HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

kisamoto

1,887 karma · joined July 16, 2012

Fullstack Engineer (weighted towards infx & "DevOps").

Aspiring mountaineer.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ejones; my proof: https://keybase.io/ejones/sigs/em0zaIvNe2TeZ3vgjRwX3qUC1zJEcJmUSPqaYuaVm-E ]

Founder of carbonremoved.com to make CO₂ removal accessible to everyone.

submissionscomments
kisamoto··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2026)
Virtusan | Switzerland, EU (Remote) | Full-time

Virtusan is a Swiss based health coaching platform for sleep, stress and recovery that works with any wearable, including our own smart ring. We're hiring our first AI Tech Lead to build the intelligence behind our coach: turning biometric and behavioural signals into personalised programmes that help people sleep better and stress less. You’ll be the technical authority for AI across engineering; you make the calls on architecture and approach, set the standards others build to and stay hand-on in the code.

To apply: https://join.com/companies/virtusan/16904650-ai-tech-lead-re...

kisamoto··on Gemini 4 Carbon
I'm on a Workspace Pro subscription and the models I have are (in order of the dropdown on gemini.google.com):

    - 3.6 Flash
    - 3.8 Thinking
    - 3.1 Pro
I would love to sign up to Antigravity to try out these new Gemini 4 models but the Antigravity pricing page - https://antigravity.google/pricing - recommends me (a "Developer") to "Get Ultra". But that leads me to an error page, because Ultra is only available for personal accounts apparently "Sign in to your personal account. Switch to a personal Google Account to access Google One.".

Back I go to the Antigravity pricing page and there is a tier "For Organisations". But now I have the option of either contacting sales (are you kidding me?) or "Start now via the API".

So I'm out - I want a simple subscription like Claude or Codex. I don't want API enterprise pricing for a 2 person organisation. I could use my personal account but I'm already paying increased Google Workspace prices to access Gemini and I can't even use the latest models with that.

If someone at Google sees this, flag this ridiculous behaviour please and get things under control. It should be a very clear process - don't show me things I can't access. Price things consistently and please just make things logical.

kisamoto··on Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows
In my opinion the OS should broker the communication between harnesses (which is part of Siri), LLMs and app functionality. It can take into account the permissions, the user could configure which LLM to use at an OS system settings level and complex workflows can integrate permissions like FaceID only once as the harness then interacts with APIs exposed by applications (arguably already there with app intents).

Self promotion blog article:

https://braw.dev/blog/2026-04-06-mobile-os-as-agentic-broker...

kisamoto··on Fastmail offers EU data region
Does this still apply if there are separate legal entities for US & EU operations? Take Hetzner as an example. They have a separate US company to deal with their US data center. Would their EU servers be vulnerable to the CLOUD Act?
kisamoto··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
The irony to have the EU criticised for regulation on one side but complete government control of access on the other.
kisamoto··on Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
> We focused on occupation-level shifts in remote work rather than personal choices, as decisions to work remotely may themselves reflect individuals’ mental health status

> Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work

Remote work is not for everyone so if you are someone who predominantly makes their social connections in an office being forced to work remotely will have an impact.

However I think a lot who choose to work remotely have friends outside of work. I know this study focuses on those who live alone but it may also be very different for those who live with a partner/family/friends.

Anecdotally I have found that people who want social interaction in the office push for everyone in the office (rather selfishly in my opinion) because without enough people in - for example in a hybrid model - they don’t get the same kick.

kisamoto··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
Zed - https://zed.dev/

Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).

Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).

kisamoto··on Building a SaaS in 2026 Using Only EU Infrastructure
It's worth considering why you are choosing a European stack.

Is it to support local/European companies - Great. Is it because you don't want to be at risk of the US and the CLOUD Act - Not so great. Any company that has servers in the US (which Hetzner and basically all CDNs do) are still vulnerable to the CLOUD Act and that includes servers in Europe.

kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
OP here. I do like Opus but I don't default to it for everything. My CC usage is a lot of Haiku/Sonnet and is also very bursty (bursts throughout the month, not a day).

I find that a lot of my Claude usage goes unused and then when I'm coding or leaning on agents I hit a limit and have to wait. I don't like that dynamic. I do have Extra Usage enabled (with a cap) but then I'm spending more than the $100 I already do.

I'm learning that a lot of people seem to consistently stay within limits and that works for them but I was looking for something different for myself.

The real pain is that Anthropic don't easily quantify usage (which can now change over the day). How many tokens is it? Minimum? Maximum? I tried to quantify this with OpenTelemetry for a while but have decided to move to this more flexible setup.

kisamoto··on Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
A non-profit identity service.

Uses government IDs that a lot of people already have and saves signed credentials to your phone. There is a server element for the verification process but it runs all in-memory (follow the Mullvad model and not even have persistent storage in the servers).

It's fun. Get to practice mobile development (Flutter), use some local GPUs, learn about the changes to JWTs for signed, selective disclosure, Bitstrings for progressive disclosure lists etc.

Landing page is https://agora.gdn/ in case anyone wants to try a beta in the future.

kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
I had a similar opinion a couple of years ago, content with more of an autocomplete.

Now I'm happy with agents as the models and harnesses have improved significantly but the token usage comes at a cost.

kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
Thank you for taking the time to explain that - makes sense. I lifted what was present in your terms of service as I'd like to understand the minimum time I have.
kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
I'm always interested in how people use tools. I like to have a full editor to review code as a complement to the CLI and as I don't often use hooks the integration is also good enough for me.

1. What do you use the hooks for?

2. Do you use an editor alongside the CLI to review code or only examine the diffs?

kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
I did. Perhaps too much consumption of AI responses but articles and engagement are written by me - a human.
kisamoto··on Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter
You are absolutely correct, I was not aware of this. I will update the article accordingly and perhaps it's more worthwhile to stay solely on Cursor with the limited models.

Sadly Zed seems to add 10% so it's still more worthwhile to use OpenRouter.

kisamoto··on Cursor 3
If only Zed had more extensions I would use it consistently over Cursor to be honest but for now Cursor remains my daily driver.

I like the option for different models that I just don't get with Claude Code. I want an IDE to monitor files and understand the code, not just see snippets (I know that there is still the Editor view in Cursor but with the push towards the Agent view I feel it's headed into a Conductor direction and personally I'm not ready for that).

kisamoto··on Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana
As someone on Reddit pointed out, now that it's in the Grafana stack you can also use standard alert management & notification tools to send updates on usage and alerts for abnormal spikes.
kisamoto··on Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana
You can get user prompts and tool calls in the logs (but not system prompts) although you do have to set a couple of extra environment variables.

It's under the `prompt` and `tool_parameter` fields in the logs.

    {service_name=~"claude-code"} | prompt != ""  | line_format `prompt={{.prompt}}`
kisamoto··on Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana
Claude Code supports using OpenTelemetry to gather some metrics including token usage, cost, user prompts and tool calls (unfortunately no system prompts).

This is possible without custom certificates, MITM or proxies. However you do need something to collect, store and visualise the OTEL data.

I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this but you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz.

Leave it running, track your usage and when you hit limits look back to understand how many tokens that actually was.

kisamoto··on European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
> EU can’t out innovate US tech

why not?

Okay not today but China was known as the cheap copier and is now the innovator.

kisamoto··on European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams
Personally I've found Matrix significantly more user friendly than Threema work. Zulip I haven't used in anger so I can't comment on that but I've seen a few places that even open source they charge per user for things like notifications. Not ideal IMHO. There should be an option to replace notifications with a separate service.

It's hard to find a decent service that ticks all the boxes but I do sincerely hope that the EU can support Matrix to bring it up to the standard that we all deserve.

kisamoto··on The collapse of "Human Signal" on the web
Hi all,

I've been thinking a lot about why I feel disheartened at the state of the internet and of possible ways to approach fixing it.

I believe the root cause is the lack of a privacy-preserving 'Proof of Humanity.' My approach to fix this combines biometric passports (ICAO 9303) with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs/Confidential Computing) for verification. We then push a signed payload back to your device, not centralising any data.

I know 'Passport' + 'Internet' sounds like a privacy nightmare and this type of solution is generally disapproved upon by HN. However I'd like to offer an approach that tries to set such a service up as an integral part of the open web: Non-profit (Switzerland for what it's worth) association to avoid monetisation pressures to exploit user data and open source in a Tursted Execution Environment (TEE) to offer some additional guarantees about the processing of user data.

To be clear, this is not pushing for mandatory age verification - that is not the aim. It is however trying to increase the "human signal" on the web as we interact with each other while maintaining as much privacy as possible.

kisamoto··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
LiveMap | Geospatial Data/Backend and Mobile Engineers | Full-Time | Switzerland or Remote (CH, EU, UK)

Visa sponsorship is not provided.

LiveMap is a funded startup with a vision to build the next generation of mapping apps (think hyper-personalised Google Maps). How that looks is still being explored so we're building prototypes, getting them into customer hands and iterating quickly. We're looking to bring on a couple of people to help accelerate this development process.

As a data engineer you'll set up a data pipeline, work with product to identify relevant datasets, connect, persist and expose that data.

As a mobile engineer you'll be the UI delivering value to the customer. We are testing hypothesis in weeks and leveraging tools like Claude Code to do it.

Please find more information and application forms at the links:

• Geospatial data/backend engineer - https://tally.so/r/n095jj

• Mobile engineer - https://tally.so/r/w56N1Q

Happy hacking

kisamoto··on Apps SDK
I suppose you just have to trust that it's incentivized to find you the best route and not only offer you 3 options which it says are the best, but are actually paid promotions.
kisamoto··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
I would argue that just being in the office or not using AI doesn't guarantee any better learning of younger generations. Without proper guidance a junior would still struggle regardless of their location or AI pilot.

The challenge now is for companies, managers and mentors to adapt to more remote and AI assisted learning. If a junior can be taught that it's okay to reach out (and be given ample opportunities to do so), as well as how to productively use AI to explain concepts that they may feel too scared to ask because they're "basics", then I don't see why this would hurt in the long run.

kisamoto··on How I build software quickly
Fully agree. I would also say it's easy enough to use Django for (almost) everything for a self contained SaaS startup. Marketing can be done via Wagtail. Support is managed by a reusable app that is a simple static element on every page (similar to Intercom) that redirects to a standard Django page, collects some info about the issue including the user who made it (if authenticated) etc.

I try to simplify the stack further and use SQLite with Borg for backups. Caching leverages Diskcache.

Deployment is slightly more complicated. I use containers and podman with systemd but could easily be a git pull & gunicorn restart.

My frontend practices have gone through some cycles. I found Alpine & HTMX too restrictive to my liking and instead prefer to use Typescript with django-vite integration. Yes it means using some of the frontend tooling but it means I can use TailwindCSS, React, Typescript etc if I want.

kisamoto··on ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure
Any info on context length or comparable performance? Press release is unfortunately lacking on technical details.

Also I'm curious if there was any reason to make such a PR without actually releasing the model (due Summer)? What's the delay? Or rather what was the motivation for a PR?

kisamoto··on Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05
Amateur question, how are people using this for coding?

Direct chat and copy pasting code? Seems clunky.

Or manually switching in cursor? Although is extra cost and not required for a lot of tasks where Cursor tab is faster and good enough. So need to opt in on demand.

Cline + open router in VSCode?

Something else?

kisamoto··on Show HN: I made a web-based, free alternative to Screen Studio
I have no connection but seeing as these conversations often discuss alternatives I'd like to mention https://screenrun.app/.

It's web based, offers plenty of features and can be had for a one-time of $40.

I've only used it a handful of times however I keep coming back.

kisamoto··on Not For Large Profit: An opt-in framework for responsible companies
"Responsible capitalism" is not a term you often hear but it's something I think we could strive for.

Not-for-large-profit is a set of guiding principals that tries to sit in the middle of the non-profit and profit-at-all-costs spectrum.

This is my initial attempt at an idea I've had floating around for a while and I would love to see feedback either in comments here or discussions/PRs on the GitHub repo.

Thanks and happy hacking,

Page 1 of 9Next →