skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of your points rely upon the assumption that Craisglist "owns" all of the posts submitted. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but if that is true then wouldn't that extend to Facebook owning all content submitted to their service, Twitter owning all tweets, Flickr owning all hosted photos, and Stack Overflow owning all submitted answers?
I don't understand, what would that evidence even be? What exactly are you looking for here?
Classifieds were a huge oversight that the industry deserves to be excoriated for.

The print newspaper I worked for is still limping along on its print revenues. If the OCR wasn't making money on print ads, how did it stay in business?
my entire comment is about the name Ryno, which I assume is a homonym for "Rhino". And you ride it, even though it obviously looks dangerous and unstable.

Do you have any specific examples like that from BMW and HD? This wuold be like, I don't know, calling a plane "freefall". Sure there's a danger mystique - but should that be in the name?
I wasn't saying you were incorrect, mainly because I'm not nearly well-versed in law enough to define 'stealing' in such a nuanced context.

I'm simply saying that Craigslist has a vested interest in keeping their data/facts/ads/whatever on their platform.
What about breaking Google's TOS by using a bot to scrap data from them?
Why would you even need to scrape it? It's available as a torrent: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...
Nah, they weren't open to discussing any sort of deal involving the website (they were willing to license data for the mobile app).
Here’s a comparison. You walk into a used instrument store looking for an eight string bass. Another fellow walks in at the same time looking to sell the bass. You wink at each other and meet outside, buy that bass, and cut out the middleman.

It’s his bass and your money, but the reason you knew he had a bass to sell was the store. Likewise, it’s “your” listing data, but the reason padmapper is able to hire someone in the third world to read the internet and manually screen scrape the data—or whatever it is they’re going to do—is because craigslist aggregated it for them.

This is very similar to the kerfuffle over allegations that Bing was scraping results from Google rather than organically indexing the web. It’s quite possibly legal, but it’s not particularly admirable.

And I join Phil (disclosure: He once called me a “giant,” so I owe him) in suggesting that arguments that the ends justify the means are suspect.

I’d prefer to see the padmapper folks put up a pirate flag and openly declare war on craigslist. Just come right out and call them the evil empire already.
A science career is what I'm referring to. Science and math learning, and a technology career, are fine.
Thank you for doing this. My only problem with it is that you're rewarding craigslist for being obnoxious tools, but ultimately it's better for the users, so that's an acceptable sacrifice.

3taps is pretty awesome. I wish they'd do an AMA or something.
Been using win8 in a VM for testing and ... it's fine. I'd like to be able to pay for it, and the 'upgrade price is $40' is a nice step, but really... I'd just like to be able to pay $40 for it full stop. I'm not 'upgrading' from anything, and this will mean I've got to shell out $200+ for it if I want to use it legally.

I do have an old vista ultimate license, but I don't have it installed and probably won't install it again because I moved VM too many times and the process for reactivation was annoying. Maybe I'll have to suck it up again?

Given that most people just get Windows installed on a machine, and the mfg aren't paying more than $50 per license, why can't we have lower retail prices? $50 for a copy of Windows - I'd have no incentive to pirate. $200+... ??

Will I be able to upgrade to Win8 with a Vista license key? Does anyone know for sure?
Doesn't Windows accept forward slashes in most situations?
> Outside Developers like/want the CL customer base, their reputation and their page views and see them as a quick, easy path to success. However, you are not entitled to them.

As far as I can see, Padmapper is not using the Craigslist reputation or page views. The data Padmapper is aggregating is treated as public information by Craigslist's own policy. Given these facts, I don't see what he's doing that's wrong, specifically.
As others have pointed out, it's not Craigslist's content. According to CL's own terms, users own all content posted on the site. So CL has no copyright claim on it.
There is already kinda sorta a MVP for this in form of Zombie 5k challenges like 'Run for your Life':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4XvnVz9qDQ

The Zombie Theme park would seem like a scaled up version of those as it seems to have similar limitations (no weapons) and rules (if you lose your tags you become a zombie).
It really doesn't matter what you "think", it's their data, you gave it to them, it's on their servers, and it cost them money to host it.
So what you're suggesting is that if a service put "noindex" in its robots/metatags, they would be somehow be overstepping the bounds of what they can do with their users' content?
but you have a wealth of tools to do that yourself

That's the problem. With Clojure you don't have to invent interfaces and then convince other libraries to use them. All the data structures are built upon well considered language level protocols that anyone can implement preventing pointless API proliferation.
It actually sounds like the opposite was ultimately decided by the supreme court. Two lower courts decided in favor of the DB owner (in this case analogous to Craigslist), but the Supreme Court found that the database did not meet creativity requirements to fall under copyright law (in the example, a company was not allowed to claim copyright over a database of phone listings in alphabetical order).

Applying this example to the Craigslist situation (in a decidedly IANAL fashion), Craigslist would have to be able to argue that the manner in which it "selects", "coordinates" and "arranges" its data is creative and unique enough to be protected by copyright law, and furthermore that PadMapper's use of the data infringed on that specific creative selection, coordination, and arrangement of the data (since the data itself is still not protected by copyright).
Decreasing time between deployments is not guaranteed to always be a good thing unless you really do "work on deployments", which may not be best for your product.

Consider Firefox moving to six-week deployments and the negative impact it had. That could have been mitigated by a "work on deployment" that added value to a product.

Many enterprise software packages are painful to deploy. Having worked on these, I can tell you it is because hooking up a dozen systems is just complex. You could conceivably have a way to make that turnkey, but that "working on it" probably would not be good for your product as enterprise customers understand (and usually appreciate) the slower pace.

Somebody else said don't go cargo cult with this. I couldn't agree more, but certainly think about it, understand where it is wasting you money, and fix it.
Will Developers Ante Up for a Gambling API?
The Internet of Things: The Robopocalypse starts with your toothbrush
Craigslists owns the unique compilation of their listings. That's what is at stake here.
I wish Joel would go back to blogging about software dev in general rather than writing what I consider plugs for Trello.
I started playing with Trello a week ago. It's beautiful and I see huge potential using it for my daily todo list. One thing I really want is a dead simple way to add new items to an "Inbox" list, which I sort later. (Thinking GTD)

An Android home screen widget and maybe a Chrome extension for this would rock. This is how I currently use Remember The Milk on my phone because you can specify a default list for all new items.

Is something like this in the works? If not, looks like I should be able to cobble something together using the Trello API.
Thanks for that description. Amazing that Airbus hadn't addressed this already. I've read that the initial problem that confused the pilots was the lack of air speed (and maybe altitude) data, due to frozen pitons. So I still wonder why the planes couldn't use GPS for that, at least as backup.
>Do you know the benefits of typed functional programming?

Yes, that's how I know what ML and the tragedies of tagged pointers are.

SBCL supports type annotations, and Racket has a Typed Racket dialect that does type checking insofar as you've provided the types.

Part of the problem that Lispers and Schemers have is that they can add the static analysis to their programs anytime they want through the macro system (hence typed racket). They don't have to hack up the compiler or anything.

The other problem is cultural. Lispers resent implementation-level obligation to a set of rules that were made ignorant of any given problem they may be solving. What if you need to resolve something at runtime? What if you need to resolve something at compile-time? Lisp lets you choose where each should happen.

I feel similarly about purity. I think it makes for a nice default, but I think the degree to which immutability is forced on you in Clojure and Haskell are pretty damned awkward for expressing a variety of problems and not just ones related to IO. It seems especially silly since a lot of code in Common Lisp will by default be pure because it'll just return results based on inputs absent mutation.

Regarding your delvings into Lisp, since you're not unfamiliar with the benefits of functional programming I'd like to recommend a book that will help you break ground with a dynamically typed, multiple-dispatch Lisp with an object system. Get "Art of the Metaobject Protocol". Hopelessly specific to Lisp but glorious nonetheless.

The book doesn't get as deep as I'd like, but it's considered one of the best books on the subject nevertheless.
I feel like they snagged the community of online classifieds first and have been able to hold on pretty tightly, as people like my dad love that almost nothing has changed.
This does not seem like an important distinction. The user implicitly authorized it to be posted on CL by virtue of, well, posting it on CL. They did not authorize any other sites to post it. Or am I missing something?
Yeah, it's impressive that Google hasn't shut down 3taps...I think Google once shut down my IP's access after just 3 automated queries.
Yea it sucks your dealing with CL and not Facebook or you probably would have been acquired.

I say try and move the traffic to pad. It's certainly a big task, but not "far too big". Pick the region where you have the most significant traffic and start there. I haven't looked deeply into your site at all, but I know you have Garry Tans support, ask him what you need to do to get in YC. Get "Craigslist is the Killer" as a headline on TechCrunch. Piggyback the Padlister browser add-on with other common downloads, then push a popup to users posting apartment listings on craigslist saying "Also list on Padmapper?" There are all sorts of things you can try.

There are hundreds of people on HN that wish they had the traffic you have. Use that momentum before it dies off.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/padmapper.com/
It doesn't matter. It's a copyright issue. Craigslist has the right to protect their copyright, it can be proven that they have a unique database, and it can also very likely be proven that the scrapers knew they were doing something illegal (e.g. willful infringement) when the scraping took place.
> I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

If you'd stuck with it for even just a couple of months, you'd have rapidly realized that the ribbon UI was much more efficient than the old, menu-based UI. I hated the ribbon UI at first too, but now I don't have any problems with it.
Microsoft Acquires Perceptive Pixel Inc
I like how Rust uses colons for the type, compared to Go's colonless syntax. The colon works as a nice visual delimiter.

I like a lot about Rust, but one thing I vehemently dislike is how type names are all lowercase by convention. It's unambiguous in variable declarations, but everywhere else it reduces visual information. In most other languages, I immediately know that "Foo" is a type and that "foo" is a variable. Even though Rust allows for omitting the type in many places, it quickly becomes a sea of lowercase for me.

This, plus the focus on short keywords/identifiers and C++-style syntax (::, semicolons), makes Rust look a lot gnarlier than Go, overall.

It also seems to me that Rust still hasn't fully adopted its "object syntax"? One aspect of Go I really like is how functions can be used as methods and you design entire interfaces associated with a type -- the best of object-orientation without the worst. Rust also does this, but on the whole it seems the current standard library is not designed around this philosophy. For example, code uses `vec::len(foo)` instead of `foo.len()`. Are you moving away from the OO syntax, or is it simply considered a stylistic choice?
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EpigramsInProgramming
To be fair, he said to do exactly what you said: cut the backlog off at X weeks. For something new to come in, something else has to go.

It was the bug db he recommended clearing out, which I kind of agree with. Little is more disheartening to a developer than seeing a project with 3000 bugs. You can't help think your project sucks, so why bother (or you learn to completely ignore the bug db).

Regardless, your last statement of "don't be cargo-cultish" always applies. Understand the tradeoffs for your organization. Even Joel just called them "suggestions" not "here's how you do it".
Ask HN: Projecting sales, growth, etc for proforma
My co-founder and I have been hard at working creating our first proforma and we'd really appreciate some tips from those with some experience.

One of the things we are really struggling with is projecting client acquisitions rates, growth, etc. It seems anything we come up with is pure speculation and could be argued against in some way. Are there any standard approaches to this estimation or is it always just guesswork and creative storytelling?
Is it really relevant if it was 6 million or 2 million or less. Regardless of the numbers it was mankind at its worst. Not the singular act of depravity, not the only act of genocide, but it does not need to be so to be condemned. I think there are better things to do than nitpick on the numbers.

At least the allied forces had the foresight to document the concentration camps. My first reaction to it when I was reading about it was, go on fight the war, cover more ground, why are you pausing over this "PR exercise".

But then they (Churchill et al) were right, I was wrong, clearly I am not made up for this kind of stuff.
Do they really have a rule against scraping their scraped data? If so, you'd be in violation of that, but that's your problem with Google now, not Craigslist.
Or more likely CL will just tell Google to stop caching their pages.
I love Trello and am a huge fan. I'm finding that I don't use it as much as I thought I would, though.

The missing feature for me is the ability to share a column between boards. This would let me work with other people. Work is hierarchical. I make big decisions and then those big decisions get split up and consumed by other folks. I can't have everybody controlling boards at every level. So when I drop "clean room" to my "Stuff my son is handling" column, I don't care or know how he breaks that up and does it. All I care about is that once he's broken up that work and completed all of it that he passes the card to my "done" column. I create and track the task at a high level. He does the same at a lower level. My big task breaks up into a bunch of small tasks for him. The same kind of scenario plays out in lots of things: refurbishing a house, planning for a summer vacation, tending to landscaping around the house, and so on.

Everything can't be flat. There has to be some kind of hierarchical structure. Having one column appear in multiple boards would allow that to happen. Might be some other solutions. Don't know. You could get into some kind of parent-child thing, but that's butt-ugly. I think just letting one column exist on multiple boards would solve the problem without creating a complexity problem.

That's the one thing preventing me from active use. If they could fix that, and somehow figure out the hosting/privacy issues many companies have, it'd be a perfect app. Keep up the awesome work, guys!
This is a slightly complicated topic. It comes down to a substantial difference between elite state institutions and elite privates, undergraduate and graduate programs, and engineering/cs vs general majors.

Elite private universities (stanford, harvard) tend to have very small undergraduate populations and draw from a national or international pool of applicants. This of course makes them highly selective, as spots are scarce and the applicant pool is large. Public universities (Berkeley, UW) have very large undergraduate student bodies (often 5 times the size of a small private) and require a much larger portion of in-state students. More slots, smaller applicant pool means a much higher admission rate and generally lower numbers (SATs and so forth). Like another poster mentioned, 25%ile at MIT > 75% at UW, but the top 25% of the class at UW is larger than the entire undergrad population at MIT. The difference in nature of undergraduate admissions makes the averaging kind of meaningless.

At the graduate level, elite private and public universities tend to admit roughly similar numbers of students. And not surprisingly, admission rates are much more comparable. Elite publics, for some reason, seem to do particularly well at the grad level in engineering and computer science (aside from Cornell, the ivies don't really show up much on the top 10 lists, while Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and so forth are highly ranked - by the same magazine (US News) that doesn't put a single public into the top 20 at the undergrad level).

Lastly, there is the question of the degree itself. At top publics, engineering often requires a second admissions process - you get into Berkeley or UW, and then you have to keep your grades high enough to gain admission to the engineering or CS major. You can gain admission directly to the major from high school, but that's tougher. And the process of getting the degree itself is daunting - I don't know much about UW, but the coursework in CS at Berkeley is extremely rigorous (and I have no reason to think it wouldn't be at UW as well). As with UW, Berkeley does have a much larger undergraduate population. It's less selective because of that (and the in-state quota), but on the way out, we're talking about students in the top quarter of the class, from a major that is extremely difficult to enter and complete.

All in all, I'm not surprised that people would feel that the undergrads who make it out of CS from UW are among the top grads that year. The grad level programs are already known to be top 10, so I don't think that even comes up.
Ask HN: What do you really need help with?
I'm looking at the list on Hacker News, thinking "this can't really be what entrepreneurs need help with right now"-- (ie, do you really need to know the state of Vim immediately?)

I'm curious, what do you all actually need help with in your businesses right now? What challenges you?
A Stress Test of Titan Graph (6 machine cluster - 14 machine read/write servers)
As gray hair as they might be, they come across as rather morally bankrupt and I can't imagine this ending remotely well for anyone in this industry.

Either Google will have to begin applying constraints to cacheing, or the websites will have to apply constraints to Google indexing, or the websites will have to enter into an arms race with the likes of 3taps.

The end result will be a great deal of wasted money, and if 3taps is actually successful, the decimation of the businesses whose data they rely on.

Then what? Is 3taps going to build another Craigslist, for free, and open up their data silo to the internet?
Cartographers, encyclopedicians, and dictionary aggregators have always included some false data as a honeypot: An alleyway might not really exist. An obscure word might have been made up. A famous person might be entirely fictitious. The goal is to catch people copying their books. If you use “original research,” you’d never say that Braythwayt Street runs parallel to Rhodes Avenue in Toronto, you must have copied our map data without permission.

I’m curious as to how padmapper intendeds to solve this problem. If Craigslist seed their listings with something false, that something is entirely craigslist’s copyright. It isn’t a “fact.” They don’t have a right to reproduce it. Lawyers, please chime in.
It it invalid to apply analogies involving physical property to intellectual property. The two are not similar enough for that to be a convincing argument, especially since mere facts aren't protected intellectual property at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
Coda 2.0.1 fails to parse some SSH config directives
I smell DART in the air.
This won't be the last JS app they will abandon.
Looked nice until I saw this example: https://0xDB.org/ . I thought the idea of using Windows-style menus and windows in the browser was pretty much dead? I don't like it at all.
I know it's not what you want to hear, but we have no plans to make a self-hosted version.
> I would respect you more if you just came out and said "fuck Craigslist, we're using their data"

The material facts of a listing on Craigslist don't belong to Craigslist. You can't copyright the fact that a given listing is for $2400 a month. You can't copyright that it's at a given street and cross-street and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms on the premises. I don't even think anyone should copyright the aggregate of the above data. To do so would be evil. (In that there would be widespread implications.)

It's not their data. It's their listing. Those are two different things.

Are you saying that Craigslist doesn't own the data, but it still owns the aggregation of the data?
The future is always expensive (think cars, when they first arrived) and then gets progressively cheaper.

And looking at the price to sequence DNA -- I have seen little, if anything, that ever crashed that fast.
YMMV. I used it every day at work for years. I never got used to it, never fell in love with it.
I think you need to take one more step back. Craigslist doesn't own the listing data on their site. They even say so and for a VERY important reason.

If they own the listing data, they're responsible for it's content. So, in some cases, they'd be responsible for selling sex, drugs, and stolen property. Not to mention responsible for a murder or two.

As soon as they claim they own the user generated content, they'll be opening themselves to thousands of lawsuits for their complicity in thousands of illegal acts.

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...
True. That is a good point.
Student creates world's fastest shoe with a printer
Eero - A new ObjC compatible language inspired by Smalltalk, Python and Ruby
Manny spammers buy email lists. They don't harvest addresses themselves. By your logic, they've "gotten around the objection".
Closer to black than gray.

It's data that a CL user has entrusted to CL. The user could've gone with PadMapper but they didn't. Being posted publicly is irrelevant, since the user agreed to CL's TOS not PadMapper's.

The direction PadMapper should be going in is to forget about the CL data and do things that make it number one over CL. Stealing CL's clients is fair game and in the long run aren't one CL TOS change from being in the wrong again.