Hacker News: kasey_junk

New comment by kasey_junk in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

kasey_junk — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:20:58 +0000

Big companies have thousands of budgets. An email is _worthless_. In fact, it would probably cause me to lose faith in a cloud that provided that as the control.

New comment by kasey_junk in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

kasey_junk — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:13:18 +0000

Features for bad customers that risk good customers are easy to say no to.

New comment by kasey_junk in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

kasey_junk — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:11:27 +0000

Because most enterprise users would much rather have overages in billing than outages. The opportunity costs on any serious service I deploy dwarfs usage pricing, at least at the level a generic cloud can determine.

So it’s a feature the best customers don’t want, that adds risk to those customers deployments, to appease the worst customers.

At least historically. Perhaps Simon is right that the calculation has changed.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market"

kasey_junk — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:43 +0000

Every consumer bank and piddly credit union in America will offer cash management customers a sweeps program that will stripe your funds across banks to keep you under the insured limit at each bank.

Whether you want to do that vs bonds is a risk, liquidity and yield decision.

New comment by kasey_junk in "The great crime decline is happening all across the country"

kasey_junk — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:45:01 +0000

Even a cursory reading of that article is full of stat crimes. They denominate a single value for the past then a gigantic range for current times. But basic math shows no major increase for the bottom of their range in their own numbers.

I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.

Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

kasey_junk — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 10:06:48 +0000

The more fair reading of the parent comment is that some people bought homes prior to 1968 with racial covenants attached that were subsequently made illegal. Those homes built in that regime still exist. So we have precedent within the lifetime of the _homes_ for this sort of change.

Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/32c7a747127e46dda11...

New comment by kasey_junk in "Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless"

kasey_junk — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:40:59 +0000

Fwiw I’ve had next day non-emergency mri (and sadly same day emergency mri). And this was across 2 states. I absolutely believe that coverage is spotty. But mri machines are extremely common in most places in the US.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless"

kasey_junk — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:37:46 +0000

You can easily find MRI in the US for less than half of that. Though a trip to SE Asia sounds nice.

New comment by kasey_junk in "How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?"

kasey_junk — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:41:38 +0000

I live 8 blocks from the fairs location. The parks it left are central to my daily life.

New comment by kasey_junk in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

kasey_junk — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:34:11 +0000

My daily commute is by open air rail in Chicago.

Me and my fellow commuters know snd like our conductors.

New comment by kasey_junk in "The Hierarchy of Money"

kasey_junk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:52:28 +0000

Your presentation about fiat money is more biased than anything presented in the article.

Take the UK. They only left the gold standard due to ww1. But they broadly stopped accepting anything but governmental currency in the 1400s for tax payment.

It turns out money is more useful than commodities even when it’s a 1:1 relationship and even with that 1:1 relationship governments want their currency to have official legitimacy.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices"

kasey_junk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:55:58 +0000

This is the right response.

Most state bar associations require a lawyer (or group of them) to own law firms. That _doesnt_ prevent law firms from doing crazy deals to gain liquidity for their partners, including from private equity.

Dictating who has to “own” something just incentivizes people to separate ownership from financial benefit. In most cases that’s just plain worse than letting real ownership happen.

If there is a business practice you don’t like, regulate the practice, not the corporate structure.

New comment by kasey_junk in "How to Write with an LLM"

kasey_junk — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:46:27 +0000

This is the real crime of llms on writing. They’ve taken perfectly reasonable verbal ticks (the one I miss being able to use is scaffolding) and caused the audience to rebel against them en masse. Verbiage is a great word. I refuse to give it up. It’s load bearing even.

New comment by kasey_junk in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

kasey_junk — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:43:01 +0000

Compare the US and China on oil usage. The US is a net exporter compared to China being a huge importer.

And they for _sure_ are pulling from reserves since the US attacked Iran. The volume of imports and usage figures can only be explained that way. The impressive thing is the numbers suggest their reserves were massive and probably bigger than anyone thought.

They are for sure electrifying fast. In many ways the envy of the world on this. But they are oil import dependent and likely going to be more so soon if their reserves draw down too far.

New comment by kasey_junk in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

kasey_junk — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:20:59 +0000

China has almost certainly been dramatically drawing down their oil reserves. They don’t publish trustworthy numbers on it like western countries do, but their import rates dropped too fast for any other explanation.

That’s not to say they haven’t done a phenomenal job with demand destruction it’s just their own domestic usage is still very high and they have to import unlike other heavy users.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

kasey_junk — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:24:35 +0000

Nike famously built there business on the back of the running trend of the late 70s and early 80s. It’s headquartered where it’s headquartered because of its association with a monster collegiate running program.

Before that they were known specifically for their innovation in serious running shoes.

If anything it’s that they abandoned that which caused their current downswing.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

kasey_junk — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:39:56 +0000

Do you have code formatters, linters and static analysis?

I can get extremely dumb models to get our code style correct because of those guard rails and a specific style document.

New comment by kasey_junk in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

kasey_junk — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:37:22 +0000

That’s a take for sure…

New comment by kasey_junk in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

kasey_junk — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:44:33 +0000

Aluminum smelters have run their own power generation for ages and don’t get to skip epa regulations.

New comment by kasey_junk in "Ask HN: How many of you juggle multiple agent sessions at the same time?"

kasey_junk — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:30:08 +0000

8 is about my limit but I never have less than 4.