Hacker News: santiagobasulto

New comment by santiagobasulto in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

santiagobasulto — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:10:22 +0000

LLMs are aligned to be cautious. And “good” financial advice is extremely simple. A conservative approach gets you there 80% of the time. Is when people want to get too smart (or they’re bordes) that money is lost (gambling mostly: literally or with bad investments). So yeah, I’d assume AI is good at this.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Azulejo"

santiagobasulto — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:39:39 +0000

I'll take advantage of your domain knowledge :) Where's the best place to find local artists that produce them?

New comment by santiagobasulto in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

santiagobasulto — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:54:31 +0000

Didn't expect to see a MESHUGGAH reference in HN today. Not bad.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Show HN: 18 Words"

santiagobasulto — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:56:00 +0000

I loved it, i hated it. I'm so bad at this.

I think summarizing everybody's feedback the simplest solution is: "Game difficulty".

- Standard: what you have today

- Relaxed: 1 minute per word?

- Practice Mode: no timer whatsoever

And "Practice Mode" is a completely different mode that lets you skip questions, and instead of "you win / you lose" which is today's behavior, you end up with a score (14/18).

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents"

santiagobasulto — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:41:26 +0000

Forget AI agents, this DSL is better even for humans. Cool project!

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Tell HN: Who wants to be hired" posts outpace "Who's hiring" 2 to 1"

santiagobasulto — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:57:35 +0000

Yours looks much nicer!

Tell HN: Who wants to be hired" posts outpace "Who's hiring" 2 to 1

santiagobasulto — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:31:53 +0000

Lately I've noticed that "Who wants to be hired" posts are getting more comments than the "Who's hiring" ones.

I pulled the data using HN API and confirmed this "reversal". "Who wants to be hired" posts are getting 2x more comments than "Who's hiring" posts (and seems to be accelerating). For reference, in 2022 it used to be 0.25.

I'm old, I'm from the times where demand for software devs greatly outpaced supply, but maybe we're seeing a reversal of it?

I don't want to draw any conclusions yet, there could be many things going on. My initial thoughts would be AI-related. We're either entering a general recession because the AI bubble is bursting, or the job market is changing due to AI.

Again, I don't have any answers, but it's something definitively interesting to discuss!

Here's the source code (including data): https://github.com/santiagobasulto/hn-who-is-hiring-analysis

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816813

Points: 57

# Comments: 35

New comment by santiagobasulto in "David Beazley – Programming Courses"

santiagobasulto — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:30:09 +0000

David's talks at PyCon are all amazing. My favorite is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4

Funny enough, a few months ago we decided to start a new project and we chose async Python. I had no clue how'd work so I decided to read the PEP and learn a bit more. Big was my surprise when I realized I "knew" all the fundamentals just by understanding how coroutines and generators worked low level, thanks to David's talks.

EDIT: His talks about the GIL are also super informative!

New comment by santiagobasulto in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

santiagobasulto — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:41:04 +0000

I think we're missing the important point here.

The problem is not that the ID wallets require Google and Apple. The problem is that we're getting eaten alive by this Big Brother called EU (lead by the UK initiatives) that is starting an unprecedented control over the population.

These ID wallets should be all optional, there should NOT be any age verifications.

I remember ~10 years ago when Europe was laughing at China's face detection systems to track citizens.

We're becoming much worse than that now.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Pollen (CEO Negus-Fancey, CTO Wright) tried to remove article, and Google helped"

santiagobasulto — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:57:58 +0000

This is all super interesting, but I can't decide what's the MOST interesting thing:

1. The whole Pollen case (I didn't know about)

2. That Google can be tricked so easily?

3. The whole "industry" that seems to be in place to clean the image of some scumbags in the internet (this whole Ellie Piee from Bouvet Island)

I think the most worrying part is Google's fragility to hurt itself.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Midjourney Medical"

santiagobasulto — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:44:00 +0000

The fact that you're not naming any cost related variable reflects your own current personal situation (privileged, I'd assume). But this is NOT the situation for most people in the world.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also privileged. I can pay for pretty much any type of medical intervention that I'd need. So my variables are usually "comfort", "speed", "convenience", etc. But I know that this is NOT the most common scenario for everybody.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

santiagobasulto — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:27:33 +0000

That is true, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t make the connection until I saw Bellard’s project for the first time, and I said: “ah! That actually makes A LOT of sense”

New comment by santiagobasulto in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

santiagobasulto — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:33:43 +0000

Bellard has a very interesting project that is `ts_zip`, a compression algorithm powered by LLMs. It's just an "experiment" and should never be used in production, but very smart.

The description on his website is amusing: "The ts_zip utility can compress (and hopefully decompress) text files using a Large Language Model"

https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Anthropic flies staff to D.C. to clean up White House fight"

santiagobasulto — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:31:16 +0000

> Senior technical Anthropic staff

doesn't seem to be a political meeting, but rather a technical one. Maybe they'll review the jailbreaks and demonstrate that can be replicated in any model out there?

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Meta Down"

santiagobasulto — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:54:18 +0000

Whatsapp is working fine for me (in Europe) btw

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

santiagobasulto — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:29:50 +0000

Not at all, I had the same feeling as yours the first time I read it. I think the key is that the "encoder" they're using is just a linear projection, which is probably pretty fast and memory efficient. A single matmul vs a ViT encoder is probably a huge win.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

santiagobasulto — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:27:45 +0000

I don't think it's the same. It's a similar concept, but Gemma is using just a linear projection, which I assume is a lot faster. The developer guide has more details: https://developers.googleblog.com/gemma-4-12b-the-developer-...

    Vision embedder (35M parameters): Replaces the 27 vision transformer layers of the other medium-sized Gemma 4 models. Raw 48x48 pixel patches are projected to the LLM hidden dimension with a single matmul. A factorized coordinate lookup (X and Y matrices) attaches spatial location information directly to the input

the "single matmul" is the key here, I haven't tried it, but it's probably pretty fast and memory efficient.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "The $500K AI Film That "Premiered at Cannes" Was Not in the Official Festival"

santiagobasulto — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:52:03 +0000

I mean, "Cannes" the city right? lol

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Ask HN: Is anyone working at least 4 hours daily on an Apple Vision Pro?"

santiagobasulto — Tue, 26 May 2026 06:39:02 +0000

I don't own Apple Vision Pro, but I tested them two times already and I'm amazed by the technology. I honestly think it's the future. We're probably WAY too early yet, and the Vision Pro might fail badly, but it is indeed the future.

I did a special test session in Japan for "productivity" (the guys at the Apple Store were very friendly and agreed to let me install VSCode and Ghostty on the testing laptop. I cloned an open source repository and spent ~20 minutes just coding.

It was FANTASTIC. The Apple Store was full and I could still "black out" the noise and completely immersed myself in the experience.

I'm seriously considering buying a pair now, but I'm just concerned about the under-investment in the sector.

Regardless, I honestly think it's the future, maybe in 10/20 years, but it'll be the norm.

New comment by santiagobasulto in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

santiagobasulto — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:27:03 +0000

General consultancy is an extremely crowded space. As a startup CEO, I get at least 3 emails per week from software agencies and consultants. On top of that, they're usually located in India/Ukraine and the rates they offer are very low, so I assume it's very difficult to compete.

My advice would be to differentiate yourself:

- Become an expert in 1 thing, and one thing only: either start an open source project, or become the main collaborator in one. And be an EXPERT in that ONE thing. Not a generalist.

- Go personal: I can't see who you are or where are you based in your website. If I want to hire an EXPERT (see point before) consultant, I want to see their face and why they're different. I need a feeling of trust.

- Network the hell out of it: once you're an expert on one thing and you have a face, people will recognize you and recommend you