Hacker News: briffle

New comment by briffle in "NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect"

briffle — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:13:42 +0000

> Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.

My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.

But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.

its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.

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

briffle — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:00:24 +0000

My state charges a fee for every new bicycle that is purchased in the state to help cover costs.

New comment by briffle in "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"

briffle — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:19:01 +0000

Great to know that everyone's RAM, GPU, and SSD costs have skyrocketed over the last year, so that companies like Oracle can fill giant buildings full of RAM and SSD's (and GPU's) and then not even be able to turn them on..

New comment by briffle in "Two-tier encryption in the UK"

briffle — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:03:35 +0000

They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.

New comment by briffle in "Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August"

briffle — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:01:54 +0000

I have not been attributing it so much to malice, just that all the major cloud vendors seem to be running at full capacity, and can't build new datacenters fast enough. I just kind of assumed that as they got busy training newer models, that they allocated less resources to handle the existing systems, because they aren't able to get more capacity right now.

New comment by briffle in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

briffle — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:55:21 +0000

I had a cousin that worked private security, and for a few years (I think it was early 2000's) his main gig was to work as a team of armed security, and follow trucks from the two Intel campuses in Oregon to the airport in unmarked vehicles, get on the cargo plane with the cargo, and fly to the location where they did the packaging of the wafers (I want to say it was the Philippine Islands) and then fly back. Lots of overtime.

New comment by briffle in "Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera"

briffle — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:16:41 +0000

i think this is actually good, because there are differences between the images they found, and security settings that the company claimed.

They had not admitted before to tracking people, but their software is clearly submitting them. They had not admitted before to looking at bumper stickers, but turns out they do.

I wonder if they could find all cars with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers within X blocks of a polling place.. I can imagine that (or similar queries) might be very useful in the wrong hands.

New comment by briffle in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

briffle — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:58:02 +0000

most large tankers are too large for both the Suez and Panama Canals.

New comment by briffle in "An overview of how our family is prepared"

briffle — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:35:03 +0000

Sat in CERT and emergency coordination meetings in the Pacific Northwest. If the > 9.0 earthquake happens that is predicted, it will take a week to get temporary shelters working. All supplies will get flown to the few large airports east of the cascades (Redmond OR, Tri-Cities WA, Yakima, WA, etc). Because all the small bridges on moutain passes will collapse (creeks, small rivers, etc) all supplies will be helicoptered over the mountains until they can get Army Corps of Engineers teams in to rebuild runways.

They suggested having at LEAST a weeks worth of supplies, and more if you don't want to be waiting in a very impatient line with a bunch of scared, hungry people that may be desperate.

The other data is harder to quantify, but kind of insane. Like how long DHS estimates it will take to rebuild I-5 (minus major bridges) as a passable road, along with some key railroads, and basic power.

New comment by briffle in "Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond"

briffle — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:39:04 +0000

I would have also immediately asked for their policy on how long children of different ages can be unsupervised.

New comment by briffle in "Smaller reactors bring nuclear power closer to fulfilling its promise"

briffle — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:33:26 +0000

> If it's so much cheaper to build multiple small reactors, just build one big plant with 24 small reactors.

That is literally the plan with several designs like NuScale (and I think TerraPower). The plan with NuScale is to ship the reactors on rail or barge, and then truck it in the last few miles. So they cost savings is in not having to custom desgin the actual components for each site, and build them on site. Standard reactor, standard monitoring systems, standard control room able to monitor multiple reactors, etc.

Plus, when you have 12 of them onsite in one large area, you can take one offline for refueling, and still produce power with the rest of them.

New comment by briffle in "Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise"

briffle — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:24:55 +0000

The two highest grossing dispenseries in the state of Oregon sit off the first I-84 exit in Oregon about 40 min from Boise..

New comment by briffle in "Diesel Margins Top $100 a Barrel to Reach Record High as Supply Crunch Grows"

briffle — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:08:55 +0000

i'm not an expert in the oil industry, but my understanding is that caverns they have made are full of liquid to keep them from collapsing. For every barrel of oil they pump out, they pump a barrel of water in, and push more oil to the top and grab it out. And that once a certain percentage of it is just water, it changes its density, and all the calculations for its 'holding' strength were assuming a certain density range..

New comment by briffle in "Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly"

briffle — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:14:27 +0000

I think battery life is the most important. My Garmin Instinct 2 goes about 3.5 weeks between charging (the older non-OLED screen). It has solar, so I usually go over a month.

But a watch, something people will wear swimming, sweaty, in the rain, etc, is something that should ideally follow the wireless charging standards, and not have a plug taking up space, and being a spot for leaks...

New comment by briffle in "The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence"

briffle — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:56:16 +0000

our family has had a special 'code word' we have had since the kids were in elementary school. If someone ever needed to pick up our kids from school (they never did) our kids were taught to ask for that word.

This is a good reminder that we should review that, since its been 10 years or so.

New comment by briffle in "DOJ Closing Abbott Labs Case Spurs Wider Corporate Crime Retreat"

briffle — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:31:51 +0000

Here in America, if you or I get shot, a detective gets assigned the case along with 30 other cases on their desk. When a CEO gets shot, the largest city assigns an unlimited number of police to the case to find the person...

New comment by briffle in "LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach"

briffle — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:11:09 +0000

Only if we also add Social Security numbers, since it was supposed to be a unique Identitifier (like an email) and not a secret.

New comment by briffle in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

briffle — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:28:10 +0000

A commercial driver has a physical every year, severe restrictions on how they can drive, hours behind wheel, etc. But if you have 2 cataract surguries, oncoming dementia, and a body full of arthritis that can barely move, you can drive a 50' Class A Motorhome to your winter home in the South.

New comment by briffle in "A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime"

briffle — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:11:22 +0000

and when they can't get lots of "we don't accept unverified calls" messages, they will fix the problem.

New comment by briffle in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

briffle — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:11:51 +0000

Logical replication needs a special 'upgrade' use case that will automate most of its pain points away. I understand why DDL does not replicate, and that you may want to replicate to a data warehouse that only needs some columns, etc, but there should be a case just for upgrading that handles all DDL, sequences all existing everything, and just works...