U.K. online bank Monzo has raised £113 million ($144 million) in a fresh round of funding led by the U.S. start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Monzo is now valued at over £2 billion ($2.5 billion), double the £1 billion it was worth in its last funding round in October last year. “It is a really great signifier of how far we’ve come since the last round,” Tristan Thomas, Monzo’s head of marketing, told CNBC, adding that the bank has also doubled its customer count to more than 2 million since the last round.

SID defines a small component interface which serves to tightly encapsulate them. SID includes a tutorial-style user’s guide (HTML) (PDF), and developer’s guide (HTML) (PDF), and component reference documentation for the component library. If you’d like to contribute to SID, the one thing the project really needs is more components!

Some people know about SBIRs (small business innovative research grants), through which federal government gives away more than $1B of R&D funding to small businesses. I know government grant process can be very cumbersome but so is trying to raise VC money (especially outside of SV). I am noticing more startups (e.g. Palantir, Anduril) starting off of government opportunities, but they seem very rare.

The prevalence of dark patterns across the web is unknown, but in a study released this week, researchers from Princeton University have started to quantify the phenomenon, focusing first on retail companies. The researchers developed software that automatically scanned more than 10,000 sites and found that more than 1,200 of them used techniques that the authors identified as dark patterns, including ThredUp’s fake notifications. The report coincides with discussions among lawmakers about regulating technology companies, including through a bill proposed in April by Senators Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that is meant to limit the use of dark patterns by making some of the techniques illegal and giving the Federal Trade Commission more authority to police the practice.

(Reuters) – U.S. parcel delivery firm FedEx Corp on Monday sued the U.S. government, saying it should not be held liable if it inadvertently shipped products that violated a Trump administration ban on exports to some Chinese companies. The move came after FedEx reignited Chinese ire over its business practices when a package containing a Huawei phone sent to the United States was returned last week to its sender in Britain, in what FedEx said was an “operational error.” FedEx returned the phone and told the sender that it could not deliver the package because of a “U.S. government issue” with Huawei and the Chinese government, PCMag reported.

A floating device designed to catch plastic waste has been redeployed in a second attempt to clean up a huge island of garbage swirling in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. Boyan Slat, creator of the Ocean Cleanup project, announced on Twitter that a 600 metre (2,000ft) long floating boom that broke apart late last year was sent back to the Great Pacific garbage patch this week after four months of repair. Fitted with solar-powered lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the device intends to communicate its position at all times, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic every few months and transport it to dry land.

The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to date over the past seven years to obtain massive amounts of call records — including times and dates of calls, and their cell-based locations — on at least 20 individuals. (Image: file photo/Getty Images)

With access to the cell provider’s bank of call detail records, the hackers compressed and exfiltrated a target’s data — some hundreds of gigabytes — amounting to a vast number of records — potentially weeks or months at a time. Div said because the attacks were ongoing, the company wouldn’t name the cell networks — only that some are large providers, and the smaller companies are in “unique and interesting” locations, likely each a strategic target for the hackers.

Foundry vendors are readying the next wave of advanced processes, but their customers will face a myriad of confusing options—including whether to develop chips at 5nm, wait until 3nm, or opt for something in between. At advanced nodes, meanwhile, Samsung and TSMC are shipping 7nm processes using today’s finFET transistors, and both vendors will extend the finFET to 5nm. So at this cadence, chipmakers introduced a new process technology with more transistor density, enabling the industry to lower the cost per transistor.

Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Content analysis of the notes consistently showed that students who used laptops had more verbatim transcription of the lecture material than those who wrote notes by hand.

Here is a short list of some of the codecs I tried, and the smallest size I was able to get out of them for 30 minutes of speech that was still inteligable:

Now I was performing these transcodes from a wav file that I had processed in audacity as I will describe below. Then I encoding the resulting wav file with opus at between 6 and 10 average Kbps, variable bitrate, tuned for speech. I was unable to get the OPUS file to play back in any other programs on either OS, and I was never able to get the OPUS file to play back on anything in my collection slower than a Pentium MMX (although it has been suggested that a high end Pentium, or possibly even a very fast 486 should be able to handle it, I don’t currently have rigs available for testing.)