skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
German, Romanian, Vietnamese-American (1st generation immigrant), Chinese-American (1st generation immigrant), Spanish, Iranian, French, Australian, South African, Indian, British, Russian. What's that? The nationalities of the people who sit in my hallway in the computer security department of one of the biggest software companies in the United States. OK, admittedly there also four or five true red-blooded Americans in the hallway but they are definitely a small minority.

We are absolutely feeling the lack of US geeks. They are rare enough in software development but even rarer in computer security. We have several open positions but it's mostly non-Americans who apply. We are basically excited about every application from a US citizen we get. This makes hiring much easier and we do not have to wait until October 1st when the new H-1B visa period kicks in.

Now, I have speculated that maybe the company I work for is just unpopular with US citizens but then I recently interviewed with a Bay Area company with a much sexier public image and it's even worse there. I talked to members of a team of 12 people. 11 of them were not Americans.

In fact, we spent the lunch interview speculating about the causes of this situation. In the end we considered it most likely that the title of engineer is simply not sexy in the United States. In other parts of the world like some countries in Europe and especially Asia the job title of engineer carries a good amount of social respect and commands a respectable salary. That is not the case in the United States (well, the salary is actually good, but not the reputation) where the reputation ladder is topped by jobs like doctor or lawyer. It is not surprising that the smartest students would rather get into those jobs.

Anyway, in the light of all this I keep being amused that the US three-letter agencies are advertising their computer security positions so aggressively. With the current US talent I am seeing in the wild there is no way they will be able to fill these positions in any way that can compete with, say, the Chinese hacker legions. Rather, I foresee national interest waiver greencards for people like those in my hallway.
I agree that losing the right to exercised options in a highly public, billion dollar deal is odd. However, the end result is that guy has no stock or money. This is the same result of the "variety of games to screw common shareholders" which you seem to agree is standard tech practice. I guess there's a difference in the mechanism, but the result is the same for the guy getting screwed. Unfortunately, I cannot cite "real" statistics so feel free to write this off as internet hearsay. I should qualify that I made the mistake of spending too much time working in Boston where everyone secretly wants to be Thurston Howell III, not Steve Jobs or Larry Page. Thus, my experience is not really "the Valley" but then again neither was Skype's.
That is true. But without knowledgable people in their midst, who will educate them about the electronic frontier?

This is why the EFF came into being in the early 90s.

Here's a link to Sterling's book, the Hacker Crackdown[1]. He talks about the early, early EFF. It really reminds me of today.

[1] http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
Paul Graham himself? Because he can't afford it.
Dude. If you cure AIDS, I DO NOT CARE why you did it.

God may care, you may care, and that's all very important. Seriously.

But me, I DO NOT CARE.
IIR, he and his wife are also major contributors to the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in San Francisco.
Does anyone have data on whether the "poor" or the "rich" are better entrepreneurs?
A Dissertation Format For Competitive Papers
The format for a dissertation is what is prescribed by the academic institution. However, there are standard features of a format which students need to follow when writing their dissertations. This will enable them to submit a clear, organized dissertation.
We can't rely in gov't funding to spur interest in geekdom,
http://m.cnbc.com/id/43499606
Firms Have Record $800 Billion Of Cash But Still Won't Hire
Okay, two things that are relevant to this particular instance of outrage that you may not be familiar with regarding EVE:

1) The real rage is not over the Incarna vanity items, which are priced silly, but ultimately pointless. It is over a leaked memo which suggested that RMT was planned for game affecting items like ships, weapons, and faction standing.

2) If you quit EVE for even a little while, you are ceding control over space and resources to other players in the game. EVE is one of the few games that has fulfilled the promise of a truly persistent and meaningful game world. In the major alliances, there are political and military structures designed to ensure control over null-sec systems and the planets and facilities that can produce high-grade equipment.

For your suggestion to work, either players would have to decide that their protest is worth throwing away the time and effort they've put into territorial control and asset development OR that everyone in the game would have to agree not to take territory while the protest was going on.
I am the OP, and I'm not rich.

BuzzData is designed to be useful and profitable in equal quantities. It must succeed at making money in order to continue being useful to people.

If we work hard and stay focused on making something that people would be upset to lose, then I will become wealthy as a side-effect.

I plan to use my wealth to become an angel investor, which is something I can't do unless I change my current fiscal status.
The last two examples are supposed to compare Georgia and Tekton, but they seem to show Univers (or a rip-off of Univers) and Snell Roundhand.

Maybe it's some really subtle trolling for typo-nerds? I don't know.
I agree with this list, but let me add that when you say "Go to at least one random social even that has no connection to CS" I hope you mean "make a commitment to a social group that has no connection to CS".

Also w/ regards to "Minor in something non-technical, or at least take a few classes" I can't agree more. I am a CE, not CS, but close enough. Currently I am taking German, and I would say it is one of my favorite classes. It has completely changed my way of thinking about languages, including English.

To be honest, my involvement with student gov, fraternity, and German is what keeps me sane for my technical classes.
Wait until you deactivate your facebook account.

Then you get some real guilting. Your friends will miss you. Why don't you send some messages now to let them know you're leaving. Awful.
It looks like Snell Roundhand to me.
I just finished reading Taubes's latest book, and I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend it. I'm putting the science to the test to see how lean I can really get.
What you're missing is that there may be multiple copyrights that apply to any particular piece of recorded music. In particular, there's the copyright covering the song itself (i.e. the notes written on paper), and there's the copyright covering the recording (i.e. the actual performance that you listen to). As far as I can tell, he paid for the song itself. He wasn't paying for the license to distribute a "low-res" version of the original recording — he was paying for the right to record his own versions of the songs.

This is why it's OK to sell your own performances of Beethoven's music (which has long been in the public domain) without paying anyone, but you can't freely copy a Vanessa Mae CD and hand it out to people on the street. There's no copyright to the song itself anymore, but the modern recording is still protected.

A photograph is more like a recording than it is like sheet music. If I happened to be standing right next to the photographer and intentionally snapped an almost identical shot half a second later, he couldn't sue me for infringing on his copyright.

If he had significantly transformed the tune itself, he wouldn't have even needed to pay for that, but AFAICT he produced faithful Nintendo-style performances of the original songs. That's why he needed to pay the rightsholder for the song.
> these are the same morons who just a few days ago grabbed an entire rack instead of one server, not being able to tell the difference.

The FBI agents who did that are very much not prosecutors (and we still don't know why the FBI did that; it may have been intentional).
New York State Senate to Vote on Same-Sex Marriage
> That is not the case in the United States ... where the reputation ladder is topped by jobs like doctor or lawyer

That would be a sample of environments where higher education is strongly pushed. In the area I grew up in, the amount parents spent pushing their kids to excel in athletics above anything else is stupid. I know a 6th-grade teacher who complains about kids not having any time for homework because they participate in non-school sports.
Elop seems to come across as being obnoxious. Maemo and Meego were getting to a point where where they were nice and usable unrestricted platforms. I wonder if Nokia shareholders have anything to say about the man. Nokia is being gutted as a sacrificial offering to MS by this man.
Gay Marriage Approved by NY Senate
What's wrong with being international? My parents were once international geeks -- their company sponsored their green card and they've been living in the States for over 50 years. They both received their PhD's from US universities and work in research firms. They consider themselves more American than any other "true" red blooded American even though they weren't born here.

I think the real problem is our immigration policy.
True. That's why I said it keeps them "looking like" they are innovating. Failed or not, each small product or feature release gives them PR points. Look at +1, buzz or any other new products. They are all the rage when they are released. Everybody hails Google as the new king of innovation and when the products are killed a few months/years dows the line, the only people complaining are developers who took dependency on that product thinking it was a good long term platform bet.
I don't think there was any chance of the N9 being very successful anyway. As nice as job as they appear to have done on it -- the hardware and UI both look gorgeous, from what I've seen -- people buy smartphones for apps, and what developers are going to make apps for a dead platform? Elop's comment is not so much the last nail in the coffin as it is the last shovelful of dirt on the grave.
I agree that CS shouldn't mean learning Java or ASP.NET from top to bottom, but it wouldn't hurt to have an idea about them. Also let's not forget that even Peter Norvig said Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science".
Well, most of the rich people I know donate to all kinds of actual charities, and they also, you know, create lots of JOBS - that's why they're rich. Creating lots of jobs is pretty awesome.
They also often work quite hard at ensuring those jobs stay where they are.

The interweb forums all make the same mistake of lumping in "Rich people" into a single category.

Do Directors and C-level executives of large corporations make possibly immoral, evil decisions? Seems like it. They're often rich people, sometimes because of the company they are working on, sometimes that's only part of it. Or none of it.

Are there dynastic families full of rich people with some useless people who don't really contribute anything of value to humanity and just kind of hang out and party their entire lives until they die of a drug overdose or cancer with no real friends? Sure.

Money and wealth are not what the average person who considers themselves "not rich" think they are.

I'm not rich by these VC standards, but most of the people in my country of residence would consider me rich - compared to them, I am, in their view. Not in mine.

So - at christmas I go out and buy toys for 300 poor kids. None of that money goes to fund anyone's paycheck - I wrap the stuff up in paper, write some notes, and load it onto the truck. It goes to be distributed. Is that an awesome thing? It sure is for those kids and their families every christmas.

What you do with what you have for reasons other than the accumulation of wealth is up to each of us individually. And the most valuable thing many people have to offer? Time.
There's an implicit "smart & passionate" qualifier on the title of the article. There's a shortage of smart and passionate geeks. It's not about cramming more people into the Computer Science pipeline. That will make absolutely no impact on the actual problem.
Usually, when this sort of thing happens, it's because the rent was artificially low due to a long-term lease without appropriate escalations. In other words, the tenant is getting a hell of deal, and then a lease rolls over permitting the landlord to again charge market rent. Not sure if that's what happened here. If not, then it was likely something similar. Real estate is a remarkably transparent market.

When you look it that way, it seems a little less "awesome".
Subsidizing a losing business isn't the sort of activity that makes one rich.
Yes and no. This list makes me sad because it neglects every single computer scientist that's interested in doing work on theory. I am one such computer scientist, and much of the work that I do involves merely pen and paper. There are a lot of people on HN that are web monkeys and make good money doing Web 2.0 stuff, and there are a lot of people that know pretty much nothing about computer science but use computers and program. These people equate CS with programming and the other sorts of tasks described in this article and then forget that there are computer scientists that could conceivably have no idea how to program in a modern language and still make contributions to the field.

But maybe HN is the wrong place to go looking for discourse on this sort of material. The point, though, is that this article is misleading. Perhaps it would have better been titled "10000 things every software engineer-hopeful should do" or "10000 anyone who writes code for the web should do".
Yeah it should be "One Person Actively Exploited up to 100 People".
If there's a 90% chance of winning, maybe the lawyer would be willing to pay the defendant's legal fees if he lost.

Maybe. How about a 65% chance? Should we discourage that plaintiff if his lawyer declines to back him financially? After all, lawyers are lawyers, not bankers.
Unfortunately reforming immigration policy is not a very popular issue and neither party has any intent to solve it. It's a much easier to get votes by saying we want to protect US jobs than to say we are protecting US interestes by making it a more attractive destination for international talent.
Huzzah. About time. Now can we stop pretending that the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution doesn't apply to marriage?
I said good.
The principles of supply and demand apply just as much to the market for "smart and passionate labor" as "all labor". If demand exceeds supply, the price is too low.

Even if you assumed that the ability to program was purely the result of some genetic mutation, so that there were X programmers in the world and there could never ever be any more, there still wouldn't be a shortage if prices rose enough - because there would be less demand. If each programmer had to be paid twice as much, companies would hire fewer programmers, and there wouldn't be a shortage.
As far as the state should be concerned, marriage is nothing but a legal contract, and the state has no business telling anyone who they can or can't enter into a contract with. You've done the free world a solid, New York.
You generally give them the non-hidden volume password, not the hidden volume password. This is because, unless you tell them so (or they see you using it, or have spyware on your system, etc.), there is absolutely no way to prove the existence of a hidden volume from looking at the file. There's also no way to prove that a truecrypt file does not contain a hidden volume, which leads to some interesting problems if people catch on to the existence and usage of hidden volumes (I recommend creating a hidden volume in any encrypted container just so that you can show that there's nothing hidden in it. Truecrypt doesn't support more than one hidden volume in a single file, right?).

If you do accidentally tell them, it's a bad thing. Generally, you should only take advantage of this if 1) the punishment for whatever you have in the hidden volume is bad enough that the addition of perjury charges would be like adding a single spike to an atomic bomb, or 2) you are absolutely sure that they're not going to figure out the existence of it from anything you have lying around or other people.

This is not legal advice, I'm not a lawyer.
Good to read:

Original in Spanish:
http://spanish.martinvarsavsky.net/general/porque-ya-no-voy-...

English automated translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
Blogging Fogbeam: Episode 2: The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins...
Rich people do awesome things all the time. Most investment vehicles are essentially loans to businesses to help them grow. As long as the money is not in the mattress, it's probably doing something awesome for whatever business or person is indirectly borrowing it.
The accused will often be the only one who knows how strong the encryption is, or how prevalent the foreign language is, so they're the only one who knows whether it is possible for the police to decrypt/translate without their cooperation. Thus, in reality, the determination of whether the accused can be compelled to provide the decryption information cannot depend on the strength of the encryption/obfuscation.
You are assuming that most people follow their passion, disregarding the economic aspect.

PS: what about the smart and passionate people interested in cs that choose another career because of the perceived social and economic status?
Ironic invocation of Godwin's Law?
Summary:

1) People dont like remembering long complex passwords so they end up using short easily brute force-able passwords.

2) So, break up a complex password giving the user something short and easy to remember and store the remaining complex part of the password in an encoded image that when decoded reads like a captcha image.

3) The "profit" here is that despite the user still using small simple passwords, in order to brute force the system you need to rely on artificial vision to read the noisy image for the second half of the password. Which is slow and inaccurate.

The idea is simply adding more computational time to the brute force method. Ie, it's more of a setback than a solution.

Unfortunately/fortunately technology is moving along too fast for this setback to provide significant benefit to justify the efforts to implement it.
One of the things that made the US so strong in the last century was the influx of great scientists from Europe during the world wars. I know many brilliant people from other countries today who would love to become US citizens but in some cases it is difficult for them to even secure visas. Our academic culture might still be preferable to that in many other countries but if we continue to let it decay this won't be the case for long. I think that it would help solve the problem the article addresses and carry countless other benefits if we made citizenship very easy to obtain for people with intelligence that is far above average. Even some rule like any foreign national who graduated from college in the US in the top 5% of their class automatic gets the option of US citizenship would have a profoundly positive impact. It's just baffling to me that we close our borders to people who would clearly improve our country.
about time. still a great fear for equality in the US
This is an appealing idea at first glance, but it really doesn't accomplish anything for plaintiffs represented on contigency. They get charged nothing if you take the rule literally, and if you use the plaintiff's attorney's costs they could often be as high as the defense costs. The rule still punishes indigent plaintiffs who bring lawsuits in good faith to litigate genuine disputes.
Actually, both popular mobile operating systems have a POSIX-y system programming interface under the hood. Whether application developers can get at it is a different matter.
YES. And once we're done with that, can we admit that "marriage" is simply a contract between interested parties and get out of it completely?
I'm proud to be a new yorker today. Not that I'm not other days, but I can be finally proud of my senate.
Go to the bank and order $20 australian for an example.
What every web developer should know about security
I think that part of the problem is in how geeks are trained and what they work on. For example, think of all the software people go go to school, learn java, and then build big ugly enterprise bank, insurance, whatever software inside some megacorp that nobody cares about. Most end users of said software don't like it and have zero appreciation for the people who made it.

Outside of Silicon Valley being a geek isn't cool, being a geek just means that you're seen as tech support to friends and family. They appreciate it, but it's not like you're a doctor or a lawyer or pro athlete or something.

Also, not only do a lot of the jobs for developers kind of suck, the things we expect from geeks is horribly standardized. For example, outside of the startup community you have 3 primary camps - PHP, Java, and .NET. I think most jobs I've seen want developers who are stuck in one of those three camps and have lots of experience there so that they build more standard software on standard platforms.

Even PG wrote about that very phenomenon when he talked about how you didn't have to worry about a competitor whose job listings wanted Oracle. I see more job listings for PHP/JavaEE/.NET coders in a week than I've seen for Rails/Python/Lisp/Scala/Clojure in a year.

If we are turning developers into PHP/.NET/JavaEE glue coders I kind of doubt that young geeks would look up to us either. It's hard to be a uber geek when all you know is Java from college CS course and Java EE in your full time job. It's hard to make other people want to turn into uber geeks when they see their parents or friends' parents having boring corporate tech jobs they don't enjoy any more than the accountants or secretaries or managers do.

If as geeks we want more geeks, we have to do more super cool geeky stuff instead of being so dreadfully boring.

We need to do more things that are "magic" like iPhone, Facebook, Kinect, and StumbleUpon(which has become bizarrely popular on college campuses I've noticed) and less things that are super lame like building horrid software that people loathe using - Lotus Notes, SAP, etc...

Since when does programming have to feel like double entry accounting? Since when should the hiring process and the training process feel much the same as accounting or banking?

Geeks have gone from being seen as wizards to being seen as technical bean counters and paper pushers.
Inspired By Wikipedia, Quora Aims For Relevancy With Topic Groups/Topic Pages
It is blanket protection from testifying during any phase except if you've been given immunity. Then your testimony cannot be used against you and you can be compelled to testify.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_S...

"If the government gives an individual immunity, then that individual may be compelled to testify. Immunity may be "transactional immunity" or "use immunity"; in the former, the witness is immune from prosecution for offenses related to the testimony; in the latter, the witness may be prosecuted, but his testimony may not be used against him. In Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441 (1972), the Supreme Court held that the government need only grant use immunity to compel testimony. The use immunity, however, must extend not only to the testimony made by the witness, but also to all evidence derived therefrom. This scenario most commonly arises in cases related to organized crime."