Hacker News: Symbiote

New comment by Symbiote in "Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees"

Symbiote — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:29:44 +0000

The chip on a credit or debit card is an HSM.

New comment by Symbiote in "High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days"

Symbiote — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:58:30 +0000

Pedestrians and cyclists save money by reducing healthcare costs, sick days, aged care etc.

They should get a credit each time they use a road.

New comment by Symbiote in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

Symbiote — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:51:18 +0000

I removed some pay-per-use APIs from our (business) public website after a surprise $4000 bill, caused by an LLM company scraping the site.

Some were replaced with a competing service which has a limit, others replaced by a self-hosted alternative.

I think many small businesses would prefer to be offline or have a degraded service than pay $X000.

New comment by Symbiote in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

Symbiote — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:45:15 +0000

What is its annual power usage?

It might not "run fine" when you take that into account.

New comment by Symbiote in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

Symbiote — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:48:10 +0000

In Copenhagen (and I think it's similar in most of Denmark) there's a fireproof cupboard in the basement of my apartment building for hazardous waste. Houses have a small red box they can leave out if they have something.

Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.

https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-farl...

New comment by Symbiote in "Show HN: Check if your IP has appeared in a residential proxy network"

Symbiote — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:16:45 +0000

I think it was down voted as it looks like self promotion

New comment by Symbiote in "Show HN: Check if your IP has appeared in a residential proxy network"

Symbiote — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:57:07 +0000

Bright Data claim to have 400 million IPs.

https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies

New comment by Symbiote in "Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils"

Symbiote — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:28:11 +0000

The bug report I filed several months ago hasn't been looked at. Many of these utilities were released and made the default for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS!

There's a whole load of basic bugs reported and ignored:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils

New comment by Symbiote in "How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread"

Symbiote — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 06:17:01 +0000

The law changed in 1994 requiring appliances to be sold with the plug attached.

New comment by Symbiote in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

Symbiote — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:37:08 +0000

Not only that.

Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.

Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.

New comment by Symbiote in "Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Is Selling Its Original Movie Puppets"

Symbiote — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:18:33 +0000

> All the sets and figures from the new Wallace and Gromit film are safe because they are being exhibited elsewhere in Bristol.

That looks to be what's being auctioned.

New comment by Symbiote in "Understanding the recent DDoS attack against Read the Docs"

Symbiote — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:29:43 +0000

That has only partially mitigated much smaller attacks (residential proxy scraping etc) on my employer's site.

We're currently on the "Business" plan, but I'm coming to the conclusion that we need to upgrade to the "Enterprise Advantage" plan for the JA3/4 fingerprinting and detection ID features.

I get put off by "Contact Sales" pricing.

New comment by Symbiote in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

Symbiote — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:32:53 +0000

At the level of wealth of owning one of these yachts, hotels will ensure they have the bed and pillows you want, and your PA will arrange it when booking the hotel.

New comment by Symbiote in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

Symbiote — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:46:40 +0000

I would equate the wooden cabinet to the PC's metal case — the ore must be mined, the metal extracted, etc etc.

Once you've done that, just add the computer chips.

New comment by Symbiote in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

Symbiote — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:39:31 +0000

One year after we graduated, the guy I'd shared a flat with in London got a £30,000 bonus from the small fin-tech company he worked at.

But the more stressful work, and the idea that I'd be working to trade stock a few nanoseconds faster than the competition, didn't not appeal.

New comment by Symbiote in "VMware migration reduces Tottenham Hotspur's licensing fees by 85 percent"

Symbiote — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:40:51 +0000

> Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has 20,000 network access points, 1,849 IPTV screens, and 519 CCTV screens. It hosts about 63,000 viewers

A decent part of that is probably important to be working on the day of a football match. They already own a suitable building, probably with decent backup power, so running their own servers seems both more reliable and cheaper than renting.

New comment by Symbiote in "Topologist's Map of the World"

Symbiote — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:40:39 +0000

Northern Ireland isn't an exclave.

New comment by Symbiote in "Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive"

Symbiote — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:41:37 +0000

Cambridge is top ranked for everything they offer.

But there's going to be a difference between the students who finished with the highest grades, and those who scraped through.

New comment by Symbiote in "Unauthenticated GitHub requests intermittently fail from Europe"

Symbiote — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:35:11 +0000

The "maintainer" who responded wrote:

> To help ensure reliable access, we recommend updating workflows that use HTTPS Git operations to authenticate with a Git credential, such as a personal access token.

so it looks like anonymous access to Git repositories is being limited. That will be very disruptive to many people with build scripts etc. It's disappointing to see it rolled out without any announcement.

(I am seeing about half of Jenkins jobs fail with this error.)

New comment by Symbiote in "James Dyson Sold Us on a $400 Hair Dryer. Now He's Trying a $499 Toothbrush"

Symbiote — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:33:49 +0000

Yeah. I associate Dyson with having my face sprayed with a mist of other people's dirty water while my ears suffer a blast like a jet engine.

Generally I wipe my hands on my clothes or shake them around instead.