TLDR 2019-02-05

The popular messaging platform, Slack, filed with US regulators to go public without disclosing the details of its share-sale plans. Slack plans to sell its shares directly to investors without an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The estimated value of the company is more than $7 billion. While it is rare for a company to forgo an IPO, other companies such as Spotify have successfully gone public through this route.

Tesla has reached an agreement with Maxwell, an ultracapacitor and battery component manufacturer, to purchase the company for over $200 million. While Maxwell is best known for its ultracapacitor technologies, Tesla’s acquisition is more likely due to the dry electrode technology that Maxwell has been recently showing off. The dry electrode is a battery technology that is able to significantly boost storage capacity, simplify the manufacturing process, and lower production costs.

A college student who stole $5 million in cryptocurrencies using SIM swap attacks (hacking the user's phone and using that to gain access to their email and cryptocurrency wallets) has accepted a plea deal of 10 years in prison. Joel Ortiz stole funds from around 40 victims. Authorities have been slowly arresting and sentencing cryptocurrency thieves, aiming to send a message that people who commit these crimes do get caught and that the consequences of these crimes are severe.

Elon Musk tweeted a series of videos, showing SpaceX’s new rocket engine design, Raptor, being tested. The engine, designed for its Starship rocket, has a new ‘radical’ design that uses methane and liquid oxygen to attain thrust. SpaceX has planned to attach 3 of these engines to its Starship rocket for low-altitude testing later this year. The article contains the videos showing the Raptor rocket engine being tested.

Sheety allows you to quickly and easily convert any Google Sheets spreadsheet into an API in 3 easy steps. This tool allows developers to prototype quickly and easily, without having to worry about building a back-end system. While the creator states that it is a personal project that shouldn’t be used for anything critical, it is a great tool for quickly developing and testing ideas before progressing into further development.

Flexsearch is a high-performance REST based full-text searching library. It is fast, memory efficient, and has a variety of plug-ins to customize its functionality. Flexsearch is well documented and researched, and the GitHub repository contains benchmark results against other search libraries.

Many companies are starting to use computers and automation to fill and replace roles, and this is starting to have a real impact on job availability. The transition to using computers for menial jobs is similar to how the farming industry started replacing workers with machinery. There is now an upper class part of the workforce that works in information jobs that enjoy high wage growth, while the lower class working menial jobs have little hope for advancement and have had stagnant wages for decades.