skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that in terms of skill-set marketing is probably easier to pick up than programming (I make a living as a marketer and programming is a hobby), there are organizational factors in a marketing department (large ones anyway) that don't exist in an engineering dept. Namely, a multitude of stakeholders who all need or want a say in how the product is marketed. This is compounded by the fact that marketing effectiveness can be harder to measure - MUCH harder if you don't control the sales channel - and so a lot of subjectivity comes into play.

Where I work, on a consumer electronics product, there are up to a dozen different departments and no less than 27 people who weigh in on what I do. Compared to programming, where the ultimate arbiter could simply be "Does it work?" or "Do the tests pass?" marketing is a tangle of opinion and politics.
Ubuntu provides by default an on/off slider in its privacy settings for disabling the display of online search results in the dash[1], BUT I'm not sure if changing that slider to 'off' will also disable the sharing of searches with Canonical's servers. (The language used by the settings app is ambiguous: "When searching on the dash, include online search results - ON/OFF.")

Moreover, I don't particularly feel like spending time & effort examining Unity Dash source code to figure out if and how my information might be shared with Canonical and/or other third parties. Canonical should make an unambiguous promise not to transmit any data to anyone, right there on the privacy settings screen, whenever that slider is set to the 'off' position. I would trust such an unambiguous promise.

So thank you for submitting this website here -- I've bookmarked it for when I upgrade my desktops from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS next year.

--

[1] http://b2b.cbsimg.net/blogs/screenshot-from-2013-03-24-09342...

--

Edit: Added second paragraph.
The Onion Halts All Print Editions
My personal fix Ubuntu:

Be careful, this is pretty rude and may break stuff - it is also not complete but some dependencies are too entangled. Only geoclue and indicator-datetime still annoy me. The idea to poll the internet regulary to check for the timezone of the machine is beyond me.

apt-get purge ubuntuone* # I don't use it
apt-get purge unity-lens-music unity-lens-video unity-lens-photos # I don't need the integration
apt-get purge friends* # I don't use this either
apt-get purge telepathy-logger telepathy-indicator telepathy-salut # pidgin is enough for me
apt-get purge unity-scope-musicstores unity-scope-openclipart # No need for that in Unity
apt-get purge oneconf # I don't want to sync my settings
apt-get purge empathy # pidgin works fine
apt-get purge software-center* # synaptic is enough
apt-get purge evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-goa evolution-calendar-factory # thunderbird and lightning for me
apt-get purge unity-scopes-runner unity-webapps-common xul-ext-unity xul-ext-websites-integration # my browser is enough - no integration for me

apt-get --purge autoremove
apt-get install pidgin synaptic

Shrinks RSS from 622MB to ~400MB on my system.
And then I find out that all the old ways I had of managing the box are out-of-date. /etc/ files give way to gnome-config-* gadgets, and don't even get me started about sound.
CIA Paid AT&T for Phone Records
I'm not whining here, I'm a long-time Ubuntu user and want it to do well and become more popular, but if the 'year of the Linux desktop' is ever to happen, there are greater fixes that Ubuntu needs (Ubuntu is pretty much the only distro that, at this time, has a chance of becoming mainstream i.e. reach at least 5% usage share).

For starters, it needs to work out of the box with the average user in mind. I don't think I've ever had a smooth install that didn't require searching the Ubuntu forums to get basic stuff running. If Ubuntu wants to compete with Windows, it can't ship an operating system that can't wake from a suspend on most laptops and requires using a terminal (which most people don't even know what it's for) to perform basic tasks and configuration. The experience for a novice computer user, however terrible you think Microsoft is, has always been excellent on Windows in that it suits their needs of requiring only little knowledge of how software works.
Sensationalist BS. Canonical isn't trying to silence anyone. They have _the same information_ on AskUbuntu.com, a site directly supported by paid Canonical employees.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/192269/how-can-i-remove-amazo...
Pick your poison.

Data cap.

Fully metered.
From http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...:

"These FAQs describe our new monthly data usage plan for XFINITY Internet Service in the following areas: Huntsville and Mobile, AL; Atlanta; Augusta and Savannah, GA; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, MS; Knoxville and Memphis, TN; and Charleston, SC."
From the site:

DRM?

We trust our readers and therefore do not haven any copyright protection mechanisms installed. Read the book where you want. If you have reasons to give the book to a friend, do that. You would do this with a printed book too. Do the right thing.

I'm not a rabid anti-DRM guy, but this is so...sweet it makes me want to buy the book just to support someone with this attitude.
The more Americans know about the NSA, the less they like it (or vice versa)
It's about halfway done; should be out by this weekend crosses fingers. It's about getting press, and man there's going to be some cool stuff in it.
I installed i3 on my ubuntu laptop and am so used tiling windows now, especially since i3 lets you choose which way new windows will be tiled.
Nah. askubuntu has existed for many months as an independent site (both during the askubuntu.stackexchange.com beta and after moving to the .com domain at official launch); and the official sanction has been actively sought from both sides.
This explains why I thought this was old news. It has been in Nashville for a long time now.
Congratulations - I know the feeling of finally, finally, finishing. It's great.
My account just disappeared one day, I was getting some error page that I am not eligible to make an account, didn't even do anything just watched videos. Everything is gone and now I am tied to G+. I don't like Google anymore but I never cared for their products to begin with. Gmail is the only thing I use, maybe its time for me to find something else.
Then why bother? Do you have OCD?
This whining about Ubuntu is ridiculous. Removing the shopping features is easy enough anyway, without devoting a site to it, never mind posting it to HN.

Furthermore, there's plenty of choices out there. The best of which (IMO) are openSUSE, Fedora, and Arch/Manjaro. Mint is terrible - like a buggier version of Ubuntu or unstable Debian...

Furthermore, Canonical puts alot of work into Ubuntu. They deserve to get paid. Maybe consider actually using Amazon through their app as a way of contributing?
Well then now you know Tina has been there and you can go somewhere else, no? it's not like you are forced to book the same hotel because you saw her review
To be fair, the person made no assertions, they said "I highly doubt", and couched other limits in terms of thermodynamics. I'm pretty comfortable saying that thermodynamics is not going to change in a year; at least as comfortable as saying that the sun will rise in the East next year.

More importantly to my way of thinking, the parent to both your posts is talking about company strategy. You have to base future strategy on reasonable projections. Some projections are more likely than other, and you have an n-dimensional space of Gaussian and non-Gaussian probability distributions to optimize. Fortunately, most of the likely scenarios lie near a low dimensional manifold, and we can thus say things like a cell phone won't perform like today's Kepler without running at 200C (because thermodynamics). On a website we can smile knowingly and speculate about possible futures, but company directors need to be far more prosaic and pragmatic.
I get annoyed by those n stupid popups on every video now. Do I really have to close 15 * overlays before I can watch a video?? really?

Google, how does this add to the experience? How does it make youtube a better product?

I won't even get started on the asinine recommendation system. Backed by one of the largest companies in the world and the brightest employees in the world. And yet youtube gets crappier every year. Scratching my head on this one.
This pack contains a lot of valuable tools, well done to who ever put it together.

But please, indicate clearly that it is a lottery where 500 people will win.
Why do they insist on shoving Google+ down people's throats. It isn't going to work out. It's going to crumble and die just like Buzz.
If they commit to providing suitable bandwidth for services such as Netflix and YouTube, I'm not sure how opposed I am to paying for bandwidth.

Estimates are that Netflix movies are 1GB/hr- or $0.20/hr at the Comcast rate. Not super cheap.
I've never heard of this but the 10 rules of a Zen program are very poorly written.
http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen-programmer-030...

I found two glaring mistakes very quickly, which makes me wonder how many mistakes are in this book.

1. Focus
" You’ll not become quicker, just you work multithreaded."
3. Beginners Mind
"Remember the days were you were a beginner."
I don't see what difference that makes, you could get maybe $50 on ebay for a ps3 slimline.
I was just thinking of building a javascript snippet for that XKCD, but you beat me to it. Looks like reading the news is going to get waaaay more interesting....
Steam works fine on both Xubuntu and Mint. Haven't tried it on Debian yet
If you're looking for a simpler OS, you should try Xubuntu:

http://xubuntu.org/
I fucked up...and I don't regret it.
But look, we're building this awesome boat in SF Bay from scraped container parts! How cool is that??!?
Interesting; I mostly agree, except for the "no smooth installs" - from my data points, where I was struggling with Windows drivers, Ubuntu had been mostly plug-and-play (since about 10.04 onward). Then again, my userbase is mostly using office PCs and laptops, without too specialized peripherals.
Or maybe they should have a strategy that doesn't violate user rights. Mindblowing I know.
I don't understand what's the complaint here. I'm not familiar with Mint, but if Mint is using upstream versions of Linux kernel, Firefox and Xorg, I can see that only as a good thing, since I have more trust in upstream core developers of these packages then in Ubuntu or any other distributions "hardening". Just remember the Debian OpenSSH security fiasco where Debian "fixed" the security flaw in upstream OpenSSH and made all its users vulnerable.
And the SV/VC/Tech startup culture is just brimming with altruistic, wonderful people?

Sociopathy isn't restricted to finance. Silicon Valley has seen its share.
Does Xubuntu have any of the privacy concerns / "features" built in that Ubuntu does?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-quake/ibkbfanm...

Something like this for quake live would be cool.
Sorry this is the original link, but if you are on a mobile device like an iPad, this page sticks a massive overlay over the content. Which was hard to get rid of and actually read the page!
I never said the time spent is "wasted". At no point in this discussion have I argued that any of this stuff is "wasted". I am simply arguing that it counts.

Yes, the time spent by the engineers has long-term benefits in increasing their experience. However, a large portion of that time is lost to the spacecraft. If that time could have been spent more productively elsewhere, then spending it on this was a bad idea.

Again, I'm not saying that the mission actually was a bad idea. I'm simply saying that "the money stays in the economy" is a terrible argument.
Yes, it's supposed to disable it completely.
How close do you get to monthly caps?
The complete guide to getting what you want with body language
> "Either way, (3) is a new product, essentially a startup on it's own."

Hehehe, the good old "it's a startup inside a big company!" thing. Here's my advice for when someone pitches that thought to you: run away.

Here's the thing about "startup inside a big company!" - it's never true.
When was the last time you used Debian?

I'm using arch (rolling distro) as my main OS. I do EVERYTHING on it.
My personal one:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

Then I go and find another distribution that doesn't treat its users like cattle. Ubuntu, after shuttleworth being an asshat to the community and the whole amazon and NIH Mir and upstart crap, is now the Ryanair of Linux distributions.

incidentally, don't type the above.
Lubuntu is pretty good too.
Alan Grayson Asks Eric Holder If He Would Arrest Glenn Greenwald
Have you considered giving FreeBSD a try? I do most of my work (development) on Windows, but the times when I did use Linux, I felt much the same way you do. Then, last summer, I decided to give FreeBSD a try; I loaded it up into a VirtualBox on one of my Windows machines and was amazed at how simple and clean it felt compared to Linux, and I've found the FreeBSD community (the forums, mailing lists, etc.) to be extremely helpful while learning my way around.
Halfway between Stable releases I switch to Testing. It helps keep my software versions fresh with upstream releases.
US you're ISP's suck please wake up and do something about it!

Now I'm not in a lot better position ISP's in London are not that much of an improvement.

However if i say Romania what pops into your mind? I my case internet speeds starting from 50Mb/s in every major city at a price equivalent to £6/month.

http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet...
Yeah, sound on Linux can still be an absolute arse, which is surprising to still have to say in 2013. I have no idea how to make my system detect headphone insertion and switch output without a bunch of manual steps. That said I've had problems trying to get windows doing 5.1 sound over HDMI too.

Gnome configs are only an issue if you still use gnome :)

In general things are moving to a more "it's all done for you" way of doing things, with less reliance on config files and unix file permissions and more dbus, service-oriented stuff. Personally I'm not a fan of because when things go wrong they go wrong in very, very opaque ways (try using the 'slim' display manager on Ubuntu 12.04 if you want an example).

At some point someone will probably come up with "CurmudgUX" for people like me that think the new levels of system-component integration will only lead to future pain, avoiding systemd, dbus et al. Guess we'll see.
I really haven't noticed a big difference between XP to 7. The control panel things moved around a bit, but the settings were all still in the Control Panel (and you could get the classic view back easily), and I had to figure out how to right-click on things "run as Admin". My son just hopped from XP to 7 and he's been having zero issues.

I admit I haven't gone to Windows 8. I owe myself a new laptop and I just have this feeling of dread about that.
That's a nice position to be in. Disolve some of your shares: investors take $70 million, you take $30 million. Everyone should be very happy.

Be sure to check your term sheet. It could be that your investors have a liquidation preference that includes a multiple. Based on my (admittedly limited) understanding, if your investors gave you $50 million for 10% of the company, with a 2X multiple liquidation preference, they would be entitled to the first $100 million of any sale, plus 10%. So you may be able to sell for $100 million, but you wouldn't see a dime.
> I think that 90% of people (100% on HN) understand this.

Really? Well, then you should understand that the feedback loop I described alone is enough to make BI unsustainable, and thus not worth pursuing. But it doesn't seem you do. There's another feedback loop too: the more people are just sitting at home, the more will want to join them, and so on.

From another comment of yours:
>> Do you think that wealth redistribution is wrong?

Do you think it's wrong for a mafia to extort money from you? -Yes? Well then, do you think it's wrong for the government to do the exact same thing?

You see, you'd pay "protection money" under threat of violence, but you also pay taxes under threat of violence. Spare yourself the mental gymnastics here. Forcefully dragging you to jail or just plain shooting you if you resist does actually count as violence.

Where do you think the "wealth" to be "redistributed" comes from? -Why from extortion, of course. Would a mafia's extortion be perfectly fine as long as they used your money "efficiently"? Heck, their spending of your money increases aggregate demand, so all is well!

>> There are many arguments suggesting that zero wealth redistribution is not the optimum.
>> I'm convinced that wealth redistribution leads to higher aggregate utility. Whether it leads to higher nominal growth, I don't know.

You throw around these terms as if they meant something here in the real world, let alone after acquiring the wealth to be distributed through blatantly immoral means. What makes zero redistribution of stolen loot "not optimal"? I'd say it's actually precisely the optimum.

"Higher aggregate utility", "aggregate demand"? -Well there's Keynes again. False voodoo economics meant to justify/rationalize State spending and taking on ever more massive debt loads until, of course, eventually the nation's extortion income is wholly consumed in paying interest and the house of cards falls down.

Does an economy imploding help the poor? Does currency debasement and inflation (ie. loss of purchasing power) help the poor? Why no, no they don't. Quite the contrary, but those two are what governments are causing with massive printing and borrowing and using money they don't actually have.
is it possible to pay them and get an "ad free" version?
If a site requires facebook, I won't use it. If a site where I previously had an account forces me to shift to signing in with facebook, you bet your ass I'm leaving.
You misspelled "Fix Unity".

Yes, of course average desktop users don't get the difference between OS and desktop manager, but a) wasn't that one of the issues we were supposed to solve with Linux on the desktop?, and b) those users are never, ever going to follow those instruction.

I'm all in favor of spreading awareness, encouraging people to turn this crap off and putting pressure on Canonical to at the very least make this explicit opt-in.

But this is just jerking off in the dark.
I've had FiOS for close to 7 years now. I really need to get my service upped from 20/5.
I (still) don't think online searches are a privacy violation.

1) It's a search box. Stuff not typed in the search box never leaves the machine (unless you count things that do by design, such as web browsers and email, obviously).

2) It's plainly obvious the first time you use it that results are coming back from the Internet. No real user is going to be misled into believing that searches are local. This makes it no more a privacy violation than the default Google search box in Firefox.

2b) There is a prominent notice saying so. If you don't think it's prominent enough, see point 2.

3) It's a search box that didn't exist previously. Canonical invented it. I think it's reasonable for Canonical to create a "search the universe" mechanism on the desktop. Fair enough if you don't like it, or don't want to use it. It's trivial to turn it off (there's even a global Privacy Settings dialog) or to use other searches. But that doesn't suddenly make it a privacy violation; nor the results of your search "ads".

Edit: I should have expected the downvotes. I notice, though, that the downvoters are unable to actually respond to my argument.
I'd love to see a post-mortem explaining how they possibly could have a $35k/mo AWS bill for a platform that only serviced 55k users.
It's hard to compare which is more difficult.

Marketing is more of a soft skill - it takes relatively more creativity and a better understanding of human nature than programming languages. This isn't to say programming isn't a creative pursuit; it's just creativity bounded by logical constraints imposed by whatever language you're working in.

Programming is more of a hard skill - it takes years of studying and practicing the different languages and mastering the logical thought processes that make things tick.

So difficulty depends on what your natural talents are. If you're an intelligent, logical individual you might find coding easier. If you're an intelligent, creative individual you might find marketing easier.

I think the prevalence of UX/UI design has evolved from a need to have both spheres in order to build the best projects possible. It combines the human aspects of customer experience with the mechanical aspects of making shit work. Apple got it right and look where they are now.
Third-Graders React To Video Games Tracking Their Play
1) Install ratpoison...
People use default Ubuntu with Unity? From what I see, most people use a variant (X/L/K) of it and those are really well put together without (most) of the Canonical crap.
"Efficiency" is ambiguous. In terms of (benefit dollars delivered)/(benefit dollars delivered + administrative costs) its almost true-by-definition, since the absence of means testing removes most of the source of administrative requirements in traditional welfare programs.

In terms of effectiveness at achieving the goals of welfare programs, it is far less clear, though there are pretty clear arguments that certain features of basic income -- particularly the lack of disincentives to outside income -- are beneficial in that regard. OTOH, there are also pretty clear arguments that the lack of need-based focus -- which is intimately tied to the lack of disincentives -- are potentially negative, especially when replacing welfare programs whose existing qualifications are based around special needs (e.g., programs qualified by particular disabilities) that increase costs rather than simple lack of resources (e.g., income/asset-qualified poverty support programs.)
Am I allowed to agree that Canonical deserve to get paid, but firmly believe that doing it via the methods which the submitted link removes isn't the right way?

Personally I've used http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/questions to contribute.
You are right this particular case would not necessary pass the test for nominative use. But there are other legal protections available, especially in the case of commentaries or criticisms, that could protect even in the case where the logo was used.

See section "Commentary and criticism" on the page below

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-trademarks-others
Why would Canonical put up a Web site about how to fix their own product, rather than just fix it?

This guys use of their mark clearly falls under the nominal use exception of fair use.
it's an action plan, that means that they are starting to work on it, not that it's already like that.
I find the web works much better with fewer logins[1]. In my opinion, the old way of using the web, by URL alone, worked best. Want to share something? Copy the URL to your blog, paste it to IRC/IM or wherever. Those that actually care enough to follow you will comment on it if they really want to (and you want them to). We never needed those moronic sharing buttons, only those who wanted to track us did. And we don't need logins for any of that.

[1] I noticed this since using the Self-destructing cookies addon for Firefox, which deletes all cookies for a site when the last tab on that site is closed (unless whitelisted). I'm whitelisting only a select few sites, and Google/YouTube are not among them.
This is actually a much better policy then the one in place 3-4 years ago when I had comcast.

Back then I had a cap of 150-200 GB/Month and if you went over they would give you a warning, but eventually boot you for repeated offenses. Now it looks like they will just charge you a bit more instead of kicking you off completely.
Xbox One User Experience (OS / App Framework)