Hacker News: yodsanklai

New comment by yodsanklai in "Learn Programming with OCaml"

yodsanklai — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:15:23 +0000

LLM + static types is a winning combo. And if you want to be serious with what you do with your LLM, you need to understand the output to some extent.

That being said, you may as well use Rust. The extra complexity of manual memory management and Rust idiosyncracies are easily dealt with by the LLM.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Learn Programming with OCaml"

yodsanklai — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:12:45 +0000

It's a good language to learn programming. Very simple semantics. But ultimately, you need to learn different paradigms, I think the order doesn't matter, they'll still be an element of surprise.

Also OCaml lets you write imperative code if you wish so. So you can learn the different paradigms within the same language.

New comment by yodsanklai in "GPT-6 Astra"

yodsanklai — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 23:08:53 +0000

It seems like every few days there's a new model with hundreds of comments on HN. I find it hard to keep track of the progress. Is there a TL;DR on what benchmarks to look at to understand what is going on?

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:41:43 +0000

My point is that US can restrict visa all they want, it won't prevent companies to move somewhere else where they can get better talent and/or cheaper labour. So all this whining about H1B taking the jobs Americans feel entitled to is a bit misplaced - because this is all this discussion is about. It's all the more ironic when it comes from conservatives who claim to promote free market, globalization and meritocracy.

Now local talent over immigrants, each country has different policy, and it certainly affects where companies decide to open foreign offices. For instance, would OpenAI open an office in London if all they can hire are British citizens?

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:22:01 +0000

Big tech companies aren't patriotic, they work for their shareholders. They don't care about US or Swiss citizens. They'll open offices wherever there's a high density of talents, and where they can import qualified foreign workers. I'm pretty sure there aren't many SWEs from Switzerland at Google Zurich offices. If the US wants to restrict visas, automatically a portion of these jobs will be moved abroad.

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:12:04 +0000

What I'm saying is that I don't know if they are US citizens or not. From the look of it, most are not though. As for eligibility to work there, I suppose that's validated before with the recruiter.

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:02:40 +0000

If these companies relocate the jobs, Americans wouldn't even get a job.

A megacorp isn't property of the US government. It's a property of this shareholders who very often aren't even US citizens.

It's pretty ironic that Americans who forced globalization to the rest of the world, and largely benefited from it, are now bitten by it.

If Americans want the lucrative jobs, they should better improve their education system and work hard to compete.

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:57:27 +0000

> not if they rank first at whiteboards or fizz-buzz.

As an interviewer, I don't rank candidates. I have my set of questions, some candidates solve them, others don't. You can argue that it's the bar to do your job properly. Should politicians tell big tech companies what's the bar for being a successful SWE?

> When it comes to national interest, the argument for "meritocracy" falls apart quickly.

A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers. I'm not sure what would be the tech industry without them.

New comment by yodsanklai in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

yodsanklai — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:16:02 +0000

I work in a global company. As an interviewer, I don't even know if the person I interview is a US citizen. I don't even know if they live in the US or another country, and I'm probably not allowed to ask. I just rate their performance. And everybody is paid the same.

I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.

If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar, or would they expand their Shanghai or Zurich offices? Are US citizens entitled to work at Google more than others for the sole reason they have a particular citizenship?

New comment by yodsanklai in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

yodsanklai — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:58:13 +0000

My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

yodsanklai — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:51:50 +0000

Youtube comments is a junkyard compared to HN.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

yodsanklai — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:44:15 +0000

I don't think this has to do with free speech. If companies can deliberately harm kids, they should be regulated.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

yodsanklai — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:34:09 +0000

Exactly. And also a way to opt-out of the comment section. It's hard for me to resist looking at the comments, and sometimes commenting.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

yodsanklai — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:32:52 +0000

Yes, and also if only I could disable shorts and the comment section in youtube.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"

yodsanklai — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:07:50 +0000

> A few degrees warmer in the ocean and El Niño becomes an incredible problem for half the world.

Ice age was only 6 degrees less than now, half of Europe was under ice

New comment by yodsanklai in "Protobuf has LSP support"

yodsanklai — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:46:33 +0000

Aren't LSP dying (and eventually IDE, at least in their current form) as everybody use LLM to code. I know some big tech companies redirected teams supporting them to new efforts (ie. tool integration with AI).

New comment by yodsanklai in "Grok 4.6"

yodsanklai — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:00:16 +0000

Could it be that there's no magic formula, everybody uses the same known ideas, the same computation power, the same training data? if that's the case, we can imagine that models will be commoditized.

New comment by yodsanklai in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

yodsanklai — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:28:44 +0000

> put the effort into keeping Search profitable

The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.

New comment by yodsanklai in "EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"

yodsanklai — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:43:56 +0000

> All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason ...

Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation. There are activists and politicians who really believe this is a cause worth fighting for.

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

yodsanklai — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:31:55 +0000

It's more complicated than that. You probably don't want all your equity in stock, unless you're young and you're confident you can keep your strategy when the AI bubble crashes. And what do you do with the part that isn't in stock? bonds? what are they? which ones to buy? Even the 6-12 months of expenses in cash doesn't apply to all people.

That being said, I agree with the bad and expensive advisors, but I think financial planning is hard, and you really need to educate yourself.