Hacker News: jb3689

New comment by jb3689 in "Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs"

jb3689 — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:54:52 +0000

Sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the room for not wanting to have to usher the LLM through phase by phase. Every time I need to choose the next skill or cat the next error is just a waste of my time that could be spent doing things that actually need my attention like making business tradeoffs.

New comment by jb3689 in "How Claude Code works in large codebases"

jb3689 — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:46:11 +0000

Yeah, this is how it factually does work, but it’s not great. That’s why so many people are having to build custom tools to fill the gaps

New comment by jb3689 in "We see something that works, and then we understand it"

jb3689 — Sun, 10 May 2026 13:01:22 +0000

You have a deadline and scope (of solution) handed to you from product/management. It’s the same issue now at work.

New comment by jb3689 in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

jb3689 — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:18:35 +0000

I’ve found LLMs very good at two things: 1. Recommending paths forward, 2. Following established architecture. Your job is to be able to treat the LLM and code as sheep

New comment by jb3689 in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

jb3689 — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:14:31 +0000

Why would you do anything else? It’s still faster than me doing it as long as I’m parallelizing. I can regularly get up to 5-6 things running in parallel at the moment with no downtime. I suspect by EOY I’ll figure out how to run more

New comment by jb3689 in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

jb3689 — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:01:15 +0000

$400 * 23 business days would be $9k. Sounds ballpark to me

New comment by jb3689 in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

jb3689 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:00:25 +0000

A good interviewer won’t be looking for a single solution to the problem. I’d expect them to entertain the Google Sheets answer - it’s good signal that the candidate will consider what already exists in the world. I’d rather extend the problem: the team is spending considerable time iterating with manual entry, what would you do?

New comment by jb3689 in "Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate"

jb3689 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:42:57 +0000

Distributed systems and probabilistic data structures really should be in every undergrad CS curriculum even if just in passing for the second

New comment by jb3689 in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

jb3689 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:40:05 +0000

It irks me that these "just use Postgres" posts only talk about feature sets with no discussion about operations, reliability, real scaling, or even just guard rails and opinions to deter you from making bad design decisions. The author writes about how three nine's is multiplied over several dependencies, but that's not how this shakes out in practice. Your relational database is typically far more vulnerable than distributed alternatives. "Just use Postgres" is fine advice but gets used as a crutch by companies who wind up building everything in-house for no good reason.

New comment by jb3689 in "Statement from Jerome Powell"

jb3689 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:57:18 +0000

The problem is that a lot of what is happening is within the executive branch's power and/or democratic. A nontrivial number of Americans support everything that has been happening. The expectation at a time like this would be that you have checks and balances working, but all other branches have yielded their power. I find that jaw dropping personally, but it's where we are. Midterms are happening soon and are the right place to disrupt congress.

New comment by jb3689 in "OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss"

jb3689 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:13:44 +0000

On the other hand, no one cares about Velcro or Tupperware

New comment by jb3689 in "AI coding"

jb3689 — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 14:27:17 +0000

100% agree. I am interested in seeing how this will change how I work. I'm finding that I'm now more concerned with how I can keep the AI busy and how I can keep the quality of outputs high. I believe it has a lot to do with how my projects are structured and documented. There are also some menial issues (e.g. structuring projects to avoid merge conflicts becoming bottlenecks)

I expect that in a year my relationship with AI will be more like a TL working mostly at the requirements and task definition layer managing the work of several agents across parallel workstreams. I expect new development toolchains to start reflecting this too with less emphasis on IDEs and more emphasis on efficient task and project management.

I think the "missed growth" of junior devs is overblown though. Did the widespread adoption of higher-level really hurt the careers of developers missing out on the days when we had to do explicit memory management? We're just shifting the skillset and removing the unnecessary overhead. We could argue endlessly about technical depth being important, but in my experience this hasn't ever been truly necessary to succeed in your career. We'll mitigate these issues the same way we do with higher-level languages - by first focusing on the properties and invariants of the solutions outside-in.

New comment by jb3689 in "Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling"

jb3689 — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 05:08:27 +0000

Where though? The only people I see moving around live in Seattle, SF, and NYC where there are tons of open positions

New comment by jb3689 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)"

jb3689 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:26:08 +0000

  Location: Boston, MA, USA
  Remote: Yes (In-office/Hybrid also fine if local; travel is fine)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: AWS, Linux, Programming (esp. Ruby, Go, Elixir/Erlang), React, Typescript, Databases (MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, etcd, Kafka), Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, Data Eng (Spark, Trino, Airflow, Hadoop), Consul, Envoy
  Résumé/CV: Shared on request
  Email: deplhwa6y@mozmail.com (Note: e-mail mask; will openly share e-mail in response)

14 YOE with experience leading teams. Currently working for a unicorn. Keeping details light here so I am not doxed, but I am happy to share openly in private. Looking to roles working in distributed systems, reliability, or infrastructure (esp. databases, streaming, data eng). Prefer working for companies which are in scale phase and which have some traction. Role must have technical leadership opportunities.

New comment by jb3689 in "Foundations of Computer Vision (2024)"

jb3689 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:04:48 +0000

I really wish someone would have shared something like this with me in graduate school. Learning how to be a successful grad student took me too long to learn. In fact, I honestly didn't event learn it until I was done with school.

New comment by jb3689 in "At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work"

jb3689 — Mon, 26 May 2025 19:50:59 +0000

Makes me wonder if we’ll see more emphasis on loosely coupled architecture as a result of this. Software engineers maintain the structure, and AI codes it chaos at the leaf. Similar to how data engineers commoditized data via the warehouse

New comment by jb3689 in "Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)"

jb3689 — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:41:23 +0000

Musicians picked Monster because they were reliable and had an excellent replacement policy not because of brand ego. The Darn Tough of cables at least in terms of policies

New comment by jb3689 in "Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working"

jb3689 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 11:01:09 +0000

> They did it within a system of laws and regulations that government admittedly does create for fostering such wealth creation. However, this still often requires strenuous effort by these people for their own ends.

You are confusing two things thinking they aren’t highly related but they are. This statement could otherwise be written “government created a flawed system and motivated individuals achieved wealth by taking advantage of that system”. That implies a flawed system was causal. We don’t need bigger government, we need the right government. No one wants to say that those who worked hard - even by benefitting from a flawed government - should not have high wealth, but by your same argument, what did the wealthy children of these individuals do to justify their wealth? Their children? How long do we believe this chain of inheritance is sensible?

New comment by jb3689 in "Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working"

jb3689 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 10:44:07 +0000

I believe the previous poster was arguing that taxation still exists at a macro level, i.e. money is sucked out of the economy. It doesn’t matter so much who paid the taxes. The wealthy pay the interest.

New comment by jb3689 in "Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working"

jb3689 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 10:39:05 +0000

Part of me wonders if doubling down on taxing transactions (which tariffs is categorically) can thus work. It seems like an elegant way to avoid having to deal with wealth vs income.