Episode Details
Back to EpisodesHacker Newsroom for 02 June: Instagram Support Exploit, Malicious Npm Packages, Gemma On Old Xeon, Pirate Bay At 20
Description
Hacker Newsroom for 02 June recaps major Hacker News stories, moving through instagram support exploit, malicious npm packages, gemma on old xeon, pirate bay at 20.
1. Instagram Support Exploit
The next story is about an Instagram account takeover flow that a security researcher calls almost comically broken. The article says attackers only needed a target username, a region-matching VPN, and Meta's support AI to redirect verification codes to a brand new email address, with reports that even the selfie check was easy to fool.
2. Malicious Npm Packages
The next story is a GitHub security issue reporting malicious npm releases inside the at red hat cloud services package scope. The post says multiple compromised packages were detected and quickly deprecated, adding to the long-running pattern of supply-chain risk in the JavaScript ecosystem.
3. Gemma On Old Xeon
The next story is about running a modern Gemma 4 setup on a recycled 2016 Xeon server with no GPU at all. The article walks through how the author paired quantization, speculative decoding, and a forked llama dot cpp workflow to get a 26B mixture-of-experts model working at roughly reading speed on old hardware with plenty of RAM but weak memory bandwidth.
4. Pirate Bay At 20
The next story is a 20-year retrospective on the Swedish police raid that was supposed to shut down The Pirate Bay for good. The article argues that the takedown attempt only strengthened the site's mythology and helped turn it into one of the internet's most resilient piracy symbols, even after the founders were convicted and the operators changed over time.
5. Anthropic S 1 Filing
The next story is Anthropic announcing that it has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC. The post itself is short and formal, saying only that the company has started the paperwork for a possible IPO and that timing, pricing, and share count are still undecided.
6. Stanford CS336
The next story is Stanford's CS336 course on building language models from scratch. The course page lays out a full-stack curriculum that goes from data preparation and transformer construction to training, evaluation, distributed systems, scaling laws, and alignment, with public lectures and assignments meant to make the whole pipeline legible.
That's it for today, I hope this is going to help you build some cool things.