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Google demonstrates 'verifiable quantum advantage' with their Willow processor

https://blog.google/technology/research/quantum-echoes-willow-verifiable-quantum-advantage/
105•AbhishekParmar•1h ago•56 comments

Cryptographic Issues in Cloudflare's Circl FourQ Implementation (CVE-2025-8556)

https://www.botanica.software/blog/cryptographic-issues-in-cloudflares-circl-fourq-implementation
80•botanica_labs•2h ago•19 comments

Linux Capabilities Revisited

https://dfir.ch/posts/linux_capabilities/
75•Harvesterify•2h ago•12 comments

Designing software for things that rot

https://drobinin.com/posts/designing-software-for-things-that-rot/
72•valzevul•18h ago•8 comments

MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/21647#issuecomment-3418675115
445•LexSiga•10h ago•267 comments

AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content
199•sohkamyung•2h ago•149 comments

The security paradox of local LLMs

https://quesma.com/blog/local-llms-security-paradox/
48•jakozaur•3h ago•36 comments

SourceFS: A 2h+ Android build becomes a 15m task with a virtual filesystem

https://www.source.dev/journal/sourcefs
46•cdesai•3h ago•16 comments

Die shots of as many CPUs and other interesting chips as possible

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Birdman86
132•uticus•4d ago•26 comments

Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites

https://nednex.com/en/the-internets-biggest-annoyance-why-cookie-laws-should-target-browsers-not-...
333•SweetSoftPillow•4h ago•391 comments

French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgkm2j0xelo
265•begueradj•10h ago•344 comments

Go subtleties

https://harrisoncramer.me/15-go-sublteties-you-may-not-already-know/
149•darccio•1w ago•104 comments

Tesla Recalls Almost 13,000 EVs over Risk of Battery Power Loss

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-22/tesla-recalls-almost-13-000-evs-over-risk-of-b...
135•zerosizedweasle•3h ago•114 comments

Infracost (YC W21) Hiring First Dev Advocate to Shift FinOps Left

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/infracost/jobs/NzwUQ7c-senior-developer-advocate
1•akh•4h ago

Patina: a Rust implementation of UEFI firmware

https://github.com/OpenDevicePartnership/patina
65•hasheddan•1w ago•12 comments

Farming Hard Drives (2012)

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
12•floriangosse•6d ago•3 comments

Evaluating the Infinity Cache in AMD Strix Halo

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/evaluating-the-infinity-cache-in
121•zdw•12h ago•51 comments

Show HN: Cadence – A Guitar Theory App

https://cadenceguitar.com/
135•apizon•1w ago•29 comments

The Dragon Hatchling: The missing link between the transformer and brain models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26507
110•thatxliner•3h ago•65 comments

Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died

https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/In_Memoriam/gbnewby
352•ron_k•7h ago•59 comments

Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/cigarette-smuggling-balloons-force-closure-vilnius-...
49•n1b0m•3h ago•17 comments

Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani

https://www.ft.com/content/8e6de299-3eb6-4ba9-8037-266c55c02170
15•amrrs•48m ago•10 comments

Knocker, a knock based access control system for your homelab

https://github.com/FarisZR/knocker
49•xlmnxp•7h ago•74 comments

LLMs can get "brain rot"

https://llm-brain-rot.github.io/
446•tamnd•1d ago•274 comments

Ghostly swamp will-O'-the-wisps may be explained by science

https://www.snexplores.org/article/swamp-gas-methane-will-o-wisp-chemistry
23•WaitWaitWha•1w ago•10 comments

Distributed Ray-Tracing

https://www.4rknova.com//blog/2019/02/24/distributed-raytracing
21•ibobev•5d ago•7 comments

Starcloud

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/
129•jonbaer•5h ago•170 comments

Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

https://www.edn.com/poe-basics-and-beyond-what-every-engineer-should-know/
216•voxadam•6d ago•170 comments

rlsw – Raylib software OpenGL renderer in less than 5k LOC

https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/src/external/rlsw.h
228•fschuett•19h ago•87 comments

Ask HN: Our AWS account got compromised after their outage

364•kinj28•1d ago•87 comments
Open in hackernews

Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/cigarette-smuggling-balloons-force-closure-vilnius-airport-lithuania
48•n1b0m•3h ago

Comments

dylan604•1h ago
The smugglers must have a high tolerance for loss acceptance if this is their delivery route. I'd love to know more about the logistics on this. Searching for this topic just returns various sites with the same report. A headline from Fortune suggests these are hot air balloons, but the image in TFA does not indicate that at all. They mentioned 25 balloons at one time, so this is not a small operation. Do they have 25 separate teams waiting for the balloons, or is one or two receiving groups expected to locate them all? Inquiring minds want to know
mothballed•1h ago
Yeah the price differential isn't high enough to justify narco smuggler like loss rates.

On the other hand, take a look at the price difference of cigarettes between Australia and Indonesia, like 20x. There must be a pretty insane volume of smuggling going on between those countries seperate by a short straight of Ocean, it would support narco submarine levels of sophistication.

codyb•17m ago
I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?

Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.

That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.

Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.

Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?

giorgioz•1h ago
I assume they let them fly at night and they have some form of GPS and way to communicate the data positions. The pickup team maybe just needs to shoot them down on top of a inhabited area.
dylan604•25m ago
Shooting them down with what? These things will fly at high altitudes. How do you find them at that altitude in the dark to shoot with what, a rifle? US military took more than one missile to shoot down the very much larger Chinese balloon. It's not as simple as you might be thinking
stickfigure•11m ago
> These things will fly at high altitudes.

That seems improbable? Lithuania is only a couple hundred miles across and these balloons are completely at the mercy of wind.

I would expect the balloon owners want a quick hop over border security. Chasing them down over hundreds of miles of potentially private property sounds like more trouble than it would be worth.

Tade0•42m ago
I recall a friend of mine smoking cigarettes smuggled from Belarus back in 2006 costing 2,30PLN a pack, so less than €0,60 at the time.

Considering how light the product was, that translated to ~€20 per kilogram, with about 20% of this figure being the cost of third rate tobacco stuffed into those cigarettes.

The smell was distinctly foul, but he was happy with the bargain he got on them.

uyzstvqs•55m ago
Strange. Presumably there are many different methods which would be much more efficient and reliable. And I don't see any mention on how they would track and recover the cargo.
dylan604•16m ago
Tracking and recovery is as simple as placing a GPS locator on the payload, and then driving+hiking out to where the payload lands. hopefully on dry land. If these are simple balloons using hydrogen or helium, they will continue to rise in altitude until the gasses expand to the point the balloon bursts. This could take around 2-3 hours depending on size of balloon and weight of payload. Once the balloon bursts, it's just free falling with I'd assume a parachute of some sort. From burst altitude to on the ground would be about an hour again depending on weight and parachute. From there, you just go to the dot on the map. This is all based on my personal experience with helium balloon "experiments". Balloon reached close to 90000', and went 100+ miles down range in about 3 hours from launch to landing.

Depending on how sophisticated the efforts are, there are websites you can go to that will give you a flight path prediction based on current+previous day(s) wind. So you could stage recovery teams in the general area to get much closer. There could also be some sort of timer that some how deflates the balloon instead of waiting for simple physics to have a little more control. At the end of the day you are subject to whatever the wind currents are.

kragen•30m ago
The article doesn't describe how the balloons are controlled or tracked, but it seems inevitable that the combination of advances in electronics, cryptocurrences, and new tariffs will make smuggling of all kinds explode over the next few years, by air, by water, and even by land. You could see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb as a kind of smuggling, the kind where the recipient of the shipment doesn't want it.
txru•27m ago
This might be paranoia, but could this be state sponsored?

I can see a lot of reasons for Belarus and Russia to create lots of contacts in EU airspace. The strategy is called "salami slicing" [0]

Especially in light of the point the others are making-- this is a really unreliable form of smuggling.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics

janwl•25m ago
Consider you may be spending too much time reading West-aligned news sources.
txru•16m ago
I haven't found much utility in reading Russian-language sources, though I can read the language.

Unfortunately I'm not extrapolating, this fits within a very mature pattern. See 'Little Green Men' in lead-up to Ukraine invasion and the drones violating airspace that Poland has been shooting down.

DonHopkins•22m ago
> this is a really unreliable form of smuggling

It's a reliable way to spread bad breath and cancer.

codyb•21m ago
According to the Enforcer's (https://www.youtube.com/@EnforcerOfficial) stream yesterday

They just use prevailing wind routes, and toss tons of balloons up, and have 'em float over the border cause cigarette taxes are so high in Europe that it's worth it.

And then there's people waiting along the wind path to pick up the balloons as they come down.

There's a lot of inefficiencies built into smuggling operations. You can absolutely grab huge amounts of smuggled items in busts and not end up denting profits for the smugglers cause they're smuggling so much (see cocaine, fentanyl, cigarettes in blue states in America).

I wouldn't entirely rule out the Russians or Belarussions doing probing moves, but the Enforcer's been a great source of information for these events as they occur.

There's a fair number of articles from previous encounters - https://fortune.com/2025/10/05/hot-air-balloons-smuggling-ci...

It's entirely possible that the operations are in cahoots and this is an intelligence operation being conducted as a smuggling operation.

janwl•26m ago
Piracy is a service problem. Maybe if this is happening at such a scale, cigarettes are too highly taxed.
cogman10•9m ago
Just from googling around because I also had this question.

It doesn't look like it's so much a tax issue as it is a labor issue. (Well, it is a tariff issue and tariffs are taxes).

My guess is that they aren't growing enough tobacco to meet local demand which has ultimately kicked up prices.