Hacker News Reader

Plugging a previous personal project for learning jq interactively: https://jqjake.com/

MrApathyon Pig lung transplanted into a human

Generalizing a lot here, but Jews and Christians interpret ambiguities within scripture very differently. Most Christians will try to maintain the spirit of the rule. Jews often view ambiguities as loopholes intentionally left by God. If the loophole wasn't mean to be there, God would have written it differently.

For a great example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv . Look carefully and you'll see these in Jewish areas of NYC like Williamsburg.

MrApathyon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

jq Jake: An interactive challenge based approach to learning jq for JSON processing. https://jqjake.com

jq is an incredibly powerful tool, but it's not always the easiest tool to use. LLM's are remarkably good at constructing filters for most uses cases, but for people that work with JSON a lot, learning jq can be real benefit.

MrApathyon Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom

"They Stole a Quarter-Billion in Crypto and Got Caught Within a Month. How luxury cars, $500,000 bar tabs and a mysterious kidnapping attempt helped investigators unravel the heist of a lifetime." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/magazine/crybercrime-cryp... (gift article)

MrApathyon Show HN: Jq Jake, an interactive approach to learning jq

Thank you!

MrApathyon Adobe users are outraged over vague new policy's AI implications

https://developer.visa.com/use-cases/identify-merchants-rece...

This is solid as a convenience to the cardholder. When there's fraudulent activity and the card needs to be reissued with a new number, it's not as painful to update all of the subscription services. Most cardholders, most of the time, would prefer the impact to be as minimal as possible when issued a new card number.

MrApathyon BenQ releases 3:2 aspect ratio 28 inch 4K+ monitor designed for programmers

Obviously only an issue for Americans, but the Huawei Mateview isn't widely available due to the ban on Huawei products. It could be imported grey-market, but only at slightly inflated prices and without any warranty protection.

The BenQ monitor will be commercially available in the US.

MrApathyon Firefox Keeps Getting Faster

Right click on a single tab > Select all tabs > Reload tabs.

MrApathyon Proposed EU rules would require clothes to last longer and be easier to repair

I see this line every so often that Patagonia will repair or replace damaged articles, but the one time I tried, I wasn't successful. I purchased a Tortentshell rain jacket and the laminate on the top of the hood started to peel after a year or so. I took it to a Patagonia store for inspection and they offered to recycle it for me. No repair, no free replacement, no offer of a discount on a replacement.

MrApathyon Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?

Is there a consensus on whose software we should be using instead? I get that they're all bad, but which one is least bad?

MrApathyon NYC Mayor demands CEOs end work from home as economy struggles

This is mostly correct. Prior to 1999 individuals who worked in NYC were required to pay the ~2% income tax regardless of residency. This included people from NJ and CT. They're no longer subject to the tax (the reverse is untrue; I live in NYC and work in NJ, but I'm still required to pay NYC income tax). Historically this was known as the "commuter tax."

Since 2009 residents of NY who live in counties adjacent to NYC are subject to a 0.34% tax if they work in NYC. I believe this tax does not go toward general NYC operations, but rather helps fund the mass-transit that supports their commute. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_tax

MrApathyon American chestnut

Stretch explanation: in popular culture the chestnut tree served as a major plot point in Richard Power's 2018 novel The Overstory, which won several major awards. His most recent novel was published in late September, so to some extent his name and plots are back in the news.

Stretchier explanation: Frequency illusion, also called Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Per Wikipedia, "a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency of occurrence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

MrApathyon Campbell Soup turned New Jersey into a tomato-growing state

Shhh, quiet on the NJ-is-nice front, please. NJ doesn't need more people, let's all pretend the bad rap is true.

MrApathyon Why do 70% of families lose their wealth in the 2nd generation? (2018)

Thomas Picketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is best known for central its argument that wealth will concentrate in the long term, but it also extensively documents the European generational wealth that was destroyed in the first half of the 20th century. Two wars, a great depression, inflation, and high taxes were enough to permanently ruin the accumulated capital of many families.

So it's true that some families that were wealthy 500 years ago are still wealthy today, but this was not the norm.

MrApathyon Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?

Yes, true, Leopold is Korean, however the C boards with Topre switches are made in Japan, though some sources say made in China and inspected in Japan.

I believe Leopold sells a similar line of non-Topre keyboards as well, certainly possible that the cases are manufactured elsewhere and imported/sent to various factories based on switch type.

Regardless, if final assembly/inspection does occur in Japan, it was quite disappointing to receive a keyboard with such an obvious defect, especially at that price point.

MrApathyon Why Are Topre Keyboards So Expensive?

Re: "Rigorous Japanese Quality Standards," earlier this year I ordered a Leopold FC980C. It arrived with a warped case that would not lay flat on my desk (tested on multiple surfaces to make sure the problem wasn't with my desk).

So much for legendary QA.

MrApathyon Tesla ranks almost dead-last on Consumer Reports reliability list

But they have!

The Ford Bronco was introduced in 1965. The Jeep Cherokee arrived in 1974. I remember seeing a lot of them as a kid, though if I had to pinpoint the start of the SUV craze, it would probably be closer to 1990 when the Ford Explorer first came to market.

MrApathyon Ask HN: Experiences with VDI-like platforms, but used by developers

I work for a bulge bracket bank and have been on a VDI for the past five years, currently on my third desktop. This is extremely common in finance, most developers are running on VDI's since it's much easier to manage and lock down. First generation was terrible, 8GB RAM made life difficult. Second gen was much better, had that up until earlier this year. That one was based on Windows 7, so my firm was paying through the roof for extended support (7 was EOL a while back). Current VDI is actually based on Windows Server 2016, not Windows 10. Performance is respectable, I've got 64 GB RAM and 4 virtual cores, but business users get less powerful desktops that aren't as great. In my firm job title dictates what you get, so as a SWE I get better hardware than people on the business side, including those who may be doing data-heavy work in R/Python. My complaints:

* Machine loses settings since not everything was set up correctly. Outlook won't retain my settings for autoformat (disable everything), due to forced weekend reboots I have to redo my settings every Monday morning.

* Heavily locked down.

* Non-standard configuration, common Windows files aren't where you would expect them to be.

The good: * Software request and installation fully automated, quite easy to get the applications I need with the caveat that the software is approved and packaged internally. I can select from a list of approved IDE's, for example, but if I want to use something less common, next to impossible to get it approved (tons of paperwork & reviews). Typically not a problem since most of what I want is available.

* Can log in from anywhere. No machine to lug around.

MrApathyon Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York (2015)

Very important. The centerpiece of this article is the 421-a exemption which was repealed last year. New condos being sold today are subject to the full assessed amount. All stock currently in the 421-a program is subject to a phased increase over a period of 25 years.

MrApathyon Voltswagen of America

My own admittedly uninformed understanding is that there was cheating all around, but VW was by far the most flagrant. BMW and Mercedes diesels required DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), whereas VW did not. Marketing and/or executive leadership (again, as per my understanding) pushed the notion that the additive would make diesels appear to be less attractive and who wants to add a second liquid beyond fuel every few hundred miles?

But weren't they all cheating? The diesels with DEF were still above the legal limits, albeit to a lesser degree than the VW's who didn't even bother with DEF because, I guess, if you're going to cheat anyway...

How incorrect is my understanding?

MrApathyon Nuclear power looks to regain its footing 10 years after Fukushima

You build a big grid. Wind won't be light everywhere. Load is lower at night, so lack of sunlight is less of an issue. Maybe people start placing battery packs in their homes. Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly.

There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.

MrApathyon Nuclear power looks to regain its footing 10 years after Fukushima

Nuclear is one notch above dead, though I'm sure it won't officially die for another few decades. As a former proponent it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. Sure, nuclear makes for a better baseline load, but the regulatory and safety requires of nuclear make the economics difficult, almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation.

MrApathyon Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?

Context: bulge bracket bank.

Within my area, data sourced from just about everywhere, Oracle, Maria, SAP, SharePoint, flat files, etc. Alteryx and Informatica used to structure data, with some Python at the more advanced level.

On the visualization side most everything is Tableau or Qlik, with the former having the larger footprint (maybe 3x as large). Tableau is oriented more for less technical business teams, Qlik Sense for more technically included teams (more powerful, at the expense of being more difficult), and QlikView for a lot of legacy dashboards -- currently reviewing whether to close it off to new development.

On the reporting side, primarily Cognos.

We rely heavily on vendor applications since we can typically insure support is available.

Only new tool we've evaluated and picked up recently (last couple of years) has been Looker, which was licensed for a small use case and hasn't worked as expected. Interest has been primarily in the scripting/ETL component, less so on the visualization side, but the license model makes it very expensive for what we use it for.

MrApathyon Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index

In the specific context of Bitcoin it may be true that the preference is for ASIC, but (1) some Bitcoin is still mined using GPU's and (2) there are several thousand active digital currencies, many of them favoring GPU's.

Grandparent's wider assertion is absolutely true, the GPU market is skewed by miners. Purchasing a 3000 series GPU is not easy right now.

MrApathyon Coolest custom mechanical keyboards

The custom mechanical keyboard community has been slowly growing for years and at the high end figures probably weren't too impacted by WFH since the supply is as constrained as ever. The "good" stuff is run as group buys and typically sell out within minutes. Satisfaction75 had 1300 units available and sold out in just over 10 minutes, smaller runs like Iron 180 or Bauer 2 sold out in something like two minutes. Those examples are all from the fall.

And this is not a hobby for the impatient. Group buys take your money now, but often don't deliver for 6 - 12 months.

Some keyboards are unlimited (e.g., Grid 650), but that's typically not the norm.

MrApathyon Why can’t you buy a good webcam?

I think it's in part related to fractional scaling, which hasn't been sorted everywhere. Text at 4k on a 27 inch is too small to run at 100%, too much of a waste to run run at 200% (equivalent to 1920x1080). So you're running 150% or 175% and that can be an issue if you're running something that doesn't like fractional scaling.

27 inch is perfect for 1440p 100% or 200% (i.e., 5k), but it seems like no one other than Apple has that figured out.

MrApathyon Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

Also a Fastmail user with my own domain. Reliability has been excellent, their web-app is great, and their documentation is very helpful. I've never had to contact support (in over five years), so can't comment on that. Two minor complaints: (1) their spam detection is good, but not Gmail good; and (2) their file storage has a 50MB per-file limit, even though the total cap is 10GB. I have a small personal site hosted with them. I'd like to zip all my personal files and store them with Fastmail, but I can't because the file size limit is too low.

MrApathyon Facebook account banned after linking Oculus account

But the issue is that in having his account terminated, he's also losing access to all historical purchases made over the years. The CC company may be willing to accept a charge-back on recent purchases, but what about the application/game purchased four years ago that's tied to the account. It's no longer accessible, but is the CC willing to refund for a purchase made that far back?

I honestly don't know, but if I had to guess it would be no.

MrApathyon IBM introduces z15 mainframe

Yes and no. I work for a bulge bracket bank and we're moving a significant number of applications to the cloud, including AWS, GCP, and our internal cloud offering.

But we have literally thousands of internally developed applications. We can move thousands of apps the cloud and still have a need to keep thousands on virtual/physical machines. My own apps are stuck on commodity physical hardware for at least the next few years.

The type of applications that can historically been run on mainframes is not really moving to AWS/cloud. Most of what's going to the cloud is what I would consider to be "supporting" applications, not core applications.

My own experience, that of others may differ.

MrApathyon The FastMail Security Mindset

Backscatter is (I think) when the target server of a spam mail bounces the email back to me, the rightful owner of the domain, typically because the address is not valid (though I sometimes also get out-of-office messages or mailbox full errors).

It works like this: the spammer forges their headers to make it look like the from address is under my domain. My domain has DKIM/SPF set up, so a good recipient will compare the email to the authentication records, see they don't match, and then trash the email. But there are still a lot of mail servers out there that don't have that set up, so they accept the email as valid, process it, then return it to me when the account doesn't exist on their server. Like I said, annoying, but not a lot I can do other than set up rules to trash messages with a subject of "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender."