skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't Want to Pay to Have Someone do a Shitload of Work for You? Screw You!

Not paying someone to do business related work devalues that 'sort of work', across the board.
If I can get interns to some amount of work for free, then I am not employing and (more importantly) paying someone to do that same work.
This may be good for the company, but it is bad for people who are unemployed and the other employees of the company.
This is because the practice drags down the average price that any company can expect to pay for one unit of that 'sort of work'.

This may be great for shareholders, the CEO's bank balance, but it is not good for anyone else.

(Economically it is better to have an intern making minimum wage, and spending it than to have the money aggregating in some billionaire's bank somewhere).

To act like the intern has any choice in the matter is wrong; as the majority of companies now precondition employment for even the 'starting' positions with some amount of experience. It used to be that employers would hire kids right out of college and actually take the time to mentor them in the business world. Then it was internships during college, and now it is unpaid internships, and soon I'm sure we will be paying for the opportunity to work!

It strikes me as incredibly arrogant that someone would think that the mere experience of working for him is equivalent to any sort of compensation. (What am I really gaining out of making photocopies for you, Mr. Cuban?) When profitable work gets done, someone should get paid, end of story. To me that seems to be morally and ethically correct, even if it drives my bottom line down by a few dollars an hour.
In some situations sure, I can agree with that. But to say it makes society tangibly worse I strongly disagree with because it assumes that all or at least most unpaid interships will benefit the internee. I don't think that's the case.
Well, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade got rickrolled. Not so sure all the viewers got it, though. :)
Who are you to decide the partnership isn't equal? And just how does the internship law protect the little guy? By making sure she can't get valuable experience? Also, just because you don't understand why someone would offer an unpaid internship instead of a minimum wage job doesn't mean it's a bad idea. Should your ignorance be the basis of public policy? I don't mean to come across as rude but come on, I'm a grown adult and don't need or want your "protection".
Ah, your right. I see now that your right with the Dugard thing.
Really thoughtful post. I've never seen the debate framed quite this way and I'd imagine a lot of developers will be influenced by it.
Just pay the fucking interns, billionare. If we can do it, so can you.
Nokia N97 mini Cherry Black 
Nokia N97 mini is a Quadband GSM and UMTS equipped with HSDPA touchscreen display 3.2 megapixel resolution with 640×360 pixels and 16 million colors, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 8 GB of internal memory, Symbian OS v 9.4 S60 fifth edition, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connectivity, integrated GPS receiver, Nokia Maps, media player and FM radio, video calling, proximity sensor, accelerometer and qwerty keyboard that pops up.
hopefully http://musicslu.com will take off
He also had to live on the street with his child for those six months, and at the end of the day was still lucky to get the job.

Maybe he wouldn't have been given the opportunity at all if it were paid (though I find that line of reasoning doubtful), but it's pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been better off with a paid internship.
The current super soaker models are very disappointing to me. I've held a few "battles" with neighbors in my yard and the power is not what I remember from years ago. Taking a step back in product development makes very little sense to me.
Very well thought out article. It's great insight for guys like me who aren't sure whether they want to focus on desktop apps or web apps in the future (I write client/server at work and web at home).
Sorry for being not clear, let me try again:

I assume YC is presented with a glut of choices, there would probably be a triage stage that runs something like this:

1) nonsense (say 60%)

2) maybes (say 20%)

3) positives (say 20%)

Of the positves YC can due to resource constraints only accept a certain number, say for the sake of the argument that YCs resource constraints allow it to accept half of them, or 10% of the original group.

If after that you follow the 10% that got accepted with the 10% that did not as a control group then I expect both groups to do equally well in terms of success, in other words the 'hit rate' should workout roughly the same in both groups.

YC will find that it has invested in some duds, most of them will be so-so and there will be a very limited amount of take-offs, in the other group the ratios will be very similar.

I hope that makes it more clear...
Having lots of sexual partners creates epidemics of, wait for it...sexually transmitted disease.

The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.
Yes. That's what he's complaining about. His business has a project that only works if he can start it with people he doesn't pay. You just said nothing at all: we knew he wanted to do something with the interns, apotheon.
Then why would an unpaid internee stay at their position if they didn't see any value to themselves? There generally is at least some value even if it's a line item on a resume (that can have significant cumulative value)
Why shouldn't they be allowed to? The hit to their reputation if they tried to pull a stunt like that would be far worse than the damage any law could do - they would never be able to hire new people again. You seem to presume that the law is the only thing keeping corporations in line.
A smart hard working guy
I am all the things above but what i dont have is usually time, money is time , if i had enough money not to have to work or worry i could spend all day getting my bio-diesel business off the ground! Not working 65 hours a week. a trust fund is a guarantee that a guy like me can make it... almost. I'll make it any way but it will take 3 times longer. lol
ambivalence != indifference
Implementation of yesterday's xkcd comic
Are hacked Wordpress installations usually running old versions, or is the latest Wordpress version usually equally vulnerable?
The Tarsnap guy (cperciva) who appears here sometimes runs a paid beta, which is close in spirit.

I'm confused. How is tarsnap similar to charging a signup fee for an otherwise free service?
I've swapped out my Wordpress installation in favor of a static HTML site generated by a couple of Python scripts. Wordpress is great if you need all that power, but it isn't maintenance-free. Making things static reminded me how nice it can be to have a site that is essentially immune to attack and blazing fast, all without the overhead of dynamic page generation. It's cool that Movable Type does static generation too.
Ahh, good question! 3 college credits for ~250 hours. That's the incentive. One did it just for the experience, and regretted it.
Why is tracking game reports or driving trains unequal, but sex equal? Similarly, why is using sex toys equal, but using colonoscopes unequal?

Maybe you could explain what you mean by "equal"?
" Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is."

Hardly. Individuals can very easily manage a police force. Look at Blackwater.

The reason you might want the State involved in either of these is because you want it to have a monopoly. I really don't want competing police forces and armies. Having competing organizations that evaluated and licensed doctors might be a good thing.
From what I understand, molecular level effects are the same as quantum effects looked at from a slightly higher level. My point was that, as far as we can tell, everything people do is the ultimate result of applying a fairly simple set of rules (the physical laws).
Otherwise, you'll just take what you want?
A lot of programs are effective as web apps, and they should be web apps, but there are a few that cannot be web apps, or function much worse:

* Image Edititing
* Video Player
* Chat
* Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt
* Software Developmnent
* Music Player

Such things need to start fast and be easily accessible. The web has that problem - it does not start fast, and things tend to get lost among all the tabs and windows.
Some food for thought:

Writing an iphone app as a "desktop app" v.s. writing a iphone web app.

If web apps are so much better why are people making fat apps for the iphone left and right?
I think this is a great argument for web apps. It only persuades me to focus on web apps for certain categories of software, though. For things like high-end games and video or audio applications, I think desktop will continue to dominate... at least until the web and desktop meld. At some point I'd love to see the distinction go away. That's probably a long way off, since it would mean Apple and Microsoft and the FOSS world agreeing on a standard. Hmm... this comment gives me lots of ideas...
I think you meant 'hear' :)

If you are self-aware and you are curious about self-awareness then you can present your environment with stimuli (spoken words, gestures, and so on) to create variations on the Turing test, if the parties appear to think like you do then slowly the evidence over time accumulates to the point where you will have to assume others are sentient.

Testing rocks, cats and people in this respect will give you different ideas about the sentience of rocks, cats and people (and in the case of the cats, if you should frighten them with your sounds or gestures will give you a healthy respect for small creatures with claws).

I believe the people in my environment when they say they have a mind too, I trust cats to have 'some form of mind' because they seem to be self motivated like I am. Their motivations are clearly different than mine, but they do seem to think, at some point the evidence that points in that direction has to be taken to be overwhelming, so therefore we lean towards taking it to be the truth.

No simulation gets in the way of that one.

Now if someone were to slip a simulated intelligence in my environment (we are assuming that it is a fact here for the sake of the argument) and I would not be able to tell the simulation apart from any of the other entities then we have achieved a situation where there would be an equivalence between that simulated intelligence and 'the real thing'.

Maybe I'm stretching things here, but it seems to make sense to me.
Image Editing

Given that Adobe is betting the house on flash and the web would now be a good time to start a startup to create next generation Image Editing desktop application? Photoshop seems like the app that the interns are getting assign to maintain while the "cool" devs are off working on some web / flash projects.
And are you assuming that the internships are being provided as a public service? That is laughable.

Either the company gets a hire-able employee or they get a whole bunch of work done that no one else was going to do.
I asked a similar question here recently and got a number of valuable links, see thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764982
I see some assumptions here that need to be challenged.

- Click through six screens that no one in the history of man has ever read.

You don't have to have any screens. This is your fault for using a wizard based installer. The app could just display "loading" while it installs and prepares to start.

- Potentially weeks pass. Find your way back to the shareware site. Check out price.

Why doesn't your app prompt the user to buy the full version and open a url to your payment page?

I agree that desktop software has more opportunities to exit the funnel, but it also has more opportunities for retention and upsell. You can install a desktop shortcut, a system tray icon ...

Andrew Chen recently blogged on this same topic: http://bit.ly/pTJsE

Some more suggestions on how to improve a desktop app:

- Lost registration keys

Don't use registration keys. Sell a machine specific license with free upgrades. Vend the license from the app. Each license will be tied to a machine and can't be used on other machines (use the NIC as a machine id).

- bugs present in old versions of the software that are still floating around download sites

Have your software automatically update itself as soon as it is installed.

- Piracy

It is much harder for to pirate your app if you use machine specific licenses. It is still possible, but doubtful that someone is going to use a hex editor to try to patch your bingo creator app. They might as well exploit your web app, steal your source and put up a free version.

- Analytics

Mixpanel has a REST api. You can use it from your desktop app.

- Split Testing

Why can't you do this on the desktop?

-Long Cycles

IMVU redeployed their desktop app 50 times a day on the way to over 10M in annual revenue (http://bit.ly/CwJN4). They also heavily split tested.

I'm not saying that a desktop app is appropriate for his business. Just that there are more things to consider before writing them off.
There is a better solution then Tweetmeme already. It's the TwetCount plugin by BackType

http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount

I use it on my bog successfully. You can customize colors, retweet text, even choose between several URL shorteners.
I like it when someone changes his mind because of reality.

In a way, I find the arguments given here irrelevant. Sure they're persuasive, but not much more persuasive than the opposite arguments. What really matters is the fact that one option is just working better than the other in practice. It takes mental flexibility to try this, and be willing to see the results, when one's preconceptions run the other way.
I agree with Daniel, and I've had this discussion with others starting up new sites focusing on UCC recently.

My personal opinion: the only time it's okay to scrape data is when it's actually "data" - e.g., addresses, events, etc. Scraping conversations or articles - content that people took the time and energy to craft - even though it may be legal, just isn't right.

But I've come across this practice with increasing frequency over the past few months... and every site I've come across that engages in this practice or -even worse - uses it as their business model - has been put on my blacklist (e.g., BigResource, etc.).

Reasoning? It takes 10 sec. for a page to load. After I've seen 6 pages in a row that have the same exact content, I've wasted over a minute of my life, and want to throttle someone.

First impressions are the ones that last, and if the first impression a user gets of your site is one that makes them vow not to use your site again, you'll end up far less successful than if you were to wait and allow your content to grow organically.

A better option: look for topics that haven't been covered elsewhere (or at least topics that aren't easily found through google), and ask and answer the questions yourself (maybe even using a different account so it looks 'real') with a mind towards SEO.

And I've found this to be such an annoyance that yes, I'm cross posting this response on my blog.
I don't think it is quite that simple. Quantum effects can screw up the apparent 'rules' of the macro world (atoms, molecules and upwards) subtle the closer you get to the lower levels of the macro world.

Physics as you know it ('classical physics') stops making sense at that level, things no longer have an apparent causal relationship.

What Roger Penrose argues in his book 'the emperors new mind' is that 'mind' springs from these effects.

He suspects that if we simply follow the classical physics rules that we will end up on a dead end and that it will take a full blown quantum simulation of a whole brain in order to simulate one with the emergent behaviour that is being sought.
My startup was rejected for YC summer '07. I launched it while working full-time for another company, built it to profitability over the course of a year and a half, and quit my day job in February of this year.
Spend more time outside the aerobic zone without worrying that I'm damaging muscle tissue.
You don't have to have any screens. This is your fault for using a wizard based installer.

I've stripped as many as I'm comfortable stripping -- it is three. Give me a bit of dramatic license -- unless you've installed a piece of OSS recently, in which case six is perhaps excessively nice. ;)

Why doesn't your app prompt the user to buy the full version and open a url to your payment page?

It does. Believe me, I've optimized that interaction to within an inch of my life. Regardless, it is hard to break users of their habits, and one of those habits is "When I want to go somewhere online, I go to Google." (Or, recently, "I type stuff into my search box" which is replacing the URL bar in modern browsers.)

IMVU redeployed their desktop app 50 times a day on the way to over 10M in annual revenue

IMVU has a hybrid desktop/web app. The continuous integration stuff affects the web portion. The desktop portion has a development cycle measured in weeks.

http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/cd-for-client-so...
No, really. Someone's got a lot of free time on his hands. C'mon! Yesterday's XKCD?
Image Editing still has to run locally, you cannot have a request sent to the server everytime you resize an image or apply a filter. Yes, you can make it download-on-demand, as per flash, but it still needs to launch quickly, have fast and complete access to the local filesystem as well as the web, and this is a bit challenging to the current crop of browsers.
The section on "Phone Home vs. Google Analytics" is something I have been pondering for long time. I hack on the Arora browser. Now if I had Arora report back with what actions user use (File/Quit etc) I could answer questions like: Does anyone ever use View/Source or do they all just open the Inspector? But even though people are using a Browser I think they will still complain that it is reporting something back to a server which is exactly what every single webpage they go to does, but somehow it is bad because it is from the desktop app and not the webpage in the desktop app.
You make some good points. On this, though:

Andrew Chen recently blogged on this same topic

...I just read it. He gives tables of numbers and equations that as far as I can tell are completely made up. He also recommends practices that I think are pernicious, including:

Install itself on the system tray
Start up automatically when the OS loads
Run nicely in the background to pop up when appropriate
...and many other retention-happy features

("Happy" for whom? Certainly not the poor naive users I know whose computers are bogged down with programs that do these things.)

His post is intellectually dodgy in exactly the way that a lot of this kind of software is dodgy. Which makes me notice something I never thought of before: web apps feel cleaner. As a user, I control when I go to the website and use the product; there is less opportunity for semi-scrupulous vendors to mess with me.
Generic code with all my objects cleaning up after themselves.

Are you sure they really cleaned up after themselves, and you don't have a subtle memory leak waiting to happen because of some unnoticed and rare and disastrous problem with the order in which your destructors get called? :)
In Illinois, you need a license to charge money to suggest where throw pillows should be placed; interior design is a licensed profession. A system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying licenses.

Licensing helps, but it can be abused. Unlicensed anything isn't necessarily a bad thing, and, legal and mental affairs notwithstanding, buyers should be able to choose between multiple options.
Can you provide an example where you would see a young person starting their career would find themselves worse off by accepting an unpaid internship?

I presume you accept that the young person would only do so if
(a) they weren't able to find a paid position, or
(b) the experience they believed they could get would exceed the pay they could get elsewhere - and presumably therefore would result in future benefits?
History Writing and our present
According to the article, the Chevy Volt really gets the equivalent of 50 mpg, not 230. If you go over its 40 mile battery range, it gets only 20 mpg.
RSS  twitter
If web apps are so much better why are people making fat apps for the iphone left and right?

The way iPhone apps are distributed mitigates many of the leaking funnel difficulties with desktop applications. There's exactly one place to buy them, and OH MY GOD would I kill to have one click buying for all my customers.

However, the mindshare iPhone apps have on HN is tremendously disproportionate to their utility for the developer vis a vis other opportunities to sell software for money. I will happily explain why on another day.
I for one welcome our new Junpeng overlords.
Wow, cry me a river. Apple gave them exclusivity for exactly the same reason -- more profits. Obviously you like them enough to be a customer. You could switch, why don't you?
Exactly my point. So Adobe is going to invest their best developers and gobs of money trying to make a web based photoshop. What if I were to form a startup that made a new next-generation Desktop Image Editor based on Qt (cross platform ftw) with the goal of being able to surpass Photoshop.
The point is that they are both activities engaged in by two consenting adults.

It's a common belief that one is not the business of the state, but the other one is. My question: what are the exceptions to the "two consenting adults can do as they wish in privacy" rule?
He listed 17 different ways for a user to not convert to a paid user with a traditional desktop app. The iphone mitigates many of these reasons.
I have never heard anyone refer to Python's lambdas as "exceptionally well-thought-out" before.

Python, like any programming language, is not perfect. There's simply less to not be perfect.
Why so many words. Modern browser (webkit-based with optimized js runtime and hardware-accelerated rendering) now is what java ought (and failed) to be - portable desktop application platform, but without installation, additional training or special support required.

Almost everyone are familiar with browser - can click on links, hit the back button and have some assumption what they would see on the screen and what to expect.

There are already obvious trends, like an end of desktop mail apps (yahoo and gmail are leaders), desktop chat programs - they were evolved into voice/video communication technologies or replaced by social networks and so on.

Tell me one reason why not take advantage on this situation and remain attached to previous century's "desktop" technology from MS. (sure, special cases, such as heavy 3D games or CAD/Video-editing tools will stay long.)
* Downloading/FTP/Torrenzt

The Transmission web GUI is actually very nice, but I suppose this method assumes a web server on a LAN, which for most people doesn't work
Sex is a market. Money is only involved covertly (many women seek wealthy husbands), but it is still a market. Some market pressures:

If some women have sex on the 1'st date, it will be hard for women who want to hold out until marriage to compete.

Similarly, if Tina and Joan and Kellie engage in fellatio, Jennie might have trouble keeping a boyfriend if she does not. There is your "race to the bottom".

Furthermore, sex can both cause pregnancy and spread disease, and therefore does affect healthcare.
Not necessarily; it could be that YC helps companies become winners (which it certainly professes to.) But both YC's ability to pick winners and their helpfulness to the chosen few would be disproved if there was no difference between rejected and accepted applicants.