skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, I use Ubuntu as my primary OS, and I have for a number of years. I'm running 10.04 now, and it's good (obviously, or I wouldn't use it day to day), but I don't think it's any more than incrementally better than 9.10.
Apparently you live in an alternate universe. I've been using Linux for my desktop OS since 1999, and Ubuntu since 2004, and it's been a consistently great experience. Sure, there are warts on occasion, but that's true with all OSes. Ubuntu has been solid enough to keep me productive by day (as a CTO of a company of over 1000 employees), and by night (as a consultant). I even bought a MacBook Pro last year and gave OS X a try. It lasted around a month. My frustration with its completely odd UI design decisions, dismal package management (ports, fink), and second-class treatment of open source software led me to install Ubuntu on the laptop and wipe OS X. Couldn't be happier with it now.

2010 may not be the year of Linux on the consumer desktop, but it's another year of Linux on my desktop, and I couldn't be happier.
Agreed, I've never tested a Ubuntu operating system that had the same usability feel as windows (which is my current OS more by habit than choice), or even that has the same refined-but-alien feel of using OS X (I've rarely had grasp of a mac for longer than a few hours, but despite feeling alien I can still navigate and do everything I can with windows, simply because I'm computer-savy), but Linux never even achieves that feeling. It has an unrefined ad-hoc feel to it, things don't seem right or straight.
The free software foundation has a campaign, their view is it limits free software and perhaps freedom in general: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/
Animal Lovers: Zoophiles Make Scientists Rethink Human Sexuality
If you want to think of it like that sure, they are running a small biz around their software. I don't see it like a regular business where you are developing your software based solely on the customers needs, the devs needs will come first. I see it more like structured donations around user requests.
I have a friend who is a retired Scotland Yard detective and he has an interesting take on the US war on drugs: we effectively put hundreds of billions of dolars a year into the hands of organized crime, and the possibility that there are payoffs to the US Congress to keep this money flow going is a real possibility.
I think that intrinsic motivation is key, without it, it will be impossible to really learn. If you don't have intrinsic motivation to learn something, you can always go fotr the monkey approach, where you ape after your instructor to finish a task, or solve a problem. That is by no means "learning" though.
Africa's Forever Wars: Why the continent's conflicts never end
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/specificator
Stability in the US government bond market shows signs of cracking
Dismal package management. The article talks about a consumer OS. My mom would have a fit using Ubuntu and demand her Windows 95 back if I replaced her Mac OS X (which I moved her onto) with Ubuntu. :)

For a CTO, like you, with technical skills I think Ubuntu really can work, specially if open source software is important. But as a consumer operating system? I think the iPhone OS is closer to what my mom needs than what Windows 7 or Mac OS X is. Of course, consumers gets more tech savvy as time goes...
A regular user should never have to go to the command line to do anything, but I can't seem to avoid that with Linux.
I really want to like Ubuntu, but then I start it up and see horrible fonts, icons that look out of place with this new theme, and UI strangeness that doesn't seem to be justified.

Why doesn't the close button sit on a corner? Why is the program launcher on a different bar than the already running programs? If I want to bring up a program like Firefox, I don't really care if it running or not I want to go to the same area to bring it up.

I know I can change all of this things, but I have better ways to spend my time. Older users even if they wanted to aren't going to be able to change these things.
Trust me, if you used Linux for some time you will feel the same about Windows. I certainly do. It starts with installing programs by download installers, goes over not having windows dock on each other and ends with having no useful terminal.
Can someone tell me WTF "pre-calculus" is meant to mean? AFAICT, it's just a fancy word for algebra.
And google execs will personally lead the fed anti-trust lawyers to the mobile ad department of 1 Infinite Loop St, Cupertino, CA 95014.
This story is dead on. I know this from personal experience and from teaching my own children. I could not add until I was 10. It was painful. I still remember it vividly. Suddenly everything clicked, and I rocketed through all the material I was behind on.

I have six children, five of which are old enough to be in school. We have been home schooling them, I believe I have some creds on this.

Two of them (both girls) took right to math early on. No problem there. Two of them (both boys) couldn't be bothered, no matter what method we tried.

One of the girls was doing math before she could read, because she was a late reader. Couldn't read until she was 9. But suddenly she got it, and took off, and is reading voraciously today. Her younger sister was reading at 4.

Both boys are now doing pre-algebra. One is 13, the other 11.

We decided not to sweat it when thy were way behind. We just kept getting them to do what they could. If they weren't getting some concept, we went slower, or went to other topics they could understand. Eventually everything started clicking.

Cookie-cutter education could never do this. I agree that national education standards that fit all children into specific requirements by age, are foolish and harmful. As guidelines they are fine, but if the government is behind them they are never just guidelines. They won't fix the problem of bad and lazy teachers (in fact, they make that problem worse), and they don't help good teachers teach better.
Not even close. The 'cloud' is half-baked (I was rather embarrassed when I sent out share links for a PDF to a bunch of people, and it turns out that none of the share links worked, ever), no one cares about the music store when audio doesn't reliably work, etc.
I think the fact that Linus eventually took his advise and works that way now is a strong indicator of ESR being correct. Git is the prime example of ESR being right.
Usually buy the ones with an awesome OS. Those don't come with docks. ;)
I did visit the Googleplex last summer. Basically, find a Googler to invite you ;) He/she will make you visit it and you may even have diner at one of their cafeterias. They have a merch store on site by the way.

Otherwise, you shouldn't have problems walking around the volleyball field and the dinosaur without an invitation, just don't look too suspicious. The Google Security guys watched me from their SUVs as I was walking near the campus with my 65 liters backpack and day pack.

Mozilla is across the street. I went inside but all I could find was an empty room with another door and a magnetic card reader, so I couldn't visit.

The Computer History Museum is a 10-15 minutes walk from the Googleplex. There is also a movie theater in proximity.
I don't know the figure now but ten years ago you were expected to bring in at least ten million in business annually to be considered for partner at Andersen Consulting.
Why not? Security concern?
“alternate universe”

No alternate universe needed. Different people don’t have to have the same requirements and preferences. No one right screw for the one right nut. People and Operating Systems are sadly|luckily quite a bit more complicated than that.

That’s just why discussions about the general superiority of any one Operating System are always so horrendously stupid. (This sentence is a general comment and not a response to you. You specifically write about your needs and your needs only, no claims of general superiority involved. Just to clarify.)
How are commercial apps normally installed on Linux? (I'm presuming it's not by downloading installers.)

I'm not a fan of arbitrary window docking - I have my own layout system based on cascading - while Cygwin rxvt provides most of what I want out of a terminal, shell etc.
Out of curiosity, what do you find yourself having to use the command line for?

I tend to use it out of preference, but I can't offhand think of any "regular" tasks I do that would require it. Some more obscure bits of troubleshooting might occasionally require it. But even there the gui options seem to have almost everything covered unless you start going a lot deeper than any regular user will care to.
Bear with me here, I have to lay down some foundation to get to my point.

Bias has a specialized definition in machine learning; in a (really thin) nutshell, it represents the set of concepts a given technique can represent. If your banana vs. ball classifier can only represent "roundness" and "yellowness", the bias will prevent it from seeing a yellow cube as anything but a banana. (If you really dig in, I find this concept is really a superset of the traditional meaning of "bias" and find it a lot more edifying, but that's beyond this post.)

A learning agent, even a human, can only learn what their biases permit. Much of intellectually growing up is the process of learning better biases, for instance putting away "magic" and replacing it with "chemistry". If you've ever felt your brain stretching as you learn something (a foreign language, Haskell, etc), that's your biases growing. Characterizing growing biases mathematically has been a great challenge for machine learning, but it clearly happens to humans.

Alright, getting up to the payload here: I have actually had similar concerns about our educational patterns before because you can't effectively teach something until you have the necessary biases in place. Unfortunately, you can't stop learning, you are always learning. So what happens when you "teach" something to students that lack the ability to apply the correct biases? You get the square yellow cube effect above... one way or another it will fit the biases you have (give or take growth, which takes time). The result is semantic gibberish. Now, by itself it is inevitable that you will go thorough quite a lot of gibberish as you grow up (see also "Kids Say the Darndest Things"), but why are we using precious school time to do that for math?

Furthermore, it is transparently obvious that things can be taught too soon. My 18-month-old is frolicking around my feet now, and he can't add. There's not much I can do to correct that right now. At some point he will, but this suffices to prove the point that there is a "too soon". So, when is it no longer "too soon"? Are we really sure that our traditional answer is anything more than traditional, that it has any actual truth?

Teaching things early is not harmless, either. Think about it; how many adults have downright childish issues with math? Childish misunderstandings, childish opinions, childish beliefs? Coincidence? Bad motivation? Or a schooling system that jammed it into their brains before they were ready. And those that don't have childish problems... is it merely because we were ready soon enough, rather that necessarily any actual unique skill? Some people never recover.

It is at least a question worth research and thought before we knee-jerk an answer of "if it was good enough for my grandpappy it's good enough for you".

(Getting a little more controversial, this is why I don't support really early sex education (i.e., elementary school). You will accomplish nothing except hilarious misunderstandings on a very important topic. This can have real, negative consequences, and the intentions count for nothing.)
The Pirate Bay - The world's most resilient bittorrent site
If I remember, since geometry is such a large topic, pre-calculus also teaches the parts of geometry necessary for traditional calculus study. That way, the geometry course can be made more simple.
With a common object model, like pyshell or powershell, improved autocomplete, and syntax highlighting, the command line might not be such a bad thing. Although, I would stop at that point to prevent an eclipse.
Whether it is polite to bother them (it's not) is orthogonal to the fact that such a roster of seminal academics and hackers is located in one place.
Wireless has been a problem for me too.

Edit: No, I'm not trolling. Try getting a Marvell 8335 to work. I couldn't.
I used to skive off school and go down the woods and do maths problems to entertain myself, so that I could avoid Irish lessons.
Nice Linux troll from 10 years ago. Since hardware is more standardized these days (Intel video / wireless / hd-audio), Linux rarely has hardware compatibility problems. Sure, there are bugs, but it's software. On my OS X box (that I finally killed off and replaced with Debian), I couldn't eject DVDs if they were in VLC's playlist. Drag to trash, nothing would happen, hit the eject button after that, nothing would happen. A reboot was the only way to get the DVD back.

Welcome to software.
This is blogspam. The original article from Psychology Today was already submitted to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211198

But I must acknowledge that some searches for submissions of the original article that I just tried on Google failed, although SearchYC works with enough keywords.
Precalculus is the usual current designation in the United States for a secondary school course that includes functions and trigonometry, and perhaps also matrix algebra.

Many remedial courses in math in colleges will have the title "college algebra" while others will have the title "precalculus," with much the same content.
You download installers, just like you would for Windows.

If you want to install Komodo IDE for Linux you download the tarball and double-click the excutable (or start it from a console).

Want to install github firewall install? Download tarball, double-click excutable.
Just a late note: if Amazon, or whoever, sold me, by mistake, a pirate copy of some paper book, I'd be rather miffed if one of their employees came into my house and took the book from my shelves.

With electronic devices, the "sellers" are making it normal for them to keep the keys to the house. Sounds more like a rental, with rather uninhibited landlords ...
Of course it does.
Capitalism just like Adam Smith pictured it
For what people use personal computers for these days, I agree that Ubuntu is a good choice. Everyone's favorite web apps work, you can play movies, and you can make Word documents. Add a little eye candy, and people are happy.

What's even nicer is not needing CPU-sucking anti-virus protection scanning every file in the background, draining your laptop's battery life. If you want to install software, you don't have to go to some random website; you just open the software installation control panel, type a keyword, click a button, and start using the software. Even Apple realized this was a good idea, and copied it in the form of "the App Store".

There will never be a perfect desktop OS (ever use OS X or Windows!?), but Linux is certainly becoming a great competitor these days. I no longer shy away from recommending Ubuntu; it meets most people's needs, and it's easier to maintain that Windows or OS X. Who would have thunk it!
What? Thinkpads come with docks.
Not until they lose the Fisher-Price look.
Actually it is by downloading installers(or at least it has been in my experience. Houdini, Java, etc. )
Read the wikipedia page on ongoing conflicts to better understand how many people are dying every year and where exactly they are dying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_conflicts
ESR is wrong, Linus is right. The letter should be read in context, and it demonstrates the blunder of ESR.

Here is Linus' letter on which ESR responded:
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0201.h...

And here are Linus' points, in short:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12
This dust removal GIMP tool seems nice, too:
http://registry.gimp.org/node/13289

Does anyone have experience with it or something better to suggest?
Ugh sorry, I just accidentally downvoted this while trying to upvote it. Sorry again. Thanks for the link!
The USA, at 300 million people, is only 5% of the planetary population (over 6,000 million people).

Even if you discard huge chunks of the developing world as not a reliable market, you've got 500M people in the EU, 200M+ in the developed Pacific Rim (Japan, SK, Taiwan), 300M middle-class Chinese, and so on. It probably adds up to 1-1.5Bn developed world citizens.

For a 5% minority, the USA punches above its class at 20% of traffic ... but in the long term, hopefully it will trend towards only 5% of traffic. (I say "hopefully" because that'd indicate the rest of the world was at the same average level of connectedness ...)
The comments look uninformed and scattered. Care to share why you think this is a dangerous simplification? From what I have observed and read about the various conflicts, kidnappings, and terrorism that occurs in Africa this article appears to provide a valid point of view.
Agreed, but again, what's changed? This problem has always existed, and it's getting some airtime now because someone made a little blue box to that makes it a bit easier to configure.
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Did you even read the article? The whole first page is devoted to the improved, more professional look of the OS.
I've been using velcro and double-sided tape, but I think this method is even better.
Once again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928726
Africa is a very big place. I've been a resident in South Africa for 27 years. The majority of which has been peaceful - I get the feeling that we're in a critical tide turning phase right now.

It's going to swing one way or the other. It's both exciting and incredibly scary.

I am definitely not qualified to comment about the rest of Africa. I did, however, watch an insane documentary about Liberia on Vice TV. (And if this documentary is any indication of what is happening in the rest of Africa, that's scary.)

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-gu...
You haven't actually said why it was an abrasive experience. Plenty of people are happy with Ubuntu as a desktop.
Go to: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c51fbbce-3908-11df-8970-00144feabd... for site with no registration requirements.
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I think I perform poorly in these sorts of interview, because in the wild I never solve programming problems by writing things on a whiteboard or on paper (unless it's a geometry problem), and I also frequently use external references like books or the internet which are never available in the interview setting. Another problem is that I almost never debug code exclusively by staring at it on paper.
+1. My sister is on Ubuntu since years and she had to temporarily switch back to XP : the painful experience she described was just similar to what you usually hear the other way around.
Ha! Sorry, you can't. You need to be a referrer from Google (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...)
IAd: Apple to Launch New Mobile Ad Platform?
Say what you like about colonialism, but this kind of shit never happened under the British Empire. They'd come in, kill the local armies and resistance, then they'd start building roads, hospitals, and schools and generally managing their territories fairly well.

Last time I mentioned this, someone brought up to me that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It's an okay document, it's got some of the best parts of the Magna Carta and U.S. Bill of Rights in it, but one part I particularly disagree with:

> The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

I think "the basis of the authority of government" should be sane, good governance - protecting individual rights, keeping peace and stability, and keeping citizens free from violence and crime. I could care less if I have a say in the government if they're generally keeping me safe and leaving me alone. I think sane, wise, and effective governance should be the basis of authority for government, regardless of whether it's "the will of the people" or not. I imagine many in Africa feel the same way, and would be much better off under rule from proven decent governors instead of what they've got now.
Since the article is about monetisation I'd say GDP would be the best importance metric to use. I believe the US is around 25% of world GDP.
When I was in high-school I could read or even do my homework in a bus or in a tram, but now I can't even read a flier because I get dizzy.
I'm very happy you've found that Linux serves your desktop needs. For me, I would never host on anything but Linux or FreeBSD, and my phone is a G1 Android.

But your desktop is only one of ~1-2% of desktops that use Linux. The "alternate universe", i.e. the 98%+ of the world, are happy with Windows or OSX, some of them by choice. Your clearly a very happy with Linux, but don't project this happiness on others.

The open source world could learn a lot from the story of Firefox. When the market was frustrated with a slow and insecure IE, Firefox came along being very fast and secure. Us geeks loved it, recommended it to non-techie friends and, these benefits were important to them too. What benefit does desktop Linux give me? The only real new benefit coming in Linux is the fast boot up. That is a real consumer benefit. I can't think of another real benefit in the current crop of distros.
India Reynolds Bare poses for Nuts Magazine December 2009
India Reynolds, India Reynolds Pics, Magazine Scans, Nuts Magazine
Why do you feel the need to do consulting work at night if you're the CTO of a 1000+ people company?
so the guy lives in an alternative universe because YOU like Linux?
"Our New Old Enemies" By Ralph Peters
Ask HN: What are your AdWords Ratios?
I'm launching an adwords campaign, and having very little success. Only two clicks to my site in three days. Obviously I need to change things, but it occurred to me that I have no idea where to focus my efforts.

Should I focus on more ad impressions (raise my CPC and add keywords), or should I focus on changing my ad text, to make better use of the page impressions I am getting?

How to decide? Ask HN. What is considered an acceptable ratio of ad impressions to clicks? The answer to that will tell me where I'm going wrong.
Command lines are great things... for power users. Requiring the average user to even know what a command prompt is is the kiss of death.
The social networking client Gwibber is now built right into the desktop.

Argh! There's nothing I hate more than seemingly cool open source software being saddled from birth with ridiculous names! Gwibber!? What was the author thinking!?
Three key points:

"Our enemies of the future will be enemies out of the past.

The Bible does not sugarcoat man's nature. Faith is not required--read it as a secular history and you will get a better picture of the very human enemies our soldiers will face in the next century than any work of contemporary scholarship or speculation provides. From child warriors to fanatics who revel in slaughter, man's future is written in man's past.

Still, if you are uneasy with the Old Testament as a catalog of human behaviors, substitute another work, the Iliad. It is the fountainhead of our civilization's secular literature. That epic begins with an argument over raping rights, proceeds through slaughter and betrayal, and has genocide as its goal. It is about the wreckage of Yugoslavia."
Yes, security concerns.
clearly. the error was... amusing, though.