Hacker News Reader

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.

dopa42365on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded

Goddamn turbocapitalist commies! How dare they!

dopa42365on Diesel Margins Top $100 a Barrel to Reach Record High as Supply Crunch Grows

Shouldn't it be profitable? Buying low and selling high. Like, the current oil in there was bought at below $60/barrel or so and sold at 50% higher price or whatever. The oil is always sold at a much higher price (otherwise it wouldn't be available in the first place).

dopa42365on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

Twitch ads haven't reliably been blocked by ublock origin (in any browser) for years. The "best" solution people came up with is replacing the stream with an ad-free low res version for the duration of the ads, which doesn't make for a very enjoyable viewing experience. There were/are some more experimental options like m3u proxies to jurisdictions where Twitch isn't serving any ads for one reason or another, but those aren't reliably working all the time either. In any case, somewhat outside the scope of ad blockers and closer to paywall circumvention-ish.

dopa42365on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

87.5% vs 83.1%

Renewables have to go up by 10x (or more, with electrification of all the things) everywhere pretty much in the coming decades.

dopa42365on Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

Europe has a seemingly infinite amount of coal (same as everyone else), but obviously it's not exactly what anyone really wants (gas and even oil is more climate friendly than coal sadly).

North Sea oil and gas are long past its prime, Norwegian supply is already nearly as expensive as LNG shipped from half the world away. The ideal gas station is Siberia, but that is what it is currently.

So, dunno, what's left, the Arctic? Frack the polar bears?

dopa42365on Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy

Pure caffeine is dirt cheap to produce at the enormous scale that it is consumed worldwide. Appeal to nature is a logical fallacy.

Just get some perfectly fine caffeine if that's what you want, nothing wrong with it.

dopa42365on 7.1 Earthquake in Japan

Not like earthquakes are unheard of in Taiwan or South Korea either.

Buildings are going to be more expensive (base isolation and an extra commie blocks worth of reinforced concrete), but given how expensive fab equipment is, that might not even matter all that much.

dopa42365on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake

Or $150 billion SpaceX? Internet constellations may be mildly profitable, but beyond that, most things are an endless money pit without clear path towards profit anytime soon. Like, no one is going to spend a trillion on a moon base (or exponentially more for mars) without plans to somehow recover all that money.

dopa42365on Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

It's not like same parameter count models are identical, so that doesn't appear to be an indicator for quality, or even compute requirements?

There seems to be more to producing a better model than brute forcing parameter count after all.

dopa42365on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

Well, trying to isolate and bully a country into submission isn't normal.

China wants to happily trade with the rest of the world (absolute horror, truly).

dopa42365on OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe

>indicates that these devices may potentially

Translation: they could do that (just like everything else connected to the internet), but they don't? (hence you never heard of that probe again?)

dopa42365on New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-TEX-ERCO/live/fi...

Despite all the yapping, there's a crap ton of (ever growing) solar and wind and battery storage and what not in Texas. And ERCOT does have a power link with the neighboring SPP.

https://www.spp.org/documents/71831/ercot-spp%20coordination...

No one wants the grid to collapse after all (except you I guess, for whatever reason).

dopa42365on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

Internet works on phones?

The more you know.

dopa42365on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

The 5 wage slaves on current ocean giants aren't even a rounding error on any calculation.

dopa42365on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise

A million Americans chose death from very effective (preventable) disease instead. That's how.