Hacker News Reader

wmfon Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance

Fixing the DAO hack wasn't done via a 51% attack. In most/all blockchains protocol changes aren't done by simple majority vote.

wmfon Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance

Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.

wmfon Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks

non-skittish hosting providers are uniformly also unprincipled

Yeah, this is what I'm saying (although absolute free speech is itself a principle). I wish it weren't so, but you're 99% right that the cloud isn't really usable for anything outside the Overton window, whether it's far left, far right, erotica, pro-suicide, extreme trolling, etc.

However if you're using Cloudflare you can "hide" your backend hosting provider and they usually won't kick you out because they don't take any reputation hit. So I still suspect a mainstream cloud (with good off-cloud backups) could work for AO3.

wmfon Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks

There are a few "Nazi" hosting providers that could probably handle AO3. Maybe AO3 couldn't handle them.

wmfon Archive Of Our Own down for maintenance for 2 to 4 weeks

Imagine if there was an API to rent servers within minutes or someday even seconds.

wmfon If IPv4 were land

The "solution" is that IPv6-only servers do not exist and will never exist.

wmfon Gemini 4 Carbon

Didn't looped transformers come out a month ago?

wmfon Microsoft and others tell crypto platform not to tokenize their stocks

If you want to trade MSFT in the US just... use Robinhood?

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

They weren't really late. In many people's minds IBM validated the concept of the PC.

wmfon Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models

The EDA tools that are used to design chips do not support diagonal wires so that kind of rules out hexagonal grids. With only horizontal and vertical wires you end up with rectangular/square grids or rings.

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

If the PS5 is offline it will install the game from disc. If it's online it will auto-download patches (which may be the entire game).

wmfon Mark Zuckerberg Pushed Meta to Shield Him from California's Proposed Wealth Tax

As a moron, are you allowed to decide that Zuck knows how to run Meta better than the shareholders?

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

Encryption keys, being purely random, are not copyrightable. (In light of recent events, this raises the question of artisanal human-created keys.) Distributing keys probably violates DMCA section 1201 though.

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

They'll definitely ban your box and account if you leak anything. If they go out of business it will become fair game.

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

Pirated files will never be higher quality than the source. If streaming is the only thing left in the future it will be the limit of quality.

I heard the other day there are a few shows that are streaming in 4K (probably low bitrate) but the discs are only HD.

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

DVD and CD are completely documented formats, the DRM has been cracked, and the patents are expired. Blu-ray patents are about to expire.

wmfon Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

Kaleidescape has the same or better quality than Blu-ray. It's DRMed and probably won't continue to work if the company goes out of business though.

wmfon Securing our frontier model training environment

“Completely air-gapping this infrastructure—that is, disconnecting it entirely from external networks—isn’t currently feasible, since we need external connections in order to run and monitor experiments”

wmfon Meta's GB{2,3}00 Cluster

IIRC one of the analysts said 1:1 CPU:GPU was for recommendation algorithms and 1:2 is better for LLMs.

wmfon Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly Report GLP-1 Signals of Slowed Biological Aging at ARDD

You're not the only person to report anhedonia. This shouldn't be downvoted.

wmfon Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account

RTX Spark is $1,000 cheaper because it doesn't have the NIC and it also comes in a laptop if that's what you prefer.

wmfon Ask HN: Why can't Ukraine use LoRA instead of Starshield?

Besides what others said, it's very easy to jam.

wmfon What was a Token Ring network?

No, Token Ring cabling was so over-engineered that you could run 100 Mbps Ethernet over it.

wmfon eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear

It sounds like there's an exemption for used equipment which is what you would find on eBay.

wmfon What was a Token Ring network?

BTW there are adapters so you can run Ethernet over Token Ring cabling. We had a lot of them at IBM since all the offices were wired for Token Ring.

wmfon Neural networks are clean

I think "clean" means something like each neuron encodes exactly one concept and it's possible to discover what the concept is.

wmfon Are there any more startups with real technical challenges?

Oxide, Cloudflare, Tailscale...

wmfon Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts

AFAIK OpenAI and Anthropic have both hardened their environments since August.

wmfon We have no moat, and neither does open source

This mindset goes all the way back to GNU being mad about Linux.

wmfon The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s

It's not a good look that the UK seemingly isn't installing air conditioning, decarbonizing heating, or adopting electric vehicles. Efficiency is good after you have high living standards but the UK should probably focus on growth first.