Hacker News: jackconsidine

New comment by jackconsidine in "How to ask for help from people who don't know you"

jackconsidine — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:48:05 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs"

jackconsidine — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:44:28 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars"

jackconsidine — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:41:41 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers"

jackconsidine — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:11:23 +0000

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.

New comment by jackconsidine in "Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude"

jackconsidine — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:24:06 +0000

> 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

New comment by jackconsidine in "Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)"

jackconsidine — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:20:15 +0000

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/

New comment by jackconsidine in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

jackconsidine — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:46:14 +0000

> 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.

A decade of flying Spirit Airlines

jackconsidine — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:09:49 +0000

Article URL: https://jackfromgetcho.substack.com/p/farewell-and-thank-you-spirit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085736

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by jackconsidine in "GeoJSON"

jackconsidine — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:00:37 +0000

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

New comment by jackconsidine in "GeoJSON"

jackconsidine — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:11:25 +0000

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.

New comment by jackconsidine in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

jackconsidine — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:01:40 +0000

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”)

New comment by jackconsidine in "Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?"

jackconsidine — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:46:09 +0000

> 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//-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

Farewell and Thank You, Spirit

jackconsidine — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:51:39 +0000

Article URL: https://jackfromgetcho.substack.com/p/farewell-and-thank-you-spirit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006510

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Spirit Airlines prepares to shut down as bailout talks stall

jackconsidine — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:09:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/spirit-airlines-prepares-to-shut-down-as-rescue-deal-falls-apart-5a2d5936

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975707

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

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