skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi all, Roee from Soluto here (providers of the W8 data). I'll try to respond to the questions and comments here.

But first, a bit of background to the size and quality of our userbase. I warn you this is going to sound defensive, but it's important to establish that we're not a bunch of kids who sampled 50 Win8 VMs. So - Soluto's agent has been downloaded on over 3M machines in over 150 countries. We had one of the first applications running on the developer preview of Windows 8 over a year ago, and our first metro app was in the first batch released to the public in February together with the launch of the first consumer preview. We are a 2012 Microsoft Partners of the Year (in the startups category), we share investors with the likes of Skype, Dropbox & LinkedIn and most importantly - we're building a service that helps techie folks to provide tech support for their friends and family remotely without the need for remote desktop (free for supporting up to 5 PCs). Our hundreds of servers now deal with over 50 million data points every day, and we're big data junkies. Use Google to verify all that :)

And now a couple of points I hope will answer some of the questions-

1. The data used for the Windows 8 part is only based on RTM versions and later, i.e. it does not include developer preview or consumer preview.

2. Our users are outright techies, but on the other hand the machines we manage are a mix, since our users support their friends, parents and grandmas, leading to some really non-techie level usage types (IE6, 5 toolbars, etc). That being said, Windows 8 is more prominent on the supporter side in our userbase (i.e. we see more techies using it then non-techies).

3. The sample size for Windows 8 is still way smaller than that of Windows 7, naturally. But that page is automatically updating, so check it out once in a while, and with time the data will become more accurate, as big numbers tend to become. We still think it's valuable that way, even if not everything is perfectly significant. iTunes crashes more and Google Drive crashes less, that probably won't change without an update from these vendors.

4. To those who say there are no BSODs in the world since Win7 - I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong. I see the data on a daily basis. The situation is much better then XP and Vista, but part of the population still suffers from BSODs, mostly because of 3rd party drivers. I personally had a BSOD on W8 (the sad smiley modern BSOD, but still a BSOD).

5. I'm not the OP of this post and I don't know vinothshankaran.

6. As our page gets refreshed with data, we'll also be adding more components and clarifications.

If there's anything specific you'd like to see added to the page, by all means please share it here. As the lead product manager at Soluto and a long time HN enthusiast, crowdsourcing our requirements to this community sounds like a dream :)

And if you have specific questions or comments do feel free to contact me at roee@soluto.com

One last point- if you're the kind of person who receives phone calls for PC tech support from your friends and family members - give Soluto a try :)

Roee
I didn't say you could. But the start menu was always one click away. Now it's a hot corner, a click, and typing to find the program, away.

Well except I bought and paid for Start8 and I've been way happier with it installed.
You can hover over variables to get their value. There is a quick watch area in which you can add variables.

You can't change the source directly, but you can change the properties of an object and change global variables with the console.

https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/sc...

http://stackoverflow.com/a/4949829/352087
IMO true hyperinflation is extremely unlikely since the US can also "unprint" money at will due to it being mostly digital debt. They will however continue to inflate as much as they think they can.

Related, "gold bugs" may have had a good decade but I also believe that gold's value comes from nothing more than tradition: you can't eat it and you can't defend yourself with it.
Human energy utilization is a fraction of a fraction of the solar energy that moves in and out of the earth system. Heat lost from burning is not something worth worrying about right now.
Right now it does not, but if Google release an API for this I'll be on it.
Pre-Marathon Nutrition Simplified – 7 Diet Tips
The only thing that annoys me is the split up of searching for programs, settings (control panel applets), and files. I alway hit start and then begin typing, but 2/3 of the time don't see what I'm looking for. I have to notice that I'm actually looking for a setting or file and then change context. I know there are shortcuts to jump straight to searching files or settings, but I'm not always thinking about that. Especially when it is a gray area like control panel applets or small utility programs that I don't have shortcuts for.

When most search implementations are becoming more single and "unified", Windows has taken a step backwards.

Why can't they just copy Apple's Spotlight?
His diet suggestions seem to be the opposite of crazy. He was very early with "more fat, less carbs, no sugar" which seems to be more or less common wisdom now. That coupled with generally few calories (CR must be the most well studied diet there is) and vegetables is basically what he recommends dietwise. His early and seemingly correct conclusions on diet allowed him to cure his diabetes type 2. That you would suggest those as crazy makes you seem poorly researched and makes me less likely to believe your other statements.
Or, if you want an explicit “Search for apps”, then it's Win+Q.
On Flash? So they wanted to make sure you can't use it on a mobile device?
If you like that kind of thing I'll push Kaiba as a further-future look at a world where the ability to edit memories and change bodies makes personal identity much more nebulous. It's all emphasised with these amorphous visuals that are a great example of something that's only possible in the animated medium.
If they're toeing the line of acceptability, they're bound to cross over it at some point. This is a discussion about how one user thinks they've crossed that line, what effects that might have on their business and their users and customers, and what can be done to bring it back into line.

Must every article and discussion be about something "surprising"? Meta-discussions like this are dull; if you're uninterested in an article, ignore it.
Or use the keyboard instead. Win+c opens the side panel you'd get when going into the top/bottom right corner.
I also haven't been able to figure out how to search the app store. The same "universal" search functionality that works from the start menu (by just starting to type anywhere), doesn't work in the app store. Right-clicking in the app store doesn't work either. What am I missing?
At this point I don't think its smart to wait. It's time to move on and start looking at alternative ways to lock down PHP. I'm running 5.4 and had to make the difficult decision to upgrade my server without it. There can be PHP security without Suhosin. And maybe I have bad information but hasn't there not been a single peep out of the Suhosin project for a seriously long time?
You'll be delighted to find the UX in desktop mode to be pretty much the same (sans Start Menu, which becomes more and more obsolete if you pin stuff to the task bar) with loads of nice tweaks. From a better file copy dialog to a new task manager – the improvements are there.
Fair enough, but I would hazard a guess that most users in versions previous to Windows 8 attempted to click on the center of the button, a slower movement than hitting the bottom left corner of the screen.
"If/switch" branching is sometimes called "boolean blindness":

http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blin...

The reason is that no new type information is gained when you branch.

When you pattern match, however, you gain new names in scope that have new types. This is new type information such that the branch choice represents new information not only in the program position, but also at the type level.

For example:

if(x != NULL) {
.. compiler does not know if x is null or not ..
} else {
.. ditto
}

Whereas with pattern matching:

case x of
Nothing -> .. Scope gets no new value.
x is a Maybe type, not usable as a direct value
Just y -> .. Scope gets "y" as a value of the type
inside the maybe, which is directly usable.

Also, you can define a function like:

f (Just (Right x)) (y:ys) = ...
f (Just (Left e)) [] = ...
f _ xs = ...

which pattern-matches multiple arguments at the same time, including recursive pattern matching (Right inside Just, Left inside Just, etc).

If you meant the difference regarding open/closed sum types, I can expand on that.
I'm generally a proponent of exit over voice, but I don't think this would be a strong effect except in the case of tiny tax havens attracting super rich people. Unfortunately, having a bunch of people migrate to your country does not benefit politicians unless those people reliably vote for you.
HTML5: Understanding the audio tag
This is eerily similar to the show H+.

Not on the same scale of course, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post.
Seems in line with what PG has been saying recently about the increasing number, and feasibility, of hardware-based startups:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hw.html
not in XP if you had the language bar in the task bar

So that is the reason. I've never understood why the lower-left corner thing worked on some XP machines and not others. Now I know, Thank you!
W3C Character Entity Reference Chart
Lenovo UEFI Only Wants To Boot Windows, RHEL
You have to bring up the charm menu (mouse in upper right or windows-c), and then click search and then start typing. Took me far too long to figure that out.
3.99 is because I want to generate some revenue in the short term, but still have it basically free. In the long term there will be premium features that will cost more. Once these become popular I may even go to a freemium model. But for right now I want it cheap to get a lot of users but also try to generate revenue to at least fund part time development. Right now I'd rather have more users then fewer at a higher price.

This is also all subject to change as I'm just trying to find out what works. But right now my thought is this should be as cheap as an android or iphone app.
It's a horribly bad decision. Why would you need a unified experience between devices with vastly different interaction and input scenarios? Desktops make up 80% of user interaction, but Microsoft is focusing on the 20% who use mobile or tablet. A small handheld device which is used primarily for content consumption would be best served with a Win 8 style UI, but for the desktop, it makes working much more difficult - people work at desktop PCs in a vastly different way.
Spatial rather than lexical memory.

I have a console, aliases, scripts etc. if I want to start programs with typing.
Can't people just type in the name of program they're interested in?

For the same reason people like vi -- switching back and forth between keyboard and mouse is slow, inefficient, and distracting. When using the mouse, you want to stay on the mouse as long as possible. When using the keyboard, you want to stay on the keyboard as long as possible.
Like the author in his conversation, I found myself reading this article looking for the answer to the question of what I should career-wise myself. doh!
Let's not argue here. Obviously he's a cool kid and we should all learn a thing or two from him. Like how to be the very last person here who still thinks its fun to take pot shots at PHP.
Fuckin' A. Thanks...
Thanks to everyone working on PHP for all of their hard work. Looking forward to using that new password hashing API in future production systems in particular, once 5.5 goes final.
one thing that Apple did correctly

Am I the only person who remembers the switch from OS 9->OS X? The noise around Windows 7->Windows 8 sounds quite similar to the noise Mac users where making around that time.
Mirror Imaging: What it is, and Why You May Need It
If anyone has any invites left, we'd all sure appreciate it :)

peterk @ chykalophiagroup.com

Wonder if this works alright in the suburbs ...
I'd have to go back a couple of years and review which ones have upgrade issues. I remember that Solidworks is one of them. We are under maintenance contract on SW itself (~$1,500 year per seat), so that's not a problem. The FEA tool, which cost ~$12K as well as our integrated CAM sofware (I think it was around ~$8K) I believe are the issues. Since the incremental improvement wouldn't really buy us much of anything measurable it makes no sense to spend thousands per workstation just because you upgraded the OS.
I found your comment fairly cryptic. I had a fun twenty minutes trying to work out what you meant, and under what circumstances dotless RHS in email addresses might be legal.

I suppose from the RFC, sure the spec doesn't require dots.

For example, I can use http://mythic-beasts.com/~pdw/cgi-bin/emailvalidate and verify that sure, '1@2!3!4' is a valid RFC822 email address. But I think e.g. UUCP-style addreses are a pathological case, and we don't _really_ want users signing up with them.

Another option would be intranets, e.g. 'baker@internal', but again I think that's being a bit pedantic, since most people on HN are writing webapps for the public Internet, not mail clients.

So can we get an email with foo@<some-dotless-string> routed across the public Internet? Even a bounce would do :)

You might be able to do a riff on xyzzy123@[23.55.211.36] (e.g xyzzy123@[389534500] or xyzzy123@[1737D324]. However, do you _really_ want your users to specify these?

There are mx records for existing TLDs (e.g. com, org, au, mx) - but all the mx records I tried refused connections on port 25. So no mail for 'xyzzy123@com' :(

So gTLDs are another option, and there was a time when it looked like xyzzy123@xyzzycorp might route (as long as it didn't collide with anything on the local resolver's search list). But it seems that dotless use of gTLDs is seriously deprecated at this point, and that ICANN will treat it as a TOS violation: http://domainincite.com/10254-why-domain-names-need-punctuat...

Basically, ICANN's conclusion was that dotless TLDs are a terrible idea for many technical reasons.

I looked into IDNs too, but of course due to the way DNS works, you can't really get around the dots.

So the conclusion of all this is that:

1) Using an RFC822 regex is a terrible way to check emails. The things it thinks are valid are MUCH wider than what you actually want.

2) You should probably check the RHS against a public suffix list if you are e.g. accepting a user email address on a signup page. If you accept dotless TLDs or other constructions (e.g. ips on RHS) there is some (low, but nonzero) risk that a malicious user could cause your systems to route mail to your other systems internally.
High Performance Ruby
As a minister it only matters that she is clever enough to take expert advice and run with that. She's there to represent us, it's unfair to ask her to have an in depth knowledge of any portfolio that she could possibly be given.

Having said that MPs, like the general population, seem to undervalue expert advice and value 'gut feeling'. This is especially true if their gut senses media controversy or 'giving the opposition a stick with which to beat them at the next election'.

While it would be nice to see a tech savvy person in such a position they may well not understand the social implications of policy (such as most people don't know how to search in the internet for a filter let alone understand what a filter is) and that would be equally painful to watch.
Not entirely correct, from the article "While 68% indicated they would get one of the new Windows 8 models, 30% planned to buy an Apple iPad touch tablet, and 12%, an Apple Macintosh computer." Math seems a bit off here.
Windows Phone 8 review: Microsoft lays a foundation for success
I love the underlying engineering cause -- let's get everyone to keep a GPS/data link open while they walk around popular city attractions and roadways so we can build an amazing pedestrian pathfinding system.
We are using both simple queries and MapReduce.
Simple queries like
db.cloudmagicAnalyics.count({type:'search', ts:{$gte:new Date('12 November 2012')}});
or say we need to find the number of users who searched
db.cloudmagicAnalyics.distinct('user_id', {type:'search', ts:{$gte:new Date('12 November 2012')}}).length;

Map/reduce gives an edge as we don't need to process the info again in PHP. For example we want to know how many users are searching in each platform. Either we run multiple queries and get result or one single map/reduce command.

Due to some technical limitations and to ensure our search speed is not deteriorated, we decided to log all requests conditionally and then asynchronously parse and insert them in MongoDB. My next blog post will explain this better.

I have not given a whirl at Aggregate Framework, looks interesting, will try it out.
Computer running slowly – it could be your CPUs thermal protection in action
Instantbird 1.3 Released
I've been using Win 8 on the desktop for almost a year, and I have no need for a start button/menu/etc. The Metro (er, Modern UI) paradigm works as well with a mouse as it does with touch. The days of touchless screens are coming to an end; in the near future most laptops and desktop monitors will all be touch-ready. I find most of the FUD about the new paradigm is coming from people who haven't even used it. Use it for a month; you'll find it gets out of your way and lets you work just fine.
Undoubtedly one of the coolest things I've seen in 2012.
I confess I just do not understand those tiles. I don't want to put my phone down on a desk or restaurant table (well I don't do the latter much anyway) and have other people observe photos and social media feeds. And my current iOS device allows for many more available options from the home screen with the small icons. But horses for courses I guess.
Older start menu prevents context switch... it's way simpler to multitask when your screen doesn't constantly switch between full screen windows.
History Buff
What I find really irritating, is the lack of interaction between the start menu and the desktop. I use current AV and Firewall software that's "Windows 8 compatible". However, if I'm in the app store and attempt to launch an app from there, the firewall will happily block it with no notifications visible where I am currently (app store, or start menu)

If I then go back to the desktop, I can answer the alert from the firewall AND go back to the app store and use the app. I've since learned that the start menu will have toast notifications, but everything that I'm reading about them is that they will not have the same elaborations that desktop notifications have. In other words, I can't answer "allow", "deny", "block" or anything else while in the start menu.

Is nobody else seeing this behavior?
It's highly possible. But even if they didn't I just hate this concept where FB/Zynga try to trick users into doing something they expect will yield X when in fact they have changed it to do Y.

For instance, I once used my PayPal account to authorize a in-game payment in FB (Zynga game) for my wife. Go figure why she likes to play that stupid game but she does. In my mind I was thinking "I am authorizing THIS payment NOW" but what they did in fact? Paypal added FB as an authorized company allowed to charge me anything.

So then when my wife clicked something curious in the game thinking she would just see something, the game actually charge my account for that. I never agreed to it charging my account once again and a third time. But that's what it did.

I know, it's probably all very well explained in the those small grey letters but I didn't bother to read. My wife won't read them. My grandma won't either. Nobody will... and they know it.

PayPal was a whole experience in itself. I had to dig down into 4-5 levels of options until I found the list of authorized companies and FB was there.

I know this can all be explained with "users are dumb and deserve it" but really? Do they have to resort to such tactics? Well, they probably have otherwise their stock will keep falling more and more... sad situation.

A few weeks ago I deleted my FB account because it was fed up with all the things mentioned here and it was a great distraction. It's impressive how little impact it had, except I have more mental space for other (let's hope so) more useful things.
Why do British startups waste so much time on tech conferences?
Think really hard about what you said. Does a networked multi-core FEA tool running under Solidworks and solving non-trivial problems JUST run the CPU like hell for hours?

Does the operating system do nothing else while this is happening? Does the person using the workstation just sit there and watch it run or is he/she, perhaps, doing other work and running other applications?

While running an FEA tool is not THE test, it is one data point, good or bad. I can't remember the last time on of the Vista 64 machines crashed in the last, I don't know, four years or so.
I can't believe I didn't know this :\
In the Enterprise, I think Java is here to stay for the foreseeable future. It's partly because huge organisations don't like to switch because it's expensive and problem-prone. Look at how long COBOL lasted (and is lasting).

What I think is especially amazing is that in the current growth areas of cloud and mobile, Java is also very strong.

I think when and with what Java will be replaced will be just as unpredictable as Java's rise itself. Probably more dynamic, but also able to build huge systems. It will probably have to wait for the next platform after smartphones/tablets/cloud.
HTC Desire X review: one last hurrah for a former flagship?
Stefan Sagmeister: 5 Brilliant TEDTalks to Watch With a Friend
You can use it right now: https://packagist.org/packages/ircmaxell/password-compat
Malware "used to spy on opposition" in Georgia
That's Apple's stance, which I disagree with. Even today, some tasks are just faster and more natural with touch regardless of whether it's on a desktop computer or a tablet.

Incorporating touch into a desktop OS also forces the industry (PC manufacturers, software developers, etc.) to innovate and think outside the box. Perhaps in the future, we no longer position our monitors upright all the time.

Lastly, if you don't like touch-based interface, you don't have to use it.
The new start screen is actually perfect for spatial memory. Instead of an unordered list of programs on the start menu, you get a colorful matrix of icons you can size and arrange however you like. For those with lexical memory, hit the windows key and type a few letters and you're good to go. It's really the best of both worlds.
Facebook offers $10 to each of its Sponsored Stories victims
I have yet to see a single viable example of a Knockout app that's been progressively enhanced. Until then, I'm not even going to consider touching it.
Tylted Launches GameDrop,A New Kind Of In-App, Ad-Based Network For Mobile Games
For monetary policy to respond properly the fed has to read aggregate demand and react accordingly as quickly as possible. There are extreme incentives for the fed to keep interest rates low to encourage borrowing and economic growth, there is little encouragement to think long term and turn up the interest rates so that currency is protected.

Bitcoin may be flawed, but at least its obviously and predictably flawed. This stability should in the long run allow for much better planning on an individual level.
"the white house" also works.
How do you get to write as well as George Carlin unless you push, practice and get feedback?
For bash:
alias make="nice make -j $(grep 'processor' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l)"