~hackernews | Bookmarks (191)

AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it. In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-dri...

All-around, highly generalizable generative AI models were the name of the game once, and they arguably still are. But increasingly, as cloud vendors large and small join the generative AI fray, we’re seeing a new crop of models focused on the deepest-pocketed potential customers: the enterprise. Case in point: Snow...

Fisker says it’s planning more layoffs less than two months after cutting 15% of its workforce, as the EV startup scrambles to raise cash to stay alive. Fisker expects to seek bankruptcy protection within the next 30 days if it can’t come up with that money, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reg...

Tesla profits fell 55% to $1.13 billion in the first quarter from the same year-ago period as a protracted EV price-cutting strategy and “several unforeseen challenges” cut into the automaker’s bottom line. Tesla reported revenue of $21.3 billion in the first quarter, a 9% drop from the first quarter of 2023. Analys...

The European Union has opened a second formal investigation into TikTok, announcing Monday that it suspects the video sharing platform of breaking the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), an online governance and content moderation framework. The Commission also said it’s minded to impose interim measures that could f...

In the latest iteration of the never-ending (and always head-scratching) crypto wars, Graeme Biggar, the director general of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), has called on Instagram’s parent, Meta, to rethink its continued rollout of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). The call follows a joint declaration on Sunday b...

Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The recall caps a tumultuous week for Tesla. The company laid off more than 10% of its...

Consolidation continues apace in the world of security. Sources tell us that Lacework — a cloud security startup that was valued at $8.3 billion post-money in its last funding round — is in talks to be acquired by another security player, Wiz, for a price of just $150–$200 million. Sources close to the negotiations ...

A financially motivated criminal hacking group says it has stolen a confidential database containing millions of records that companies use for screening potential customers for links to sanctions and financial crime. The hackers, which call themselves GhostR, said they stole 5.3 million records from the World-Check...

Elon Musk’s decision to green-light a robotaxi over an affordable EV might cost the company its lead. Last week, Musk reportedly canned the effort in favor of a robotaxi, the sort of pie-in-the-sky project that defined his first decade at the helm. There’s an argument to be made that the company is where it is today...

Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs. The Hyundai-owned firm has always marched to the beat of its own drummer. Even so, it’s an odd decision as funding pours into the category by the hundreds of millions. Venturing an educated guess, I wo...

Ghost, the open source alternative to Substack’s newsletter platform, is considering joining the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. According to a post from Ghost founder John O’N...

Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots.” “Current AI (and troll far...

Ad blockers might seem like an unlikely defense in the fight against spyware, but new reporting casts fresh light on how spyware makers are weaponizing online ads to allow governments to conduct surveillance. Spyware makers are reportedly capable of locating and stealthily infecting specific targets with spyware usi...

Airchat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.” A previous version of Airchat was released last year, but the team — led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder product exec Brian Norgard — rebuilt the app and relaunched it on iOS and Android yesterday. Currently invite-only, Ai...

Google’s Cloud Next 2024 event takes place in Las Vegas through Thursday, and that means lots of new cloud-focused news on everything from Gemini, Google’s AI-powered chatbot, to AI to devops and security. Last year’s event was the first in-person Cloud Next since 2019, and Google took to the stage to show off its o...

This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 folks came together to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud. What they heard was all generative AI, all the time. Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor. If you didn’t know that, you might have missed it in the onslaught of AI news. Not ...

Tesla has slashed the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscription to $99 per month, down from $199 per month, as the electric vehicle maker aims to boost adoption of its advanced driver assistance system ahead of first-quarter earnings. The price cut comes a couple of weeks after Tesla launched a free...

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that Russian government-backed hackers stole emails from several U.S. federal agencies as a result of an ongoing cyberattack at Microsoft. In a statement published Thursday, the U.S. cyber agency said the cyberattack, which Microsoft initiall...

Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries on Wednesday, warning them that may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks. The company said it sent the alerts to individuals in 92 nations at 12pm Pacific Time Wednesday. The notification, which TechCrunch has seen, did not disclose the attac...

Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks and was last valued at $5 billion in April 2022, has laid off 382 employees as companies are not significantly hiring talent. TechCrunch exclusively learned that Checkr conducted the layoffs across all departments and different levels on Tuesday. T...

Switzerland-based Proton, the privacy-focused firm behind end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) webmail ProtonMail and other apps, has acquired Standard Notes, a note-taking app founded back in 2017. It offers the same kind of robust privacy promise to its 300,000+ users by also applying E2EE. In a press release announcing th...

In 2023, higher egg prices provided an opportunity for alternative protein companies to show they could compete with traditional egg manufacturers. A year later, prices have calmed down, but the flurry of activity in creating more sustainable egg products continues to thrive. One place seeing a lot of activity is On...

Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet. Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Özfidan and Egemen Koçhisarlı with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server...