skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually in Austin TX it's been a common practice for a very long time. The reason being, in many degree programs at University of Texas students are required to do a semester internship to graduate. Therefore, it can actually put a pretty enormous burden on companies in the area to facilitate internship programs twice a year. Because it is tied to degree programs, there's also a fair amount of documentation and work that these employers must do. In addition, interns require training which costs money and wastes time, and they usually quit as soon as their requirements are complete.

That said, unpaid internships are justified and common here. However, as a general best-practice I always advise companies to pay their interns if they are working on billable / revenue-generating work. If they are just doing mindless work, then I feel they are compensated with 3 hours of school credit and the cost/time sink.

Having worked with a lot of interns from the school, you get a lot of fickle results and often it's really more of a waste of time than beneficial situation for the company. And I damn sure would not trust an intern to work on mission-critical projects until they proved themselves, which often takes longer than their internship requirement. To any UT students, I was able to get out of mine and get 3 hours credit because I was self-employed w/ 2 companies. :)
My solution will be something similar to this. The company/whatever creates two twitter accounts, for instance: @Company & @CompanyNews. This way you can follow the one you are interested in, or both.

Even create multiple twitter acounts by topic.
I agree to an extent. But what if you just want to learn and you DON'T have skills. I realize most people just teach themselves. Fine. I did that too. But there is a definite benefit to working with teams on programming projects that you wouldn't get otherwise unless you worked at a company...and most companies wouldn't pay you outright unless you had skills. So in this scenario, I think the unpaid internship idea makes sense.
1. Rob banks
2. Date Supermodels
3. Become a movie star

Not necessarily in that order. On second thought, perhaps you should rephrase the question.
Oddly enough, if the tables were turned and it was Microsoft in a difficult position, we couldn't say the same things about .NET.

As a .NET-developer I have to say this is true and for a reason.

Java has had much more time in the market, Sun has been a lot less willing to adapt to the market, and hence communities has formed to cover up for Sun's shortcomings platform-wise. As for Microsoft, they haven't been around for as long with .NET, and in the short time they have, they have evovled the platform unimaginably more than Sun ever did with Java trough it's entire lifetime so far.

And Microsoft did so to cover up for what the marked asked for. Unlike Sun they were also willing to break backward and version compatibility if it was needed in the name of progress (ie the .NET 2.0 release).

So there has been less time and less incentive for communities to provide FOSS-style solutions to .NET, not to mention that most .NET technologies not having Visual Studio support are dead on arrival. Had Visual Studio been a open-source product, things might have been radically different, but that's pure speculation on my part(1).

So in this case I would say Microsoft is both to credit and blame for the lack of open-source .NET communities and projects compared to Java.

1: Disclaimer: I have never tried to develop my own Visual Studio add-ons.
It's all about mutual benefit. For example, I'm going to be doing a few server installs for a friend while I'm traveling, in exchange for some cycles on those machines to use for my own project.

My friend is happy, because he doesn't need to spend $2k per server to have an engineer fly out and install them. I'm happy, because I'll be traveling anyway, and I get to use a pile of machines around the world without having to pay for and install them myself.

No money is changing hands, and we both benefit in a way that we find acceptable.

An unpaid 'internship' for a 'guru'? Fifteen hours a week for no pay and no equity?

I think not.
The typo mistake and the "forget parens" mistake are quite different in quality, though. If I mean method call, it is very unlikely that I would forget the parens in a language that always has parens for method calls.
I think people often think of natural selection as only allowing the best to exist, when really it allows what can exist to exist, even if the mutation provides no benefit.
Python is, I think, still a bit faster than Tcl, but it's not the order of magnitude that C is. And, realistically, there are a lot of things that Tcl is fast enough for these days... it's certainly in the same league as, if not faster, than Ruby and PHP.
Cf. Fred Brooks.
Actually I know quite a few people in my unpaid internship (programming) who don't have "real" jobs and are not exactly rich either. What they do is learn the trade by day, and go home at night to contract out their work on e-lance or something. It's basically a homework assignment that pays for your education.
I had the same question. It is possible that the trait survived as a recessive one for a long time. In the same way that sickle-cell is only lethal if a person has the defect in both sets of chromosomes (homozygous recessive), the weaker jaw muscles would only be a disadvantage for big-jawed primates if they were homozygous recessive. Later, when alleles for smaller jaws appeared, the weak-jaw-muscle allele had a higher chance of being propagated.

Another possibility is that the myosin heavy chain, or a related regulatory function, induces larger jaws. Without this the jaw was not given enough stimulus to grow large enough.
Another thing that is somewhat interesting about the social networking aspect of some of these ventures is that it makes it easier for people to socialize against you. This could mean something like "fight facebook so they don't charge us" to "let's move to shmacebook they have cool feature xyz". So switching from non-pay to pay could be more troublesome than anticipated.
Basecamp was made with 10 hours per week. Doubt you'll find a DHH working for free.
No, they took that into account.
Yep. Pretty much.

There's a big difference between working for no money and working for any amount of money (or for equity). Even if they agree to pay you minimum wage you at least have a job to point to -- and a starting point for future negotiations. There is no raise so difficult as the one from "free" to "$x".

Another point I'd make is that working cheap like this is a deal that might make sense for a few hours, but which will make exponentially less sense as you do more and more work. And you'll know it, too. The first three hours of free work you do for someone can feel great, but eventually it will rankle.

[ I've moved the rest of this post to a separate comment. ]
The typical explanation for why humans have smaller jaws than early primates is that our diets changed, and so we didn’t “need” bigger jaws.

Maybe, if you're getting your typical explanations from outdated high school biology books.

Human skull and bone structure along with genes relating to muscle strength, have to do with our giant brains and the necessary skull changes to accommodate them.

I'm not bothered enough to find the relevant papers, despite the fact that someone is wrong on the internet.

-- EDITED--

The old-school view of evolution as tiny little changes over a ridiculously long period of time is turning out to be not quite exactly true.

Yeaaaah... I'm done reading that article. (The above has not been true of the school of evolution since BEFORE Stephen J. Gould)
This analogy would work if killing someone for profit was legal.
I'd like everbody to post their stuff to twitter, because I don't use RSS readers anymore.
Has Your Startup Been Screwed Yet?
I think the actual drop is smaller than 45%. A lot of the job postings on Dice are by recruiters. More often, different recruiters post for the same positions. So let's say there are 100 jobs less posted compared to last year. It's likely that the actual # of positions is just 50 or even less.
Xpra: (GNU) screen for X applications
Xpra is 'screen for X' -- it allows you to run X programs, usually on a remote host, direct their display to your local machine, and then to disconnect from these programs and reconnect from the same or another machine, without losing any state. (see the FAQ: http://partiwm.org/browser/README.xpra also, for more)
CTIA09 Video: Palm demos Pandora, Fandango, Sprint TV, FlightView, and Nascar
What really gets me is how these types, the come-work-for-free scammers, don't give up - but then again that is assuming they have enough presence of mind and brains to realize that

A. This has been tried before, many times

B. There are many who have seen this, and can see right through it

Never fails to amaze me, the room temperature IQ crowd. The crowd that really thinks that someone who is bright enough to do what we can do will - at the same time - be dumb enough to fall for a 7th grade level scam.
When you get down to it, natural selection is merely about who is able to create the most successful offspring. The fact that the offspring have very similar traits as their parents is the reason why these offspring are themselves likely to reproduce successfully. The question then is weaker jaw muscles somehow became more prevalent than stronger ones. As I explained in another comment, this might be because the trait was able to survive recessively until a good genetic environment was available.
Categorize submitted URLs by media type?
I'm on a work computer with no sound. I'm not interested in following a link to a video or podcast. Maybe just some radio buttons on the Submit page to categorize the link?
How to Incorporate in California and Stay on the Budget?
In addition to that, I know that, at least in the Bay Area, there has been a consolidation among smaller recruiting firms. That may contribute to the decrease in job postings.
To answer your question, a lot of paleontologists believe that hominid dietary changes from cooking, which came before Homo sapiens and somewhat after the genetic change mentioned in the submitted article, eliminated selection pressure in favor of strong chewing power, because food became softer, more digestible, and thus more nourishing. This allowed the ancestral line to Homo sapiens to devote more total bodily energy to growing a large brain (also enabled by the mechanisms mentioned in the submitted article) and much less energy to developing a hindgut that can digest raw vegetable foods. So there were several synergistic influences that allowed a diverging body plan between the chimpanzee line and the Homo sapiens line.

This Economist article (previously submitted to HN)

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

tells part of the story. HN discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490292
Any software startup that would accept an "intern" on the team is failing one test of viability. The last thing you need in startups is more than one level of hierarchy. [1] You don't want people to expend valuable mental and emotional energy trying to figure out if task X is "right" for a mere intern, or if it's really important not to have conversation Y in front of the intern, or (in general) whether or not the intern is really a member of the team. One likely result is that your team will not gel. Another is that the team will gel, but suffer a breakdown when the intern inevitably quits. A third is that the team will defend itself by shutting out the intern, assigning him or her to go mend broken XHTML tags or make coffee while everyone else does the real work. Which is another good reason not to be that intern. ;)

Interns are for big companies, where they make only a tiny marginal contribution to the already massive political overhead. ;)

---

[1] Two levels, if absolutely necessary. But the best leaders are the ones who always manage to convey the feeling that it's really only one, that they're only the leader because somebody has to have their name on that line of the corporate charter and be forced to take tedious phone calls from big clients.

I can also attest that, if it grows, eventually your software startup will need a hierarchy. But at the beginning it's probably just unnecessary friction.
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Could someone tell me what a "cyber katrina" is? Would that be like someone crashing Digg and HN would have to temporarily house all of the refugees? That could be pretty terrible.

I know politicians are ignorant and really do think the same kind of catastrophic event could happen to any area "on their watch", but how exactly would the internet kill people and destroy homes? The worst thing that could happen to the internet is for it to crash (say, widespread router bug), and this bill would only make this possibility more likely.
Elastic IP + EC2 + Elastic Block for hosting. S3 for backups. I also make judicious use of Mechanical Turk for usability testing.

I also use Google apps for my domain for email hosting (free). I also use Woopra's real time analytics (free).

I have an online store that I'm paying Yahoo Merchant Solutions for. I also pay for an extra line with Vonage for my business line. ($10 a month).

I've used Google Adwords for advertising occasionally.
Bill Venners chats with the Twitter developers, in Twitter on Scala
So, he thinks nobody at Geico has ever looked at that $90MM and tested what happens if they spend less? Really? The idea that nobody has ever wondered what would happen to his or her bonus that year if they saved even 5% of the SEM spending is kind of far fetched, IMO.
Negotiate a comprehensive world peace settlement.
I've worked for a company spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on SEM. SpyFu's numbers are really poor.
Free version of most of the paid apps work just find for us. Dropbox, getsatisfaction, basecamp.

We pay for slicehost.
The services side of our business:
highrise, basecamp, glance, blinksale

The internal side:
serverbeach, github, campfire

I think they're all great, so it's easier to say what we would switch away from.

We would switch from serverbeach to slicehost if we were scaling faster.

We would switch from highrise to a different CRM if it was easier to write custom reports.
There was an podcast yesterday here about "pricing is hard" or something like that. It was about how to price an enterprise app. One suggestion was to ask the client, "How would you use this app if it were free?" The idea being to find out just how useful the software could be to the client if the client maximized use of the software. The more your product is worth to your client, the more revenue it should generate for you.

By initially pricing your product for free, you're carrying out the free-pricing thought experiment for enterprise software in real life: you get to actually see how your potential clients would use your software if it were free. You encourage them to make maximum use of the product. Then, you can figure out how to price your product to reflect it's value to the users.
It's never amusing to have somebody continuing to remove your freedom, one bill at at time, year in, year out, decade after decade. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, but they always move the ball a little closer to the end-zone. The ball never travels in the direction of more-freedom, only less. You're probably too young to get that, but after a few decades, the amusement begins to pall.
Page not found

maybe they outsource web hosting...
I don't think its necessary to create the most successful offspring, merely offspring that can reproduce before they die.
I thought it might not be perfect, but making it perfect is probably next to impossible. Here is a link with some monstrous URL matching Regexps: http://www.regexguru.com/2008/11/detecting-urls-in-a-block-o...
To be fair, everything they do, and other blogs/services/websites -- is to "get traffic". They arent running a charity.

I dont think they really overhyped another rumor, I think they just published another rumor. Thats what they are -- a rumormill. And thats fine. A lot of people like being on the cusp of new news, even when its wrong or partially incorrect most of the time.

Ive always read TC with that in mind, and I dont understand why most people think TC should be some beacon of journalistic integrity. 1 - its a blog. 2 - its admits to being first over right. It isnt the washington post.
A real trader would start trading anyway. Volatility? Just a number computed from a mound of stale data. Kurtosis? Sounds like a disease. Too much thinking for a game as simple as "buy" and "sell"!
I am not an evolutionary biologist (I do write software for a lot of research biologists) but I don't think there was anyone walking around with tiny jaw muscles and a huge jaw. I suspect the development of the jaw is related to the same gene. What that article attempts to say, and fails to do it, is that HUGE changes often happen in a single generation.

There's a contagious non lethal dog tumor that used to be a dog, as in an individual dog.
+ annoying
We're using

Slicehost (Hosting)
AWS (Storage)
Authorize.net (Recurring Billing)
Bank of America (Banking)

and we're currently looking into paying for an 800 number...anyone have any suggestions for this?
A professor actually asks students to submit homework files via blackboard? This is the first I've heard of such a thing, and I'm a prof (well, postdoc).
There are NOT SmallTalk libraries out there that are 70x faster than Ruby - that would be faster than raw C (Ruby is about 30x slower). Are you trying to say that SmallTalk is faster on average than raw C? So why isn't everything written in SmallTalk?

And I'll believe Maglev's outlandish performance claims if and when I ever see them realised. If they are anything like those claimed at RailsConf 2008 (50x or thereabouts), I'll eat my hat and any other hats anyone cares to send me.

I say this as someone who would probably seriously consider murder if it would make my Rails apps run 10x faster. I want it to be true. I just don't think it is, unfortunately.

And one could probably take just about any Lisp and give it the power of the other 10% (like Erlang) with moderate effort.

I keep hearing things like this, but no-one ever does it.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce: A Web Service API for Hadoop
I've regularly criticized git for being good, but overhyped and not quite ready for prime time.

However, it is dirt simple to set up a git repository for use by a few people on a box where they have accounts anyway.

cd /var/local/
mkdir myapp
... appropriate permissions, add a few files ...
git init

And you're done. Granted, you can do fancier things, but we're talking about startups with just a few people here, right?
Couple of years back, I was on the verge of starting a PhD with AST but some strange things happened :(

To me, AST is a god.
Mt. Everest. Duh.
I'm surprised at all the people still using Slicehost. They are good people, and run a nice service, but in terms of money, you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.

Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:

http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta...
Wikipedia article about this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate
Man coughs up 30 year old nail stuck in his nose
This particular version of Wolfenstein 3D is actually rendered using standard 3D techniques in OpenGL. It's just low on detail and the ability to look up/down.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, however I think the intention (if not the wording) of the gp is that hackers should skip past this opportunity if they actually have marketable skills or that hackers should expect compensation/equity if they are "gurus and/or strong coders."
@massify we use:

- Slicehost (some hosting)

- Datapipe (hosting)

- EC2 (Document/media conversion)

- S3 (Storage)

- Panther Express (CDN)

- PBWiki

- PivotalTracker

- Protoshare

- DNSMadeEasy

- Hosted MS Exchange

- JIRA/Fisheye/Crucible
> We can get around any centralized controls with ad-hoc and mesh wireless networks

Mesh networks are only viable when population density is high enough. Perhaps in 10 years we'll see progress on that front, but currently it's a non-starter.

However, most businesses require the internet, and really trying to cripple it would destroy the wealth that the government leeches to survive. The saving grace is ultimately HTTPS traffic (since it's used by everybody), and the ability to tunnel arbitrary protocols over it.
In my experience, the setup cost is minimal, but maintenance _always_ takes longer than I expect. Restarting servers, opening the correct ports, updating w/ security patches, integrating w/ ticket management, etc.

Just my $0.02
Samsung's Android Phone Plans
45% drop in new tech jobs. It's not like 45% of techies got fired.
HN has a block list?
Many of these comments are legit, but as someone who works with faculty in a system that uses Blackboard, I must say that many instructors who use the software are indifferent, disorganized, and inconsistent. I find it hard to believe that a different software would magically solve these problems.

Blackboard can be frustrating and there's a learning curve, but this is true of virtually any software. (Ever used Photoshop, for example?) If content is "so hard to find in Blackboard that it causes students anxiety" the faculty member should seek some help. In that case, the problem isn't Blackboard--it's the user.
* Restarting servers? If you're doing something really basic, it's just sshd.

* Since you connect to the server anyway, that one's open.

* Security patches is a regular apt-get update and not much more.

* Ticket management... ok, that's an extra, but github still doesn't have a ticket tracking system, does it?
Question - does anyone else get offended by the name "coder" I've always found that people who write code prefer to be called developers or hackers. I'm a bit of a hacker myself, so maybe i'm overly sensitive, and i know this is a small point, but i always feel like the people who use the word "coder," don't understand them or what they do.
Life was good back then. And it keeps getting better!

Back then would you have ever DREAMED that IBM would be buying Sun, and that Sun would have open sourced almost all of its cool technology?
I know everyone can't do this because at some point you need compensation

Which is why using unpaid internships to screen your hires is unethical. It's an artfully disguised form of class discrimination.

Lots of very smart and hardworking people cannot afford to work for free. Apparently those people are at a severe disadvantage when applying to work at your company. And it's not as if unpaid internships offer financial aid, like schools do.

I think it's fine to screen prospective employees as paid interns. I also think it's fine to try them out as consultants first, or even to have them perform a few hours of work for free, as a test. But in general work should be paid for. Unless, as I've said elsewhere, it is 100% free-software work.

Of course, just because it's unethical doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that you can do anything to change it.