ReHacked #109: Reddit jumps on IPO bandwagon, Toronto considers banning sidewalk robots, The 5 Most Common Jobs in a Medieval City and more
Shadows aren’t black. --Ian Storm Taylor
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Reddit jumps on IPO bandwagon with confidential filing | Reuters #socialnetworks #internet #economy
Reddit Inc, whose message boards became the go-to destination for day traders during this year's meme stock frenzy, said on Wednesday it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering with U.S. securities regulators.
Reuters reported in September the company was hoping to hit a valuation of more than $15 billion by the time it planned to list its shares.
Toronto considers banning sidewalk robots #technology #urbanism
The Toronto City Council is considering banning mobile robots from sidewalks and bike paths.
The provision was originally put forward by the Toronto Accessibility Advisory Committee. The committee voiced concerns about sidewalk robots being hazards for people with low mobility or vision as well as elderly people and children.
If passed, the provision would ban all robots that operate on anything other than muscular power, are automated or remote controlled and don’t transport passengers. Those who violate the provision would face a $150 fine.
Design Tip: Never Use Black by Ian Storm Taylor #design
Problem is, we see dark things and assume they are black things. When, in reality, it’s very hard to find something that is pure black. Roads aren’t black. Your office chair isn’t black. The sidebar in Sparrow isn’t black. Words on web pages aren’t black.
Xsnow - Wikipedia #software #history
Xsnow is a software application that creates the appearance of snow falling on the elements of the graphical user interface of a computer system. Xsnow was originally created as a virtual greeting card for Macintosh systems in 1984. In 1993, the concept was ported to the X Window System as Xsnow, and was included on a number of Linux distributions in the late 1990s.
The 5 Most Common Jobs in a Medieval City - Medievalists.net #history
Established in the late tenth century, Montpellier had become, three hundred years later, one of the main urban centres of Southern France. Before the Black Death, more than 30,000 called the city home. Montpellier was famous for its university that taught medicine and the trade goods that came with access to the Mediterranean, a dozen kilometres away. Detailed information on its population comes from a series of tax records spanning c. 1380-1480 that yield the names of nearly 10,000 householders, and the occupation of approximately 6,500 of them. So, who were the most numerous urban workers?
Einstein wins again | Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy #nature #physics #space
An international team of researchers from ten countries led by Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has conducted a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein’s theory of general relativity with some of the most rigorous tests yet. Their study of a unique pair of extreme stars, so called pulsars, involved seven radio telescopes across the globe and revealed new relativistic effects that were expected and have now been observed for the first time. Einstein’s theory, which was conceived when neither these types of extreme stars nor the techniques used to study them could be imagined, agrees with the observation at a level of at least 99.99%.
The results are published in Physical Review X.
Michael Kail, the former Vice President of IT Operations at Netflix, was sentenced today to 30 months in federal prison for his convictions for honest services wire, mail fraud, and money laundering, announced Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds, Federal Bureau of Investigation Craig D. Fair, and IRS-Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge Mark H. Pearson. Kail was also ordered to forfeit $700,000, pay a $50,000 fine, and serve a three term of supervision upon release from prison. The sentence was handed down by the United States District Judge Beth Labson Freeman.
Global pipelines – 30 times Earth’s circumference
According to the Global Energy Monitor, there were at least 2,381 operational oil and gas pipelines distributed across some 162 countries as of December 2020. The combined length of these pipelines is more than 1.18 million km (730,000 miles) – enough to circle the Earth 30 times.
The entire Bay Area has become a large declining tech company #economy
The large declining tech company. We’ve all read articles in the tech press and blogs analyzing how once hot companies lost their way. Most of them have followed similar trajectories and have a common set of characteristics. What if we apply the same “large declining tech company” framework to the Bay Area? It turns out that large declining tech companies and the Bay Area actually have a lot in common.
It breaks my heart to see what has become of San Francisco. I lived there for almost 25 years. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1997, it was a magical and inspirational place. Remember the Flying Saucer and Survival Research Labs parties? I hope that by analyzing what has gone wrong using a framework we know well, we can find a path to revitalization, and also provide warning signs for other metropolitan areas to not follow a similar policy trajectory.
The fall of Yahoo! is a well-documented example of a large declining tech company, and the following five categories are a great framework to analyze what is going on in the Bay Area.
Google Drive could soon start locking your files | TechRadar #internet #software #privacy
As explained in a new blog post, Google will take active steps to identify files hosted on its platform that are in breach of either its Terms of Service or abuse program policies.
These files will be flagged to their owner and restricted automatically, which means they can no longer be shared with other people, and access will be withdrawn from everyone but the owner.
The universe is expanding faster than it should be #nature #space
It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.
Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.
“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.
Group of Monkeys Kill Over 250 Dogs for 'Revenge' in Indian Town #nature
A group of monkeys in a small town in India took "revenge" on the local dog population this month by throwing them off of the top of tall buildings and trees. It is reported that the monkeys have killed about 250 pups in the process and are now targeting villagers.
The monkeys, located in Majalgaon, India started the rampage after some of the dogs allegedly killed an infant monkey. News18 reported that when the monkeys see a dog approach, they catch them and throw them from a significant height to the ground.
Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on - Terms and Conditions Agreement #software #privacy #link
Easily run Windows software on Linux with 🍷 Bottles! ⋅ Bottles #software
Run Windows in a Bottle
Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!
Test Your Product on a Crappy Laptop - CSS-Tricks #software
There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and it’s only going to get larger.
What can you do about this? Get your hands on a craptop and try to use your website or web app.
An iframe from googlesyndication.com tries to access the Camera and Microphone #privacy
In case you're not aware, there is extreme alarm about the possibility that the web-camera or microphone built-in to laptops, smart phones, and the like, could be surreptitiously turned on. What if Big Brother were to turn on the camera, without turning on the indicator light, and take pictures, or record audio from the built-in microphone? There's a long list of possible nefarious results, and this has to be seen as a serious privacy intrusion.
There is no legitimate purpose for an advertising network to access either the camera or microphone. But, going by the messages I found in the JavaScript console, that appears to be what an advertisement tried to do.
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