Comment by vient | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vient | Hacker News Reader

There is also a specific subset of this problem named "USA conferences on themes from Technology Alert List" with common examples being information security conferences like DEFCON or BlackHat. Just mentioning such conference during visa application may already give you headache, and usually you work in this field if you go to such conference - working in critical field automatically gets you an administrative processing when your passport gets sent to USA and some agencies check that you are not a spy or something which may take anywhere from several months to infinity. Also even if you pass this processing, you will get visa for 1 year max instead of usual 3 years.

I know at least two such cases with my peers, one being my friend still waiting for visa decision 5 years later after Google accepted him for an internship and he got sent to administrative processing because of his job at security firm at the moment. Obviously, his internship expired years ago. From my experience, getting US visa is the worst by a wide margin compared with EU or UK.

> getting US visa is the worst by a wide margin compared with EU or UK.

Indeed. I’m a Brazilian/Hungarian living in Ireland and Hungary did a number by telling the US that Hungarians born abroad can’t use the ESTA system and need to apply through the “normal” channels.

I had my interview scheduled for next week, but since I had to travel for a family emergency, I had it rescheduled to the next available slot… in mid-November. And all seems done through a for-profit third party and feels really, really scammy. Why would a government that has a very large embassy need a third party to manage scheduling visa interviews?

As an Indian the UK visa is way more work than US and the other part is US often gives you a 10 year visa whereas the UK gives 6 month visas so you have to go through the whole process every so often. EU is also more work. You often need to show hotel bookings, flights both ways and so on and if it gets rejected it is a lot of effort down the drain.

Yeh but it’s the same the other way around… as a UK citizen applying for an Indian visa was painful even though I was visiting a supplier in India

Sounds as if the current Cold War II situation keeps on escalating, people from a growing number of countries straight up won't be able to get visas for those conferences anymore.

Maybe fewer people being able to attend in person will force more conferences to take accessibility seriously. WWDC seems to have taken this to heart, for example.

In general (it's complicated and it's not as simple as have a video camera in every session) tech conferences are doing a pretty good job of getting session content online these days. And, yes, Apple invests at least as much as anyone.

It's not really a replacement for attending a conference live but it's a mostly inexpensive (money and time) way to get exposed to a lot of the formal content of a conference.

> It's not really a replacement for attending a conference live but it's a mostly inexpensive (money and time) way to get exposed to a lot of the formal content of a conference.

This is something that has troubled me about in-person conferences for a while: they are inegalitarian. If they’re not really about the content, the only people who get the true benefit are those already privileged enough to be able to attend. That means the purpose of in-person conferences is to compound inequalities. We should not have them.

If you follow that thinking through though, it would mean that almost any "real world" interaction would further inequality, and that any kind of significant exchange of knowledge should be restricted to online spaces - so effectively going back to pandemic living, at least as far as meetups and conferences are concerned.

You could certainly do that but it's not a world that I'd personally would want to live in.

Maybe an alternative would be "distributed" events like e.g. Global Game Jam: Have not one venue but multiple, in different countries or "visa spaces", then link them all up online.

Also more focus on "hybrid" conferences: Make online attendance less second-class by e.g. allowing remote speakers with an in-venue audience, and local speakers with a partially remote audience; also let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc.

In general, I agree. I also found that "let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc." pretty much didn't work except for some smaller events. Yes, they could load questions into a queue which is something but, then, Q&A in a large conference session isn't great under the best of circumstances. "More a comment than a question" :-/

But doesn't society also benefit from both the formal and informal part of the conference? Is it worth levelling down?

This is a race to the bottom.

We shouldn’t throw out something beneficial because it’s not perfect — and doing so has already drastically degraded our societies.

Edit:

Personal anecdote — smaller academic conferences being cheap means that you actually get a mix of people. Most of the cost is travel and lodging ($150 for a week conference ticket). So you get a few more corporate people at them than you’d expect.

You can argue it’s classist, and it is, but society will always have a class system (eg, check out Russia and China at any point in time) — our question should then be “what is the most egalitarian system of classes we can have?”

I would suggest you get that with two ideas:

- your class is the log of your net worth

- there are affordable tickets to the structures of cultural power, eg conferences

I know that soil ecology and human sociology aren’t identical, but it might be worth considering why we don’t want to till soil too often [1] and why people might therefore prefer systems where there’s some cultural continuity — even at the expense of perfect meritocracy.

[1] - https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-ti...

Guess I shouldn't have said that I was attending DEF CON to the CBP agent at Dublin Airport, but I was just told to have a nice time in Vegas

For all intents and purposes you most probably had no problems with this test [1], which is another problem that does not get explicitly mentioned that often (the author of the post alludes to it when writing about "by post-colonial geopolitics")

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/044/241/ski...

A pretty bad faith assumption that turned out to be factually incorrect. The OP elaborated in another comment that them and their friends that had issues with visas were from Russia. I am fairly certain that they are more likely than not to pass that "test" you referenced.

Glad to hear that that very-well known problem has been solved by now, thank you for making me learn after you had listened.

Never said it was solved, I just pointed out that the problem you are talking about has nothing to do with the situation that is being discussed.

I should clarify that my friends and I are Russian citizens. I can imagine that entering USA is easier for an Irish citizen but I've heard not once or twice about Russian/Chinese/... speakers that were not able to get visa in time or were prohibited to enter US.

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