Even if you’re a subject matter expert with an outline in hand, there are a lot of unknowns: the time it takes to do research; the time it takes to come up with good examples; the time it takes to derive reference implementations; the number of times you delete and re-write sections to get them right; the overhead of coordinating contributors, and so on. While O’Reilly provided good technical editors, I had to seek out subject matter experts myself and convince them to look at my manuscript. Of course, that’s a giant ask that comes with a significant time commitment and little pay-off (O’Reilly can front technical editors a few hundred bucks as a thank you, which can feel inadequate for the 10+ hours an editor might spend editing your manuscript).

“This is Murray Gell-Mann”, the caller said, then launched into a monologue about why Caltech was the center of the universe for particle physics at the time. In telling this to me, Feynman then went into a long diatribe about how Murray always seemed to think the names for things were so important. I never quite understood why Murray—who could have gone to any university in the world—chose to work at Caltech for 33 years in an office two doors down from Feynman.

That is why we built jerry.ai to create the easiest experience for our users. Enabled by disruptive technologies, jerry.ai aims for the one-click user experience in financial product offerings which traditionally requires users to fill out long forms. Based in Silicon Valley, we are looking for engineering talent to join our team in Canada.

Surely it was only a matter of time until Phish Reunion Tour tickets hit the printer tray — and management would pounce. It came just weeks after our Opinion section began an ambitious series of stories on the growing threat to privacy in the digital age. Maybe the folks in Opinion wanted to chronicle how people would react to the introduction of workplace surveillance in real time.

In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. “Every second that goes by and it’s not fixed, I’m dripping pennies”

Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Metadata is frequently cleaned up after a song is released as mistakes are noticed

In an ideal world, once a song is finished, the metadata would be crafted by the artist or the artist’s producer, and they would submit that data to the record label, distributor, or publisher(s) involved for verification and distribution.

But in one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers’ revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. “All of these externalities with regard to the ad economy—the harm to privacy, the expansion of government surveillance, the ability to microtarget and drive divisive content—were often justified to industry because of this ‘huge’ value to publishers,” Mr. Soltani said. The shift toward behavioral targeting has come along with two other trends: the emergence of the Google-

Facebook

duopoly, which in 2018 accounted for 58% of U.S. digital ad spending, according to eMarketer Inc.; and the stalling of digital display ad revenue growth for many digital publishers.

At OpenAI, researchers have trained a robotic hand to manipulate an alphabet block as a child might. At a Google robotics lab, researchers have shown that machines can learn to pick up random items, such as Ping-Pong balls and plastic bananas, and toss them into a bin several feet away. As OpenAI’s system learned to play Dota 2 over several months — more than 45,000 years of game play — it came to rely on tens of thousands of computer chips.

The net worth of the average 18- to 35-year-old has plummeted 34 percent since 1996, according to new study from accounting group Deloitte. The group’s average net worth is now below $8,000, putting today’s millennials in a worse financial position than previous told The Washington Post that the study’s findings “debunk many conventional wisdoms about the new-age consumer.” The study also found that “only 20 percent of consumers were meaningfully better off in 2017 than they were in 2007, with precious little income left to spend on discretionary retail,” according to the paper.

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Amazon’s behavior toward open source combined with lack of leadership from industry associations such as the Open Source Initiative (OSI) will stifle open-source innovation and make commercial open source less viable. Source-available licenses

Is it inevitable that the combination of Amazon’s behavior and this lack of industry leadership will stifle open-source innovation and make commercial open source less viable? The trend is toward “source-available” licensing rather than “open-source” licensing because source-available licenses, uncontaminated by the myopia of open source industry associations, do not require that Amazon have the “freedom” to take your code, run it as a commercial service and give nothing back to you.

SEATTLE — The fatal flaws with Boeing’s 737 Max can be traced to a breakdown late in the plane’s development, when test pilots, engineers and regulators were left in the dark about a fundamental overhaul to an automated system that would ultimately play a role in two crashes. In both doomed flights, pilots struggled as a single damaged sensor sent the planes into irrecoverable nose-dives within minutes, killing 346 people and prompting regulators around the world to ground the Max. Current and former employees at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration who spoke with The New York Times said they had assumed the system relied on more sensors and would rarely, if ever, activate.