I see a lot of people writing about how expensive the hardware to run these local models is - but see no mentions of the Intel Arc Pro B50/B60/B70 which seem like decent value if you're not interested in Apple kit (as much as anything can be decent value in the current status quo).
I just got a B70 with 32GB RAM for the equivalent of $1200 (incl. sales tax and import duties to my non-US location, so presumably it could be cheaper elsewhere). The memory bandwidth is 608 GB/s. For M5 Max (32-core GPU) it's 460 GB/s and for M5 Max (40-core GPU) it's 614 GB/s. A 3090 is still faster at ~900 GB/s but you're getting 32GB VRAM for a lot less than equivalent Nvidia cards. It's about 1/3 the bandwidth of a 5090 for 1/3 the cost, but with the same 32GB VRAM. If you're interested in being able to run bigger quants with some context and stay on a lower budget then it's an appealing trade off.
I'm still exploring using these local models so don't want to spend the equivalent of $5 000 - $10 000 just to test it out. I don't mind slightly slower perf to do some experimentation more affordably.
I actually got an B50 16GB (with meager 70w TDP!) first to test an Intel card with my stack - it worked easily with Ubuntu & Vulkan. I'd read a lot about hassles and people writing them off as unusable but it seems like these are often with SYCL which doesn't even seem to outperform vulkan and so why bother? (The B50 was just $370 inclusive tax and duties). Literally `apt install` the vulkan libraries and it worked with default xe driver in 26.04 and the vulkan build of llama.cpp. The SR-IOV PF/VF also just works with qemu/kvm, no tricks required. Since I got it fwupdmgr has updated the firmware twice so Intel is presumably actually trying to support these products.
I saw another article - can't find it now - with statements to the effect that transmission of Andes strain hantavirus is typically only between very close contacts, like amongst partners. But already the original couple who traveled in the endemic area of the Andes virus prior to boarding the ship have apparently spread it to another couple on the ship, the ship's doctor, 2 crew members and additionally the person who has tested as positive in Switzerland.
I'm the developer of the ExchangeRate-API.com service.
Obviously it's upsetting to have our API used by a scammer, but our service couldn't have been involved in this hack beyond fetching a JSON-formatted response of up-to-date exchange rates because that's the only functionality our service/domain provides.
My guess is that the scammer implemented a call to our API to fetch up-to-date exchange rates in order to make their fake wallet seem more plausible & real. Interestingly my API doesn't even support any exchange rates involving cryptocurrencies and so the scammer would have had to additionally integrate with a different API to get something like the up-to-date exchange rate between BTC and USD.
The API is a very simple service - it's just a few endpoints that supply JSON formatted exchange rates over HTTPS. Anyone with an email address can sign up to use the service for free and there are even some totally "open access" endpoints that don't require any authentication. One of these has been used in the GNU `units` converter software for a while.
With regard to proving it's a legitimate service, this is the point where I wish I had made more progress with the landing page update that emphasizes social proof I've been working on recently! The API is used by ICs/teams at hundreds of recognizable companies. There are tens of thousands of free users including some that have used the API consistently for free for over a decade. I guess you could check many instances of the service being archived on the wayback machine? https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.exch... I'll definitely admit the domain does look a bit odd but back in 2010 when registering it the "Exact Match Domain" bonus was a big factor for SEO. The site has been a top 3 Google result for "exchange rate api" pretty consistently - presumably also how the scammer ended up using the service.
I've used Cloudflare since approx. 2019 and their "cloudflared" tunnel infrastructure since approx. 2021 to secure servers against DDoS.
I'll contact popey to see if we can get more details on the exact path/request they saw being made to our domain and if that leads to any further information or logging from our side.
Yes. Most houses in SA have electrically heated water stored in a tank called a geyser. There are other options - some apartment complexes have central heat pump hot water, some houses have on demand heating via gas - but the most common is something like a 100/150/200 litre insulated steel tank in the roof that stores hot water and regulates it to 60 degrees C via thermostat.
Long comments like this often look like they're going to present a serious diatribe but this is actually a balanced take.
The line "The two mega coal power stations have been beset with issues as well" even radically undersells just how much of a debacle these two power stations have been. They were supposed to be the 8th/9th biggest coal stations in the world & accurately sized to solve the pending shortages in time, the major contracts went to legitimate companies like Alstom, GE & Hitachi. They were supposed to take approx. 5 years from 2007 and cost a reasonable approx. R30 billion each.
What's actually happened is that 15 years later neither is fully operational and the money spent has crossed 10x the original plans. The parts of the stations that currently do work are hamstrung by massive and debilitating design flaws that regularly cause trips or bigger issues (e.g. a smoke stack collapse last month) and there is no clear end for the construction in site even after all this time & money. And these aren't complex nuclear plants - these are just standard coal power stations. How to build them is quite well understood by now!
It's a combination of sustained and massive corruption (every now and then the current administration finds a few extra billion to recoup from a corrupt contractor), poor original designs that have complicated every subsequent step in the waterfall chart and finally unfortunate incompetence (for instance one of the 6 units at Medupi was entirely blown up after hydrogen wasn't vented before maintenance. The entire generator room must now be replaced with new parts from France at the cost of multiple billions of rands and over a year and a half of additional delay).
Finally, w.r.t. the reforms mention in parent comment's final line - I think they have a chance. South Africa has previously had a radically regulated energy sector. Basically you couldn't generate your own power, period. But due to the pressing political weight of the current situation there have been increasing steps away from the ideological commitment to exclusively state run coal powered grid. Large energy users and businesses can now do paperwork for approval to run their own multi-megawatt stations and basically every big factory, mine, mill etc. is now doing this to varying degrees. The big mining houses especially will spend a lot of money building their own infrastructure now. Between allowing the grid to buy private power (a lot of which is affordably priced renewable energy) and a lot of heavy demand starting to make its own power I think there's a fair chance things will stabilize in the next 2 years. The big question is electoral conferences and the next elections. If EFF wins meaningful electoral power there is a strong chance SA will go the route of Venezuela quicker than people think - and I say that as someone who is very committed to staying here and doesn't subscribe to most of the negative takes people can have about SA.
Absolutely. That said, the bigger effect is actually from geysers since almost every house has one whereas batteries are not as widely spread. As the power comes back on the geyser will suddenly draw substantially since the temp will have fallen during the scheduled cut.
Accordingly there have been big govt. subsidies for geyser timers to put on your DB and solar geysers to try reduce this effect. Big information campaigns about not running the geyser all the time etc.
The consequences can be substantial, the city electricity depts. have to continually deal with substations and local transformers blowing up (literally, in an explosion, I've seen the aftermath!) because of the demand surges. Some areas are exempted from the scheduled cuts in my city to preserve older infrastructure.
Additionally, insurance companies report big spikes in claims from devices being damaged due to the unstable power as it reconnects. In my house everything is behind varying levels of surge protection, and interestingly I actually have SA made surge plugs that don't pass power through for the first 5 minutes after powering back on. This way my fridge compressor won't be damaged by unstable power (e.g. sudden substantially lower voltage, or a surge) as the scheduled cut ends.
Exactly. I've had conversations with friends about how much less effective load shedding must be now compared to when it started because of the proliferation of battery backup. At the beginning, an two hour cut would have reduced total GWh used substantially. But now, as soon as the cut ends demand will spike as batteries charge. Without data on just how many batteries there are it's hard to work out at what point an additional hours cut will be required!
Of course it's not the biggest crisis because grid-level electricity usage spikes overwhelmingly at morning and evening peaks. So if you can use the power cut schedules to shift demand away from these peaks, even if the batteries reduce the efficiency a bit, you're still having a substantial effect on the required peak grid power.
There are much stricter rules now, KYC on exchanges etc. But up until 2017/2018 I'd say the tax authorities weren't paying much attention and I'd be surprised if people with money who wanted to get it out didn't take advantage.
Interestingly I wouldn't say it seemed so. AIDS devastated the political base of the politician in question and people who fought for the right to treatment were also politically popular. I think it may have just been a strange ideological bent in a specific set of political circle. Thankfully these ideas and policies have been pretty much entirely consigned to history now. The consequences were terrible though, nearly a million children were orphaned because of both parents dying of AIDS. I can't find a specific source to cite a specific number, they all reference much higher numbers across the whole Southern African region.
The problem is that not everyone can afford battery backup, due to the poverty in our society the country basically has to have a reliable base load. Coming from the sections of society where everyone has solar, inverters, datacenter style lipo UPS in their houses etc. it's also been interesting to me how inefficient storage at the endpoint is. People are spending R300k ($17k) on batteries and inverters sized to their houses' peak load, but 90% of the time they could actually get by with radically less. I read on HN about a company making a smart Distribution Board for houses - seemed like a really good idea based on this. If you can intelligently manage load you can cut your off grid setup cost substantially at minimal inconvenience.
Exchange control has been somewhat relaxed compared to when I'm guessing when your parents left. It used be insanely punitive. Provided you have up to date tax clearance I think you can now take R11m out the country per year. So approx. $600k per year. So people with a higher net worth than this who are leaving will have to a take a few years to fully financially emigrate, but it used to be much more complicated and restricted. If you have a substantially larger net worth you can also negotiate with the reserve bank! Famously Mark Shuttleworth - the Ubuntu linux founder - had a series of big court cases litigating some of these rules. He sold Thawte for approx $500m(?) to Verisign while South African but then moved to the UK. It's still a very unusual thing and foreigners are often surprised that a country with western style democracy has some China-style exchange controls.
Due to how long these power cuts have persisted a lot of businesses, industry and the middle class & up have almost habituated to the levels up to 4. Shopping centers have generators, business parks have full solar and retail stores have battery backup. For instance a local clothing chain (Foschini) installed 300+ Tesla powerwall setups so that all their locations can be totally uninterrupted even with 2.5/5/7.5 hours per day of power cuts. Cell towers, fiber infrastructure, hospitals, even traffic lights at busy intersections all have battery backup these days.
The reason this announcement is making the news is because levels above 4, like the two weeks or so of stage 6 we recently had are much more problematic. You start to run into issues where cell tower batteries can only charge like 80% back up with the number of hours powered per day - and so after a few days they no longer have enough charge to keep up with the interruptions and go offline, disrupting communications & internet access.
Additionally the provisions heavy industry has made over the years to deal with this become insufficient and you start to lose shifts and thus there's a lot of evidence the economy is very materially affected at these levels of cuts.
Of course the real weight of this crisis lands massively on the poor and disrupts job growth when it's desperately needed, curtails foreign and local investment etc. To discuss how parts of society can easily function with the lower stages of power cuts is not to miss how insane this all is... A society of 60 million people has largely stood by while this has happened for approx. 15 years now. And it's not like this is a matter of a poor nation without the ability to invest - approximately $40 billion USD has been spent by the power utility just in capex alone in this period - and afterwards they are producing less power than at the start... Quote from a local article: "It means that Eskom destroyed 46 GWh of power generation per R1 billion spent on increasing its power generation." [1]
I'm not sure there even could be 200+ currencies? There are only 193 members of the UN and many will share either the Euro or the US Dollar as their currency. E.g. countries like El Salvador just directly use Dollars and don't have their own currency.
So it's either referring to how many pairs they support or the marketing is over reaching a fair amount...
I don't like being negative on HN - but this doesn't feel like a good faith Show HN.
The product isn't available to use - it baits you into putting your email address in but then just tells you that you've been added to a waitlist.
Secondly, there are so many APIs like this. There are a few that are reliable and have been around for years - but there is an endless churn of new ones created, barely maintained and then abandoned. What is different about this one? There doesn't seem to be anything new about it or any specific reasons to think it isn't just yet another cloned SaaS product being "growth hacked" on HN.
I've experienced exactly the same as you both except all the way back in 2015 and so I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice in case it's helpful. I had never heard of panic attacks before I got one, had never worried once about my mental health etc. and so I also ended up at the emergency room convinced my death was imminent.
Considering my healthy history my doctor and I agreed to try deal with it on a lifestyle level. I did meditation, yoga and revised my diet. I became more healthy but still had the panic attacks. We then stepped this up to therapy which I did for a year but still had the panic attacks. They were totally random and incredibly draining. My life & work were seriously affected and so I eventually followed the doctors advice to consider medication. Saw a psychiatrist and started the most basic SSRI at the minimum dose for panic disorder. I had a few attacks during the first two weeks and then they just stopped entirely. 100% completely. Haven't had one since.
So - my advice. If you are seriously struggling with panic attacks on a continuing basis despite a reasonable level of lifestyle interventions please don't do what I did and basically resist trying psychiatric medicine because you're healthy, successful and happy in your life and can't see a "legit" reason to be on meds. It felt like a much bigger intervention to me than it really is. I know for some people dealing with this sort of thing isn't this easy but for a lot it seems it can be.
(Also I don't blame my doctors at all, I always felt well informed about the options available to me. Obviously in retrospect with the way my life was affected meant I should have seen a reason to try meds sooner. At least the year of therapy was good for me even though it didn't stop the panic disorder!)
Good point. I just presumed there was a general pattern at play - I guess because the OP's statement didn't mention any specifics that imply a sudden change in what they process. But yes, for certain types of a fraud it's entirely reasonable that Stripe have an immediate blocking function of sorts.
This feels like more like a Reddit post than an HN one to me - light on the details with plenty Russell Conjugation [1]. I know Stripe has had it's support lapses but I highly doubt they'd just suddenly suspend an account doing $10 million per month without any prior engagement.
In fact, lower down the thread we can in fact see the OP mentions that rather than processing since 2018 "without issues" as they claim in their post they had their reserve requirements increased a few months ago by Stripe to 50% of revenue held for 90 days!
This is a very substantial reserve requirement and presumably there was a conversation between Stripe and the OP's company at the time about the fraud or risk profile that lead Stripe to impose these increased reserve requirements. Presumably whatever prompted the increase in reserve has got worse and caused Stripe to decide the business relationship is no longer worth it.
On the other hand - just 48 hours to leave doesn't seem like fair play. So either 1. the OP is misrepresenting the communications they've had with Stripe over the past few months (including how abrupt the shut down notice from Stripe actually is), or 2. Stripe really will make snap algorithmic decisions over the future of businesses without remorse...
Maybe there's a way for Stripe to show which it is without breaking any of their privacy considerations.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-01-...
From Sept 15 all new sites added to CF will even block Googlebot by default on any page that serves ads as I understand it.
I think it's CF trying to force Google to separate out their bot traffic into bots for training and bots for the search index.
I think CF sees a big opportunity to get businesses to pay them to allow certain uses of their data but block others.
They're also starting a registry of "Approved" crawlers.