slay2k

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Thanks to all three of you for the insights.

It's amazing how strange something can appear when interpreted in a different social or cultural context.

Crazy. To what end, food on the table ?

This would also imply the children took guns to school. Am I the only one who finds this rather insane ? Also, if you happen to have any links on the matter I'd appreciate it.

Awesome read, though Jefferson seems to have suffered from the "these are facts because I said so" type of thinking. Here are some relevant quotes:

  "Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind."

  "Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind."

  "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. [snip] Walking is the best possible exercise."

That last one leaves me pondering what he's talking about, since he doesn't appear to be referring to hunting, unless it's the long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind..

Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ? I kind of wanna give it a shot.

I think your whole post argues against you.

Craig was a developer. Whether he was good or not is irrelevant, but he knew enough to write a prototype. He had (and arguably still has) little business skills. If he hadn't been a developer, there would be no Craigslist.

The same applies to Markus Frind, the google boys, and the majority of famous tech startups. Hell, even in Sun's case, Vinod (MBA) approached Andy (PhD) wanting to grow an existing, already-profitable business.

> Only on HN would people argue that it's more important for a small business owner to know how to write code than to know business.

If the small business is a bootstrapping internet startup, then yes we'd rather know how to code.

I think a more accurate mentality is if you build it they CAN come. I'm fully aware that the act of building itself means nothing, so let's not make this all black and white.

What I meant is that learning how to email bloggers, use adwords, optimize for SEO and create funnels, or the B&M version of the above, is about 500x easier than being technically competent.

I have a tech background. I've built sites that achieved rapid growth. No, it didn't happen magically on its own. Yes, I eventually learned about A/B testing and conversion. But if life was an RPG, I'd load my character up on the technical mastery, knowing how much harder that is to build up relative to business skills.

No, I'd argue he's worse off than most.

You can hire business and marketing and PR people the same way he can hire programmers, administrators and so forth. The difference is, even if you don't hire those people you can still have a viable product with lots of users. He can't have anything without paying for it and keeping fingers crossed.

In any case, I hope you guys work something mutually beneficial out.

You realize there are highly skilled, entrepreneurial people willing to work for $100-200/hr, right ? Especially part time.

I'm your inverse in the sense that I'm done w/ grad school and now doing freelancing/consulting to fund my own web-based projects.

Hell, go get your degree and I'll grow your business while you're gone, all the while kicking back 20-25% of consulting income. So you'll make a passive $60k+ a year while continuing to own your operation. And I won't have to spend time looking for clients.

Trust is a real issue, of course, but there are genuine hard-working people out there. If you want to talk more, my email's in my profile.

Did you know that clicking on the item in the list pane opens the eBay item page ?

But yeah, I'll make browsing the map-side a little more intuitive and have it popup images on the left hand side.

Thank you for the constructive criticism :)

#7 - there's a checkbox for that called Show Auctions, maybe I should rename it. #6 - what do you mean show you the eBay link ?

I'll look into the others.

I'm sure your search terms had nothing to do with it. Thanks for sharing.

Point taken, but who asked for your money ?

maybe you're wound a little tight ?

Cool, glad you recognize it, and your first reaction was ?

It's only a distraction if you can recognize it, which slots you into a pretty miniscule percentage of the population.

That said, I realize the responsibilities of being in the public view, but right now the site is hardly in anyone's view, so what's the harm ?

Easiest place to start. Internationalizing will take more work, but it's on my list.

Sweet, like it enough to come back and use it on your own ?

Hmm, good points... thanks.

And yes, the original was based on CL, but it was exponentially more difficult to operate.

Hey,

I'd love to take a few of these off you if you don't mind shipping to LA. Of course I'll cover shipping. Specifically (8, 11, 17, 19).

My email's in my profile,

Thanks!

Better article:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business-headlines/ci_14416855

This is depressing.

To quote Paul Buchheit, all such 'advice' is just someone's limited life experience expressed as a set of over-generalizations. If it was really this simple, VCs would have success rates upwards of 90%.

All said, I can understand how someone who reads proposals for a living could come off sounding jaded. It's pretty easy to pass judgment, especially from the sidelines.

Thank you for the life lesson luckydude, but I'd prefer an explanation from Craig or Jim themselves.

It would only be disingenuous if there was any kind of commercial aspect to the site as it stands. There was none, and "rolling it out" on HN is merely asking for feedback, not trying to sign up paid users.

In the email exchange I've had with Craig, not all of which I've posted, I've asked him to clarify on this point:

"Oh, and about being noncommercial. A bunch of the RSS mashup sites I've seen, like Craiglook, throw up advertising presumably to cover server costs or make a few bucks. If I didn't want to go that route, would asking for donations be acceptable ?"

In his response, he said he can ask. I said please do, and that was the end of it. So for CL to break things when there is absolutely no sign of commercial purpose is a little unnecessary in my eyes.

Not today he isn't, asked him 3 hours ago, no response.

Craig Newmark: "as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes."

What's predictable here ?

Understood, and I'd have them already if craig decided to not exclude them from RSS feeds. Presumably to shut down previous, more annoying offenders. Wanna talk to him ? :)

Thanks. What is it specifically that you've been craving ?

Tell you what, get a bunch of your friends to email me requests for a Canadian province, and I'll start pulling it into our db :)

romy@ucla d0t edu

If there's a geocodable address in the optional location field, we use that. If not, it will default to the general region it's posted in.

We're currently seeing approx 75% of listings geocoding correctly, but like you said the resolution is often low. In order to change that, we'd need at minimum cross-street level data from Craig. And although I've talked to him about it, I don't think I have enough leverage to change this without a user outcry..

Appreciate the quote, but I know all this. This is why a) we don't pull from craigslist and b) i've talked to craig about it.

I chose to talk to him even though we could get the data without them knowing.