Hacker News Reader

undersuiton Oh good, screwworms are back (2025)

Maybe it came by a faster method.

undersuiton xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

So little of that is going to happen.

The DDR5 will be registered DIMMs. The GPUs will be 600W paperweights with a custom form factor. Similarly the NICs and other PCI-E accelerators. The motherboards also adopt custom form factors to fit in racks. The hard drives will be using SAS connectors. The flash will be in E1.S form factors.

The server CPUs that you want for a home desktop or small server, high clock SKUs, will be in high demand.

Any savings for someone willing to build a system from second-hand server hardware will be eaten by using adapters or sourcing a rack.

I'm not saying you won't be able to make a slightly outdated frankenserver with more compute than you need, I'm saying that's not going to bring down prices for Grandma's machine that she needs working to check on her retirement account.

undersuiton Iran Severely Damaged US Air Ops Center in Qatar Soon After War Began

But all the major offenses on Iran happened before the base was attacked.

undersuiton SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

GoPro?

undersuiton SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P

There are different indices if you want to be exposed to that risk.

undersuiton New Texas Instruments 5532 chips are not the 5532s we’ve used for decades

The rumbling and grumbling is because they read the data sheets.

undersuiton Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

Their ruins are great tourist attractions.

undersuiton Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra

How well will the local LLM run when your laptop is in your bag while you're walking around?

undersuiton Riot Games celebrates bricking cheat devices

https://heinodma.com/

$5.8k

undersuiton Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)

I would guess that there is an issue when the USB peripherals connect and disconnect as you switch inputs. I don't put USB drives in my KVM because it'll interrupt a transfer if switched.

undersuiton Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

Yes, you can setup the entire OS through dietpi terminal utilities over ssh.

undersuiton New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

The big bulky black box this little adapter replaces in Jeff's uses is actually just a PCIe/OCP card in an enclosure and you can replace that with a 10g card with SFP.

undersuiton The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought

We can do something about that too!

undersuiton The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought

These children don't know they are being sexualized. Yeah the adults in the room are exploitive and manipulative but this should literally be a "think of the children" moment.

undersuiton DIY Soft Drinks

>Most of the time it takes full on government intervention, lawsuits, etc. to change things.

That's the S.

undersuiton Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why

The Apollo missions used a disposable bag you taped to your butt.

undersuiton AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip

AMD didn't have to introduce a special driver for the Ryzen 9 5950x to keep threads resident to the "gaming" CCD. There was only a small difference between the 5950x and the non-X3d Ryzen 7 5800x in workloads that didn't use more than 8 cores unlike the observed slowdowns in the Ryzen 9s 7950X3D and 7900X3D when they were released compared to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D .

When the L3 sizes are different across CCDs the special AMD driver is needed to keep threads pinned to the larger L3 CCD and prevent them from being placed on the small L3 CCD where their memory requests can exploit the other CCD's L3 as an L4. The AMD driver reduces CCD to CCD data requests by keeping programs contained in one CCD.

With equal L3 caches when a process spills onto the second CCD it will still use the first's L3 cache as "L4" but it no longer has to evict that data at the same rate as the lopsided models. Additionally the first CCD can use the second CCD's L3 in kind reducing the number of requests that need to go to main memory.

The same sized L3s reduce contention to the IO die and the larger sized L3s reduce memory contention, it's a win-win.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-3d-vcache-optimizer-9950...

undersuiton Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

And from the linked Wiki: "According to D'Souza, athletes should also be categorised based on their chromosomal sex."

undersuiton Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events

Then we should prescribe puberty blockers to everyone until they can make such a decision.

undersuiton Iran launched unsuccessful attack on UK's Diego Garcia

What about the people who will die because they cannot afford the higher prices that will come from a disruption in gas supply?

undersuiton RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one

Improving LLM memory contention will allow LLMs to use more memory.

undersuiton RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one

> Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM"

I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.

undersuiton 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

ECC is actually slower. The hardware to compute every transaction is correct does add a slight delay, but nothing compared to the delay of working on corrupted data.

undersuiton AMD will bring its “Ryzen AI” processors to standard desktop PCs for first time

And waste all those PCI Express lanes?

undersuiton Smallest transformer that can add two 10-digit numbers

Somewhere along the line a $10000 GPU has to be equivalent to using a finger to do arithmetic in the dust.

undersuiton Data centers in space makes no sense

Article doesn't say the satellites stop working in their dark phase, it says they consume 300W in the dark phase based on some battery math.

undersuiton Data centers in space makes no sense

The solar panels on the newest satellites can deliver 6kW but the power that satellite actually uses is less. The satellite is only using 300W[1] during the dark phase of it's orbit when it can use it's entire mass to cool down. Is that limit because of the battery or is it because the satellite needs to radiate all the heat it acquired from the other half of the time in the sun?

[1] https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

undersuiton Data centers in space makes no sense

Putting solar roofs on a building? For a car company?

undersuiton Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt

PCI-E lanes for consumers. Gigabit would saturate the PCI bus, but once you're on PCI-E you only need to give it 1 lane, usually off the chipset.

Servers had a reason to spend for the 10G, 25G and 40G cards which used 4 lanes.

There are 10 Gigabit chips that can run off of one PCI-E 4.0 lane now and the 2.5G and 5G speeds are supported(802.3bz).

undersuiton Iran summons families of exiled journalists to halt their activities

Hooray more death, that'll fix things.