Hacker News: pcarolan

New comment by pcarolan in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

pcarolan — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:27:47 +0000

Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.

Ask HN: How do you manage your child's screen time?

pcarolan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:12:07 +0000

I’m a single parent to a 13-year-old who just got an iPhone, and I’m finding Apple’s parental controls leave a lot to be desired. I'd like my kid to engage in activities outside of school, sports and screens but it's hard to motivate him when the devices are so addictive.

I’m trying to figure out: - How much screen time is actually reasonable? - What should I be okay with him accessing vs. not? - And how do you enforce your rules—tech, conversations, or something else? - What works for you when trying to encourage other activities like reading, outside time, building things, etc.

It seems simple, but I feel like I’m missing a clear approach and philosophy. Would really appreciate how others think about this.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697780

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by pcarolan in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

pcarolan — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:34:09 +0000

If you’re going this far, why even have a cli? Just have your agent grab the openapi spec from the server and set envvars. It can curl its way around happily. Security? I don’t see how this is any more or less secure than any other claude code workflow.

It seems we've round about rediscovered apis.

I tried this with datadog and it can build high quality monitoring notebooks for the pr im working on in a single shot.

Show HN: Polya's urn – essays on complexity and emergence

pcarolan — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:07:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.polyasurn.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097082

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pcarolan in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)"

pcarolan — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:20:32 +0000

Hipcamp | Product Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE(US,CA) | hipcamp.com

We’re looking for a Senior Product Engineer to join Hipcamp and help build the core product experiences that connect people with the outdoors. This is a hands-on, end-to-end role working across the stack—shipping user-facing features, collaborating closely with product, design, and data, and iterating based on real customer behavior.

This is a challenging and rewarding role at the intersection of marketplaces, real-world impact, and modern product engineering. If you enjoy owning outcomes, working in a remote-first environment, and using thoughtful tooling (including AI) to move fast without cutting corners, we’d love to talk.

Apply here: https://ats.rippling.com/en-US/join-the-hipcamp-team/jobs/e1...

New comment by pcarolan in "Feedback on an open source Ruby – LLM project"

pcarolan — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:04:51 +0000

As I'm on vacation, I took a couple days to put together an idea I've had bumping around in the back of my head for a while. What if you could write pure ruby methods and ask an llm to figure out all the implementation details to return the response to any method call?

The library leans hard on ruby's magical (hence the name) `method_missing` which has always impressed me with its simple cleverness.

This is my first open source project, so please leave feedback and be kind.

Many thanks in advance,

:Pat

Feedback on an open source Ruby – LLM project

pcarolan — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:04:51 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/pcarolan/magic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048670

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by pcarolan in "The new calculus of AI-based coding"

pcarolan — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:46:59 +0000

I mostly agree, but why stop at tests? Shouldn’t it be spec driven development? Then neither the code or the language matter. Wouldn’t user stories and requirements à la bdd (see cucumber) be the right abstraction?

New comment by pcarolan in "Driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes"

pcarolan — Sat, 03 May 2025 01:25:24 +0000

You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.

New comment by pcarolan in "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over"

pcarolan — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:15:48 +0000

I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.

New comment by pcarolan in "Everything wrong with MCP"

pcarolan — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 02:04:05 +0000

Right. And if you use OpenAPI the agent can get the api spec context it needs from /openapi.json.

New comment by pcarolan in "OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK"

pcarolan — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:25:11 +0000

Yeah, I had more luck with just giving an ai the openapi spec and letting it figure everything out. I like a lot about MCP (structure, tool guidance, etc), but couldn't it just have been a REST API and a webserver?

New comment by pcarolan in "Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?"

pcarolan — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 02:24:06 +0000

Lost my wife to brain cancer (gb4). After sifting through the noise, here’s what works based on stat sig research as far as I know:

1. Radiation

2. Surgery, awake craniotomy to reduce loss of function

3. Temodar chemotherapy

4. Optune helmets

5. Monoclonal antibodies

6. Maybe high dose vitamin C (suspicious results)

If I knew then what I know now I would have focused on reducing stress in our lives as it felt like it accelerated the growth, perhaps due to a weakened immune system. Quality of life and joyful moments together is the best you can hope for. It brings you into awareness of the magic of life and each other. Focus on that — which is 100% in your control.

Here is a link to the optune helmet: https://www.optunegio.com/

Ask HN: What seems obvious to game developers but not to web developers?

pcarolan — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 22:22:35 +0000

Over the years it seems the web is becoming more interactive however it feels miles away from an average game’s interactivity and real-time nature. What concepts seem totally natural and normal to game developers yet foreign and elusive to web devs?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42446034

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by pcarolan in "Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?"

pcarolan — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 23:28:56 +0000

Leverage is also about timing your market which is a matter of local and overall trends. You can use google trends to figure out when the global market trend is in your favor: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...

Get a sense for how your industry is doing as well. Your best leverage is a competing offer.

New comment by pcarolan in "Open Source Farming Robot"

pcarolan — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 15:01:34 +0000

Do you have a good resource for getting a system started? Particularly outdoors / backyard scale?

New comment by pcarolan in "The Nature of Code (2nd Edition)"

pcarolan — Sat, 04 May 2024 14:14:25 +0000

Daniel Shiffman taught me to code for the first time in a way that totally shifted the way I thought about coding from utilitarian to fun and creative. I wonder how many lives he's had this impact on. Good on you sir.

New comment by pcarolan in "My Concerns about the TikTok Divestiture Bill as a Software Developer"

pcarolan — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 19:58:14 +0000

How does this theory hold up when your trade partner doesn’t give you equal access to their markets and has the potential to use this media platform to spread disinformation? I don’t think this is an innovation issue as much as a political one.

New comment by pcarolan in "Chronic stress spreads cancer"

pcarolan — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 17:07:04 +0000

Much love your way. I lost a partner that went through it. Modern antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication did seem to help. You are brave to talk about it and I hope more people do.

New comment by pcarolan in "IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company"

pcarolan — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:56:36 +0000

Work from office mandates may serve as a proxy for companies on the decline. When things are going well, companies are more willing to take risks that could impact the top line, when things are going wrong it’s all scrutiny and bottom line optimization.