TLDR 2018-12-10

Apple has released the Beddit Sleep Monitor after acquiring Beddit in 2017. The device is a 2mm-thin sensor strip that is placed under your bedsheets to measure sleep time, heart rate, breathing, snoring, bedroom temperature and humidity. You can connect it to your Apple Watch to display sleep report notifications and bedtime reminders. Your sleep analysis and heart rate data will also be accessible through the Health app on iOS 12. The device is available in Apple stores and on Apple's website for $150.

Uber confidentially filed papers for their IPO last Thursday. The company is expected to IPO at a $120 billion valuation in the first half of next year. Last August, Toyota invested $500 million in Uber at a valuation of $76 billion. Uber lost $1.07 billion in the just the third quarter of 2018. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is focused on cutting unprofitable business segments, and has already sold off Uber's operations in Russia and Southeast Asia.

NASA's InSight lander has captured the first ever audio recording from the surface of another planet. The recording in the video in the article is actually pitched up 6 octaves, the frequency of the unaltered recording is roughly 50 hertz, which is on the very low end of the human hearing range. The pitched up version basically sounds like wind on Earth, nothing too exciting. The recorded winds were blowing at 10 to 15 miles per hour.

The world's first two hydrogen powered trains are now running in Northern Germany. The trains are nearly silent and have a 1,000 km range. A hydrogen tank feeds a fuel cell to generate energy and push the electric train down the track. The train has a very small battery to maintain continuity and store energy from braking. While it's not currently clean, in the future companies will push towards creating H2 to power the trains with 100 percent renewables.

This is a Google open source project that combines Autograd and Tensorflow XLA to create a library that can automatically differentiate Python and NumPy functions and allows for JIT compilation of NumPy programs to run on GPUs and TPUs. If you're interested in high performance machine learning, this looks like it could be the future.

Minecraft is a really popular computer game where players build stuff with blocks (sort of like the digital version of Legos). The Minecraft Scripting API is now in public beta, it allows you to write scripts in JavaScript to listen and respond to in game events and modify parts of the game. I feel like Minecraft is the perfect game to allow user scripts on, I bet people are going to build crazy stuff with this.

Programming Digest is a weekly newsletter that curates interesting posts from engineering blogs as well as opinion pieces on programming.

This is a big Hacker News thread with over 500 comments on old software that people miss. Get ready for a trip down memory lane, featuring a surprising amount of love for Windows Phone!