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ropeladderon Ask HN: Must do's and must know's when switching to Windows?

Yes. Listary is the one thing I miss from Windows after I switched to Linux Mint. (well, that and running Foobar2000 natively)

Also I wanted to mention 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker), which is a fantastic little util that helps you make your taskbar just the way you want it. Mousewheel over taskbar for volume control, middle click closes programs, etc...

ropeladderon Show HN: Ggraph – A graph visualization library for big messy data

I really like the grouping features and the labels work pretty well too (though it's slow with large groups). Thanks for sharing your work!

ropeladderon How ‘Rogue One’ Brought Back Familiar Faces

I found Tarkin pretty distracting from the start. I don't think other people I was with noticed though, so maybe it wasn't a bad choice.

ropeladderon Ask HN: What are other minimal, all-content, no-frills discussion sites like HN?

It's true that anyone who dismisses people as 'SJW types' is probably going to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance reading metafilter.

Metafilter has a lot of female users that feel safe expressing their opinion and telling their experiences. Not to rag on HN, because generally the discussions here are pretty respectful, but gender diversity at metafilter is one thing I really value about the site.

ropeladderon The New York Times is buying the Wirecutter for more than $30M

Definitely agree with this. Here's hoping that with the Time's extra resources they will be able to keep more up to date.

ropeladderon Amazon bans incentivized reviews tied to free or discounted products

I had long assumed that Valve added the "past 30 days" aggregate to show when games had improved rather than gotten worse. (i.e. early access games) Kind of interesting that it helps clarify changes in both ways, and implies very different incentives for the game publishers/sellers.

ropeladderon “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

You can't get what's app to do anything if you don't grant it access to your contacts. I ended up creating a new user profile on my phone based on a new Gmail account just to run what's app...

ropeladderon EFF blasts Microsoft over Windows 10 privacy concerns

It convinced me to switch. I've been on Windows since forever and was excited for Windows 10, but the privacy (and auto update) issues convinced me to dual boot with Linux Mint, which I now use for everything but the occasional game. I have a few small gripes, but overall it works well (bluetooth drivers actually work much better).

I can kind of see MS's perspective, in that everyone else is doing all kinds of tracking and auto-updating on all their platforms. But for me it really felt like I was losing control of my computer in an unacceptable way.