skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craigslist is one of the greatest blown opportunities in the history of business.
What does the usability of their product have to do with it? It's their product. I know, "everything is free on the Internet, man".
I don't think drugs are that price sensitive -- they may even be Veblen goods.
I hope no one writes a robot that memorializes every single facebook user.
That doesn't mean that one shouldn't use the package manager

Using the distro package manager for eggs, gems or jars is an exercise in futility.

Bundler, Maven, NPM et al are not flawless, but maturing rapidly, and a much better fit to the problem domain.
> As we learn to code, one of the most frustrating experiences we can have is finding bugs in our code.

Bug hunting can be a really fun thing to do. It's a challenge to (often) see beyond your own blind spot and use logic and reasoning to find the error.

TDD (and its kissing cousins) aren't a panacea, but I suspect OP's testing strategy is a little too thin or absent. Chances are if there is a test suite, it's not properly testing the entire code base.
Yup, there's a catch-22 here: when your site has shitty usability but is the only source of information, people hit more pages and spend more time there. When you fix your UI mistakes, they're in and out quicker because they actually get what they need efficiently. Because you're optimizing for engagement by measuring time on site or something like that, you end up making sure never to make your site easy to use.

This is not a recipe for success. It's a symptom of measuring the wrong metric, especially when you have a near monopoly on a market due to network effects. If this is really why Craigslist is not improving their UI, they need to hire some analysts that actually know WTF they're doing.
I've personally had success with Django/python framework. Although it took 4 days of hassle to install Django/WSGI on Dreamhost.
Mozilla ditches E4X
this post explains... that there may be bugs in our code and third party libraries and that if you fix them you'll improve as a coder.

I'm curious, who learned something from this post?
OK, yes, I can see how `fromJust`, more specifically, is the unsafe part. You're dereferencing a pointer which is probably non-nil but the compiler can't tell you because you've insisted on checking it manually rather than communicating your intent to the compiler more directly.

So when you say "avoid fromJust," the alternative in practice is to use pattern matching, yes? The example you used above was a case statement. A guard clause is another obvious one, as are additional clauses (?) in a function.
Nice to see someone from FB apparently hopping on this right away and replying on SE. Having a more direct interface would be something for them to consider though as a lot of users aren't going to know how to raise an alert "where the techies wander".
If I were at Craigslist, I would strongly look at commercializing their listings. By that I mean charging a fixed amount (say $5) for every 1000 results sent to the requester (such as Padmapper). That ways Craigslist gets to keep the revenue while other companies can innovate on top of the massive data which Craigslist has.
There are various examples of Craiglist just simply not working in various countries. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Craigslist really only had a monopoly in the U.S. Brazil uses olx (I think?), Argentina and Mexico among other Latin American countries use mercadolibre where Craigslist is more for baiting foreigners with higher rent prices and international shared accomodation. Australia has gumtree, New Zealand has trademe (and they both use Seek for jobs) and I would use marktplaats in the Netherlands as mentioned above. I forget the one for Spain. The list goes on..
it's intended for people who are learning how to code and may be unfamiliar.

everybody starts somewhere.
To clarify for everyone, while the parent read the answer a few days ago, Craig wrote this response in 2010.
Hi guys, thanks for the feedback, we really appreciate it.

The tech isn't new, however the execution and spin we put to it is, main reason behind this was to show case our team in a different manner than everybody else typically does.
Content not available for licensing is a justification for infringement? That doesn't ring true at all for me - exclusive content is often much more valuable to a business than content that's licensed. I doubt anyone would think that goldman sachs coverage being distributed by morgan stanley would fit under some "no harm, no foul" ethos even if Morgan significantly improved on the layout of the pages.
Desoxyn is pharmaceutical methamphetamine. It is extremely infrequently prescribed, but technically more legal (schedule II, along with cocaine) than LSD or Marijuana (schedule I).
Jane Street or pointers to them seem to be the primary driver of OCaml on the internet. That's cool, but worrying in lack of diversity.
I would love to build something with PhoneGap or something similar. Just limited time. Building something like that would mean having to more or less re-write the backend as a front-end data store.

In fact, there is a mobile responsive design thing at http://aroundtheworldgame.com/mobile/ which works OK in iphone/ipad but it's far from perfect.
Gates and Allen thought there were too many other established companies in the microcomputer software market?
Disappointing. I'm currently living in an apartment I found via Padmapper and Craigslist. Padmapper was absolutely crucial, without it I wouldn't have found this place.

I understand why they're complying with the C+D, but I wish they'd fight it. Craigslist is better than printed classifieds, but that's about the best thing you can say about it.
If you put the word 'memorialized' into the helpcenter you are greeted with 4 results, one of which is this exact issue, and leads to this form: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=292558237463098,

A task has already been opened, internally, to display this information on first login of memorialized accounts.
If they cannot afford, then they should not be there. Scraping illegally is not a long term solution. Craigslist should conduct some market research from their end to charge a "reasonable" fee which fills in their coffers as well as allow development an ecosystem around their data. Even DuckDuckGo pays for Yahoo! BOSS Search API to show their results. Not sure why CL hasn't thought about it.
His essay is available at:

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.htm...
Hustler Turf Equipment Hesston, Kansas ... Designs, builds, and sells lawn mowers.

Wow... I mean talk about the LAST company you would think would be using a language like Haskell. I would have more likely pictured some horrible VB6-Access mess. Just goes to show you what the risks are in assuming...
"Hmm, I wanna make a better awesomer videogame ... wonder how I go about doing that". Curiosity takes care of the rest.

That's true, but it doesn't seem to me that a large percentage of programmers I know got interested in programming that way. I haven't conducted a formal survey, but that's the impression I have. It's very possible that my impression is wrong or that I'd get different results talking to a high school CS class than programmers in their 20s and 30s.

It is, apparently, culturally acceptable for a boy to arse around on a computer all day, while the same does not hold true for a girl.

I think that's less true now than it used to be in large part due to the increase in social uses of computers. Some of those social uses lend themselves to the sort of customization that would get people interested in coding as above. I'm thinking specifically of things like FBPurity, a browser extension that hides unwanted content on Facebook.

There's certainly an underlying issue with cultural stereotypes where boys are expected to tinker with technical/mechanical things and girls aren't. The distinction might be entirely arbitrary, as girls are expected to tinker with things thought of as feminine. Few people would be surprised by a girl making alterations to her clothing.
A note for college HN'ers: you don't need foreign relatives to mail you the books. amazon.co.uk will happily ship to US addresses. It costs a little more to ship and takes a week or so longer, but you can still save a substantial amount. I bought most of my engineering texts this way.
I don't understand the justification for "saving" padmapper.

Padmapper's goal is to have Craigslist subsidize their data until they grow large enough to challenge Craiglist's business.

Craigslist would be stupid to let them do this.

Instead, why don't you write a letter to craigslist asking for similar functionality?
Good point but... What? So far, the only skill is to know stuff and know it quickly. I was thinking about somehow incorporating that you race against other players somehow. Then, somehow you could use strategy to try to be smart and swift or just hard working and active. Haven't come up with something definitive yet.
Have you tried the tutorial?
The purpose of it is to give you a preview of how you earn so that you can do that yourself from there on.
Could Craiglist shut down every single IP who scrapes? Could you build Padmapper to be less 'realtime' and more 'tell me the city and I'll set up a client-side scraper, come back in 15 minutes?'
Telecommuting isn't on offer. Back in the 80s, when they promised that by year 2000 almost everyone would be working from home, they were lying. I feel more cheated on this than on personal jet-packs. I don't work in a startup, it's just a boring old medium sized company. You have to be at the office 10-5, no exceptions. Did I mention I'm not in the US?

Sad.
dayum!!!!
I admit. I haven't thought much about this. Because I'm weak on marketing I have to use the product as my weapon by making it really good.

How about, the people who play Angry Birds as a target audience.
I'm pretty sure that Craigslist disruption is coming, and it's going to be AirBnB.

I'm not too worried. What craigslist is doing (ie, sucking) isn't sustainable.
Why? They were abusing LinkedIn's service by competing with them.

LinkedIn took the time to speak with them, evaluate the situation, and then make an informed decision about whether they wanted to support their appropriation of LinkedIn's data.
The problem in Opera is your feature test in slide-deck.js line 762. At the time this part of the code executes, the DOM is not ready yet, so document.body is just null and the whole thing fails.

It does however work perfectly after executing window.slidedeck = new SlideDeck(); manually.
Google Doodle: Turing Machine
Where is the outrage? I find this an appalling act by Linked In, who seem, this shortly after WWDC, unaware of the power of a strong developer ecosystem.
How could you continue to work at such a place knowing this?

Why would anyone bother developing for their community via their API?

Linked In's site itself meanwhile is looking increasingly like Facebook to me and is increasingly irrelevant to professionals. They are under pressure to increase revenue dramatically to get close to justifying an over inflated share price, but losing your corporate values by screwing over people in your ecosystem is very short term thinking, perhaps reflecting a Wall St mindset.
Stock Photography Service Shutterstock Files For IPO
But what about all of those software businesses that have built on top of the iOS API + App Store? Would you say that they are also taking a massive risk? Apple can cut off any app that it wants at any time, almost for any reason, and yet thousands of independent developers are building profitable businesses on top of their platform.

The issue is not a dependency on an API or platform. The issue is the nature and character of the company upon which you are depending. In spite of some well-publicized hiccups, Apple has made an effort to nurture its developer community.

The point of the article is not that dependency is bad (although it may very well be), but rather that LinkedIn is a bad partner, and it's not worth spending any effort to build a business on their platform.

What I'm curious about is what companies are similarly risky to build your business on.
Not very convincing. We all know the value that Padmapper brings to apartment seekers. What's harder to explain is what (if any) value Padmapper brings to Craigslist. That's really the case you'd have to make to get Craigslist to reconsider.

Also, as much as I hate to say this, the “they didn’t do anything wrong” argument is very weak. Scraping the site explicitly goes against Craigslist’s TOS:

Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.
They can't be, at least not for "perjury", because "under penalty of perjury" has no force unless authorized by a court or, I guess, some specific statute.

The idea that you can stick the words "under penalty of perjury" on a random form to create a legal requirement for truthful answers is one of those Internet legal old-wives-tales, like adding "no copyright intended" to a Youtube upload.

However, if you report that someone else is dead, and they or their family suffer harm as a result, you can probably be sued easily, regardless of whether you use Facebook to make the report, or a carrier pigeon.
Coolest Google Doodle ever? An interactive Turing Machine
Who has seen a cooler one?
>I hope this doesn't get down-voted for the confusing title

Specially when the site is down. Pretty annoying to find this kind of reddit like title here.

From comments my guess is that it's some blog post from someone who is pissed off at CL for forbidding them to use some web app they built (PadMapper?) that scrap content from the CL site or something like that.
There are many alternatives to fromJust. They are all essentially implemented on top of the safe primitive: pattern-matching.

Guard clauses in Haskell are actually boolean conditionals, and are boolean-blind.

Safe pattern-matching can be done via the function definition sugar:

f Nothing = ...
f (Just x) = ...

Which is equivalent to a "case".

The various functions that work with a Maybe value make it non-tedious to do things. For example, instead of:

case mx of
Just x -> Just (x + 1)
Nothing -> Nothing

You can write:

fmap (+1) mx

Additionally, (>>=), fromMaybe and many other useful functions exist, and they're all based on safe pattern-matching.
It's interesting that this article mentions Heisenberg. Although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was formulated for quantum particles, it can be paraphrased as saying that measurements disturb the system being measured. It is perilous to apply quantum physics to the behavior and interactions of humans, but here I believe it is illustrative. Specifically, I think Shorris' study perturbed the system he was trying to measure while he was still in the process of trying to measure its different aspects.

Shorris' argues that the key to escaping poverty is the study of the humanities. His evidence is that a group of carefully selected students who, after being given a year of quality education, seem to be able to escape the poverty that entrapped them. Learning the humanities therefore provides a way out of poverty. While this is an uplifting, perhaps even inspirational message, the conclusions he draws are highly questionable for a plethora of reasons.

1. Response bias: Students expressing interest in the course are likely the most motivated individuals in their respective circles.

2. Selection bias: Students deemed "too impoverished" or "too uneducated" were rejected.

3. Intervention by study conductor: Education and career advice was not only given freely, but volunteered to promising pupils.

3. Variables not controlled: The education included high quality instructors who might have been capable of "inspiring" their students, regardless of the subject being taught, as well as providing an "in" to their respective institutions. Disruption of routine: Students were required to leave their immediate neighborhood and social circles regularly and engage in rigorous study.

4. No control group.

I could go on for a while, but this is sufficient. Shorris' study group consisted of the most highly motivated members of the poor minus those who were the least educated. He then intervened in their lives, not just to give them a quality education, but also by changing their habits, exposing them to the unfamiliar, enhancing their motivation and giving them career/education counseling plus networking connections to the educational institutes of the participating teachers.

I will not dispute that this course was a fantastic idea that enriched the lives of those lucky enough to take it, but it simply cannot be used as evidence for the notion that study of the humanities specifically can be used to combat poverty. Instead, it should be used a model for other similar courses.
Whether it's right or wrong is exactly the issue under discussion.
The Triumph of the Family Farm
It sounds more like a tale of an employee writing software in a language that the management didn't buy into and no one else in the company knows. If one of our employees started writing code in <some other language> instead of Haskell we'd have a similar problem.
Why Classical Liberalism Rejects War
VENDOR-PREFIXED CSS PROPERTIES

So there are CSS properties with vendor specific implementation, how are they going to handle that? Also what if the browser (like Chrome) changes its spec.? This could break your current code.
I've heard this argument many times before, it was the same with Oodle, but PadMapper's business model is to aggregate apartment listings (Google's is not) and this is in contradiction to the TOS so inevitably Craig Newmark sends them a C&D letter.

Several innovative solutions have been invented over the years, the most obvious one is to do the CL scraping on the client, this way there is no indexing server to block, it's just the client reading all the search listings, parsing them and offering faceted filters. It breaks the spirit of the TOS but it would be impossible for CL to block. I am not advocating this, just pointing out one of the many approaches that have been attempted over the years.
We started writing zerorpc in 2010. We did test msgpack-rpc at the time, but it was barely a proof-of-concept.

A few key differences: zerorpc supports zeromq (including pub-sub and push-pull topologies), streaming responses, and has a bunch a of great instrumentation built on top of it.
I'm not sure why those TOUs would prohibit Padmapper but not Google.
Its their content, just because they won't let you use it doesn't mean you can break in and grab it.
It's most likely an indication that they'll be developing their own UI.
LifeLog aggregates personal & social memories. Exclusive launch for Kickstarters
"Save Padmapper" seems to be selling the company short given the diverse set of data sources and partnerships they have. I hope Craigslist comes around but my bet is PadMapper will be more than fine regardless.
> Craigslist is in major need of disruption.

This is about the 3000th time I've read that phrase, or some variation of it, in the past ten years. If that were true then it would have happened already, no? Markets can fail in the short term, but in space as crowded with upstarts as the web, I just don't buy it over such a long period of time.

The thing I like most about Craigslist is that some guy made it just to help other people out. The thing I dislike most about all the people trying to "disrupt" Craigslist is that they're clearly in it for the money. I feel like this non-trivial selling point is lost on those who swear that CL is broken and needs replacing.
They have every right to implement technical barriers to scraping. Whether they can invoke the law to establish a legal barrier to re-publishing their proprietary-but-public facts -- not even the apartment summary text, just extracted metadata -- is not at all clear. When an auction aggregator was sued by eBay for doing something similar, the judgment in eBay's favor rested on the fact that the aggregator was posing a real undue technical burden, not the inherent fact that they were scraping.[1] Since I assume Padmapper does intelligent scraping, they might have a fairly good case.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge
Why the hate on Craigslist? It's their information, and are free to do what they want with it - most likely, develop their own platform.
I developed wiserprofile.com to help people build better LinkedIn profiles, and it works entirely against LinkedIn's API. I too found that some of the cool features that I really wanted to build were not allowed by the LinkedIn developer agreement. It's too bad LinkedIn is not willing to open up their API set to allow an ecosystem to flourish - let the developers loose guys and watch your platform grow!
Somewhat of a side-note, but interestingly enough, MessagePack's author cited ZeroRPC as a good example of MessagePack's use case: https://gist.github.com/2908191
Why Consider Discounts On Web-services
Craigslist is hiring Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers - maybe they plan on releasing a similar feature?

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sof/2841395914.html
They already run PadLister[1]. I wonder whether their endgame is to usurp Craigslist, or to continue being an aggregator? Personally I see more value in them pulling in Craigslist ads than trying to create their own community, but at this point they're really limited for options.

Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but what about companies like Twitter that rely heavily on people using their API? Is there ever a concern that the apps will try to create their own network and push Twitter out?

[1] http://www.padlister.com/
Building the right interface is simple. The real problem of building any marketplace is solving the chicken/egg problem of having a lot of buyers and sellers.

Craigslist does not avoid disruption because it has the best product, it avoids disruption because it has a huge marketplace with a lot of buyers and sellers.
Hah, people have been saying that for a decade. What people fail to realize is that Craigslist is ultra successful because of what it does, not despite.
Guildford is not escaping the wrath of the Olympics. http://www.guildford.gov.uk/london2012

I think you best leave the country to be safe !
Depending on the bug and the stress level, it can certainly be a riveting experience to search for an error deep in your own code. I find it's also an important source of refactoring for me, I take notes about what v2 will not be doing. Unit testing is great but it doesn't teach me to innovate or come across solutions I hadn't thought of before like genuine dirty bugfixing can do.
The benefit is not having to code it. The most bug-free components are the ones that aren't there. Also, it's only v1. I don't think anybody's said that they're opposed to putting it in, so give it time. Maybe file a feature request.
New coders may not really know the value of bug hunting. In a mentoring situation I would stress the bug hunting/fixing should be considered a challenge, not a chore.
Claude Shannon had demonstrated a chess learning system which taught itself by playing him to defeat him in under two weeks as early as 1949.

I call "citation needed", and needed quite badly: Shannon was a much better chess player than any program available in 1949.