Hacker News: kiernanmcgowan

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

kiernanmcgowan — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:11:36 +0000

I'm maybe thinking about finding a spot along one of the river walks. Will require more planning around finding the right angle but it should naturally allow for more space for people vs the bridges.

Found an app called SunSurveyor that lets you see the position of the sun in the sky at a specific time from either your location via AR or google street view. Its been enormously helpful in ruling out potential spots.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

kiernanmcgowan — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:12:41 +0000

Also on my way there - I’m curious how packed the city is going to be. I imagine the bridges are going to be absolutely packed

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "We charge $10k a week to delete AI-generated code"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:03:02 +0000

"rm -rf ./" can't be that expensive, right?

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Steam Machine launches today"

kiernanmcgowan — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:43:24 +0000

My guess are people who want to PC game but don't want to deal with building a PC themselves - there's a decent market of pre-built gaming PCs that this would be competitive with.

https://www.newegg.com/Gaming-Desktop-PC/SubCategory/ID-3742

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

kiernanmcgowan — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:28:06 +0000

Such good news - for those looking for a relaxing hobby fly fishing is an excellent sport to get into. You spend all day standing in a river trying to out smart some fish and trout are exceptionally beautiful creatures up close.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

kiernanmcgowan — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:38:25 +0000

Mythos has broken containment

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Your favorite brands got worse on purpose"

kiernanmcgowan — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:51:00 +0000

> Champion was acquired from HanesBrands in October 2024 for $1.2 billion...

I was wondering why these shirts went to hell. This was probably my favorite brand in the 2010s. Super durable and thick cotton shirts. I'd still be wearing them if I hadn't gained weight.

New comment by kiernanmcgowan in "Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries"

kiernanmcgowan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:48:08 +0000

Hypothesis: customer says something is bugged

Antithesis: the tests pass with 100% coverage

Synthesis: the bug is a feature

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.