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OKI Develops 124-Layer PCB Technology
2 days ago
- OKI Circuit Technology developed a 124-layer PCB technology, a 15% increase over the conventional 108-layer design, for next-generation AI semiconductor testing equipment.
- The PCB is designed for wafer inspection equipment used with high bandwidth memory (HBM) like HBM, which requires high-density and high-frequency data transfer.
- Mass production technology is targeted for October 2025 at the Joetsu Plant in Niigata Prefecture, utilizing ultra-thin materials and a proprietary automatic transport system.
- The technology addresses the need for higher PCB density and layers due to increasing signal counts and chip miniaturization, while maintaining a thickness limit of 7.6 mm.
- OKI will showcase this technology at PCB East 2025 in Massachusetts, USA, from April 30 to May 2, 2025.
Things that apparently cause cancer
5 hours ago
- Harvard researchers published studies claiming that living near nuclear power plants increases cancer incidence and mortality, using a 'proximity score' based on distance up to 200 km.
- Critics replicated the exact methodology using absurd landmarks—Costco, private colleges, sports stadiums, state capitals, and Superfund sites—and found similarly positive cancer associations.
- For example, living near Costco was associated with over 2.2 million attributed cancer deaths, more than 20% of all cancer deaths from 2000 to 2018.
- The authors' methodology treats proximity as exposure, but radiation doses measured for nuclear workers are far below occupational limits, making claimed public exposures implausible.
- The replication shows the statistical approach produces positive results for any landmark, suggesting the result is an artifact of the methodology, not a real causal effect.
- The likely reason no negative result appears is that the ecological study design, with huge circular areas and arbitrary weighting, captures noise that consistently slopes positive, making the method blind to actual exposure or causal mechanisms.
Cloudflare opens more Enterprise-only features to all customers
6 hours ago
- Cloudflare announced a pledge to make all features accessible to all customers, not just Enterprise.
- Logpush and Logpush Transformers are now available to all plans, increasing control over log delivery.
- Custom Dashboards are now available to all customers for personalized metrics views.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has expanded across products, including resource-level permissions for Workers.
- The New Account button lets users create additional accounts directly, with billing segmented per account.
- Enterprise customers can provision new accounts via their account team to reuse agreements.
- Organizations feature groups accounts for unified analytics and management, available to Enterprise now, free accounts in 2027.
- Terraform and Resource Tagging are now available to all customers for infrastructure-as-code and resource organization.
- Cloudflare internally uses multiple accounts, Terraform, and organizations for security and efficiency.
- New features like Authentik IdP, SCIM Audit logging, and MCP Server Portals are now generally available.
- Cloudflare commits to introducing no new Enterprise-only features, with exceptions for government-specific offerings.
- Billable Usage Dashboard and API help non-Enterprise customers track spending, with hard caps in prototype.
- Significant limits have been increased across Workers, Containers, Workflows, and other products.
- Future plans include making organizations self-serve for enterprises and completing the pledge.
Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill's Name
7 hours ago
- The DEFEND IP Act, a site-blocking bill, threatens the open web by incentivizing censorship and overblocking instead of protecting intellectual property.
- It deputizes service providers to block entire websites based on copyright infringement accusations, lacking safeguards against bad faith requests or remedies for affected speech.
- The bill scales up existing copyright enforcement problems (like DMCA abuses) without offering easy ways for targeted sites or users to challenge blocking orders.
- Congress should reject DEFEND IP and similar site-blocking legislation to preserve a free and open internet.
San Francisco's car crime has plunged. How much credit does Flock deserve?
6 hours ago
- Car thefts in San Francisco dropped nearly 59% and break-ins fell over 82% from 2022 to 2026.
- Flock Safety's AI-powered license plate cameras are credited by law enforcement as a key factor, though debate exists over their effectiveness and privacy risks.
- A preliminary study found Flock cameras associated with an 11% decrease in car thefts in the first year.
- Concerns include potential abuse by officers, privacy violations, and the creation of a quasi-national surveillance database.
- San Francisco is tightening rules on Flock data use, including 30-day deletion and criminal penalties for misuse.
- The city's approach may serve as a test case for balancing crime-fighting technology with constitutional rights.
Epilepsy and multidimensional time:a perspective inspired by theoretical physics
5 hours ago
- Epileptic seizures disrupt temporal integration, causing subjective time distortions such as déjà vu, jamais vu, acceleration, slowing, looping, and fragmentation.
- Subjective time is proposed to emerge from hierarchical neural timescales, oscillatory coordination, and brain–body rhythms rather than a single centralized clock.
- Kletetschka's multidimensional time model is used only as a conceptual analogy for how partially independent neural temporal processes may decouple during seizures.
- Temporal experience involves the interaction of fast sensory integration and slower narrative or self-referential processes across distributed cortical regions.
- Phenomenological frameworks such as Husserl's retentio, protentio, and presentatio help explain how seizures fragment the synthesis of temporal consciousness.
- Seizure-related temporal distortions can also occur interictally, as seen in childhood absence epilepsy, correlating with executive dysfunction.
- Cultural and social contexts shape temporal cognition, suggesting that time is not purely biological but context-dependent and pluralistic.
- Seizures are viewed as natural experiments that reveal latent plasticity and alternative modes of temporal organization in consciousness.
- The framework generates falsifiable predictions linking neural timescales, oscillatory synchronization, physiological rhythms, and subjective temporal reports.
- The Perspective integrates neuroscience, phenomenology, brain–body dynamics, and physics-inspired analogies to guide future research on temporal consciousness.
Billions of Triangles Redux
2 days ago
- NVIDIA released an updated vk_lod_clusters sample featuring a detailed Zorah scene with 1.6B triangles, using clustered raytracing and hierarchical clustered LOD.
- meshoptimizer compression extensions (EXT_meshopt_compression) halve geometry size (~32 GB vs 63.3 GB raw) for the scene, with lossless compression and fast decoding.
- A new meshlet codec in meshoptimizer 1.1 compresses triangle indices to about 6.5 bits per triangle, reducing index storage from 9.8 GB to 2.6 GB with extremely fast GPU-friendly decoding.
- Attribute-aware simplification improvements include a stable permissive mode and a new 'SimplifyErrorClamped' flag that clamps attribute error to triangle area, significantly reducing streaming memory requirements.
- For foliage, a 'simplify_dilate_borders' option preserves coverage by redistributing lost surface area to boundary edges, preventing erosion of leaves at distance.
- Overall processing time is about 3 minutes 45 seconds on 16 cores, and memory footprint for geometry dropped from 996 MB to 678 MB with clamped error.
- Lossy compression options (octahedral filter, exponential filter) could reduce geometry to ~15.3 GB in glTF, with potential for further size reduction.
- meshoptimizer's algorithms are versatile and not tied exclusively to clustered LOD; the technology is interesting but not the final solution for geometry rendering.
Where Is the Planet
5 hours ago
- This page predicts the locations of directly-imaged exoplanets and brown dwarf companions.
- Users can request new orbits by contacting Jason Wang at jason.wang@northwestern.edu.
- The tool was built by Jason Wang, Matas Kulikauskas, and Sarah Blunt.
- If used for research, please cite the ASCL Record of the tool.
Show HN: Google Maps Scraper MCP
4 hours ago
- The service enables AI agents to search for up to 20 businesses by keyword and location, returning structured JSON data with listing details like addresses, contact info, ratings, and review counts.
- Developers can connect via a single secure MCP server using Streamable HTTP at https://gmapscrawl.com/api/mcp, authenticating with a Bearer API key in the authorization header.
- Example use cases include finding coffee shops in Seattle with specific fields, comparing restaurant categories in Portland, or formatting plumbers in Austin into tables.
- The server exposes only one tool, 'search_google_maps', and requires an API entitlement (not included in an Online subscription) or a test credential for simulated results.
- The MCP server can be configured in .mcp.json files with the GMSCRAPER_API_KEY environment variable, and API keys should be kept secure, never in prompts or URLs.
<input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
6 hours ago
- User unable to log into Vanguard web account for a year due to password mismatch.
- Password reset form had input field with `maxlength="20"`, truncating pasted passwords longer than 20 characters.
- Login page password field lacked the `maxlength` restriction, causing full password input.
- The 26-character password was saved as 20 characters during reset, but entered fully at login.
- User advises against using `maxlength` on password fields; recommends backend or JavaScript-based length validation.
Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)Graces of the Parenthesis
3 days ago
- Philip Sidney's life ended abruptly at age 31 from a battle wound, mirroring his unfinished romance *Arcadia* which stops mid-sentence on a parenthesis.
- Sidney was a master of parentheses, using them extensively in *Arcadia*, a complex romance full of disguises, love triangles, and adventure.
- The parenthesis was viewed by Renaissance writers as both a graceful and potentially disruptive figure of speech, allowing for strategic digression.
- Sidney's brackets create intimacy, qualifications, and a three-dimensional narrative, inviting readers to shuttle between main and embedded thoughts.
- His work influenced later writers like Gervase Markham and Lady Mary Wroth, who adopted his parenthetical style as a literary legacy.
Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B into quashing datacenter dissent
6 hours ago
- Oracle's Wisconsin AI data center faces delay due to pending grid connection approval, risking planned 2027 delivery.
- Nvidia launches DGX Spark at $4,999 with reduced RAM and storage; the 128GB version costs $6,950.
- Stanford professor proposes Homa protocol as a replacement for TCP, designed for AI network needs.
- Russian hackers are posing as Signal support for phishing; Microsoft SharePoint zero-day attacks continue after failed patches.
- DEF CON's Franklin project enlists hackers to secure critical infrastructure; voting village reports succeed.
- Switzerland tests a FOSS alternative to Microsoft 365; KDE turns 30 with an AI-native desktop proposal.
- Shopify acquires Tailwind CSS framework, providing a stable long-term home for the open-source project.
Make Tmux the OS
10 hours ago
- Scott Jenson's talk argues that Apple and Microsoft have stopped innovating in desktop OS, leaving it to users to define the future desktop UX.
- Current desktop window management is stuck in workarounds for obsolete hardware, failing to adapt to modern multi-monitor, multi-context usage.
- Users exhibit three distinct window usage patterns: maximizers, near-maximizers, and coordinators, yet OSes optimize only for the first.
- Browsers act as mini operating systems, but their tabs and windows are not treated as first-class citizens by the OS.
- The filesystem abstraction is weakening as apps store content internally, breaking the traditional file-based workflow.
- Historical attempts like Windows Timeline, Sets, Stage Manager, and KDE Activities all failed due to lack of default adoption, app compatibility, or privacy concerns.
- A proposed solution involves an infinite scrollable canvas where each physical display is a viewport, with deterministic reflow on monitor changes.
- Tasks become the core organizational unit, grouping windows and browser tabs, while privacy is enforced via machine-observable states (e.g., connected displays).
- A local LLM could assist in organizing windows and tasks through a 'quake overlay' that proposes layouts without direct manipulation.
- Key challenges include spatial memory disruption, privacy-surveillance irony, and the need for garbage collection to prevent infinite clutter.
Show HN: Mini React – React like UI library
2 days ago
- Mini-react is a lightweight React-style library built from scratch in a single file (3.5 KB gzipped) with no dependencies.
- It implements core React features: virtual DOM with keyed diffing, function components, hooks, context, and batched updates.
- The library is used to render all the panels on the page.
Tightening Full Disk Access on macOS, in Response to AI Apps Running Amok
7 hours ago
- Apple is introducing additional controls for Full Disk Access on macOS to prevent misuse by apps like AI agents that can access sensitive user data without full understanding.
- Some developers are using Full Disk Access beyond its intended purpose (e.g., backup apps), putting user privacy at risk by exposing files, messages, and browsing history.
- Non-technical Mac users often grant Full Disk Access permissions without realizing the implications, assuming macOS protects them like iOS/iPadOS, which does not allow such broad access.
- Apple's move is likely a response to incidents with AI agents like Meta Muse, Grok Bot, Claude, and Dots, which have exploited Full Disk Access to read private data.
- Power users worry that new restrictions may hamper legitimate uses of Full Disk Access, but Apple must balance security for the majority with the needs of advanced users.
- The post highlights the tension between macOS's power as a Unix workstation and the need to protect users who are technically unsophisticated.
Why didn't we get GPT-2 in 2005?
10 hours ago
- GPT-2 required approximately 10^21 FLOPs, with multiple estimates from various sources.
- The BlueGene/L supercomputer (2005) could have trained GPT-2 in about 41 days, but it wasn't used for AI.
- Large language models weren't invented yet due to missing techniques like transformers and Adam optimization.
- Supercomputers like BlueGene/L were dedicated to nuclear weapons, not AI research.
- LLM development followed a feedback loop: cheaper compute enabled experiments, which attracted researchers and investment, accelerating progress.
- Unlike the moon landing, early LLM progress was uncertain and evolved step-by-step rather than following a grand plan.
- Scaling laws and clearer rules around 2018 made AI progress more predictable and faster.
- Keeping AI secrets is ineffective because demos reveal possibilities and trigger investment by competitors; only a massive tech lead and low prices could deter competition.

Hasty Briefsbeta

OKI Develops 124-Layer PCB Technology

Things that apparently cause cancer

Cloudflare opens more Enterprise-only features to all customers

Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill's Name

San Francisco's car crime has plunged. How much credit does Flock deserve?

Epilepsy and multidimensional time:a perspective inspired by theoretical physics

Billions of Triangles Redux

Where Is the Planet

Show HN: Google Maps Scraper MCP

<input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard

Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)Graces of the Parenthesis

Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B into quashing datacenter dissent

Make Tmux the OS

Show HN: Mini React – React like UI library

Tightening Full Disk Access on macOS, in Response to AI Apps Running Amok

Why didn't we get GPT-2 in 2005?