Hacker News: bubblethink

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:58:46 +0000

>it should be noted that a lack of a prosecution (yet?) is not proof of legality or compliance either.

Prosecution or lack of prosecution in this area are both political. The previous DOJ also sued SpaceX for not hiring asylees. I am not aware of an actual court victory. These tend to settle out of court and both sides get to claim victory and make headlines.

>they tend to look for technical compliance

I'm taking a more holistic view here, which is that the whole thing is so farcical that enforcing compliance here does more harm than good. Look at the operation that chained Hyundai workers and deported them for a photo op. What did it achieve? It created a diplomatic incident, the battery plant stopped producing batteries, and the state lost tax revenue.

>Those are some of the factors USCIS uses but no single factor is sufficient.

That's a whole different can of worms. There is endless litigation over things that USCIS does in its infinite wisdom. Fortunately, we have the APA and Loper Bright overturned Chevron, so it should restore some sanity to it.

Aside: >prosecutions for downloading something

There is no real prosecution for downloading. It's only uploading. The technical definition is the same as the legal one. The way DMCA prosecution works is that if you are in a torrent swarm and are uploading, you are distributing content, which is easier to prove under copyright law.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:45:12 +0000

>when there's significant unemployment in the sector then there is by definition availability

Humans aren't fungible.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:05:50 +0000

You are conflating several unrelated issues. In your previous post, you expressed how you wish PERM worked ("I also think that doing layoffs in the US should disqualify you from doing any PERM or sponsoring any visa for 2-3 years."), to which my response was why have PERM at all. You are still talking about how you wish the world worked. There are a lot of shoulds in your reply. PERM, H-1B, etc. all exist as a carefully brokered compromise bw different factions that want different things. It is the correct amount of broken by design. Posting in a Sunday newspaper is a requirement in the regulations. Everyone is in the right amount of compliance to maintain equilibrium. There are any number of things that could be or should be, but aren't.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:23:12 +0000

Not Peter. All your domestic stuff can probably be resolved by a skilled attorney, but travel definitely has risks. You can't do anything if you are denied entry or if your visa renewal is denied. There is virtually no legal recourse.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:15:58 +0000

Not a lawyer. PERM is a DOL process. Travel is governed by visas (or parole in some cases). The two are unrelated.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:08:25 +0000

Since we are doing wishes and grievances, why have PERM at all?

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:00:39 +0000

>and locals getting priced out by immigrants who work for tech companies basically characterizes the demographic trajectory of my hometown.

That's on the locals. They are being priced out because they don't want to build any housing (NIMBYism) nor do they want to pay taxes on property (Prop 13). Don't blame immigrants for the policy failures of the bay area. These failures extend to all of CA and predate tech immigrants.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:20:09 +0000

They've always had nationwide data. The database is NCIC. It's an imperfect database that has hits for any interaction with law enforcement. USCIS/DHS/State routinely use this database. So there's not much that's new there.

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:13:27 +0000

Also that the fee exists as a proclamation but is being litigated. It is on appeal in the DC circuit and there is a separate case in ND CA as well. In light of learning resources, my money is on it being overruled.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72095497/chamber-of-com...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71541425/global-nurse-f...

New comment by bubblethink in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

bubblethink — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:10:04 +0000

That is your contention though. The government needs to prove that in a court of law that they are violating the statute or the regulations.

New comment by bubblethink in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

bubblethink — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:12:08 +0000

News like this makes you realize that these countries have just given up entirely on the idea of progress or innovation. Peak tourist town mentality.

New comment by bubblethink in "I love my dumb watches"

bubblethink — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:22:46 +0000

Because there isn't much that is actionable with sleep tracking. You can lose weight if you have sleep apnea, and anecdotally people claim that not drinking helps, but you don't need a watch to tell you that. With blood pressure, you get on losartan and see the results immediately.

New comment by bubblethink in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

bubblethink — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:49:35 +0000

Do you mean to say that postmarketOS is somehow better on non Pixel devices? I would assume that Pixels are closest to upstream and have the longest software support life in Android world.

New comment by bubblethink in "Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable"

bubblethink — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:47:26 +0000

This is such a strange comment that is full of contradictions. Pixels are supported because the manufacturer supports alternate OSes. I don't get what languishing means here. Pixel hardware lags behind the latest Snapdragon hardware, but it's not something that average people know or care about. So, you can gush all you want, but I don't see why it's a big deal. It's great that they found an OEM and it's great for the overall health of the project, but not because of gaming or the latest Snapdragon.

New comment by bubblethink in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

bubblethink — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:13:40 +0000

>Dell has a market cap of 80 billion $, Supermicro has 20 billion $. Must really suck to be them I guess.

For a startup, if the thesis is to take market share away from those two, it's actually not such a good story. You need a product that is 10x better than the competition, and I'm not convinced that the enhancements to firmware, reliability etc. amount to a 10x jump in business value prop. You aren't making silicon. You are still ultimately a purveyor of other people's IP.

New comment by bubblethink in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

bubblethink — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:42:55 +0000

All that is fine and well, and I love coreboot, openbmc, etc. as much as the next guy, but how is this a business with growth or scale? In particular, you are not going to sell to the large clouds as they do a similar thing in house, you are not going to sell to the large LLM labs as there isn't much of a story with NVIDIA here. All you are selling to is on-prem deployments for old(er) school workloads, which to me is a shrinking market to begin with. You are like a fancier version of Dell or Supermicro. I don't get it. But maybe this is the Dropbox comment.

New comment by bubblethink in "US Immigration on the Easiest Setting"

bubblethink — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:31:26 +0000

This is easily fixable by requiring convictions. Immigration is the only area where this type of pre-crime fast and loose nonsense is allowed.

New comment by bubblethink in "Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?"

bubblethink — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:53:55 +0000

Good use case and an example of brokenness of UX on Linux in many small and subtle ways. It frustrates me to no end that GNOME, Nautilus, etc. will truncate or hide information in many places. I don't think this has been fixed but the launcher will truncate names with ellipsis. So analyzer will appear as "anal..."

New comment by bubblethink in "'Ripping' Clips for YouTube Reaction Videos Can Violate the DMCA, Court Rules"

bubblethink — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:44:44 +0000

What a moronic take. You end your sentence with a ?, so it looks like you want an answer. Here is the answer: Don't watch the reaction clips. No one is forcing you to watch them.

New comment by bubblethink in "US Immigration on the Easiest Setting"

bubblethink — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:33:11 +0000

It's a bit of both. I would wager that most Americans believe that there are reasonable pathways, either through education, work, family ties, or even asylum, to "legally" immigrate to the US. They have never dealt with the Kafkaesque nightmare that is USCIS or the State Dept.