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impish19on Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora

These Barbie promos are getting out of hand

impish19on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Surely you can point to some direction about this?

impish19on Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates

This has barely ever tipped the needle for me when deciding to buy a phone. I switched to a Pixel a couple of years ago for two main features:

Call Screening - https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

Hold for me - https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en

They're immensely valuable and I feel Apple is absolutely dumb for having equivalents baked in already. If they did, I'd happily switch over.

impish19on Ask HN: What is your proudest little invention or discovery?

Around 2000 when I was little, Cartoon Network in India used to run various contests for which you'd need to mail in an entry to participate. The problem was that the shipping address would be displayed on the TV maybe for 2-3 secs and I could never get it. After a few tries to memorize, I whipped out my solar camera and prepared for the address to appear again and clicked a picture and got it developed to get the address.

A few years later when I was in high school, everyone used to have the state-of-the-art 0.3MP-1.3MP cameras on their Moto L7 and Nokia 6600. My high school would frequently stick various notices like people's test scores, examination schedules etc. on the walls and those walls would get swarmed and you'd have to stand for minutes in the swarm getting pushed while you found your name on the many sheets of paper that were stuck, or while you copied the exam schedule etc. I'd get to the front of the swarm and channel all my energy into holding my phone steady pointed at the wall and click a picture and later zoom into it to get the information I needed from the comfort of the librar. I'd hear a chorus of 'aaahs' each time I did this when everyone would realize they could do the same.

Realization that you can click pictures of documents these days of course is almost common sense :)

impish19on Drawbacks of engaging with customer complaints on Twitter

Encouraging companies to embrace accountability was part of my motivation for working on FeatureAsk.com. Addressing customer complaints simply seems like an extension on it.

I feel like if 10% (or x% where x is subjective) of your users are asking for a feature that shouldn't be too intensive for you to build, (or are facing a problem persistently), then how dare you not build it (or address the problem). And if that's the case, there should be opportunity for someone else to see the problem and come solve it either with an alternate product, or a 3rd party solution.

impish19on Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR

If you'd like something that makes you _weirder_ I recommend this: https://www.netflix.com/title/81500204

This film opens with a testimonial from Alex Honnold for Marc-André Leclerc - whom the film is about.

impish19on Show HN: I Created a Chrome Extension for PG: TRAB (Tweet Reporter and Blocker)

Hey Henrik, the main link from this post is actually to the Github repo hosting the source for this extension. Is there more to making the source code public when you say making it open source/FOSS?

impish19on Show HN: I Created a Chrome Extension for PG: TRAB (Tweet Reporter and Blocker)

I should've clarified. Paul Graham. He started ycombinator (his tweet is quoted on the GitHub page)

impish19on Show HN: I Created a Chrome Extension for PG: TRAB (Tweet Reporter and Blocker)

Touché

impish19on Show HN: I Created a Chrome Extension for PG: TRAB (Tweet Reporter and Blocker)

I suppose bots can still be reported with this as spam

When you report a tweet today, twitter only allows to report for these categories: https://imgur.com/a/uoS3dZe

I'm not sure what category would apply to 'manipulated accounts' and how you would establish that. Objectively false information could probably be reported as 'misleading' I suppose? I'd be open to facilitating that if there's significant interest - might need to add a new button for that category.

impish19on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

Yeah I agree. I'm trying to get my initial users before I open the gates for everyone else.

Maybe just straight up opening the gates is the way to go forward - I'm considering that.

impish19on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://featureask.com/

It's 2022 and there should be a place on the internet where you can voice opinions/feedback towards your favorite products, and feel heard.

impish19on Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

@blueberrychpstx yeah, I'm familiar with UserVoice. I want to build a public UserVoice.

impish19on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2022)

Location: US/Bay Area

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java

Résumé/CV: on request

Email: hn@impish.33mail.com

I'm an ex big-tech/FANG-ish employee working on FeatureAsk.com open to part-time gigs that will let me live in the US. So, specifically looking for someone willing to: 1) sponsor a H1B, and 2) employ part-time

AFAIK since I already had an H1B I won't have to go through the lottery again.

In a heated hiring market I think making such an offer could be what gives small startups/employers an edge to be able to attract FANG-experienced engineers.

I've worked on application platforms before and am experienced in building distributed applications. Mainly familiar with Java and Python if that matters. 7 years of work-ex.

impish19on Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?

Hi, I'm an ex-big-tech employee working on FeatureAsk.com

It's 2022 and yet if you ever think of a feature for an app or a product you use, there's no good place to voice it and feel heard. I want to change that.

Looking to collaborate with fellow engineers and people with a strong product/growth sense.

impish19on Ask HN: Does any company hire engineers on part-time H1Bs?

I wouldn't have dared to think of something of the sort till I came across Gumroad's philosophy: https://sahillavingia.com/work

> It seems counterproductive for anyone to look for a part time dev when there plenty willing to work full time for the same H1B opportunity.

If you're a small company, you're going to have a lot of difficulty hiring a senior engineer who's had experience building highly scalable systems or systems with similar unique characteristics. Being open to a part-time position could give you leverage & result in a win-win situation.

impish19on Monkey MindPong

For me, I find it unsettling because it's a reminder of how ultimately we're all just compositions of atoms with electric signals in our body. While I find this immensely exciting, it unnervingly reminds me of my mortality. It's akin to what I imagine Neo would've felt when he learnt about the Matrix. I'd like to think I'd have without a doubt taken the red pill too (like I want this kind of research to be more successful) but anything that makes the Matrix more real is unsettling.

impish19on Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?

Came here to say the exact same thing. I can't stop talking to everyone and their brother about it. It feels like a clear leap into the future. For the uninitiated, here are some highlights of what it enables you to do:

- You can go to a friend's apartment with a Chromecast and just start playing games YOU own like CyberPunk & Assasins Creed within seconds on their TV (assuming they have a controller or you brought your own)

- You can go to Stadia.com on Chrome and just start playing these games from the browser using the Keyboard/Mouse

- The other day I was parked at a Target and I was able to play Cyberpunk on my phone using my phone's internet connection

- You don't have to keep worrying about constantly updating hardware, downloading game patches, deleting stored games etc.

- Time to load the game between saved checkpoints and missions is also much faster since the games run on a superior hardware.

impish19on DHS proposes to repeal Work Authorization to Spouses(H4) of H1B visa holders

It's extremely irresponsible of you to suggest that H1B holders are abusing the program by intending to immigrate because...

a) As pointed out by the comment earlier, H1B holders can have dual intent: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/About%20Us/E...

b) Structuring of EB2/3 queues according to the birthplace of the applicant itself is more abusive than most things to do with immigration to the US.

impish19on Countdown to timestamp 1,500M

This is like New Year for geeks

impish19on Supercharge your Computer Vision models with the TensorFlow Object Detection API

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14562314

impish19on Infosys plans to hire 10,000 American workers, open four U.S. tech centers

The apparent breakthrough isn't that they're going to hire Americans, but that they're planning to setup US centers.

impish19on Launch HN: Wifi Dabba (YC W17) – Low-Cost Wifi in India

Can you give us a (as long as possible) tldr version of how you went from Idea to execution? Did you have relevant background around ISPs and or telecom? How did you investigate which ISPs you could partner with and how did you partner with them?

impish19on Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

I'm with you on that and I do try to be as friendly as possible whenever I'm interviewing people for that reason. If you think there's anything else people can do to help in that regard then I'm all ears.

Edit: I guess companies should at least have a screening and training process for the people they allow to interview but, generically, I think this often gets overlooked in a lot of big companies.

impish19on Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

Anytime there's a blog post or a thread complaining about the 'broken coding interview process' it ends up being upvoted by everyone and their brother on HN but very rarely have I seen people offer a reasonable alternative instead.

I work for a big tech company and for our org, typically we have a couple of Algorithms/Coding rounds, a system design round, a technical communication round and a loosely structured interview/chat with a hiring manager. I think this works because people, at least on my teams, have to work on a wide array of features that could involve writing backend queues, or Hadoop jobs or some business logic on the API layer that would need to leverage caches/DBs/other appropriate key-value stores. It definitely does help to have people who have broader knowledge of Computer Science to be working on those features.

I feel our interviews have low recall and precision but a good accuracy (we end up hiring smart people we can count on to pick new things up). And FWIW I don't think we ask unreasonable questions during the coding rounds. I also feel it's a reasonably scalable way to organize a generic 'objective' and 'fair to all' interviewing process at a big company that can hold a reasonable hiring bar.

If I was running a smaller company then I probably would have kept in place a process that was closer to the bare practical requirements of the job.

Also, if the existing interview process was really that bad in practice with an abysmal correlation with successful hiring, wouldn't the companies have dropped it already?

I know this kind of sucks for applicants who think they have all the skills that are needed to practically do the things they'd have to do at the job they're interviewing for (and in some cases rightly so), but arguments bashing the current interview process would seem more valuable with the proposal for a better alternative that can comes off as reasonable after the same amount of critique and scrutiny that the current process gets.

Also, I often get confused - do people not agree that there's any correlation with hiring good engineers and the current process, or do they just think companies should have a more developer-friendly interview process? If it's the latter, then do the companies have any incentive to do so? It can't be that 'their potential hiring pool becomes wider' because if that really was such a big problem they would have changed already.

(All opinions mentioned here are mine and none are my employer's, obviously)

(Edited comment twice to attempt to make thoughts more coherent)

impish19on Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

I don't see it as the author complaining about the danger to the companies but merely stating it. It's not only just OK, but also necessary to throw light on this.

impish19on Spinner

Anyone else bothered by how the wheel doesn't stop when you tap on it when it's spinning?

impish19on Ask HN: Restarting the YC Podcast – who would be most interesting to listen to?

I don't know how long of a debate for a given topic are you imagining. I fear this would dilute the number of topics that can be covered.

impish19on It’s Not a Startup Visa, but It’s Close

IMHO the best deal for immigrant founders right now is that if you're in the fortunate position where your spouse has their I-140, then that'll qualify you for an EAD that you can use to start your startup.

The terrible thing about that is that puts considerable onus on your spouse to stay employed.

impish19on It’s Not a Startup Visa, but It’s Close

They didn't choose to call this program a 'parole'. The DHS already had statutory 'parole' authority that they're kind of hacking to let entrepreneurs use it because it's a pain in the ass to get new reforms fly by the Congress.