TLDR 2021-06-03

Stack Overflow is being acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion. Prosus is an investment and holding company and the primary shareholder of Tencent. Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently with the same team, same plan, and same business practices. No major changes are expected.

Apple recently posted a job listing that mentioned homeOS. The listing was later updated to replace the name with other existing products. homeOS could be an internal name for the operating system that HomePods use, but recent rumors suggest that it might be the name for a new operating system that will unify the HomePod, Apple TV, and other smart home products that Apple might introduce in the future. Any announcements about homeOS will likely be made at Apple's WWDC developer conference on Monday.

TuSimple, a company focused on self-driving technology for heavy-duty trucks, shipped a truckload of watermelons from Arizona to Oklahoma using the truck’s autonomous system for over 80 percent of the journey. The truck drove the route in just over 14 hours, 10 hours faster than the average time it takes a human driver to drive the same route. The cargo arrived at its destination in better condition as it was a day fresher. A human driver is still required to act as a safety and last-mile driver. The technology may be able to help fill a shortage of labor in the long-haul trucking industry.

NASA will send two spacecraft to explore Venus before the end of the decade. The DAVINCI+ mission will study how the planet's atmosphere formed and evolved and determine whether the planet ever had an ocean. It will also be able to return high-resolution pictures of the planet's geological features. The VERITAS mission will map the planet's surface to determine its history and understand why it developed so differently from Earth. It will also map infrared emissions from the planet's surface to map its rock types.

Facebook's F8 developer conference kicked off on Wednesday with a focus on technologies that enable developers and businesses to build and grow on its platforms. The Messenger API for Instagram is now available to all developers, enabling key automation tools on the platform for the first time. Facebook is also testing ways for people to opt into messaging with businesses. New updates to the WhatsApp Business API and Facebook Business Suite were also announced. A new Multipeer API will help developers make augmented reality effects for group calls. PyTorch is now officially Facebook's default framework for building AI and machine learning models.

Deepnote is a place where data scientists can share their Notebooks with anybody. A Deepnote project contains code and data and it all runs in one environment. Projects can contain multiple notebooks, but they share resources. Deepnote allows people to work together on data science projects in real-time and in one place. It is built for the browser, with all its processing done on powerful machines in the cloud.

Daniel Wang, a professor of astronomy, has stitched together hundreds of images to create a panorama of the center of the Milky Way. The resulting map captures some of the processes that occur at the galactic core. It is hard to observe the Milky Way's core due to the vast amounts of dust and gas surrounding its supermassive black hole. Wang used X-rays and radio observations to probe the region. Central regions of galaxies are believed to play an essential role in galaxy formation and evolution. The image can be viewed in the article.

Huawei officially launched HarmonyOS for mobile phones on Wednesday. The OS has been in development since 2016 and it is available for several smart devices, not just for phones and tablets. Huawei's goal is for users to be able to control all HarmonyOS-powered devices on a single control panel. Existing devices will be able to communicate with HarmonyOS devices using a plug-in. Huawei claims that no single line of code in HarmonyOS is identical to code in Android. It is unknown whether the OS is based on Linux.