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Showing posts from May, 2018

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to blog things I've learnt in graduate school?

Ask HN: How to blog things I've learnt in graduate school? 149 by jamesecurry | 47 comments on Hacker News. Hi, Currently, I'm pursuing a masters in Control systems. After looking for a couple of blogs by researchers and graduate students I've had some trouble understanding in how to document/write the things I'm learning in graduate school. Ideally, I'd like to write to help understand how deep my understanding of the subject is but also be a way to contact people who are interested in the field of control systems & machine learning as two overlapping fields via a personal blog. A few of my concerns involve: 1. How to maintain a technical blog without sounding like an academician i.e examples of other good blogs. 2. How to spread the knowledge from the courses I'm taking legally i.e. how much out of class homeworks/material is it okay to share? Thanks for reading!
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Google launches a Q&A app for neighborhood communities in India

Google is increasing its focus on India after it released a new social app that’s aimed at building neighborhood communities within cities in the country. The company’s ‘Next Billion’ team in charge of emerging markets has dedicated significant resources to India. Its initiatives include data-friendly versions of YouTube and other popular services, its Tez mobile payment app , a food delivery service and a national WiFi network initiative . Now it is adding one more to the list with the release of  Neighbourly , a Q&A app for sharing local knowledge. The basic goal is to give local communities an outlet to seek answers to practical questions about local life, routine and more. Google believes that an increase in urban migration, short-term leasing and busy lives has changed the dynamic of local communities and made it harder to share information quite so easily. “Life happens close to home, in order the of a 1-2km radius, and local questions come up all the time. But as citi
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Australians will no longer be able to order from Amazon’s American site

Starting in July, Australians will be blocked from ordering items on Amazon’s United States site. The company said today that shoppers in Australia will be redirected to its local site, Amazon.com.au , and that its international sites, including Amazon.com, will no longer ship to Australian addresses. The change is in response to a new tax regulation that goes into effect on July 1 and requires businesses earning more than $75,000 AUD a year to charge Australia’s 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST) on low value items imported by consumers. Called the “Amazon tax,” the new policy was introduced following concerns about the impact of Amazon and other large overseas e-commerce businesses on Australian retailers, who have to apply GST to all products they sell. A loophole in tax regulations, however, means that the GST is currently applied only to items purchased from overseas retailers if they are worth $1,000 AUD or more, which many local companies argued gave Amazon, eBay and other over
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Uber is looking at adding benefits and insurance for drivers

At the Code Conference tonight, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi spoke about the company’s relationship with drivers, autonomous driving, uberEATS having a $6 billion bookings run rate, taking over as CEO and flying taxis, obviously. Just this week, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent subpoenas to Uber and Lyft seeking information on driver pay, benefits and classification info. Uber wasn’t available for comment at the time, but now it seems that the company is looking at ways to offer benefits and insurance to drivers. Specifically, Uber is looking at an economically-sound way to offer drivers a benefits and insurance package so that “this can be a safer way of living,” Khosrowshahi said. And despite what former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in the past about needing to get rid of the driver, Khosrowshahi said he disagrees. “The face of Uber is the person sitting in the front seat,” Khosrowshahi said. He added that it usually is a man driving, but that he would “love to ha
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China’s SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, closes $620M follow-on round

SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI company with a valuation of over $4.5 billion, is back in the money again. The company raised $600 million in an Alibaba-led financing round announced last month , and now it has added a further $620 million to that with a “Series C+” round announced today. Alibaba led the previous deal, and this time around the investors include more traditional names such as Fidelity International, Hopu Capital, Silver Lake and Tiger Global. Qualcomm, which previously backed the firm, was also in this round, SenseTime confirmed. The new money takes SenseTime to $1.6 billion from investors to date. The valuation has remained “over” $4.5 billion across both of these recent rounds, according to the company. It was previously valued at $1.5 billion when  it raised a $410 million Series B  last year. Alibaba said at the time of its investment last month that it had become the largest-single investor in SenseTime. Given this fresh injection, it isn’t clear wh
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Google brings its FilesGo Android device management app to China

Google has continued its slow and steady China strategy after it launched Files Go, a files management service for Android devices. The app launched to global markets last year but today it landed in China via four third-party app stores. Named ‘ Google 文件极客’ in China, the app helps users keep within the storage limits of their device by suggesting files to delete if they need to free up space. It also includes feature for finding files and sharing them to local devices without an internet connection. Like a solid internet connection, keeping enough free space on a device is critical to it running efficiently and quickly which is Files Go aims to help. Files Go was designed for India, where budget Android phones are mainstream, but interest in the app was so widespread that it was later launched worldwide. Indeed, the U.S. is now the third-largest market for the app, Josh Woodward, a product manager within Google’s ‘Next Billion’ team, told TechCrunch in an interview. Google is
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Google is quietly formulating a new strategy for China

Google is slowing piecing together a strategy for China to ensure that it doesn’t miss out on the growth of technology in the world’s largest country. It’s been months in the making through a series of gradual plays, but further evidence of those plans comes today via a product launch. Files Go — a file manager for Android devices released last year — has made its way to China today . Not a huge launch, for sure, but the mechanisms behind it provide insight into how Google may be thinking about the country, where it has been absent since 2010 after  redirecting its Chinese search service to Hong Kong  in the face of government pressure. For Files Go, Google is taking a partner-led approach to distribution because the Google Play Store does not operate in China. The company is working with Tencent, Huawei, Xiaomi and  Baidu, each of which will stock the app in their independent app stores, which are among the country’s most prominent third-party stores. Let that sink in a little:
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Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee says enough with favoring the ‘good guys’

Diversity and inclusion is a trash fire in Silicon Valley and in the business world at large. But let’s just focus on tech for now. At the Code Conference this evening, All Raise and Cowboy Ventures Partner Aileen Lee, shift7 CEO Megan Smith and Stubhub President Sukhinder Singh Cassidy talked about the state of diversity and inclusion in tech. Lee kicked things off with how the idea and statement that someone is such a “good guy” bothers her. Often times, she said, that’s the qualification for how many of these men get the opportunity to invest in companies or work at certain companies. Meanwhile, if someone suggests a woman or person of color, Lee said, the questions are totally different and focused on qualifications. “Good guys have hired and funded good guys,” Lee said. Moving forward, “we need to systematically map out our industry and business processes and try to take the biases out of them,” Lee said. She added, “people have not been given a fair shot and we need to kind of
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