TLDR 2019-08-22

Walmart has sued Tesla, claiming that Tesla's solar panels caused fires in seven of its stores, destroying merchandise and property and resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses. According to Walmart, Tesla failed to produce solar tiles that lived up to industry standards. Walmart has installed Tesla's solar panels on the roofs of around 240 of its stores. Tesla paid $2.6 billion in 2016 to buy SolarCity before producing its own solar tiles. Last year, Tesla reported a $408 million loss in its second quarter, despite selling more cars than ever. It is currently facing a field investigation by the US National Transportation Safety Board after several Model X and Model S owners claimed that their cars burst into flames.

Amazon opened its biggest campus in Hyderabad on Wednesday, despite stringent regulations in India regarding foreign eCommerce sites and competition from companies like Walmart. The new campus covers 9.5 acres and has 1.8 million square feet of office space. It will be able to accommodate more than 15,000 employees. Amazon has budgeted more than $5 billion for its India expansion. Due to competition, it may partner up with local stores. Amazon originally entered India in 2004 but did not start focusing on its retail endeavors until 2013. It offers grocery delivery and video streaming through its Prime subscription, and it plans to add restaurant delivery services.

On the 40th anniversary of the first successful heart transplant, the surgeon who pioneered heart transplantation in the UK announced that his protege will try to replace a human kidney with a pig's this year. If the operation is successful, the techniques used should be applicable to heart transplants as well. In May, a genetic therapy for treating heart attacks showed promise in pigs, regenerating areas that had been damaged. Millions of people in the UK live with high blood pressure, with an estimated 900,000 people living with heart disease. The pigs who received the genetic treatment showed almost complete recovery of cardiac function after a month. However, many of the pigs died in the experiments as the genes in the treatment expressed in an uncontrolled way.

YouTube has started taking down robot combat videos, citing that the videos are in breach of its community guidelines. Each notice of removal was accompanied with a section of the guidelines which said that the videos displayed deliberate infliction of animal suffering or showed animals that were forced to fight. A spokesperson for YouTube stated that the videos were likely removed in error through a faulty algorithm. YouTubers who have had videos removed can appeal the decision in order for the content to be reinstated.

Showcase is a sample project that applies a modern approach to Android development using Kotlin and the latest tech-stacks. The aim of the project is to demonstrate best practices, present guidelines, and to present a modern Android application architecture that is modular, scalable, maintainable, and testable. While the application is simple, it builds a solid foundation for larger apps suitable for bigger teams and a long application lifecycle.

Google Cloud Run allows developers to deploy containerized serverless applications without having to worry about operations, scalability, and security. Google has now released the Cloud Run Button, which is an image and link that can be added to the README of source code repositories to allow others to deploy an application to the Google Cloud Platform using Cloud Run. It works with any repository that has a Dockerfile or that can be built using Cloud Native Buildpacks.

A photographer, Benedict Redgrove, started a passion project to photograph space artifacts for a self-published book and exhibit, even getting NASA's permission and help after nearly five years. Redgrove required additional funding for the project, so he placed a series of ads on Facebook and Instagram in order to promote his Kickstarter campaign. Soon after the ads were accepted, they were flagged and removed by an algorithm. Despite attempting to filter out conspiracy theorists, lunar landing deniers, and flat earthers, the ad received many comments and reactions from these groups, causing the algorithm to flag his advertisements as misleading and resulting in high negative feedback. Facebook has acknowledged that the ads had been officially approved, but declined to comment on what had gone wrong.