skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's next after Windows 7 for Enterprises?
I get that Windows 8 is aimed at tablets and that it's still basically Windows 7 for desktop users (except you have to bounce between 2 main screens now).

Most medium/large enterprise, certainly in the US and Western Europe run Windows in the vast majority of cases. They tend to lag behind the current releases, I know plenty of companies still on XP, only just considering an update to Win 7 in 1-3 years.

But what Windows 8 leaves me struggling to visualize, is what OS will be on desktop systems ( a market that will soon start to shrink) in Enterprises in 5-10 years time? Is Windows 8 going to be ignored like Vista was and the real Enterprise upgrade going to be Windows 9 in another 3-4 years?

Or are Microsoft accepting that they've lost the fight at the very bottom, the startups are all using OS X/Ubuntu/Google Apps and they're making one last play for the tablet market to make that and the XBox their main revenue generators?

Have Microsoft made any hints? If I were making IT decisions in a Microsoft shop, I'd be scratching my head at this point.
The Saudis and other oil exporters don't actually set the price of oil directly. OPEC have historically controlled oil prices indirectly by dialling their output up or down, but most producers are running flat out and have been for ages.

Saudi used to keep around 1.5m BPD production in hand to moderate supply disruptions and keep prices stable, but now they are running much closer to their maximum practical output capacity. Even if they opened all the taps and pushed forward more aggressively to bring more on line it would have a much more subdued effect than in the past. The days when they could materially affect prices on an ongoing basis are over.

Contrary to popular opinion $4 gas isn't really the producer's fault. Maybe they could get it down to $3.50 for a while (pure guess), but the idea they could just turn a spigot and gas would be £2.50 a gallon again is unrealistic.
Sure, I have an Ubuntu box. Thing is, while I would be doing myself a huge favor, the same wouldn't apply to the users of what I'm trying to create. Perhaps the world doesn't need yet another Git GUI, but if I leave out Windows support, the world will need it even less ;)
People are on track to deal with these problems (or at least are attempting to be). There are hybrid cars all over the place now, Tesla Motors is doing well as a company and there is a ton of research going into clean energy. These are just extremely difficult problems to deal with. In the meantime, the country can't just let society fail as a whole. The whole world would descend into chaos and war.

The US has to do something to protect the country and the economy. It can't allow itself to become wholly dependent on oil produced by enemies of the state in an inherently unstable region ran by crazy dictators and terrorists. So what do they do? They hedge and ensure the country can keep a seat at the negotiation table when things get tough. Given the size of the US and the dependance on trucks, rail, and shipping to move cargo, even rather small changes in the price of oil can drastically alter the economy.
Bureaucrat 'bo1024, you are technically correct --- the best kind of correct! Following the strict letter of the DMCA does not in fact guarantee that nobody will make a mistake or fail to stop someone abusing process.

What this has to do with the meat of the comment you're responding to, I'm less sure of; that comment was useful in that it corrects an extremely common misconception about the DMCA (that if you simply have a process to honor takedown requests, you're a service provider immune to prosecution).

Regardless of your opinion about copyright or the DMCA, it remains an under-appreciated fact that if you do the things Kim Schmitz was discovered to have done (it's spelled out explicitly in the Mega emails), you're violating the DMCA whether or not you honor takedowns; further, you're not simply committing individual infractions by doing so, but instead (potentially) forfeiting all your protections as a service provider under the DMCA.
HootSuite Glitch Exposed Thousands of Email Addresses
As a corollary to 'nothing comes without hard work,' a company can't stock up on good engineers without hard work on the company's part, and complaints about this are also rooted in a sense of entitlement.
Looks great -- I'll try to make it, even though there are a few other events going on that day. On that note, folks that are interested in networking and interacting with other techies in the scene should also check out the DC TechBreakfast (http://www.meetup.com/techbreakfast). A lot of local companies show off what their doing in a non-pitch style event. It's been going on now for about a year, but just came to DC a few months ago. They have over 1300 folks on the meetup and 120 or so come to the DC one, and it's not completely software focused.
(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of CPC.)

Protothread is really just a set of macros, based of Duff's device, to make it easier to write automata in a threaded style. It has many limitations: it does not automatically save local variables, it does not compose (except when using "hierarchical protothreads", which involves rewinding the whole stack on every cooperation point), etc. Section 5.3 of Dunkels et al.'s paper states that these are only limitations of the "current protoype", but I am not aware of any implementation of protothreads solving these issues at all (except if you consider CPC a full-fledged implementation of Protothreads, done correctly ;-).

Protothreads is a hack, a maybe clever hack, but a hack nonetheless. CPC, on the other hand, is an extension of the C language, compiled to C by proven source-to-source transformations. Of course, you then have to pay the cost of the added dependency (protothreads is only a bunch of C files to include), and potential bugs in the translator.

You can find a comparison of existing solutions in my PhD thesis, section 1.3 (page 43):
http://www.pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr/~kerneis/ (first link in the "research" section).
Kinda important to mention apps when talking about smartphones.

Sure, you can buy Angry Birds (or whatever) again for $0.99 if you switch platforms, but will you buy all of your apps again? And what if you really like an app that's only on one platform?
Top 5 Reasons to have a Linux Live CD
Explaining it on the homepage would be better :). I only figured it out through context of looking at the Android App's screen shots.
I like the design and the ux. Task management is a pain in the backside and I'm still searching for something that will actually work for me, for both my personal to-dos and the organizations and groups that I help manage. I do agree with jeffclark that it would be a great improvement to better communicate the pain it solves and who it's for like smack bang at the top of the frontpage e.g. "Awesome task distribution for teams" or something. And getting rid of the about in PDF form and make it html instead would probably also be a good thing.
Some might argue that won't always be a possibility, assuming it even is right now.

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/05/northern_ghawar....
If a lay person were to ask how they get back their Bitcoins if they are stolen from their account, say due to a person gaining access to their computer, what do you tell them?
I'm 100% sure. That page was for me and me alone. It was never accessed by anyone but me. I never shared the URL with anyone.

Referrers only get shared through links. There were no links to or from that page. Going to a page and typing in new URL does not provide a referrer.
Ask HN: Have you ever bought bitcoins?
I was looking into some stuff bitcoin-related and wondered whether anyone had actually bought bitcoins, and especially, why?
Google presses fair use case in book scanning appeal
FedExs lanuches new Facebook app
> oil prices do not translate directly to gas prices we pay at the pump

Technically true, but the correlation is usually very strong: http://www.gasbuddy.com/retail_price_chart.aspx?city1=USA%20...
It didn't make our life any harder, and using a different number wouldn't make our life any easier. We use cisco, juniper and openbsd, this caused exactly zero problems.
I haven't used an ad-blocker in a while (I block javascript and make plugins click to play in Chrome for security, that coincidentally kills most of the stuff).

The most ads I see are on video streaming services. But what's the state of ad-blocking on Hulu? Doesn't Hulu detect if their ads aren't making it to your machine, and halt playback? Has the device addressed this? (Have leading adblockers?)
It doesn't work like that. Reaching a .onion involves going through six proxies. You can't connect directly to its IP, because you don't know what it is and it probably doesn't listen on a public interface anyway.
The reason for the Raspberry Pi is that it meets the following criteria:

1) Always available (MacBook may not be open and charged)
2) Energy efficient
3) No variable cost (as opposed to EC2 or Linode)
4) Very powerful when headless (Linux is better than OS X here)

It's not the most powerful backend but that wasn't really the point of this project. The point was that for $35 I added a dedicated Linux backend to my already awesome Transformer tablet.
> The extraction companies have not shown a particular willingness to choose 'safety' over 'get it done' yet.

I'm not as negative as most people I know on fracking, but I do have some worry that there's a culture like this in place currently. I've been particularly surprised by surface spills/leaks of fracking chemicals in Pennsylvania, which just seems sloppy. If you're trying to convince the public that a fairly new technology, which people have concerns about, is safe and won't contaminate groundwater, you should definitely be sure to get the "easy" parts completely right, such as competently storing chemicals above ground.
Definitely not: protothreads (2006) predates Tame (2007). But all of them are somehow (great-)grandchildren of Duff's device: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html
sir, troll more please
This is not easy on the Jelly Bean Transformer Pad, and I have heard it greatly compromises battery life.
Why Are Half a Million People Poking This Giant Cube?
Very neat. It didn't really mention anything about production cost, but like most new and exciting innovations, it could be a huge barrier.
And if you're north of the beltway, you might find the Baltimore Tech Breakfast to be slightly closer to you (as it is me) -- next meeting is tomorrow:

http://www.meetup.com/TechBreakfast/

Edit: I just realized that the link points to the same meetup group -- not sure if they're run/organized by the same folks or not.
New task assigned to ourselves, thx!
You tell them it's the same as cash.
Not a penny. Adblock Plus (free!) as already mentioned.
I highly recommend onsi's Backbone.coccyx [1] for ensuring that views are torn down correctly.

https://github.com/onsi/coccyx
And it's also being hosted at the Maryland Entrepreneur Expo (http://www.innovatemd.com), which is also tomorrow. See you there!
Yeah, all of your mobile devices.
I think the correct response is asking how they would get back their money if cash was stolen from their house.

BitCoin is like cash, not like a credit card. You wouldn't want to leave a significant amount of cash laying around your house and you shouldn't keep a significant amount of BitCoin on your computer.
Same thing you tell them if someone accessed their computer and transferred money out of their bank account. "Secure your [stuff]."
I'm going to try to repeat back the argument:

A system which allows for complexity will evolve in unpredictable ways. Some economic and security models don't account for the variety, and have tried to solve the problem by constraining the system using trust & authority tools (like DRM). This (he purports) is often unsuccessful in its intended purpose, and the ecosystem's lack of unintended consequences removes its capacity to change.

I think it's an interesting argument, though he does let his feelings toward media companies color it. What it makes me think about is the negative consequence of over-engineering; maybe sometimes it's better to leave some unanswered questions.
Honestly it was the same with Sun. Ten years ago ( a little more really ) you were still dealing with the growth, and perceptions, related to the dotcom era. Sun was "ooo wow" Cisco was "ooo wow".

However, routers and switches are everywhere now. So are UNIX servers. Cisco and Sun became normal. Everyone had them, everyone ran them and for a lot of people you simply never asked 'Do I get a Cisco router for this,' it just happens.

Cisco still makes high end enterprise devices. It's just normal now.
If a lay person were to ask how they get back their dollars if they are stolen from their wallet, say due to a person mugging them, what do you tell them?
Quantified the right way. Excellent. +1
That's a great point. I definitely won't be doing any large Java Projects over SSH however I do occasionally like to code a quick algorithm proof-of-concept in Java (it's my language of choice).
Gittip doesn't have profit, but it does collect a fee, and that fee needs to cover reimbursements and chargebacks. Here's the ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/152
One place Amazon appears to be noticing the benefit to reduced or eliminating DRM is in game sales. On Reddit in the /r/gamedeals subreddit, we often discuss if a game has DRM before concluding if it's a good purchase or not. The Amazon rep Tony often hangs around there to answer questions or posts deals himself, and he sees that DRM-free games do sell more. He now says if a game is DRM free or not when posting deals.

I understand they have also had a few experiments into working with publishers to sell games without DRM to measure the effect.

So, just an anecdote from a small part of Amazon, but that information may propagate to the books section eventually. We can only hope, because nothing puts me off purchasing media like digital rights management.
Sure. When I'm trying to find a piece of code, that's a pretty good start.
That's actually not what a bank typically tells you in that situation, so you've sort of proved the point.
A game engine is more than its ability to push the GPU, and to be blunt this belief is why the video game industry is so stagnant but for a few innovators.

The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world.

HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press.

Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine.

So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
The current answer is, you can not.

In the long term, I suspect you'll see insurance companies arise that would handle that. In the end they'd probably build a better system than the one that currently exists, which sort of uses rollbacks as a crutch to avoid needing really solid security. (There are many reasons for that. Not all of them are bad.) But there's many a theft betwixt here and there.
Got me, too. :^)

https://twitter.com/whit537/status/266285523872657408
Right, I somehow misread it and understood he gave up on both. Thanks for pointing that out.
MPD is brilliant. I've been using it for a long time now and have always been happy with it :)
How Long Would It Take to Fall Through the Earth?
I don't post doom-and-gloom stuff or that our country is done for, etc., but I have gotten responses from left-wingers as if I had, just because I am not an Obama supporter.

Not all conservatives are alike ... just because we have some looneys that vote the same way we do, does not make them our ally or mean that we agree with them. I'd imagine that the same is true on the left as well!
I've seen admins/mods respond from authority without distinguishing their comment. I wouldn't read into that too much (though I also wouldn't read into the original comment that much either).
This is an odd coincidence, one of the Dead Man's Switch subscribers asked me if I supported Bitcoin, and I ended up adding a MtGox button on the site (it's pretty nifty, it even autoconverts to whatever currency you want and supports IPN):

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/pricing/

I've been warming up to Bitcoin, the same subscriber clued me into https://blockchain.info/ and it looks pretty good. The only thing I'm worried about is that Bitcoin isn't very stable, but I don't really care since MtGox autoconverts all payments. There's no downside in accepting it, as far as I can see.

Plus, I can just keep them as Bitcoins and pay right away with very low fees.

EDIT: I also decided to dabble in a bit of MtGox trading with my newly-acquired 4 BTC, so I sold high and bought higher. It... didn't go very well.
The US was a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011.
This is an important question to raise. One of the only reasons that credit cards were able to take off was because the credit card companies promised to limit your liability if your credit cards were stolen.

Similarly, there are countless examples of people's bank and investment accounts getting hacked, with the banks and brokerages reimbursing their customers to prevent bad PR.

Given this, I imagine that it would be a long time before the average person would be comfortable maintaining any store of money as Bitcoins (versus quick conversion and payment for things, but then what's the point?).
There's a pretty comprehensive guide here: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/
Cool product and a nice start.

Few suggestions:

- As Jeff pointed out, it wasn't immediately clear what this did. After playing around with it I got it, but stating it in plain words on the homepage would likely help your conversions.

- Similarly the "Apply for a subdomain now!" heading would be better suited being used to tout the benefit to the customer. Meaning, your visitors don't care about applying for a subdomain. They care about collaboratively completing a task (maybe) so gear your headlines and copy towards that.

- It wasn't clear that the logo leads you to a demo -- I had to read it here that that was the case.

- When I hover over the "enter a task" field in the demo my cursor turns into a circle with a line through it and I can't click. I'm not sure if that's intentional because the functionality isn't there yet or a bug with the implementation in my browser.

I signed up and am looking to seeing where this goes.

Congrats on launching!
Diverse diagnostics: Cross-Cultural Autism Studies
Tech Publisher Ziff Davis Acquired By j2 Global For $167M
Or more realistically, Unreal 4 vs. CryEngine 4. Source was not widely licensed, and interest in idTech seems to be low - there are currently no high-profile licensees that we know about.

Though now that Bethesda owns id, maybe there will be more "licensing" of the engine. It certainly is a very impressive piece of tech.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall with the upcoming Reddit / Conde Nast accountant meeting.
Investing in Client Meetings
Announcing RobotsConf August 18th and 19th, 2013
I usually distinguish my comments when speaking as a mod, but it's just so it catches the eye and looks official more. I sometimes forget, not distinguishing doesn't mean much.
How Your App Can Grab a Chunk of the $2.4 Billion Holiday App Sales
Show HN: Analytics for Clicky, a Mac OS X Menu Bar App
It's not technically being done in "hardware" although it's a separate hardware device. I think the Kickstarter "ad" mentions that they use a version of Linux on there and I'm guessing that their software sit's on top of that.
I just finished up a small Mac OS X app for viewing your Clicky (http://getclicky.com) analytics in your Mac's menu bar. Let me know what you guys think about the site and the app and if you have any feedback.
If I'm not mistaken, your first example was a case where 1 website made in on a list (a list with 100s of other entries) BY MISTAKE. And the bureaucratic process took over.

What happened to that website was an exception, not the rule.

On your second point, the evidence was so overwhelming clear on MU being a criminal enterprise, that when combined with KimDotCom's long criminal history, it was quite clear what was going on.
Well, there are certainly reasons to believe it might be an Interpol/FBI trap. :)
Sure, i've used a couple of upload sites recently to transfer large files... but never anything that was actually important, i didn't have local backups of or couldn't be easily replicated.

I've read about people trying to get their files back off the servers and all the other hoo-ha going on, and have nothing against people trying to do that or using the excuse that it was their main backup... just seems extremely silly to rely on it form my point of view. It's not possible to rely on Google, for fear of them shutting down your account for some violation or T&Cs (and no recourse for appeals), so to rely on these kinds of companies...

Not sure why I got down votes for a genuine question.
If you look at the comment that was responding to, it was a quote from dotcom on how the DOJ is going around the DMCA to illegally take down legitimate sites. My comment was on-topic, but the parent comment, while technically correct, was misleadingly off-topic. It implied that, if you stick to the letter of the law, you'll be fine. That's not true, and that's what the original quote was pointing out.
Not really. It wasn't really usable after the release (which was 4 years ago). Constantly crashing, featureless (which it still is, but now you have extensions). I tried it several times in the course of the first year after release and it was really (really) bad. But even if it was 3 years, it's still a short time for a browser to be around.

But as leddt pointed out, I misunderstood the comment I replied to.
Thanks for explaining that. I wasn't aware Protothreads was such a hack, and so limited.
It's not that hard but instead of thinking what code does, i have to think first what that code mean in javascript.

Writing a tutorial / informative blog post in coffeescript is like : Giving an English lesson in Chinese while teacher and students are native speakers of English.
Agreed. Nuclear has had a rough go of it as a result of Japan's problems (and vise versa to be fair) but in general it seems like electric cars and nuclear are our only real options to at least try and keep up with climate change. There are also some strong cases for cost reductions and safety improvements for new Nuclear facilities as a result of improved building techniques and more generic designs.

It is important that we be energy independent but I am totally disappointed at the lack of energy (minimal pun intended) for renewables and alternatives. In the presidential debates the bulk of energy conversation was dedicated to strutting thier oil and fossil fuel cred - hardly any other focus.
And yet, if Google did so it would destroy the value that they have, and would lose loads of money on the transaction.
So you're a supporter of fracking then, right?