. It enables you to sync, transform, and query data across your stores using simple SQL commands. PeerDB implements multiple Postgres native and infrastructural optimizations for 10x faster data-movement in and out of PostgreSQL.
Due to the nature of LLMs and their inherent dynamism, traditional software tooling is often ill-equipped to handle these models out of the box. This post explores the latest product by the team that created LangChain (the most popular LLM software tool) and see what new parts of the LLM stack LangSmith hopes to tackle.
This post explores some generative AI tools for coding. It compares various tools, like GitHub Copilot, and talks through the upsides and downsides of using them.