Posts

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Best way to find chill job where I can learn and grow as a swe

Ask HN: Best way to find chill job where I can learn and grow as a swe 5 by digitdiglet | 1 comments on Hacker News. Just got laid off from a chill swe job. It was remote. F. What is the quickest way to get a chill remote job where I have responsibilities and autonomy? 5YOE in JS Fullstack/ Python. SF. On student visa.

New ask Hacker News story: The Abstraction Trap: Why Layers Are Lobotomizing Your Model

The Abstraction Trap: Why Layers Are Lobotomizing Your Model 2 by blas0 | 1 comments on Hacker News. The "modern" AI stack has a hidden performance problem: abstraction debt. We have spent the last two years wrapping LLMs in complex IDEs and orchestration frameworks, ostensibly for "developer experience". The research suggests this is a mistake. These wrappers truncate context to maintain low UI latency, effectively crippling the model's ability to perform deep, long-horizon reasoning & execution. --- The most performant architecture is surprisingly primitive: - raw Claude Code CLI usage - native Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations - rigorous context engineering via `CLAUDE.md` Why does this "naked" stack outperform? First, Context Integrity . Native usage allows full access to the 200k+ token window without the artificial caps imposed by chat interfaces. Second, Deterministic Orchestration . Instead of relying on autonomous agent loops th...

New ask Hacker News story: Working on decentralized compute at io.net sharing what we're learning

Working on decentralized compute at io.net sharing what we're learning 2 by plutodev | 2 comments on Hacker News. I’m part of the Developer Crew at io.net, where we’re working on decentralized compute for AI workloads and agent-based systems. My focus here isn’t promotion, but sharing practical learnings from the builder side things like how AI agents behave when compute is modular, what breaks in real usage, and how developers actually think about decentralized infra in production. I’m here to learn from the community, contribute where I can, and exchange notes with others building or experimenting in this space. Happy to answer questions or dig into specifics if useful.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Feeling irrelevant in back end. How to pivot to automotive software?

Ask HN: Feeling irrelevant in back end. How to pivot to automotive software? 2 by culopatin | 3 comments on Hacker News. I have a decade of mixed experience: 10+ years in IT, 2 years on a professional motorsports team (Tony Kart, Ducati, Miata), and 4 years in software (refactoring old .NET to Spring Boot/Angular and some greenfield projects). I self-taught my way into dev and finished a CS degree while working. I’m currently at a {big_slow_corp} and feeling the AI squeeze trying to switch jobs. My exp is not public facing so the “experience building scalable apps to disrupt the market” requirement I think is my weakness. I’ve also realized my heart isn’t in web frameworks. I’m the guy bored on a plane talking to his gf about flap software, throttle response, and suspension geometry like a kid showing a toy to his mom. I want to move "closer to the metal", ECUs, controlling machinery, I’d love ML applied to machinery, even infotainments!, but my professional resume is stri...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Where is legacy codebase maintenance headed?

Ask HN: Where is legacy codebase maintenance headed? 3 by AnnKey | 0 comments on Hacker News. I've seen a few anecdotes lately that say that they use Claude Code on legacy codebase and with relatively little supervision it can work on complex problems. Then the claim that Claude Code writes most of its own code, and that they no longer mentor their newcomers - instead, AI answers their questions and they can start making meaningful changes within the first few days. To me it sounds almost too good to be true, so I'd love to have some reality check. I've spent most of my career in legacy codebases, reading, tracing behavior, making careful changes, and writing tests to protect them. I've taken a sabbatical though, which ends soon, and I'm quite worried and excited to what has happened during this time. For those working on legacy codebases: - Has the workflow really shifted to prompting AI, reviewing output, and maintaining .md instructions? - Does your company al...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?

Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha? 39 by Rooster61 | 46 comments on Hacker News. First off, this thread is NOT a petition to rally against the moderation team. Considering the deluge of trash they deal with every day, I think they are doing a valiant job and are to be commended. Consider it merely a place to discuss, which is what HN does best. That said, it's becoming more and more obvious every day that there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads. I worry about the integrity of the discourse here and if the ever growing wave of garbage will overtake staff resources to deal with it. Is it time to implement captcha for HN? If so, should it be out of the box, or a new mechanism more tailored to the security and privacy-centric nature of the HN readership? Are captchas even still effective enough in the age of AI to warrant their use?

New ask Hacker News story: Cancelled 2x Cursor Ultra plans, here's why

Cancelled 2x Cursor Ultra plans, here's why 4 by throwawayround | 4 comments on Hacker News. Posting this because it took me way too long to figure out what was going on, and I wish I had seen a post like this earlier. I just canceled two Cursor Ultra plans. My usage went from a steady ~$60–100/month to $500+ in a few days, projecting ~$1,600/month. Support told me this was “expected.” I did not suddenly start doing 10x more work. Cursor shows a 200k context window and says content is summarized to stay within limits. Pricing is shown as $ per million tokens. Based on that, I monitored my call count and thought I was being careful. What I did not realise: - Cursor builds a very large hidden prompt state: conversation history, tool traces, agent state, extended reasoning, codebase context. - That state is prompt-cached. - On every call, the entire cached prefix is replayed. - Anthropic bills cache read tokens for every replay. - Cache reads are billed even if that content is late...