skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi everyone, Eric from PadMapper here, thanks for all the comments!

To everyone saying that this is lifting their content, I disagree - it makes a summary of the content and then points back to the original. If I wanted to lift their stuff, I would have made separate pages that laid things out better than the original. Literally none of the text except the title and location string make it into the summary.

It's not a copyright issue, their main legal beef is that it's against their TOU for anything but general search engines to index their content - no vertical ones allowed. Who knows what their actual motivation is.
Or maybe those that are "forgiving" find that this "leeching" is creating a positive benefit for society as a whole, and that ultimately, IP laws are there to benefit the public.
Why some pages are intentionally left blank
I agree that that the boys and videogames thing is a bit of a misconception. But rather than attacking that misconception, we should be asking how poeple might come to have such misconceptions and how we can correct them. My takeaway is that many people (including males like me) don't see computer science and programming as the creative, empowering thing that it is. That is, until they start doing it. How can we make people see that? I remember when I was at Stuy (the school in the article), upper level courses were advertised by showing all these enticing projects that past students did. It made me super excited to take the graphics course, for example, because I knew I'd get to create a system for making awesome 3d animations, basically from scratch. But I didn't "get it" until I took the intro course on a whim (it wasn't required back then).

So maybe we need to better advertise all the creative potential of programming in a variety of fields. I know if you had told high school freshman me about using programming to make websites, I would not have cared one bit. But if you showed me how I could make generative art and music or poetry or 3d graphics, I would've been very excited.
I have a feeling all this will be somewhat moot anyway. If Padmapper is as popular as it appears to be, then many rental companies will go straight to them and submit their units in addition to CL.
This is unfortunately an increasingly common viewpoint. See for example the recent "Take My Money, HBO" site where people justify pirating the content because HBO won't sell episodes/seasons directly to them.
I would still conjecture that Craigslist succeeded in spite of their design, not because of it. That's the problem with these things, it's really hard to reverse engineer a success like Craigslist and figure out which of the moving pieces were real contributors.
Hacker News API in node.js
http://github.com/Boxyco/hackernews-api

questions are welcome! I would love to host this.
I think it's harder for small guys like Padmapper to fight them, because 1) There's no money for lawyering 2) Craigslist says that they listen more to users for UI.

So if you'd like to see CL give Padmapper license to use its data, send them an email. Your voice as a CL user weight more than Padmapper's would.
PadLister is run by PadMapper. Check the copyright at the bottom of the page.
"That's really the case you'd have to make to get Craigslist to reconsider."

There's also the possibility of making the case that shutting down PadMapper is really, really bad PR. Not to mention that there are more options here than simply killing PadMapper or returning to the prior status quo.
Could the C&D be PadMapper violating the use of the trade mark?

http://www.padlister.com/listings/new

"Better looking, effortless Craigslist Ads."
You're right, I was hoping I could go on, but I wasn't stealing anyone's content, I was posting links pasted geographically located with stat summaries. Look at a listing on PadMapper - there's no listing text, and when you click through, it goes to the original listing.
A Trailblazing Black Architect Who Helped Shape L.A
Not necessarily established companies, but people working on things that would become companies. They thought they were too late and they were pretty close to just going off and doing something else instead.

People still think the same sorts of thoughts today, as we've seen, and they are no more correct.
Craigslist is ranked #9 in the US on Alexa. I think it's completely understandable that you're running PadLister, especially since it would take some sort of internet voodoo to make a dent in Craigslist's traffic.
I just checked out my home town and there were tons of units.
I personally would have tried to find a way to work with them. But it's not my site.

Craig isn't doing anything wrong or unethical here. Quite the opposite; Craigslist continues to deliver exactly what its users signed up for.
I firstly don't understand why Wiley didn't sue the guy for the importation, rather than the resale. Importing copyrighted works for anything other than personal use unambiguously requires copyright holder permission by a plain reading of 17 U.S.C. 602 (http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/Title_17.txt). I think that is a bad law, but it is nevertheless an existing law.

Instead, they try to argue that it is the resale which is illegal, which requires a very creative interpretation of the law, and somehow manage to convince a federal district court and the 2nd circuit of that interpretation.

The interpretation that goods manufactured overseas are automatically not 'lawfully made under this title' is an extreme interpretation. The 2nd Circuit opinion said that 'lawfully made under this title' could mean any of '(1) "manufactured in the United States," (2) "any work made that is subject to protection under this title," or (3) "lawfully made under this title had this title been applicable."'. They decided that it means 1. However, to say that it means anything other than 3 seems to be stretching the plain text interpretation. 'Lawfully made under this law' is synonymous for 'Lawfully made, according to this law'.

They claim that the justification for their ruling is that 17 U.S.C. 602 would be inapplicable if they took anything other than interpretation 1, and so congress must have meant interpretation 1. But this is simply false by the plain text interpretation of the statute. If interpretation 3 is the right one, then it would be legal to import a copy of a copyrighted work in your personal baggage for personal use, and it would be legal to sell it in the US if you later decided you didn't want it, provided the circumstances in which that copy was made would have been legal under US law, but it would still be illegal under 17 U.S.C. 602 to import copies for the purpose of selling them, since 17 U.S.C. 109 only covers "sell[ing] or otherwise dispos[ing] of the possession of that copy or phonorecord".

Disclaimer: IANAL, this is not legal advice.
Dear Craiglist, please let Padmapper continue to scrape your data for free because I find Padmapper super useful and much better than your shitty site. I'm not going to address your interests at all, because they are directly threatened by the existence of Padmapper. In fact, I'm surprised that you haven't shut down Padmapper a year ago.
Craigslist's market position has very little to do with technology. This is a little like suggesting a Kickstarter campaign for IPv6.
that's great news! drop me a line about potentially getting your game more exposure. my startup connects html5 devs to large buyers.
Who is the real Wikipedia Founder?
Serious question: Do you think CL would actually follow through with a lawsuit? It seems like they fire off C&D's all the time, but I have yet to see serious follow through.
[Beta Test] Could anyone test my new app?
The second comment on this thread that suggests that the problem is "building an open replacement". Have you been on Craiglist lately?

You could try to replace Craigslist using only variants of the code shown in the original Rails screencast, with no consultation allowed. But you'd fail, because the result would be (from a UX perspective) better than Craigslist.

When people find a forum in which to post classifieds, they have exactly one (1) overriding goal: find the forum with the most vibrant market. There are a million zillion little things Craigslist can do better, but they are unlikely to make a big impact on that (1) goal, because Craigslist is already so vibrant that it has mostly put the rest of the classifieds "industry" (ie: newspapers) out of business.
PadMapper obeys robots.txt's, for the record. Also, it doesn't repost their content, it reposts facts about the content, which is a pretty key difference.

They've had an informal amnesty for services using their stuff for a long time, Craig has stated that they're OK with services that interface with them as long as they don't use many server resources, but they recently updated their TOU and started sending out huge waves of C&D's a few weeks ago, based on my talking with people.
Craigslists supposedly generates > $100 million in revenue per year from rental listings. That's at risk if something like Padmapper replaces them.
At least in cities, the introduction of the motor car improved road safety. Spooked horses were a leading cause of accidents. Working horses weigh anywhere from 600-1000kg and can easily trample or kick a man to death. Carriages had completely ineffective brakes and were effectively impossible to stop in an emergency. Their large wooden wheels and open underframes could cause horrific injuries due to entanglement, even at walking pace.

Then, as now, the most common accidental cause of debilitating injury and death is quite humble - trips and falls. As our population ages, this problem becomes more and more serious due to what geriatric specialists call the cycle of falls.

The cycle starts when an elderly person has a minor fall, which causes them to be hospitalised or bedridden for a few days. This period of inactivity causes muscle atrophy and a decline in coordination, which greatly increases their risk of falling and their risk of being seriously injured when they do fall. Without appropriate intervention, a fit and healthy older person can become extremely frail within the space of two or three years due to a series of increasingly more frequent and serious falls.
Remember, if the numbers don't support your opinion, it's because your measuring the wrong thing!
The copyright issue is that your iPod or iPad comes with a bunch of copies of software from various places pre-installed on it. That software has copyrights. So you'd potentially have to have permission from all of those copyright holders.

(But I'd think that said permission should normally already exist - else Apple would be unable to sell that hardware.)
So if they add a Disallow line for PadMapper to robots.txt instead of sending a C&D, how does that change the situation in any meaningful way?
No idea, but I've done a little bit of looking, and they have a history of attacking pretty aggressively, at least against things that auto-post. Those are mostly tools for spammers, though, so who knows if they'd come after me.
It is debatable because he was hired to run editorial, but it is true, he came up with the idea and pushed it forward. without him wikipedia wouldn't exists.
Sure, it's effectively the same in result, without the legal threat backing it up.
Hi Craig and Jim,

I was disappointed to learn you dont want PadMapper to use your listings. Their site and Carsabi are two sites I recently used to find my apartment and car, respectively, only after I had given up on dealing with your firehose and sparse search options. In using both sites I knew full well I was simply using them as a better, more elegant, more feature rich version of CL. Both ultimately referred me right back to your site for specific listings, which was exactly what I wanted them to do.

I dig and respect that you guys are staying true to your mission, running a lean company and keeping it simple. I've read all I can find about both of you and how you've built and how you run CL. You are two of my heroes. But you are really betraying your mission and your credibility with this move. You should let your data be completely open. Let people do whatever they want with it. CL is an institution. You are a backbone of the internet. Just like Facebook and how they share their graph with anybody who wants to use it, as it spreads the FB brand everywhere - you should embrace people wanting to use your data. It will only serve to spread the CL brand further and even more important, it will make the lives of people all over the World better. I thought that was what you stood for. I hope you don't prove me wrong.

Regards,

-Bill
Apple v. Motorola: Judge Posner dismisses entire case - no injunctions
What mood are you in right now? Someone already (thinks) they know.
Most landlords probably never even realize the traffic first got to CL through Padmapper at all. Whenever I'm asked, I automatically just say CL. Bringing up Padmapper is just likely to confuse.

CL is deliberately making its service less useful both to its paying customers and the public at large. And the sole justification for this is fear that Padmapper could grow to be a bigger, better competitor someday in the distant future.

Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress for fear of future competition is irksome.

It's almost certainly not illegal, and maybe not even morally wrong. But it still sucks.

Yet for all that, I'm moving on July 15th, and I think there's about a 95% chance I'll find the place through CL. That's where the market is.
I haven't used the betas of the new version, but I'm not sure I would describe VS as particularly polished. It's better than Eclipse, but IDEA beats it handily. Even Xcode (newer versions) comes out in front, in its own XCode-y way.

I actually rather enjoyed VS as a whole, especially the debugger. But we're talking UI polish here.
Eerie indeed given their existing vast bulk of personal data from emails to browsing habits. Now they want to be the portal to the entire web for people via Chromebooks and hold all their data. That makes the cynical part of me glad that Google+ hasn't been overly successful.
Network effect. Sellers go to CL because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go to CL because that's where the sellers are. Other features come in play after that. Once the network effect sets in it's almost impossible to unseat the incumbent: eBay, Linked-in, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. The dominant company has 90%+ share, and can stay that way forever doing very little.

eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rather mediocre) interface in years, and managed to alienate at least some sellers with their policies. And yet, no one managed to make a dent in eBay's position.

Network effect is the reason there is funding for a million social network start-ups. Everyone wants to capture it. But the odds of success, on the other hand, are also one in a million.

I believe there was a post recently on HN where someone pointed out how these things work - one day it just takes off. Some combination of factors (three out of 100, perhaps) gets right and people flock to the site. And then the fate is sealed. Even in retrospect it's often impossible to say what factors were the key. So, I wouldn't be surprised if founders of Craigslist have little clue as to why it worked.

I'd be really really interested to see what it takes for someone to unseat Craigslist (or eBay, or any other major network).
You're pretty far off, since a lot of stuff gets cross posted, but I'm still pretty bummed about it - it obviously made the site more useful.
3 Alan Turing Haikus (post yours)
I'll start:

may his tape rewind

great doodle great man sad death

new summer same rain

----------------------------

prideful springs forget

a homo ex machina

nothing wrong with that

-----------------------------

Some deaths are way Grimm

But there's been electric life

Many winters since
Note that Alzheimer's wasn't even "invented" as a diagnosis in 1900, though. I'm guessing that most of the folks dying of Alzheimer's in 1900 wound up getting classified into the "senility" box.
I completely disagree with other people's attitudes on this point - startups definitely need to be wary of using third party APIs, but it is incumbent upon companies to create clear and stable terms for developers to operate within if they are thinking of opening an API. It's completely unfair to make representations to people that they rely on to their detriment and then renege at the last minute.

Let's be clear too - it's not as if these guys were making a porn application or something that violated LinkedIn's TOS. Nor were they acting without LinkedIn's consent. Companies reserve rights to revoke access without reason in order to limit their legal liability but they need to be wary of the non-legal consequences to their reputation.

This is an unmitigated disaster for LinkedIn. Obviously if it is a professional network, and they as a company already offer a number of solutions to recruiters, companies and professionals, then almost every app made for their platform is going to compete with their own offerings in some way.

If they aren't willing to set clear boundaries in this regard then they simply need to shut down the API and stop wasting everyone's time. In any event, even if they leave it open they can forget about people making a serious investment in the platform.
You can disrupt Craigslist vertical by vertical, same as with eBay (before they became totally crap) and Amazon (even today).

There is really very little in common between renting or selling a house (which Craigslist is only good for in SF/SFBA, and ok in some college or other major-metro markets), selling small, highly standardized items (used iPhone 4s), selling used cars, dating or prostitution, and selling sofas. The unprofitable ghetto is selling sofas, and craigslist is the right place for that.

Amazon marketplace utterly destroys craigslist for selling most standardized, current-production items (books, electronics). There are Apple specific marketplaces for used Apple stuff which are by far the best. Etc.

Mostly because their interfaces are even EASIER for buyers than Craigslist. When I buy a used book from Amazon, it's zero friction, includes all the reviews for the new book, and has a single-button to buy (using stored payment, and shipping info, and shipping in 1-2 days for free).
And they're just saying that it presents an immaterial risk compared to all the other things people get killed by and so doesn't factor in.

Autos and airplanes just aren't comparable.
Yeah, I'm not delusional...
I just searched for "memorialized" on our help center and got a link to the page that lets you fix this: http://mkjon.es/memorialize.png

If I search for "facebook memorialized" on the google, the first result takes me to https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=185698814812082, which has a link to the right page (though it's at the bottom)-:.

I'm curious what path the OP took, and how we could improve ranking here (I work at facebook, but not on help center). I imagine the majority of people who search for this are looking to memorialize an account, not un-memorialize it, so I think in general the current ranking is correct, even if it failed in this case.

[EDIT: as ldbrandy points out below, we're making it so this is the first thing you see when you log in as a memorialized account.]
Well, no, select() takes a signed value for the length (it is actually not a length, but the number of descriptors, later used to derive a length), and there is no changing that interface obviously. This is the source of the "negative value" in this example. The problem arises because internally, openbsd "jammed a negative value into an unsigned int", as Ted put it, and made it a very large positive value, leading to an overflow.
Class actions are not about rounding up plaintiffs so you can shakedown BigCorp. That's only what enterprising American lawyers have made them. And that's what the public sees. Class actions are supposed to be about jusdicial efficiency. If enough plaintiffs all file suits with the same claims in the same court against BigCorp, the court is going likely to refuse to hear each one individually. Too much work. Courts are staffed by people who are lazy just like you and me. In nerd speak, developers do not keep answering the same questions again and again. They create FAQ's. The court will be more receptive to all these repetitive suits against BigCorp if the suits are filed as one: a class action. The court hears one case, and reduces its workload.

Given that we now have the means to easily coordinate group action via internet, e.g. group buying, crowd sourcing, etc., what's to stop people from coordinating group litigation. If enough people invidually file suits against Facebook with the same court, it leaves that court little choice but to encourage a class action. Companies like Microsoft can make you agree not to join a class action, but they can't stop you from filing a suit on your own for any and every claim. And if enough customers file the same suit in the same court, a class action may well be the result, even though the customers never sought to join one. And that's because class actions are not about shaking down BigCorp by rounding up plaintiffs. They are about reducing the workload of the court and the expense of hearing numerous suits all with the same claims and facts.

If a large contigent of Facebook users all resolved to sue Facebook at the same time in the same jurisdiction, _individually_, the results could be very interesting.
There's a wave of these C&D's coming out, a lot to sites much smaller than mine.
Actually, the quality of the craigslist listings on Padmapper, and on craigslist in general, seem to have fallen over the past year, too. Not sure if it's the overall market or just craigslist. I was trying to disprove it by looking in Menlo just now, but unfortunately(?) just found an utterly amazing place for $2100 which is about 50% less than I would have thought, which kind of goes against this. Not from Craigslist, but from a property management company.

Just focus on making the SV/SF market amazing using padlister or partnerships with property managers. Displace Craigslist in real estate in their home market.
It's clear that there's a good number of people who really love your product, and PadMapper is clearly a better product than Craigslist—the only thing going against you is the network effect. I don't know the specifics, but maybe there's enough of a support base that PadLister could take off the same way as AirBnB did.
It is not. "You win! Now hand over all your property" is not the way they should be run.
Actually I think a 50% drop in accidents is pretty good, especially given how many new dangerous things we've invented since then.

Actually there was an article the other day about accidental death rates: death due to drug overdose has overtaken death due to car accident, due to a dramatic drop in one and rise in the other.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Drugs/drug-deaths-exceed-traffi...

The extent to which drug overdoses can be called "accidental" is, of course, debatable, but I guess they're classified as accidental at least in cases where it's not obviously suicide.
I'm probably one of the only people who is glad to see this happen. Keep your Silicon Valley get-rich-quick schemes away from my Craigslist!