skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craigslist is a privately-owned company and was actually a non-profit at one point. In the past Craig Newmark has talked about Craigslist as a tool for community organization and so on. If Craigslist were 100% profit-driven I think it could have made a lot more money off of its huge user base.
> Imagine telling Leonardo that he cannot study painting and engineering at the same time.

Bad example. Imagine Leonardo attending any modern day university for education. It's also a bad example because Leonardo did much, much more than painting and engineering.

I do agree it's a bad idea to split students by degree by more than a few miles, though. I'd avoid any school that did that.
PadMapper, a company that was working to directly compete with Craigslist? What about Padmapper?
Quick and Dirty - RaspPI Home Automation - Lighting
This is the perennial frustration with the immense power of the network effect, a power that all start-ups live and die on.

Unfortunately, us humans have a hard time banding together and forming enough consensus to 'jump ship' enmass to a new service. Especially, when the a lack of 'innovative features' on a given service barely registers on the pain scale.

Look at the internets SOPA protest, the entire integrity of the internet was threatened and we did something about it. But how can you generate enough support around: we need better mash-ups to view craigslist postings!
"That doesn't mean they should be required to hand that data out to any service that requests it?"

It does, however, mean that it's up for negotiation, if the consumers want it to be.
FYI almost all synaptics touchpads (ie almost all) have supported 2-finger scrolling for years. Not even specifically multi-touch hardware needed. Update your drivers @ synaptics.
When comparing SEO to PPC the easiest comparison is to look at how PPC has instant results & can generate visitors early in a site launch in comparison to SEO. Similarly in terms of managing budget you can manage your budget and measure your ROI much more easily with PPC over SEO which often takes a much more long term approach (especially if you're going after generic competitive keywords)

- 86% of web searchers trust SEO listings more than sponsored PPC listings AND 85% of clicks resulting from a search are on the organic links rather than the paid ads.

- Although only 50% of web searchers are aware of the difference between organic and paid search results

However, PPC use declined 60% between 2007 and 2010 AND more importantly 50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.

In terms of selecting one method over the other then I know someone personally who runs a very successful bootstrapped ecommerce company which started on eBay and has since expanded into real stores - he now has over 100 employees & makes tens of millions in profit per year. His whole business has been generated via PPC although recently he has started doing SEO by hiring some in house SEO staff.

However, ideally you should be looking at implementing both strategies. SEO and PPC are both important & if you have an PPC ad slot and are #1 on Google then you have 2 of the first few results a user clicks on & from my experience - the first 5 results take up 88.1% of all clicks[1]

Statistics Used From: http://killerinfographics.submitinfographics.com/wp-content/...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3766000
It isn't your communication skills. There's no natural filter or limiting in online forums.

People who would normally be reigned in socially, or simply excluded from conversations have nothing stopping them from spiralling conversations out of control. This is not an easy problem to solve - we've been trying to solve it for the last 30 or so years.
Pretty cool, but that front page is relatively old compared to the new one. (http://www.bing.com)
Celebrate: cinco de mayo
How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts
Actually, Craigslist values us, the users, more than most companies. You know how? By leaving so much money on the table that you can't help but love them! Craigslist is a breath of fresh air in a world where everything is optimized as much as possible to part us from our money!
If you're a company, you'll do what makes you money, regardless of how you feel about regulations that affect you.

Legal hassles are totally worth dealing with if the cost of managing them doesn't exceed your profit. If you're the right company, legal red tape can be a very effective barrier to entry.
I know I am in the minority, but I happen to think that the central concern of any business ought to be to maximize end-user value. Profits are a means to that end, not the other way around. So I would evaluate the API issue from the perspective of whether it adds value for the user or not, not whether in some myopic accountant's opinion it adds to the "bottom line."
> It would be great if there was regulation over certain types of data that would require companies to post back to a central database if they take certain kinds of information. It would be great if there was a device that could help level the playing field.

My god, I hope not. The last thing we need is legislation that determines, because I went through the work of building up and creating a successful product and now have a massive amount of valuable data, I have to share it in the interest of 'leveling the playing field'.

I've been on the side of being a content creator with a very successful site, that was promptly scraped by a competitor because I had ammassed a large amount of very useful data. This data that was, through my site, freely available to the public, and the ad revenue helped pay the bills.

So I really don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who had, as part of their business model, the practice of scraping content from someone else's site, nor do I agree that we, as developers, should have free and unrestricted access to someone else's API... they are the ones gathering/storing the data, building the network, etc.. and any use they decide to allow us is at their discretion and a gift. Nothing wrong with that.
Elgan: Siri, how do I feel?
I think the majority of us are missing the point. "Good" American jobs are hard to come by. No longer can unskilled retail sales people make a living wage, even at Apple. Glad I work in tech.
Rand would say that both parties in a transaction have the right to negotiate the terms of said transaction.
The Capitol of Meritocracy is Silicon Valley, Not Wall Street
Approximately eleven years ago.
Cheating and deception are at Reddit’s core, founder reveals
I'm not disagreeing with you, but do you see how the appearance of not being profit driven can increase your profits?
If habitual eating is more predictive than occasional binging, the model won't be linear. There may even be some threshold that simply makes you uninsurable in the distant future.

But this may turn out to be a bad example, if medicine continues finding that heart attack risk is mostly linked to cholesterol you produce yourself (this is apparently hereditary), and not much affected by cholesterol you eat.
Guide to dating rich girls
This is similar to webOS background apps. You have the main app card, but you can also launch a dashboard, where the app will live in the notification area and you can pull up a little bar at the bottom of the screen with restricted functionality. The dashboard would be like a background page, and music apps often too advantage of the dashboard to display player controls in the notification area. You could throw away the main app card, but your music will still be running in the dashboard, and you can pull up the dashboard to quickly and easily play, pause, and change songs.

This is certainly a use case for music apps on Chrome as well, so I do hope they keep background pages, while encouraging use of event pages when appropriate. For example, I've been thinking about using a background page to check for updates every five minutes and notify users whenever a feed has new articles in their Google Reader. But now, I can use Event Pages instead. Chrome is giving me a more efficient way of checking for updates, but I do hope they keep background pages for the use cases they would be needed.

Incidentally, webOS also had functionality like Event Pages, where you could register a few different kinds of events, such as launch to search or timers, and webOS would call a designated script to respond to the event. The script can do ajax requests and either launch a dashboard (background page), launch the main app, or do nothing and webOS will then kill the script, just like Chrome will kill the event page if it is idle for a few seconds.
You included Craigslist to get pageviews.

Your own linked articles about that topic are a user only complaining about the legal takedown of a useful tool [1] and another complaint about UX with an included blurb asking startups and users to put their time and data into something better [2]. Nothing about API changes or right to a company's proprietary data.

[1] http://blog.garrytan.com/save-padmapper-craigslist-is-wrong-...
[2] http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/30/craigslist-is-squashing-inn...
Facebook app developers face new rules
We all live in cities that have neighborhoods where theres just always really hot, rich girls. And we all know, despite publicly not admitting it, we would like to be able to date one of them.
It's not "their" data. It's their user's data. As a user and a homeowner I post my rental listing to Craigslist because that's where the most prospective renters are.

In the past, do you think anybody ever looked at the classifieds page in a newspaper and thought "this data is owned by the Times"?

In the PadMapper case, who are the losers? Renters benefit from a radically different UI and de-cluttering of daily reposts. Owners benefit from the increased traffic to their listing. Craigslist benefits because it's more of a 1-stop-shop for owners: post to craigslist (and pay them), and get some level of syndication to different services and apps. They also aren't losing out from reduced mindshare of renters: when you use PadMapper you know you're using Craigslist. It's always obvious and all links point there.
Heh, didn't think of that. Thanks.
There are so many angles to this story that involve the tension between the forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to destroy.

Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong movement to kill that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time, nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.

Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague, supernatural objections.

(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference -- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)
Tons of reasons. Here's a few:

* Hard to use, you need to exchange "real" money to use it - you can't just link up your bank account like on Paypal and start using it right away.

* You either need to totally trust a 3rd party provider with your money (and if they lose/steal it - that's your problem) or run a clunky and slow application on your computer which requires several GBs of HD space (faster, lighter apps are coming)

* Slow, a transaction can take 10-20 minutes to finish (which means that you can't get instant order confirmations/digital product delivery like people are used to when paying with Paypal/Credit Cards).
> they have not incentive to make their data freely available

How about the convenience and enjoyment of their users?

I kid, I kid.
That's actually an interesting enough theory that I'd love to test.

My guess is that the site is generally mediocre enough that it would be hard to get more people to open their wallets except for select listing types.

If they charged to view the listings for example, I'd wager that very few people would bother and they'd lose their network effect.

My guess is that they're getting about as much money as they can without offending too many people as preservation of their user network is highest priority, as it is what allows them to keep charging money for the few things they charge for currently.
Relevant to this is the story about working at Apple stores,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151336

It isn't just writing nasty emails to people that positively review products from competing companies. It's that the level of adoration and devotion is so high in some cases, it affects people's choice of career. One quote in the article basically said, "I pushed Apple products for free, so getting paid to do it is even better".

I do not understand this behavior myself. I can see being a fan of various things (I'm a fan of Linux for example), but of a multinational corporation like Apple, Microsoft or Google?
HTML5 Source Code Offers Challenges In Mobile Gaming
If anything - Google was greatly helping the OSM project by directing so much energy towards it.
E-Tailer Customization: Convenient or Creepy?
The network effects at craigslist are an intrinsic part craigslist's value.

You can't truthfully claim you have a better product if you are missing the key feature of your competitor's product (users).

Getting users is a piece of the puzzle of building a craigslist competitor. It's not some separate thing.
Menshn, a new social network: "talk, on topic"
This is a slippery slope. Who defines these universal data types? And if they only are "defined" when someone gets big and powerful, doesn't that reduce the incentive to innovate and build big businesses?

The idea of mandating any such rule is not the solution. It's antithetical to how markets should work.

There's been no company that's managed to dominate forever. LinkedIn, CL, Netflix will be no different. Someone or ones will attack them (perhaps orthogonally) and ultimately they will lose their dominance. That's what happens to incumbents. The market takes care of them. Note: this disruption may or may not be quick.
If CL decided to take that money on the table, they might have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and went out of business years ago.

Maybe they realized the path to greatest profitability was to act like they don't care about profits.

Just a thought.
Previous submission, no comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135224

(Neither this nor the previous submission submitted the canonical URL, which helps the HN duplicated detector do its job.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111691
Facebook Just Stole an Apple Design Guru
It might be your data, but that doesn't somehow make it Craigslist responsibility to share it with other applications. If you want your data listed in as many places as possible, register with each and every system, and enter it.

In the past, do you think when you submitted a classified to 1 newspaper, they called up all the other local and regional papers to submit your information too?
"We learned quite a bit about Power of Attorney and Medical Directives, as well."

this is important. I see too many people say 'do whatever you can' but they do not realize what they ask. The loss of the mind is terrible, but so also is the complete loss of the body. Combine the two and there is real (and expensive!) trouble with doctors 'doing everything they can'.
I believe it's really CL problem. They won't ever find a better mobile engineer or someone who will even spend 10% of the time I've spent hacking something cool.

If you got a C&D as well and isn't happy about it, you should go ahead and make a better product. Otherwise you can go to work for one of their competitors. That's the beauty of being a hacker.

Just make it sure that online classifieds is your passion.
It should work just fine. I did a quick test settings constraints...

http://youtu.be/8AUA8KeDtc8?hd=1
His example is copyright stifling culture. That's a separate issue.

As far as stifling innovation, one only needs to look at the recording companies. The resistance to new technologies, easier ways of accessing "content" - that's definitely restricted by the application of copyright laws. One recent example is Zediva. Copyright then ends up concentrating on a few companies that were able to make deals, rather than ones that are continually innovating in technology. Look at how long it took to get "legal" access to The Beatles music as MP3s.

I don't think you can see copyright as not stifling innovation in those areas.

But, I suppose, we could argue that it's just the horrible overapplication of copyright laws that are stifling innovation. A weaker copyright system would probably work out just fine.
Raspberry Pi + Python = an automated coin flipper
I’ve only ever seen it written, so I’ve always pronounced it like the Greek Λαοκόων, that is, [laokoɔːn].
That is not strictly true. A better search would save the users time, compared to clicking through CL pages, which for popular categories could be overwhelming.
Of course not. But if another paper copies the listing that you paid them to run -- and runs it for free -- the newspaper doesn't send a C&D.

Nobody is expecting craigslist to push data to 3rd parties. They expose programmatic ways to access listings, and PadMapper used them.
The big difference here is that Microsoft owns a large segment of consumer OS, something that IBM did not (was stolen by Microsoft) in the past.

While I've heard or read prediction/assumption/guesses/perspective of MS smells like IBM 10-15 years ago (and they are legit, I'm not saying it has no merit), that difference alone is a huge (and fundamental) one.

Speaking of "great ones", there are plenty of great ones that work at MS, just like there are plenty that work for Google. It's just that the "great ones" solve different problems in different domain: most people only heard about smart people working at Google solving problems at scale, while the .NET team (Visual Studio, Compiler, IL, Libraries, etc) are not necessary "trendy" any more.

Judging MS engineers as "average" engineers are simply naive or too cocky without proper education at best.
Wovyn: Weaving your Internet of Things
I don't really get what you are trying to say, why is a bitcoin transaction the same as a theft?
A bitcoin transaction is the digital equivalent of a cash transaction, you can keep your financial privacy so that all your transactions are not stored in a database linked to your identity.
Both of you are mostly wrong until the actual statistical number is out.
Are you suggesting legislation that "levels the playing field"? I'd much rather have this settled by entrepreneurs fighting on the basis of their ideas than some legislator without a clue. No company dominates forever esp in technology.

Craigslist disrupted a huge classified industry without any legislator saying that papers had to "open" up their data. Markets work over time.
An Insight about Unix: It wasn't designed to be hard.
The insight is simply that unix wasn't designed to be difficult. It wasn't designed. Unix commands exist in the kind of half-formed state that all software goes through, when the author knows it well, and has succeeded in scratching all his own itches. It works well for him because he grew it from a seed. He spends no time considering the impact this grown thing will have on people that did not start from this seed.
You say that as if Craigslist doesn't provide any value to consumers as-is. How much do they owe you? Maybe they should pay you to use their website? Maybe they should buy the item you are interested in for you?

You seriously think Craigslist doesn't give a shit about users? Think about what you are saying. Think about the world before Craigslist. It's a free service that even my mother uses. This is the _exact_ sense of entitlement that the OP is talking about.
Hackers take credit for colossal Twitter crash
In the encryption wars it goes the other way. Encrypters get to make decrypters exert exponentially more effort for only polynomially more themselves, and the systems get stronger over time, not weaker. We've long since passed the point where handheld devices like cell phones can use encryption that would take resources in excess of the entire universe for the rest of time at the maximum theoretical computation rate to brute force. We don't always use that, and there may be (and probably are) weaknesses that can cut that down, but that's the direction this goes in over time, and I can't think of anything that has any chance of changing that dynamic. Even a proof of NP = P wouldn't do it (that only potentially nails certain forms of encryption used today, there are others that would still not be vulnerable), and if that's not enough....
It's possible, but if I were a cash-obsessed Craigslist founder I think I would have sold the company a while ago and moved on to something else.
tl;dr -- retail jobs pay low wages, Apple included.

What I took away from it? Apple is paying market rates for its semi-skilled employees in a high unemployment market. The market is the problem, not the employer.
This 2009 article about Google's UK tax avoidance cannot be found on Google.
Wait till they are using it to power security-cam equipped targeted video billboards on every bloody bus-stop. Which is the day I probably decide that we have failed as a species and go and live in a yurt somewhere in the woods with no electricity and live mostly on slightly burnt squirrel while designing a programming language based on the art of rearranging different piles of mud.
Wall Street Beat: Software Vendors Offer Some Good News on Sales Front
The stated ship dates are actually the other way around: Surface ARM will ship at Win8 launch (which has yet to be set), Pro ~ thee months later.
You won't see Microsoft branded PCs unless Steve Ballmer found out that Dell and HP were ready to back stab MS. Ever.

If they came out with Microsoft branded PCs and made a hit on Dell/HP sales, Dell/HP will fight back and ship Ubuntu. 25% hit on sale would be ... devastating.

You want to know why MS branded PCs won't ever happen? Because Steve Ballmer said so with the above paragraph as an example of the business trade-off.

Tablet, on the other hand, is a different segment.
I am not shy to admit that I enjoy having pageviews (although I don't run ads). I could have done some better research and provided a deeper explication of my thoughts. I just saw a connection between three major 'API' controversies lately on HN, and wanted to share my initial thoughts to prompt healthy discussion.
HTML5 Test Automation for Beginners
I see both sides to the argument. Craigslist is acting in their own self interest as PadMapper was by using CL's data to add value to their service.

While unfortunate, the move by Craiglist isn't surprising. They have done this repeatedly. The situation PadMapper is in is inevitable for any entity that isn't self-sustaining..

PadMapper should be working as quickly as possible to capitalize on the added attention this has caused and start letting users input their listings directly..
Start with Google ads to get practicing on write ups. Write to parental blogs and make them aware of your product. Also look on Facebook and target your advertising to groups on facebook like https://www.facebook.com/Parenting.
Do some youtube videos about teenager/kid safety, they can be simple webcam videos. Start there and see where it takes you.
There goes a certain former MS execs business model down the tubes if this catches on..