Hacker News: niwtsol

New comment by niwtsol in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

niwtsol — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:54:39 +0000

Shipping container costs went up after covid, but still, at their peak you could buy one for ~$5k, $500/month is insane rental price especially if he never moves it.

I looked up prices for 40ft container: pre-covid: Under $2,000, Peak Pandemic (2020-2021): >$8,000; 2022-2024: prices falling, Current: $2,300

New comment by niwtsol in "The biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs"

niwtsol — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:25:04 +0000

I would love to know the day-to-day ins and outs of being a archaeologist in today's world. A glamorous edition is "the fly around the world to exotic places to find fossils", but I'd love any good books or blogs that talk about the nitty gritty details I wouldn't expect or even know to look for.

New comment by niwtsol in "Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT"

niwtsol — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:49:21 +0000

We run several campaigns for brands on ChatGPT, brand terms consistently perform pretty low. It seems a lot of the prompts are about topics, generics, long tail things... Definitely making a jump, but I would guess people are searching for long tail prompts about working out, what apps could help them track, and you are showing up rather from the app store listing or other mentions on web. Really a black box to some degree, there are some AEO/GEO tools you could use (we have one I could run for you if interested) to try and see where you come up, where competitors come up, etc. That would only show presence, no one has any sort of real prompt volume counts at this point in time (outside Anthropic/openai/google obviously)

New comment by niwtsol in "Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond"

niwtsol — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:52:11 +0000

I went to Japan a few years ago - I saw a lot of beautiful things, but the image of schoolchildren in their yellow hats on the train system is one of the most memorable/replayed in my mind.

New comment by niwtsol in "Audacity 4.0"

niwtsol — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:13:33 +0000

I remember using Audacity back in 2006-ish, I just needed some basic mp3 editing and I was so happy with it. Has been my go to audio editor for, goodness feels weird to say, decades now, awesome to hear them staying alive and improving. Hooray opensource / PE not killing something good!

New comment by niwtsol in "Playa Phone"

niwtsol — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:35:52 +0000

I've told you this before, but I'll tell you again - thank you for running this, has been delightful in my experience!

New comment by niwtsol in "Playa Phone"

niwtsol — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:28:07 +0000

Looks like the link has changed from when you posted - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYltJN7n6NQ

New comment by niwtsol in "A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation"

niwtsol — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:39:48 +0000

That's a fair counter. I think I stretched my usage of "geographical limitations" to include the permitting process and thus new entrants. It would be much easier for someone to build a competitor to the hypothetical Walmart you proposed on the same street, in the same town, somewhere close. Ski resorts need the permit from NFS and they stopped giving those out, so the supply is capped by federal policy.

New comment by niwtsol in "A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation"

niwtsol — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:11:13 +0000

That was a very interesting read. I've always wondered about the details around the contract between the big ski resorts and the NFS, fun to read the actual permit. Ikon and Vail seem to be a duopoly and the geographical limitations inherent of a ski resort make the free-market argument hard to believe - you can't just open up a new resort next to breck or vail and charge lower rates.

I was a long time epic/ikon pass holder - I didn't buy one last year, and I bought a smaller resort's season pass directly this year. Let it snow!

New comment by niwtsol in "Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown"

niwtsol — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:29:46 +0000

woof, where are you located, coastal/northern Canada?

New comment by niwtsol in "Pressed Penny Machine Map"

niwtsol — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:01:56 +0000

You don't see a lot of sites that use a window.alert() to tell you to sign up like that... would love an about us to know who had the passion to make this.

New comment by niwtsol in "Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)"

niwtsol — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:09:13 +0000

I went from an unknown intel processor (pre-celeron) I think doing like ~75mhz and 2gb hard drive w/ 8mb ram to a gateway computer P4 w/ 1.3 or 1.4 GHZ, 40gb HD, and 128mb of ram - it was insane the jump. I do give credit to that old machine as I learned so much trying to optimize that processor to do things my friends were doing on their faster machines. Crazy times.

New comment by niwtsol in "Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)"

niwtsol — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:39:36 +0000

I was very young and I tried to upgrade the RAM on our gateway computer. I used the wrong type of RAM and fried (or broke) the motherboard. When I talked to gateway support, I think the person on the other end could tell what happened but took pity on me and allowed us to get a new motherboard under warranty. I had completely forgot that story until your comment here, thanks for the reminder on why I double check all the specs before rummaging around in there.

New comment by niwtsol in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

niwtsol — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:54:00 +0000

"most of us have been there done that" - so true. That feeling in your gut when you realize something you just did caused an outage is pretty unique.

New comment by niwtsol in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

niwtsol — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:50:26 +0000

Yeah, I think this one might be the straw that broke the camel's back and our team will look to migrate to something non-microsoft to be away from this nonsense.

New comment by niwtsol in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

niwtsol — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:12:51 +0000

Nothing like the old "everything is normal" to only be corrected 8 minutes later it is actually still down and then 2 hours later they are still working on it.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:27 UTC - Update - Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

Aug 06, 2026 - 16:19 UTC - Update - Pages is operating normally.

New comment by niwtsol in "Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac"

niwtsol — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:36:04 +0000

seems like a great little chrome extension or tool we could use to just quickly validate stuff like that.

New comment by niwtsol in "Our position on open-weights models"

niwtsol — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:39:49 +0000

I feel like so many people miss what you are saying here. The attackers are at such an advantage because of time. At t0, attackers can go and try and find so many attack angles. These traditional companies (defenders) can't just go to a model and say "fix all my things!" and ship it, way more complex in practice.

New comment by niwtsol in "Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)"

niwtsol — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:54:57 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20260719160409/https://psychedel...

New comment by niwtsol in "Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign"

niwtsol — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 04:42:04 +0000

That is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about. I see relatives constantly throwing phone cameras in baby's faces "look here, look here" the kids are trained to look at the phone/camera. I think of the experience from your daughter here, just running up to her mom wearing glasses - I hear the mass surveillance concerns, I see the pervert/harassment angle, I saw a friend do the "recording a party" angle, but I am just surprised I didn't see something as wholesome as this - thanks for expanding my view.