Hacker News: drewnick

New comment by drewnick in "Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait"

drewnick — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:13:54 +0000

The dark fiber comparison is very close. I remember contracting bandwidth with Global Crossing in the late 90s/early 2000s when they were HOT and two years later they were bankrupt.

New comment by drewnick in "Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait"

drewnick — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:08:31 +0000

I've been thinking the same way. I bit the bullet and purchased two DGX sparks and am running GLM 5.3 Flash at a reasonable quant and it's quite amazing seeing this "brain" on my desk do real work and create code without anything leaving the building. But look what happened with hosting, it got more and more centralized over time. In the early 2000s there were more companies self hosting than now I'd bet.

New comment by drewnick in "Gemini 4 Argon"

drewnick — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:49:37 +0000

For the types of basic business tasks my company does, we have hit the line where if it never gets any better, we are fine. On our own hardware. For $25k worth of DGX Sparks, we have essentially the output of a few admin-level FTEs.

New comment by drewnick in "ChatGPT Pro 500"

drewnick — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:22:15 +0000

Agree but if you don't want to then be at the mercy of the cloud providers when everyone is rushing for the exits, you need to start thinking about securing hardware now.

New comment by drewnick in "GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price"

drewnick — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:22:34 +0000

I have deepseek agents doing email responses, with real tools (think running quotes, gathering info, scheduling things) and running business processes that used to be done by $35/hr administrative type people. And the capabilities are expanding every day as I learn how to build scaffolding around the model.

New comment by drewnick in "Sonnet 5.5"

drewnick — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:37:32 +0000

Every new generation of model goes and cleans up the slop of its predecessor in my code bases, and it has turned out to be quite effective.

Last year I held off on implementing a few features knowing that a model like Opus 5.5 was around the corner. I'm now implementing them in a much more efficient and quality manner than I could have fall of 2025.

New comment by drewnick in "Ask HN: Hypothesis: Cellular providers are deprioritizing voice calls?"

drewnick — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:56:39 +0000

tello gets you close in the US, a few dollars a month minimum ($5 maybe?) I use it on my burner flip phone.

New comment by drewnick in "How and Why We Bought 4x DGX Sparks"

drewnick — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:20:53 +0000

Thanks for sharing. I've had 2x DGX sparks in my cart a few times. Yesterday and today, there was some weird nationwide run on them (microcenter, amazon, staples, you name it) and so I've got FOMO for my company now.

I appreciate the thoughtful walkthrough.

New comment by drewnick in "Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models"

drewnick — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:35:37 +0000

You can even tell the new harness to go find your latest session in the other harness and it works perfectly. You don't even need the name!

New comment by drewnick in "Grok 4.7"

drewnick — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:39:48 +0000

I use it on fireworks which is US/ZDR and pretty reliable. We run a few hundred million tokens/day through it for dollars. Many are cached, which is super duper cheap.

New comment by drewnick in "DeepSeek costs OpenCode Go user $1.14/day; dual DGX breaks even in 24 years"

drewnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:17:11 +0000

The KV cache is a great example. When you own hardware, vllm etc can keep your KV cache warm indefinitely for bursty large token loads vs clouds will purge quite often.

One of my tasks has a very large but very static system prompt and instructions, think something like 128k tokens. On our own hardware, we keep that cached, sprinkle in the 8k of goodness needed for output, and DSV4 Flash 0731 can generate our output at ~50 tps on $10k worth of hardware.

I've been benchmarking vs publics clouds (which are tbf insanely cheap!) and it's basically a break even in 24-36 months if nothing changes, which it could for better or worse.

Combined with the security and stability of internal hardware, to me it's in "no brainer" territory for this workload, even if models don't improve.

Our only "risk" is better cheaper hardware or cloud costs, which given the trajectory is murky at best short of a bust.

New comment by drewnick in "DeepSeek costs OpenCode Go user $1.14/day; dual DGX breaks even in 24 years"

drewnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:48:42 +0000

AMD AI Halo machines are similar cost and RAM. I'm in the market and comparing both. The new 192GB AMD box will be tempting but I'm leaning 2xDGX's for now.

New comment by drewnick in "DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813"

drewnick — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:08:34 +0000

+1 I have found extremely reliable systems require a mix of deterministic "adapters" is a good word for agents to actually get through the workflows I've created. I'm still amazed that it can work with both those and some "intuition" to bend the rules around the adapters if prompted.

New comment by drewnick in "Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

drewnick — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:32:07 +0000

An hour in, I've been running four terminals full bore on my $20/mo Grok sub and I'm at 9% for the week. Codex or Claude would easily have hit 5-hour or weekly limits.

New comment by drewnick in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

drewnick — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:54:15 +0000

Think about how many webmaster and business owners' egos are stroked by all the traffic they are getting, when in actuality they are often just serving thousands of bots.

New comment by drewnick in "After the AI Crash"

drewnick — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:27:36 +0000

I moved one of our daily workflows over to Kimi K3 on Fireworks. It replaces two sales assistant positions, and was about $50/day for 14 million tokens total (in/out). They surely are not subsidizing this price as it is just inference only and other providers are even less money.

New comment by drewnick in "John C. Dvorak has died"

drewnick — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:26:06 +0000

Thank you for giving us this nuance.

New comment by drewnick in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

drewnick — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:21:40 +0000

Wow, this is refreshing DX compared to iterating all messages like we did back in '24.

New comment by drewnick in "Claude Opus 4.8"

drewnick — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:53:50 +0000

While all these models are nondeterministic a feature bump is still necessary as the same input can have wildly different output on a new model. For API users being able to pin a model is a necessity.

New comment by drewnick in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

drewnick — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:54:08 +0000

Great point on the playing with Linux growing up, it's second nature to me now.

I am always feeling like I'm doing something wrong running bare metal based on modern advice, but it's low latency, simple, and reliable.

Probably because I've been using linux since Slackware in the 90s so it's second nature. And now with the CLI-based coding tools, I have a co-sysadmin to help me keep things tidy and secure. It's great and I highly recommend more people try it.