skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not.

I'm not calling them "heroic". I'm just annoyed that other people are casting them as "evil". They can be mutually beneficial, and I don't see a problem with that. The "evil" is people trying to prohibit mutually beneficial transactions.

By the way, I love the entrepreneurial spirit. I just don't love the "you must be an entrepreneur, one of the lucky people who sneak past the catch 22, or 'paid' by way of taxes" plan. I prefer maximizing opportunity, rather than limiting it, even for people who don't have that entrepreneurial spirit.
If it were possible to ban all non-procreative sex acts and all forms of contraception, it definitely would affect how many children are born.
I can't think of an article I've read recently that I disagree with more. This is a good law that protects potential employees from being used by cheapskates like the author of this article who want to get slave labor from their employees. Free internships hurt those looking for jobs because they have to compete with free when they need money to pay the bills.
Joe doing it up the butt created the AIDS epidemic. Seems publicly relevant to me. Not that I personally care much about Joe doing it up the butt, but once you think government has a role in sculpting society there is no distinction between personal social issues and personal business issues.

Women choosing to have children out of wedlock has a huge effect on everyone. Much more than some guy offering unpaid internships.
I think I agree with Cuban on this one, with the caveat that anyone who works for free for a billionaire is a bit soft in the head. I can see not paying market wages, but not even minimum wage?
Second that. We had unpaid interns at my last job, and their work consisted of telemarketing, harvesting email addresses, web form spamming, data entry. It wouldn't be cost effective if their earned even $5/hr. What did they get out of it... cynicism?

What happened to paying your way through college with paying jobs? Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do.
I apologize to TechCrunch -- a member of a private forum I'm on, who I consider trustworthy, has reported that he discovered that his blog was hacked in exactly the manner specified.
> You can argue about the efficacy of minimum wage laws, but it seems like real empirical studies (instead of just theoretical arguments) have been pretty inconclusive.

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.

> And overall, the point is that you can't just let people create a massive loophole in that law by just deciding not to pay people at all.

I, for one, don't have any problem with people finding "loopholes" in bad laws.

> So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination.

Class warfare? Seriously . . . ?
So then what you're arguing then is society is better off for there not to have any work being done at all - essentially what Mark Cuban's concluding statement is: for the "benefit" of the exploited intern, we would rather they sit at home rather than gain any experience at the risk that the experience is useless? What does it matter if the firm is for profit or not for profit/charity/government agency in the first place? So charities couldn't possibly exploit the poor/their workers?

By this logic, should we ban or let government set prices on everything? After all, any free giveaways causes pressure on substitutes to go down in value. So by setting a price on a good or service which is below what some other guy has, you're essentially being "exploited".

Class discrimination? Right, so you're arguing that it's not fair that "middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them" have the privilege of unpaid internships so this practice should be stopped?

As for empirical studies, the problem is that it's very difficult to isolate the variables but when it comes to understanding simple price floors and price ceilings, it's a pretty simple, conclusive relationship. Further, the studies are pretty clear in my books with the overwhelming evidence of cause and effect of minimum wages (sure there are those that are inconclusive, but if you're looking for a "scientific consensus" - you won't find the average economist saying that it's inconclusive unless they happen to work for a union):
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/minimum/50years.htm
This covers news sites: http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&hl=en&q=author:%2...
Volunteering is something you do for a charity.
An internship's precisely the same. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "intern" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
I find it disturbing that when "both sides of the debate have perfectly reasonable arguments" the knee-jerk response is "Let's regulate the fuck out of it!"
The post is a discussion of why I'm moving from desktop apps to web apps.

That is less consequential at HN than elsewhere, since most of the community here already is in web apps. However, even if you'll never touch desktop software, you may find the points about AdWords and conversion math worth your while. (They're about halfway down.) The short story is that anything you do to increase your conversion rate has a side effect of increasing your ability to win the AdWords "auction", which means you get additional benefit (increased volume) above and beyond the base increase in conversion.
High Scalability: Hot Links for 2009-9-4
> he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns

I find that very doubtful. Why is he even considering the project if the cost of paid interns would negate the upside?
What were they promised?
Then look at it this way. Barter is taxed, and working for free for "experience" is clearly a form of barter.

Unpaid internships still must be taxed. They will probably be taxed at a higher prevailing wage than minimum wage.

So, you have tax payment going on, while no employment paying is going on.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, rich or reasonably well-off kids can take free internships, which creates more free internships, which creates competition for free internships. And those smart, deserving, motivated kids who can't afford to work utterly for free cannot compete for free internships and instead have to work at McDonald's or some other, less useful job.

If the internships are paid, everyone is better off... except, perhaps, the employer who hoped to get free labor. (But who still has to pay taxes, natch.)
You got the timescale wrong. Try a week or a month and you'll get very different results.
Also, note how Intel's chip quality was atrocious in the beginning, kinda like japanese cars in the 60s-70s and korean cars in the recent past.
Although not mentioned till the very end of the article, his views on patents are interesting and somewhat surprising coming from the former head of Intel. I've thought patent reform has very little chance since the current system is such a short term benefit to the big companies. But maybe even they will start to become aware of the longer term downsides?
Recommended. I used this site a few years ago to educate my self in the algorithms needed for a collaborative filtering project. The project was a success because the clients that deployed it got an immediate 30-40% increase in sales.
And people eating pork created the swine flu epidemic. Please.

Because a disease preys on a population does not mean that population created the disease, whether or not it becomes an epidemic.

I'm pretty sure that AIDS didn't spring fully formed out of the abyss, thanks to anal sex.

And then, if you want to get picky, the deliberate ignoring of the health issues by public authorities escalated the epidemic.
So in a recession if GM/Boeing/Walmart demand that all new hires work for no pay for their first year 'as intern trainees' that would be OK?

If they fire these people on day 364 and get new trainees next year - that would be ok?
This might be the time to mention the true story of Christopher Gardner, as shown in "The Pursuit of Happyness" who worked for six months without pay to find his dream.

One story does not an argument make, but it's just an observation.
Simple solution - call the job a training course and charge the interns $10k to do it!
From my experience, they hire non-programmers en-masse yet have their Infamous Interviews for engineers.

Think how big they are. They need a lot of middle management types and general errand boys to keep even just their physical spaces up and running. Lots of folks start as support or writing contractors and work their way into open positions that way.
"Kids need to put their bottom line first, just like employers do." - Absolutely - and you don't think they do? Are they better off to have been denied the choice? Why didn't those unpaid interns quit? Could it possibly be that they made the conscious choice that their time spent doing these tasks was better than not at all (or working in fast food or whatever other job for that matter)?
A serious question: What's the difference between an "unpaid internship" and a CEO of a successful company (e.g. Steve Jobs) who gets paid $1/year? Is there not a way to get around this law by simply putting the intern on a $1/summer salary?
"worker safety" - Huh? Where is the safety of the worker here being jeopardized?

It's not perfectly reasonable to the person being denied the choice. Clearly for the employer, the task(s) aren't of sufficient value to pay for the work otherwise, if they couldn't get unpaid workers, they would just pay for it.

Instead, banning the practice makes society tangibly worse off as the work on the margins isn't being performed and the next paid job the unpaid intern will get will likely be lower paid on average because they have less experience.
I could speculate about that all day. Maybe it has the potential to become beneficial. Maybe it has secondary effects that would be beneficial to his sports franchise, but he can't justify the expense to shareholders. Maybe he would like to provide something for the fans because he's a fan himself. What's it to you why he wants to do it?
Apparently Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, Wordpress.com, Facebook, Yahoo, Digg... haven't hit that complexity ceiling yet :) (Some of these use other languages as well, but AFAIK it's stuff like Java or Erlang for particular tasks)

PHP is far from perfect, and personally I've also moved from it to Ruby and Python, but the automatic "switch from PHP to anything" on a language that powers so much of the web is meaningless.
Summary: "I can't have people work for me for free. Boo-Hoo!"
> If the internships are paid, everyone is better off

You're assuming that the cost of providing internships is essentially zero. When the likelihood of internships being offered at all (based on cost) is factored into things, your argument falls apart.
hi, my startup will allow you to track authors across multiple sources - not at launch - but within the next few months.
The Tarsnap guy (cperciva) who appears here sometimes runs a paid beta, which is close in spirit. I haven't seen anyone else use a straight-up gatekeeping fee before. That idea came from joshu.
You still wouldn't be allowed to have them do actually useful work for you.
> Python 3 smokes Perl.

Are those Perl programs written to use multiple cores?

> And most people are using 2.x which is even faster.

All the 1/1 and 1 make them seem pretty much the same.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
With unemployment so high, why should there be free labor? It is not in the best interest of "We the People".
Would it surprise you to know that Walmart pays its entry level workers significantly higher than minimum wage? It's relevant because it shows companies like Walmart/Boeing/GM are not price setters / don't have as much control as you presume. Further, the "race to the bottom" in wages is often not desirable or in the interests of a firm.

Sure I don't have a problem with the practice you describe, but I'm pretty sure they would being unable to find workers who care enough or are even productive and losing any good workers to others. The employment market doesn't operate in a vacuum.
> I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones

That's a pretty bizarre statement. You mean to imply that the YC folks have exactly zero predictive power in the success of a startup? That seems pretty crazy.

I agree that being rejected by YC doesn't by any means block one from future success, but the selection process is better than, say, random sampling. If nothing else, there have to be a fair percentage of just plain dumb ideas that get filtered out or patterns that emerge for people who aren't likely to pull something off that they can predict with some degree of accuracy (no matter how small).
Ah, I missed that. Cheers.
Of course if you banned contraception, the birth rate would rise. But that's not what we're talking about, is it?

We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.

You're taking the employment/sex "between two consenting adults" line and then adding an extreme element, like, for example, everybody on earth is required to work 40 hours a week.
Gangster rap isn't hip hop. I hate anything that promotes violence, and would agree that Biggie didn't contribute much to the world. I still like Hip Hop though.
While I'm not particularly fond of kingkongrevenge's example, I don't think you're faithfully representing it. He didn't claim it created the disease -- he claimed it created the epidemic.
Exactly. It's sad that the #1 rated comment right now is some ridiculous non sequitur about sex, when there are some pretty glaring holes in Cuban's logic.

First off, the value proposition: Cuban is clearly intensely interested in getting this done, because it might be valuable to his company someday. Paraphrased, his argument is that it's not guaranteed to be valuable today, so he shouldn't have to pay anyone to do it. He wants the value, but he doesn't want to pay for it. That's exploitation, no matter how much he tries to sugar-coat it.

Second, the notion of "experience" being valuable: if it's true that the work being offered is worthless to Mark Cuban's company, then the intern isn't working for the Dallas Mavericks. She's at best doing something tangentially related to the Mavericks, and hoping that Mark Cuban or his organization will give her a good recommendation someday for doing it. The value proposition to the intern is, at best, debatable, and worse, the intern is in a position where she must excel in an unpaid position to gain any value at all. The best you can say about it is that it's ethically slimy.

Third, internships have inherent value to the employer -- they're extended interviews for paying jobs. That's why so many tech companies pay summer salaries and perks to college kids; they want to recruit good employees, cheaply. Cuban completely disregards this notion.

Fourth, Cuban grants that the internship has some probability of value to the Mavericks. Thus, the internship has some expected value to the organization. Cuban's argument that the internship has no value is just wrong. Companies routinely hire interns with no concrete expectations about their productivity, because the expectation of value is higher than the cost of a few interns. I'm highly skeptical of any counterargument that this wouldn't also be the case for the Dallas Mavericks.

In short, there are any number of logical holes in Cuban's argument, but the HN conversation is featuring a conversation about sex and individual liberty instead of discussing the topic at hand.
I wish we got nation wide memes like that. I haven't seen a single internet meme that actually got into wide culture.

I want a LOLcat in time square god dammit!
"To win and conquer in every battle is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's will without fighting" -- Sun Tzu

Judging by how often Switzerland gets invaded, they must be doing something right.
No he's running a business with employees, some of which he isn't paying because they're 'interns'.
True, and one doesn't need a driver's license to know how to drive -- but a system of licensing is the most efficient way of verifying qualifications.
I don't know what else I would expect from a thread that started on such an idiotic statement, but yes, you can say that sadomasochism and unpaid internships are similar in that you can get out of both of them by saying words.
I use Yahoo mail for their Address Guard feature, so useful to generate on the fly email addresses.
A study can be designed to account for embarrassing and/or incriminating questions.

Say the question is about "illegal file-sharing" and Yes means the subject has participated in this behavior in the past and No means the subject has not. Under private conditions, have the subject perform the following:

1. Flip a coin.

2. Have the subject answer Yes if they have participated in the illegal sharing of files.

3. If the subject has not done this activity, have them answer No only if they flipped 'tails' in step #1. Otherwise, if the coin came up 'heads', they answer Yes.

The true Yes proportion in the survey population of size n can then be determined by (Y_count - N_count) / n.
Even if you didn't ban contraception, I'm sure birth rates would rise -- because people who wanted to get off and couldn't get fellatio might still not use contraception all the time.

> We're talking about "private acts between consenting adults." Birth control is another kettle of fish entirely.

WTF?
Freedom doesn't really come into the equation. Of course you can do work for free, that is your right. If your neighbor asked you to mow his lawn for free, there is no law to stop you from doing that work for him.

Corporations aren't people though and have different rights. They don't enjoy the right to employ people free of charge.
It's not a knee-jerk response. For future reference, a good indication of a knee-jerk response is a remark that reduces an opponent's arguments to seven-word soundbites involving profanity.
In the real world, labor unions have largely outlived their usefulness which is why firms in industries where they dominate find themselves either dying or bankrupt and why there has been a steady decline in membership.

I'll bite though, how is it (in an imperfect or perfect world) that these unpaid interns are unable to be the arbiters of whether or not an unpaid internship "has value" to them?
Double the conversion rate says it all. Ease of development, support and upgrades are just gravy, although they free up time to make your product better.

I would add 5a to your funnel, "Is this real or is it a virus?"

Thanks for sharing.
I won't list names, but there's one team that was rejected from this batch that had raised a series A (from a good VC) before any of the teams from the batch did.

The fundamental thing is that you've got to want to start a startup, rather than to be in YC -- if you want to start a startup YC can be something along that path, but far and away most of the startups that have succeeded have done so without YC, so that's obviously a well-worn path to success.
I agree they are two different things.

It sounds like you are talking about illustrates the dichotomy of fundamental versus applied research. In articles and discussions I read and hear on research and funding, I see a general lack of acknowledgment that we have different research models. Different research models pose different incentives.

To oversimplify and generalize a lot here, I'll describe my understanding of one model, The fundamental to applied research chain,

Fundamental research is discovery, to evolve vague notions into concrete ideas and data. It is a broad, generally undirected investigation into some phenomena.

Applied research, on the other hand, takes the concrete ideas and data (knowledge) gained from fundamental research and turn them into tangible products (physical such as medicine and virtual, such as search engines).

With fundamental research, we get ideas, but not products.

With applied research, we get products from ideas.

Without fundamental research, there can be no applied research.

Without applied research, we get no products.

Yes, that is a broad generalization and disregards the true overlap of different research techniques, but I think breaking things out like this can help discover better models and financial motivations for research.

To me, it seems that the public sector is more naturally suited toward fundamental research and the private sector is more naturally suited to applied research.
I thought I did explain my opinion, but yes you've stated it much more succinctly than I have.

I believe the law protects people (specifically young people starting their careers) from exploitive practices. It also hurts them by penalizing non-exploitive and beneficial practices. I personally beleive the protection outweighs the potential benefits in this law, and thus agree with this law.

Is this a little big brother'ish? Perhaps, but nonetheless I would vote in favour of it.
In which respect they differ from other major political parties ... how, exactly?
Basically it's a conference

The first header on your page is "NOT A CONFERENCE"
I would add 5a to your funnel, "Is this real or is it a virus?"

Dang, I forgot to mention that. My target customers have been burned by BonzaiGatorCursors Incorporated and they now assume that absolutely anything that goes wrong on their computer is the result of spyware. So if something goes wrong within, say, six months of installing Bingo Card Creator, guess who gets blamed.

Remember the worldwide Google meltdown a few months back? No less than three people accused me of breaking the Internet.
There is a really simple way around this, used only by everybody online this century: set up a fan organization and allow your so-called "interns" to do volunteer work. Make it a collaborative community, and give some fricking minimal thought to quality control by means of a voting system, and your problem is solved.

It's 2009. Why is the owner of the Mavericks not aware of this sort of thing? Answer: he wants full ownership control of the resulting content. But he doesn't want to pay for it - that would make him less of a billionaire. So actual volunteer work is out. He wants the benefits of ownership without the disadvantage of paying people.

The government is right, here. Unpaid work for somebody who fully owns the results and benefits from it directly is a scam. It's spec work for God's sake, and I certainly see plenty of people coming out of the woodwork decrying that every time it comes up. Yet here, everybody's piling on the government for trying to prevent a billionaire from taking advantage of a bunch of out-of-work creative staff.

(If people want "valuable experience", there's no shortage of volunteer work that won't involve a billionaire laughing all the way to the bank.)
I'm not sure I buy into this piece of psychology.
Wordpress has what is quite possibly the worst security design of any piece of web software.