Hacker News: mportela

US suspends immigrant visa processing for 75 countries beginning January 21

mportela — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:53:20 +0000

Article URL: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/immigrant-visa-processing-updates-for-nationalities-at-high-risk-of-public-benefits-usage.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639149

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mportela in "Tell HN: Happy New Year"

mportela — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:29:15 +0000

Happy new year from New York!

New comment by mportela in "Metropolis 1998 lets you design every building in an isometric, pixel-art city (2024)"

mportela — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:51:28 +0000

I've recently watched a video [1] that mentions how pre-rendered graphics dominated the 90s-early 2000s and were replaced by real-time rendering. You'll probably like it too!

[1] The Beauty of Pre-Rendered Graphics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3SwbHIPnfo

New comment by mportela in "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents"

mportela — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 10:26:24 +0000

FWIW I had a professor that defined "robotics" in the same way (we even had a quite philosophical debate on whether automatic doors are robots). I ended up liking Norvig and Russell's definition better by appending the word "autonomously".

Another interesting word that is quite out fashion nowadays is "cybernetics": "Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action." [1]

Having studied Control Engineering in college, to me, all these things are feedback control loops. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback

New comment by mportela in "Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013)"

mportela — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:47:28 +0000

Then definitely what 3Blue1Brown's video on eigenvalues and eigenvectors. [1] That's when I clicked to me! His entire series on Linear Algebra is incredibly well produced.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=PFDu9oVAE-g

New comment by mportela in "The US island that speaks Elizabethan English"

mportela — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:08:30 +0000

While that's true, one of the reasons why Spain mandates Castellano in the federal level is a legacy of Franco's push to annihilate the other languages spoken in the country. In a way, forcing a single language and culture is a textbook example of what authoritarian governments do.

New comment by mportela in "Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord"

mportela — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:19:46 +0000

And with good audio chat

New comment by mportela in "Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord"

mportela — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 12:18:23 +0000

Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.

New comment by mportela in "Show HN: I made my own OS from scratch because I was bored"

mportela — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:39:30 +0000

Great, now go back to study before Duolingo kidnaps your family

New comment by mportela in "Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more"

mportela — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 04:35:47 +0000

"-y" is a quite common diminutive suffix in English nowadays. As a fun fact, Americans find hilarious/cute how Brazilians pronounce English words ending in consonants (e.g. WhatsApp/Facebook) adding an extra "i/ee/y" sound because it sounds like adding "-inho" to them!

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

mportela — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:40:15 +0000

I would assume so, since a foreign attorney wouldn't be able to help with US immigration law.

New comment by mportela in "Ozempic and Wegovy are selected for Medicare's price negotiations"

mportela — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:59:02 +0000

Unfortunately, that's all the Biden administration could get written into law. The Big Pharma lobby is too strong and definitely battled to keep this list as small as possible.

New comment by mportela in "Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab"

mportela — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:22:54 +0000

like the healthcare industry in the US

New comment by mportela in "Lucy: A concise language for describing Finite State Machines"

mportela — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 21:07:50 +0000

Hmm, concatenation and alternation are exactly what I thought of when reading the work "composition" (I probably had functional programming in mind).

I'm curious. What came to your mind for "composition"?

New comment by mportela in "Updates to H-1B"

mportela — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:07:35 +0000

I believe that's the O-1 visa, not the H-1B.

New comment by mportela in "Ask HN: How do you find part time work?"

mportela — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 20:09:09 +0000

Follow up question: how do you find freelancing opportunities?

New comment by mportela in "Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion"

mportela — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 16:55:19 +0000

It's called garnishment [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garnishment

New comment by mportela in "TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court"

mportela — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 17:38:34 +0000

> Note the court does not say foreign actors don't have First Amendment rights.

Is there a precedence on foreign actors (either inside or outside the US) having First Amendment rights?

New comment by mportela in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

mportela — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 12:56:24 +0000

Sure, but education (and healthcare) costs grew much faster than the inflation.

"The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963.

(...)

After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963."

https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate

New comment by mportela in "YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design"

mportela — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 21:34:41 +0000

I had a similar experience, except Mechanical Engineering being my weakest area. Computer Science felt like a children's game compared to fluid dynamics...