skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the email I sent to Craigslist. I tried to use the following template: intro (what are we talking about), how padmapper is good for craigslist, why I care about padmapper, course of action.

Feel free to reuse it.

----

Hi Jim and Craig,

I learned today that Craigslist has sent a Cease and Desist to padmapper.com. Padmapper provides a service to visualize on a map rental listings from sources like Craigslist.

Real estate is all about location, and let's be frank, Craigslist's location-based search sucks. Padmapper helps the searcher easily see where real estate is located. It turns a grueling search into a breeze. It adds great value to Craigslist's listings without competing with Craigslist's business.

Padmapper, along with Craigslist, were essential in helping me find my current home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Without Padmapper, I wouldn't have used Craigslist in my search.

I'm sure you can find a mutually beneficial deal with Padmapper, instead of shutting them out entirely.
Craigslist isn't a charity. It is sad that they don't innovate, but it's not the responsibility of the incumbents to make the job of their would-be replacements easier. In fact that's bad business.

It would be nice if Craigslist created a platform that others could build on. Something like Facebook. http://apps.craigslist.org/mapper. I bet people would build things on their data for free even without any way of making money off it.
I'd wager 90% of their listings come from craigslist -- not really sure how they'll be 'more than fine'.
They may be wrong in shutting them off, but they certainly have the right.
I propose that Craigslist has been ultra successful because of its actions, not despite. I think it's success is due both directly to how it has built and operated the site as well as due to the overall mentality that fends off all the lame ideas from the armchair product designers.
The really shameful part is that CL could easily implement this feature on their own with very little effort, but they won't. Someone in another thread surmised that perhaps CL is planning to roll out a mapping tool on their own. If that's the case, it's really user-hostile to kill the working tool before they replace it with something developed in-house.
It may raise the price of used items, but it will also lower the recovered value of selling used items, by increasing inefficiency.

You'd get more trash, as people throw things away because they aren't work the hassle of re-selling.
Are you saying that Craigslist runs PadLister? If so, when you click "Search All Listings" it brings up PadMapper... As a result, I'm a bit confused.
"What's harder to explain is what (if any) value Padmapper brings to Craigslist."

The most compelling value that Padmapper added to craigslist was that it didn't make me want to tear my own eyes out, like the regular CL site does.
Exactly. The thing is, if some app becomes the way to access a Craigslist forum, Craigslist effectively loses its network advantage. If Padmapper really takes off, do you think it will hesitate to start offering rental advertising itself? And what does Craigslist get in return for the risk of that?
Yeah, there is PadLister - my goal with that wasn't to usurp them with that, I just wanted to have a backup in place. It actually makes it easier to post to Craigslist. But I know how that looks :-/
I am curious as to what the catalyst for killing PadMapper over LiveLovely or any of the other aggregation sites out there?
> try not to replace tools in the future without understanding all the usecases of the old tool first.

This is exactly why autotools is so hard to replace in the C/C++ world for distributing source packages on Linux/Unix/etc., and why CMake/SCons/Jam/etc. have only ever had success in the right niche (projects which are very large or cross-platform).
But let's be honest here, in eve "unorthodox" gameplay generally meant ruining the game for 99.99% of the players apart from a tiny few who were in leadership positions. Eve is about fantasising about what you could do, rather than enjoying what you actually do.

Unless you spend an extremely sad and unhealthy amount of time playing the game you will never, ever get to do anything polyfractal describes.

A good example is the end of the BoB/Goonswarm war (the latter being polyfractal's alliance). Not that I ever had anything to do with either.

Basically a single guy from Goonswarm infiltrated BoB and got granted privileges to delete the BoB alliance. That meant they lost all their territory. OK, the game mechanics sucked at the time with too much advantage given to BoB's defence, but after the alliance got deleted, game over for BoB. And CCP didn't know what to do so just kinda went 'um, yeah, that's a real mechanic, not a bug/exploit'. Game over. No epic spaceship war. No amazing tactical genius. Just some guy lying about who he was with zero consequences and smarming BoB leadership until he could click the iwin button. Just a single click.

And that's the essence of end-game eve, find the exploit, click it, laugh, then wonder why the hell you were even playing the game in the first place.

polyfractal sounds very much like he's in the bright-eyed bushy tailed phase of eve before you realise, hang on a sec, I was supposed to be playing a spaceship game...
This is very true. They could lose all that money* that they make off charging people to post there!

Oh wait.

*Miscellaneous fees for job listings in some regions, and brokered apartment listings in NY do not apply. Ask your doctor for details. Void where prohibited.
I'm just saying that the average person has contact with dangerous machines on a regular basis, compared with the past.
First of all, the title asks about iPod and you refer to iPad. But the real question is why do you care about the possibility that consumers might pay less for their iPads? Are you trying to keep prices high?

This is a simple issue of parallel importation. Americans pay more for the same products for which people in other parts of the world, like Thailand, pay less. That's because America does not like the idea of parallel imports. Other countries allow it because it lowers the price of goods to the consumer by giving them choice. The way America enforces its prohibition on parallel imports is, you guessed it, through rules on importation.

The First Sale Doctrine is not a defense to copyright infringement under S. 106(3). See below. That is a ridiculous argument. The Cornell math student was caught red-handed, he stood no chance on appeal and does not have a chance at winning at this level either. He was making obscene amounts of money (see evidence of his dramatically enhanced net worth introduced at trial) selling books that should have never have been allowed into the country. More than enough to support paying his tuition. Hardly a starving student.

So why is the S.Ct. hearing this one? Because the District Court said something very stupid and this needs to be fixed. The First Sale Doctrine does not apply to imports. Never has, never will. See below. Yet the District Court in refuting this losing argument chose to add some new reasoning of its own, instead of relying on the statute and sufficiently similar precedent, and made the erroneous statement that imported copies made elswehere are not covered by S. 109 because of the statutory construction. As everyone can see the statute is very ambiguous with respect to "lawfully made". And it's been that way for a very long time. There's no need to open that can of worms. The First Sale Docrine simply has never had an exception for imports and it's not ever going to have one. This is because the U.S. does not want parallel imports.

The S. Ct. is going to affirm the lower court decision but they will fix the District Court's blunder in trying to intepret the statute when it was wholly unnecessary. They will make it perfectly clear that the First Sale Doctrine applies to copies of US copyrighted works no matter where they are produced. They'll find a way to do it without opening a potetial hole in the Act by applying arbitrary interpretations of ambiguous language as the lower court chose to do. In nerd speak, the District Court has introduced a potentially major security flaw that puts copyright holders at risk. And the S. Ct. is going to fix it, proactively.

Sec. 109(a) [First Sale Doctrine]
"Nothwithstanding 106(3)..."

Sec 106(3)
[It's infringement] "to distribute copies . . . to the public by sale"
Hi, Talin from Trulia here.

For commute, our heatmaps are rendered in canvas, based on JSON data from our servers. This allows for the efficient slider.

We also have static image tiles, for certain (ahem) browsers that don't support canvas. The downside is that they can't use the slider.
Bummer. I'm completely mystified that CraigsList doesn't have an API. Fortunately, others do: http://3taps.com/ [no affiliation]
In my opinion a digital market is never "cornered", Google simply doesn't know how to improve over those competitors, and how to provide users with a good enough reason to switch. If Google knows its clear that its current organization doesn't allow to pursue the right choices in some areas, and you can notice by looking at several recent "flops" (boutiques.com, g+,...) .

You can have all the money in the world and all the world class runners you want, but your team will still lose if you run even just on a slightly wrong track.
Google's Alan Turing Doodle
"We will suspend your account and you may be liable for civil damages" wasn't severe enough?
One of Internet marketing’s darker segments
>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.

I thought as much. If they allow it, then great, but you're asking for trouble.

The cross-platform messaging app Kik was pulled from Blackberry App World for similar reasons:

http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/11/rim-blackberry-kik/

Edit: Added 'App World' clarification.
> If your only response to this is "go cry to various small tech publications", then you're doing it wrong.

I don't think so. The main issue is that people think that there are APIs because companies promote their interoperability to gain developers. Companies are not being sincere and nobody is taking notice. To not repeat this and other opinions I post one of my recent posts on the subject: "Reverse Engineering and The Cloud" http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...
Solution/Question:

Could the padmapper guy just make an application, which he sells for $10-$15, with the same functionality, except all the "scraping" happens from the user's computer or browser?

And if this violates the TOS, assuming I can sell a browser which only visits Craigslist -- then where is the line where a browser does too much "formatting" and becomes a TOS violation?
Other good examples of these content-over-form sites are 2ch.net in japan, and 4chan for the western world. (4chan recently updated its HTML for the first time in something like eight years.)

I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.
Why is the drop shadow at an angle other than straight down? It stands out like a sore thumb within the rest of iOS and makes the button design look sloppy. I appreciate the usefulness of a button class like this but the default design just doesn't look polished.
Zombie Apocalypse...
Cool Android Wallpapers With Alive Video Wallpaper
It's not that complicated. If you build your company on the back of another company you must abide by their TOS. If your business plan is to build the best porn app on the App Store, you would be similarly disappointed.

In general, if your business plan relies on the goodwill of another company and you provide little value to that company in return, you don't have a very good business plan.
Why haven't they done this more often? Many startups are trying to chip away at CL's business. http://www.mdaniels.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/tumblr_kw...
If this is true, then he (Craig Newmark) really needs to read the innovator's dilemma (http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...). TLDR: If you allow yourself to become a prisoner to your success, you're actually making your continued success unlikely. You can solve the dilemma by spinning out a smaller, irreverant version of yourself & giving them what they need to destroy the old company.

In craigslist's case, he could include a link on the old site that allows users to upgrade to a more modern version, and have the modern site basically consume an api/scrape the old CL till it gained momentum.
Happy Birthday Mr. Turing (we made you a cake)
Currently using 0MQ to set up our cluster...handles concurrency, the guide has plenty of thorough examples (not to mention it's humorous, and it has examples in every mainstream language (C, C++, python, java, ruby, haskell, etc).
Failure and Rescue
Because you're optimizing for engagement by measuring time on site or something like that

Oh good, nobody actually told you how they measured but you already know! Bravo.
Business is war. Anyone who doesn't think so hasn't got the enough scars to understand this yet. As a small entity, any time you tangle with large well-funded companies you have to be very aware of the fact that they could shaft you in a dozen different ways whenever the please. That's the hard and cold reality of it.

Contracts and agreements only serve to possibly give you the option to sue, and nothing more. They don't create a guarantee of recovery or reparations in any way at all.

I had one very painful incident with a large Korean multinational corporation a few years ago. This was over a hardware design. We devoted about eight months --nearly a million dollars in cash and man-hours-- to complete a set of designs based on components and assemblies that this OEM was to provide.

They wanted to get our business and pull us away from their main competitor. In-person meetings where had with the top three VP's in the US. Promises were made both verbally and on-paper. Short version: When we were finally ready to go into production we were told that the components in question --components they had recommended and guaranteed as long-availability components-- had been discontinued. Their recommendation: "You need to redesign your product line".

Soon afterwards I learned that other companies that had selected the same components were under the same dire situation. One particular company had closed a deal with the US government and was about to get sued for tens of millions of dollars for not delivering on their contract. On our front, this one event nearly destroyed my company at that time. We survived only to get taken out during the economic downturn due to having been weakened by this event.

In looking at the potential to sue this company our attorneys concluded that they'd need a minimum of $250K just to consider pulling that trigger and another $250K available past that. They expected this multinational to simply bury us with paperwork and an army of lawyers, with the only goal being to cause financial pain and get us to quit. Their recommendation: "Figure out how to survive and lick your wounds. It is nearly impossible to go after these guys and actually come out ahead".

This is how large companies, effectively, make their own rules, their own laws, if you will. While this wasn't the only tangle I've ever had with a large company it was the worst I've had to endure. I was the first domino that got tipped over in a chain of events that ultimately killed a business that I spent the better part of ten years building.

Be careful.
You expect Google, Bing and DDG to honor requests not to be indexed, don't you? How is this different?

And what Craigslist does or doesn't do to make money shouldn't change what you're allowed to do with their content.
The man who invented the computer
'alister' made some good points up top. Let me get further into the rental side of the subject.

As someone who, on many occasions, has rented in Brazil using classifieds sites, it's a mess. 'We' really, really need a CL-type site that everyone knows and uses. As a Californian, and former user of CL, it boggles my mind why CL-Brazil isn't used. It's there (here), it's usable, simple, and in Portuguese.

Instead, people use OLX (free) a little, Vivastreet (free) a little, EasyQuarto (paid) a little, and a few other sites that are either less popular or only work sometimes. Couchsurfing city-specific groups usually each have a sub-group for renting but a strange occurrence takes place there, almost no one puts the price-point. It's called doing business, paying money for a product or service, yet there's a real aversion to giving up the rental price in one's ad. Luckily, the more popular sites I mentioned make it so one has to list their rental price.

And my final two gripes are that very few people respond to inquiries into any particular ad (I think this is universal though) and a good 60% of ads here in Brazil only want women renters.

It's tough, I tell you...
Zombie Wonderland 2 para Android
PadMapper is a great tool that deserves access to that data.

Why do they deserve access?
Indeed. Who uses IE8 or earlier or Android Gingerbread's default browser anyway? No one I care about... totally worth it!

/ducks
Full Show 6/21/12: Free Assange
For those wishing to take action:

jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO

craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder

@jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster

@craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark

Simple email to copy and paste:

Jim and Craig,

I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could weigh in on the debate happening on Hacker News or elsewhere.

Thanks,
The bottom link renders at an fairly low framerate in Firefox on a 3GHz core2 duo.

On Chrome it is about twice the speed but the sliding components return to a position different from where they started.

Slow on a desktop machine translates to nearly unusable on Mobile. On an ICS Android with an Allwinner A10, The slide animation consists of only two frames.

The poor performance is not intrinsic to vector based rendering, SVG is simply not the right tool for that job.
They also don't have an API, and they also don't allow you to pay for a license or API for websites.
Vendor specific cssHooks are always executed when defined, allowing you to deal with specifics of implementation in your own code.

How exactly do you handle the "change in spec" case in your code right now?
I get what you're saying... But it's hard to argue with a strategy that's been absolutely dominating its industry for over a decade.
i wonder whether there is enough interest to build a community-supported "open-craigslist" on top of which anyone might build their own tools/services.
Accessing this on the iPad I'm totally confused about how to read the actual article - what's up with their interface?
Then use -vendor-prefixed-property-name not property-name.
Sculpt - An HTML generator in Ruby
Padmapper doesn't make money from Craigslist listings.

It also sends traffic back to CL. It shows the summary of the listing, and then when the user is interested, they can click through the pin to the actual Craigslist listing.
Businesses that are building their success on the app store are taking a massive risk, yes.
It's not that crazy if you think about it. If you're a freelancer working small contracts for people that "want a website", you're pretty free to use whatever technology you'd like. Doubly so if you "provide hosting".

Outside of tech and corporate circles people could really give a damn. They just want to get things done.
Or prefilter if you need to track global requests.
I agree with you, but if PadMapper is really that much better, what's stopping them from getting users to post directly on their site?
Facebook's Help Center isn't very helpful at least for reporting actual bugs. First off it's tucked away into a dropup in the lower part of the right hand column. The site seems to actively discourage you from report bugs (which may be what Facebook wants in terms of reducing the volume of help tickets).

I had a problem in Facebook's Mobile app (iPhone) where sometimes after uploading multiple pictures into a new album half the album wouldn't be displayed. To me it looked like some kind of memory/display refresh issue rather than Facebook not actually registering the images since if I could see the images if I looked at it through the photos album.

But I could not find anywhere to register a bug/problem and I eventually just gave up. I'm not sure if its been fixed since I stopped bothering to look for a way to reproduce it since there's no place to submit a bug fix anyways.

Subsequently I've found other small bugs on the site, for example a couple of days ago they made an update that moved the Facebook logo down 1px too much. Since they use a CSS sprite, some of the white from the Facebook logo below it was showing. How do I report that? Maybe they knew about it but it was about for 1.5-2 days (it's fixed now it seems).

One more annoying problem: As a developer, I know that other developers will want a lot of information about how the bug occurred and how to reproduce it. So I waited until I got home so I could submit the bug through their website. But if you goto the main website, they want you to go back to your phone and report it through the Mobile Help Center.

Maybe there is a place to submit it, but I've actually spent a decent amount of time looking for somewhere to send bug information to but I haven't found it.

Sorry to hijack, but hopefully someone at Facebook will read this and can suggest a solution.
There definitely need to be context links to the original comments.
Winamp 5.6.3.3234 Full on Downloads App
You seem to be implying that the forums which don't directly contribute revenue have no impact on the network effect which makes their job advertisements valuable. That doesn't really make sense to me.
Who wants to start a Kickstarter campaign to develop an open api/backend for classifieds? I'm in.
Because that would endanger their monopoly.
Colleges still have trouble trying to decide if they should provide a proper Computer Science education or if they should be software engineering trade schools. This is made all the more difficult because students enroll in CS programs but almost always what they typically want and need is the SE trade school education.
Escalator Epiphany: Inefficient Design for Increased Conversion
Do you have anything you're unwilling to sell? And if so is it cool if I just take it?
I fail to see how PIPEDA is involved. The information being published on PadMapper is information which you've chosen to publicly disclose. The fact that this publicly disclosed information is showing up on a site you didn't intend might make a case for tort law or copyright law, but there is no disclosure of information that you expected to remain private.
The IP assignment seems a bit much. I wonder if it is common for "hackathons".
I don't think any knowledgeable front-end engineer would build a page in quirks mode, but a surprising number of existing sites have large swaths of pages without a doctype.
While this looks cool, I'm struggling to see any use cases where something along these lines would be preferred. Please, anyone, enlighten me here.
Strakke Buik
I was not confortable with D and C++, and I was curious about Haskell.
Bah. Just because improve a web site is hard doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility to your users to TRY. Craigslist has not. There are ways to experiment in a low-impact way. Hell, they could offer a "plugin" system, so that users could add the padmapper plugin.

People keep building things using Craigslist data that users LOVE and Craigslist keeps shutting them down.

Craigslist is one of the great squandered opportunities for awesomeness on the internet.
Reeder 3 for the iPhone: An In-depth Review
Just an experiment really, but thanks.