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- Hacker News
- Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.by Macha
- I didn't know they had significant fruit production in Russia and Ukraine. What sort of berries do they produce?by markdown
- The Gulf States aren't at war with Iran.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
by squidbeak - Struck Wildberries depots are in Russia, not Ukraine.
- Centralised and long-distance commerce (and passenger travel) are all but wholly predicated on minuscule risks.
I draw parallels between the development of whales and large-scale shipping:
- Both are comparatively recent developments. Giant whales are less than 5 million years old, large cargo ships (tankers, dry bulk, containers) at what are now considered ordinary scales are less than three decades old. (See: <https://logisticselearning.com/largest-container-ships/> especially graphic here: <https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/im...>.)
- Both require highly-efficient propulsion: mammalian metabolism, petroleum-fueled diesel engines, respectively.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
(There's a similar pattern with air travel, in which flights virtually instantly divert far from active combat zones. The list of airliner shoot-down incidents is surprisingly large: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...>.)
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
by dredmorbius - I wonder how the real House of Saud would feel about having their name used by some random news website? Not amused, probably...by rob74
- Who knows, someone might end up in a suitcase!?
- As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.by loufe
- My annoyance is that it's hard to figure out if it's actually up-to-date or not. If you click "Live conflict timeline →" it brings you to a collection of pages not updated since April (and at different points in April, oddly). The date count seems right, the oil price might have been correct when it was published but isn't "live" despite being labeled that way.by gs17
- The "Conflict Pulse" status dot is really the shit cherry on top.
- This is the claude code frontend-skill.by hagen8
- Part of it is the clash with the pages UI. Dark black cards in the middle of a light theme.by tyleo
- They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.by cartermatic
- The entire houseofsaud.com site appears to be LLM-generated, I wouldn't trust a single thing it says.
- They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
by meshweaver - Was there really no other source than "houseofsaud.com" here? Seems like a strange source to be promoting on HackerNews. Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work. I can not find who owns this publication.
I don't see them listed on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com either, which is usually a red flag for me. For example you can find other suspicious sources - like Iran International - on there https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/iran-international-bias-and-c...
by y-c-o-m-b - Don't forget the instant dickover. I lasted two seconds post load before I hit back.by slumberlust
- Euronews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995033
CNBC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004096
This one got more upvoted for some reason though.
by r721 - It does seem like we'd be better off with a more neutral source, but the only other article I could find from today (as opposed to 3 days ago) was https://iranwire.com/en/news/155401-irgc-claims-second-strik..., which doesn't look (or sound) like a neutral source either.by dang
- The article is about Iranian state media announcing the strikes, so here's the article from Iranian state media: https://www.tasnimnews.ir/en/news/2026/07/24/3655089/irgc-an... . Not sure if it's been independently confirmed via satellite imagery though, I looked on Twitter but just saw satellite photos from Iranian media (i.e. https://x.com/SoarAtlas/status/2080490121284272431 )by ndiddy
- > Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work.
The whole website seems to have issues, probably because of AWS issues in the middle-east. But archived pages are available:
- About: https://web.archive.org/web/20260719174647/https://houseofsa...
- Contact: https://web.archive.org/web/20260328195438/https://houseofsa...
by thisislife2 - My colleague in Dubai says that ATM's are all working so the claim that bank infrastructure is down may not be correct.by pseingatl
- American agression winning silly prizes.by CrzyLngPwd
- Wrongly flagged dead (like a lot of comments get on these Iran threads):
know-how 1 hour ago [dead] | parent | next [–]
Iran has been killing Americans and Israeli since the 1970s. Read a history book.
by _DeadFred_ - I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.
Winner: US military industrial complex + Israel
Losers: Everyone else
by throwaw12 - Please explain how attacking a civilian data center in an uninvolved country is a "response".by emosenkis
- Related: Ukraine have been targeting [1] warehouses owned by Wildberries, the Russian domestic equivalent of Amazon, causing $2.2bn of damage to-date.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/24/ukraine-wareho...
by andyjohnson0 - I wonder why they don’t target Russian data centers? Much harder to repair or replace.by testdelacc1
- These feel quite different. IRGC attacked Amazon compute. Ukraine attacked several warehouses. Comparing Wildberries to Amazon is also only half the truth. Wildberries is directly part of russian war machine as soldiers need to buy essential dual-use equipment there and they even sell weapons.by mkesper
- 1. Wow this is a headline.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
by rootsudo