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jackconsidine

1,570 karma · joined October 14, 2019

I'm a developer at koptional.com and founder of getcho.app
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jackconsidine··on Saab has unveiled its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept
TIL Saab was an aerospace company. My Dad had a '98 Saab. It had an "S" button on the shifter. It stood for "speed". When we were 7/8 years old we'd beg him to press it and it would speed up 10mph. I got my license in 2011, immediately took that car onto the highway and pressed the S button.

Nothing happened. I went home and read the manual. S stand for sport. It keeps the engine in a higher gear than normal for quicker response

jackconsidine··on Should We Have Kept the American Empire?
> The economic performance of the states and territories still within the US compared to the nations we let go is evidence that American annexation has large positive effects.

“Economic performance” between states and territories though differ dramatically. Look up the GDP of the poorest US state and that of Puerto Rico. And then maybe for good measure a Western European country.

I know, GDP is a rotten proxy

jackconsidine··on Show HN: I built a free app for New Yorkers to save money on groceries
Near and dear to my heart. Would be very hard to add but there's a sensational operation called Mr. Mango (bet the OP has heard of them). Don't know how exactly they do it but Mr (Mango|Lime|Kiwi) sells fresh (often organic) produce at 30% market rate. Big case of strawberries for 99 cents type thing.
jackconsidine··on How to ask for help from people who don't know you
This was an excellently written, salient post with some good tidbits.

I've learned some of these lessons the hard way. I'll add a few. Proof of work is important, but it's not about the magnitude of energy you spend. I went through two iterations of reaching out to my college network. The first time I put so much time into handwriting notes and trying to provide my relatable background. 100 notes, not a single response.

The second time I sent emails that were a few sentences. I had a much clearer ask and devoted the effort into fitting my questions into the email. I wanted a conversation really, but I also tried to communicate what I planned to ask.

15% response rate and invaluable conversations. Less overall "work".

Secondly, and relatedly, don't ever waste someone's time. Don't ask for / accept a meeting if you don't have some semblance of a clear ask. It's hard, especially in early stage business where you're trying to discover what you don't know. But you can try to lay out your tier 1 "here's what I think", "here are the follow ups".

I sensed once that I had irritated someone by lacking the agenda. Another time I took a mutual connection up on an intro where I didn't know what I really needed. I regret both of these.

Thirdly try to pay it forward. It won't always come back around, but you can feel more comfortable asking for help and more cognizant of what a helper (so to speak) is thinking

jackconsidine··on The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs
Achilles and the tortoise [0] is usually a fallacy. If the tortoise has a head start, then Achilles will never catch it because in the time it takes Achilles to reach the tortoise's location the tortoise has moved some degree further, ad infinitum. Obviously not real because Achilles will pass the tortoise -- I think a fallacy because the framing creates a fake asymptote (they will both pass the point where they're approaching a tie).

In this case it may actually apply though, no? Open models get better from closed model distillation?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

jackconsidine··on The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars
From Craig's Wikipedia article [0]. He sure cares about fighting scams. Craigslist != Craig I know, but may these are intractable problems, not that there's necessarily negligence

> In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40]

> In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41]

> In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark

jackconsidine··on Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers
Hard agree. I’m constantly struck by GPT puppets - who apparently can’t synthesize the information in their own brain - that think they’re adding informational value

Yeah, LinkedIn is a cesspool so I shouldn’t go there, but it’s jarring. And to OP’s point it happens in far more sacred places.

jackconsidine··on Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude
> Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook

TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude

jackconsidine··on Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1]

> nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026

[0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3

[1] https://www.askjf.com/

jackconsidine··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
> State records show in 2024, Bradley nearly tripled his salary, earning nearly $250,000 in one year.

> That's more than the salary of the Illinois State Police director.

jackconsidine··on GeoJSON
Excellent question it certainly does come up. Practically speaking the more populous zip codes are all accounted for and that’s where the vast majority of deliveries go to. For example I took the census zip code data 150 miles (crow flies) outside Philly and found virtually 100% coverage.

For missing ones you have to fall back to distance based estimates and in my business that means you’re quote may be off and you’re exposed

jackconsidine··on GeoJSON
GeoJSON is super useful. At Getcho (delivery, logistics) we use zip code GeoJSON encodings to draw polygons on zone maps and quickly generate rates. This has been a persistently annoying thing to do until we discovered this format. If you're curious, someone made a repo with all the 2010 census zips a while back [0].

[0] https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON/blob/ma... although you can generate newer versions from the last census.

jackconsidine··on Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy
That is ironic. Four years ago, cloudflare didn’t let human me have an account / buy domains because I signed up, never used a single service but didn’t respond to a request to verify my drivers license

> This account is in violation of Cloudflare's Terms of Service. Specifically fraud. The suspension is permanent.

(Yes that’s really it. Sincerely. No “but I also abused X”)

jackconsidine··on Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?
> Every docker compose pull keeps the previous image on disk. Every container with the default json-file log driver writes unbounded JSON to /var/lib/docker/containers/<id>/<id>-json.log. On a busy host this is one of the most common reasons for an outage: the disk fills and Docker stops being able to write anything

I ran docker compose in development a lot. Just an easy way to turn on / off 5 different services at once for a project. Over time this was filling up my machine's storage (like 1 TB). Every few months I needed to run docker compose prune and see 600GB free up

jackconsidine··on Bodega cats of New York
Was so excited when I saw this link. Was hoping it would be more like the Trees of New York [0], but appears to be a book.

The bodega in my last neighborhood (Fort Greene) featured an orange cat, Ice Spice. Spice birthed Olivia who now has loads of kittens. They wander in and own like they own the place, even whining at customers to open the doors for them. Here's a picture I took of Olivia on top of the tobacco products

[0] https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map/neighborhood/177

[1] https://ibb.co/h1cJTs0g

jackconsidine··on The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables
New information here -- I had no idea that Env enumeration was happening MONTHS before the disclosure for example and that's part of why I come to HN.

Would guess that double digit percent of readers have some level of skin in the game with Vercel

jackconsidine··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
There's a difference between sensitive, private and public. If public (i.e. NEXT_PUBLIC_) then yeah likely not a reason to roll. Private keys that aren't explicitly sensitive probably are still sensitive. It doesn't seem to be the default to have things "sensitive" and I can't tell if that's a new classification or has always been there.

I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)

jackconsidine··on I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to
> Can you hike in the Grand Canyon? Yes, technically. You can walk along the rim, but the view won’t change; same damn canyon on one side, same damn parking lot on the other. There are trails that go down into the canyon, but they’re a trap. They are featureless steep inclines formed into endless switchbacks, and when they finally end, there’s nothing to do except go back up, which will be just as boring but three times as hard and might kill you.

I’ve seen enough. From the Midwest so was looking forward to a takedown of the dunes (or something witty craptowns esq). but dunking on the GC for being a canyon?

The “non superlative” is largest canyon by volume

jackconsidine··on The Intelligence Failure in Iran
https://archive.is/hScAw
jackconsidine··on Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)
When H Melville stuffed the middle of Moby Dick with a "cetology" -- BEFORE The Origin of Species, famously saying "a whale is a fish" -- he didn't forget the Greenland Shark. I think all the time about how many of those sharks swimming around in 1851 are still swimming around today.
jackconsidine··on The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline
Point taken but I think it's a bit of a fallacy to frame this way. The market can go up and down as can individual stocks; "85% of the decline" doesn't make sense because some stocks are going up.

A book I read a few years ago put this more eloquently. Some governor said that 20,000 jobs were created last month and his state contributed half of them. Well, many states lost jobs and the state next door actually gained MORE jobs, so the "more than half" framing makes no sense

jackconsidine··on Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports
Very interesting. Would love to see comparisons with LV where sports gambling has always been legal (relative delinquency rates to other states before the ‘18 ruling, especially in the u40 group). Also change in delinquencies in LV as a control (presumably flat)
jackconsidine··on Theodosian Land Walls of Constantinople (2025)
As alluded, the walls stood the test of time (1,000 years) until the final siege in 1453. The Ottomans fired thousands of cannon shots (weighing 1k lbs) into the walls and ultimately broke through.

I'm struck by the significance. The walls allowed the Byzantine Empire to outlive the Roman Empire by ten centuries. Their undoing marked the end of medieval times (the collapse of the Western Roman Empire marked the start).

jackconsidine··on Books of the Century by Le Monde
> Ulysses by Joyce => 264,258 words (16 hours 1 minute) with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)

Don't want to know what difficult is

jackconsidine··on The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.
jackconsidine··on “Your frustration is the product”
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads

jackconsidine··on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
Anecdote: I lived in Austin from 2017 to 2021. My rent was always very cheap (my baseline is Brooklyn which I guess makes everything feel cheap. But my rent went up $50 for the first 3 years and then down $200 during Covid and I checked recently and my aptmnt is still the same price). Around the time I left everyone was buying up houses to rent and Airbnb. Very palpably felt the growing supply when it came to bnb's (the owners having a harder time competing for renters etc). It's hard not to be surprised in spite of the tremendous growth in that city
jackconsidine··on Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
Saw the headline and thought we were coming full circle on GEB -- a discovery of page number mechanisms in DNA functioning like GOTOs in code.

It's instead a way to stitch together longer sequences of DNA. Still very cool

jackconsidine··on Mermaid ASCII: Render Mermaid diagrams in your terminal
> Aesthetics — Might be personal preference, but wished they looked more professional

Im sold. Love mermaid but totally agree.

jackconsidine··on There is an AI code review bubble
> Only once would you have X write a PR, then have X approve and merge it to realize the absurdity of what you just did.

I get the idea. I'll still throw out that having a single X go through the full workflow could still be useful in that there's an audit log, undo features (reverting a PR), notifications what have you. It's not equivalent to "human writes ticket, code deployed live" for that reason

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