skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Some people think Perl is a good deal more expressive and powerful for them. A whole lot more people would if they managed to get past their initial reaction."

Don't shoot me, but I also observe a similar symptom with high-priced and/or hard-to-move-away-from "corporate" (as in "boring") products. The more your company invested in said product, the more successful the enterprise will show up on internal communications, with little or no correlation however badly it failed.

People get attached to their investments, be they money, time or self-esteem. Or, in the corporate case, the jobs of the people who signed the check.

As for Python, as a long time pythonista, I can tell you there are many steps to Python-zen, exactly like what happens with Perl (I did a lot of Perl between 95 and 2002). The simplistic syntax hides a lot of power that elude the newbie. When I review my early code, I see it as childish and crude.

If someone wants to learn new languages, I always advise them to learn something as different and "alien" from his/her comfort zone as possible. Haskell is a good choice, a Lisp like Clojure or Scheme is another. And by learn I mean taking a couple years as a side hobby to do increasingly difficult problems, perhaps some you already took with your comfortable-set. It _has_ to be an enlightening experience or it loses the purpose.
Want an Unpaid Internship So You Can Get Valuable Experience ? – Screw You
You must have an interesting definition of 'old'.
The missing bit of this story is that governments have two ways to promote the development of new drugs and can run both in parallel.

First is by passing patent laws. The attractive property here is that the government is not paying out on research that fails. Private business does that and has to suck up the losses. The other side of this coin is the big "windfall" from monopoly profits when the research succeeds. What seems like a shrewd incentive scheme ex ante, seems immoral ex post.

The second way is by funding research in national laboratories out of general taxation. The problem is that the government keeps paying for research that fails, and since success is rare the process is hard to manage. At what point does the government admit that a research institution has lost its focus and should be closed?

This second way raises awkward questions. Having worked in government funded research myself I'm painfully aware of how easy it is to persuade one-self of the merits of long term research over short term research to the extent that one wanders off into the wilderness and never achieves anything. The profit motive is one way of countering this tendency. Are there other ways? They need to work better than the profit motive, but that is setting the bar pretty low.

I think Ben Goldacre could better spend his time talking about the psychology of being a researcher. The second route is seen by many as a money-pit, but there is much new thinking on Public Choice Theory and Mechanism Design. Are we not ripe for some new and better ways of running publicly funded research? If we never get round to thinking about these issues, then the mocking title of "Please give us all your money" also works well as an attack on publicly funded science.
A lesson in becoming a nonconformist
This sounds like a damn cool place to work. A startup with government and supreme security divisions as clients is definitely something thing different and impressive.

It also impressive to know that they took the plunge to take technology, data analysis to steer a field like this instead of a more chalked out field like finance sector.
Rumor has it that the CPS 2000 was removed from the market simply due to its sheer power. Anyone who has experienced a direct blast from a CPS 2000 can tell you that the stream packs more punch than most garden hoses. All future models based on the CPS systems appear to have been toned down in order to meet some forms of safety criteria.

A friend of mine got this for his birthday the month it came out. His party was a watergun fight. That was quickly abandoned when we realized how powerful it was. It knocked down 6th graders at close range.

Instead we spend hours taking turns who got to have the gun and stand on the deck. Everyone else ran around in the yard and tried not to get shot. Last person standing won the round.

This is one of my better childhood memories. I am really glad this link was posted so I can use it to back up the power of the water gun in the story.
While APL has its problems, baroque syntax is certainly not among them! You can write an APL parser on a napkin. With a felt-tip marker.
Still begging the question using fuzzy terms. "If computers are sort of good they are very good!" That statement doesn't mean anything concrete. Don't the recent results in GO invalidate : if(computers can compete) {humans have to be perfect} ? When does the conditional get satisfied? The moment there is a basic implementation which follows all the rules of the game or according to some fuzzy notion of "compete" which gets changed conveniently :)
I don't know. If I had the money to invest, either response would be good although I would prefer the last one (you know in your gut that you are right and they are wrong, and you know you don't get anything from going back to the drawing board).
It gets more good attention too - it's better designed, easier to use, looks good has a vast range of plugins and templates available for free ...
I've been buying a lot from Amazon MP3 lately. Mostly because I'm much less willing to spend the time to find what I want which isn't always very popular stuff. It's so much easier to just search on amazon for it. Now if only I could find a similar service for Movies, I might not have to do all this work. The MPAA needs to understand that DRM is making their stuff very inconvenient for most of us. We don't want to rent a movie for 6 bucks we want to own a movie for that amount or maybe even for 10.
True enough.

BTW, if you'd like to chat more about concurrency, I'm around all weekend (although I'm late getting to the University of Belgrano today). As my comments during your talk yesterday indicated, I think you're pretty off-base arguing that people aren't trying out interesting concurrency solutions in Python — ZODB is a (somewhat broken) STM that's been production-stable for many years, and Stackless is specifically targeted at actor-based modeling.

So I think people in the Python community have actually been way out in front on these issues. It's just that most people use Python for production work, not research, so the researchy stuff doesn't make it into the mainline.
The poster you replied to did not say Go-bots were competitive yet. He said they had shown a lack of progress in the face of increasing resources until recently.

The only thing I'm saying here is that your counterexample does not make sense because Go-bots are famously bad at Go.
> they're applied at compile-time!

I seriously don't under stand that statement. Decorators are callables that return callables, nothing else, nothing special. Decorator Syntax is just sugar.

Decorators can be applied any time including runtime. I'm not even sure what you mean by "compile time" in regards to Python, import time?
New Release of FCKeditor With More Features: CKEditor | guidesigner.net
is there a reason you believe this?

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

python looks like it has staying power

So did the Roman Empire, JOVIAL, FORTH, and PL/1.
Amazon returns deleted Kindle books, offers $30 check
A strange fact popped into my mind, after reading this story and remembering some comments on the "Turing deserves an apology" story.

Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom. As soon as the act those adults want to do becomes nonsexual (e.g. an unpaid internship, unlicensed medicine), that principle goes out the window.

Very confusing.
Look at the bottom of stackoverflows pages:

site design and logo is © 2009 stackoverflow.com llc; user contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/

So it looks like as long as you play by their rules you'll be fine.

And if you don't play by their rules you've basically told the world now that you did so with intent.

Also, to save you some time and them a lot of server load here is the data ready for download:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...
Microsoft from http://www.microsoft.com is in the Compete top 100,000. We are not looking for VC investment. We are profitable.
So call it volunteering? Surely volunteers are not illegal yet.
You're right in that your two statements appear to be consistent and their explanation is a bit twisted. But I'd be fascinated to here of how you know, by observation, that there are a plurality (>1) of minds.

The explanation appears consistent with a response that says "A simulation may be observed to be equivalent to the real thing (true)".

Perhaps a simple logic slip.
They're the same issues with minimum wage. The "minimum wage brings minimum jobs" because it hurts those with the least experience the most (http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel/2009/08/new-video-minim...). The irony is that people who call themselves advocates for the poor pushing for increasingly higher minimum wages actually hurt the poor with these policies.
2 minutes, Alan Watts, beautifully complementary to this article:

http://www.richardsreader.com/alan-watts-on-the-unsettling-t...
The true crime is that more companies are not offering minimum wage internships. I for one, would be happy to recruit smart kids from college, and spend ten or twenty hours a week providing them with direction. I know the software company I work for could utilize their talent for brute-force work like dependency tracking in our code base, testing, build automation, documentation, etc.

I think more small and medium sized companies should provide (paid) internships.
Thank you for the thoughtful responses.

Interesting points. We're actually doing a trip to Mexican villages in the coming weeks. We're bringing the VP Engineering as part of a customer validation effort.

"gruseom": In regards to cultural, organizational, technical issues. I don't discount that but it's really hard to know. We haven't been around long enough for issues like these to manifest themselves but I'll have to think about that more.

Thanks again....
It may not be a popular opinion but I agree with the US gov on this one. Everyone wants something for free.

However, I think the big problem is how the compensation is valued. If the experience gained by the intern is more valuable than minimum wage, then yes, the law seems broken. However for every job that would actually provide meaningful experience and benefit the intern there are probably many other internships that provide very little if any benefit to the intern. Since the gov really has no easy way of measuring the experience / networking compensation, if they attempted to, it would be to the detriment of the mojority of iterns, who would end up working for free for very little if any benefit.

I don't have any numbers to back up my claim of non-beneficial v.s. beneficial free internships. However, I also don't have anything to gain either way and it's just my impartial gut feeling that any system that tried to solve his problem would create more problems for the majority of these free interns, or end up costing tax payer's a lot to police the practice.
Breast Cancer Fully Explained
He'd lose a little money, but couldn't he pay them minimum wage and then charge them $7/hour for the training he's giving them(just like the martial arts schools)?
Also, if his company is him and a bunch of interns, who's going to sue him?
if you go to searchyc.com, bing, google with terms like "mashup copyright", unfortunately most of them are about music mashups.

http://searchyc.com/copyright
going thru this is a legal education

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411555

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/01/23/lawsuit_o...

And, oh, yeah, IANAL or bus dev person or MBA anything like that.
It's more or less required for cell phone service. They need to know what cell you are in order to connect incoming calls.

Besides if you're using AT&T you're either ignorant or unconcerned about privacy. They have looong history going back to the Clipper chip, PATRIOT act era wiretaps, of "selling out" their customers.
You haven't explained why you agree with the US government on this one (though it's not just the US government). Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place?

Are you saying that instead of letting people make their own choices at an individual level as to whether or not the experience is of value, it's better for government to just ban the choice altogether?
I think his argument is that it would not be a waste of time for the intern who would gain some experience, skills and resume building if they had nothing better to do. However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage. I don't think his net worth is relevant to the argument.

Regardless I agree with the gov, which I stated in a previous reply.
Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't.

The unpaid internship law serves to give some protections to the little guy.

Btw, I really don't understand why a billionaire (?) can't afford to pay hourly minimum wages to a bunch of kids.
You are incorrect.

"Second, the idea that TRE is merely an optimization, which each Python implementation can choose to implement or not, is wrong. " - http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimi...
That doesn't even begin to handle the backwards compatibly argument. We still have people using browsers like IE6, so for a long period of time you would need to write code in both languages.
I would say that the operative questions is more about founders who become successful after they were not accepted into a YC "class." YC themselves are good at pointing out that most start-ups have to change direction/pivot multiple times before being successful. That's why it's about the people/founders imho.

I also suspect that there is little correlation in terms of success or not for companies accepted/not accepted into YC. The one exception worth exploring is that moving to SV for 90 days for non SV companies and working in one living room might increase focus and hence chances of success. That would be interesting to know.
As Guido says, TCO is not an optimzation, it's a language feature. Here's his reason, which I think is pretty sound:

"Second, the idea that TRE is merely an optimization, which each Python implementation can choose to implement or not, is wrong. Once tail recursion elimination exists, developers will start writing code that depends on it, and their code won't run on implementations that don't provide it: a typical Python implementation allows 1000 recursions, which is plenty for non-recursively written code and for code that recurses to traverse, for example, a typical parse tree, but not enough for a recursively written loop over a large list." - http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimi...
Well, that was the day my company's new site (smartpress.com) started its adwords campaign, but somehow I doubt that had anything to do with it.
Amazon MP3 looks promising, but alas:

We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is
currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous
states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

So the industry is in my opinion far from what they try to be -- from the article:

It does not need to make piracy impossible—just less convenient than the legal alternatives.
Alex3917 is there a link to your company I could check out. Congratulations on a huge milestone. I hope you take time to celebrate.
Naw, this has the same kinds of risks as drug-dealing, except few people would be willing to chance prison for a movie, if they thought it was a real possibility. Going from darknet to sneakernet is a step backward. What needs doing is a combo TOR/bittorrent client for Windows that emphasizes the security of the TOR route over the normal bittorrent route with UI design, while still allowing the latter, so that the client can gain traction.
As if the job market weren't already too much of a "buyer's market." So many Americans are held hostage by their jobs because of the lack of good unemployment/severance and the deathgrip of health insurance. I don't see any reason to encourage the situation even more by having some jobs - that are actually jobs - be for no pay.

Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.
Agree on smashing mag, also look at Speckyboy: http://speckyboy.com/2009/09/02/50-inspiring-web-application...

Yahoo has a UI repository as well:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones (in terms of success)

Did you mean variation rather than correlation?
Employment is not a private act, it has huge social ramifications.
This is very nice---it catalogs a number of standard continuation tricks in a manner clear enough (I think) to enlighten those who barely know what continuations are in the first place. As a bonus, the devil/angel/milestone idea is new to me.

It's a (very small) shame that dynamic-wind doesn't get any coverage.
So "the government thinks we should pay people who work for us, but what we're going to do is prey on the jobless and exploit their desire for a job in the future, we'll use that hope for a job to get them to volunteer to work for us - then we can dump them and get some more suckers later, we'll be even more rich and they can starve for all we care".

Volunteering should not be illegal. Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be. Differentiating these positions is pretty hard - a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.
His company is very large. He owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and HDnet, along with a bunch of other smaller things. Plenty of money for lawyers to go after.
Where our politicians would rather see you pay out of your pocket to go back to school rather than get valuable on the job experience.

huh.?. from what I have seen, politics almost runs on interns. Every politician and political organisation has unpaid interns doing real work. The whitehouse has hundreds..

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/Internships/
No, it's not. Low calorie diets don't tend to create ketosis and if you start eating too few calories on Atkins, you will stop losing weight. (I speak from experience. Had to make myself eat more. Funny, huh?)
unlicensed medicine

That's completely different. The licensing of medical practitioners is not based on any notion of protecting society from deviant behaviour; it is based on the need to protect vulnerable individuals from fraud.

I have no problem with consenting individuals engaging in sex acts or internships, with or without pay -- but I absolutely believe that fraud, in all its forms, should be illegal, since a fraudulent transaction is not one between truly consenting individuals.
The issue of min wage came up here before - the studies I found were mainly inconclusive, it's a hard one to test. One that came up, was a test in the food service industry (low waged) either side of a state border, one side with min wage the other without. It showed that the min wage tended to increased employment and improve the financial position for those employed with minimum wage vs. those in a non-min wage position. Indeed a larger increase in the in wage over the surrounding areas led to higher employment still.

I'll see if I can dig out that study later.
a) known fact: insulin spikes cause more calories to be converted to fat, even when the same amounts of calories are consumed

b) even diet soda can cause insulin spikes, causing rats and calves to gain more weight on the same # of calories as rats/calves not consuming diet soda

There are links off the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_soda

There have also been lots of books written about the insulin response and weight gain, all citing studies, all pointing out that insulin resistance/syndrome x play roles in making some people fatter even if they do not overeat. Gary Taubes' is especially good.

I don't know why nerds seem to want to persist in believing that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, despite all the evidence.

In my mind, it's like a nasty twist on "tough love" -- people want to believe it because they want to believe that fat people are bad and weak, and therefore deserve what they get. By taking a hard line approach, they can feel... virtuous.

But the body is extremely complex, and a tightly-coupled system at that, with so many variables that it is vanishingly unlikely that we can categorically say that there is one simple, clear, clean fact that rules it all.
Is The Whitehouse a for profit privately owned business (eg via stock).
A billionaire complaining he has to pay people.... to paraphrase the title of the post, screw him.
> Hmm, one is an equal partnership, the other isn't.

Is it really? Is SM play "an equal partnership" between master and slave?
The sexual options for two consenting adults are fairly limited compared to "everything else imaginable that is unrelated to having sex".

I also don't see any connection between the two schools of thought, other than them both being things you've read recently. At least I've never seen a "CIVIL UNIONS ARE A CIVIL RIGHT, AND NO UNPAID INTERNSHIPS" sign.
Procreation and norms of marriage and family have enormous social ramifications. There is no distinction.
Agreed. My experience is that optimizing and scaling your app from day one in preparation for Twitter-like traffic is a self-defeating prophecy. Web app scaling is hard, and if you spend so much effort on it from the beginning it will leave little time for actual development, and as a result your web app will most likely fail to become popular.

I'm convinced that scaling is something you need to worry about after you become popular. There's no point to worry about it any earlier.
One need not be licensed to be honest.
> However the profits for his business would not be enough to justify minimum wage.

I think he gave the game away here:

One silver lining of a “great recession” that we are now
in is that there are a lot of incredibly talented people
without jobs, or who have lost their jobs....I thought we
could assemble a talented group who would enjoy the
internships and could also gain valuable experience to add
to their resumes.

ie, expectations dashed.

Nevermind the cost of labor, though: it's obviously worth his time to try to get this effort off the ground. Why? Brand promotion, of course!

Sure, there might not be any directly attributable revenues, but it is very disingenuous of him to claim that he thus cannot afford to pay his interns.

cake: have | eat, pick one.
He probably didn't become a billionaire without trying to find ways to cut costs as much as possible. He's not running a charity.
do a quick sweep of my dozen or so WP blogs and make sure they were all updated

If you install and set up Wordpress Mu [1], you can run all those blogs off of a single installation, and then not only do you have a contralized install to manage plugins and themes, but it's far easier to keep a single install up to date compared to twelve or more...

[1] http://mu.wordpress.org/