Hacker News Reader

dopa42365on Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack

In the Reuters article on it weeks ago they mentioned finding 4500 similar freezers still available online, with the simple login bypass included. So yeah that was just a matter of time?

Glass half full: The scale of this is rather small overall, so most supermarkets etc. appear to have at least some form of basic security.

dopa42365on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them

https://www.biochemical-pathways.org/metabolic-pathways.pdf

Your body is one hell of a lab.

dopa42365on US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears

Even with insane memory prices, 16GB of GDDR7 is ~$200-300 at most. That by itself isn't responsible for GPU prices to explode. The fabs are just producing more profitable chips, so everything else becomes more expensive as they compete for a much smaller remaining capacity at TSMC.

Definitely not just a memory problem.

dopa42365on New iMac with M6

How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.

dopa42365on IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

Ford vs. Ferrari, except that the Ford is actually a few months old Ferrari.

Does Ferrari have any moat if it can't convince the government to ban Ford?

dopa42365on DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine

Reality: renewables rapidly increasing in the US every year, especially solar (around 30%)

dopa42365on How Quickly Can the DoD Rebuild and Recast the Munitions Industrial Base?

Anduril sells missiles like the Barracuda-M (1/10 the warhead of a Tomahawk missile, and reduced range) for north of $200k. Very similar payload delivery price, that isn't actually a cheaper alternative. Arguably many targets don't require a 500kg warhead and in those cases a much smaller and cheaper missile would do the trick just fine, and if it can be produced much faster and benefit from economy of scale, even better, but at the end of the day they're just as much looking to make as much profit as possible as everyone else (everything for the shareholders).

dopa42365on How Quickly Can the DoD Rebuild and Recast the Munitions Industrial Base?

US military procurement regulations keep companies like GlobalFoundries alive. No alternative for critical chips from some of their legacy nodes (at least none that can be certified within years, obviously the chips themselves are very far from cutting edge).

dopa42365on How Quickly Can the DoD Rebuild and Recast the Munitions Industrial Base?

Everything made in Ukraine is just assembled Chinese parts though (nothing wrong with that, entirely different difficulty however).

dopa42365on French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack

Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?

On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).

dopa42365on Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'

Memory demand over time naturally goes up, so even an overcommitment wouldn't last longer than a few years until demand catches up again. SK and Samsung memory margins are utterly ridiculous currently (> 80%).

For September:

> In IT, semiconductor exports rose 262.8 percent to $60.30 billion, exceeding $60.0 billion for the first time as memory demand continued to grow, with export volumes continuing to expand and contract prices maintaining their upward trend.

https://english.motir.go.kr/eng/article/EATCLdfa319ada/2743/...

Not too shabby for a rainy day fund.

dopa42365on I guess I'm using WebP now?

HEIC is a container, not a codec. You can put an avif in there if you want to.

dopa42365on Chernobyl particles reveal unexpectedly stable nuclear fuel after 40 years

Even the cleanest bombs (97%+ fusion rather than fission) turned out to be too dirty for basically everything civilian (unlocking gas reservoirs - too radioactive; landscaping to replace enormous amounts of conventional explosives - too radioactive).

dopa42365on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome

webp = VP8 image

Nothing wrong with that per se, it's just old and limited, especially compared to avif/AV1 which would be like a theoretical VP10 at this point.

dopa42365on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent

It's mostly about the distance, isn't it? Iirc even with the most modern ultra high voltage lines, it's about 3% per 1000km. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad, even for really long distances (like solar power from some desert to where people actually live).

dopa42365on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

It's like the racist facebook users profile picture meme, but with "concerned" reddit users post history (always hidden).

10 years ago redditors took some pride in transparency, you were able to check who you were talking to based on their profile (unlike boards like 4chan). Now it's auto-generated user names with hidden everything. Might as well get rid of unique names and profiles at all and call everyone anon.

dopa42365on How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Latency has roughly remained the same since DDR2, no? So that has just about nothing to do with the improved performance of every generation.

dopa42365on Claude Opus 5.5

Right next to the hypersonic missile vibecoder

dopa42365on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes

There're like 20 magnitude 4 earthquakes worldwide every day too. Even those are rarely noteworthy.

dopa42365on Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA

Ever seen the phrase "diffused in Taiwan, assembled in Malaysia"?

dopa42365on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil

A fully loaded Falcon 9 carries less kerosene than 1 (one single) A380. What level of concerntrolling is this?

dopa42365on Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

More specifically, beef and lamb.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?

dopa42365on GPT-6 Astra

like eh 2 days ago it was the usual "too powerful to release"

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-says-upcoming-model-...

> "With the right tools and access, Astra can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well-protected systems without a person guiding each step," said Amelia Glaese, an OpenAI vice president overseeing its safety work.

> The company plans to make Astra available "soon" to a limited group, but declined to provide specifics. Glaese said the extra security measures may "sometimes slow, pause, or stop legitimate work," and that OpenAI would work to minimize those disruptions.

what a bag of horseshit

dopa42365on Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise

Except some of them are still building new plants today (large ones cause higher efficiency, unsurprisingly). For China and Russia those are entirely separate from the kind of reactors used for plutonium reprocessing or medical isotopes or whatever else, they only exist to boil water at the end of the day. The only incentive here is electricity, and both have plenty of other options available.

Bit of a paradox isn't it? They'd just burn coal or gas instead if that was much cheaper.

dopa42365on Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)

5% enrichment (regular reactor grade) is 2/3 the way to weapons grade already.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Hence there technically being no enrichment cap for any country that signed the NPT and stuff (not to be confused with protection from US bombs or rogue states that never signed the NPT).

dopa42365on YouTube Format IDs

>Are there specific cases where "HFR" videos are really improving the viewing experience of particular (types of) content?

Yes. Every single one. It's that simple.

dopa42365on Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights

If anything, the freebase is more potent by weight (albeit less water soluble than the salt form, so it's only really usable via vaporization).

dopa42365on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

Those are all telegram reposts, barely anyone in the former combloc uses twitter.

dopa42365on Starbase, LA

Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:

>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.

https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab

That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.