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Comment by cuuupid | Hacker News Reader

The visa that would correlate to this is the O-1 visa

20k O-1 visas were issued last FY which was mostly under the Trump admin, up from 19.5k the previous FY under the Biden admin

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No it is H-1B visa. Right out of the university it is hard to recognize extraordinary talent. People like Sundar Pichai were not recognized as extraordinary right out of the university, he had to start at the bottom and rise up the ranks.

Melania got a EB-1 "extraordinary ability" immigrant visa

To be fair, that was clearly well deserved. Marrying Trump and then becoming first lady is definitely an extraordinary ability; I doubt I could have done it.

This makes even less sense, Trump admin has been here for 1 year, the implication here is a university grad on H1-B in January would become a world class researcher capable of building a frontier model in <18mo

This is why VC is actually hard. Everyone’s instinct is always “Man, once the company has demonstrated it’s awesome I would love to have been in the seed round”. The tendency to want “proven performers” is the default belief.

When people demonstrate their capability thoroughly, the Chinese government takes away their passports. You’re not exactly going to get them here with an O-1.

This admin and its policies on immigrant visas have been around for 1 year and Biden was famously pro immigration

The O-1 has also been abused for a long time, basically any software engineer kid who gets into Y Combinator has been getting an O-1

This is essentially the point of the visa, it feels wrong especially as YC drops standards and increases cohort sizes, but the same power laws that keep them winning also apply here in maximizing economic value of each O-1 approval

Basically of all visas O-1 is virtually guaranteed to have highly positive economic value

It's not the point of the visa, the O-1 is supposed to be for people of extraordinary ability, eg Nobel Prize winners. It's used for software engineers.

No, not just Nobel Prize winners. Look it up.

I know what it is.

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