skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most online learning courses aren't particularly challenging. There are exceptions (Coursera's Probabilistic Graphical Models, MitX's circuits etc) but most courses seem watered down for online consumption.

One big flaw I can see is that there is no way to do proofs or otherwise handle theory in the problems sets and assignments. This limits exploration in depth, particularly for math/science/CS.
I'm guessing they're not cracking down on the ones that opted to contractually license the CL data.
Because we're also a community of apartment seekers, and Padmapper makes Craigslist's data many times more useful. It's fine if Craigslist wants us to use their mapping service, but it doesn't exist yet. It's a purely selfish argument, but shutting down Padmapper does nothing but make our lives more difficult.
Too bad it doesn't matter at all what you personally recognize. I happen to agree with you. And it does suck that reason has anything to do with this stuff. It's about money and control. This is just another example of a few people or corporate entities vacuuming up all the resources of the world. In this case they are vacuuming up raw ideas and the ability for individuals to profit from those ideas. They do this because they can. They have power and they use that power to change policy to allow them to do this. It's that simple. And it will only get "better" if it suits them. And I don't see it suiting them. Vive la revolution!
that seems pretty good, I am going to look into it a bit more. thanks for the suggestion.
The decisions listed (buying a house, retiring, paying for college, etc) are all fairly infrequent, separated by many many years - so not much value from return users. I think getting $$$ from people for that is going to be very very tough unless they can quickly expand and become the "financial decision-making engine" for pretty much every $500+ purchase in your life.

If that's not in the cards, they must be thinking of (A) targeting intermediaries (e.g. mortgage people at banks to use with their clients), or maybe (B) planning something a-la-Mint (e.g. present you with relevant offers to whatever it is you're considering buying/leasing)... or maybe something else?

Curious to hear how you guys are planning to monetize...
Attitude? Your use of that word should set off alarm bells in your own head. I'm talking about a matter of fact, not a point of ideology.

I know people can work many more than 40 productive hours a week for years at a time because I did it myself during Viaweb. I know lots of YC founders who do as well.

I also know from my own experience that this ability varies between people. I can't work the hours now at 47 that I could at 30.

Why shouldn't ability to work vary among humans? Practically every other ability does.
Sources: Google's Sparrow purchase cost under $25 million
>> you have no practical ability to distinguish between the two at the time

That's BS. You talk to your customer and tell them payment is due. You then act accordingly based on the legitimacy of the response. Believe it or not, there are quite a lot of organizations that just pay on their own schedule (i.e., 60 days after receipt of invoice, regardless of terms), but they do pay.

Going adversarial at the first moment of non-payment (i.e., "they have ceased being customers at the point of nonpayment") is just a sign of inexperience and honestly, ignorant of how businesses typically work.
I agree! On top of that, the ability to free-ride off of other's data without permission could be seen as an attempt to stiffle innovation as well. Why should I take the time to build something when (a) others can come along and use my data for free and take away my market share or (b) I can just wait a year and scrape the data off of somebody else and not do as much work.

It seems about time Craigslist re-evaluates creating an API. They have such vast amount of local data that others could use that they could easily charge for use and make some money there.
Are you talking about this?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sigames.fm....

If so, it seems to be doing pretty well so far for a $10 app.
Ask HN: As a remote worker, would you resist screen monitoring software?
I run a small software development company, about 10 remote software developers. I have great relationship with them and they are really good developers. From time to time I have a feeling their productivity is not great. Also they fill their time sheets once a month and I am not sure how accurate their time reports are - which we use for billing.

I don't want to invade their privacy and don't want to send them a message that I don't trust them if I recommend screen monitoring software like Time Doctor. I understand that like inhouse staff they have right to waste some work time too, but my nature is that sometimes I think about it too much and doubt my staff if they really work. This affects my relationship with them and I am trying hard to prevent myself from showing it publicly.

Time tracking would probably solve my uncertainty and make me feel better about their productivity.

I am thinking of giving them a payrise - e.g. 5-10% if they accept the use of this software.

Would you accept this offer if I gave it to you?
Ugh, per-process licensing? What is this, 1995?
In Chinese the fraction 355/113 has been known as the 密率 ("detailed ratio") and 22/7 as the 约率 ("approximate ratio"). It is documented in the Book of Sui, volume 16:

宋末，南徐州從事史祖沖之，更開密法，以圓徑一億為一丈，圓周盈數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒七忽，朒數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒六忽，正數在盈朒二限之間。密率，圓徑一百一十三，圓周三百五十五。約率，圓徑七，週二十二。 [1]

While it suggests that the value was calculated around the end of the Liu Song Dynasty (~479 CE) by Zu Chongzhi to have an upper bound of 3.1415927 and lower bound of 3.1415926, the 密法 method is not explained.

It has been thought that Zu may have used a "method of averaging days" to calculate an intermediate value between two prior known approximations of 22/7 and 157/50 [2]. Not a very satisfying result for anyone who wants to find something special in the numbers 355 and 113.

[1] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%9A%8B%E6%9B%B8/%E5%8D%B71...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=QlbzjN_5pDoC&lpg=PA34&#...
I have no motivation to read that wall of text, but if I had a business that was considering a Groupon deal I most certainly would.
Is there some reason documentation on the Golang website has 57 upvotes?
I wonder what would happen if their mobile app was simply a browser shell pointing to a mobile-optimized website. That mobile-optimized website could be accessible from a desktop, though unadvertised.
s/employee/open source programmer
We are building the new social ad unit at Referly - and every word is written and targeted by humans, not demographic algorithms
I think the neatest outcome it that this may encourage more people to play around with datalog. Coming from a SQL background, I used to say that I wanted first class functions in SQL. Who knew that this little restricted version of prolog would enjoy such a renaissance? See also cascalog . . .
Maybe they had a rough childhood.
There is no reason for any new language to lack tagged union types. It disturbs me that Brian Cox rejects a simple, proven language feature that he does not even understand, even though it would take all of 2 minutes of searching/reading to understand. I'm sure he spent at least that long composing the replies in that thread, never moving past the ego-threat of "will Go ever have X?" to honestly evaluate the question.
Youtube use explodes on the 2012 campaign trail
Well, I got stopped as soon as I hit the Javascript-dependent template.

I realize I'm a bit on the fringe, here, and I've complained about it before. But I do not like "basic" web pages, e.g. this blog post, becoming dependent upon local execution of arbitrary code (in which camp I'm not including HTML and CSS).

For me, it's a matter of security. And I'll continue to whitelist, based upon established trust.
Iranian nuclear program hacked, made to play AC/DC
That sucks. I have been a long time Apple supporter and I am disappointed in them. That said, Samsung should play the game and make their stuff look different.

I just got a Samsung Galaxy S III phone: fantastic device (1280 x 720 pixel screen). Really awesome :-) I find myself using it instead of my iPad (although the iPad is great for web browsing and Netflix).
Buy/rent calculators are definitely a great tool for homebuying assistance but we need more things like how what area to choose based on preferences (suggest me possible areas based on my preference?), should i really buy even if financially feasible (single vs. married couples etc), what is my possible job outlook or status in next 3-5 years, do i expect to move soon? if an app can take in all these factors along with financials, it could suggest something close enough.
"(Craigslist) said it offered a license that would have allowed PadMapper to use its data on mobile applications but that the competitor did not accept the terms."

But on the other hand, "users and developers are exasperated with Craigslist’s insistence on preserving an outdated interface and design."

I don't know the legal merits of either party's position, but from an ethical perspective, I tend to side with Craigslist here. Dissatisfaction with a commercial site's UI is not just cause for using their data without permission, particularly if they had made an effort to offer a licensing agreement, whatever the terms might have been.
Why I'm not switching my bank to Simple
My nutshell answer to "What is datomic?":

It is a database system for Java or Clojure where not all of the database code runs on the server. Instead, the server is fast and "dumb" and all the work for your queries runs on each client individually, which just cache chunks of data from the servers as needed. It turns out having your queries run on the clients has nice properties in terms of query language power and performance.

Additionally, it has an extremely powerful and elegant way of tracking historical information: No data is ever forgotten, so that if you want to say "run this query against the database as it was last Wednesday" you can do that. In a typical production application, much of the complexity in the database comes from having special auditing tables that keep track of historical info- In datomic you don't need to have such tables.

Finally, it can do all of these things while still being highly scalable (with a small caveat that it might not fully scale in the rare case where you have an app that is extremely write-heavy.)
That is hardly shutting down Padmapper. It is just a roadblock and they would have to find another source of data. It has been clear for many years that Craigslist doesn't want their site scraped, so building a business that is so dependent that it would close if they lost that source the business would be ruined is extremely short sighted.

Edit: finished my thought that I left out mid-sentence.
Craig is paranoid about changing the UI of craigslist. So while I don't feel they're unjust in suing, he is indeed stifling innovation.
Genocide turned out to be the high order bit, but even in 1942 the Nazis were clearly bad news on account of conquering Europe and starting World War II.

I'll just note that the United States gets criticized for not rushing into war against aggressive dictators about as often as it gets criticized for actually doing so. The record of the other Western allies is little better on that account, as they explicitly abandoned Czechoslovakia and implicitly abandoned Poland, Norway, Denmark, and even France.
I hope there's some standardization too. You'd think there would be some coalescing around the most popular OAuth2 implementation: Facebook's. But even they weren't big enough to get people to settle on one.
I would think that the search algorithms are smart enough to conflate references to go in an article about programming with golang as a search query. I am not a google engineer but I do know that they have very good "did you mean" analysis on search queries.
Not everything in the world is a business model. If Linus was in for the money 20 years ago, the world that we live in would be seriously fucked up (much more than it is today). Same goes for Google's Android - it's open, it's free. It's focused on abundance, on sharing.
Are you referring to stealing in terms of ethics, or theft in terms of the legal system? Ethics are subjective, so I don't really want to go down that road. In terms of US law, however, the Supreme Court case Dowling v. United States found that "interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud." (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Theft )
Firefox Aurora has existed for the last few years. It's their preview release of stuff, equivalent to Chrome Canary.
The same reason facebook bought instagram: craigslist doesn't want any other web site's userbase to become the kernel for a replacement listing service.

Once you have a web site that attracts buyers, you can replace craigslist data with your own listing service and stop paying for their API.

They clearly don't fear this kind of competition in the mobile space, hence offering licenses for mobile-only API use.
The only problem with a calculator like this (intelligent as it is), is that it doesn't model the most significant cost of home ownership - upkeep. Compound that with a complete inability to model the risk associated with "home price appreciation" and it's really only of academic interest.

In my experience this decision cannot be made empirically - home ownership will probably be more expensive, but will afford more freedom and stability (no one will sell the property out from under you and disrupt your family). In addition, like any investment, there is a possibility but not a guarantee that the asset will appreciate; however this is not a given - look closely at the economic future of your location and try to decide if there will be more or less demand to live there in twenty years - the Bay Area will probably be safe :)

There's also a significant opportunity cost attached to a down payment.

Don't get me wrong, I think SmartAsset has done a phenomenal job with this calculator! Just keep some of the intangibles in mind that are impossible to model this way before making the decision to rent/buy for yourself.
they won't be if they've paid to use the craigslist mobile api.
IIRC there are already 70(?) million WP sites, with 45(?) million not hosted on wordpress.com. I wouldn't be surprised if this built in git deployment makes that number grow much more quickly. It sounds like a lot of people already treat WP like a tech stack. So, this could basically be treated like heroku.
Couple of questions

Is this Net Present value ?

Do you publish the calculations that got us there (I could not see it)

There seems to be some sensitivity to a few key variables (down payment?) - is there a write up of the algorithm (in plain english :-)

But its pretty good - I just chucked in my UK prices and guesstimated equivalent rental, but its quite a shock - I expected to see rental as a more expensive option much much earlier and by a wider margin. its 20 years before you start saying - well thats worth it.
What is Static Code Analysis
You can also do that in common-lisp by using the special form `with-open-file` is built upon: unwind-protect[0]. `with-open-file` is just a macro over it, specialized for files handling.

[0] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...
Thanks, this will be very useful when I decide to become a criminal! If you have any tips on pickpocketing or insurance fraud, please post those as well.
At least they're not claiming a violation of the CFAA (which I think would actually be a more straightforward argument).
How does this differ from Readability or Instapaper stripping advertisements away and serving users pure content in their respective interfaces? I'm not sure what they're doing is illegal.
Most likely because Google aren't using their service to compete with, e.g., Craigslist. I also imagine that if you ask Google (especially with a C&D), they'll be more than happy to remove you from their index.
I love hot dogs.
I'm using vim with the vim plugins that come in go/misc/vim. I use :Import and :Drop for adding and removing imports, and :Fmt to run gofmt in vim. I also have a git pre-commit hook that runs gofmt.
I'm confused. I see the word "engineer" appear several times, but the company appears to offer MP3 recording technology and a "share" button.

Where are the moving parts?
In the words of Neven Mrgan, "Huh. You made the app icon blue? Interesting choice…"
So because the private licensing terms offered were not optimal for PadMapper, it follows that PadMapper should just ignore their public licensing altogether?
Because if you ask Google to remove you from their index, they will.

Rupert Murdoch has threatened this in the past. Each time he's backed down, because he knows that being removed from Google's index is akin to being removed from the Internet.
I actually turned down a really good job because they insisted on installing Screen Sharing (for viewing only) software on my personal laptop (they didn't have the resources to provide a company one). It just makes the worker feel like they are constantly (like 100%) micromanaged. Also they may have to modify their workflow as they may be using quick shortcuts, un-approved software, etc and feel that you would not approve if you knew they used it. The way I look at it, I don't care if they only work 15 minutes of a 8 hour day as long as their tasks are getting done and getting done reliably and thoughtfully (i.e. not hacked up garbage just to make a "this many lines of code by x" schedule). Not only do they feel micromanaged, but in this instance I felt as if they were more worried about me doing work once hired than actually preparing me to work there (i.e. they could spend $199 on screen observing software but couldn't get a hold of a spare ThinkPad).
Why Life Science Needs Its Own Silicon Valley
I agree that this isn't a simple open and shut case. But, I doubt that PadMapper will take things the distance before rolling over.

It's not a new thing for a start-up to use Craigslist to gain an advantage (i.e. AirBnB), but they all seem to eventually be cut-off.
Care you explain? I don't know what the CFAA is.
some of the above is already available (eg we model taxes for single and married couples so you can flex that in the assumptions - also most of the data we use is local to the zipcode you are searching in) and some of it is on the way (like contextualizing our advice with the type of home you can afford and more qualitative neighborhood info).
Although this might fly with some SMBs, this is not how multinational companies work.

In a typical multinational company there is an annual DPO (Days Payables Outstanding) goal, that shall be achieved no matter what. So unless a vendor has monopoly or has unique product/service, such approach will not fly [unless all such vendors have the same terms].

So if all software developers are using 30 days or 60 days terms, 10 days will not fly.

Until then, I would recommend a more constructive approach - use factoring. Don't know the cost in US, but certainly less than 10%. Increase your price by the factoring charge. Note that this might require you to update your contract and include right to re-assignment [check with legal person].
the obvious one is about three comments down - a guy in the UK wants to join up and use the engine. I suspect that most mortgage providers would be happy to have you play with a "independent" site that shows you how much richer you will be in 20 years if you buy their mortgage, and price comparison sites would love to show you which mortgage will pay off most in 10 and 20 years.

That's probably worth following up - is there a way of putting multiple mortgage lines in there ? I assume its doable.

Edit spelling
There's no doubting the legality of Padmapper scraping Craigslist data, so I think now would be a good time for him to innovate and really push his other product, PadLister. If Eric were to write another blog post, I'd make PadLister the focus of it and start building a new community there.
Hmm, if all this is true, then how can any successful company have an open source software product? Bacula http://www.bacula.org/en/ is a great backup solution available fore free, with installers, yet they run a successful business.
Yes, but in light of the current events, you'd think it'd be changed.
I see this from the opposite viewpoint, that PadMapper is operating as a search engine designed to help you find the right Craigslist posts for your apartment hunt. Claiming that PadMapper's success is from Craigslist failing to 'provide a good UI' is like suggesting that Google News' success is because newspaper companies failed to provide good article SEO. Instead, it's a different modality of content discovery, and it ultimately redirects you to the original source.

In my (personal) opinion, I would argue that the content providers or aggregators and search engines benefit synergistically. CL and Belgian newspapers appear to disagree.
I was always wondering that. In essence, both cases appropriate CL's data for the users benefit, and both tend to send traffic back. I'm currently in a similar situation, where I have to ask myself how much i can scrape/aggregate/visualize 3rd party data that is useful to an user while stil providing value to the 3rd party.

I believe ultimately, it is at the 3rd partys (in this case Craigslist) discretion who is allowed to appropriate their data and who not.
They have an api for mobile apps. If you haven't purchased it, doesn't that tell you all you need to know?
I would bet the OP, while having no problem with late penalties on his own invoices, would have trouble signing a contract that penalized him for being late.
No, it's the other way around. I view real Craigslist pages but use Padmapper to get me there.
HTML Canvas Book open sourced
Yup, "treating it like Heroku" is exactly our idea! They showed the way and we're happy to follow their lead and bring that functionality to the WordPress community.
Actually, it's quite a good analogy. No one benefits from this strategy in the final analysis because a race to the bottom makes all developers paupers. Smoking a cigarette relieves the pains of addiction (delivers short-term profit), kills you in the long term (destroys your business model), and imperils the health of the people around you (makes iOS and Android less desirable platforms).

That said, I disagree with the careless linking of FOSS principles and bad market practices. Linux, BSD, Apache: these technologies and others have had enormous positive impact that has enriched the industry as a whole more than paid versions could ever have benefited individual developers. However, the existence and promotion of FOSS in no way guarantees the cancer of one-dollar apps. Only developers' persistent undervaluation of their own work can do that. Specifically, their rush to capture the long tail of cheapskates at the cost of forgoing the bulk of the consumer surplus makes the entire market less desirable. Everybody loses when we must wade through a swamp of low-cost crap rather than the garden of costlier but higher-quality services we'd wish for.
we intend to build a platform for all personal finance decisions. the home purchase decision is just the tip of the iceberg and even here we are just getting started. In 18 months we intend to be able to provide personalized, interactive answers to over 200 questions, on topics from car buying to going back to school, to family and retirement planning.
The criticism here would probably apply to any other framework in the same space - the alternative way to solve those problems can only be described in guiding principles - otherwise he'd be incurring in the same mistake he is criticizing, by giving you another framework...
> I honestly wish they'd take names off the comments too

I have seen familiar (absolutely not famous) handles from IRC on HN on two occasions. Made me happy. I can't turn this into a more rational point, though.