Hacker News: collinmcnulty

New comment by collinmcnulty in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:20:03 +0000

Exactly. Surely the finance industry can come up with a product that automates this so you automatically sell them a tiny slice of your home to make up the property taxes without it affecting your cash flows.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Time Travel in Braid (2015)"

collinmcnulty — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:12:40 +0000

The mechanics also work on a second level: they represent real physics concepts being studied around and leading up to the time of the Manhattan project. The reversibility of time, the effect of gravity on the spacetime continuum (the ring), time and space as part of the same fabric.

I also took the "final" text about a good start as an indication that the level of understanding of the mechanics required to get the stars to actually reach the princess (which is possible in the game) is quite advanced.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Time Travel in Braid (2015)"

collinmcnulty — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:08:38 +0000

Braid is the video game that made me realize I like art. Not just the beautiful visuals, but the core concept of art. The way the mechanics represented both the internal mental state of the protagonist and the physics research being conducted was mind-blowing to me at the time.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "How Singapore's government-run dating service works"

collinmcnulty — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:13:53 +0000

This honestly sounds dystopian. The foster care system does not point to "people who are in it for the money" as the best people to raise children. The market is not the best solution for everything, and working on structural barriers to family raising for people who would like to raise a family seems like a worthwhile effort. I do not know enough about Singapore to say if this dating app will help, but I like seeing efforts like this; hopefully in addition to daycare, education investment, and family leave policies.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

collinmcnulty — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:34:46 +0000

I’ve always interpreted this saying to point in the direction you’re actually going. That a machine does not have a “purpose”. Its creator might have had a purpose in mind, but when talking about the machine one should focus on what it actually does. This avoids needing to fend off attacks about how noble the creator’s intention for their machine may or may not have been, which could otherwise consume the rhetorical oxygen better spent.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution"

collinmcnulty — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:25:19 +0000

This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Tin: full-text search for Postgres"

collinmcnulty — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:57:34 +0000

I don’t understand your comment, can you elaborate? I’m saying that drawing corporate investment into open software is preferable to all of that investment going into proprietary software. I want as much open software as possible and I want us to be practical at all levels. Big swings like public grants and a better safety net (even UBI) are things I’m supportive of too, and can coexist with incentives for drawing in corporates. There’s a certain purism argument that a company that is involved in open software is constantly criticized for being insufficiently open but a proprietary software company receives no such similar criticism, which I think is irrational.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Tin: full-text search for Postgres"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:21:56 +0000

I find this attitude self-defeating because the lure of being able to provide some amount of proprietary software on top of open is what draws in the corporate investment in open software. And in the system we live in, it’s hard to imagine there’d be nearly as much open software as there is without that corporate investment. As a big fan of open software, this seems like a great trade to me.

(Disclosure: I work for a company with this business model, in part because I like working on open software)

What we owe reviewers in the age of AI

collinmcnulty — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:26:38 +0000

Article URL: https://carbonandsilicon.substack.com/p/what-we-owe-reviewers-in-the-age

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695703

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Gateside by TSA Precheck"

collinmcnulty — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 03:58:11 +0000

It says “to those with Known Traveler Numbers”

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:33:42 +0000

I wouldn’t describe any of those jobs as “cushy”.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:46:37 +0000

> I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular.

Based on what?

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest"

collinmcnulty — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:02:47 +0000

Which is why foreign student visas are being handed out in greater numbers, right? Right? Oh.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/international-student-enroll...

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity"

collinmcnulty — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:16:46 +0000

A total ban is nonsensical. If you’re concerned about noise regulate the sound level. If you’re concerned about energy use, tax it and put the money raised into a solar subsidy. But the idea you can have a heat pump and can’t have an AC is absurd because a heat pump literally is an AC flipped around.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

collinmcnulty — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:03:01 +0000

My concern is that even if the LLM can turn your colleague's bad writing into something more coherent and actionable, is that something actually what your colleague meant to convey? It could be clear and still detached from the reality of their intention, or they may not have even formed a clear intention. If the goal of writing is to convey what's in another human's brain, that goal is failed completely.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?"

collinmcnulty — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:53:19 +0000

Then don't use an agent for high stakes tasks. If you can't drive and accept the responsibility for avoiding a fatal collision, don't drive the car.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development"

collinmcnulty — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:17:30 +0000

Artists have to eat, it doesn’t make them not artists. Games are not hard to classify as art. You may not like the art or think a lot of it’s not very good, but they are art, because art is not the exclusive domain of “auteur driven passion projects”.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:43:02 +0000

Do you work in this field or are you just reading that? I’ve been out of the game for over five years now, but as far as I can tell from people I know still in that world, if you’re going to make more than like … 3 of a part, casting is going to be much cheaper. And while you can do some prototyping on 3d prints, the nature of the material winds up different from a cast part.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

collinmcnulty — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:05:01 +0000

Relatedly, I fully expect the software business to fail to learn from (nearly) literally every other industry how to operate when your marginal costs are no longer zero. It drives me nuts the number of people in software who think that people in other industries are slow because they’re just not as smart as us, rather than because when it takes months to get a cast part made, it better be right the first time.

New comment by collinmcnulty in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

collinmcnulty — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:42:07 +0000

Good catch! One of my own biggest pet peeves too