🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #74

It's Friday—almost time to relax! Let's stay focused and finish well.

#MightOfTwoTierCities - 80% of Indian online shoppers now come from households earning between INR 2.5-10 lakhs annually. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar led user growth, while use of regional languages and voice search jumped 162% and 40%.

#GoodbyeStats - X will soon remove the amount of likes, comments, reposts, etc from replies to posts. You can click on each icon to still view this info however.

#YoutubeAdBattles - YouTube is testing a new way to show you ads - through a picture in picture mode. Not sure if that makes it less annoying though…

#TruthSquad - YouTube is testing out a new feature that lets users clarify videos. It works just like Community Notes on Twitter/X. Users who find a video that is “confusing or inaccurate” can submit a note.

#NewLeadArrives - Russ Cox, a pivotal figure in the development and evolution of the Go programming language, has announced his resignation as its tech lead. Austin Clements will take over the leadership role for both the Google Go team and the broader Go project.

Indian Crypto Exchange CoinDCX Establishes Rs 50 Crore Crypto Investors Protection Fund
CoinDCX has announced the establishment of the Crypto Investors Protection Fund (CIPF) with an allocation of Rs 50 crore. The fund is designed to compensate users for losses incurred in extremely rare scenarios, such as security breaches. This seems to be a direct result of the recent hacking of WazirX platform where users lost significant amount in a hack.

Reliance Reduces Workforce by 11%
Another way to put it would be that Reliance slashed over 42,000 jobs last year! Reliance Industries is India's largest conglomerate with a diverse range of businesses including retail, telecom, and technology. So, in its latest financial year, it cut down its workforce by 42,000 people (11%) and slowed hiring, with over 143,000 employees opting for "voluntary separations".

Google And Meta Secretly Targeted Teens using Ads on Youtube
Google and Meta teamed up to target teens on YouTube with ads, even though it's against their own rules! They used this secret demographic category called "unknown" and voila! They claim to ask their customers to follow responsible advertising but they themselves do not.

Seek Tune | An implementation of Shazam's song matching algorithm.

Tinykeys | A tiny (~400 B) & modern library for keybindings.

Firefox Browser Support in Puppeteer
Puppeteer now has first-class support for Firefox. It’s now easy to write automation and perform end-to-end testing using Puppeteer. The Firefox support is not based on a Firefox-specific automation protocol, but on WebDriver BiDi. This is a cross browser protocol that is undergoing standardization at the W3C.

Senior Engineers are Not Coding Superheroes
Common misconception among junior engineers about senior colleagues is that they are debugging ninjas, always one step ahead, and tech encyclopedia-level experts. Reality has revealed that senior engineers deal with complex challenges, dig through legacy code, communicate with stakeholders, and balance coding with other responsibilities.

NPU Explained
We first had the CPU, then the GPU. Now - we have the NPU. NPU stands for Neural Processing Unit, and it’s specifically designed to perform AI-related tasks. NPUs have specialized accelerators that unlock parallelism at a large scale. Microsoft's new Copilot+ PCs come with a powerful NPU, delivering up to 45 TOPS.

Program Directly In Databases
Modern databases are durable, efficient, and programmable data repositories. Many database features, such as functions, triggers, and materialized views, have fallen out of fashion. This article shows how to build a database-centric application without sacrificing modern software engineering principles.