TLDR 2018-11-05

Apple will put out its first 5G iPhone in 2020, using Intel's 8161 5G modem chip. Apple has previously been unhappy with heat dissipation from Intel chips, which can cause issues with battery life. The first 5G Android phones will debut next February, but there are currently only a limited amount of 5G cell towers available. If you do happen to be near one though, you will be able to get multiple-gigabits-per-second download speeds.

Amazon is very close to making Crystal City, Virginia, an urban neighborhood south of downtown Washington DC, their second headquarters. Things are far enough along that Amazon has had internal discussions about how quickly it can move employees there and Crystal City's top real estate developer has pulled some buildings off of the leasing market. Amazon says it plans to make $5 billion in capital investments in whatever city it chooses for its second headquarters, and while most cities' offers to entice Amazon to come have been secret, we know Maryland has offered an incentive package worth $8.5 billion and Newark has offered an incentive package worth $7 billion. The ultimate decision is likely to rest with Jeff Bezos, but it really looks like Washington, DC is going to be the site of Amazon's HQ2.

Wifi fills the world with a constant background field of radio signals. Researchers have now figured out how to use this to track the locations of people inside their own homes from the outside using just a smartphone. First they locate the Wifi transmitter by measuring the change in the signal strength as they walk around outside the target building or room. Once they know that, they can use the fact that the Wifi signal should be constant unless disturbed by movement from people inside a home, and each movement changes the signal in slightly different ways to track the people inside the home. These researchers can tell when you are typing, opening a door, or walking around from outside your home using just their Nexus 6 phone. If there are two Wifi transmitters in your home, the accuracy increases from 92.6% to over 99%.

Elon Musk's Boring Company will be opening its first tunnel to the public on December 10th in Los Angeles. The tunnels use electric skates to move 8 to 16 people at speeds up to 150 mph. The article contains a 30 second video showing the entire length of the tunnel that Elon Musk posted on Twitter.

Harvard Law School is digitizing and making 6.5 million state and federal cases dating from the 1600s to 2018 publicly available. They can be downloaded as zip files or accessed through an API. The cases are mostly from Supreme Court and appellate decisions, and has many federal trial opinions and opinions from the state of New York, but fewer from some other states. Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab director Adam Ziegler says "Building businesses around artificial scarcity of public information should not be much of a viable business in this day and age with the Internet. But building search capabilities, building analytical insights, building applications using that data is where all the action is in the future and should be."

So this is a marketplace that allows you to buy old abandoned side projects from other developers for under $1000, or you can also sell your own abandoned side projects. It's essentially a side project yard sale (lots of junk but a few gems!). Every project includes a helpful questionnaire that the owner fills out, with questions like "What is the technological stack?" and "How can the future owner turn your project into a business?"

This is a really great open source icon set, downloadable in png or svg formats. There are also two versions, one with filled icons and one with icons that are just outlined. If you're working on a web project, these can also be installed directly via NPM.