skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His post is chock full of BS:

> 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.

Because Craigslist isn't suing Google. If they didn't want Google indexing their stuff, Google would comply.

> Google doesn't get special secondary property rights to privatize public data to the exclusion of anyone else.

They can and do. That's why it's beneficial to set your user agent to Google Bot when browsing news sites.

> Equal access to exchange data and search data is a principle in parallel to the notions of net neutrality.

Full of shit. It takes effort to provide the service that Craigslist does. Claiming that you have a right to that data is wrong, and moreover has already been decided by case law (you can find links in other comments on this page).

> 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.

There is a reason Craigslist doesn't make that data available - it would reduce the utility for sellers of their website, reducing their revenue and potentially drying up their business. Trying to squeeze it out of Google's cache is still copyright infringement.

> Note, Craiggers does NOT disrupt the existing Craigslist revenue model for Craigslist.

Yes, it does. By scraping craigslist in an attempt to undermine their platform you are eliminating their site's relatively utility for buyers, which eliminates the impetus for sellers to list there.
I know the 3Taps people pretty well. They're seasoned entrepreneurs and they definitely know what they're doing with the 3Taps API. One of the founders is a grey haired attorney who's thought this through pretty carefully. They're also prepared to handle any legal issues that arise since they need to be, but also because it would be the best PR ever.
Do you have any social proof to speak of? Testimonials from previous employers or even just a well-designed case-study of the work you did for them?

In any of your interviews did you engage the client in terms of their value proposition to customers and suggest improvements above and beyond what you were being hired to do? Anything from 'What have you tried to get more information about your users?' to 'I've had success using #{some_tech} for managing complexity in #{something} codebases, what have you tried so far?'

Can you demonstrate technical skill beyond what the clients are expecting of you? For example, if you didn't use backbone.js or some higher level abstraction around your paginated list, were you able to discuss the tradeoffs of using that sort of framework? If you have only one months professional experience with ruby, did you at least send an example rails application over to them for their developers to look at?

If I click on your HN profile or a link in your email signature, do I get linked to your portfolio website that clearly outlines your value proposition to potential hirers? What is it exactly that you can do for me? Your LinkedIn profile for example is mostly about your non-technical experience, which is great, but doesn't make me feel better about hiring you. You have a list of technologies but what exactly is it that you're a specialist at?

As someone who is charging a hefty daily-rate, with nowhere near the level of acclaim as patio11, with comparable technical skills to you living in a city with a substantially smaller tech scene, I get the impression that your lack of secured work is more to do with your communication/sales skills than it is with your technical ability or connections.
You may be right, I'm flying by the seat of my pants here (after having talked to some lawyers). My goal isn't to supplant Craigslist, which is what you seem to be suggesting - that's far too big a task to take on, even with my sites' substantial usage, and not really something I'm personally interested in - I think that classifieds are a mostly-solved problem, with the exception of reputation and security. I think CL can get there, they seem to be hiring devs.
Christ, what an asshole.

What? Eric is so obviously not an asshole that your comment is just weird.
I have some experience with indoor location tech, but not magnetic fields. If I had to guess (and I do) I'd suspect that the algorithm depends on consensus based on traffic/usage. The map's gonna change regularly, but if enough people use the technology you can take the algorithm's guesses for everyone and start to build a confidence weight for your prediction, weed out anomalies, and update your understanding of the magnetic fingerprint of the space over time. I'd also assume it uses GPS to get your bootstrapped whenever possible, ie: sort out what entrance you came through, use pathfinding over time to get some limit the possible locations you might be in currently.
The exploration explosion
>It's cold comfort knowing you're right when no one wants to listen.

This says it all. Being critical, challenging ideas and evaluating possibilities isn't about being right and letting people know it. The whole point of being critical, challenging ideas and constructive criticism in general is to do it for their benefit. To help the person see things they may have missed. It's not about ego tripping for your benefit by proving that you're a visionary who noticed all the negative things they didn't want to see.
Backbone.js App Walkthrough Part 3: External Templating – Screencast
HTML5, CSS3, and DOM Performance
Much of the time, your definition will prevail. But what we found in our first version, is that in a significant percentage of occasions, people do tend to put a little more effort into a note knowing that they intend to share it.

It's like when you type out a quick email to your team linking to a competitor and giving a little context. That's essentially what a shared note looks like. The reason we believe it should live outside the inbox, is because the inbox is designed around time-sensitive content - not content that needs time to gestate or be talked about.
Creating a site where buyers can browse property listings does harm the Craigslist business model. To say otherwise expresses a lack of understanding of online ecosystems.
Self-interest isn't incompatible with passion and personal moral indignation. You're essentially accusing him, if I read you right, of being disingenuous: claiming he's restoring that data for one set of reasons, when really, he's doing it for another. I don't think it's fair of you to call his integrity into question, and I don't think he's done anything to merit it. I disagree that your reasons, not his, are "all there [are] to say."
In theory it'll work like this: all investments and savings are tax-deductible, all withdrawals are taxed at the ordinary rate. The practical implementation would probably to designate tax-protected accounts, similar to how IRAs work nowdays. The top tax rate would probably need to be increased.

There will need to be tax treatments for potential loopholes, like shifting consumption under a business you own or own in part, or time-shifting withdrawals, but overall economists think this would be far more elegant and simple than income taxation.
Spent millions gathering? Two basic problems with that mindset. First, spending money to assemble a database of public facts does not magically give you a right to protect your investment in an uncopyrightable asset. Second, I don't know what millions you are talking about since craiglist's only asset is the users, and the users are just a result of tremendous network effects. They had a great idea and got very lucky, but gathering their massive userbase had nothing to do with spending money.
Very much Kogan's style.
Ukrainian Students Develop Gloves That Translate Sign Language Into Speech
Many in north-east feel they are not Indians.
http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-china-she...
I'm going to print out the thread and cut it into workable chunks of feedback in order to organize and understand it.
Can someone provide more detail on the cache hack? Surely this is going to be an unreliable way to grab the information, considering the speed the cache is updated at?
Everything that Joel says is true, but keep in mind: having inventory or backlog has a cost, but everything that clears it also has a cost. Inventory is always bad, but sometimes it's less-bad than the alternatives.

Anecdata: My company has a client with a large budget and a large appetite for change on his website. The project manager intentionally chosen to throttle back the rate of change and build up a backlog. The intention is the rate of work is about enough to employ 4 people full-time, and we'd rather have that be consistent rather than just an average. Were he to clear the backlog as it came in, the flow of work would be very uneven, and that would necessitate all sorts of other overhead costs. During boomtimes, onboarding new people to the project; during busttimes, finding other work for the 4 current people; during the transitions between the two, juggling obligations from 2-3 projects as people get transfered from one project to another.

TL;DR project management is hard. Reducing inventory is a Good Thing and you should do it, but it has a cost, so don't be cargo-cultish about it.
10.7 brought tons of new UI elements, including NSView-based NSTableView. Before Lion, it required a thousand lines of code (maybe more) to create something simple like this: http://gentlebytes.com/media/blog/2011/08/LionTableViewTesti...

Now, like on iOS, it's just a few lines of code.

Take a look at these links:

http://gentlebytes.com/2011/08/view-based-table-views-in-lio...

http://gentlebytes.com/2011/08/view-based-table-views-in-lio...

-----

http://oleb.net/blog/2011/07/whats-new-for-developers-in-lio...

http://oleb.net/blog/2011/08/whats-new-for-developers-in-lio...

http://oleb.net/blog/2011/08/whats-new-for-developers-in-lio...
Try 500$. BMW owner. This was my quote from the Dealer when I thought I lost my key.
I am not surprised that the guy didn't get any help from his insurer or the drug company.
Investment is planning for future consumption. Taxing one affects the other. In tax incidence, there's no free lunch.

The point is to tax in a way that's most useful. There's no point in progressively and compound-ly taxing people for having large investments. There is a point to progressively taxing people who consume many times more than average.
True, although software can never be 100% user/customer/community driven. Something Henry Ford something something “faster horses.” Or within my lifetime, if we had take a survey in 1983, how many personal computer users would have voted for “mouse and bitmapped screen” as their top priority?
From what I gather, the Craigslist T&Cs specifically forbid scraping data off their website. They explicitly call out the fact that they do not own the actual data/listings/facts on their website, so those are public domain (or possibly owned by the person who created the listing, who knows). By scraping the data from Google's cache, you're no longer in violation of the T&Cs because you're not scraping from Craigslist's website anymore. You are free to use the data obtained in this method because Craigslist doesn't own the data. (IANAL)
Mods please re-title to make it clear this is an app in the store
If that is the thing you'd like to collaborate around, then yes, you could use it for that purpose. ;)

We had someone plan a wedding with it during the pilot.
Posted elsewhere in this thread:

http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

http://www.bitlaw.com/source/cases/copyright/feist.html

If you read the second link, you'll see that it is exactly what the OP is doing and it has already been decided in favor of the database owner in case law.
Craigslist is being the RIAA/MPAA in this situation. Users (buyers/sellers) want to remix the same content in a different form, and the RIAA/MPAA/Craigslist won't let them. So then it comes down to whether this can be technologically stopped or not.
> objectively observable

Design is never objective. Even from a usability testing perspective, different people have different results.
Be careful reading these comments. There's an overwhelming bias on HN in favor of "rules that impede startups are there to be broken", and, of course, 3/4 of the site is going to cheer you on. Remember when Mark Pincus said early stage startups need (as I remember) to lie, cheat, and steal to get off the ground? HN cheered that on too.

Just remember that every nerd that has ever broken any rule --- from seeding a torrent of a movie to scraping a competing site to (yes, go look it up) exploit SQL injection to dump a company's mail spool to the Internet --- has come up with a personally compelling rationale to do it. MAFIAA, "we're helping apartment hunters", "STRATFOR was an evil intelligence company". These are all of a kind.

The fact is, you compete with Craigslist. However much "better" your service is, customers don't agree: they overwhelmingly prefer Craigslist, because that's where the market is: the "killer feature" in your space is the market.

So, to stay viable in the face of competition that has you beaten dead to rights, you've rationalized cheating them.

I don't find what you're doing detestable, or anything like that, but it sure is annoying to watch you pat yourself on the back for it. I'm with Phillip. Have you read a lot of his comments? I have. He's not dumb, nor is he a troll.
I think everyone should just step back and look at the big picture.

This guy is finding any means necessary to add Craiglist data back into his application and Craigslist does not want him to. I think the "gray" area is pretty black and white. Craigslist said no. He's doing it anyway - even if indirectly.

Here's how I see it:

Me: Don't go in my house.

You: But you left the back door unlocked by accident, so I thought I'd just come in and eat your food.

In the real world this would not be acceptable.

Even though we are talking apples, bananas, and oranges, the same ethical perspective should be employed. Craig said no, so we respect his wishes. It's the RIGHT thing to do. If he adds an API someday, then he's sharing the key to his house with us, until then. Doors are locked, too bad, move on.
Yep, same here; been doing PHP development for around ten years and the few times I've touched WordPress I've regretted it.

Plus, it seems like WordPress development is a rather crowded space... how are you going to differentiate yourself? I see a little bit of wanting to "own the market" here with the in-WP app store idea, but why would I go to you instead of going directly to the developers of the plugin?
Yes, but this can't reasonably include the material facts concerning the listing: how many bedrooms, the rental amount, the street and cross street. The data I just mentioned and the relationship between them is not something that Craigslist could reasonably own even if they did ask for exclusivity.
What caused widespread religious disaffiliation in the 1990s?
I don't know. $100,000 to find a great treatment for one cancer, which previously had no treatment, seems cheap!

And I think a truck full of hard drives hurdling down the highway has had greater bandwidth than most of the world's networking for a while now.

As the future of medicine is clearly personalized I think the costs associates with genome sequencing and other analysis will come down. Or, at least, I hope they do.
Looks really cool! Load times are really high even on Chrome though.
I thought Detroit itself was already supposed to be something like a zombie theme park.
Looks like Apple changed the guidelines in late 2010 to allow interpreters to run as long as they don't download separate code... interesting.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4891642/interpreter-for-t...
Such jokes are warranted and funny, but I don't think WiseWeasel was joking.
> Why are people using craigslist?

Because everyone else is.
Will do. Appreciate the interest.
Send them to a secure page on google.com with instructions on changing their dns servers to 8.8.8.8. Everyone trusts Google, right? ;)
It depends what your intent is. If you're on the consumers' side, people's side, wanting to make their lives easier, better, through efficiency and therefore increased productivity - then being integrated into everything will of course cause this. Best case scenario would be some form of partnership, however Craiglist seems to want to create and control an ecosystem instead of being the management piece, instead of finding a way to survive as a management piece.
I was at photo conference a years ago and watched as the help staff hit there walkie talkies looking for a monitor dongle for a mac. They got one just in time saving apple's embarrassment.

I generally like apple products but they recently seem to have gone too far in the style vs functionality direction.
Hacktastic - Clojure RPG build series
Whenever I go to someone for advice or an opinion on something I'm working on, I look for people who aren't afraid to tell me I've done something wrong, something looks bad, or the whole idea is just plain garbage.
Instead, what you get is people half-heartedly telling you, "Oh, that's really something."

I'm not a baby, people. Tell me what you hate about it so I can make it better! You can't fix bugs if no one reports them.

Unfortunately, this mentality gets me into a lot of trouble with my girlfriend, who is a Graphic Designer. She'll show me something she's working on, and I tell her what I would want to hear: "That face looks funny", or "I don't like that colour". What she takes from it is, "I hate everything about what you just showed me."
I'm still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
We actually have two of the best in Toronto. :)
Maybe he just had faith it was all a scam.
If you went and did the work to get those prices (called or visited all of the stores in a city, for instance), then you'd be correct. But if you're scraping someone else's website in an automated fashion, and that's provably true, you're entering into the copyrightability of databases.

There's a material difference - collecting data yourself versus copying someone else's collection of data.

As another example, can I go to Amazon.com (without using their API), scrape all the product names and prices off their web site and map the dates and times they change? I would think not. Those too are facts, but you're basically just copying someone else's database.

Can I scrape stock data off of Yahoo finance without having to pay the license fee associated with getting historical stock data?
But he said this doesn't involve touching Craiglist's servers at all. I admit I am drawing a blank as to how this would work, but the (seemingly impossible) description he offers seems to get around that objection.
I think Trello is fantastic. It's a game-changer for development and project management, even if you use it solo. My only problem is I can't use it at work due to our privacy and regulatory requirements.

Fog Creek: A version we can host ourselves, please! We would pay fogbugz-levels if not more.
Data Replication in NoSQL Databases
Having the comfort access feature, and having a car stolen
many years ago, there's no way I would trade one of my most
enjoyed features for a lower risk of car theft.

The reality is that if someone wants your car they're going
to get it.

Why get rid of an awesome convenience feature for the
risk of something that is a) unlikely and b) won't cost you
anything (absent a small deductible) if it does happen?
Yes, but are they prepared to handle everyone else's legal issues too? Is doing so in the agreement between them and Padmapper? I'm sure they're great guys, but that doesn't obligate them to protect Padmapper from Craigslist.
The Scary Bomb Not on Netflix’s Balance Sheet
If you're a thief and you can't drive a manual car then something is wrong with you.
silly op, J and S aren't hexadecimal digits.

Edit: Also, cripes, I get that you're trying to show off your amazing web app framework, but whatever happened to degrading gracefully?
Yes, live product demos are common.
no its very simple. Don't submit your listing to craigslist them. Submit it to a site that is indexable friendly.
You didn't actually lean out the process, you just pushed more work on to a different group of people.

Did people pay for this software? I can't imagine buying software that makes me find/submit bug reports and then on top of that re-submit them to actually get them fixed....
Google pushes map technology - (video)
Discretely tucked away near the end of page 4 (emphasis mine):

"Unlike iOS and previous versions of Android, Jelly Bean’s speech recognition system doesn’t have to relay snapshots of the user’s recorded speech input to a remote server for processing. Speech recognition can now be done entirely on the device."
As far as I can tell, they aren't posting the full listing. They are only aggregating the material facts about the listing. As far as I can tell, short of actually hoofing it to the place, you still have to get on Craigslist to make contact with the landlord.
I don't feel it's petty to want what in 2012 should be basic information, obviously you do and in that our opinions will differ. I also didn't realize it was only marketed to the tech industry, I must have crossed over from the regular internet to the tech internet by mistake. Do you have to put in your tech credentials when you order? Otherwise how do they keep nubes like me from ordering?

In my experience ordering popular products, when I check back on placed order's not yet shipped, the estimated ship date gets updated (Apple and Amazon both do this). So while new orders may continue to show a 2-3 week ship date, an early order might show 1-2 days. I believe this is what he is asking for. Seems as popular as this product is they are probably back-ordered before they've shipped the first batch. If they aren't updating then the question begs why not? (At least for me and the original poster, you apparently don't care if they ship this today or next year). Is it too much to ask for up-to-date information or when I use Google search should I expect results that were only relevant 2-3 weeks ago? Again, this is Google we are talking about, some of the smartest people on the planet working for a very wealthy corporation. Why can't I expect world class customer service? Is that beyond their means?

Engadget hasn't banned me yet, but then again I don't ever recall posting there. You seem experienced with this internet thing, what should I post to get banned there and what are the advantages of being banned from Engadget (other than no longer having the desire to post on Engadget)? Can I reach Engadget through the regular internet or do I need access to this tech industry internet that you use?
Has there been any info/rumors on the release date for Windows Phone 8?
> By scraping craigslist in an attempt to undermine their platform you are eliminating their site's relatively utility for buyers, which eliminates the impetus for sellers to list there.

This is exactly what Craigslist will argue, but it's hard to imagine how that could be true if the eventual downstream destination of the data always sends the user back to Craigslist to finish the process.
Also, I'm pretty sure Google's TOS doesn't allow you to do automatic queries and/or scraping.
Should point out that the Win8 start screen still has the behavior, even though the search bar isn't visible at first.
Dear PadMapper,

We hate your app and you can't use our API.

Sincerely, Craigslist

+ + +

Dear Cragislist,

Fuck you.

Love, PadMapper
I would respect you more if you just came out and said "fuck Craigslist, we're using their data" than go through a bunch of pie in the sky philosophical reasoning to justify your decision after the fact.

Let's be frank and direct: you're being a dick to Craigslist, and you're doing it so you can build a better product.

I even agree with that decision--Craigslist has brought it upon itself by creating what is (IMO) a mediocre and clearly substandard UI. But your choice is what it is. Embrace it.