anelson

Anecdote time:

My Eastern European wife and I recently faced the decision of how to go about getting her a green card. At the time we lived outside the US.

One option was to enter the US on her B1 visa pretending to have no “immigration intent” and then “change our mind” a respectable number of days later and apply for AOS. The process for this was 1.5 to 2 years. I didn’t want to do it for that reason and because I wasn’t comfortable with what amounts to visa fraud, but our attorney presented it as a pretty standard option.

The other option was consular processing. This wasn’t automatic. Our attorney contacted a few consulates in the region where we lived to see if any would accept our case (due to war the consulate in her home country wasn’t handling routine cases). We got approved for consular processing in Budapest.

I had to go once as the US citizen spouse to submit our application packet and do a pro forma interview. Then a few months later it was my wife’s turn to go to the interview.

The process, like any immigration process, was paperwork heavy and nerve wracking. The final interview was very simple and felt like a formality.

In that case once approved she received a visa that would be stamped upon entry to the US and this would count as a temporary green card pending receipt of the physical card.

All of this happened during the second Trump administration so I was expecting a hostile or at least adversarial process. But it was quite the opposite. Total elapsed time was about six months from initial attorney consult to entry into the US as an LPR. It would have been faster if our attorney was more on the ball getting our final interview appointment.

If I were to find myself in need of a green card for a foreign spouse again I would opt for consular processing if given the choice. Now that it’s required I imagine there will be a longer backlog.

Obviously if you need to do this at one of the consulates that no longer offers consular processing that’s a different story. I was fortunate that the Budapest consulate agreed to take our case.

US General class here.

I got into it recently mainly to play with digital modes on HF for emergency comms and also because it’s an interesting and unexplored field for me.

There’s precedent for Georgian dissidents fleeing to Ukraine. Saakashvili was living in Ukraine for a while before he returned and is AFAIK still in prison in Georgia.

I fled to Georgia when the invasion started and lived there 10 months. I’m grateful to the Georgian people for their hospitality towards me and my Ukrainian colleagues who took shelter there in a very dark time. But having said that we all subsequently returned to Ukraine.

Georgia isn’t a bad country. It’s very under rated in my opinion. The Georgian people are very friendly, their (private) healthcare is high quality, and as long as you don’t run afoul of the ruling party it’s pretty safe as well. But Ukraine even in a time of war is more advanced and has better economic infrastructure. If I were a Georgian dissident I could easily see myself fleeing to Ukraine.

If you really believe that you’d be better off somewhere else, and you’re a US citizen in decent financial shape, you are absolutely not trapped in the USA.

I’ve in Europe for 7 years now, not to escape any particular political ideology back home but suffice it to say that I was motivated. If you’re motivated and willing to endure some discomfort there are multiple options for European immigration available to you.

Making any statement about “Europe” is painting with a broad brush, that said I am not particularly bullish on Europe now, for various reasons. But I can’t think of any European country that has the same problems as the US; they all have their own problems, as well as just different ways of doing things.

I’ve never lived in an agrarian commune but I can say with certainty that it would be my absolute last choice.

The move that I’m fighting in my company now is hiring bargain basement Indian outsourced heads who are very obviously vibe coding slop. It’s a raw deal for us since we’re paying extra for a meat wrapper around an LLM coding agent, but I’m sure it’s a boon for the outsourcing company who can easily put one vibe-coding head on three or four engagements in parallel. It’s hard to imagine LLM coding technologies not being enthusiastically adopted by all of the outsourcers given the economic incentives to do so.

Whether or not they end up losing business long term, it seems like a nice grift for as long as they can pull it off.

I’ve experienced this as well. If management is not competent they can’t tell (or don’t want to hear) when a “star” performer is actually a very expensive wrapper around a $20/mo cursor subscription.

Unlike the author of the article I do get a ton of value from coding agents, but as with all tools they are less than useless when wielded incompetently. This becomes more damaging in an org that already has perverse incentives which reward performative slop over diligent and thoughtful engineering.

Not the parent, but I take it by going to any pharmacy in Ukraine and asking for it. Prescription not required. In my case it’s part of a treatment protocol for insulin resistance but the pharmacist doesn’t ask and I don’t tell them.

When I lived in Georgia it was also that easy.

You regurgitated Russian propaganda about Russian-speaking people in Ukraine which is clearly not based on your own experience and I provided a counterpoint based on actually living in Ukraine. If you think I have misrepresented the actual experience of actual Russian-speaking Ukrainians in actual Ukraine then by all means educate me.

Ukraine has a long history of resisting Russian subjugation, long before supposed CIA plots and conversations with Victoria Nuland. I wish there were some sinister plot to vanquish Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine; maybe then the Western powers would finally jock up and put an end to Russian imperialism once and for all. Sadly I’m afraid this narrative of Ukraine as pawn to destroy Russia is only a Russian propagandist’s fever dream.

This bullshit Russian propaganda talking point needs to die. “Russian-speaking Ukrainians” are Ukrainians.

I was at a birthday party in Kyiv about a month ago, the only non-Ukrainian guest. Most of the day most the guests were speaking Russian, even when cursing the Russian invaders and toasting to their deaths. These were “elites” economically speaking.

The idea that there are Russian speaking Ukrainians being oppressed like Jews in Nazi Germany is idiotic and not at all based in reality.

Source: I speak Russian but not Ukrainian, my wife is a Ukrainian whose native language is Russian. Every time we wake up in the night to Russian bombardment we curse the Russian invaders—in Russian!

I had the opposite problem. They closed my account with very short notice back when they decided to purge all customers with any connection to Ukraine. This was an account for a US company owned by me a US citizen receiving payments from the US and paying contractors in Hungary, but once upon a time I had paid contractors in Ukraine. All addresses and legal agreements were in the US.

So if anyone else is having trouble closing your Mercury account I suggest you contact support and ask to change your principal location to somewhere in Ukraine. Your account will be closed in no time.

In almost every restaurant and cafe that I frequent in Ukraine, each table has a unique QR code that links to a site with both the menu and an option to pay the bill. The pay option shows the current itemized bill with options to pay with monoPay (a payment service operated by MonoBank which also operate this QR code system) or Apple Pay or iirc Google Pay. Tip can also be paid here (although it’s not pushed on you with dark patterns like in the US and 10% is reasonable). It felt odd at first to just walk out after a meal without having given money to a person but it quickly become my preferred payment method.

There is no app to install. WiFi is always available so you don’t even technically need to have a mobile data plan.

If you don’t want to use this then you call the waiter over and someone brings the mobile credit card terminal instead.

The “how does the waiter know to come and take payment” problem is unique to how restaurants in some countries handle paying the bill.

I too am impressed by Cloudflare Workers’ potential.

However Workers supports WASM so you don’t necessarily have to switch to JavaScript to use it.

I wrote some Rust code that I run in Cloudflare Functions, which is a layer on top of Cloudflare Workers which also supports WASM. I wrote up the gory details if you’re interested:

https://127.io/2024/11/16/generating-opengraph-image-cards-f...

JavaScript is most definitely the path of least resistance but it’s not the only way.

Yes, 1000x this!

School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.

Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.

What you're describing is actually not that different from my own conception of what a senior principal SWE is. Simply stated, I would define that level as a very experienced, knowledgeable, competent SWE whose main value to the org isn't in KLOCs they personally write but as a force multiplier who sees around corners (but also writes their fair share of KLOCs).

What turns me off about the version of an L7 SWE as described in the OP's link is the extent to which it doesn't sound like that at all. Maybe it's my bias against BigTech career ladders, but reading between the lines it sounds to me like it's more about navigating organization, political, and bureaucratic obstacles and attending a lot of meetings and generally being seen to be doing these things.

The point of my comment is that perhaps it is rational for an org like Dropbox to value the ability to do that more highly, but I've been in those roles and I found them personally to be soul-crushing.

When reading BigTech career ladders like this one, I immediately fall into the trap of projecting myself onto the ladder, and getting upset when the level I've chosen for myself is described as something that sounds far removed from what I want to do. I must remind myself to frame this as how Dropbox describes the things that they value in each position. An L7 SWE is the most valuable SWE in Dropbox, as measured by the comp that they are will to offer to L7s.

When I see that "code fluency" expectation tops out at L3, "design" at L5, and "architecture" at L6, I'm taken aback. So in Dropbox, L7s and L3s have equivalent code fluency?? Heresy! Nonsense! Dysfunction!

But I try to see this from the perspective of the (I assume) execs who maintain this document. Is the value of an L7 that they write better Python or React or Rust code than the other Ls? Or is it that they are expected to navigate the bureaucratic maze that Dropbox has become, making things happen and getting things shipped instead of throwing up their hands and blaming corporate dysfunction? I imagine myself as a Director in this same environment, bucking for a promotion which could easily have a seven-figure impact on my comp; who do I want implementing the projects that I am going to put into my promotion packet? Probably I want whoever will make things happen, I doubt I care very much about how finely crafted the code is or how many CPU cycles that hot new feature is going to consume in prod. In fact the document is explicit that all roles are measured on impact, which is only vaguely related to technical excellence.

This kind of thing used to upset me, as I've spent decades refining my craft as a SWE, I consider myself to be very good at it, and here's a Dropbox document telling me that they value my skills at about an L3-L5 level which would typically be 20-somethings on a traditional SWE career path. If I want to work at Dropbox with a title that matches my own self-assessed level (L7, naturally!), I will apparently be expected to do very little of the craft that I love and have honed over decades, and instead should attend a lot of meetings, craft long-term visions, influence strategies, and probably cross-functionally synergize paradigms or something.

But thinking more deeply about this, setting aside emotion, it makes a certain kind of sense. After all, at this point in the lifecycle of Dropbox or any other BigTech, what would have a bigger impact: another hot-shot software engineer shipping code day and night, or a smart technically-minded operator navigating the corporate hierarchy and political minefield to get the right things done in spite of the dysfunctional structures that seemingly every big org evolves into order time? The answer is obvious from my framing, the only confusing thing about this is that they use the title "SWE" for both of those things.

I would be interested in a Dropbox L7 SWE level of compensation, and I've already self-assessed myself as L7, yet my impression from reading this document is that I would be miserable as an L7 in Dropbox. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've spent almost the entirety of my career in startups without rigid career ladders, or vesting-in-place at the big companies that acquired those startups, or most recently founding my own software startup. That this career framework has convinced me that Dropbox isn't the right place for me is probably a good thing, as it saves me and Dropbox interviewers quite a bit of wasted time and effort.

That’s a long story. Mostly just a series of unexpected turns and a search for meaning in my professional life.

As for why I stayed, it’s hard to believe but even today, modulo the air raids, my life in Kyiv is just better than the life I led before in Miami, and vastly better than my life now in Budapest. I fell in love with that city when I started traveling there on business in the 2010s, and decided to move there to build my next company in 2018. The people, infrastructure, services, startup culture, healthcare, etc are all much better than a country with Ukraines history and geographical fate would suggest. That’s down to the Ukrainian people who have by force of will achieved some remarkable things with very little.

The war is already destroying some of what they have achieved, and depending on how it ends may destroy it all. But as I said, even now in a brutal and relentless war, life goes on.

I should also point out that as recently as last month I heard a lot of American accented English from obvious tourists on the streets in Kyiv. I was at a trendy restaurant with a Ukrainian colleague and nearly every other table had at least one foreigner. Some are there to cash in on the wartime opportunities with drones and other offensive and defensive technologies, some are deniable operators doing god knows what, but my sense is that a fair number are just tourists. Go figure.

It is true that war can rage in a country and people not on the frontline can live reasonably normal lives. I returned to Kyiv in August of last year, and lived for over a year during some of the worst air attacks on the country.

It’s not so much that there is no danger or the war is far away. I woke up many times to explosions in the distance and air raid alarms in the capital are a daily occurrence. Attacks are absolutely not limited to critical infrastructure. Even if Russia didn’t deliberately target civilian populations (and they definitely do), air defenses don’t vaporize enemy ordnance so it’s going to fall down somewhere, and when attacks are happening in cities then it’s likely that it will land on something populated.

It’s more that the odds of being killed or wounded as a civilian in the capital are higher than in a peaceful country but low enough that the mind just gets used to it and you go on with life.

I finally left Ukraine a few weeks ago, for fear of how bad the winter will be with the infrastructure bombing. My wife and I moved to Budapest. Believe it or not, we miss Kyiv and want to move back in the spring, war notwithstanding.

Having said all that, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and I do not understand why any Iraqi family would move back there during that time, unless they were Kurdish and moved to the northern Kurdish territory.

This is a great visualization. It highlights not only the increased frequency of attacks but the extent to which they happen at night and especially pre-dawn hours.

I returned to a Kyiv in August 2023 and in the intervening time I’ve noticed this trend as well. It really takes a psychological toll when you are woken up in the night over and over by explosions or air defense systems firing.

If more westerners had to live this way for a month or two I think it would go along way to a better understanding of the plight (and incredible grit) of everyday Ukrainians.

It's great to see the rapid iteration on this. Congratulations on the adoption so far!

It must be so cool to work at a company that is cool with open-sourcing projects like this ;)

I have personally obtained two Starlink dishes in Ukraine. One I preordered more than a year before the war, which was fast tracked by SpaceX shortly after the war started. This was a lifesaver in the early days when power outages took down landline and mobile internet. I paid the $599 for this one.

I then ordered a second one later in 2022, thinking it will be years away. It was ready to ship in a month or so and spacex offered to ship it with no additional charge (just the $99 deposit I paid). I accepted this generous offer and am grateful to SpaceX for their help.

So technically it’s correct that SpaceX did not provide either of these dishes for free. I also paid the monthly service which is discounted compared to US rates but not free. However it’s also correct to say that SpaceX was generous in making Starlink available and gave at least one dish away for nominal cost in the early days. I’m sure I’m not the only one who benefited from this.

Starlinks are used a lot on the front. Of course they get captured by Russian forces sometimes.

At my company we’ve written all of our Lambda functions in Rust. It’s a perfect fit with the constraints in Lambda. We did customize the runtime somewhat for our needs but that wasn’t all that complicated.

My company maintains an out-of-tree kernel module for changed block tracking. It requires a full-time Linux driver developer to keep it compiling and working on new kernels.

Our module is GPL FWIW but I doubt it would be accepted into the kernel tree as it is. We need to have a driver developer on staff anyway to support it so it works out okay for us. But if we ever stop maintaining it, it will bitrot quickly and stop working on new kernels.

I remember reading this quote in the original print magazine when I was a teenager living in rural Nebraska. For some reason a Safeway in the nearest town had a decent selection of magazines including Dr Dobbs Journal and MSJ. I cut out that particular quote and pasted it next to my monitor, because I was so deeply struck by the fact that there was actually another person in the world who felt the way did about programming. It’s quite the wave of nostalgia reading it again now in my 40s. How little has changed…

I have a residential Starlink terminal in Ukraine, service costs $60/mo. I assume this higher fee is for a higher tier of service suitable for military use where reliability is mission critical.

That’s been our experience as well. Auth0 seemed like a great deal and we were happy to have such a sensitive component handled by a dedicated third party, but their sales team aggressively pursues us as soon as we go over some MAU limit and it’s clear that the nickel-and-diming is only going to get worse as we grow. We need to migrate away sooner or later.

.308 is probably referring to 7.62 NATO. If so there do exist level IV rifle plates that can also protect against a single impact from 7.62 NATO ball.

HESCO make some and I’m sure others do as well. But they’re not cheap. The HESCO plates I’m thinking of also claim to stop 30-06 armor piercing! You might survive a hit like that on your plates but the blunt force of the impact would still cause injury.

Wow that brings back fond memories of my youth. That thread spawned numerous memes across the gun forums I frequented at the time. I remember reading this on ar15.com but that could be the mists of time obscuring my memory.

I got this too for my Starlink unit in Ukraine. Dropped to $60 from $100. A welcome change although I for some reason assumed it was specifically for Ukraine. Looks like it’s in a number of markets.

We use localstack for as much of our integration tests as we can, and have multiple paid licenses. When we started using it I was skeptical that it could reliably mimic all the AWS services we use, and I was right. Don’t get me wrong it’s a valiant effort and it lets us run tests much faster (and obviously cheaper) than the real thing, but those same tests need to pass on live AWS too before we have any confidence in our code.

If any of the localstack authors are reading this, thank you for your tireless efforts!

Another NewsBlur user here, ever since Google killed off Google Reader. All of my news and regular content consumption, including HN, is via RSS. If a site doesn’t have a well behaved RSS feed then I won’t be able to follow it.

I’ve used a number of blog engines over the years and don’t recall ever having a problem with RSS. It seems like a solved problem on the publishing side.

I do find it annoying when the RSS feed publishes only partial content without making it clear that it’s doing so.