skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simple - Yes. Dangerous - I don't really see how. While it may be possible to overwrite 8 bytes of kernel memory prior to a panic I'm not really sure what's so dangerous about that, nor does the article demonstrate any exploit.

If such a program manages to make it onto your machine in the first place there are also far more nefarious things that it cold be doing.
Hmm, I'm from the DC area, but I don't personally know of any startups that are highering at the moment.

There was a group of HN readers that meet a couple of times, but I don't know what's happend to that.

You can find some tech events: http://www.dctechevents.com/ and I'm sure that there is more.

There is a lot of opportuity, given the recent and predicted growth in government, but not all of it is being tapped; at least not in an organized way.
So is it like a page you can create with your favorite links and such? (i'm not sure, havent made an account). Have you seen http://start.io/ - sounds like the same space
Do you have to move to DC? Because it's very much the wrong place for what you're looking for.
Not really.

It's more like asking a truck driver to read a sign at 20 feet, and to flex his hands and legs to make sure he's able to control the wheel and pedals.

The idea with writing code on paper in an interview is to disqualify the blind-since-birth truck drivers who would point to a rubber duckie in a line-up and say "That one! That is a truck."
LaunchBox Digital is a DC-area incubator along the lines of YC and TechStars - you could try connecting with them to see if they know of any startups looking for devs. If that fails, I could also connect you with my CEO (I work for Viget Labs, which is headquartered near DC); he knows most of the people in the scene.
Sure Linux may be a "hackers OS", but I'd still argue the opposite.

For people who work with Linux for a living, like system administration, you want your Linux distro to absolutely minimize the amount of work needed. When your server-park scales, manually having to fiddle around 200 Slackware installations simply isn't an option.
As long as true articles are being deleted for 'notability', I'm talking about a real problem, not a theoretical one.
Awesome! You've written down a pattern I noticed on both Reddit and HN -- what I called the troll filter: if more comments than points, the troll filter fails (the link is a troll and unlikely to be worth reading).

Exceptions are the types of threads where people are encouraged to contribute, such as "who's hiring" or "I'm <something interesting>, ask me anything"

I'll use this.
eterm is kinda fun
http://www.enlightenment.org/
I completely agree. I equate it to coding standards. Whether I indent with two spaces or four doesn't really matter until both get mixed into the same code base. The point is not that these rules are arbitrary, but that they are standardized. The same goes for the color of code samples in Wikipedia articles: no matter what article you are looking at, the code will look the same.
What was the point of putting it online if you didn't mean for anyone to read it?
aka The importance of context. (Not just in valuing ideas, but also in generating them.)

As an aside, this is the second time this morning that this concept has come up, in my persona communications. (Dare I note some context in this, itself?)
I am in a very similar situation as you are. We have a very niche product that we sell to higher-ed. We sell it as a subscription model, which we allow them to pay X years upfront with a contract so that it more closely resembles a fixed-cost product to better fit their budgets.

As far as cold-calling goes, it really isn't worth it in this industry. The low conversion combined with the insanely long sales cycles just isn't right for a cold-call approach. That said, we've modified the cold-call approach by setting up Google Alerts for phrases which indicate a university that is ripe with need for our product, and then send them direct product information tailored to their specific needs.

We've also developed some internal software that helps automate this process. It has worked very well for us so far.

I would be very interested in talking with you further, as it seems we share a common market with common obstacles. Please feel free to shoot me an email.
Google's plan for world's biggest online library: philanthropy or piracy?
Liberalizing immigration in all other skilled industries is a good idea, too.

ADDED: Note that neither "programmer" nor "software" appear in the original article: the author is talking about all H1-Bs, which includes medical specialists. (Though, licensing issues might prove a more significant employment barrier for foreign doctors than immigration rules, and those also need to be addressed.)
OK, just for full disclosure I am still trying to collect a large enough body of knowledge on immigration issues to make an informed opinion. That said, I'll let it be known that I am inclined to have immigration be open everywhere. Preferably with other places even being more attractive than the US. This way immigration contributes more to global development, and not just development in the US.

Now with this out of the way, I have to say that if these companies you are talking about are 'raising money', then they have not created any value for the US economy. You are hoping that they will create value for the US economy. When the companies turn profitable, then they will be creating value. Until that point, they are being used to recycle currency, not to create wealth.

Just a little nit pick on your post. The propensity to confuse 'raising money' with 'creating value' or 'creating wealth' is a pet peeve of mine.
True, though "ps" isn't the best example, as it's one of the least portable commands I've ever seen. :) Its output is not even consistent from one Unix variant to another.

I kind of hope most Unix variants follow the /proc filesystem model of Linux. It basically cleans up these kinds of queries considerably.
This is awesome! Love the idea and the implementation looks really slick too. I had to work on a huge excel file before (like 400,000 rows) and I so wished to have an add-on to run a simple SELECT query.

Congrats on the bold move. I am in the same boat -- just quit my job last Friday and will be working on my startup. I wish you the best of luck!

Alex
HN member complaining about how they don't care about TechCrunch and/or Twitter = don't care.

Seriously, every submission about Twitter has a comment like this. Move on.
Storage? Ease of access? There're a lot of advantages the Internet brings you even when you're not trying to whore for attention.
I've tried it three ways: having interviewees write code on paper, on a whiteboard, and on a computer.

Of the three, the computer fares worst. Many developers work in highly customized dev environments with special keyboards or monitor layouts. Using an unfamiliar setup, cold, in a stressful situation can make them sieze up or perform poorly.

Paper is no good because you can't watch their problem-solving process without hovering over their shoulder, and they get no feedback from you if they're going into the weeds.

The whiteboard seems to work best, because you get a good give-and-take effect between the candidate and interviewer.
Your words will be lost on most people here friend. For them, 'raising money' is 'creating wealth'.

<sigh>

I agree though, we should stop bringing in programmers and start bringing in doctors.
Your proposal means more bureaucratic rules about what jobs are comparable and what pay rates should be. That's moving in the wrong direction, if you want growth and high-employment.

The article provides a much more simple solution: if someone qualifies to work in the USA, end the rules which tie them to a specific job. It's those rules that cause the gaming, limit competition by employers, and cause lower pay.
I wonder how these developers managed to find job.
Consider this, though. Even the most qualified H1-B candidate can end up getting paid less than they should simply because of the way the green card application process works.

Once an H1-B holder has filed for a GC, they can't be switch employers or be promoted. Since most companies have pay caps based on job title, this means the H1-B holder can't get raises past a certain point. The end result of all this is you have H1-B "junior engineers" who've worked at the same company for 5+ years really doing the job of a intermediate/senior engineer.

The joke is that the company is not "gaming the system" at all. By not promoting someone with an outstanding GC application, they're doing exactly what the law requires of them.
I'm curious, do you know about http://identi.ca ? If so, why would you consider Twitter to be more advantageous?
This really isn't a tough market to get into, as long as you have the experience and portfolio to back up your skills. As many people as are in it right now, the market is still booming. I do a lot of sub-contracting (I'm better at B2B sales than B2C), and one of the biggest problems I see isn't getting new clients, it's finding the developers to do the work.

1. Have a strong portfolio (or build one if you don't have one already).

2. Meet people. Go to networking business events in your area. Volunteer to speak/present at events and expert panels on marketing and web design.

3. It's a numbers game. The more people you send your resume/portfolio to, the better your chances of finding something worthwhile. Subscribe to RSS feeds for industry-specific job boards, read your local papers for potential opportunities with new companies, etc. You may even finding yourself developing software that automates this entire process to allow you to spend your time working instead of lining up new work. That's what I did anyway ;-)
"The demographic makeup of SV engineers was overwhelmingly white American until around a dozen years ago."

A dozen years ago was 1997. Do you seriously think this is true?

"With the importation of so many engineers into the US, wages were suppressed..."

You seem to think that white Americans work hard to "create" jobs, which are then "stolen" by hordes of immigrants. In other words, white Americans "give" and immigrants "take". That's just not how it works.

Immigrants in SV are on average smarter and work harder than Americans - not because there's something wrong with Americans, but because these immigrants are a highly biased sample of the world's huge population.
For Best Results, Take the Sting Out of Criticism
Sorry, but I just can't call something that lacks tail call optimization a Scheme :)

Not to say that Clojure is bad or something.
On top of that, those platforms are shared between all the major Canadian political parties.
Reassign the people now enforcing/renewing H1-Bs? (If I understand the proposal correctly, all existing H1-Bs become green cards by fiat, obviating a lot paper-pushing.)
I'd really like to know how to prevent incapable devs from even making it to the interview step. Obviously if you email test questions but it's too easy to cheat. What else can you do?
10 tips for advancing from a beginner to an intermediate developer
...on the other hand, if the truck driver can't complete a task like that you might begin to wonder.
This looks really cool, I would definitely be one of your target market if I still worked at my job (which I quit half a year ago to focus on my own startup). I now use Apple iWork 09 almost exclusively, so as soon as you come out with a Numbers version, please let us know!
Because more people use it, it's simpler, and it's prettier. identi.ca serves a very niche audience.
I've been wondering about the status (posed here, I guess I mean generally speaking) of extension support.
Haskell Package Popularity Rankings: September 2009
The reality is that very, very few highly skilled technical people, even people like Jerry Yang or Sergey Brin would have qualified for O-1 visas if they had needed to try. It's also indisputable that Yahoo! and Google have each generated a lot of jobs an a lot of tax revenues for the US.

The following is from Wikipedia:

Generally, to qualify for O-1 classification, aliens of extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics must demonstrate sustained national or international acclaim and recognition for achievements in the field of expertise by providing evidence of:

Receipt of a major, internationally recognized award, such as the Nobel Prize; or at least three of the following forms of documentation:

1. Documentation of the alien's receipt of nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor;
2. Documentation of the alien's membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought, which require outstanding achievements of their members, as judged by recognized national or international experts in their disciplines or fields;
3. Published material in professional or major trade publications or major media about the alien, relating to the alien's work in the field for which classification is sought, which shall include the title, date, and author of such published material, and any necessary translation;
4. Evidence of the alien's participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in an allied field of specialization to that for which classification is sought;
5. Evidence of the alien's original scientific, scholarly, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field;
6. Evidence of the alien's authorship of scholarly articles in the field, in professional journals, or other major media;
7. Evidence that the alien has been employed in a critical or essential capacity for organizations and establishments that have a distinguished reputation;
8. Evidence that the alien has either commanded a high salary or will command a high salary or other remuneration for services, evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence.
I'll speculate: Testing.

* maybe with ZFS, there were problems like slow speed, unreliability, poor resource use, etc... more speculation of Apple's testing benchmarks...

* maybe without ZFS, no problems were found in testing. If this was the case, and remember I am speculating, I would ship without ZFS, easy.
Generation B - Middle Aged, Laid Off and Losing Hope
I think you misunderstand. I'm fine with people reading my unfinished, half-baked ideas, but that is not the same thing as publishing them or claiming they are finished.

I have a directory structure on my hard drive. The "dumping ground" is like a folder of drafts. Have a look, there's all kinds of unfinished and half-baked ideas in there. I publish it to git

I have no problem with people reading it. It's just as if you came by my house and looked at my pond while I was building it. It isn't a secret that I was working on it.

However, allowing people to read my half-baked stuff is not the same thing as publishing them. Whoever posted this actively went there and linked to it. This is very different from when I actively publish a post in my RSS feed, or tweet it, or whatever.

The point being, is this my opinion? Yes. Do I have a problem with you reading my opinion? No. Am I forcing my opinion on other people by publishing it? Also no.

FWIW, my opinion is that HN was clogged with posts about iPhone development, and that I didn't want to meta-clog it with posts about posts. So I wrote this to get the idea off my chest and left it alone.

Besides, I was too busy writing code to polish those few paragraphs up and turn them into an essay!
To protect their populations against internal and external threats and revolts, Sparta - the ancient Greek city-state made a few decisions.

1. Every Spartan citizen has to join the army and train since childhood to become the best fighter possible. Weaklings are killed at birth.

2. The currency of Spartans was changed to heavy iron bars. Prevented folks from other neighbouring city-states from doing business with Spartans.

This made Sparta very independent. And their citizens became the best fighters the world had ever seen. People looked up to them in awe. Poems are written about them.

But these same protectionist rules that made Sparta glorious for little time, led to Sparta decline in the long run.

Populations declines. Wealth declines. Progress declines.

Moral of the story has always been: protectionism brings short term benefits but long term doom.

But yet we'll always see the majority of the people rooting for protectionism for short term progress.

(I'm pretty sure I'll be slammed for this post because there is no direct relation or parallels between Spartan policies and American policies. Time was different. Threats were different. Rules were different. But I had to write it to make a point against general protectionism. And not against any specific American policy including the one being talked about here - restricting H1-Bs.)
Nope. Don't know anything about it. I use Twitter because my Twitter network is large enough to do cool things with.
My company was part of LaunchBox Digital '09 class and I can say there is definitely a startup scene in DC but it's in the early stages. There are some great events like TechCocktail that highlight companies in the area that you can look to hook up with. As for a job, you should be able to find one with relative ease (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/the-best-and-worst-citi...) although it will be harder finding an early stage startup that can pay you a livable wage for DC.
Interviews without coding segments.
I turn into a blathering idiot whenever someone is watching me code. Because I have to spend like 60% of my brain power worrying about what the person is thinking of each intermediate step and if I should show it or keep it to myself.

But now that I started my own company, I get paid a little more than a guy of my age/qualifications should. Hopefully soon a lot more if I can keep building it up. I get paid based on the economic value of my products, not what any one individual thinks of me personally.
With spanish operators, roaming is about 10€ (~15$) for each megabyte... So 3,5€ for each megabyte is "cheap" for me.

Anyway, it's still really-really expensive. And they really could lower the price, as the home operator (the operator you're roaming with), and not the "roam operator" is getting most profits from data roaming.

I think Vodafone offers in Europe a rate of 200MB-60€, that's about 0.3€/megabyte. Veredict? Operators have really inflated prices for data roaming...

... In fact, it wouldn't be expensive (for them) to offer a flat rate of unlimited (or with a reasonable data limit) mobile internet, at least in Europe.

But money is money.
The emigration of even a "tiny percentage" of geniuses is a great loss -- they're geniuses!

And if the "majority" are "not that much better than the average American worker" -- but still just a little better -- why can't they stay? Everyone above average brings up the average -- why not have them producing great stuff here rather than elsewhere?
I think a truck driver would likely slap someone who asked them to do that, and he'd deserve it too.
There's Social Matchbox, which recently held an event:

http://www.socialmatchbox.com/

Some good links on their site.

There's also the Startup Rockstars:

http://startuprockstars.com/

Which holds the next event on Sept. 9.
You did not clearly understood the implication of "trade" part.

If trade is central to the wealth of society, then more trading with other economies of the world will lead to increased wealth in the US.

In fact, we have the largest free trade zone right here in the US. Goods and services in the US, for the most part, move freely.
Care to explain that statement?
I follow 600 people, but I still notice spammy people. I followed Guy Kawasaki for a short while, but soon decided that he wasn't worth following.
How not to render 3D graphics: 40 ways to get a blank black screen
It works on /classic and /news, too, if you add an asterisk to the end of the @include url. I.e.:

// @include http://news.ycombinator.*/*

Would you mind throwing it on GitHub or somewhere similar? I really like the idea, and that way lots of people can easily contribute tweaks/improvements.
If you can overwrite 8 bytes of kernel memory, you can do absolutely anything to the machine. You don't have to cause it to panic, you can instead modify some function to run your code first.

I couldn't say for sure, but this would probably allow someone to become root on the machine from a local user account.

But at least it is not exploitable remotely.
"better than every other current choice"

That's all that really matters to me.

My media system is using ZFS (currently 98.7% full), and I keep a small zpool in my backpack with a bunch of data on it I don't want wasting space on my SSD.

There's nothing else I trust my data on at this point.

I have a FreeBSD machine with a raidz for all my other data (databases, mail, a copy of my music, my photo album, etc...) It was RAID5 before that and it was pretty terrible.

My current plan is to stick with ZFS until something better comes along, and there isn't all that much better showing up in this neighborhood. That does mean my media system can't run Snow Leopard, though. :(
RedTube - Free Porn Videos - Young college girl exploited and abused
Did you read the article? He's not saying to increase the number of H1-B's, he's saying to increase the speed at which they can convert to permanent residents with green cards.
WorldCalc 3.5  Free Download
I recently started interviewing developers this way. A simple pre-screening interview weeded out around 80% of the candidates. I'm still amazed at how many people applying for a "senior developer" position can't do the most simple of coding tasks. Here's an "Ask HN" post I made about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747653
Source code for Skype eavesdropping trojan
"A dozen years ago was 1997. Do you seriously think this is true?"

Of course. That's why I wrote it. This is based on my living and working in SV at the time.

"You seem to think that white Americans work hard to "create" jobs, which are then "stolen" by hordes of immigrants. In other words, white Americans "give" and immigrants "take". That's just not how it works."

Who are you quoting when you put quotes around the words "create", "stolen", "give", and "take"? Are you trying to give the impression that you are quoting me?

The wage issue is basic economics: if you increase the quantity supplied of something (such as wheat, or trained engineers), the price will drop.
I wonder how fast or economically it would be to retrain workers to other section of the economies experiencing shortage of workers.
I think he is somebody who bothers to write.
It looks like this guy went to Spain, so a few things that may interest you if you're going to travel there and use data:

There's a virtual operator (simyo, http://simyo.es) which offers a reasonable rate of 1€/first 100mb of the day, 9ct/megabyte after those first 100mb/day, and a cap of 5€ if you don't exceed 500mb in a month (if you use 300mb in a day, you don't spend 1€+0.09*200=18€, but 5€.

Vodafone also offers prepaid internet offers: 1GB for 7 days (19€), 15 days (29€), 30 days (49€). Locked modem costs 50€, but you can use those cards with any 3G modem and most smartphones (I tether with a soft-unlocked iPhone).

It's hard to get a SIM card: anonymous SIM cards (even for data traffic) don't exist there, and it can be a pain to get a pay-as-you-go if you're a visitor (that's because of the 11M terrorist attacks, yeah, gbye privacy!).

Also, be aware of internet coffees. A good price is 1€-1,5€ for 1h..

Starbucks don't have WiFi, but some McDonalds have it. You have to buy something (I love McFlurrys!) and ask for a WiFi card (if they have wifi, of course, you'll see a sticker outside). Just connect to the open Wifi and type the number that is in the card (that will give you 30 minutes of navigation).

And... good luck!
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, joblessness is worse for men over 45 (7.7 percent in July) than women the same age (6.9 percent).

And feminists still claim discrimination in the workplace.