Hacker News: smnrchrds

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

smnrchrds — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:19:21 +0000

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.

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

smnrchrds — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:11:48 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway"

smnrchrds — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 19:59:21 +0000

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?

New comment by smnrchrds in "US manufacturing employment is down, but each state has its own story"

smnrchrds — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:05:06 +0000

St Louis Fed is really angling for that Beigie award.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition"

smnrchrds — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:20:57 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly""

smnrchrds — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:35:13 +0000

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?

New comment by smnrchrds in "Coq theorem prover is now called Rocq"

smnrchrds — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:09:55 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

smnrchrds — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:21:01 +0000

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...

New comment by smnrchrds in "New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements"

smnrchrds — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:17:49 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements"

smnrchrds — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:05:20 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements"

smnrchrds — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:06:20 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI"

smnrchrds — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:09:33 +0000

I disagree. Hexagons are the bestagons.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Retailer denies memory replacement due to 4x increase in DDR5 pricing"

smnrchrds — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:00:22 +0000

According to the link posted above, the choice is up to the customer, not the retailer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366595

New comment by smnrchrds in "Retailer denies memory replacement due to 4x increase in DDR5 pricing"

smnrchrds — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:18:10 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

smnrchrds — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:01:59 +0000

> 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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Just Get a Better Job"

smnrchrds — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:35:12 +0000

Sure. But this post resonated with me even though we have universal healthcare in Canada.

New comment by smnrchrds in "A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash"

smnrchrds — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:49:08 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash"

smnrchrds — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:47:53 +0000

> Well the em dash remains difficult to type on a normal keyboard

Not on Mac:

hyphen/dash: -

En-dash: ⌥-

Em-dash: ⇧⌥-

New comment by smnrchrds in "Show HN: RenderCV – Open-source CV/resume generator, YAML to PDF"

smnrchrds — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:59:08 +0000

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.

New comment by smnrchrds in "Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break"

smnrchrds — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:12:20 +0000

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?