skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So PadMapper isn't trying to make money or build a business? Just doing it for the people? My irritation isn't with PadMapper, it's that many of HN have latched onto PadMapper as some kind of cause, many resorting to complaining about CL not allowing people to use their data, even though the terms of service are crystal clear on the issue. There are plenty of companies out there that could benefit from piggybacking off of others' data. I have little sympathy for a company that builds their product around using someone else's data and then loses access to that data, when they should have had their partnership deal with that company in place before just going ahead with it.

Building a great UI is trivial. Anyone on this site could build something useful in a weekend. The hard part is actually building a business around it. Sales, marketing, business development. Code is the easy part. Ebay, Godaddy, and countless other sites have terrible UI design, but they have marketing and sales efforts that build their businesses. Plenty of beautiful sites and companies have washed away because they didn't know how to sell their product. CL certainly isn't making the money they are by giving their data away to anyone that just decides to start using it.

In my own business, in the telemedicine/mental health space, it would make my life so much easier if I could scrape the Psychology Today therapist listings and just use their data with my better (in my opinion) UI. But I certainly didn't build my business depending on that data and then complain that they won't let me steal their marketing, advertising and sales efforts for my own benefit. Instead, we have to do the hard work of selling our product ourselves.

I certainly didn't come crying on Hacker News because site X won't let me make money off of repackaging their content.

It all comes down to the terms of service. If it's against the terms of service, why the hell would anyone build a business around violating those terms, knowing full well that it would get a Cease and Desist.

Building a better Craigslist is an awesome goal -- but you don't do it by stealing craigslist data. You get your own damned data. Building a business is hard work -- it isn't just about building some nifty aggregator.

I would gladly use PadMapper and a related service Unpakt. Those are pain points for me that certainly need curing. But I'm not going to feel some sort of moral outrage that Craigslist is protecting their business.

Compete. Don't whine.
To the CEO if the report is substantially accurate:

The cost of attorneys and more importantly the distraction isn't worth the worst case invoice for three days work. It's not going to cost you your shirt, just one sleeve. Be glad it's a cheap lesson.
Zeus: Programmer's Editor for Windows
seems too desperate....
Because then the user is ready to accept a change in workflow.

They're getting an OS they don't understand anyway. They're "starting from 0", in a way.

It also helps that OS X doesn't bother you all that much with it unless it's actually important.
Missouri, circa 50's, catholic school.
RBS could face £100 million bill after IT failure
Zeus is a language neutral programmer's editor for the Windows
platform.

The latest Zeus Version 3.97m has just been released.

This Zeus release adds support for the Go language with features
like syntax highlighting, code folding, code completion, class
browsing, code templates and debugging.

Zeus also supports the Go Build, Format, Run and Document commands
and can be configured to work with gocode.

NOTE: Zeus is shareware, runs natively on the Windows platform
and can be run on Linux using Wine.

Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus Editor
That seems pretty reasonable to me for a professional freelance design from scratch like that. I normally expect individual pages to cost in the range of $1k from scratch.
Homebrew doesn't handle software that updates itself. It's an opinionated piece of software.

UPDATE: More on this here http://blog.izs.me/post/3295261330/on-npm-and-homebrew
I'm a conservative and have spent a good amount of time here and have been vocal periodically. I know how unwelcome my views are but that doesn't stop me usually, although I don't speak up nearly as much as I did for a while. And it's not just conservative views. Basically if your views don't match with the majority of urban, liberal, Apple-evangelizing, Silicon Valley, entrepreneur/MBA/developer elites, then you will be put in your place. It's too bad really, because so many here that don't share those opinions stay quiet. It is quite a bubble.

But back to the site at hand, I think it is a neat idea, but I don't have time to text with people I don't know about politics, because I work, have a family, and am old enough not to waste much time on politics. I wasted many hours of my life trying to convince others about the perils of fiscal liberalism, and the best I was ever able to do is to point people to the Peter G. Peterson foundation: http://www.pgpf.org/Issues.aspx
Yay! This looks great. I'm particularly excited about v0.9x as the current SSL performance is still a massive issue when it comes to actually running apps in production (it's SUPER SLOW). It seems that optimising this will be a core focus moving forward:

SSL performance leaves much to be desired at the moment. Node's interface with OpenSSL is somewhat naive and leaves a lot of potential optimization on the table.
Was Zuckerberg thinking about the right time for this in 2009 when he asked this question on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/When-did-Steve-Ballmer-join-Microsofts-...
His username is his full name and its in his profile with his real email... thats not exactly noteworthy that you managed to find it.
The fans would know about the discount, so I'm sure they'd be more than happy to give their name and show a driver's license at the door.
On the other hand, this is a vibrant case study for both inexperienced founders and freelancers about the importance of doing the boring shit right. Sign a contract. Set a price. Get paid. Make sure there is a meeting of the minds, as the lawyers like to say.

This, right here, is exactly why we do these things.
I'm pretty sure that identifying someone for their sexual preferences first and their career accomplishments second is a textbook example of bigotry...so I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with the author here. I'm not slapping a high five to ESR, but this author is profoundly misguided even if their heart is in the right place.
Vestidos de novia con mangas
They take their grass seriously at Wimbledon
"I was a pampered little brat who was waited on hand and foot."

Are you a male? Were your sisters/cousins/etc. treated similarly? Just confirming my (presuming) Indian stereotypes :)
Maybe it's an age thing? How old were you when it came out?

That game changed my life. It was the most immersive, scariest thing ever. It was 4 players (not 2), and we had endless LANs and modem games. We made maps, there were whole map-making communities, whole BBSes only talking about Doom and Doom 2 and Heretic and other games based on it.. It was the biggest thing ever, even bigger than Quake in many ways because there was a lot fewer similar games at the time. I played through the single player so many times that I can revisit most maps in my mind 15+ years later...

Even the book Masters of Doom is mostly about how that game was created, rather than Quake or other id games that came before or after because Doom truly was the game changer.
Hell, I love the sound of his text.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Facebook does this routinely, and yet people go back.

Would you be surprised if news broke that Facebook has been selling your private messages to third parties? Not really. What if Google did that? That would cause uproar, so G+ is competitive in terms of user control.

Is there a tradeoff between user control and social connections that users face when using Facebook? Were this the case, G+ would have much higher market share and users would have already started flooding away, with the network effect in play.

But that's not the case. Control is relatively negligible to the majority of Facebook users. Competitors won't succeed until values change.

Personally, I value control. I'd be done with Facebook were it not for its White Pages functionality - with a name, you can find someone and contact them. That's not the case for the majority though, so having other competitive systems won't do much good.
Here are some more interesting terms courtesy of a TechCrunch article about FacebookSearch (now defunct) http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/14/your-public-facebook-status...

“playing hooky” "don’t tell anyone", "rectal exam", "stupid boss", "HIV test", "control urges"
Damn... looks like Ontario isn't on the tour list. I suppose Cleveland isn't all that far though.
Why would someone want to be the "go-to-guy" for a client that's refusing to pay an invoice of $780? I can understand the referrals just because it's YC. But, in general, I doubt designers go around asking clients that refuse to pay for referrals.
Most companies don't have "legal departments"; they have outside counsel they retain for random stuff. Like this.

The onus was on the vendor to actually submit the invoice to the email address the CEO said to send it to. That's not a hardship. Try invoicing a Fortune 500 company for the first time. Goat sacrifice may be involved.

Note that I have no idea at all whether he actually did do that.

In the real world, it is actually allowed to question an invoice. You probably end up paying regardless, but you are in fact allowed to ask the questions.
I'm realizing now I misread the OP, and we are talking about a verbal contract-- for which I'll agree different rules apply. (Not legally, but practically.)

My question is more about whether there's any practical distinction between an informal email which contains a clear agreement to work and the "signed contract" spoken of in legend.
You're missing my point. That information is uninteresting to me no matter what the purpose of this site is
Could you please elaborate as to why you think so? I'm not trying to be a contrarian here. I'm asking because I'm a backend engineer so my opinions on design admittedly isn't very sophisticated.
There are lots of dedicated fans who are locked out by a price higher than $45.

To some people, $45 is a huge amount for a single night of entertainment. To other people it is an insignificant amount.

Pricing the tickets higher/lower than $45 has much more to do with this distinction than it does with the level of fan dedication.
I seem to remember learning the pecise reason why plants both respond to sunlight and to gravity during my Freshman year Biology class in high school. I remember that it is due to a single plant hormone that stunts the elongation of cells. I think it begins with an 'a'.

Aren't the mechanics of this well-known?
Very well stated. Microsoft will serve as a business-school case study in how a moribund juggernaut can survive well beyond its deserved lifespan.
It's mint.com for health insurance.

I'm trying to figure out what additional value Eligible's supposed to add that outweighs just logging into your insurance company's website. And how they're supposed to make a profit.
5000mAh Portable Battery Charger for iPhone/iPad
I agree that exceptions done badly are poor. That is especially the case with C++ where they were introduced later, and they are one of the things some people omit when picking the subset of C++ they use. I also don't think exceptions should be done without GC. Java's checked exceptions are very annoying.

My experience in Python is the opposite than yours, but then I've only been using it for 12 years :-) Undocumented serious exceptions are no different than Go's panic - they will probably terminate the program. But the usual case is extremely useful and not littering intermediate functions with error handling is wonderful.

And sure they can be abused, but virtually any functionality gives you "power" and that power can be used wrong. That isn't a good reason to take something away from the developers who would use them right.
It's only the default sort, though, which I already usually think of as an attempt to either guess my preferences, or game some kind of referral system on their part (even if I don't normally assume it's based on OS choice). If you want to sort by objective factors like Price or Distance, you can still do that fine, which is what I normally do.
Dropbox, Skype, and Microsoft Office being distributed through App Store would be a hallelujah moment for me beyond all other hallelujah moments.

A staggering number of people I meet either can't get the job done, are too intimidated to start, download some malicious garbage, get waylaid by virus scareware, have no idea how to get the app into /Applications, get frustrated with Auto-Start naggers, freak out on Sparkle update dialogs, or never figure out how to pin the app to the dock.

Mac App Store is the answer to a lot of questions nobody "in the know" has had to ask in a decade or three.
I haven't used antivirus software in well over a decade and I will no longer instruct anyone to install it. I have had no good experiences with antivirus software and from what I have read over the last decade they seem to stop only the most flagrantly obvious viruses out there. These same viruses are easily stopped by teaching safe browsing techniques and running web browsers that auto-update with plug-ins disabled. Antivirus software gives at best a false security blanket.

I've advised dozens of friends and family members over the years. The ages range from 12-80. It is typically not a quick process because everyone has questions. But I see this as a good thing because that is how you learn. I try not to ever give them the answer and just step them through the process. Most of the time they come across the solution themselves they just need someone nodding their head to get that confidence to continue. I'm not sure if it is a life-altering moment for them.

Only had a couple switchers so far and I have had no complaints. Plug-in blocking in Chrome is so seamless that they don't see it as a hassle at all when they realize how it protects them.
Don't worry about it, Eric. I think a lot of HNers have found PadMapper useful, support what you're doing and want it to be successful — hence, this making the front page.
The point isn't that it's uninteresting to you, the point is that it may very well be interesting to stalkers, bosses, insurance companies, thieves, exes, "lost" relatives, arsonists, mother stabbers, father rapers, litterbugs, jaywalkers, identity thieves, nosy neighbors, and other undesirables.

It's a thought experiment. Along the lines of
YOU DOLTS, YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T BE PUTTING ALL THIS STUFF OUT HERE!
fuckoff@ is one interpretation.

how_serious_are_you@ is another one.
Free press not always a good thing. For example: free press on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California :-)
I'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Expedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge.

Edit: Turns out they prices weren't different, just showing pricier results first.
I'm cofounding a startup in the travel space and our cofounder has a lot of domain expertise and according to him it's illegal to show a rate lower on Exedia than say Marriott.com. There are exceptions as always, but for the most part this is true. Now I don't know if this applies to the opposite..I guess you could just add to a price but I still would think that's fishy. Anyway, just a little tid bit of knowledge.
Assuming, as Malthus did, that people breed at a rate above replacement whenever they have the means to do so(which turns out not to be true these days in many countries, and may turn out not to be true for the world as a whole soon), population growth will eventually reach a rate at which the world would be a ball of humans expanding faster than the speed of light. It's hard to imagine human ingenuity figuring out a way to make that happen. Exponential growth is a bitch. HN readers should understand this, because it's the same thing that makes exponential time algorithms unreasonably slow, no matte what hardware you throw at them.

A century or two of faster than usual technological growth does not falsify Malthus, nor does a hysterical follower like Ehrlich who made predictions that were obviously ludicrous when he made them (he predicted the extinction of marine animal life by 1980 in 1970, which is not justified by anything Malthus wrote). Declining birthrates in the face of prosperity does - if it lasts.
True, but so what. The code I like the best is the code I don't even have to write. Having to write all the intermediary code between where an exception happens and where I'd like to handle it is annoying.

And the "understanding" argument applies to other things, such as using a compiled language instead of assembly or GC instead of manual memory allocation.
Deeper Into the Land of Lisp: First Contact with Noir
Simple bookmarklet to debug your rails assets and sprockets apps
GreenCam Helps In Turning Off Computer | sciencefeature.com
My advice? Get up, dust yourself off, and move on.

These scenarios might result in a deluge of support from others in your field, but for a lot of managers, this puts you on a special kind of blacklist. We can't know all the details of the circumstance, but we do know for sure that you were willing to "name & shame" the client here on HN. For some, that's enough.

Just to be clear, it definitely sounds like you got a raw deal here, but I've only heard your side of the story. Experience tells me that people who find themselves in this position are there because they cut corners (work order and statement of work), or trusted someone too early. Both of these are poor judgement calls. Take ownership of that, learn from it, and go find new clients. If you're not in a financial position to take it on the chin, file your small claims paperwork and have your day in court. I just doubt that the name & shame approach is the best thing for the future of your career as a freelancer.
Yes, I understand that. The fact is that people drink and do drugs. Smart people, stupid people. That's reality.

This is a "thought experiment" that teaches cowardice, IMO
Sorry, I haven't followed this discussion, so this may be offtopic, but...

If your family or friends are using Windows, then Microsoft Security Essentials is free and absolutely fantastic. Speaking from personal experience, it's far better than AVG for example. (AVG bogs down the system; Essentials manages to maintain an active scan with almost no overhead.)
I don't even think we have enough context to learn that lesson. I can easily see the email from the CEO having been an apology/prayer (with the understanding that it migh not have worked out), followed by not just a stern "no, seriously" but instead including a threat of legal action.

People throw these threats into all kinds I thins, whether it be something as simple as a request for a refund on a $1 purchase or a thousand dollar consulting bill. People even seem to believe that it helps: that it provides motivation to be heard.

On my end, however, the second there is a threat is the moment I cannot help you any more: I refer you to legal. If you threaten legal action, it is no longer a business decision, it is a legal one. Likewise, of I threaten legal action, it is because I've already given up on business and have already talked to a lawyer, and actually want to talk to yours.

Here, we just don't know. We have some sentences taken out of context that are designed to make this designer seem reasonable. ...but... that "I figured :)" from the CEO is, to me, really telling: it tells me that this person probably thought the designer was "over the top" in their reaction and of course would try to escalate with lynch mob...

So, in that possible context: does "talk to finance help"? If it does, I feel like it would send the wrong message: that you really are now in legal land, not in finance or business land. Again, though: just "possible context", as we don't have the entire email exchange (leading me to be stuck in "people who have reacted like this at me had these associated behaviors" world).
Haha, that was a good comment :)

> Fortunately, it's all burning to the ground and will be forced to change. Nature doesn't allow such absurdities to exist for long.

Unfortunately, it's never going fast enough. Behaviour change spans over dozens of years.
I was trying to not make the post have a "Mac is better" tone but it was difficult.

Most of the people I've advised learned on Windows 95 or 98. Those were horrible UX days and helped formed a lot of bad habits.

I've never had to switch someone to Windows and I've always wondered what sort of experience it would be. Coming from OS X I think they would have a better understanding of "the basics" but I wonder how this teaching style would apply to someone using Windows for the very first time.
What it'll take is a hyperlocal focus. Taking on CL head-on for national listings is daunting and inefficient. It would be much better if PL would go after a specific, narrowly-defined area, for example Brooklyn. Be the very best and definitive source on Brooklyn apartment. Contact landlords listing on Craigslist and offer them the chance to cross-list for free. Promise them higher quality leads. Add a showing/scheduling tool so prospective tenants can make viewing appointments online. Have a message center where clients can ask questions (which are then just emailed directly to the landlord.) Make it were the landlord doesn't have to do anything at all. You do the postings yourself. Do it for every quality Brooklyn apartment, continue doing it, day in, day out. Once you have a sizable number of listings flyer the hell out of Brooklyn and Union Square (or your local equivalent.) Post flyers for 3 hours every day in every coffeeshop, bar, bike shop, barber, on every light pole you can. If you don't have time, hire some kids to do it for you.

Once you are THE place for Brooklyn, add some listings for the East Village. Rinse and repeat.

Research how ZocDoc did what they did. Just going all scattershot isn't going to do anything.

What PL needs is a high listing density for a particular area rather than just a few apartments here and there. No one wants to visit an empty nightclub, so rather than opening a stadium-sized place, open a small basement place and make it the hottest place around, using that success to grow.

Also, if you can show great metrics in a Brooklyn-type place, you'll have some solid investor interest that can drive even more growth.

Whatever the city -- hypertargeting is the edge that could push you past craigslist. After all, that's exactly how craigslist got started in the first place. Use their strategy to beat them. You start getting some traction in a particular area, then you can start charging for preferred listings or some other value-added thing.

I'm far from an expert, but if you want to beat CL, that's how you do it.
Not that familiar with most of the hotel examples shown but, for Las Vegas at least, both the hotel examples shown are pretty low-end Strip Casinos. (i.e., at least this example isn't about significantly different classes of properties)
The thing is, this can (and sometimes does) happen with larger and better established businesses too.

A common rule of thumb in the design industry is that if the amount of fees in question isn't going to be worth going to court over, then a 50% deposit paid up-front is a reasonable request.