skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a smart business decision to me. It would just make sense to pursue this new revenue stream, and license out an API. This response just seems like more of an emotional response than a business strategy.

Edit: Not sure why this comment is getting down-voted, but if I offended some one that was not my intention.
How Craigslist can evolve:

Become a for-pay API.

Thoughts?
Fed-sponsored cybersecurity talent competition for 9th graders
Why Flash Photography Is Banned In Art Galleries
Social Business Capital and the New Start-up Manager
Also in the revolutionary category, all data is treated as immutable, and what we traditionally consider an update to a piece of stored data (with the change being made in-place of the original datum) is treated as a new fact with just the time being different (a new record with the change in value is created along with the time of change). Since data is never changed, only added, there is no need for the traditional transaction locks, etc., thus providing a whole new way to manage and process your data and providing a perfect audit trail in the process.
Microsoft details Windows Store app pricing
>but ascribing the high homicide rate only to racial diversity seems reductive.

I'm not ascribing it to racial diversity. I'll elaborate a bit on exactly what I mean--I'm ascribing it to a particular cultural mix that is in part uniquely derived from the New World's history with slavery.

>n the US this poor are black, while in other countries the social segregation goes around different lines (e.g. gipsies in eastern europe).

That's not comparable, Gypsies do not make up anywhere near the percent of the population in Europe that black americans do in the US (also according to wikipedia we have have more Gypsies in the US than the vast majority of European countries).

>is actually the same as saying "poor/uneducated/mistreated people are responsible for most killing"

That's not correct. If it were that simple, once you adjusted for education and income, you would expect to find similar crime rates between blacks and whites, and nearly identical crime rates between blacks and other minorities. But that isn't the case, a poor uneducated black person is still many times more likely to commit a crime than any other poor uneducated race/ethnicity in the US.

Yes there have been plenty of cases of discrimination against minorities and increased criminality amongst minorities, but there are two factors here which seem to be fairly unique.

1. Descended from slaves. There is no other first world country where 13% of it's population is recently descended from slaves, forcibly moved there. In fact if you'll look at every other country in world that does have a large percentage of slave descendants, you'll find an incredibly high crime rate.

If you look at the top 20 countries by intentional homicide rate[0], you'll note that all but South Africa are in the New World, and have some recent(last 200 years) history of slavery.

2. No other first world country has had such a large single monolithic underclass for nearly its entire history. Underclasses come and go as immigrants assimilate. That hasn't been the case in the us with this one particular group.

In the end what I'm arguing is that you can't compare the U.S. to Europe, there are just too many differences to take into account. Take 2 separate groups in the US--blacks and whites--adjust for income--and you'll find that whites, even poor uneducated ones, have a similar homicide rate to other first world countries. Therefore gun ownership/access is not what causes our high homicide rate.

I would argue that if you banned guns tomorrow, and every law abiding citizen in the US decided to march down to the police station and turn in his gun, we would still have a murder rate much higher than nearly every country in Europe.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... Note that the top 20 countries have far higher murder rates than the next 20
Say Hello To Pearltrees For iPhone
DJ Shadow distributes through BitTorrent… and gets paid for it
I don't get it. Can someone explain to me how this is different or better than:

infile = open('site.log'); outfile = open('err.log', 'w')
for line in infile:
if 'ERROR' in line:
outfile.write(line)
infile.close(); outfile.close()

Sure, you're saving a line with the files being automatically closed at the end of your scope, but hardly "MIND == BLOWN".

What am I missing?
Buy vs Rent chart is not net present valued... not sure if that was your question though?
More involved with the startup/AlphaLab community then the specific tech groups (going to the RubyConf though), I'm sure we'll cross paths at some point!
That seems overly adversarial. 10% per week is punitive; not representing any real cost.

What you should do is charge enough up-front (as a fraction of the invoice or a flat number) and bill frequently enough that a client stringing you along for a bill doesn't really hurt you.

You should also have a few clients going at once so that a few weeks late doesn't mean a few weeks of lost work, because at the first sign of a late payment you switch to other clients.

And for your regular clients, especially ones that have trouble paying quickly (perhaps due to corporate policies), ask for a retainer so you can keep their projects at a high priority without sticking your neck out.

Professionalism and respect go in both directions. Even large companies don't necessarily have a team of people dedicated to paying your bills instantaneously. If it's a good relationship and they value the project and you make it known that prompt payment is necessary to meet the schedule, they will pay promptly. If not, then no amount of punitive late fees will change that.
I've seen a rather light gray pg comment -- not too long ago. Although I don't remember the context, and I don't know whether it stayed that way.
3 Reasons to Use an Escrow Service When Selling a Domain Name Through a Broker
Science publishing: The trouble with retractions
MySpace's problems are due to their user base defecting en masse, I don't think their ad strategy was really a factor. Could be wrong, though.
He also has to be willing to trust that you will actually split what you win after stealing the whole pot. Otherwise, he will worry that you could dupe him and walk away with everything, and then choose to steal.
I interpret this different. I certainly think that Craigslist is stifling innovation (perhaps purposefully, perhaps not), but simply stifling innovation is not illegal.
IFTTT Adds Box And Plans New Channel Platform Intended To Connect Business Apps
Collections For Mac Wants To Be A Universal Finder For The Cloud
Here are a couple of legal questions (not taking sides, just honest questions):

Does the data belong to Craigslist or to those posting on Craigslist?

If so, is this in their TOS? I don't remember ever clicking a checkbox that says "we own your listing" whenever I have sold stuff on Craigslist or posted jobs/gigs. Maybe real estate is different.

Why would I want to give Craigslist ownership of my listing? If I were posting a property for rent I would probably want other services to pick-up the listing.

Similarly, why do they own the Copyright on something I have written?

Again, I don't remember ever giving that away either.
The Original iPad Was Gigantic
I've seen a number of comments over the last few weeks to the effect of "if you don't understand this product, watch the intro video".

In my opinion, if a product can't be described in a couple of concise sentences, it's going to run into some major roadblocks in getting traction.

Watching a video incurs a number of costs - the time taken to watch the video, the effort of plugging in headphones, the pain of buffering content. All of these are minor obstacles, but you want to eliminate as many reasons to leave as possible when attracting a new customer.
Because you specifically grant access to your content using the robots.txt. If you don't want to have your site indexed, then you change your robots.txt. Or like it was said before, you ask Google to remove you from the index.
I guess I should have made that more clear. I'll change it so that it is. I just really liked the article.
I spent a good chunk of time last night working through this tutorial (http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hosting/wordpress-developme...) to set up git deployment for a new Wordpress site. sigh At least I learned some stuff?
Who told you that JavaScript was "not really OO"?
I think "with" is a great example of where Python and Ruby differ philosophically. Python uses "with" to very explicitly implement their state manager protocol.

Ruby doesn't need "with" because "with" is really just a limited special case of what you can do with blocks.

The Python fans will counter that their less general solution is harder to abuse.
I did say "no data is ever forgotten" which is a way of explaining immutability to a layman :)
Has there ever been any consideration at some kind of partnership? I know there may be some bad blood at this point, but I don't see how it wouldn't benefit both Padmapper and Craigslist to potentially work together to create an alternate Craigslist(using the same data). The contracts would have to be thorough about profit sharing, but it seems at least possible.

If people had a secondary Craigslist portal they could use to access the same data, while avoiding the shitty interface, more and more might migrate over to the new 'design'. The current Craislist design has been dated for some time, and I just can't see a startup or even a big player not moving into their space with a better design and interface.
Heartbreaking.

Padmapper is the best apartment rental interface out there. The author has been single handedly working on this for 3-4 years and constantly improving his system.

Legally he might not have been in the right but we should be helping him out not uselessly debating and casting judgement.

If theres anyone who exmplifies the true spirit of Hacker News it would be the author of PadMapper.
Look into wave accounting. It is pretty decent and FREE to use.
Couldn't you argue that _not_ having the most widely used color would be a great differentiator for your app? People have been complaining for the longest time how pages and pages of apps on their iPhone are just pure blue icons. Why be another blue icon lost in a sea of iPhone apps?
Well I certainly didn't say that they can't ask you to look at your bags. As long as the search is voluntary, they can ask pretty much whatever they like. But you can surely say "no" and then leave. If they physically block you from leaving, they are violating the law in many jurisdictions (they're trying to make a citizen's arrest, which you can't just do without any reason, and refusing to let them look in your bag isn't a reason). If they actually touch you, then you may even have claim of assault. From what I can tell, this has not actually been tested directly, but it is a reasonable expectation of how things would play out, if you took it all the way to court.

On the other hand, the store is also perfectly within their rights to ban you from the premises once you've left. So even if they can't arrest you, they can certainly put a picture up that says "Don't let this guy in the store." It is private property, after all.

The main case mentioned in the thelegality.com article you linked ended with Righi settling with the police so that they dropped the charges in exchange for him giving up the right to sue. Given the balance of resources and power between an individual and a police department, I think that's pretty good evidence that the police department themselves didn't think they were going to win that battle.

The Legal Lad article, on the other hand, seems to just wring its hands about various scenarios without addressing the question everyone cares about: You walk out of a Best Buy, nobody has any reason to believe you stole anything, and when they ask to check your bags, you say "no thanks" and walk out.
Thoughts on ECMAScript 6 and new syntax
elegance?
All star daniel alfredsson jersey
"MIND == BLOWN" is a hyperbole in almost every context, but the `with` statement is just cleaner code with fewer chances to screw up (e.g. by forgetting to close).
Considering that firewire is a popular attack vector that isn't really comforting...
I don't think this has any legal bearing for anyone, but it's worth noting that Google respects publishers who do not wish to be indexed.
Thanks, Colin. Should have done that to start with. I really liked Michael's post and thought it could use some new visibility--which is why I wanted my blogs readers to see it (mostly Java guys).
> the results that I collected are from a random sampling of tweets across a 9-hour period, approximately 9am to 5.30pm on the 18th July.

9am to 5.30pm in which time zone? That could greatly skew the data. A better study would be time period that is a multiple of 24 hours.

Day of the week matters, too. People might tweet from the work computers on weekdays and then tweet from the phones on the weekends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

The relevant part of the act would be: "Intentionally accessing a computer without authorization to obtain ... information from any protected computer". A "protected computer" is a computer "which is used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce or communication", which fits Craisglist pretty well.

Violation of the clause I quoted is a criminal offense with potential jail time.
This isn't surprising of course, it is their data after all, but it brings up the 'easy problem' / 'hard problem' (E/H-P) conundrum quite nicely.

The conundrum is that it is 'easy' to take an existing, quality data source, and re-skin it for broader market appeal. This is something that Craigslist should be doing but perhaps through poor management are not. It is 'hard' to take a conceptual model of skinning and building a quality data source behind it.

As I said elsewhere, the PadMapper guys might have taken this to Craigslist and said "Look what we can do with your data, lets make happy music together." and then debated the terms. Or they could take their UX to the venture capital world and say "Look at this cool product we could build if we had access to a database with Craig list's quality" and debate cap tables and dilution (assuming they got to that stage of a term sheet).

But they chose the third route, "Lets see how long we can get away with this..." and the timer on that just ran out.

Sadly, this third path makes the first two paths much harder. Craigslist already sees them as the 'enemy' and VCs will see them as a team that makes poor choices. Both views make it harder (but certainly not impossible) to consummate a deal. However, from the blog and from previous postings here it seems they made those choices with their eyes open.
Again I'm not seeing how a to_lower on a string in any way implies plain text storage. There's no indicator at all frankly. It was a 2 minute decision by whoever implemented the user input and has negligible impact on password entropy.
Well. This has generated quite a conversation (both here, and on the blog post). I suppose I better clear the air, a clean up a few misconceptions. The following is pretty much a cross-post from the comments there:

1. The default terms are exactly that. Default terms. They will be discussed with clients before a project starts, and we will negotiate terms that suit us both. Think of it like asking for all the brown M&Ms being removed from a rockstar's rider. If a client is unwilling to discuss terms with me or unwilling to negotiate for their project, then either the project will proceed with these terms, or I may refuse the project entirely.

2. The actual wording allows me to implement the penalty at my discretion. I've had a couple of late payers, and often just the mention of the penalty will prompt them to pay. I'm not trying to destroy client relationships here - I just want to get paid.

3. A penalty for late payment isn't the only protection; that would just be stupid. Aside from contracts, I am very willing to refuse working for clients who I don't trust to pay on time.

4. This isn't something that I will just spring on a client at the invoicing stage. Yes, it's copy on my invoices, but that's there to remind clients of the agreement.

5. Negotiation is important. I realise that this is a re-hash of point 1, but it bares saying twice. I have contracts with different clients where different terms are enforced. The point is that these are default terms, which are there to protect me and my business. They are my starting point for negotiation. So long as you don't come at me offering "I promise to pay you on time" as a point to negotiate with (you can't negotiate with promises that you should be keeping anyway), then we'll figure out better terms for both of us.
This is properly the best example of why hn needs tags. You think you are going to read an interesting article on food and culture and maybe learn a valuable lesson, when in reality you get a piece of whyning crap delivered by a marketeer.
> As far as I can see, whenever the Go team encountered a language feature that could possibly be abused, they always deferred to leaving it out.

All features can be abused.

The Go philosophy is more to leave out features that obscure the meaning and understanding of code (what is also known as "magic").

Also part of the Go philosophy is to not include any feature unless it is clear that its benefits are greater than its costs, and which might interact in unpredictable ways with other existing features.

In other words, the default is to leave things out, rather than to include them, the opposite of a kitchen sink approach.
The 10 Coolest Security Startups Of 2012 (So Far)
A list of the key startups that are focusing on the security space with a variety of different offerings that include cloud security, authentication, identity management, access management and encryption.
This is a "feature" (simple crud) that would take 6 clicks to build in Visual Studio (just saying) :-)
Double Standards
Their iPad app is one of my guilty pleasures. (ditto HotPads and Redfin)
Does PadMapper respect the robots.txt file?
If what 3Taps is doing is illegal, then what Google is doing is illegal. It's a search engine.
It's a project that allows the Clojure guys to monetize their work.

Go ahead HN Lisp lovers, kill my karma!
Can you/he give examples for task he can automate with a program?
It is up to Craigslist, and Craigslist only. I prefer not to speculate.

They already offer an API for mobile.
Does Grunting Help Tennis Players Win?
You're missing that if an exception gets thrown, the files are still guaranteed to be closed as soon as you exit that 'with' block.

Imagine you open 'infile', but then opening 'outfile' fails. To prevent a resource leak, now you need to close 'infile'. The linked code guarantees this. Likewise if there is any error which aborts the copying, both files will get closed and you don't have to worry so much about corner cases.

See this for more:

http://effbot.org/zone/python-with-statement.htm
Padmapper doesn't infringe copyrights either.

edit: Ok, I won't be so cryptic. Padmapper doesn't copy the posts on Craigslist, they link to them. That's not a semantic quibble. All search engines do so. If I blogged that I was renting my apartment and linked to the Craigslist post describing it, I would be doing exactly what Padmapper is doing.
I think they tried to circumvent that using 3tap or whatever the site was that was scraping Google's cache.
Iirc there's a certain site that requires you to solve a differential equation as captcha. The name escapes my mind.
Code a Dynamic Photo Login Box using Gravatar
"why?"
WP Engine Announces Git Push to Deploy
Ah, that makes sense. Really good explanation. Thanks!
I agree HN needs tags but still think this was an interesting post. While the analogy could have been more thoughtfully constructed, I think the topic is very relevant right now for startup business models (ad-supported versus paid).
When our clients didn't pay us, we stopped all work on that project until we had their money in our bank account. That's really the best incentive: send out invoices once a month, and stop work on whoever doesn't pay you. People don't want to see all that money they paid go down the toilet. Getting 10-20% up front eradicates situations where people who don't want to send you the last payment for a finished project.

There's also nothing wrong with actually paying them a visit and politely demanding your money (only if they're in town of course). This can make you seem a bit more like you actually exist and you're not some piece of paper asking for money.
PadMapper gets no traffic from Craigslist. Craiglist gets traffic from PadMapper.

PadMapper is basically a pointer to a listing on Craigslist (when Craigslist listings are the reference), where you can search the pointers with filtering that you can't on Craigslist. In order to get to PadMapper, you have to visit the site directly.
Craigslist has the better of the arguments; both Padmapper and 3taps are violating (and probably bound by) the terms of use agreement:
https://plus.google.com/112961607570158342254/posts/HcCuHVG7...
OK... but I still don't feel bad for crazy, unreasonable business plans that fail.
The first step to beating Craigslist at apartment listings is to get everyone to use a different front-end. (ie. Padmapper) Then you offer a way to create listings entirely within that front-end and bypass Craigslist entirely. CL becomes little more than a backend database, and eventually goes out of business as no one needs to use it anymore.
I think Padmapper in particular is in a unique position where while they started with CL listings, it's proven itself an invaluable enough service to enough of us to the point where I'd use it exclusively to list my apartment over Craigslist. I'd even pay month-to-month for exclusive or time-sensitive listings given the way I use it.

Whether or not Padmapper is in the right here, CL's long-standing stance in not evolving their UI or creating a decent API is going to bite them in the ass. Helping people sort your content is now more important for them than the idea that change is bad or time-consuming. As many people have said in the past, it wouldn't take much to really bring CL up-to-speed, but if they don't want to do it themselves, they should at least make it an option for others to pay a fee to use the data.

Edit: Didn't realize http://www.padlister.com/ already existed. Score.
At MIT, 6.00 is an introductory course. Most EECS majors do not take it. It's intended for people interested in EECS but who do not have much prior experience. It is in no way an easy course though---it's fast paced and covers a large amount of material. The only thing "introductory" is the minimal background assumed.
Not necessarily, here's an alternate view: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=892062

>The conventional wisdom holds that American patents have always been grants of special monopoly privileges lacking any justification in natural rights philosophy, a belief based in oft-repeated citations to Thomas Jefferson's writings on patents. Using 'privilege' as a fulcrum in its analysis, this Article reveals that the history of early American patent law has been widely misunderstood and misused. In canvassing primary historical sources, including political and legal treatises, Founders' writings, congressional reports, and long-forgotten court decisions, it explains how patent rights were defined and enforced under the social contract doctrine and labor theory of property of natural rights philosophy. In the antebellum years, patents were civil rights securing important property rights -- what natural-rights-influenced politicians and jurists called 'privileges.'
> Patent infringment consists of using some technique without the permission of the owner.

There are different punishments for patent infringement with and without intent, so by definition you can have patent infringement without intent.