Hacker News: t098i3

New comment by t098i3 in "PBS fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider"

t098i3 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:56:38 +0000

HN title is inaccurate - article is about a single local PBS station, not PBS the national broadcast network. (Source title is unambiguous)

New comment by t098i3 in "Stop Making TUIs"

t098i3 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:45:36 +0000

They made a ton of sense back when the cost difference between a basic text-only terminal and a full-color multimedia PC was significant when multiplied over all of your employees.

New comment by t098i3 in "Never Be Angry at Work"

t098i3 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:30:37 +0000

An artist making a painting owns the IP of the painting[1]. A software engineer working for an employer generally does not; the employer (or client) usually owns the IP, and usually has a larger financial stake in the software than any individual.

I think this attitude is fine if you are the sole stakeholder and IP owner (e.g. a personal project or a small business you own). But not for something you are building in collaboration with other engineers for someone else's ownership.

[1] Artists do often make works for client IP, in which cases, they also do not have full creative control of their output!

New comment by t098i3 in "GPT 5.6 Sol 20% price reduction"

t098i3 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:23:54 +0000

They were first to offer a frontier model which also meets enterprise requirements (i.e. not training on or retaining on customer data, able to purchase tokens through AWS and GCP instead of having to onboard a new vendor). They did so with a proprietary harness, which creates friction for teams inside enterprises to move (can't just install another harness - your IT org has to approve and configure another harness for you). In particular, they were the first to make their model acceptable for defense contractors, and defense spending is a huge market. (An F-35 costs $30k-40k per hour to run, you think an aerospace company notices $10k of API usage per month?)

New comment by t098i3 in "Buy Your Friends Batteries"

t098i3 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:10:10 +0000

I've heard of people doing this kind of rotating "Everyone pays $X in each week/month, a different person decides how to spend it each week/month" thing. It's mostly for building social connection/community.

Think about it like a secret santa with a $20 limit - wouldn't it be more efficient for everyone to just do what they want with $20? You're "purchasing" time and connection with friends.

New comment by t098i3 in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

t098i3 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:42:20 +0000

Public transit is a great example. Pretty much every attempt to privatize transit worldwide has resulted in, if not failure and subsequent deprivatization, at least higher prices and worse service for the people using the service.

The interstate highway system, which replaced a complex system of partially privately owned roads, is another.

In most countries, healthcare is another great example. And arguably education as well - public schooling produces generally pretty good results worldwide for not that much money per student, and outside the US, higher education is often public and incredible value for money.