Hacker News Reader

thgon Tesla’s optimus hits snags in hands, suppliers as scale-up begins

"Wildly overpromising and catastrophically underdelivering" is his signature move.

thgon How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+

Fairphone 4 (2021) parts: https://www.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?catego...

Fairphone 5 (2023) parts: https://www.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?catego...

Parts for the Fairphone 2 (2015) and Fairphone 3 (2019) aren't available anymore, but I suppose that's not all that surprising after 11 respective 7 years.

Afair, they started running out of some Fairphone 3 spare parts around 2024 and kept the ones they still had for warranty repairs. Source: I own one (and switched to the Fairphone 6 early this year).

thgon Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double

It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).

If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.

thgon OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says

The early years Amazon wasn't profitable by choice. They could have stopped that at any time and even did demonstrate it by having a single quarter with $1 profit or some such.

Anthropic and OpenAI have no choice but to go public if they want to avoid bankruptcy. Venture capital firms are struggling to raise more capital, the bond market is so saturated that the borrowing costs are getting too high and big tech is also at the limit of how much they can invest, all while AI companies' costs are going through the roof. Retail investors is the last market they haven't tapped into and to do that, they have to go public. There's just no way around it.

thgon OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says

Will Locket wrote about it last month: https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/openai-is-in-a-far-wor...

tldr is: They either get a successful IPO to stave off bankruptcy for a couple more months, or they're going to be bankrupt by the beginning of next year.

thgon AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

Let me give you an analogy: If you e.g. figure out some undocumented endpoints for a REST API, which are intended for internal use only, and started using them, do you expect the developers to inform you about changes?

As far as AMD is concerned, this was never supported, nor documented. Now pulling the rug with a firmware update isn't a very nice thing to do, but maybe they've had some actual reason for that beyond "this shouldn't be enabled". Nobody should expect undocumented and unsupported features to just continue to work in perpetuity, simply because they did work at some point in the past.

thgon AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

This was never marketed as a feature of the consumer CPUs and if some malignant actor does get physical access to my (consumer) hardware, then them being able to read out bytes through cryo-freezing the RAM really isn't high up on the list of things I'm going to worry about.

thgon UK to require ID or face scan before you can make social media accounts

The UK left the EU years ago.

thgon Your ePub Is fine

> Amazon could effectively brick your device if so desired.

I have a 16 year old Kindle (Keyboard) that Amazon actually decided to turn into a brick last month [0]. Still works just fine and will continue to do so thanks to Calibre, but buying books from Amazon, or using their "Send to device" feature (both through the e-mail convert and for books already in my Amazon library) is now forever closed for me and de-registering the device will brick it with no recourse.

[0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-amazon-ends-suppor...

thgon Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

For posterity: It's rank 34 at the time of this comment

thgon Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

I bought a Fairphone exactly because I did care, so yes.

thgon Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?

NASDAQ has, however. SpaceX will be weighted at triple its public float.

thgon Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

A fully reusable Starship has a launch cost of around $75m - $90m and the last V3 launch managed 44 tonnes of payload on a sub-orbital flight of not even 200km (Starlink satellites have an orbit of around 550km). That's an optimistic launch cost of $1.700/kg for a rather meaningless altitude and assuming a fully reusable Starship that doesn't keep blowing up.

I have no idea where you pulled your $400/kg number from, but it's complete and utter nonsense. To be economical at all, Starship needs to reach its target capacity of 100 tonnes to orbit, which is simply never going to happen. But even if it somehow does, it's physically impossible for Starship to ever make it further than the moon, at extreme costs, due to the refuelling requirements and fuel boil-off in orbit.

thgon Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

> Starship is going to make whole entire industries viable that were not viable previously.

Starship is a complete and utter failure, as you can read about here, among other places: https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-is-going-nowh...

> It might even take a significant chunk of air freight which is going to be a big deal with rising oil prices.

By being several magnitudes more expensive than an airplane would ever be?

thgon U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years

Several, actually

thgon Self Driving Car Insurance

It was just another marketing stunt to pump the stock price before their terrible earnings report. One "unsupervised" unit, with the supervisor in a follow car, that nobody could actually get and drive around in.

https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/teslas-unsupervised-robotaxis...

thgon Tesla's Germany Sales Down 72% from Their Peak

For the last few quarters, Tesla was only profitable due to their selling CAFE credits. With those gone and their sales declining, it's all but certain that Tesla will post a loss for Q4, unless they resort to some very creative accounting tricks.

thgon Tesla's Germany Sales Down 72% from Their Peak

They're declining worldwide and since Musk got the climate change denier elected who did away with CAFE credits at the end of Q3, Tesla is now also no longer a profitable company.

thgon BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

Tesla was only profitable the last few quarters due to selling their carbon credits to other companies. They'd have lost money otherwise. And since Trump basically did away with that, Tesla is no longer a profitable company now.

thgon Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi

Geely owns Volvo Car AB. Volvo Trucks is a different company and part of the Volvo Group, which is not owned by Geely (but they are a big shareholder).

thgon Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students

They couldn't even if they wanted to, because that scam was shut down in 2011.

thgon Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

Doesn't help the op, but I use my Nikon Z6 II as a webcam under Fedora and have been doing this for a few months now, mostly without any problems.

Here's a guide for those interested (not by me): https://www.crackedthecode.co/how-to-use-your-dslr-as-a-webc...

thgon Beekeepers halt honey awards over fraud in global supply chain

That's a link to this discussion.

thgon Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices

The traffic limit is outbound only. There is no limit on inbound / internal traffic. So even if they were to hit you with a 5TB / month limit, you'd be just fine.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ (bottom of the page)

thgon Why are my ZFS disks so noisy?

Not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I suppose it will be of at least some help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tf4qx1aMJp8Lo_R6gpT6...

thgon It's Now Officially Illegal to Use AI to Impersonate a Human Actor in Hollywood

Quoted from the second paragraph:

> the new laws not only bolster those existing protections but extend them to everyone in California — not just to people working in front of a camera in Hollywood

thgon Germany sees company bankruptcies soar

That's 80+% of the companies here, so I doubt it really is the relevant factor.

thgon Ask HN: Should we stop posting X links on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

It's a little-known and barely-used feature that's mentioned in the sites' FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

thgon Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history

Now that's simply not true.

Closing down all nuclear plants was first decided on in the year 2000, 24 years ago. It were the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) who rescinded that decision in 2010, only to later reinstitute it in panic after the Fukushima meltdown happened.

Those reactors that got shuttered hadn't had any safety inspections in years, they had no viable fuel left and not even the owning energy companies wanted to operate them any longer than absolutely necessary, so they would have been shut down even without the Green party in the current government.

That the now missing nuclear baseload had to have been replaced with coal, well.. Thank the Christian Democrats for that. They're the ones that favoured building out coal, slowing down the build-out of renewables as much as possible, at every chance they got.

thgon iPhone 15 Pro Max vs. DSLR photos: Real world camera comparison

> The article seems to praise the iPhone a lot for some reason

It's an Apple news and rumours site, so not really unbiased.

> but to my eyes all its images immediately pop out as worse, except for the case where high depth of field is desired

Can only do so much with limited glass and computational photography. Dedicated cameras are always going to win in the image quality department, simply by virtue of having much larger photo diodes to capture more light with.

Smartphones will also never be able to match the bokeh, as the shorter the physical focal length, the more depth of field you have. Can't beat the laws of physics. They're great for flat-looking everything-in-focus photos, though. Can't replicate that with a DSLR / DLSM, unless it's an (almost) static composition and you do focus stacking in post