skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craigslist is in major need of disruption.

Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!
The GAE and Maps price hikes were an odd decision. I'm not sure why they decided to do that.
oh sad to hear this. padmapper service with craigslist really helped me!
Padmapper's a brilliant solution. I'd like to think that Craigslist is building their own great solution, but knowing how slowly CL moves on everything, I sincerely doubt they'd build a worthwhile replacement. Bummer!

Padmapper's helped me and a few friends find our apartments in SF.
Now if only Patrick L. Jones (Senior Manager of Continuity & Risk Management) would step aside. His involvement in the gTLD continually sides with "what's best for corporations and $$" rather than "what's best for the future of the internet" (which I would argue is ICANN's first responsibility.)

A list of Jones' gTLD involvement can be found at http://www.icann.org/en/about/staff/jones.htm, and an quick example of his corporate-bias is at http://forum.icann.org/lists/jobs-phased-allocation/msg00315....
In your post, you say "After news of the API cut off, LinkedIn got in touch to suggest a possible trip to its San Francisco HQ" - IIRC, LinkedIn's HQ is in Mountain View, not San Francisco.
Because then you have to handle things like route precedence, method routing, "resource" mapping, etc. The `def route` way is very linear, you have one point of entry and that's it, the code just flows from there. With a bunch of `match /xyz` statements, or even a routing layer, the connection is less direct and potentially more prone to bugs.
Specific? I already mentioned CPAN Testers. And that CPAN works... (I've seen people with years of Python experience that had problem doing simple things. Edit: Including uninstall of packages, which you mention.)

Edit: Here you see a result of CPAN Testers for a module with complex dependencies. Note statistics on where/how dependencies are run. Also click on a dependency icon to see the matrix of perl/os versions.

http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=Catalyst;perl=latest
big picture tangent: if you've gained enough experience/wisdom to accurately predict needed features, you should encapsulate them in a product (or library/component/framework/plugin etc) to be sold/open sourced. In this way, you should never be able to anticipate things likely needed, unless you are writing such a product. :-) Not entirely facetious, as this process does actually happen as features get pushed down into standard libraries, languages, operating systems, hardware (e.g. video decoders). It's a similar idea to something attributed to Turing http://www.turing.org.uk/book/extracts/ext6-326.html:

There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that
are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.
If anyone gets too much traction they can cut out the middleman.
From France, there's not so huge a difference, is there? You're still probably flying into SFO.
I think you need to back up your reasoning for how this creates a bigger gender gap. The aim of this event is not to create cliques of female programmers who only work at 100% female companies and only attend womens' events, which would do as you say, but to try and encourage more females to enter/stay in the industry, which would reduce gender disparity by moving the proportion of male to female members towards 0.5.
You should be able to up that to 2 seconds with no problem, provided you're following the other usage rules of course.

https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API
Just out of curiosity, why would they not want you to use their classifieds? Unless I am missing something, they don't collect revenue for listings. I thought Craigslist was all about spreading good will. If Pad Mapper provides a more efficient way of spreading that good will, then why not?

As a user of PadMapper, I am very disappointed to see this happen. Craigslist is almost unusable if you don't know the area you are looking to move to.
Why Microsoft Must Stop the Surface Madness
Super, thanks! Saw a lot of stuff that I missed, e.g. the physicist who can calculate anything:

* If I gain a kilo of weight here on earth, how much more will my wife be attracted to me? Ans: 4x10^-9N

* How large would the wings of a pegasus have to be to allow a horse to actually fly? Ans: 1000m2
Some people don't know what PadMapper is. Like me for example.
I think its pretty well documented that craigslist is known to shut down services that use craigslist data. I really don't think should come as a surprise to the creator.
Are you kidding me? The tracking on that app is abysmal. It has not one, but two banner ads, one on the top, one on the bottom. Furthermore the UI obscures much of the image. And you have to purchase the pack that includes the mustache. There are many apps that do what Instagram does, but there is only one Instagram for a reason.
Anyone who hijacks NXDOMAIN for ad clicks deserves to lose.
I tried to sign the petition and got this:

>>>CiviCRM Profile Create
>>>Sorry. A non-recoverable error has occurred.
>>>The requested Profile (gid=37) is disabled OR it is not configured to be used for 'Profile' listings in its Settings OR there is no Profile with that ID OR you do not have permission to access this profile. Please contact the site administrator if you need assistance.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
Really sorry to hear this. I've successfully found 3 different apartments in perfect locations through PadMapper (and one that I'm moving into in 2 weeks actually). And I've had several friends use it too.

Great job with all the time you've put into the site, Eric - hope the service pulls through this somehow, but also looking fwd to seeing what you work on next if you decide to move on.
I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove (http://www.rightmove.co.uk/) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why wouldn't they build a padmapper esque system (or acquire padmapper)?
Was there some attempt made at monetizing Padmapper? IIRC Craigslist isn't super hard core about not-for-profit projects using their data, but takes a hard line on commercial use.
This really sucks. Finding an apartment in Boston on Craigslist is nearly impossible without PadMapper.
A factual error is a factual error. Definitely lowers the credibility of the article for me.
Something I think would make a good business is someone selling every "tier" of hosting and making transitions push button simple.

For example, press a button and get dedicated vps hosting for your cloud images, press another button and get dedicated physical hosting, press another button and you buy the hardware and switch to a colo relationship, press another button and you get your physical hardware overnighted to anywhere.
"betrated" should be "betrayed"
Do you take speed limits of the streets in consideration?
Craigslist should buy you, not block you.

I'm basically a Luddite and yours is the one service I always recommend.
George R. R. Martin, Write Like the Wind
In this context it can basically mean "improves".

It comes from a recent trend in software development called Agile where new features are added in short cycles e.g. week called an iteration.
First it was Carsabi and now Padmapper. While I'm not surprised, as the Craigslist ToS explicitly prohibits crawling their site, it is incredibly frustrating that the website with all the data is unwilling to innovate and unwilling to help others innovate.

Craigslist will continue to be a mediocre, "good enough" solution. Since everyone associates online classifieds with craigslist, none of the other classifieds sites seem to have a chance. It's not even as if services like carsabi or padmapper are competing in any way with them.
This is because MSFT and others have set the precendent that you don't own software, you license it. They can include a clause in the license that prevents resale of the license.

The physical good that software is distributed on is covered by the first-sale doctrine and you can resell that, but it won't do much good because you can't reassign your license to it. If I have a license for Windows but lose the physical disc, I can buy your disc. However, without owning a license, I wouldn't have the right to use the software.

If the SCOTUS upholds the circuit court's decision, I wouldn't be able to buy your Windows disc anymore (assuming it's pressed outside of the US).
BTW, check this out: "20 SVG uses that will make your jaw drop" http://www.netmagazine.com/features/20-svg-uses-will-make-yo...

This one will really make your jaw drop (you have to click on different parts): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Trajans-C...
Because it works just fine as it is, as far as Craigslist is concerned. It's not a mindset the HN crowd is used to, but Craigslist is an absolute behemoth, and they're doing just great. They also do a hell of a lot more than just accommodation, so might not be that incentivised to buy Padmapper.
Thanks - downloading the Kindle sample :)
Do any SVG renderers (especially in a browser) do subpixel rendering?

It seems like this would greatly help perceived resolution. With a bitmap, you can't necessarily assume a particular pixel color ordering, and even if you did, with tablets/phones you can't even assume a particular screen orientation. By doing subpixel rendering at view-time, it should be able to give increased resolution in all cases. It would even look best on a printer, which doesn't have separate subpixels (right?).

(Of course, without hinting like fonts have, it could also be worse in some cases.)
That was my first thought. What kind of customer service experience are they willing or able to provide?
All of the cases involve resale of items that were imported without authorization of the copyright owner. When you buy an iPod from Apple in the US, that import was authorized by Apple.
As best I can tell, it's a matter of corporate philosophy. Craigslist is predicated on local, person-to-person interactions. It has long taken pains to curtail uses of the system which allow aggregation of multiple CL local sites (there is, for example, no convenient way to search all of California for listings), or to include CL listings in third-party services.

As a long-time user of Craigslist, and a recent fan of padmapper, I'm disappointed, to say the least.

I do suspect it's time for some disruption in CL's space.
Imagine stating the location of your work and the cost of your time in $/hour (whatever you assign to it), and the size of housing unit you want. The, you would see a map colored based on the delta between the cost of your commute (via either personal vehicle or public transit) and the cost of housing in various areas. I bet that, for most urban dwellers, there would be a few surprising points on the map.
Worth noting the stock browser is not the only option on android-- Although it is still no doubt a strong majority that lack SVG support.
HipChat vs. Skype
And it's that sort of logic that sees a business/market disrupted.

One might think that Craigslist, of all companies, would understand that.

Innovation beats litigation in most long-run scenarios, IMHO.
Hacker news mobile web reader
Parse - New Atomic Operations for Arrays
In which case the author is still wrong. The copyright logo has not been necessary to enjoy copyright protections since 1989:

> The notice was once required in order to receive copyright protection in the United States, but in countries respecting the Berne convention this is no longer the case. The United States joined the Berne Convention in 1989

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_symbol
Sure, and i would expect them to offer a lot as well :P

MS seems to use Dell (only link i could find): http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/28/dell-...
It would be relatively easy for companies to force Amazon Marketplace, eBay and Craig's List to take down unauthorized sales.

That said, I don't think any tech company would be stupid enough to start enforcing this right. Tons of new purchases are subsidized by the sale of the previous version of that product. Game companies, on the other hand, would probably love this.
Isn't this all about who can get cheaper electricity?
Quite a bit hand-wavy! Only because SVG support is easily detected with the likes of Modernizr http://modernizr.com/. Background images with CSS are very simple to provide both SVG and a raster fallback graphic for. Image elements aren't as simple, but I'd suggest defaulting to SVG in both cases and replacing the source if support doesn't exist. That way the issue with eventually disappear alongside legacy browser usage.

As you said the benefits of high pixel densities are visually huge. A small and temporary JS hack is a price worth paying in my opinion.
Craigslist is, unfortunately, the "best" example of the network problem. Due to its popularity, it is entrenched.

That said, there are methods of disruption. AirBnB bootstrapped off Craigslist to get their initial dataset, and have since moved to their own content. That's probably the strongest approach if you're lucky enough to be able to move quickly when you need to.
I think you may be under the misunderstanding that AWS = EC2/S3. It isn't.

AWS also includes SQS, IAM, SWF, SimpleDB, DynamoDB etc all of which are proprietary with very Amazon specific APIs. As each new developer starts to use these it "locks" them into the platform as a whole. And since many of these are core services I just don't see customers moving to a competitor unless there is a massive difference in price/features.

Also don't forget: NOBODY offers the complete range of unified services that AWS does right now AFAIK.
> i really believed at that time that SVG (at that time only working (in a sane way) via an Adobe Plugin (yeah, you read right)) would be the future.

Adobe SVG Viewer 6.0 preview 1 was released in July '03 and not updated since.
that moniker is still popular
This is just offensive.

It would be one thing if Craigslist was doing their best to satisfy their customers and they wanted to shut down others who were scraping their site and leeching off their business. However, Craigslist puts absolutely no effort into making their product usable. The continued existence of Craigslist is just a testimony to the enormous strength of network effect lock in.
Sure, Android is a hugely successful way of protecting their advertising business by controlling the mobile platform. However, the revenue from Android is tiny compared to their advertising revenue, and negligible compared to Apple's revenue for comparable products.
…which is a façade for the existing CSS engine. Developers clamoured for it (right or wrong), and it was implemented.
I think one of the messages here is that if you're a start-up and your product requires a third-party API that you have no control over to function then you're taking a massive risk.

This isn't specific to Linked.In: API access isn't a right. If your product requires a third-party data source and you don't have any contractual agreement with that third-party you have to accept that the rug could be yanked from under your feet at any moment.

And maybe that risk is acceptable to you and your investors - but to not have a backup plan is foolish.
This is horrible. I used Padmapper extensively when looking for an apartment here in New York two months ago. I guess I'm never moving again...
Nobody can possibly think it is a good idea to use someone's API to create a product that directly competes with the API providers' paid offering.

The sense of entitlement to be allowed to use someone's product against them frankly baffles me.
When Gates and Allen launched Microsoft they thought they were too late, that there were too many other established companies in the market to be able to find a niche for themselves. When google launched web search was half a decade old and dozens of companies were in the market. When apple launched the ipod mp3 players had already been around for years and gone through many generations.

An absence of competition is a near certain way to gain market share, but the easy way is not the only way. If you have a good enough product you can steal business from the competion and even grow the size of the total market (as was the case with the ipod and iphone).
In practice, at least at my university, this wasn't as big a deal as it sounds. A normal single-major doesn't mean you only take classes in one department.

A double-major typically means you use major A's elective slots to take the core classes for major B, and vice versa. The upshot is that as a double-major, after sophomore year I would have no time to take any classes outside of those 2 departments. Counter-intuitive as it seems, staying a single-major allowed me to take a much greater variety of classes.
Yes I remember you saying that !
I guess my humble iPod Touch that sputters out on bloated sites like GitHub just isn't up to snuff.

Try loading a page without script bloat and you'll see a noticeable difference.
This goes agaisnt the spirit of capitalism, and will only result in more monopolies and a worse free market. Imagine if there was a similar law when Herbert Henry Dow fought the german bromine cartel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Henry_Dow#Breaking_a_Mo... .
Craigslist is closer to a non-profit than a business. You can't model them as a self-interested agent.
I used chrome and almost just exited the page until I accidentially clicked on the black part next to the slide. That's not a browser issue.
I've used padmapper twice to get an apartment so far, and It's great! I've loved the fact that it's constantly improving and has exactly the features I need: Walkscore, bookmarking, map, proper filters. It's strictly better. To the author: I would have paid for this.

It sucks that this waas mainly an interface to craigslist, and now they're gone. I hope this gets enough critical mass that eventually so that the unusable but unexplicably popular horror that is craigslist apartments just dies an ugly death. Maybe you can even sell it to them, who knows?

All I know is while CL's response is perfectly rational, I can't help but be pissed off that I'm locked into a shitty product that is only surviving because of head start, critical mass, network effects, etc.

Edit:
An alternate approach (that would admittedly not help Eric) is to open source padmapper and let people do local installs for themselves. Would be pretty hard to ban that. Although I'm not sure on the legality of scraping.
No, AWS == EC2/EBS/S3. Period.

That's where the money is. Yes, Amazon offers that other stuff. I'm sure someone buys it. I refuse to believe it's a significant fraction of AWS revenue without evidence. Huge numbers of successful sites are built on the core stuff. Are any large sites using the Amazon lock-in features? I'm certainly not aware of any.
That's a foolish and shortsighted way of looking at it. My company's headquarters is in Newton, MA, but if we're flying people in to talk, they universally say "Boston". Because to people not from the area, that's what it is.

Synecdoche is a part of English (San Francisco being the most notable part of Silicon Valley). It may upset the overly pedantic, but...oh well?
I don't know about "doing business" in general but as someone who is a very big fan of both Google and Amazon and who uses lots of services/products from both (but not Adwords as an advertiser), I know I would much rather deal with Amazon when it comes to anything related to customer service.

The thought of dealing with Amazon customer service fills me with warmth. The thought of dealing with Google customer service fills me with dread.

I love Google as long as everything is working, but they (still) really suck when you need to interact with them. And before anyone mentions it, yes, I know this is because "I am Google's product", not their customer, but ultimately that viewpoint seems to have become part of Google's culture and in many ways that does actually make them lesser than Amazon at "doing business", IMO.
Codeigniter - Learn It Correct (Free Access to my codeigniter course)
Linode and Rackspace are nothing more than commodity Linux box providers with some related services.

AWS is morphing very quickly into a true end to end PaaS. Big difference. And it's hard to see who can compete with them.
Rails is not my bread and butter however in iOS I find it'a almost always better to split things out into helper classes. Otherwise when you find that you end up needing that method in other parts of the app and then you either have to break it out into a class anyway or have two of the same method in two separate controllers I.E. NOT what you want.

I think the OPs code looks clean and follows OOP.
Kudos to CL for standing up for user privacy. When I use CL it's with consideration of their TOS which bans these practices.

When padmapper copies the data they violate my privacy, my copyright, and the agreement between myself and craigslist as outlined in the TOS. What padmapper is doing is a violation of many data privacy laws like PIPEDA, EUDPD, and various copyright acts.

If padmapper wants the data why don't they just obtain consent from the CL posters, instead of copying it without consent.

Would the padmapper team be ok with me deciding to stick their logo where ever I deem it necessary? I bet they'd probably sue me for copyright and trademark violation.
They already do on eBay - the "veRO" program gives any company that wants one an unappealable, instant takedown button for literally every auction on the site.

Try reselling your weight watchers program materials on eBay and you will learn about the program very quickly.
An alternative that we know is legal, you can use http://reddit.com/r/tabled.

To expand on that, you could create a stylesheet or such that modified the look of it. Something similar to the mobile HN sites where banner ads are preserved could be considered as well.
Except when you say "AWS has cornered the market", you actually mean "EC2 and S3 have cornered the cloud VM and blob storage markets". Every other AWS service has a ways to go before it can claim to have cornered anything.
I think it depends on the situation, and it's difficult to for me to describe. I try to think about it like this:

I am writing a class to represent a car. I need to know if the cars doors are opened or closed. The `open` or `closed` attribute is the state of the car, so it makes sense that the Car object would have that state.

Now compare that to the use of `LanguageDetector` from the example:

LanguageDetector.new(@comment).set_language

Presumably this object is keeping a reference to the comment for it's internal state. When I'm dealing with an object, I like to say in my head "language detector, can you tell me the language for some text?". Nothing in my question gave the text a 1:1 relationship with the language detector. Since my question did not identify a relationship, I would not make the comment a part of the LanguageDetector object. I'd rather write something like this:

detector = LanguageDetector.new
language = detector.detect_language(@comment)
@comment.language = language

What might the LanguageDetector actually want to have as it's state? I think maybe things like encodings, or particular languages it supports. The question I ask is "language detector, what encodings or languages do you support?", and the relationship becomes clear. For example:

detector = LanguageDetector.new(:encodings => [...], :languages => [...])
# etc

I hope that makes sense, and that I don't sound too crazy (talking to myself and whatnot).