Hacker News: jackconsidine

Trees of New York City

jackconsidine — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:27:48 +0000

Article URL: https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/tree-map/neighborhood/177

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866585

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jackconsidine in "Bodega cats of New York"

jackconsidine — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:27:14 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables"

jackconsidine — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:10:42 +0000

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

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

jackconsidine — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:55:53 +0000

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)

New comment by jackconsidine in "I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to"

jackconsidine — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:07:33 +0000

> 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

New comment by jackconsidine in "The Intelligence Failure in Iran"

jackconsidine — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:47:16 +0000

https://archive.is/hScAw

New comment by jackconsidine in "Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)"

jackconsidine — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:40:48 +0000

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.

New comment by jackconsidine in "The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline"

jackconsidine — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:50:05 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports"

jackconsidine — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:52:40 +0000

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)

New comment by jackconsidine in "Theodosian Land Walls of Constantinople (2025)"

jackconsidine — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:06:08 +0000

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).

New comment by jackconsidine in "Books of the Century by Le Monde"

jackconsidine — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:57:49 +0000

> 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

New comment by jackconsidine in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

jackconsidine — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:16:35 +0000

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.

New comment by jackconsidine in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jackconsidine — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:02:44 +0000

> 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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

jackconsidine — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:33:19 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy"

jackconsidine — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:57:41 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Mermaid ASCII: Render Mermaid diagrams in your terminal"

jackconsidine — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:04:38 +0000

> Aesthetics — Might be personal preference, but wished they looked more professional

Im sold. Love mermaid but totally agree.

New comment by jackconsidine in "There is an AI code review bubble"

jackconsidine — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:10:51 +0000

> 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

New comment by jackconsidine in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

jackconsidine — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:34:19 +0000

Anyone know the VP who referenced the paper? Doesn't seem to be mentioned. My best guess is Gore.

Living VPs Joe Biden — VP 2009–2017 (became President in 2021; after that he’s called a former VP and former president)

Not likely the one referenced after 2017 because he became president in 2021, so later citations would likely call him a former president instead of former VP.

Dan Quayle — VP 1989–1993, alive through 2026

Al Gore — VP 1993–2001, alive through 2026

Mike Pence — VP 2017–2021, alive through 2026

Kamala Harris — VP 2021–2025, alive through 2026

J.D. Vance — VP 2025–present (as of 2026)

New comment by jackconsidine in "My first year in sales as technical founder"

jackconsidine — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:26:37 +0000

> Why do I even need to do sales?

> When looking specifically at bootstrapped (self-funded) SaaS startups, this is a valid question. There are many profitable startups in the low-end B2B space ($10-$50/mo) that exclusively rely on marketing. These are the perfect lifestyle businesses that the indiehacking community is dreaming of. But they’re very hard to pull off, and leave a lot of money on the table.

Fellow technical co-founder-turned-salesperson. I'd like to add something here.

In previous businesses I relied on marketing, SEO etc.I thought "they're the gift that keep on giving" whereas sales is effort in value out. Not only is that wrong, but SEO / ads take time. For an early-stage company / product where iteration is key, sales is the fastest way to get signal.

Imagine using web conversions as the driver for iteration. It takes at least a week to kick off some campaign, months to build up, and months to have interpretable data. Plus no one's going to just tell you "no"! With sales, you can send 100 emails and in one night get some real signal. You might even get an inkling of "that's not going to work" or "ok I'm interested". In a compounding feedback loop, that is often the difference between a company that pops off and one that fizzles

New comment by jackconsidine in "Common misunderstandings about large software companies"

jackconsidine — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:31:28 +0000

This important devil's advocate perspective reminds me of Chesterton's Fence [0].

I used to run a dev shop and had the opportunity to work with companies of all shapes and sizes. The startups often discovered Chesterton's Fence by declaring they didn't need this or that (meetings, accountability measures, etc), only to learn the hard way why they existed.

And meetings, beauracracy, et al are rightfully criticized for being inefficient and fostering mediocrity. But I think I'd agree with the author that it's glib to say meetings are dumb, no need for hierarchy without understanding their purpose

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...