skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Karma is currently (roughly) calculated as the sum of a users submission and comment votes. I would be interested in seeing an alternative implementation that takes the sum of that users aggregate votes on each comment and article, raised to x.

For example:

If x was 1.2 and I had posted 3 comments with vote scores of [1,20,-10] my karma would be round(1^1.2+20^1.2-10^1.2)=22 as opposed to roughly 11 where it would stand now. I think it would encourage comments that are very thoughtful and discourage comments that are pure flaming.
Also, check out ui pattern libraries:

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
http://www.welie.com/patterns/
http://ui-patterns.com/
http://uipatternfactory.com/
> Having people "volunteer" as a way around paying them to do work for you should be.

I think the idea is that it would be nice to allow people to volunteer/intern when you have no other way to give them that introductory experience. If your options are "give people a chance to get some experience without paying them" and "let them figure out how to get that experience in a down economy on their own because you can't afford to pay anyone", I think trying to find "a way around paying them to do work" is actually good for them.

> a simplification might be that volunteers can work free for a charity but not for a for-profit business.

So, what you're saying appears to be that for-profit businesses can't directly do anything charitable without paying enormous out-of-pocket costs, since they can't use volunteers. I think your plan sucks.
I wonder here if the problem is really just the small default stack size on Linux. In fact, why is the stack limited to 8MB by default?

(I'm no fan of C++, but I suspect a number of languages that allow general stack allocated objects could fail in the same way).
While the usage might be awkward at first (you have to run a main application which you control through your browser), I2P is great for anonymous filesharing. Bittorrent is strong, there are 3 or 4 trackers with fresh uploads all the time. Speeds are lower of course, but 10-20 Kilobytes/s for new well-swarmed torrents are possible with not too much effort. The applications you can use with I2P are often normal desktop applications, for Bittorrent there is for example PyBit.
This makes me seriously reconsider even posting to StackOverflow anymore. I HATE websites that just repost stuff from other sites (think Nabble). You give the appearance of having a community of users (the only thing about sites like StackOverflow which is actually useful), but you really don't. If you find something cool on a site like that, there's nothing you can really do about it. It's like a figure in a wax museum. It looks like the real thing, but you can't interact with it. If you post a reply, you're going to get nothing in return, because the community is at StackOverflow, not at the other site.

To me, this is like lying to your users, and I don't see how anything good can come of it. I never, NEVER use Nabble despite the fact that they infest Google results like vermin. Please don't do this.
Unpaid internships are one of the biggest scams ever.

You want me to work for you for free so I get "invaluable experience"? How much is my work worth to you, if you're not paying me? For that matter, how much is the experience I get, if I'm doing worthless work? You want ME to be grateful for the privilege of getting the experience of making YOU money for nothing in return? Screw YOU.

Mark Cuban makes it sound like this is about the bright-eyed ambitious kid who just wants to get his foot in the door and, given that one chance, will eventually rise up to run the company. Bullshit. The ambitious kid will find a way. This isn't about him.

This is about all the people struggling on the lowest rungs of a profession, trying to enter it. They can't find a job, so they'll jump at any chance they can to be "working" in their chosen field, even if they don't get paid. They're strung along with the promise of an actual job down the road. And guess what? As soon as they want money, they're out, replaced by someone else who's willing to work for free. This is about having too much supply and not enough demand for a profession, and free labor only makes the problem worse, by masking the real market condition.

This is about a lot of things. It's about ambitious kids, it's about struggling people, it's about flux in employment conditions. You can bring in mentions of the apprenticeship model of yore, but you'll probably realize pretty quickly that there are some big differences.

But let's drop that bullshit and call it what it is, Mark. You're arguing against minimum wage, since zero is usually less than the minimum wage. Why don't you come up and make that argument straight up.

Edit: after re-reading my comment and noticing how many comments there are here and on his blog, I once again realize that Mark Cuban is a troll. Bleh.
Perhaps this is why most unpaid internship programs require you to line stuff up with your school. This was they can classify it as an educational activity?
Uh, it's not like the "slave" is someone the "master" just kidnapped. It's an agreed upon situation with an established "safe word" the "slave" can utter at any time to stop whatever is happening.
Wouldn't it be possible to write any additional functionality as a PHP extension in C/C++? This effectively becomes low entry with immense power...
So . . . the fact you don't want him to be able to benefit from an internship is good enough reason to make sure the would-be interns don't get to benefit from it either. Is that it?
If I could use anonymous micropayment to purchase the files, then I would. Up to 50¢ per song. I would want my formats though, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. And a way to redownload whenever I need to.
I understand that.. but the fact that the white house and politicians he rails against have interns show that they think it is a positive experience.

They also know a for-profit business should be paying their workers.

(Not to say I agree one way or the other. It is a fine line between experience and exploitation)
The music industry as we know it must die. It's a dinosaur. It had at least a decade to adapt but it failed miserably and its still ignoring the reality.

Musicians like Trent Reznor or Radiohead have shown a new way of earning money for musicians: Cutting out the middleman. The music industry is not needed anymore. It's only hampering progress.
I'm sorry, but the two have nothing to do with each other. And, honestly, I'm aghast to find such poor reasoning on HN.

Employment shapes society. Employment pays taxes, puts rooves over people's heads, causes stress and worry (what if I lose my job!?), informs societal choices regarding basic social services (tied to company healthcare). Finally, employment is a public act because it is a market -- if Joe works for free, that creates market pressure for Tina to work for free, too.

With the exception of (almost entirely illegal) sex trade...

1. Sex does not house people

2. Sex does not employ people

3. Joe doing it up the butt does not affect your ability to find a partner

4. Tina engaging in fellatio with her husband does not affect your ability to find a partner

5. Couples not having babies does not affect other couples' ability to have babies

6. None of this affects healthcare or taxes

It's simple: it's not a market.

That's why employment is a public act.
Anyone have any idea where I could get one of those t-shirts?
> He's not running a charity.

I think that's the problem -- people don't want him to help people if it's not a purely charitable effort, for some reason. If he actually derives material benefit from it, that makes him evil.

I don't get that attitude, but for some reason that seems to be how people view it.
Under the 13th Amendment, you don't have the right to sell yourself into slavery in the United States. That is, you can't sign a contract under which I pay your family $n and in return you work for me under conditions of slavery. Prohibitions on unpaid labor are an extension of this restriction on your freedom to enter into contract of your own free will.
> Working for no pay on your own company is still totally legal and, whaddaya know, also known for giving a person experience.

. . . but useless for getting your foot in the job field's door, because you have to already be there to "take advantage" of that "opportunity". Your "solution" completely ignores the catch 22 of needing a job to get experience and needing experience to get a job.
Congress and the White House have always been exempt from most workplace and labour regulations - for example, you can't file an OSHA complaint if you work in a Senator's office.
AcuRest Anti Snoring Medical Device & Snoring Solutions
I don't know if you've noticed, but sex creates people.
Thanks bill, the link is swagapalooza.com. Basically it's a conference that I'm leveraging to do other things. Hopefully I'll be able to post more about this over the next 6 months.
If Mark Cuban's social media effort does not generate revenue, why do it then? The Mavericks after all is a for-profit business.
One of the things we find in startups is that people consistently confuse ideas with executing the ideas to make real change.

An idea is that drug X does well in vitro under certain conditions. Real change is a development, certification, marketing, sales, and accounting system that lets drug X actually help people. Ideas are cheap. Execution is tough. I might have a drug that cures cancer, but if I can't prove it, if I can't get funding, if I can't get certification, if I can make the drug, warehouse it, distribute it, etc -- it's just an idea.

This is why the argument does not work against general science. General science is all about ideas -- that's all there is. Making drugs is about delivering solutions to people.

They're two different things.
Actually, he's complaining that he can't employ people for a project that probably won't happen at all unless he can employ interns. You're saying "screw him" because he wants to create something that is of greater advantage to people entering the workforce than not having it in existence at all.
Did you read the article? Apparently even internships used to satisfy school requirements are often illegal.
Everyone deserves fair compensation for their work. I've never understood how anyone could work for a profitable business for free. An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.
One need not keep their train ticket to have purchased one...
Not sure what the point of this article is. For Intel history, read Inside Intel and the "Only the Paranoid Survive" - the Grove book hinted at but not mentioned outright. Can't see anything new here.
re: "It is a fine line between experience and exploitation" - shouldn't the person getting the experience/being exploited be the arbiter of that rather than some random bureaucrat?
You could call it cddddring if you like. The question is whether the labor of the person benefited the company in any way. If it did, then according to the Fair Labor Standards Act the person must receive compensation.

http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.p...
Well, this ought to be obvious. A trade union exists to promote the interests of its members and its leaders (not necessarily in that order). As the union itself creates no added value, it can only do this in a zero sum fashion - at the expense of both employers and the unemployed and anyone else who isn't a member.
"Web development sucks."

Yes. It's so practical compared to old-school GUI development, and so it pulls you in and mushrooms into a scaling/integration/maintenance fiasco unless you can say "no no no!" to every non-essential feature. Things like Django, JQuery, HTML5 are app-level improvements but we're still asking too much of our feeble software infrastructure.

Step back, ask what we're trying to do with the web (decentralized computing?), and come up with a system that solves the basic UI/OS/protocol/language needs "once and for all". Implement it as a kludge on top of the web; use and refine; discard the web; discard the old OSes. It's a pretty tall order :-)
Government wants free labor, but doesn't want people to get internships in the private sector. This is hypocrisy -- not a defense of government.
Not at all, it could be very beneficial to all parties. More power to him and the free market system.

But his concern for the betterment of the interns is just sanctimonious prattle. He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.
Do you think that refutes anything I said?
I think the argument that interns are somehow compensated by "gaining invaluable experience" is somewhat of a strawman. Experience doesn't go away if an intern gets it. Money does and work gets done. I have seen too many people being lured into one "valuable" internship after the other. SOmeone wanted to get some work done and offered "valuable industry insights" as compensation. That is just laughable. If you need someone to do work, pay for it. Simple as that.
The book is mentioned outright in paragraph seven.

The news to me is that Dr. Grove is teaching at Stanford Business School, and his views on the government bailout of the automobile industry.
The sex acts that are considered illegal do not create people. Thus they have no greater impact than childless heterosexual couples who only have sex in the missionary position. Whether that childlessness is intentional or accidental is even more irrelevent.

Moreover, spouses/sex partners and offspring are not half as fungible as employees. If Joe and Sue (or Bob and Brad) have a child, don't have a child, or adopt a child, that doesn't affect your ability to have a child or not, as you wish.

Meanwhile, employing people for nothing does have an affect on the job market.
In a perfect world yes.. but in the real world that is the reason there are labor unions.

If you complete a 6 month internship we will give you a job. And keep stringing the person along.. etc..

I think a good compromise would limit an internship to 3 months, afterwards you have to pay. And the employee has to be in a college or degree program or 2 years out of one. And somehow limit it so Burger King can't make you work 3 months for free.
1. I'm not sure you're clear on the meaning of the term "strawman".

2. An internship actually can be valuable work experience, and that job may not exist at all if it can't be unpaid.
Tracking one author across multiple publications. Possible?
Let us say I like an author. Ed Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard. He contributes regularly to Economix (economix.blogs.nytimes.com), but he also writes for other publications. E.g., an article in TNR ( http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/what-city-needs?page=0,1 )

Unless Glaeser maintains a Twitter feed or a blog and updates it when he's written something new, there's no comprehensive way to track his mainstream publications. (He has neither.)

Has someone developed a method of aggregating content like this and consolidating it in the form of an RSS feed or tweet stream?
8 MB is also the default on Mac OS X. That's for the main thread -- for other threads (at least those created by the standard pthread mechanism), it's only 512 kB:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/qa/qa2005/qa1419.html
These bundles of keywords are generally pretty imprecise and likely based on some of the AdSense lexicon clusters. Undoubtedly a few erroneous words, timed with something like a Coke promo or book launch or whatever would cause this kind of bump.

For example, if there was an author named John Lufthansa launching a book, that would likely also trigger a jump in the air travel trends, erroneously, as users search for just the last name.
> An intern, especially in the technical field, is probably more up to date than a salaried employee.

That's a dubious claim, but let's roll with it, just for argument's sake. If it's true, that doesn't change the fact that someone likely to get an internship doesn't have any job experience, and may thus have a very, very difficult time getting hired. This is why people accept internships; so they can get experience that allows them to get a job.
Create a FriendFeed account dedicated to him and add his RSS feeds :-)

Or try Yahoo Pipes.
An internship is just like that. The safe word is "I quit."
Many people will say that two consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedroom

In that case, both parties are natural persons, in complete freedom, entering into an agreement with each-other that is unlikely to have bad consequences for society. There is not need for government regulation.

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.

Because in those cases, one of the parties is either not a natural person (but a company) or it's a natural person that performs specific actions that have a much larger chance of having bad consequences.

Companies can only exist by the grace of government regulation. They can be extremely powerful and hence the government must protect its citizens against it's own creations. Government regulation is already the case.

The first purpose of the government is to take care of issues we cannot individually handle. Judging who is fit to be a doctor and who isn't is one of them, as much as maintaining a police force is. Government regulation of this is part of its 'reason for being'.
> He doesn't like to leave money on the table, and he's peeved that the government will prevent him from getting the best price possible.

Actually, from what I read, it seems like he's peeved that the government will prevent him from creating those jobs in the first place -- because without unpaid interns, the whole project will become nothing but a gigantic money pit.
I can respect that it's difficult to isolate for the variables and testing the effects of minimum wage (ie you would have to isolate the "value" created from the various businesses like the food service companies), but the laws of supply and demand are pretty straightforward. Price floors (e.g. minimum wage) result in surpluses, price ceilings (e.g. rent control) result in shortages.

From an employer's perspective it's easy to see that the more you pay the more interest you'll get from those who can perform work better. The idea that employers would naturally exploit their workers is a bit silly given the ability for those workers to look elsewhere. And they do - which is why real wages have risen substantially over time (capturing some of the value in productivity improvements) to the point that in many cases entry level/effective minimum wages greatly exceed legislated minimum wage. The idea however that government should impose a choice means higher costs on society - in this case borne by the lowest wage earners as they are the ones who are least employable for whatever reason (by definition), means that fewer get hired.

And thus you get examples like this: http://www.seattlepi.com/opinion/153901_unemploy26.html
Minor Tweaks to the Blog – ReTweeting & Twitter
After years of freelancing, without prior "work experience" and without even a high school diploma, my first job paid me $64,000.

Think about it - I ran my own business, I was responsible for everything from client acquisition, billing, account management, not to mention actual production and marketing.

And I didn't starve or get evicted, so it clearly worked. That's great experience.

An unpaid internship doesn't give you any more experience than running your own business. And honestly, it can reflect poorly on your business acumen and/or drive.

If you are relying on the names on your resume, not what you actually did, it's not going to do you much good.

It's fine to not have enough drive to do things on your own, to want to take the "default route" to "default success." There's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. I applaud anyone who finds their path to happiness.

But. People frame these unpaid internships as some great act of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, and they're not. If you want to be rewarded down the road for great acts of heroic entrepreneurial spirit, be an entrepreneur.

Bonus: that creates jobs, and builds everyone up, instead of creating competition for 'free' jobs that pay nothing but 'experience.'
Why I'm Moving From Desktop Apps to Web Apps
I think it really depends on the industry. If someone had offered me an unpaid internship for coding at any point in my life I would have told them no because I am aware that I could easily earn money or I'd probably be better off contributing to an open source project.

But consider the hypothetical in another industry. Someone gets a shot at an unpaid internship, they do really well, the company they are associated with gives them a recommendation, and immediately after the internship they get an offer for a position in that industry. Or: Someone does not get an internship, it is a competitive industry, the person ends up working an $8 / hr job for the next some odd years until they get an opening in the industry. It would seem the benefit to the unpaid intern could be greater than the benefit to the company.

Of course, there is the scenario where the person becomes an entrepreneur.
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.

The government can't figure it out. Can the interns? If there's a huge population that's willing to work for free, and they're all undervalued, then a company that hires interns for minimum wage will be able to get all the good ones.
. . . and, as he pointed out, in some jurisdictions at least it doesn't have to be someone within the company suing. A competitor could sue, or some ridiculous do-gooder who can't stand to see people "exploited" (like some of the people in this discussion, evidently).
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804857
How is an unpaid internship anywhere close to being slavery? The unpaid intern can walk away at any time. Further, it's the choice of the unpaid intern - not their family as to whether or not to accept the choice.
I'll take a crack at justifying it.

First of all, if you have a minimum wage law (which we do), it has to be enforced. Allowing people to work as "unpaid interns" is a half-assed way that corporations take to work around that law. 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. 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.

Secondly, from a simple ethical standpoint, unpaid internships privilege people who are already well enough off to be able to give their labor away for free (i.e. generally middle-class or wealthier kids whose parents can support them). You don't get a lot of poor kids applying for unpaid internships at age 20 or 22 because, guess what, they need those 40+ hours a week to actually earn an income. So the tradition of unpaid internships in certain traditionally white-collar industries tends to be a subtle form of class discrimination.

And recasting it as a "volunteer" thing is also a total cop-out: you volunteer for a non-profit charity, not a for-profit corporation.
"Value is subjective - so in the end, why would we rely on the government to establish value in the first place?"

We don't. The government takes the logical position that all such internships are illegal, so regulators don't need to make that subjective judgment.

In this light, the answer to your second question is "yes" -- the government is erring on the side of worker safety. It's a judgment call, and you can disagree with it, but both sides of the debate have perfectly reasonable arguments.