TLDR 2019-01-21

Apple is selling the iPhone SE on the clearance section of its site for $249 for the 32GB version, and $299 for the 128GB version. The offer is only available to US customers. Apple had stopped selling the iPhone SE in September, it was one of the last 4-inch iPhones and one of the last models with a headphone jack. It has the inside parts of an iPhone 6S jammed into the body of a smaller iPhone 5S.

Tesla is laying off about 7% of its workforce in order to make their "cars, batteries, and solar products cost-competitive with fossil fuels." Currently the cheapest Tesa is the Model 3, which costs $44,000, Elon Musk wants to get it down to $35,000. Earlier this month, Tesla cut the price of its cars by $2000 to offset a $3750 reduction in federal electric car tax credits. "The road ahead is very difficult" says Musk.

Poachers have been hunting elephants for tusks for decades. Originally less than 4% of female elephants were born without tusks, but due to evolutionary pressure from poachers, 98% of female elephants in Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa are born without tusks. Males need tusks because they use them to fight over females. Tusks are still useful for females to strip bark from trees, so these new tuskless females may have to compensate by expanding their range to make up for their lack of foraging ability.

Russian startup StartRocket plans on launching dozens of CubeSat satellites into the sky to create gigantic billboards. These billboards would display advertisements for a year at a time. The ads would be visible from evening to morning twilight. They say the tech will be ready by 2021.

This is a collection of classes from universities like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT that are available online through Coursera, EDX, and Udacity that can replicate the requirements for an undergraduate computer science degree.

Google is looking for people who want to use AI to change the world. They have a total of $25 million dollars they'll give out to applicants, as well as cloud computing credits, coaching from Google's AI experts, and consulting from Google Cloud. The applications will be judged on impact, feasibility, use of AI, scalability, and responsible use of AI.

This is an article by a mobile engineer who interviewed at LinkedIn, Yelp, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google and got all six job offers. It also includes the study plan they used, and lessons learned (mostly generic stuff like practicing algorithms, remember that it's a numbers game etc.). Probably worth reading if you're looking for jobs soon.