Hacker News: kevinmchugh

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

kevinmchugh — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 22:26:48 +0000

There's a few modernist cooking tricks that require small amounts - tenths of a gram - for big impacts. Sodium citrate can make any cheese melt beautifully into a smooth sauce, using something like 1% of the weight of the cheese.

Any juice can take the roll of lime or lemon (in cocktails or baking) by adding a bit of citric or malic acid. Orange juice is 1% citric acid, so add 3g citric and 2g malic per 100g juice and now you can make an orange daiquiri or "key" orange pie.

Emulsifiers get goopy if you use a lot, but can make a smooth syrup in small amounts. You can make a nice syrup from any nut milk with a small amount of xanthan and gum arabic.

There's a wide array of ingredients including xanthan and gum arabic used in tiny amounts in gluten free baking

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Has the New Cocaine Arrived?"

kevinmchugh — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:31:04 +0000

If a drug is compatible with a healthy social or productive lifestyle it would seem unreasonable to ban it. Danger of withdrawals might be a consideration.

Caffeine is pretty safe. The withdrawals, for those of us who experience them, are safe if unpleasant.

There's prescription drugs that cause dependency but are widely prescribed. Gabapentin is a good example?

Alcohol is the drug that best fits the "grandfathered" idea, since it's for many folks not compatible with a healthy lifestyle and the withdrawals can be fatal. Alcohol is impossible to ban, though, because the precursors are in every grocery store on the planet and grow on trees

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable"

kevinmchugh — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:25:20 +0000

That's my understanding. Decompilation is legally protected in the US, and you can do a reimplementation based on a decompilation. Sony v connectix is aiui the precedent.

Theoretically you could clean room by having different agents/models/context windows to do both decompilation and reimplementation. This is untested in court afaik and I don't think anyone wants to spend money to find out.

There was a non-clean room reimplementation of gta3 a few years ago. The gta publisher DMCAd and of course the fans who did it didn't have any money to fight in court (and probably couldn't find anyone who would take a big complicated case on such bad facts pro bono). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/02/take-two-interactive-h...

New comment by kevinmchugh in "I Love the Computer"

kevinmchugh — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:27:01 +0000

JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson, Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau: all big Star Wars fans.

Tony Gilroy is not!

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Pirates, a naval warfare game inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates"

kevinmchugh — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:11:24 +0000

It was remade in 2006

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Child prodigies rarely become elite performers"

kevinmchugh — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 04:10:35 +0000

Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Child prodigies rarely become elite performers"

kevinmchugh — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 04:06:11 +0000

There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say"

kevinmchugh — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:37:42 +0000

We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

kevinmchugh — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:40:50 +0000

Higher rise pants help. I have a long torso and started buying higher rise pants for the aesthetic difference, but they also make me less concerned about a t shirt becoming a belly shirt

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Using Git add -p for fun (and profit)"

kevinmchugh — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:05:36 +0000

I occasionally forget to add a new file but don't mind it much. I consider it a significantly smaller problem than committing a file that shouldn't be. CI is gonna run and my tests are surely gonna fail if I didn't commit some file. So I'll see that and commit --amend or fixup to add the new file.

unless the file I forgot to commit is the tests, which hopefully I'll catch by the time of the PR

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Using Git add -p for fun (and profit)"

kevinmchugh — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 15:34:23 +0000

I almost exclusively use add -p. It's another moment to review my changes and it saves me from having to type out the names of the files I've changed. I don't know if I've ever committed a file unintentionally since adopting it.

I like it especially in concert with git commit --amend, which lets me tack my newest changes onto the previous commit. (Though an interactive rebase with fixup is even better)

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Coca Cola has an executive dedicated to McDonald's"

kevinmchugh — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:44:43 +0000

I went to Bentonville, Arkansas a few years ago. You'll see every major consumer packaged good company represented in the skyscrapers there, because Walmart is hq'd there. They want to have people close to Walmart, since Walmart is always a big part of their sales

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Secret Boat Strike Memo Justifies Kills by Claiming Targeting Drugs, Not People"

kevinmchugh — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:56:22 +0000

You mean the casual sense of "innocence", but they are literally innocent in they they've not been convicted of the crime they were killed for allegedly committing.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "The Greatness of Text Adventures"

kevinmchugh — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 01:29:07 +0000

Counterfeit Monkey is very high up on my favorite games of the 2010s: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

The puzzles are all excellent, the writing is remarkable, both for game and fiction.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "The MacBook Air 2025 Is Now Cheaper Than a Random Mid-Range Windows Laptop"

kevinmchugh — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:29:17 +0000

Apple announced M5s recently, so these are the old chips.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Ruby Blocks"

kevinmchugh — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 21:26:33 +0000

Fun fact - there's no Boolean class in Ruby. True is an instance of TrueClass and false is an instance of FalseClass

New comment by kevinmchugh in "You did no fact checking, and I must scream"

kevinmchugh — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:56:19 +0000

Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator"

kevinmchugh — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:47:36 +0000

Reddit has an easy way to choose moderation, just stop going to the reddits that are poorly moderated.

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Pre-record your demos"

kevinmchugh — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 01:42:08 +0000

Yes - I call them "the other cake" demos

New comment by kevinmchugh in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

kevinmchugh — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:46:09 +0000

I quit caffeine with no withdrawal symptoms by reducing my intake by 10% every day for 10 days. I weighed how much iced tea I drank on day 0, then had 90% of that on day 1. The last day was just a shot glass full.

I probably picked the idea up here, but don't know from whom so I thought I ought to continue sharing it