Hacker News: kiernanmcgowan

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "The house is a work of art: Frank Lloyd Wright"

kiernanmcgowan — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:19:37 +0000

This is, by far, one of the weirdest places I've ever visited. Tonal whiplash is an understatement.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:56:38 +0000

"We have a beautiful moon rise, we're heading right at it" got me a little choked up. Here's to the ever unfolding adventure of mankind.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey"

kiernanmcgowan — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:44:58 +0000

My biggest road blocks as an engineer has almost never been the authorship of code but everything else around it.

* Getting code reviewed

* Making sure its actually solving the problem

* Communicating to the rest of the team whats happening

* Getting tests to pass

* Getting it deployed

* Verifying that the fix is implemented in production

* Starting it all over when there is a misunderstanding

Slinging more code faster is great and getting unit testing more-or-less for free is awesome but the separation between a good and great engineer is one of communication and management.

AI is causing us to regress to thinking that code velocity is a good metric to use when comparing engineers.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Using go fix to modernize Go code"

kiernanmcgowan — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:56:29 +0000

Its tooling like this that really makes golang an excellent language to work with. I had missed that rangeint addition to the language but with go fix I'll just get that improvement for free!

Real kudos to the golang team.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

kiernanmcgowan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:37:40 +0000

Slight counter point - claude code is basically the only developer tool that ever been happy to pay money for. Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Thatcher Effect – Optical Illusion and Explanation"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:26:02 +0000

Do you think Margaret Thatcher had Girl Power?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G6RF5ChKYQ

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI"

kiernanmcgowan — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:31:08 +0000

MechaHitler now has space launch capabilities

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)"

kiernanmcgowan — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:59:04 +0000

I've read Dune - I know exactly where this is going. Please do not apply sand trout directly to you skin unless you are ready to control the spice.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:43:47 +0000

Out of date and worth an update

https://kiernan.io/

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists"

kiernanmcgowan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:37:00 +0000

LLMs are really great at copy/pasting answers from stack overflow and fitting them to work in a given system. If your work is outside what is answerable on stack overflow you're going to end up fighting the results constantly.

Front end pages like a user settings page? Done. One shottable.

Nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack? You're going to be yelling at the agent.

> LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were.

A bit harsh considering that many of us used knowledge bases like SO for so long to figure out new problems that we were confronting.

Ask HN: What did you learn in 2025?

kiernanmcgowan — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:46:37 +0000

What is something you learned (or had to re-learn) in 2025? New skills, insights, life lessons that could be worth sharing with the rest of the forum.

For me: I've been forced to relearn how important sleep hygiene is and that it is something that can fall away slowly resulting in misery. Maintaining a consistent be time is a chore but one that does make for a happier life.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482509

Points: 21

# Comments: 8

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

kiernanmcgowan — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:20:02 +0000

It’s also a direct usage tax to support road maintenance. Heavier users of the road ways end up contributing more to the maintenance of the public good.

We had a proxy for that via gasoline taxes but with EV becoming more common we need to find a replacement for that revenue.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "How we automated federal retirements"

kiernanmcgowan — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 18:02:09 +0000

Because 18F was from the Obama administration

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

kiernanmcgowan — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:27:44 +0000

Gravity's Rainbow - still chewing on it all

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "AI will kill all the lawyers"

kiernanmcgowan — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:50:58 +0000

Its a funny take because this reddit thread seems to suggest the opposite. Pro se litigants (people representing themselves) are using LLMs to create more lawsuits resulting in more work for lawyers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1n9cwfv/pro_se_...

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks"

kiernanmcgowan — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:58:05 +0000

I’m working on a burrito artillery system. It’s the ideal form factor for high velocity chorizo but the delivery tends to make a mess.

Ring of Fire

kiernanmcgowan — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:29:12 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197888

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up.""

kiernanmcgowan — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:32:34 +0000

You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Starcloud"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:14:52 +0000

Whats going to be delivered first - Tesla FSD or a space based data center?

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Lessons from 863 episodes of This American Life"

kiernanmcgowan — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 19:47:20 +0000

Give it a listen! It’s a real gem of a show