skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't expect any of these to actually be implemented by Microsoft as they are all major design changes, but, to name a couple:

Central standard system for software configuration.

This would be similar to the Windows registry but with larger scope. Every setting of any software would be configurable here by users. No nonstandard config files. No trying to find config files everywhere, etc. The Windows registry is only used by some programs, and in my opinion, is not at all user friendly.

This would apply to the control panel and internal settings as well. The current control panel has many different inconsistent styles for dialogs and configuration screens and can be tough to learn and tough to know where to find some things intuitively (eg: to restart your network you have to go through a 'network adapters' page).

Package Management

Windows has made strides with Windows Update, Add and Remove Programs, and standard installers, but there is a long way it could go to entirely streamlining this.
Only marginally related, but it has been surprising to me that US media seems to talk about the risk of a "radiation cloud floating over the Pacific" (which is effectively a non-existent risk to health), and yet doesn't talk about the risk to Californian nuclear plants from earthquakes & tsunamis.

For example, to quote Wikipedia:

Diablo Canyon Power Plant is an electricity-generating nuclear power plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California. It was built directly over a geological fault line, and is located near a second fault... Diablo Canyon was originally designed to withstand a 6.75 magnitude earthquake from four faults, including the nearby San Andreas and Hosgri faults.,[6] but was later upgraded to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake.... In September 1981, PG&E discovered that a single set of blueprints was used for these structural supports; workers were supposed to have reversed the plans when switching to the second reactor, but did not.[11] According to Charles Perrow, the result of the error was that "many parts were needlessly reinforced, while others, which should have been strengthened, were left untouched."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

Or take a look at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is literally built on the beach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_S...
I also think it would have been a good idea if they spent the extra 30 seconds talking about how you can have a higher-power charging station to speed up charging, I'm sure they also would point out that they may not exist where you are when you want to use it.

I'm sure in some places you'll be fine, like LA or San Francisco where I suspect they have more charging stations than the average town.

And this is an obvious chicken/egg problem and if you explain it, people will understand.

Maybe I should add, the same chicken/egg problem exists for the Hydrogen car which was shown later in the show.

To be honest hydrogen is a nice idea but just looking at one item, compressing, hydrogen just seems like loss of energy. I don't know if it will ever work.

Just know one thing that electric 'engines' are the future, I don't know where the power will come from though.
Just consider this. Most tax money goes toward providing defense, Which is just a nice word for protecting the property of the wealthy. The more property you have, then the more value you receive, thus the more, not less, you should pay. Its called welfare for the rich. Our taxes go towards securing their position and goods. Say hello to that boot rushing down on you.
I think Microsoft will move Windows towards Metro, as Apple moves OS X towards iOS. Which is good, since both Metro and iOS are both less tech, and more human.
This runs very well on mobile Safari as well. In fact, the frame rate is smoother on my iPhone 3GS than it is on my MacBook Pro.

Edit: After some further testing I noticed that setting any dummy CSS transform boosts transition/animation performance on iOS. For example: -webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0)
Nice. One suggestion- make the title or something clickable to restore the clean table after using this to examine some site's code.
Most durable interconnects have, by design, poor usability - they are bulky, big (also by diameter), too stiff, etc.
Hardened security, automatic restrictions on applications to stop them hogging memory/processor cycles and slowing down your machine.
Can anyone else not stand the ribbon UI? It drives me nuts. If ribbon UIs are going to be even more pervasive in Windows, I'm even more glad I switched to Mac.
What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count, just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a timely manner.
What a mess, so much clutter still going on. Doesn't look like a very pleasant or easy UI to use.
If you want vanity urls then you still have to have unique username.
New Features & Improvements:

- Added option to remember key sources (key file paths, provider names, ...); it's enabled by default.

- New locking timer (using a timeout instead of a countdown).

- Lock files are now hidden.

- On Windows 7 and higher, the main window peek preview is now disabled when the KeePass workspace is locked.

- File transactions: the NTFS/EFS encryption flag is now also preserved when the containing directory isn't encrypted.

- {FIREFOX} placeholder: added support for registry-redirected 32-bit Firefox installations on 64-bit Windows systems.

- Relative database paths on the command line are now evaluated relatively to the initial working directory (specified by the parent process) instead of the last used directory.
- Improved user-friendliness in UAC dialogs.
Improved help (moved placeholders to separate page, ...).

- Installer: the KeePass start menu shortcut is now created directly in the programs folder; the other shortcuts have been removed (use the Control Panel for uninstalling and the 'Help' menu in KeePass to access the help).

- Upgraded installer.

- Various code optimizations.

- Minor other improvements.

Bugfixes:

- (None).
In Belgium it's 50% starting at about €32k. Add social security tax and municipal tax to that and effective marginal tax rate becomes over 60%.
Agreed. /dev/urandom should be mixed with other sources of entropy (system statistics, epoch, low-level counters, cryptographic PRNGs like Yarrow) and then "combined" using a cryptographic hash. Such a principle is used in e.g. Fortuna.

See:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fortuna_%28PR...
Just not buying that this real. Why would they reuse Windows 7 wallpaper, and return to NT style login. It is a repost from: http://www.withinwindows.com/ looks like they enjoyed the traffic too much to let it go, as a follow up reveals more detail: http://www.withinwindows.com/2011/04/02/windows-8-secrets-wi...
Actually, the reason WinXP is 5.1 (instead of 6) and Win7 is 6.1 (instead of 7) is for "maximizing application compatibility":

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/archive/b/windowsvista/ar...
The top 1 percent of American income-earners account for ~25% of the nation’s total income every year. The top 1 percent of American wealth-holders account for ~40% of the total wealth. I hear statistics like this all the time but I never understand... What is the "correct" amount? The top 1 percent of anything by definition are going to hold some larger share. There are compelling theoretical reasons for wealth and income distribution to follow a power law (ie. Pareto distribution). Why should these numbers be as they were 25 years ago, or as they are in other countries now?
Yeah, that is the most frustrating thing about the arguments from Chernobyl revisionists.

There was no possibility to do all the science that would ideally have been done, everywhere it should have been done. So the anecdotal evidence is often the only evidence--and it is discounted. That is where you get idiotic statements like 'only 28 people died as a result of Chernobyl'. Also, there are many other things that happened to people short of death that nevertheless really sucked, e.g. getting nonfatal thyroid cancer.

There's definitely merit to having a compendium of only rigorous scientific results, of course, but it doesn't help advance the debate (or the species) when such work is mischaracterized and used to promulgate bogus conclusions (much less weird fanboy ideologies).
Well, I'm sure eventually there will be something to chew on. But for now... Reading about the ribbon feels like reading that the next Cadillac will have chromed tail fins again. Intensely interesting if you're thinking about buying one, but not particularly actionable.

Which is an interesting counter-point to the Windows of so many years ago: The entire industry worked on a calendar dominated by Windows releases. Apps would be upgraded on that schedule. PC purchases would spike on that schedule. Hordes of apps would become extinct overnight as Microsoft built their features into new releases of Windows.

But now? As a developer, what does a new release of Windows mean to me? What does a new release of Windows mean to startups? Come to think of it, what does a new release of Windows mean to Microsoft?

Can Microsoft count on taxing their existing customer base in the form of upgrade revenues? Specifically, incremental upgrade revenues (people upgrading to Windows 8 that wouldn't upgraded to Windows)?

Obviously the thing will sell to OEMs and so on, and Microsoft will claim huge wins from corporate customers upgrading, but are we going to see another bit of sales jiggery-pokery where most of the revenue would be money Microsoft would have made anyways?
The only issue with that is if you don't have a spiffy OpenGL video card. Mutter and Clutter have come a very long way since the decision not to use them.
If these are real, they're screenshots of an early internal build. It'll be a while before they start adding the final artwork.
Having some experience of dealing with all sides of this type of situation, I feel as though I should comment.

Is SiteAdvisor a scam? No. In a nutshell, it's something that's used by McAfee customers - they paid for the service and no they don't have the ability to make the decision for themselves as to whether or not a site is safe.

Is SiteAdvisor any good? No. As Cdixon pointed out, they're heavily understaffed. It's full of false positives, it's a fairly crappy service.

Is McAfee AV any good? No. It's one of the easiest AV's to bypass. McAfee is the most commonly found AV in the enterprise we come up against on penetration tests and unless we're using something like metasploit we get past it undetected every time and have done for years.
Ask HN: Best sites online to sell tshirts?
I've only used Cafepress a couple years ago to make a tshirt for myself. I have something in mind to sell (I have a design that I want to upload) in an online marketplace. I have experience with Cafepress and started looking at Zazzle, but I figured it would be a good idea to ask for some advice from other folks that might have better recommendations.
Id wager that while some of Apple's design can lead to fraying or other failure, they have done a lot in recent years to improve the quality of their products and cables.

1. The introduction of the UniBody design and manafacturing process has made their MacBook Pro laptops much stronger than previous versions and competing plastic laptops.

2. The introduction of the MagSafe charging cable design has been the lifesavor of accidental tugs and trips. As well the second iterative design of the cable (introduced with the MacBook Air) has even further reduced fraying.
To be fair, both features already exist as third party applications (for years).
The cheap Android phones space is actually the most interesting one... There are already Chinese manufacturers making touchscreen Android devices in the price range that fits the developing countries. A billion people more with a browser in their pocket?
Another approach was selective downtime: have the modem accidentally drop the connection when the problem user dials in, say, 50% of the time, in hopes that they'll get too frustrated to keep connecting, but without getting angry enough to plot revenge (because hopefully they'll think it's just an unreliable system).
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, but targeting Americans and American culture without being familiar with it yourself is certainly going to be challenging. You may be able to get around this though by employing Americans, but I'm not so sure that would work out, either. I know there are many Indian startups with various degrees of success that are based entirely in India, so it may work out keeping your business in Chili. No matter what you decide though, be careful when writing anything that is client facing, in fact you may wish to hire someone similar to a publicist or a writer. (Not to be rude, but your writing has grammatical errors and the judgments native Americans will make against you for this will be detrimental to your business.)

Is there a specific reason why your startup cannot work in the Chilean (or Italian? Are you in Italy?) market?
It goes without saying that you shouldn't do a simple "rm" on the password file. I'm not going to put on my tin-foil hat and start gibbering about magnetic alignment and electron tunnel microscopy but this is just "one of those things" that everyone knows to avoid.
Because the bottom X% are starving.
Ribbon on explorer is a bit weird but better then then win7 no menu, weird context sensitive button bar.
>> Perhaps I’ve missed some obvious reason why the industry still does this.

You have indeed. It is called "double opt-in" and legally required in many jurisdictions, before a web site can send you regular automated emails. Otherwise it might be considered Spam.
99.84.5.2 is IP for SBC
The story of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga is fascinating on many levels. In fact, the Amiga nearly was the Atari ST for a while. For a good morning coffee read, try the link below.

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ahistory.html
Those cables aren't great indeed, but the newest magsafe design is a great improvement. I wouldn't be surprised if they copy that to their other cables.

(not the fact that it's vertical of course, that wouldn't be very practical.)
Coincidentally, I am furiously trying to read HN before my MacBook's battery runs out, as my "elegant" white connector is frayed, making it useless. As this is the second cord I'm buying, while the black industrial cords are ugly, I'll take function over form any day.
Or just use /dev/random :)
A security system for programs ala Android where you have to approve what each program can do (but in more detail, eg this program may not read my files but it may store files in a private directory on my hardrive or it may access facebook.com but not any other url, etc) programs should be installed as a bundle ala MAC programs with standard directories for dll, exe, configure files, etc.
While it is a nice idea, I do not see any practical applications.

It requires a receiver who is a) knowledgeable enough to decrypt it using something like openssl and b) have access to the actual private key.

If that's the case it is highly likely that this person is either capable of using something like PGP or facilitate a file upload form on the apparently available website. Both of which are at least as secure and a whole lot more convenient.

Something related to this I would be really interested in would be a way to encrypt a file client-side, in the browser using javascript prior to uploading it (without the need for the user to do special tricks beyond picking a password). So far this only seems remotely possible using something like flash or silverlight.
Perhaps that is taking defense too literally. In this day of age, there is very little threat to people's property from Mexico or Canada.
I think the Kindle connector cable gets the balance between prettiness and durability just right.

http://www.harinair.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/111.jpg
Whatever happened to Quora?
Although those numbers only really apply to London. Average property prices are much lower elsewhere. Average detached house in the north of England is £249,382, Wales is £220,330... (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_pric...)
By the time you get to the six month point of living in Chili, whatever you have left of that $40K may not get you much more time in the bay area. Your best move might be to stay put while you work on getting to the point of being profitable.
Integrated version control: call it something like "Tracked Folders" and build the UI into Windows Explorer. Build an efficient set of diff algorithms for text, binary, images, and media, plus visual-diff views for each. Make it work with Office's change tracking, so old changes from Office documents are automatically added to the repository. Provide a complete API, so developers can add differs and diff UIs for their own file formats. Integrate it with search, so you can have indexed search through old versions of files.

That's quite a project, but it would be a formidable response to Apple's Time Machine (a feature I've personally seen sell a few Macs).
AFAIK, the archos 28 ships without the full android market.
Great I think that got most of it (validation!) but revocation checking worries me and a skim of the OpenSSL (0.9.8o) sources doesn't leave me with the warm'n'fuzzies.

s_client.c calls SSL_CTX_set_verify() (the default verifier). Results from that can be obtained from SSL_get_verify_result() and are documented in verify(1).

All of the CRL/revocation-related return codes there are marked "unused". There is no mention of OCSP.

I found found a "crl_check/crl_check_all" option for verify(1). Command line help mentions an "ocsphelper". OpenSSL does have a separate OCSP client. But I don't think any of this machinery is activated by default.
The problem with Pastels law isn't that we make mistakes, thats a given.

The problem is that it still works. Drive a car too fast around a corner and you are thrown of the road; write invalid xml and you get an error.
GoPano micro - Capture 360º videos from an iPhone 4
In many ways, the IPv6 debate is similar to the x86 vs RISC debates. While everyone agrees that the Intel architecture is bad, in practice it doesn't matter all that much on big desktop chips.

Linus Torvalds had a small rant about that when the Itanium was introduced: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1008015/linus-torva...

The sad fact is that the x86 architecture survived because it was good enough, and there was no incentive to replace it with a "purer" design. Only in the mobile / microcontroller space has there been widespread success for more RISCy designs (ARM/AVR). This wasn't because HTC, Samsung and Apple decided that ARM was "purer", it was mostly because there was no x86 processor that could compete with the speed and power and chip real estate afforded by ARM designs.

Likewise, the incentives for IPv6 aren't there, and in fact, it introduces a host of new problems for most users.

For instance, I spent quite some time trying to figure out why my NTP daemon would not work. The reason? It was IPv6 enabled, as was my operating system. The NTP server was also IPv6 enabled and had an AAAA record. But my ISP didn't route IPv6, so no communication took place.

Now, I could blame the NTPD creators for not thinking about this and writing some specific code for it with an IPv4 fallback (perhaps after 30 seconds just to make life interesting). Or I could blame the ISP for being slow to implement IPv6 (this was in 2004 after all). Or I could blame myself for being incompetent and just using the default config files provided by the operating system.

But the fact is, this is just what happens when you have one protocol that always works, and another new protocol that sometimes works but you really want to make the new one the default, preferred protocol.
ShowHN: How not to be a UI/UX expert
Found this link from a talk on Skyara

http://www.skyara.com/s/run-your-project-or-idea-by-a-uxui-e...

Couldn't help myself once I seen the stripy colored in background making the text unbearable to read.
Formatting your web content to be a pleasure to read
I used to use Password Safe. I switched to KeePass recently because there was an Android version available (the only PWS compatible Android app was read only)
For me, the content would have to be specific. Interviews are good. Specific content is good. Generic "5 things startup founders have to know" just makes me want to kill myself. Maybe that's just me.

Good luck!
This article makes one logical fallacy after another, offhandedly referring to "economists" as an appeal to authority without providing any reference, proclaiming numbers and statistics without any evidence, making bias slurs and assumptions without giving any warrant or citation. It spews Keynesian Economics and a Communistic regard everywhere while blaming Capitalism for the consequences of Progressivism in the last century. That somehow the Recession is the fault of a rich CEO and not hyperinflation and credit expansion. And provides no accountable cross reference to other time periods or governments.
It is a great relief to see that this was not upvoted by HN for its content but rather to demystify its preposterous pontification. Worst of all, the author tagged himself in the keywords, now talk about vanity.
If I get a strange Email I am going to assume it is spam, which means I report it as such and whomever send it will have trouble sending email to gmail users in the future.
> 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier

Do you know anywhere I could read about the specific plans for this? I assume lots more wind turbines are a big part of it.

I buy green power from Vattenfall, and I know at the moment most of it is hydroelectric imported from Norway.
Agreed. Windows 7 is a wonderful OS. I've never said that before about a Windows version -- tho I was certainly wowed as a 13 year old first seeing Windows 95.

But package management would be wonderful.

You know, all my development is linux-based. Many of the guys I work with run ubuntu for that reason. I tried that. And I tried OSX.

But in the end, Windows 7 is the best desktop experience I've ever seen. I love it. And I just live in vbox for development which also has a ton of advantages itself.
In short, we can summarize the reasons why e-mail confirmation is necessary:

1. It's required by law in many places. That's why newsletter/auto-responder services use double opt-in.

2. If someone or something does sign-up on your behalf, why should you have to specifically opt out? So, it's always better to have someone confirm their e-mail, instead of having random users having to "opt out" of services they never signed up for.

3. Many a times, if it's some random site, the activation e-mail can go directly into your SPAM box. If an "opt out" type e-mail ends up in your SPAM box, then you probably won't see it, and it can potentially cause more damage.

4. For features like password reminder, it is always better, security-wise, to send the reset link to an e-mail you know for sure belongs to the account holder. If you mistyped your e-mail, and never received the conformation, you'd try creating an account again. However, if the account was activated by default, and you started using it right away, then you'd have all your e-mails going to someone else.

There might be more reasons...

I don't see how e-mail confirmation can be counted as "wasted seconds." It is to protect you. It's like taking a backup of your website. Many of them don't do it, because the few minutes it takes doesn't sound worthwhile. However, if the server crashes and your data is lost, only then you realize that those few minutes could have saved months of efforts.
Not only the cable issue... The most un-durable design from Apple in my opinion is the unchangeable battery for iPod, iPhones and iPads.