Hacker News: raz32dust

New comment by raz32dust in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

raz32dust — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 06:11:43 +0000

I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant" whereas for all practical purposes it is really an immigrant visa. Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency? People buy homes because it is a reasonable belief that they are going to be living here permanently and it has historically been true.

In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.

New comment by raz32dust in "Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022"

raz32dust — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:11:49 +0000

It almost certainly is. Just too early right now.

New comment by raz32dust in "Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?"

raz32dust — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:46:09 +0000

Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?

As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.

New comment by raz32dust in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

raz32dust — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:28:30 +0000

I know but the point is that it worked too. You could argue one problem is harder than the other, I am not and expert so I wouldn't know. But at least it's clear the second result is also impressive, and didn't require much expertise. So it's wrong to say that you need expertise to get hard and impressive things done with AI.

New comment by raz32dust in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

raz32dust — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:35:07 +0000

The top comment has a counter example though https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709

I think it's not even about the ability to steer the AI. Just the ability to ask the right questions

New comment by raz32dust in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time"

raz32dust — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:41:40 +0000

If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)

New comment by raz32dust in "The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon"

raz32dust — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:16:22 +0000

I agree with the author that engineers need to recalibrate and say yes more often but the zirp connection is a stretch and unnecessary.

Good engineers will say yes and no thoughtfully and will adjust to the new reality anyway. So it feels kind of pointless since no one is really a just say yes or just say no person, though it is well written.

New comment by raz32dust in "Waymo expands pause to four cities as robotaxis keep driving into floods"

raz32dust — Sat, 23 May 2026 07:08:55 +0000

Does anyone have insight into how waymo is actually doing as a business? It seems to be unaffordable in the bay area. 2-3x the cost of Uber/lyft whenever I've checked. It is very cool, but I can't imagine they're doing well at that price point

New comment by raz32dust in "How diamonds are made"

raz32dust — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:37:14 +0000

It's marketing plus perception of how expensive it is. Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.

New comment by raz32dust in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

raz32dust — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:53:16 +0000

Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.

New comment by raz32dust in "TransUnion says hackers stole 4.4M customers' personal information"

raz32dust — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 17:12:56 +0000

What can we do to keep these companies accountable? This is so frustrating.

New comment by raz32dust in "Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration"

raz32dust — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 09:46:05 +0000

This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.

New comment by raz32dust in "Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel"

raz32dust — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 04:52:53 +0000

In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.

I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).

New comment by raz32dust in "Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff"

raz32dust — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 01:19:17 +0000

No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.

With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.

New comment by raz32dust in "Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff"

raz32dust — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:15:11 +0000

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.

[1] https://backlinko.com/twitch-users

New comment by raz32dust in "Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content"

raz32dust — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 23:00:28 +0000

My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.

New comment by raz32dust in "Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript"

raz32dust — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:10:51 +0000

I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.

New comment by raz32dust in "George Carlin's "Soft Language" (2019)"

raz32dust — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 20:05:16 +0000

How is "firing people" more clear in intent than "Reduction in force"? Reduction in force/cutting costs is usually the intent. People getting fired is a side effect. "Firing people" is a more vivid picture, which is exactly why it is not the right term - it's too personal a term for something that usually is not personal. Performance-based layoffs = Firing. Cost/business-outlook-based layoffs = RIFs.

New comment by raz32dust in "Are any words the same in all languages?"

raz32dust — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 23:45:35 +0000

illai in Dravidian languages

New comment by raz32dust in "Cosmological time dilation in the early Universe"

raz32dust — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 07:02:14 +0000

"most accepted theory of physics is that the universe started from a single point": This is not true. The most accepted theory is that the universe was extremely dense, but it is not accepted that it was literally a "point" of zero volume. Our laws of physics are thought to break down beyond a certain density of matter, so we don't have any reliable predictions about it. The "dense" universe could still have been infinite even back then. Just super dense and infinite in all directions - and now all of it has expanded and it's still infinite (a bigger infinity?).