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smnrchrds

10,766 karma · joined December 20, 2012

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smnrchrds··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
I had a study permit at first. I renewed my permit, got a work permit, renewed my foreign passport and extended my work permit, got PR and got citizenship, getting visas to match my work and study permits, over a period of 10 years, without ever having to leave Canada. So my experience is that in Canada you never have to leave but in the US you do.

My classmates who had gone to the US for PhD programs, even those who were fortunate enough to get multiple entry visas, had visas that allowed re-entry for only the first two years of the PhD program. After that, if they wanted to leave the US, say for a conference or to visit family, they would have had to apply for a visa from abroad and hope to be granted one. In Canada, I could apply for the visa and get it while in Canada. Even comparing like with like, the American system seems bizarre to me, looking at it from a Canadian lens.

smnrchrds··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
In Canada you never have to leave to renew or change status; it's just sometimes faster to do so. It's always the applicant's choice. I went through the whole work permit to PR to citizenship pipeline without ever having to leave the country.
smnrchrds··on And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
That's really egregious to do in Nova Scotia out of all places. Where there was a mass murderer on a 13-hour rampage, they just tweeted about it. This is what they use the emergency alert system for?
smnrchrds··on US manufacturing employment is down, but each state has its own story
St Louis Fed is really angling for that Beigie award.
smnrchrds··on Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition
The lawyer they banned was not engaging in litigation against MSG. She was part of a large firm (with more than 1000 lawyers) where another lawyer was working on litigation against MSG. Like imagine if Google sued Live Nation and then anyone working for Google was banned from Live Nation venues and Ticketmaster.
smnrchrds··on Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"
Imagine if you fall seriously ill and a charity hospital comes to you and admits you in, giving you medical care and shelter, at no cost to you. You are in dire need of urgent care, so you accept. There are round the clock nurses and doctors and you're attached to a ventilator.

Then one day hospital management changes and the next morning, they fire everyone and turn off your ventilator, not even giving you time to find another hospital to move to. Many patients suffocate to death before noon.

Did the new manager do anything wrong?

smnrchrds··on Coq theorem prover is now called Rocq
As a non-anglophone myself, I hate the fact that we have given one language so much power to dictate how every other country and language should name things. You will never find an American company changing the name of their product in the US because it sounds naughty in French. Yet here we are, a group of francophones feeling pressure to change their product's name for anglophones' sake.
smnrchrds··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
Australia already does something like this. I don't know if there were any engineers involved in designing it.

https://www.afsa.gov.au/professionals/resource-hub/penalty-u...

smnrchrds··on New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements
Same here in Canada. I have had three non-competes in my career, none of which were paid. All of them were probably unenforceable if it went to trial, but I would have never gotten that far in the hiring pipeline. I instead opted to switch industries and move to a jurisdiction that doesn't allow non-competes.
smnrchrds··on New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements
Most non-competes are at least 6 months but usually more than a year, and I have never worked in a company that was open to hiring someone with a start date that far in the future. Plus, the clock wouldn't even start running until they leave their job, so if you hire them for a start day in 12 months, they have to quit now and spend their savings. I have never met someone who was open to doing that. I am sure it could happen in very rare circumstances, but most jobs would be closed to most people with non-competes. I am glad that I live in a jurisdiction that doesn't allow them anymore.
smnrchrds··on New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements
You may not even get as far as an interview. More and more, I see job applications asking whether you are subject to non-competes, alongside asking about visa etc. I imagine answering yes will unceremoniously move your application to the reject pile.
smnrchrds··on I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI
I disagree. Hexagons are the bestagons.
smnrchrds··on Retailer denies memory replacement due to 4x increase in DDR5 pricing
According to the link posted above, the choice is up to the customer, not the retailer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366595
smnrchrds··on Retailer denies memory replacement due to 4x increase in DDR5 pricing
According to the article, the law says B. If that makes for bad law, it's up to the legislature to change it, not up to the retailer to unilaterally decide to stop following the law.
smnrchrds··on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
> From the site: Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November

It's Calgary. The landscape will be a lot snowier anytime in November.

smnrchrds··on Just Get a Better Job
Sure. But this post resonated with me even though we have universal healthcare in Canada.
smnrchrds··on A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
In my defense, I remember it because I expect Option key to modify the original character and Shift key to make it bigger, so remembering that Option plus Shift makes hyphen into a bigger alternate version of it, i.e. the em dash, is not difficult. I acknowledge that not everyone would see it this way.
smnrchrds··on A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
> Well the em dash remains difficult to type on a normal keyboard

Not on Mac:

hyphen/dash: -

En-dash: ⌥-

Em-dash: ⇧⌥-

smnrchrds··on Show HN: RenderCV – Open-source CV/resume generator, YAML to PDF
First of all, thank you for making this. I used it in my recent job search and it was fantastic.

Second, if I may make a request, could you please follow SemVer? I tried rendering my resume again last week, only 3 or 4 months after having made it originally with RenderCV version 2 point something I cannot recall, and it would not work. The design schema and perhaps also the CLI options have changes so much that I expect I would need to spend 2 to 4 hours getting it to work again, and there is no guarantee that it would not break again in another month. I would have appreciated if the versioning scheme followed SemVer, so I would know that any v2 engine would work and v3 engine would not.

I also would appreciate it if you could write detailed migration docs between versions and/or recommendations in error messages. The reason I think migrating my CV would take so long is that I have to go by trial and error, searching for similar-sounding parameter names and replacing them one-by-one. I gave up after an hour of this as I was nowhere near done.

Third, is markdown render supposed to miss information or is it a bug? Some sections of the resume would not end up in the markdown version, only showing section title and nothing else. If this is not expected behaviour, please let me know.

Again, thank you for making this. I look forward to using it again in the future.

smnrchrds··on Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
Thank you for writing this post. Your writing is insightful and thought-provoking. I would love to follow your blog to read your future posts as well, but I could not find an RSS feed or an email newsletter option. Is there any chance that you would add RSS to your blog in the future?
smnrchrds··on Layoffs hit highest level for the month since 2003
I can see the logic. Layoffs are always terrible. But if I am getting laid off anyway, I would prefer to know about it before I spend a whole bunch of money during holidays.
smnrchrds··on Harnessing America's heat pump moment
I see. Thanks for the explanation. So the system is slow to come up to the set temperature. Is it good at keeping the temperature though? After the house temp gets to 70, does it consistently stay at 70, or are there shortcomings in this aspect too?
smnrchrds··on Harnessing America's heat pump moment
I have never had a heat pump, so I wasn't aware of this shortcoming. Could you please explain a bit more how different it is with heat pump compared to furnace?
smnrchrds··on US tariff negotiations with Canada terminated over advertisement
Also Canadian here. Have been closely following US-Canada trade for years. What you are saying is news to me. I am leaning towards believing you are simply mistaken, but if you have specific evidence about these two assertions, I would love to study them:

> tariffs on a ton of stuff

> we are rebuked because we have tariffs on a bunch of their goods

I can guess why one might think some of this (tariffs on Chinese EVs directly led to agricultural counter-tariffs from them and dairy trade barriers have always been a source of frustration), but in general, Canada's tariffs and barriers are by all indications in line with peer countries (US, UK, EU, Australia, etc.) and not particularly noteworthy. If you have concrete evidence to the contrary (not just that some trade barriers exist between Canada and its trading partners, but that they are out of the ordinary and much higher than other countries'; and that the world, in particular EU does not want closer ties with us because of them), I would love to study your sources and update my understanding.

smnrchrds··on Show HN: A Digital Twin of my coffee roaster that runs in the browser
I didn't know digital twin had an official definition. Could you please share a bit more on what makes a simulation a digital twin?
smnrchrds··on "Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces
For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.
smnrchrds··on Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply
H1-Bs are indefinitely renewable as long as you keep your job.
smnrchrds··on Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply
The only effect of applying to jobs on jobs.now is that someone who is already working in the US on H1-B, and was gonna get green card if you hadn't applied, would instead stay on H1-B.
smnrchrds··on LLMs aren't world models
Indeed. If the LLM calls a chess engine tool behind the scenes, it would be able to play excellent chess as well.
smnrchrds··on The era of boundary-breaking advancements is over? [video]
OpenAI defines AGI as a "highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work" [0]. It may not be the most satisfying definition, but it is practical and a good goal to aim for if you are an AI company.

[0] https://openai.com/our-structure/

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