skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The founder of 3Taps posted this on Quora last year, in response to a question about disrupting Craigslist:

... the postings in question are public facts about exchanges. Just as any price/supply/demand in a marketplace is open for any and all to notate and republish, so too is the entire set of Craigslist data -- as these offers between seekers and providers are clearly in the public domain. Historically, Craigslist has attempted to block access by others to the comprehensive use of this data. They block many 3rd parties who try to gain access to the data, and sometimes threaten to sue and bankrupt others as if they themselves created the underlying data and hold copyright like property rights over the same.

But public facts are public property. And while some think that predatory Terms of Use demanding that you hand over the Brooklyn Bridge in liquidated damages if you don't comply with some obscure (and potentially constitutionally void) constraint will stand in court -- such absurdities will break if exposed.

A fear, uncertainty,dread approach over access to data breaks down in a world where Google already indexes all of Craigslist data and caches that information all over the internet (for search performance results). If its possible and legal for Google, then why not for any and everyone else to also index and offer access to the same data. In short, Google doesn't get special secondary property rights to privatize public data to the exclusion of anyone else. Equal access to exchange data and search data is a principle in parallel to the notions of net neutrality.

The points above are not a theoretical discourse. Look at 3taps.com/developers to see the execution of this concept. And look at what a 3rd party application (craiggers.com) can do in recreating the whole of Craigslist in a format that gives access to data in a way that is not remotely possible in the legacy Craigslist offering. Craiggers is a perfect example that the function of displaying Craigslist data (rather than gathering it) is a totally distinct (and competitive) marketplace, even if there are still huge network effects in the gathering of Craigslist postings.

Note, Craiggers does NOT disrupt the existing Craigslist revenue model for Craigslist. It simply opens up the field (along with any other developer building on 3taps assisted access to Craigslist data) that wants to build on top of (rather than compete with) the network effects of Craigslist. Think Kayak and Indeed, but now for the whole body of data covered by Craigslist accessible, rather than just a single vertical.

http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-di...
This "tax" is elitist internet bullshit.

I'm all for using any browser that you'd want, but why go through elaborate lengths to put Microsoft down? Especially on a version of IE that's 3 iterations in the past.

I understand that IE7 may not be as great as the other browsers. I'm fine with being annoyed by that. But what about the other versions of IE? Why isn't there a link for IE9 or IE10?
The guys behind Stackoverflow and Trello have a positive tracking record. There is no evidence it will change. :)

However you raise a good point: exportability/portability of the data...
No, but if you created a website that showed what prices stores were selling coke for, Coke couldn't do anything. The facts of an ad are not copyrightable.
Is it really Craiglist's data? When I post to Craigslist, I think of the listing as my listing, not Craigslist's.
> I can't see why they wouldn't do that. It's not like the Google cache offers much utility for Craigslist posts to begin with.

Then there's no harm in their putting the tags in.
NASA unveils Mars panorama: Next Best Thing to Being There
As a content creator, I would prefer you bring the issues to my attention, not subvert my protections under copyright law. You don't get to do as you wish with my creations just because you don't like how they're displayed. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the NYT or some random blog.
It's free and easily accessible. Compare to the costs involved in getting an ad listed in a dead tree.
Ask HN: How should I land my next consulting gig(s)?
Like any good HNer, I've been working on speculative projects, expanding my skillset with side work, and paying the bills while having a blast consulting for startups for the last couple of years. However, for a number of personal reasons, I need to spend the next 6-9 months maximizing my cash income. I want to put this into effect starting in early August. So that means I have one month to put the necessary client list/portfolio/resume together to start making this happen.

As a programmer, I am very proficient in building Django web apps. I can write the necessary SQL, python, javascript, and css to build every part of a Django app, and then do the system administration necessary to deploy on AWS using EC2. I can also rig up a CDN to work seemlessly with the app using S3 and Cloudfront. I have built GIS applications using GeoDjango and PostGIS, and I have constructed social video apps by implementing Encoding.com as a service to prepare raw video files for consumption on the web.

I am also moderately proficient in programming PHP, Java, and C#. I have built web apps in PHP, and desktop apps in Java and C#. I have dabbled with Android applications and iPhone apps, but nothing I would show off.

I also have some experience doing SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. Many of my clients have needed their apps promoted after they were built, and I was always happy to oblige when I could.

I have also worked with biometrics technology including fingerprints for government contractors. This was as much a business analyst role as it was a programming gig, as I had to help answer RFPs, make checklists, and work around reems and reems of regulations to build applications that met very large bureaucratic requirements.

I only have two real requirements for my next gig(s):

1) Work remotely. I live in North East Ohio, and I don't plan on leaving, but I wouldn't mind traveling one or two weeks out of every month to service clients who need on-site help.

2) $60.00-$999999.99USD/hr contracting rate. (OT: Why can't I use &infin; here?)

So what should I do for the next 30 days to achieve this? Should I target some large company and learn the requisite buzzwords to impress them? Should I learn some new language or technology? Polish some skill that I already have? Should I build something using my current skillset, or with some new technology? Should I put a website for my consultancy together to market myself? Should I do that using latest technology x, y, and z? Or should I just slap something up on Tumblr?

I'm willing to do anything (moral) over the next 4 weeks to put myself into a position to maximize my income, and I'm open to all and every idea HNers may have. Let me hear them.
Have you tried a shared task management app like Asana or Flow? Same premise... applied to note-taking.
Outside Developers like/want the CL customer case, their reputation and their page views and see them as a quick, easy path to success. However, you are not entitled to them. Understanding this and moving on are key to doing it yourself and blazing your own path. Attempting to work around access limitations and usage restrictions and then attempting to justify your actions is only going to end badly.
Yes. As opposed to sequential access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_access
Eugeni Dodonov lost his life this weekend
> It's obviously not OK to post the content of the stories on your site, but you're totally within your fair use rights to write something ABOUT their stories.

Yes, a better question would be, "Is it okay to index the stories on your site?"

If it's not then Google and all other search engines are wrong.
I think the latter is what could be useful to people learning.
E.g. "set X to Y so browser B doesn't do Z" is actually useful to someone who has never seen that behaviour and may encounter it, or be looking at you sources cause it seems you handled it somehow but it doesn't work on one's own page.

Not sure how much though.
Shortkeys for Chrome: custom (Vim-capable) keyboard shortcuts
I see some very interesting comments on this thread. I remember not long ago lots of people where upset that people where scraping stackoverflow and getting a higher ranking in google results. This was a threat to S/O's business model model and it made lots of people on this board uneasy.

How is Pad mapper any different? How does the fact that this site has a better UI design somehow give them a pass to use data a company has spent millions of dollars gathering and feels is being used in a way that is a threat to their business model?
It's not an assumption, it's a fact.
I think that's why I don't care about IntelliJ; I'm primarily a C/C++ developer. I also have a strong aversion to buying development tools.

XCode 4's tight integration with LLVM, a Debugger, online documentation, and code completion are the reasons why I use it instead of something else.

Eclipse is satisfactory for Java development though, so I'll probably be happy enough with it when I do Android work.
Craigslist's #1 asset is their gigantic amount of classifieds. There's really nothing else going for them.

Any service competing with Craigslist that uses those classifieds might not be stealing them, but its certainly in Craigslist's best interest to keep their most valuable asset safe.
Show HN: OxJS - a JavaScript Library for Web Applications
Should Steve Jobs have said:

a) It's a tablet
b) It's an iPad, or
c) It's for consuming content in a relaxed and portable way?

Honest question. I'm curious what your approach would have been.
I'm pretty sure you don't. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, framing it terms of another developer will hurt you if you are charging more.

If you are delivering $100,000 in business value, and you charge $20,000 for it it is a win for the company. If another developer charges $10,000 for it. Going with them isn't twice the win for the company.

You don't say I'm worth x% more because I work x% faster. You are worth $20,000 (which just so happens to be x% more) because you've done this before, helped other clients realize 5x ROI and you've worked around the nasty #2343 bug in the database that will bite them if they go with someone else.
I'm sure everyone takes notes differently, but with the way I do it I'm not sure a social note-taking system makes sense.

For a note to be useful to me, it has to be quick to make. For a note to be useful to another person, it has to contain enough context for them to be able to decipher it.

For example, the notebook on my desk reads "core 495 0.20%" which I know is the number and fraction of users in the core group - and I have enough context to know what those all mean. If I had to write down that context in a way other people could understand, it would no longer be quick to write, so it would no longer be a note.

Is your idea of what note-taking is different to mine?
Here's some good commentary on this case in a blog post "The future of cancer therapy?" from a cancer physician in today's Science-Based Medicine blog:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-future-of-...

"While the story is basically one long anecdote that shows what can be done when new genomic technologies are applied to cancer, it also shows why we are a very long way from the true 'individualization' of cancer care.

. . . .

"Taking the results of the sequencing of the entire genome and RNAseq data and analyzing them allows scientists to probe the genome and transcriptome of cancers in a way that was never before possible. It produces an enormous amount of data, too, terabytes from a single experiment. At cancer meetings I’ve been to, investigators frequently refer to a 'firehose' of data, petabytes in magnitude. Indeed, the sheer quantity of data from these experiments challenges the bandwidth of universities doing them, and, in fact, it’s not at all uncommon for the preferred means of sending experimental data to be to load up a hard drive with the data and send it by the quaint but effective method of overnight mail to other investigators because it’s faster and more reliable that way. Not surprisingly, serious computing power and major advancements in computer algorithms have been necessary to develop the methods of analyzing data from these experiments.

"What I’m trying to convey is that what WUSTL did for Dr. Wartman was not a little deal. It was a big deal that took a lot of resources and effort and likely cost well over $100,000. Apparently it was paid for through research grants, and Dr. Ley claims that no patients were neglected while all that sequencing and computing firepower were transferred to sequencing Dr. Wartman’s cancer genome and transcriptome, having done the same thing for a previous patient."

In other words, the glimpse of the future that we may be able to derive from this case shows that the future is still far off, and the steps to reach the future are enormously expensive. More details are available in other paragraphs of the linked Science-Based Medicine post.
A TOS is only a legal obligation if one enters into said agreement in the first place, which is questionable even when one has signed up for an account. In most cases, it's mere wishful thinking or just extra garbage for lawlyers to bully people with.
The why is just as important as the what in these sorts of decisions. So, this post was my attempt to explain the thought process I went through that finally tipped the scales. Some people make life better via charity, I try to do it via software. So that's what's tipping the scales on my moral compass. Money can be useful for that too, but mostly as a tool, it's not my main motivator.
It sounds great on paper, but it's not going to stop Craigslist from C&Ding all the developers using the 3Taps API. IANAL and not sure they even could indemnify their customers, but I know I'd want more than a reasoned argument and bold words from my upstream provider if I were to build a business on the 3Taps-provided Craigslist API.
I'm sure there are loads of opinions on what it means to be compared to a well-known service. My experience is that it can help with the elevator pitch, just to put a picture in someone's head in a hopefully enticing way.

Then, if they are interested, you can launch into your 5-min pitch where you explain how you're not just like that well-known service, but different and much better.

I used to hate having my startup compared to another service (and I'm still not crazy about it), but I now find such an analogy to be a useful stepping stone in a conversation.

I say this because Google Wave definitely evokes an image in my head, one that is high-tech, interactive, collaborative, and ultimately failed (which is not a bad thing; that's just what my head spits out). A note and notebook evokes an offline pad and paper notebook... or Evernote, for some reason.

Whatever analogy you choose, hopefully you choose one that evokes the right kind of image and sentiment you want from your listener. Good luck!
It makes reservations to have drinks with my fellow note takers?
I think mtgx is referring to where Google claimed that Microsoft stole their search results...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
Really fantastic conference last year! Looking forward to 2013!
You probably feel like the stuff you upload to Facebook belongs to you too.
Wow, the bit about seeing vim commands as sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives blew my mind. I thought about learning vim, but I didn't know about this, so vim commands seemed like some arcane language that I would have to gradually get proficient at over months.. this might make the transition a lot easier.
I'll add: The times that I've left off a void* context, I've always wanted one later. Just put one there. Honest. Don't think about functions without also thinking about their environments.

(In languages with closures, you'd just use a closure. Passing a void* around is C's meatball way of expressing an execution context).
I think that the biggest thing that people on this thread are missing is that the interviews' main point is not to evaluate the idea, but rather to evaluate the team; the value of the idea itself is of secondary importance in that it reflects the ideas and thoughts of the team itself. As pg has said before, one of the things that they look for is confidence. The problem, according to him, is that some people are very good at faking it. Therefore, an objective of pg is to get people away from canned routine and to be original. Therefore, if the people are smart and capable of expressing their ideas, they should do well.
Reusable Patterns for Riak in Scala
This may seem like a good analogy, but it's not. NYTimes owns their data; that's their intellectual property and no one would contest that. The posts on Craigslist are, if anything (see last paragraph), the property of the individual posters, not Craigslist. In fact, Craigslist makes this clear in their Terms of Use and does so largely for legal reasons: they don't want to be liable for potentially illegal posts.

Now, it's definitely a gray area to repost the individuals' content on another site, but what Eric is doing is clearly in line with the intent of the original poster: distribute a listing to get eyeballs. I'm making an assumption here, but I'm pretty sure that he would pull the post if the individual requested as much.

And finally, although I think this is a bad place to stake your claim, the posts themselves are arguably purely public data the second they hit Craigslist. The data conveyed is factual, there is no IP, and it's being disseminated publicly. It's similar to (and yes, there are a lot of ways to poke holes in this analogy, but for the sake of argument...) a town crier shouting an advertisement out in a crowded square and one of the listeners taking that information, traveling to another public square, and repeating it.
I think you've effectively captured the essence of my post.
Seems cool, but isn't sharing a VNC with a real editor like emacs/vi better?
Cool. Does it work with Cocoa on OS X?
Except that I don't want the Java part of it. I'd much rather just use Clang and C.

VMkit is a nice effort, though. I hope it will some day power fancy new languages that have dynamic features which are not well suited for AOT compilation.
It may be irrelevant, however you will get penalised on costs (at least in the UK) if you do not attempt to resolve the dispute prior to issuance of proceedings.

I personally wouldn't want to risk the ire of a judge in issuing proceedings when at least on the face of it, PM complied with at least part of the initial cease & desist sent by CL.
I think you got both. From your article:

“So what is Rocketr?” he opened.

That's a very open-ended question. If you had taken things in a good direction from there, I bet he would have just let you talk.

“So people can all write to the same place. So it’s like a wiki?” he asked.

This question isn't really driving either. He's just reflecting his understanding back and giving you more of a chance to explain clearly.

The missteps continued when he asked, “Who needs what you’re making?”

Here's where pg started driving. And he was doing you a favor. You only get 10 minutes to convince him that you're making something people want, and you've wasted minutes already. If you're someone who's bad at interviewing but is good at understanding customers, this question might sift the gold nugget from the sludge. Unfortunately, your answer was just more sludge.

I'm zeroing in here on what you did wrong, but overall I'm encouraged and impressed that you not only owned your mistake, but made a public blog post about it. And now I'm watching to see what you do with the feedback you're getting.
But then you would have to wrap one-liners more often. The syntax of the 'defer' keyword is obviously designed to match the syntax of the 'go' keyword for launching Goroutines, and it would be annoying to wrap every 'go' call with arguments in an anonymous function without arguments.
Stock JB: 281+3. Chrome: 369+11.

Chrome has too high startup time for me to use as a default browser though.
No. Cutting your deployment time is equivalent to saving a one-off cost. A comprehensive set of automatic tests is a massive ongoing cost (it's by no means impossible for the tests to cost more than the product), forever. The latter vastly outweighs the former.

There are domains in which you need the tests anyway. If you're in one, you'll probably find your deployment cycle is also constrained by the nature of the domain. If it's not, and if the existence of the tests lets you deploy faster than you otherwise could have, well and good. But it certainly isn't worth investing in the tests just for faster deployment.
There is no protection for a database of public facts under US law, contrary to say the UK. Craiglist's data is all public facts.
You can export data very easily, either using the Trello API or just by appending ".json" to pretty much any URL. For example to get a JSON dump of the resources board: https://trello.com/board/trello-resources/4f84a60f0cbdcb7e7d... (note the .json).

Disclaimer: I'm a developer on Trello.
+1

That was just my immediate reaction. You sound like you're alright.
This is a poorly thought out idea. If the city took two years (after initial opposition) to agree to a tree farm I can not imagine they'd ever get support for this idea.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230489870457747...

What happens when someone running from 'zombies' gets injured inside one of the buildings? Just making the structures safe for the game would run into millions of dollars.
This has been fixed. I put in the wrong link. Thanks for the feedback.
Another great story from the trenches that doesn't involve killing or crushing it, but rather keep moving.

It makes me wonder how many great developers and entrepreneurs give in/up/out to the fundraising machine without finding what they could actually have done on their own. Of course, this won't fit all startups that don't have a business model.

The saying of seeking funding to avoid finding sales seems to ring true here and in a lot of stories.
Yes: the copy of your listing that resides on Craigslist's servers is theirs.

You are free to post the same listing to as many other sites as you want; Craigslist doesn't demand exclusivity. In that regard, your listing remains yours. You have no other claim to the posting on Craiglist itself.
Yes. It is just like a shared notebook.
British found solution to the caste menace and promptly gave independence to Christians/Anglo-Indians/Sikh/SC/ST communities in 4th August 1932 Round Table Conference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_Award
I would've totally appreciated and understood a 'bring it on, we'll fight the good fight' style post.

This however comes across as feeling sleazy, shrugging it off and doing it anyhow.
After reading the post and discussion, my conclusion is that Craigslist is making a policy mistake.

They should make the same calculation of public good that ericd made and license 3rd party websites that add value to Craigslist, provided the 3rd parties do not harm the Craigslist infrastructure or business models. Doing otherwise is just holding up progress, and is a losing game in the long run. Facilitating value to users would be a win for them, as it was in the past.