skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true. If you violate a patent while knowing about the patent you are violating you can be on the hook for triple (treble in lawyer-speak) damages compared to a violation where you didn't know of the patent previously.

For this reason, a lot of companies I've worked for have had a blanket policy requesting that software developers never read patents, especially in areas the company is working in.

Of course the fact that you can very easily violate many patents without having ever read them is just more evidence that the patent system isn't currently serving a useful purpose for anyone but patent trolls and lawyers.
I don't dislike Software Architects (I've only worked with actually brilliant people with the SA title), but I think there's a strong truth to this:

"The SA/Dev stratification is an anti-pattern."

A good architecture is a good high level organization of the code. To be a good architect, you have to be a good developer. And you cannot be a good developer without being good at software architecture. So as far as I can tell, the only actual reason for the SA/Dev divide is to have titles to give to people. Titles are essentially something an organization gives to people in order to keep them happy. And to me, "architect" seems like a fancier title than "developer", if only to sound better to strangers at a party.

I'd like to hear people's opinion of this. In my organization, there are two career paths, one for "architects" and one for "system developers". They are presented as equally valuable roles. Are they actually distinct roles, or only a useful invention for the organization? Moreover, is this distinction actually valuable?
Twitter adds spell correct and auto-suggest to its search
Ask HN: App Store Devs, Are you guys still motivated?
We now know that the vast majority of apps make a large loss. They are part of the long tail. Only a very small portion of apps make any sort of money and most of those investing in them still don't make enough money to quit their day job. If you count in opportunity loss, you might even say most of the winners still lost money.

Are you guys still motivated? If so, where does your motivation come from?

Edit: Minor corrections.
Holy Fuck.... that looked really cool as it brought my whole system to a dead stop. Took forever to recover enough to close the tab. :/
There is no investment without risk. And in fact, volatile times (as well as recessions) are some of the best times to invest. I wish I had had more liquidity in 2009.

And when comparing inflationary effects, I bet if you gave a true comparison between the quality of the cars available in 1972 and 2012, adjusted for inflation, that the 2012 cars would win out.
I have not, I think I must !
I think it's a 13-lined ground squirrel. Commonly mistaken for a chipmunk. Not all squirrels have bushy tails.
Say, armchair's scientists' advice has only 1% chance to help find better solution to hard problem. Would you still recommend to withhold such advice?
Possible bug: as I'm scrolling down any list, for example http://www.coreyballou.com/six-character-domain-names/L/, and the infinite scroll refreshes at the bottom, I'm seeing many, many dupes – like the list is repeating. Makes the search very frustrating to keep seeing the same words. I'd second the request for a downloadable text list of names if you're feeling generous. :)
I think you're starting to understand my points then.
Probably because the number of people with "software architect" on their business cards greatly outnumber the number of "enterprise software systems that span multiple divisions and locations of an enterprise with 30,000+ people in 100 countries".

It's the 95% of useless bureaucrats that can't tell good working software from a print out of a diagram most developers have a problem with.
Down-voting is awkward. Some feel it should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances, others that it's essential for every day curation of the site. Frequently, the person being downvoted does not know what they did wrong. But if all downvoters were to explain their reasons, far too much attention and page space would be spent on poor comments.

Proposal: The downvote arrow takes you to a "confirm" page with a "reason" text box. If you want to downvote you are encouraged (required?) to enter a reason before confirming your vote. This page also shows otherwise hidden comments by other people explaining their downvote.

Advantage: Allows downvoters to explain to the commenter why their comment is being downvoted without cluttering up the main discussion page. Ideally produces a better and more functional community.

Credit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208938
After the Kindle Fire, I don't know if I really trust Amazon to release quality hardware. The traditional Kindles are top of the line, but their foray into more advanced electronics hasn't been up to snuff.

They'll definitely need a huge hook in order to gain a solid market share. It can't be just an Amazon branded phone running a customized Android OS.
You have to fix that title.
The ethics and lessons of Readability
Powerful targeting for iOS push notifications
At my workplace, I get alerts whenever our security event monitor notices a pattern consistent with malware. We've had ~10 boot sector malware infections since May, most of them being ZeroAccess. Our policy is to reimage the computer rather than try to remove it, in order to keep maintenance times low.

As you mentioned, ZeroAccess is spyware that installs itself to the master boot record to avoid detection or removal. Boot sector viruses are indeed still an unfortunately common issue.
Having high-quality products in the App Store is a great way to convince prospective contracts that I'm legit. http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...
Pfft. Just use the mind reader api. It works based on words already said, body language, and tone.
PHP White Screen of Death
The Tasmanian Echidna’s Four-Headed P.
Startup Month in Review #4
It's distracting, cluttered, and inundated with results that attempt to drive you to Google's own properties. It's the last one that bugs me the most. Valuable real estate and attention is being used in an attempt not to give me the best information for me, but rather the best information for Google to have me look at.

> The same as it ever was - organize the world's information.

But too often lately, they seem to be forsaking the world's information for their own.
When I worked at a fast food joint in a mall, our boss had us move the safe after the mall closed to bring it to a new location.

Picture two 19 year olds rolling a safe on a handtruck to a rental van parked in front of a the mall entrance at 11PM. The mall rent a cop came up to us and yells "What the hell do you think you are doing?"

My coworker snaps "WTF do you think? We've moving the safe -- get that door for us!". He did, and we rolled the safe into the van, then headed for our cars.
They don't spread by themselves, they are installed by rootkits to help hide them. I recently had to clean up such a rootkit.
Perhaps the part that you are not seeing is that if the poster truly cares about engaging with the community he or she cares about understanding why their post is being down-voted.

I see that, but am prioritizing the good of the group over the re-education of the individual. I think the majority of new posters will catch on to the norms of the site quickly, and those that don't will likely move on if they don't get responses.

HN could easily make down-voting comments a requirement and then add a simply feature by which down-vote comments are folded below the original post and not visible.

Fine idea. I posted it as a feature request here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4209304
IOU: Creating a Framework for Open Source Developers to Offer Commercial Support
Division of "labor" is counter productive in development, because in immortal words of Jack W. Reeves, "Code is Design." Say anything else (UML) and you're deluding yourself. So non-coding architects are effectively only HALF-designing the system.

Read this article and weep, for it was written in 1992 and 20 years later, is still rings true, even though there was no UML at the time: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.h...

The problem with non-coding architects is that they are isolated from learning. They have an incomplete feedback loop, and are isolated from the repercussions of their decisions. This at first makes a non-coding architect useless and then makes him actively wrong. This is especially true in systems as complex as enterprise systems.

Because code is design and because building the design is free (in comparison to building a bridge), you need to actually translate your mental design into the real blueprint--the code. If you are isolated from that, then it's like sketching blueprints. You may be consistently wrong on some aspect of it, but you'll never know.

If skyscrapers could be built and torn down overnight, I bet you money architects would build the skyscrapers without the same rigor of blueprints, look at the result and say "Nah, move this a foot over!" and build again.

The correct equivalent for building construction workers is the compiler.
Ask HN: Gmail migration?  
Hey All,

I'm planning to switch from an @gmail.com address to an @<myname>.com address.

The purpose of the switch is to use a better email address. Beyond that, I'm also concerned with organization/searchability, travel-friendly access, privacy, and reliability.

I have a couple of choices for email providers: self-hosted or Google Mail.

I like the idea of having the privacy and security self-hosting offers, but I've never set up a mail server before and I don't know what options are out there. Is any self-hosted solution anywhere near Google's UX and ease of use? Or is Google so far ahead of the competition with its labels and search that it's not worth self-hosting? What have you chosen in this situation?

In addition to choosing a mail server, I'll need to migrate several tens of thousands of emails accumulated over several years. I believe this is possible manually via IMAP, but it sounds slow and tedious. As in, more-than-a-day slow and tedious. There are services that can migrate emails. The best-seeming one I've heard of is YippieMove -- http://www.yippiemove.com/

Has anyone here used YippieMove to either migrate from Gmail to Gmail, or from Gmail to self-hosted email? Does it do what it says on the tin? What about security? It's bad enough that Google has access to all of my messages -- I'd prefer that random employees of another company not read them, too. What kind of security/privacy assurances can YippieMove or others provide? What kind of precautions can one take prior to using a service like this?

Any and all input is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Oh definitely. Or rather we need a vm designed to write code that can be optimized to run fast (personal dream, allow me to optionally include typing information. I already type my JS, might as well make it run better).

This means that the vm would be lowlevel enough that performance would start to approach that of native code, with complete freedom for the programmer to write the code for it in any language he desired.

The browser would then be able to execute this code instead of the corresponding Javascript file (e.g you compiler outputs two different object codes, one minified javascript for legacy browsers, one modern vm file for modern browsers).
This is great. Super easy to implement, too.
What the fuck did I just read... the programming world is not defined by some childishly perceived game of US vs. THEM. Can you take this drivel elsewhere please?

Hipsters? Nerds? Geeks? These pointless monikers don't say anything about someone's true programming aptitude. You're doing yourself and everyone else a disservice by acting like that these stereotypes exist.
I have to question if any high profile development team has the balls to actually prevent Ubuntu from using their software. Ubuntu dropping your packages from a default install would have enough of an impact, but having them removed from the repos as well seems catastrophic.

Canonical is not really a small-time player in the Linux world.
I personally hate having to parse through all the commercial/sale/etc emails that flood my inbox every day.
> - Why is the language so unbelievable slow?

In comparison to what? For the class it is in, it is very fast.

PHP is what I would an intertwined language as quite often people don't separate PHP the language, PHP the included battery (aka the standard library), PHP the easy deployed script and PHP the web tool at core.

It's both a curse and a blessing IMHO. It easy to ignore the differences but hard to learn about them later and the official doc not really teach about it doesn't help. I am not say the doc is bad, just trading off clearly for easiness. It probably helped PHP grow so popular.

As for the quote, PHP the language _is_ slow but the mitigated by a fast standard library (mainly C function wrappers). That said, PHP 5.4 is faster than ever.
As you stated, I would imagine that the ad networks see people like me as a very small minority.

However, there are particularly notable exceptions. There are ~11.5 million Catalan speakers in the world, and most of them in Spain. While the majority of Catalan speakers can also speak Spanish, they are extremely defensive of their language and you will find most road signs, governmental correspondence and general communication in Catalan as well as Spanish.

Most Ad networks will shoe-horn these users into Spanish ads. I imagine some Catalonians find that practice offensive. When you compare the number of Norwegian speakers in the world (~5 million), it puts things into perspective.

In actual fact these ad networks are missing a pretty big slice of the market when you add everything up. In Europe there are huge migrations of different nationalities. In a very short time the numbers of Greeks who leave Greece for other European countries will start to sky rocket. This open migration throughout Europe means that this problem will only get worse, and the numbers of people being mistargeted will increase.

That is what I would call a market niche (or unique selling point) that is potentially up for grabs.
That is illegal in the US; the FTC entitles you to a copy of your prescription [1]. This doesn't include your pupillary distance, but shops will tell you whether or not they'll give PD as well. Some places I called offered to measure mine for free as a walk-in, it's pretty quick.

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/alerts/alt143.shtm
Fear of what, getting fired? Is it hard for Internet-scale application engineers to get a job in the Valley these days?

Is it really so hard to imagine that employees at Apple feel loyalty to the company? Employee loyalty is not an uncommon thing.
Загрузочная флешка с Acronis(3.07.2012/RUS)
What Amazon Must Do to Succeed in the Smartphone Space
"This snakeskin jacket is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom." - from Wild@Heart.

For some people expressing individuality is more important than "wanting someone to use their software".
Leaky abstractions - not really the most original answer, but the layers of abstraction away from the machine code allow me to do things in hours that would take months or more.

It's also the source of most of my bugs, most of my slowdown, and it's the reason my C:\Windows folder is 13gb.
Freenode uses ##<channel> to refer to "non-primary" channels. Regardless of what that means (I don't really know), the channel you're looking for is ##php.
I don't know why, but I had a visceral reaction to the browser prompt to install the extension in the paddleover demo. This is despite the fact that I'm a developer, and I'm well familiar with bittorrent. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I feel like I have to be keenly aware of what my BT client is doing at any given moment. The thought of letting a BT client run unchecked in my browser is disconcerting ... am I completely off base here?
Only until the first one is let loose in a conventional war.

And or only if we're talking about at least modestly rational nation states (all bets off in the hands of 'rogue groups' or terrorists).

It's not amazing at all that Israel has remained the sole nuclear power in the Middle East. Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria have all been attacked (in one form or another) over the years to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons.
This is some pretty risky naming. It makes me think, "Cause of death: thrown trying to ride a Ryno."

That would work if it were an energy drink - but this thing will be in traffic, which really is a major cause of death.

I mean it doesn't exactly say stability and easy of riding, does it? (Which are the main reasons that people who aren't being gimmicky don't choose unicycles over bicycles.)

With a name like this it would attract a suicidal/desperado crowd, which usually doesn't invest in its future long enough to have much money at any one time. (i.e. you can't target early adopters at a premium price with this naming/branding, which is usually the key to marketing something like this successfully and getting it adopted widely as you learn how to make it better and roll out on scale.)

I would change the name.
You are not going to get rich for free. That would require extra effort over 40 years. You can put that effort elsewhere, for example launch 5 startups, or have 5 more kids, or extra vacation every year.
This trick does not work correctly in IE9, due to the unclosed comment tag.
This is cool...

When I looked at your JS, I thought to myself "that is a reasonable amount of code for that kind of functionality...even a little less than I would've thought"...considering there's no dependencies to browser-taming libraries:
https://github.com/plehoux/fontBomb/blob/master/js/particle....

And then I saw the CS:
https://github.com/plehoux/fontBomb/blob/master/src/coffee/p...

Nice!
Everything has had EULAs for years.
is apt-get/yum not working for you?
Dunno, I've seen some evidence that other animals also have self-consciousness. Maybe it's the fact that we're uppity about it.
Put another way, your question is "What if an armchair scientists' advice was unlikely to help, but still likely enough to make it worth considering?"

By picking 1%, you're begging the question. You probably picked it because it sounds small, but if we could do some task that helped us solve our problems about 1 out of every 100 times we did it, we would do it all the time. And, in fact, we do. We consult related literature that might help, we talk to colleagues whose complimentary knowledge might help and so on.

The crux of the disagreement is in what the probability is. orangeduck's point is that the probability is more like 1e-100 than 1e-2.
Yes, the second definition was added because people lazily try to leverage the first definition to intensify the exaggeration of their figurative statements. The problem is that the second definition now masks the first (because it is essentially a devolved form of the first and actually relies on the first definition), making it difficult in many cases to get across the meaning of the first definition without resorting to other words. I see you've embraced this unfortunate evolution. Some of us are still mourning it.
This is great, I really love the integration with my Dropbox folder!
There was a 'virus' that spread on 4chan years ago that did something like this. AFAIK when saved as a .js file and run it would post itself back 4chan to continue spreading.
Improving Linux performance by preserving Buffer Cache State
Yes, but Canonical advocating GPL breaches and strong-arming a high-profile team into a standoff? Would any of the sides want the fallout of that?

My point was that it is not true that you can just pay up when convicted and continue as before if you are found to be in violation of the GPL.
> Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation?

But we're not talking about innovation. We're talking about people saying "I could do better" and then doing nothing.
Wait, is it using the image data as code to evaluate? My mind is too blown to appreciate this.

EDIT: Oh, okay. It's not a valid PNG. That would have been all sorts of incredible. Still great, though.
cool idea but the design is frustrating.

there's a lot of noise on the page considering all I want to see are the names and they only occupy about 1/16th of the screen currently. would be more easily consumable if you grouped by bigrams and had each row devoted to a given leading bigram.

al

hi fi ...

alhico alfiof

alhiea alfiou

...

be

...

if i click on a name, then show the affiliate links.. otherwise they're just wasting space.

given that all the domains you're displaying are the same length, you have a nice constraint to work with in the design and could really use space well.
You said "privacy and security" but for a personal email, there's a much bigger problem... spam.

It's been a couple years since i tried it, but I used <name>.tld for email like you're considering. I never received more than a few emails a day, but it was greatly outnumbered by spam. probably 100:1. gmail and Google Apps mail is the tits with spam. false positives (or negatives) are very rare on the order of 1 every month or 2... probanly 1:1000 emails.

If you use Google Apps for email, it syncs right in with android devices and is subject to the same security (good or bad) of gmail. Even if you're an experienced sysadmin (irrelevant of os) it will take an order of magnitude more time to setup and maintain the infrastructure than if you just use google.

yeah yeah i know, i'm suckin their junk pretty hard... but the beauty of it is that their stuff 'just works'. It's hard to beat.
So it's okay to pretend these stereotypes exist as long as we're talking about brogrammers and women, but not when it concerns hipsters and nerds?
Use MD5, very secure snickers
After downloading the demo (which was super cool!) the biggest unanswered question I have is:

Am I seeding? If so, how do I stop?
HN has a long history of people turning comments into blog posts.
It's very sad that there are so much sites with poor readability. I close site very often few seconds after it's loaded because I don't want to read such ugly stuff. I'm delighted if site looks well. I guess it's because design tools evolve and we must wait a bit before good readability becomes standard. You know, few years ago we were happy if there was any text on website at all. Maybe one day MS Word documents are going to look like LaTeX ones. I hope so.

Thanks very much for those "read later" stuff. I think I might find them useful. I'll see.

"I am very sceptical of the euphemistic suggestion that the primary purpose of these sites is to enable postponement of reading." - You write. Well, many things weren't initialy supposed to be used way they are, but as they evolve, things change. It could be so with that stuff too.
and "high quality" doesn't necessarily mean "successful". There's plenty of good apps (and cars and restaurants) that never make a dime, and plenty of absolute shit that can't seem to die fast enough.
If there is a need for a separate position to do that - the softer side - what does that have to do with software architecture?? The best solution to the problem doesn't really care if the VP of Marketing is sad that they weren't involved.

However, I do agree that role is important but from what I've seen it's typically the job of a VP Eng, CTO, Scrum Master - "Management-y" types.
But there is one problem: on the iPhone, it can't distinguish between a touch event and a scroll event.

So it is impossible to scroll without planting bombs!
Nietzsche for Entrepreneurs
Mixmastamyk, thanks for your reply. The problem is if he learns python and lands next job which is completely .Net shop or Java shop, how would python benefit him there?

Since he is in valley I think it makes sense for him to learn Core Java with test automation tools like Selenium. What are your thoughts?
B or E