Hacker News: mportela

New comment by mportela in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

mportela — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:24:11 +0000

Oh, yeah, that makes sense!

New comment by mportela in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

mportela — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:14:43 +0000

Not really… Theoretically, you could get it issued in a third country under very restrict conditions (renewing to the same class, in Mexico or Canada, force majeure, etc). However, the likelihood of it being denied was considerably higher, so basically all immigration lawyers strongly recommended going back to the home country.

The recent policy change ended that possibility altogether.

New comment by mportela in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

mportela — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:06:16 +0000

Not _this_ time but they were targeted previously: banning up to 75 countries from issuing visas, adding a $100k fee to the application, forcing visa renewals to go through consular processing instead of change of status, etc.

The end goal is to do end migration as a whole (especially from “certain places”) and expel all “undesirables”. To get there, they will test the waters, get the right precedents and judicial orders in place, and move the Overton window enough so the public sees these actions as “business as usual”.

New comment by mportela in "Disruption with Some GitHub Services – Resolved"

mportela — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:24:55 +0000

I agree. I think it is the kind of situation that goes “gradually and then suddenly”, to quote Hemingway.

New comment by mportela in "Disruption with Some GitHub Services"

mportela — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:41:39 +0000

GitHub Actions upkeep is down to one 9. I miss the days big tech aimed for four or five 9s of reliability :(

New comment by mportela in "China's Rise in Drug Development Looms over U.S."

mportela — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:23:26 +0000

Non-paywalled article: https://archive.is/9tg3a

China's Rise in Drug Development Looms over U.S.

mportela — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:22:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/business/china-lung-cancer-drugs-asco.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341176

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by mportela in "Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence"

mportela — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:14:05 +0000

The legit gacha experience

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.