skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would be very skeptical of any startup trying to compete against Craigslist because, in addition to strong network effects, the latter has two difficult-to-replicate competitive advantages:

* Craigslist’s operating expenses are ridiculously low in relation to its huge size, allowing it to offer most services for free and still earn a profit. According to its public fact sheet, every month the site receives more than 50 million classified ads and serves more than 30 billion web pages.[1] Alexa ranks it as the ninth most-trafficked site in the US.[2] Yet somehow, the company manages to do this with just over 30 employees![1] On a per-year basis, that’s around 20 million classifieds per employee! Infrastructure costs are also very, very low in relation to traffic, as the site’s design, functionality, and interface are all ridiculously light and bare-bones.[3] No startup can match such ultra-low per-classified costs.

* While Craigstlist is technically a for-profit corporation, it operates as a non-profit organization,[1] so it is not seeking to maximize profits; instead, it is seeking only to be financially sustainable. Wealth-seeking entrepreneurs are at a huge disadvantage if they try to compete against a well-established entity that has both an ultra-low-cost advantage and no desire to acquire wealth over time.

In short, Craigslist possesses what Warren Buffett calls the “low-cost producer” advantage: it can offer a commodity service for less than anyone else.[4]

[1] http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet

[2] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US

[3] According to this 2011 presentation, Craiglist, the 9th most-traffic site in the US, is powered by only ~500 servers located in two data centers: http://www.slideshare.net/jzawodn/lessons-learned-migrating-...

[4] For example, read Buffett's description of GEICO’s competitive advantage in his 2000 letter to shareholders: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2000ar/2000letter.html
Could you please tell me in which alternative reality you live in? :-)
I've found the opposite. If I can sit down with a potential client over lunch, it is far easier to sell myself (especially when I first started and had few references).
It has been an uphill battle for me in trying to explain this that there really are two uses for money: store-of-value and medium-of-exchange, and that it is possible to cleanly separate the two. It's even been done successfully before, most famously in the town of Wörgl between 1932 and 1934.

Keynes centered his attention on the macroeconomy and used inflation to grease its wheels. Hayek focused on the individual and the value of a deflationary currency at that scale. Gesell showed that these are not, in fact, competing visions and by separating store-of-value from medium-of-exchange you could have your cake and eat it too.
The first question that comes to mind: why not just use bitcoin? Have you explored adding the features you want to see to the (open-source) bitcoin project?
Apple still ships Java; it's just not installed by default. When you run a Java app without having Java installed, you get a prompt to automatically download and install Java.
Only shipping stuff counts
Apparently it does exist, although it's not well-defined under UK law:

"Iain Connor, who works for Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW, said that provisions within the UK's Extradition Act would give the legal means for suspected criminals to be summoned to the US.

The UK-US extradition treaty agreement allows either country to surrender a criminal suspect to the other if the crime carries a minimum punishment of a year's prison sentence.

"US companies are likely to try and secure a conviction in the US where they know that they could succeed on the basis of an offence of 'authorising copyright infringement' which in the UK is not a well defined offence," Connor said."

— http://www.out-law.com/page-12056
Campaign Monitor Redesign
That's not how economics works. We had a 'credit crunch' because billions of dollars in market value was disappearing, sometimes overnight, devaluing securities. A new currency that no one wants to hold for longer than they have to isn't going to change that.
This is a great step. I am personally pretty hateful of Apple's decisions as far as hardware lockdown and restrictive use, but it's a tradeoff they offer customers and many consider it a good deal.

That aside, being more security minded as opposed to claiming immunity for marketing purposes is a fantastic move and one to be applauded by the tech community.
Stateful Web Applications pt.2
MS Acquires Yammer
Not completely what you are looking for, but I found a Chris Granger inspired vim theme: https://github.com/chmllr/vim-colorscheme-elrodeo
Is this really so surprising? I think anyone who knows how semiconductor manufacturing works would have looked at the scaling graphs of magnetic storage vs. transistor density and seen that they cross. We've all been using flash-based embedded systems for well over a decade -- it started with cameras, then fixed-function network gadgets, then phones, then... So now it's hitting PCs.

If anything, magnetic storage has actually scaled faster than expected (frankly it's so cheap in bulk that it's effectively free relative to the power required to run it).

To me, the only surprise was that consumer applications never found a need for more than about a quarter TB of storage, so that's where the crossover happens on PCs. We haven't actually hit the cost-per-byte point yet.
Lisp Hackers: Juan José García Ripoll
best site ever!!!
I like CL as is. (I may be old fashioned. E.g. I still use Notepad for small lists, instead of logging in to some web app for that.)
Right Now, What Does A Direct Marketer Need to Know and Be Able to Do?
Create the face of Mobile Medicine - Summer Internship
Hi! We are a team of two interested in finding a third to improve the use of technology in medicine. We are looking for a Mobile Developer that can work to create an iOS or Android app.

We have created a server based algorithm to identify pills using image processing, and we have the clinical connections to get this in the hands of ED doctors at SFGH and family practice doctors at UCSF and Stanford. We have a proof-of-concept demo in Android (http://youtu.be/1APM1ZX1JHk), although we would like someone to work on a mobile UI (either in iOS or Android) full time for the summer. We would like help to create a polished mobile interface that is ready to use for physicians.

http://hackmedicine.wordpress.com/
Voeding: dit mag je wel en niet eten bij spataders | Leef Nu Gezonder
I'm not sure how that's relevant--the situation would be the same with Freicoin, which would run over the same bitcoin network and protocol.
I think that Khan Academy is providing small nuggets (videos, quizzes) of content.

As a teacher, I can take Mr Khan's currants and bake my own cake with them (i.e. use their stuff to support part or all of a course). I pick and choose, but of course my students know the site and they can pick and choose as well.
This is the same approach to twisted-beams that was done with wifi signals recently. Question is that whilst the beam of light is twisted - does it not travel futher than a non-twisted version and in that woult the latency increase!
Thanks for recognizing one of the biggest downfalls of it. They could be opening the Apple platforms for massive "protect yourself" scare sales.
Steal? Those scientists earned those keys.
So in both cases you pay $960 for 2 years, except in one case you don't get a phone line.
Researchers Crack RSA SecurID Tokens, Extract Keys
remotepad seems nicer, it includes a keyboard....
Malthus introduced exponential growth rates, but not equilibria; he assumed a runaway growth would lead to collapse. Logistic functions, which describe equilibrium-finding, were introduced by Pierre Verhulst.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Verhulst

John von Neumann and John Nash deserve some credit for founding game theory; in particular the strategies described are minimax strategies, introduced by von Neumann.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
FuckItJS: Runs your javascript code whether your compiler likes it or not.
How is demurrage different from inflation? Isn't the financial system already set up to encourage savers to invest their assets rather than storing value as bills under mattresses?
I wonder what it takes to make TechCrunch write about my startup too. :)
As I look at these Nexus Tab specs, my first-gen Nook Color is looking very feeble by comparison. I've been running CM9 (ICS) nightlies on the Nook, and the hardware just barely manages. I'd love to grab a powerhouse 7" tab at that kind of price point (~$200).
I've seen Nook Colors (and own one myself), but not many.
Yes. Love these guys. Every time I call support I get to talk to somebody with both knowledge and sense. In sharp contrast to when I had AT&T DSL or have to deal with Comcast for friends.
At first glance, this looks similar to PadLister (http://padlister.com), the companion service from the guy who did PadMapper. Both post your listings to multiple sites and can accept online applications and do a credit check. Is there a difference I'm missing or are these two direct competitors?
Greece faces more woes: finance minister resigns
Not quite, Granger committed to making a Python version in the Kickstarter.
The Difference a Single Button Can Make
>The contact link in the Craigslist post goes to a sign-up form for the Yardsale app.

This was a tactic that AIRBnB used and they got some flak for it. CL doesn't like the middle-man approach.

I don't know though if AIRBnB got any C&D or other imperial entanglements due to this approach.
SoundCord - Ruby GEM
I think this is a great idea, but I'm curious... -- so I'm playing devil's advocate with this question -- Couldn't there be some risk that it would be tough to build a case against someone involved in illegal activity? Like how much harder is it to build a case against CP offenses with only access to two weeks of logs?
But... if no cruft then how am I going to share that cool post I saw for an oven mitt for sale, with my 297 friends?
Agreed. I used to live in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and http://www.usedvictoria.com was probably mentioned just as much as Craigslist. Goes to prove that local services can sometimes make a dent- not a significant one, but I'm sure someone is making a living out of it.
More diversity in things like this does improve software. I learnt this at one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Do men know best what women want? No. Get women involved, and there is a better result.

If we don't begin to be inclusive, then Ubuntu will stay a closed mens club - and we will all be poorer for it.
Why do positive feedback loops always end in a counterbalancing negative feedback?

Because if they didn't, they'd continue until they hit one.
Hi zhemao, thanks for the comment! I'm a Khan Academy developer. I just wanted to add that we do hire educators. Among them are Beth and Steven who are our in-resident art history faculty (http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team). We also have a dedicated School Implementations team (http://ka-implementations.tumblr.com/) working directly with schools to understand how Khan Academy can be integrated in classrooms and to evaluate our performance against independent test results.
Similarly, the acceptance of suicide as an out can cause them to feel happy. They won't tell anyone their plan, but they have one, and its removed a burden they felt.

The author of that article seems wholly unaware of the nature of depression. When forced into social situations, you learn to hide it. You act happy, tell jokes, disarm the situation if anyone sees you looking sad (I'm tired, have I told you I'm an insomniac?) or crying (allergies, contacts).
Facebook pushes Facebook.com email address in Contact Info, hides alternatives
Paging & Ranking With Large Offsets: MongoDB vs Redis vs PostgreSQL
So this is a fork of bitcoin? How many changes have you made? Have you started mining with it? Whats to prevent you from mining the difficulty up while we fund your indiegogo?
Not just credit checks, but background checks as well would be valuable.
I guess I'm not sure why you'd want to try to compete with Craigslist directly. Besides the network effect, there is also the fact that Craigslist isn't really making that much money (at least compared to how much they could be).

This means that anything competing with it with a goal of making money is going to have an even harder time competing with CL, which is mostly free and completely free of advertising. Look at eBay, which arguably could have been improved on quite a bit and charged users fairly high fees - nobody (that I know of) ever managed to compete with them on a large scale in the auction space.

Like others have said, I think the value is in competing on very specific areas. A few that would be possible and profitable:

- Jobs/contract work. Given the technology we have, I think the internet has done a poor job of changing the way we find and apply for employment and short-term work. I've been working on some prototypes for tech-oriented job sites, and I think there are a lot of other industries that could benefit from smarter job sites. Plus, there is a considerable amount of money in this area.

- Housing, especially in places like SF and NYC.

- Local services.

Lower-end stuff like people selling used couches and Xbox 360 games is probably not an area worth getting into.
Microsoft purchases Yammer for $1.2 billion
Wow, the UI on that is gorgeous. I noticed a trend to add features and capability to GitHub which makes a lot of sense because it must have something like millions of users by now and it's something many of here personally use. I'm also working on something for GitHub (a work in progress, http://gitify.me - better notifications). I think we're going to see a lot of growth in the ecosystem around GitHub and tools. Using git and GitHub is going to become more important as time passes by.

For Prose, the front-end architecture makes a great deal of sense, and they must be using a proxy to get around same origin on API requests. I think some server side operations for caching might make sense to enable speed and reduce the number of requests on GitHub.
This looks great! As a former property manager, I can definitely say that integrated credit checks would be a godsend (when I was doing this there weren't any great web-based tools like there are now).
> I recall PCMCIA cards that had slide-out ethernet ports.

PCMCIA requires quite a bit of internal space though, an ExpressCard/34 uses roughtly the same internal volume as a sodimm. That's a lot compared to a TB port.

> Dongles always feel cheap somehow, though.

Yeah, but an expresscard would look and feel even cheaper.
Cool aid.
MS buys Yammer
TechRadar's user database compromised
Full email I just received from TechRadar:

It has come to our attention that TechRadar's user registration database has been compromised. Unfortunately, user details including username, email address, date-of-birth and encrypted passwords have been stolen in the process. We are not aware of any misuse of this data but are taking action today to alert users as soon as has been possible.

Our IT team launched an investigation immediately and has identified the cause of the problem and taken action to rectify it. The forums have been closed and will remain closed until we are satisfied that there are no further issues and the forum can be safely restored to service.

In the meantime, although your TechRadar password is encrypted, we are contacting you today to let you know that if you use the same password on TechRadar for any other websites then we strongly advise you to change these passwords immediately.

We will contact you again shortly with instructions on how to update your password details for the TechRadar website.

We take the security of your data extremely seriously and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Yours faithfully,

Nick Merritt
Publisher, TechRadar
Is this really a credible complaint? Someone who wrote this:

public int hashCode() {
return new Double(x).hashCode() ^ new Double(y).hashCode();
}

does not seem to have the requisite understanding of how things to work to declare the inferiority of a widely used garbage collector.
This is what I thought of too when I read the wikipedia page for "Demurrage". Here's what's referenced there:

> The major central banks' post-WWII policy of steady monetary inflation as proposed by Keynes was influenced by Gesell's idea of demurrage on currency,[2] but used inflation of the money supply rather than fees to effect the goal of increasing the velocity of money and expanding the economy.
I would have though the efficiency comes from spinning the heatsink and so having a very efficient metal-air heat transfer compared to blowing air over a stationary heatsink

It's weakpoint is getting the heat from the CPU across the air gap into the spinning part
Yes. Turing, Church, Shannon, Kolmogorov, a whole section of thought, was started by these people. We forget that sometimes.
I guess Yammer is going to eventually start sucking. Re: Skype for Mac UX.
Agreed! Saying no to a new client who contacts you is not too difficult (although depending on circumstances a pile of bank notes being waved at you can influence the decision...) - but it is much harder, at least I find, to say no to existing clients for fear of damaging the relationship.
I've been wanting a tool like this for some time. I've considered migrating simple websites running on a CMS into Jekyll but the lack of content editing for "humans" has always been the blocker.
But it doesn't run over the Bitcoin network or use the same protocol. Its not an implementation of Bitcoin.
Can we put this to rest once and for all? Craigslist is a for-profit company. From the fact sheet you've apparently cited without reading:

Q: Is craigslist a nonprofit?
A: No, craigslist was incorporated as a for-profit in 1999.
Completely agree with this. Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are not driven by money - money happens to be a by-product.
That's already valid in JS.

function x($thing) {
return $thing + 2;
}
echo (x(3));
But now people can prove if a currency is worth using by inventing new cryptocurrencies instead of just merely saying "this is utterly backwards".

I am skeptical too, as I don't see why freicoin is worth using over bitcoin. The only other currency I would use is namecoin, but that's because it actually occupy a different niche.
What is this Pandora for Cats you speak of, can you give meow information?
CL isn't US Steel. I doubt Craigslist even has a straight 40% of rental market share. But for urban 20-somethings looking for cheap living situations and roommates? It feels like it has 95% market share. At least in Portland.

This is all theorycraft though. If anyone had hard numbers on CL's market share for rentals I'd love to see them!
What Does Haskell Have to Do with C++?
Wait a minute.. did they do this to just hide emails from spammers?? or did they actually replace your email address with your official facebook email address?
Confirmed: Microsoft buying Yammer for $1.2 billion
As someone who works at Google, I can say that (at least within my team) people do not tend to work unreasonable hours. People will stay late during crunch time, or when they're on a roll. But there is no expectation that you will work yourself into the ground. There's an expectation of high productivity within a 40 hour work week, plus or minus. There's expectations that people will react to emergencies and deal with them whenever they occur. But there's also an expectation that this will be rare.
Khan Academy is fantastic.

We need a charter school that uses it as the core of its content delivery for educating on the subjects covered as a test.

I would put my two kids in that school without question.
Untrue. This[0] is what was written in 2010:

> The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide
> protection against malicious software and security threats
> right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100
> percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may
> offer additional protection.

Something similar is still present in today's security page: http://www.apple.com/osx/what-is/security.html (near the bottom)

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20100123154433/http://www.apple.c...
Mixing 64-bit and 32-bit code in the same process
jeremymims: technically you're right, but in practice Craigslist operates as a non-profit. From the same link:

Q: Why does craigslist still use a ".org" domain? A: It symbolizes the relatively non-commercial nature, public service mission, and non-corporate culture of craigslist.

I updated my comment to reflect this. Thank you for pointing it out!
My gripe is that I want DSL only. They say this:

DSL service: $40

Phone service: Free

Actual bill comes in:

DSL service: $40

Phone service taxes: $3

Phone service fees, surcharges etc, discretionary, levied by Sonic whose entire proceeds go back to them: $12

ie the "Free" phone service I do not want and do not use costs an extra 30%. If they were honest they would say this:

DSL service: $40

Mandatory phone service: $12 (no additional usage charges)

Mandatory taxes: $3
Twitter open sources Iago, its load generator
40% Conversion Boost in 5 minutes
This is going to be interesting; sleep with one eye open, Mr. Ballmer, sleep with one eye open...

Edit: for the downvoters who probably don't "get" the reference, out startup (Fogbeam Labs) are now competing with Microsoft since we're in this same "enterprise 2.0" space as Yammer.

Anyway, Mr. Ballmer... "never mind that noise you heard, it's just the beast under your bed." :-)
"The 7 inch tablet really has to die IMO."

Because you don't want it, it needs to die? So you "need a nice big screen", good for you; I don't. The seven inch tablet is great for me. I'm in the over forty crowd and my iPhone is hard to use accurately with my fingers, to the point of frustration. I need something to use as my pocket computer that's easier than my smart phone, allows me to configure it to my convenience, allows me to insert portable storage, uses standard ports, such as USB, and to change the battery when it wears.
I really hate these types of employees. First of all they raise employer's expectations that all the other workers will be willing to put in free hours for them. Second by working for 130 hours they are basically taking away jobs from 2 other people who could be gainfully employed if these types of employees worked a normal schedule. Obviously the counterpoint is that these guys really loved their work so much that they didn't really mind. But in that case isn't it better that they do some charity work, help more needy people rather than helping fill the coffers of mega corporations.
Why would they ever want to host their websites on the cloud as opposed to shared hosting? What's the value prop?
Math learning software and other technology are hurting education
I love Bertrand Russell. Such brilliant quotes. I especially love his thoughts on religion.

Unfortunately, he was no futurist. His view of the manual laborer doing all the work vs the bosses telling the worker what to do was hopelessly mired in the past and plagued with his thinking that the industrial revolution's growing pains were permanent or even worsening.

Given that Peter Drucker was around and writing at the same time, it's not like the idea that we were heading somewhere better as a society was unknowable.

This passage in the link you provided stood out to me:

The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it,
but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no
surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other
times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger.

These days, our warrior/priest caste is actually the government and the elite corporatists that collude with it. Economy goes up, government spending goes up. Economy goes down, government spending goes up... strange that.