Readit Newssharno commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network? · Posted by u/mbix77
That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.
It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.
Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.
Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.
I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.
Whenever I'm filling a long form on an official website, I feel like I'm racing against an invisible clock because of this session time out thing that happened to me countless times.
sharno commented on Push Ifs Up and Fors Down matklad.github.io/2023/11... · Posted by u/goranmoomin
A more general rule is to push ifs close to the source of input: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/dont-push-ifs-up-p...
It's really about finding the entry points into your program from the outside (including data you fetch from another service), and then massaging in such a way that you make as many guarantees as possible (preferably encoded into your types) by the time it reaches any core logic, especially the resource heavy parts.
That's almost the same thing as parse don't validate: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...
https://github.com/sharno/zagel