Hacker News Reader

akshat_hon Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade

It is technically not the arch way to use aur helper, but I use paru instead of pacman which shows arch news before updating.

This makes sure I get any arch news before potential breaking updates.

akshat_hon On Leaving Facebook

So why do we ask them? AFAIK, it is engineers asking these questions and also criticizing the same metric.

I think it is a case of this being the least worst option.

akshat_hon GC progress from JDK 8 to JDK 17

I haven't personally used this, but does this work?

GC.TryStartNoGCRegion Method

Attempts to disallow garbage collection during the execution of a critical path.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.gc.trysta...

akshat_hon Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

If anyone is curious, it might be this talk.

Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google. It is on Etsy Eng channel Youtube url with the relevant time frame https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532

akshat_hon I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Thanks!

Yes it is for the same employer. It will be with extension of status, and not consular notification, AFAIK, so that clears up my situation.

akshat_hon I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Thanks. I am in US and don't have any travel plans now.

Was wondering if I'll have to leave and come back to get valid I-94, which will be tricky due to the Executive Order on visas.

akshat_hon I’m Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Does an approved H1-B extension necessarily extends the i-94 date?

If not, is the only alternative to leave the country, get a new visa stamp(which is not possible till Dec 31, AFAIK) and reenter the country?

akshat_hon H-1B: Government issues first-ever official estimate of visa population in U.S.

H1-B has other issues but regarding H1-B working for 10+ years, it is mostly due to country caps for green cards.

H1-B do get sponsored green cards, at least for the non-startup companies. IIRC, any H1-B having more than one extension i.e. > 6 years has to have a green card application pending. H1-B doesn't have country caps.

The green card system however has per country caps, which impacts primarily people born in India, China, Mexico,El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Vietnam and Philippines. If you are born in Greece and come to USA on H1-B where a company sponsors green card for you, you would get it in around 1-3 years.

Source: Was born in India and also had a roommate from Greece who got green card in about 14 months after being in USA.

EDIT: Added El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Vietnam to list of countries impacted based on https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

akshat_hon H-1B: Federal judge backs government’s narrower view of ‘specialty occupation’

and you'll have to GTFO the US within (IIRC) 2 weeks.

I think there was a grace period of 60 days introduced in 2017 though I am not sure on the status of it now.

akshat_hon The Growth of Reddit

I don't think r/the_donald is quarantined.

There was some issue with sticky threads not rising as much to the r/all that impacted r/the_donald, but otherwise, I can still see posts from that sub on the front page though I do have to scroll quite a bit.

akshat_hon Cisco ‘secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring US citizens’: report

Discussion yesterday on a similar article titled: Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers (bloomberglaw.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17804755

akshat_hon Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’

Does Steam take a cut for in game purchases? I think the major issue here is with companies having app stores inside app store. All the companies mentioned i.e Amazon, Steam seem to allow in-app purchases at a scale quite different than normal apps. It does seem weird that if I am purchasing an item through Steam's app store, Steam has to pay Apple.

I mean it would be like Amazon paying Apple a cut, if I buy a TV from amazon. AFAIK, it is only for digital goods that Apple charges, but I am not sure how the demarcation works.

On the flip side, if Apple/Google allow any app to use in-app purchases without a commission, then all apps will use in-app purchases for everything.

akshat_hon Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

As an H1B, while there is employer tie in at some level, I am free to change jobs. What I am not free to do is to stop working. That fear certainly does indirectly result in lesser job mobility.

For example, opportunities like say going to Recurse Center, or having the freedom to have a decently long sabbatical etc. even with a 6 month emergency fund are not available. The other thing is no freedom to pursue any other job, i.e working on a startup idea during the evenings or weekend, or writing a technical book etc. for money is not allowed.

There are certainly issues with the H1b system, i.e. the lottery, low salary cap, multiple applications per person to game the system etc, but employer stickiness is not one of them, at least for people who are qualified.

The major problem is due to long wait for green card for people from China, and almost impossible wait for people from India. My friends who were not born in these two countries have been able to get a green card within about a year, after getting an H1B, while I am looking at a more than 20-30 year wait.

akshat_hon Cisco Said to Be Cited for Bias Against U.S. Workers

AFAIK, the number considered is salary, so the number is decently high, even for bay area. There are some exceptions like Netflix, but a lot of companies pay majority in equity, especially at higher salary levels.

I don't know how easy/difficult would it be for companies to move from equity based compensation to normal salary though, if something like that is implemented.

akshat_hon ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Awful Advice

It depends on the passion as well. Not all passions are equal and can be easily transferred into a successful career. Assuming you have multiple passions, my personal advice would be to maximize money/time ratio for your career that corroborate with one of your passions to have some job satisfaction as well as pursuing your other passions.

For example, if you have a passion for say writing and computer science, I would recommend to get a job in CS, since money/time ratio is usually higher there.

akshat_hon Atom 1.28

Yeah, I think op was joking/trolling as well and I fell for it. Honestly I expected something like Scratch as an answer.

akshat_hon Atom 1.28

I can see it being 'fun' in something like Scratch. I expected op to reply with either some edutech or some domain I hadn't heard of. It does however seem that op is trolling, and I missed it.

akshat_hon Atom 1.28

I am quite curious of the domain where you use emojis in function name? That sounds fun, and also from what I have seen of unicode support somewhat terrifying.

I work mostly in enterprise backend so variable names are typically boring, but I have never heard of emojis being used in var names.

akshat_hon Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013)

I think this is also because no one really teaches you how to interview. Giving multiple interviews doesn't, at least IMHO make you knowledgeable to be on the other side.

It is kinda at a certain level in your career you are expected to just know how to do it. For other skills like management, you at least have your peers who are doing the work day in day out, who you can learn from. Interviews are closed room, usually, though I have had some where one person was shadowing the interviewer.

Also, if you take a terrible interview, its not gonna really impact you. There is no performance report that'll negatively impact you. There will be another candidate, who you'll have a rapport with. Or someone else will interview someone else.

As you said in your anecdote about the binary search problem, not everyone is best at being an interviewer.

But aside from there being a dedicated person for interviewing for big companies, or outsourcing interviews for startups, I don't really see a solution. And outsourcing, whether internally or externally comes up with its own set of problems.

akshat_hon Google admits brainteasers were useless for hiring (2013)

Aren't a lot of so called 'algorithmic problems' similar to brain teasers? If you have seen it before, you'll know it. But otherwise, there is not much chance of you cracking it without an 'Aha' moment, which may or may not come during the one hour allocated for an interview.

Weird tricks in bit manipulation, linked lists, array, hash problems etc. are all standard in interviewing and are still used, even at Google, at least 2 years ago, when I last interviewed there.

This works though as Google's, and the industry in general has a policy of rejecting candidates, rather than accepting them, because hiring is very risk-averse. Candidates switch jobs frequently at the beginning of their career and so there is a rotating pool of good candidates the companies can pick from.

akshat_hon Greater speed in memory-bound graph algorithms with just straight C code

Interesting approach for optimization of an algorithm that I haven't seen in any books(as the author also mentions).

Is there any comprehensive resource for these, or does everyone kind of fiddle around and stumble on these independently. I have always been curious about 'hacks' such as the Fast inverse square root method. How does anyone figure these out in the first place?

akshat_hon Solving dynamic programming interview problems

Thanks! I was getting confused between stack data structure, function stack and stack space and had gotten to a weird mix in my head. The example cleared it up.

akshat_hon Ask HN: What are some technical topics I can blog about?

This is kinda similar problem to the advice given of "Build Something" given to new programmers. For a long time, I thought that meant "Build Something completely new and fascinating" and I would spend days trying to find something to build, see examples of it already present and give up. Recently I have realized it doesn't really matter. Sublime text had the first release in 2008, a time when I would have said Text Editor market is saturated. Visual Studio Code was released even more recently, and still gained sufficient market share. Now will you write the next Sublime text? Probably not, but that doesn't mean writing a new text editor, music player, heck even a todo app is a bad endeavor to learn. And it'll be really hard to write sublime without writing a notepad clone.

My main point here is, even if you are writing about the most mundane topic, in CS there is bound to be something, a different command line flag, a different point of view, something old rediscovered etc. just by the virtue of writing on it. Will it happen on your first attempt? Probably not.

You can start to write about the most mundane or the most esoteric thing. Only with practice would you find a niche, and there eventually will be some gems.

akshat_hon Solving dynamic programming interview problems

Any examples of code for this approach? From what I guess, you are implementing some kind of assembly like approach with explicit saving of stack frame, but I am having a hard time imagining it as being easier.

akshat_hon The Story of Me-A real programmer

It does seem similar to my experience when changing jobs or changing stacks, but I don't see this happening after the settling in period. I am not working in web dev though, so maybe the experience is different.

Another thing that stuck me was about the use of a semicolon, comma etc to get working. It is a common pet peave when searching for documentation.

For example for a command

$ program <file_name>

Is file name in quotes, <>, or something else? What to do if there are quotes in the filename? Single or double quote? Two examples in the documentation, one simple, and one as complex as possible would be great. This is one thing I end up going to stack overflow again and again.

akshat_hon Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?

Has anyone really read these books from page to page?

Also, are they really relevant when you are starting your career? These seem more into the category of making you competent in the field of algorithms research, rather than something a person starting a career should read.

akshat_hon Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

There is no delay for other countries, at least for Employment based green cards.

There is some fixed number of employment based green cards that are awarded per category(EB1,2,3) with rollover between categories. The reason why there is a delay is that there is a country-wide cap on a percentage of total green cards awarded that year. So countries with higher number of people immigrating have a queue. If there were thousands of Australians immigrating, there can be a queue there too.

I am not sure about Canada though, as there maybe some other category for it.

akshat_hon Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

To add to the above post. For people born in India the wait time is estimated to be more than 20+ years, since the queue is going to get longer and longer, and there are only fixed number of people who leave the queue every year. Unless you are on EB1, it is better to basically forget about getting a green card. Talking to my friends from India, the options are:

1) Do a PhD and hope to produce original, well cited research that qualifies you for EB1.

2)Similar to above, but if you are in a research team and can get good papers out that qualify you for EB1.

3)Wait and hope for promotions that qualify you for EB1.

4)Move back to India after a couple of years.

5)Try to move to Europe or Canada. Everyone is kinda fuzzy on this since no one really has clear idea of immigration laws in other countries.

6)Get enough money from some IPO to pay for investment based green card and hope for the best.

This is if you currently qualify for EB2 i.e 5 or more years experience or a Masters from US. I don't even know what is the condition for people in EB3. As one of my friend put it memorably, there is a person whose parent's haven't even met, that will get a green card faster than me, if born anywhere but India, China, Mexico and Philippines.

I know, barring a recession, I'll be in US for the next couple of years, but after getting a family, I think my tolerance for having my residence in the country coupled with my job would drop and I'll look and see if one of the above option works for me. Plus ageism in tech is something I fear as well.

I would love to settle here, but barring a law change, it is right now impossible for me.

EDIT: Separate line numbers for the numbers points.

akshat_hon 'My £1,000 Macbook Air was stolen at airport security and no one cares'

Windows displays calendar appointments on the lock screen. Not sure about Mac. Maybe that was what they saw and flight name was part of it?

akshat_hon Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

I have always wondered this. Tech and probably other fields do want you to be promoted. From what I have heard, if you are not able to get promoted in certain number of years, you are put on a PIP and possibly laid off. But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens? Just the fact that the numbers in the pipeline is always reducing suggests to me that some people get laid off and never find a job? Is that true? If not, what exactly is happening?

I am still at the one of the lowest levels on the totem pole, so maybe I am missing something obvious here.