skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That means on the average day you have 150 metric tons of wheat flour in stock. At today’s prices, you’ve tied up $73,000. Forever.

What's so bad about having that money tied up in inventory?
Once it's in there, you can just forget about it, and it has no impact. If you reduce your inventory and "free up that money", you're just going to spend it on something else, and then be on an endless quest to forever reduce inventory, because the money you "free up" kind of looks like revenue, which you are obviously trying to increase. Continuing down this path has no future.

At some point you can't reduce inventory any more (lets even say you get it to zero with JIT), at which point your "revenue" will "fall" compared to last year/quarter and everything looks bad.
Ha, typical. I just bought this last week. It's ace though even at 1.99 or whatever it cost me.

When I say ace, expected limitations apply, however with a fully working network and threading library, it's no hassle to extend SimpleHTTPServer and allow you to upload your .py files created elsewhere.
I find it difficult to believe that you have searched for an apartment in a tough rental market on Craigslist and consider their interface "fast and simple." If you've never had the task of finding an apartment within a mile of a given spot in a big metro area, you're not looking for what PadMapper offers. If you have had that problem, and you've never sworn out loud at Craigslist, you're a saint.
Kayak Prices $100 Million IPO at $25 a Share
http://www.poeticous.com
SnagFilms Lands Another $7 Million in VC for Indie Flicks
Why are there so many submarine cables going between Alaska and the continental US? Does the US not trust Canada to have land based cables, or is it actually better to go under the sea for that link?
Along the same lines, how does a company that takes another's data protect its own? If padmapper takes craigslist data under the genuine opinion that it is fully legal for them to do so, can I go ahead and copy all their data? Craigslist couldn't sue me because I am siphoning the data off padmapper's servers, and padmapper couldn't sue me because after all, it is all totally legal and super duper helpful to the end users.
Feeling userful? Europe offers up billions for r&d
That's not the goal, no. The point there is that neither PadMapper nor 3taps interact with their servers, so neither has to implicitly agree to their ridiculous TOU in order to summarize the listings. That's the only reason for that.
Shirky: Institutions vs. Collaboration [2005]
Mach 20 and beyond? Darpa program to develop hypersonic flight
Well in some cases. We become extremely proficient using a particular tool. I'll admit, the more time I've spent away from using MS Windows, I've really begun to suck when relatives call for support. I have one Windows 7 machine in the house now and I wanted to map a network drive to a share on the Mac. After fighting through all the wonderful wizards in the network control panel, I still could not browse the network. Finally I just said SCREW THIS CRAP. Start->Run->cmd..... net use m: \\server\share /persistent:yes

Screw you Microsoft for making a mundane task so damn difficult....
I've been wrestling with this, too. Right now my GTD Inbox list is just empty, because if I'm going into Trello, I might as well put the item where it belongs (whether Next Actions, Waiting On, etc). I guess I'm looking for my Inbox to be populated with stuff that arrived outside of Trello.

I might be wrong on this because I'm relatively new to Trello and GTD, but I also didn't see a way to tag cards, which seems really useful.
I don't think so.

Users are on Craigslist to buy/sell, because it's the biggest place for that. If you post to CL, virtually everyone wants the largest audience possible, so 99.9% of people will be thrilled to have their post copied to other services.

The only annoying thing would be if you take down your post from CL after you've bought/sold your thing, and you continue to get calls/emails from people getting it via copied data. But sites that copy just need to stay up-to-date on whether postings are still up or not...
I believe that technique (called 'map bunnies' in the mapmaking domain) has been used to discover copiers, but that subsequent legal/social action against the transgressors is not based on the damages caused by the bunny-copying itself, but the now-detected larger pattern.

IANAL, but I would expect the copier-of-fake-listings to have a number of defenses in such a situation.

It would be hard to prove any real damages from the copying of just those fake listings – any loss of business is due to the copying of the bulk of other real listings. To the extent those other real listings are 'facts', reproducing them may be a protected activity under US legal precedent ('Feist'). The false items don't change the key issue at all. (Statutory damages might still be a problem.)

Further, consider:

• Someone couldn't intentionally hoax a newspaper and then sue the newspaper for having reproduced their creative work of fiction.

• If I tricked you into downloading a file labelled "public-domain video of the 1997 state-of-the-union address", which is actually the 'West Wing' pilot episode, it'd be hard for me to collect damages for copyright violation.

To some extent, passing off material in the form of something else – where that something else would otherwise be legal to disseminate – can easily be considered implicit permission to treat that material as if it were the first thing (true facts, hot news, copyright-unemcumbered information, etc).

Injecting the false data still serves a 'detection' purpose but probably can't serve a 'damages-heightening' purpose. (And, detection isn't at issue in this scenario: PadMapper has announced their intent and technique publicly.)
> Christ, what an asshole

Downvoted for ad hominem.

One of the wonderful things about HN is that it provides a forum for civil discussion. If that's your style, there are lots of other places on the web that are better venues for you.
That is exactly the issue in a nutshell, even though the armchair lawyers on HN don't want to believe it.

Craigslist said no. The user that posted the data to Craigslist did not give Padmapper or 3Tap permission to copy their listing. 3Tap and Padmapper did anyway. The Google Cache, for legal purposes is Craigslist's site if it is a cached copy of the Craigslist site. Google has a legitimate fair use argument that the cache is directly related to its primary non-infringing use of search, which is why it gets to cache the site. Google does not get any copyrights to the cached sites; the copyrights remain with the owners.

Thus, the problem remains that 3Tap and Padmapper are violating Craiglist's copyright and its TOS. They could also be violating state and federal laws.
In a sense, building any company is a charitable act, because you leave consumers better off than they were before

Are you daft?

It's not a charitable act to start a for-profit company, because you get paid for providing the service that leaves the people better off. The whole point of charities is that they provide the service without getting paid.

(If your business is a startup that has deferred monetization until later, that still doesn't make you a charity; you've just chosen to turn away payment now in the hope that doing so will yield you a bigger payment down the road.)

That's not to say that starting a business is a bad thing or that businesses can't improve the world; but there's a clear line between what a business is and what a charity is, and it involves the expectation of getting paid. Which means a business is always going to be lower on the Do-Gooder Scale than a charity is.
Thanks for the great product, guys.

I use Trello to keep track of my work tasks, personal tasks, and game dev tasks. It's heavenly.
HR uses it. Insurance companies are still stuck on faxes.
Converting a simple website to Python Flask
Not a lawyer, but I would be really surprised if that sort of copyright shenanigans held up against any legal challenge. I don't think you can sneak copyrighted stuff into non-copyrightable stuff in order to protect it.
Let me try. What you say is correct. The listing is "fact". And CL is not preventing posting this fact to other services. The user can post the same listing to CL, Rent.com and dozen other sites. What they are controlling is access to their servers.
I have an idea for a open source bounty board. You can post a job that you would like the open source project X to implement feature Y and you are willing to pay Z to whoever does it.
What do you think?
We’re getting wildly differing assessments
Ask HN: Learn Philosophy The Hard Way
I am interested in learning all of the classics in Philosophy whether western or non western ,ancient and modern as a long-term project.Any suggestions how or where i should start?
Yes, at some of these companies, you are not allowed to use Google Docs for coordination but Sales gets to use Salesforce.com because that is the industry standard.
Going off-topic here, but that was a cool dog. Looks like a huskie. :)
Tuesday last day to apply to Startup Chile ($40k grants)
The Supreme Court apparently ruled overwise on this case, as discussed above, i.e. here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219085
Thanks for that simple explanation. My use case is fine with 64-bit only, so I'll proceed with Golang. I would probably decline if I needed to support 32-bit, given how nasty memory leaks are.
Data can also be exported with the "Share, Print, and Export" link on every card and on a board's drop-down menu.
"Signups are not really what matters."

Signups to free services matter less, relatively as well.

What means something though, in nearly everyone's mind, is a large number. 500k free signups to a service (regardless of whether they login more than once (which is what I did btw) is more newsworthy and attention getting then a small amount of paid users paying bupkas to the traditional world. (I'm not talking about someone posting on HN about something that they put together over the weekend which earns them $1000 per month which HN finds interesting).
Sure they do, that is why there is not a single nobel prize won by an IITian when ten Indians have a nobel prize.
Complete guess, but it might be harder to maintain overland cables running through the Rockies than undersea cables.
I'm not sure what you mean. The WP App Store is me, I am the developer of the plugin.
From an economic sense, the problem of the money tied up in inventory is precisely the interest on $73,000. (Interest rate you pay on loans if you have any loans, interest you'd get from a bank account if you don't have loans.) So around a dollar a day at today's interest rates. (It gets worse if you figure in the small probability of spoilage or damage that is uninsured.)
Deploying MySQL on EC2 - 8 Best Practices
Get the most out of your Amazon hosted MySQL instances. From backups to autoscaling, integrity checks to RDS.
For Western philosophy, you should read Copleston's History of Philosophy. It's probably the most comprehensive treatment of western philosophy out there.
And what if the owner looses that "small electronic device", or forgets to forward it to the new owner.

The whole point of this feature is that you should be able to get the car running if you loose EVERYTHING apart from the car itself. The only way to stop it is to give the manufacturer (or other trusted third party) exclusive right to issue keys but apparently the regulations say no to that.
Sorry but I think your idea would just make the language less consistent. A call is a call, it can be deferred or made asynchronous (with the go keyword). In the latter case at least it is very common to specify arguments. Having a syntax to defer a function call, that only works with functions that take no argument, would be weird and inconsistent.
Automatically Cached Rake Routes and Annotated Models - Mike Mayo
Steve Jobs has a famous quote about hating focus groups.

"You can't ask people what they want because they haven't seen it yet."

(or something along those lines)
I liked that calculation. I was inwardly cheering while reading it. Quantitative ethics FTW.
Sure, I get that. What I was saying is, would it not potentially be better go give the founders some time to give their thoughts in the order they have them in... before starting to go off on tangents and probe specific areas? Especially considering that the question you're about to ask, may be something they're going to be answering anyway.

I guess that if pg and crew believe that they learn something by intentionally knocking people out of their planned routine, then that's one argument for it. That is, if the idea is "we want to evaluate your ability to think on our feet, react to unplanned questions, etc." then OK.
Does it really take an API to determine the outcome of a slot machine (generate a random number)? Sure, Betable might create a nice payment gateway, but there are other services that already do that, and it seems like the value-add is minimal.
> [H]ow many personal computer users would have voted for “mouse and bitmapped screen” as their top priority?

I still wouldn't...
This is true if you consider Marxism-Leninism a religion.

Which many do; in former Yugoslavia you can find obituaries posted on the walls, and they're marked either by black cross, or by green crescent, or by red star: meaning that communist beliefs are on the same page with islam and christianity.

But then again, most atheists would stand up and announce they don't like communism (at least in its violent early-soviet form) at all, and they're against persecution of christians under such regimes. I do. Early soviet regime sucked a big time. Not a good example for anyone to follow.

Still, I don't think there's terribly many communists who claim their religious (or whatever other) feelings were hurt by other people.
Nah, it's not morally gray. You guys are a search engine. Craigslist may not like what you're doing, but that doesn't make it wrong. Traditional publishers hate Google, despite all the traffic it sends them. So what?

Getting a C+D from Craigslist is a good sign. It means you matter. Hang in there long enough, and Craigslist won't be able to cut you off, because a good chunk of their traffic will come through you.

It's kind of weird to think of Craigslist as stodgy old-media using the courts to defend an out-dated business model because they don't like being disrupted by new technology, but here we are.
Are we at peak zombie yet? This infatuation seems almost unkillable.
True. Using XP on a machine from today is actually not so bad. You can fly around the interface with ease.

Flashback to 2003: Dell ships their Precision/Optiplex towers with a base level of 256Megs of RAM. XP will install... but you're going to WAIT if you do something crazy.... like hit the Start button.... And you'd better leave that PC running, cause you do NOT want to have to reboot and wait for the systray to load. God forbid you have Mcaffee or Norton installed....
For a couple of years I've been cooking a gambling API and while there is a huuuge market for that, execution is what separates wheat from chaff. Here are two key things I believe will make it a winner:

1. Make it easy for developers to integrate in their apps.

2. Make it easy for users to deposit/withdraw/bet money.

So, if I am playing online poker on my iPad, I may call, raise or go all-in on very single hand. Can your API do that? What means all-in in that case? All I have in the bank?

Allow me to move $100 from my account to any game I feel in the mood to play. Let me deplete that bag and go for more or just quit in the middle and get the rest back. Can your API do that?

Btw, call it iChips and put it on the app store (there is already one app with that name, but fight for the name) and use colorful casino chips everywhere.

Again, execution is king...
"If they could fix that"

The question also is how long will they continue to fix and offer a service which has no revenue? And who is to say the service won't get acquired (in addition to just being outright cancelled). Saying "always be free" doesn't create a legal obligation given a change of circumstances.

(I have a workflow which depends greatly on free Thunderbird and the (paid version) of the quicktext pro extension. I was pretty upset to even see stories that TB was not going to be maintained as well going forward.)
Hey guys, congratulations on the release and the cool interface! I worked as an intern at TG back in 2005 and fondly remember playing around with this data to see where the connections were.
What category of smartphone apps and web apps isn't a crowded category at this point?

I pity startups doing pitches in this space any more. There are simply too many of them doing the same things so it must be murder to speak to what you are doing and claim your are, in fact, "different". Most of the obvious and doable apps have been flogged past the dead horse stage at this point. Silicon valley kind of needs a new rule, until you come up with an innovative and original idea maybe you shouldn't do a startup.

Doing a hundred permutations on the same ideas and hoping that either superior execution, a competitor buyout to get rid of you or a lucky streak of virility leads you to the promised land doesn't seem like the greatest strategy any more.

I guess its still OK for the VC's like Y Combinator, as long as they have the patience to sift through them all, because the more pitches there are the more chances there are to find the ones that are unique, interesting or promise exceptional execution.

The problem with web and smart phone apps is the barrier to entry is too low so everyone is doing them.
When I saw My.MAGIC_CONSTANT I closed the tab. Too PHPish for me.
Interesting solution to the regulation "problem"

I think the big question here is not whether developers ante up for a gambling API. Certainly some will, given the prospect of making more money. The real question to me is whether it becomes 'required' in the sense that in order to compete, they need to use it (or a competitor's equivalent). The social game industry seems to be all about fast-following on features, especially monetization
More on vi as a "language:" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...
IAAL. And what you just said is not true, at all, in the U.S. It may be true in Somalia or some other country without an established legal system.

Google's cached Craigslist site is, legally, a copy of the Craiglist site, which just happens to be hosted on a different server with permission (under fair use, it is essentially compelled permission).

Craiglist does not own the facts on their website (nobody can own facts), but they do own the data (a filtered or specifically selected set of facts) or a license to use the data. They also have a license to post the listings (which are owned by their users). These licenses do not extend beyond Craiglist.

Craiglist's T&C bars scraping because that is an end-run around both the user's copyright in the listing and Craiglists' licenses in the listings and underlying data.

By scraping from a copy of Craiglist's website, 3Tap and Padmapper are still scraping from Craiglist's website.
I totally get where you're coming from and felt the same way.

Perhaps I am reading too much into, and someone evidently disagrees with me because getting downvoted and buried but I was trying to bridge your reaction (which i share) with where I thought the OP was coming from.
> Legal arguments are ones that are essentially saying "I have government violence backing me up."

I am not arguing from that standpoint. I'm thinking about the implications for the freedom of data.

You are essentially saying that anyone who has done work resulting in the aggregation of public data somehow "owns" or holds the rights to the aggregation of that data. By this same logic, the first company that published a general-interest encyclopedia would own the general concept of the same aggregation of data. That can't be right, otherwise there could only be one encyclopedia in the world. By the same token, the current search companies own the reference graph of the web, and anyone who starts another web crawler is in violation.

In so far as what Padmapper is doing is the re-aggregation of already public data, he has to be in the clear, otherwise the concept of "owning" an aggregation of data becomes restrictive.
In the US, Craig's List doesn't have a copyright claim on the data or the aggregation of data (known as a database right; a separate copyright assignable for the compilation of data, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow).

In the UK and EU, database rights do exist, although Padmapper could argue that Craig's List makes no investment in actually compiling the database since listings are user submitted (as opposed to the investment they continually make keeping the database accessible).
I don't think it's arbitrary, just selfish(1). As a user, I want the best experience possible, and don't really care wether I get it from Bob's House of Widgets, or Alice's Sprocket Emporium. I don't even especially care if Bob sort of copies some of what Alice is doing. I just want the best widget for my dollar/time spent.

(1) In the Objectivist/Randian sort of way, not in a negative way.
True. On the other hand, it creates some level of trust since any programmer can now implement a Trello alternative for you to port your data to. So making the data available removes a lot of the lock-in. Of course, if the data can be exported in a format immediately usable by an application you already know such as some form of calendar this would be better. But I don't know of an application that overlaps sufficiently with Trello to capture the whole experience.
Pc Control Via Arduino+Python+IR Detector[video]
Show HN: Resumes for Hackers
Wherein Joel espouses an agile software development methodology and invokes the Toyota Production System.

And pictures of Taco the Husky are always appreciated :-)
I use Trello on a semi-regular basis, for what may be a unique thing. Use it on a monitor for a D&D initiative board. It's great for shared viewing, shared editing of sequence. It's scale-able for display on external monitors, and easily color coded.

Not it's intended use, but it's been a great improvement over a small whiteboard and magnets.
In my opinion it is ironic that they built a better C, but gave it attributes (like GC) which made it unusable for exactly those cases you would want to use C in the first place.

Go seems to live in a quite unfortunate design space.

If I'm able to use a language with a GC requirement, I would prefer a high-level one to Go.

And in the cases where GC is not acceptable, Go doesn't even apply.

Apart from that, they messed up pretty badly by using tuples for their error checking idiom. Scary that such a design mistake made it through.
If CL had a more elegant UI, I would also be against the OP continuing against CL's wishes. What makes CL the bad guy in this case is that they're locking up a critical system-economic element, not doing anything with it, and trying to prevent others from using it; exerting minimal effort to progress human economics while also exerting legal force to prevent others from progressing human economics. Consequentialism! Consequentialism! If CL had their own Google Maps API then the loss of renter-hours would not be nearly as severe and the negative consequences of Padmapper not adding the service back in would not be as bad, nor the gain to other people from adding it as great. Of course the right thing to do might change, if the consequences change!