skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm beginning to think that "corporate and consumer well-being and productivity" might be the next big thing, and it's already here. There are incredible opportunities in this space, like biohacking, supplements, self-testing (blood, brain function, etc), computer-assisted learning and meditation, diets and just plain old food a level beyond "organic" (i.e. known origin, local, glyphosate free soil, "grass fed" etc).
5 Customer Service Tools Your Business Can't Live Without
Let me google that for you:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arianna-huffington-uber_...
Funny, I get the exact opposite vibes. Given how crackpot racism has a strong historical background it's very hard not to treat it as a signal of being a produce of crackpot racism.

"Race" does not explain anything - although, many people would love it to because that would make it easier to comprehend the world. There is very dark history of this in european pseudoscience. There is far more genetic variation in average within population groups of same 'race' as there are between 'races'.

There are cultures with obviously harmful practices - take female circumsision for example - but to the way to respond to those is to make it clear it is not acceptable, and not to use it as an example of the barbarism of individuals belonging to the culture in question.

There are wide variations in cultural sensibilities, and actual painpoints between interactions of populations. There are well known, and actually difficult problems to solve. Adding crackpot theories to the mix based on opinion and imagination does not really help the world to evolve.
Why not coreboot?
This strongly reminds me that Silence on the wire by Michal Zalewski, really is an excellent read.
How many times do you get nickserv alerts from IRCCloud (indicating that "your" client has reconnected). I use IRC enough that it's worth the money (I also support their work on IRCv3), but this is getting silly.
Implementing a basic neural network is a lot of work, to be honest. I tried in C, in fact even made it parallelizable. It was hell. Lots of hair-pulling. I thank the gods for Keras and keep my head down.
If everything was compiled into u-boot and a bit extra added, then yes. U-boot as it is commonly found (the small version you're referring to) doesn't do as much stuff as UEFI. Plus Secure Boot is a thing that people really care about, and when used correctly enhances your own security, it's not (always) some giant conspiracy.

As I say I have no great affection for UEFI. Internally the code is pretty awful. But if you want a standard that works the same across x86 and ARM servers and exists already on those servers, then it's UEFI (I'm aware you can run u-boot on x86, but next to no one actually does that).

BTW UEFI is fully open source as of a few months ago after Microsoft relicensed the FAT driver. So we're just comparing two free software projects with different takes on the booting problem.
I am consulting for a company across Los Angeles and depending on the time of day, it can take 1.5 hours or more to get across, one-way. For a while, I got in the habit of getting up before the sun to make the commute before everyone else (35 minutes) but coming back it still took about an hour and a half.

Then I started using Uber -- now I get extra time to catch up on my emails and promote my business.
> Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner.

Population growth has been slowing due to increases in quality of living, and is set to peak around 2050. Then we'll experience population deflation, which may be even more problematic than inflation.
This may be true, but Bremen, Niedersachsen and Schleswig Holstein are not in a very good shape either (at least compared to Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg). But what all of this shows, is that there are a whole bunch of historical and socio-economic factors at play that have no connection with religion.
How about all computer languages? They're largely subject to grammar constraints (e.g. LR, etc.), but they're quite subject to creolization and almost all the widely used ones are derived from english, nerd slang, slang tech terms, short tech terms, and shit that early programmers made up to express themselves. I've been wanting to do a study on the evolution, understanding, and psychology of programming languages (even wrote a blog post awhile back about it) but i haven't gotten around to it.
Yeah, this sounds like a great recipe for a stable economic system and orderly transition to steadier demographics over the next 20-50 years.

Edit: An informative graph for the bleak jobs picture for young people this shift is creating in the US: http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...
What Opportunities Does the Sharing Economy Have for You?
And the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259911
Driving Tips: How You Can Help Limit Traffic Jams
I never could use IRC because it's hard to sift through the noise. I have the same issue with group chats as implemented in Slack, but at least Slack can be accessed with an XMPP client, meaning I can get asynchronous delivery of messages without the need to have a client running 24/7. Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer and a bot or do they rely on a service like irccloud? Either way, without async messaging, it's hard to use in a distributed team.
Thanks! Looks exactly what I was looking for.
> Unfortunately he can ring this bell for the next 100 years and people will not get it.

This is true and this quote from the article is why:

“users have to have control to run the program as they wish and to study the program’s source code and change it,” Stallman said. “This is based on two essential freedoms: to make exact copies and to copy and distribute your modified versions as you wish.”

The vast majority of users don't care about the ability to study and modify the programs they use. They are concerned with one thing, whether or not the damn thing works. For most people a computer and the software on it is simply a tool, not some lifestyle or ideological statement. If the FSF wanted to be effective, they'd focus on providing working, usable software first, and then the message second.
Career planning study, based on data from tech employees
Reproductive Health Project Cutting Data Collection Down from 5Yrs to 6Mths
The Rise of Artificial Unintelligence
Stallman's view is even more developer-centric.

Who cares about source code? Not most users.

If the aim was to make software that's easily user-modifiable - user-modifiable, not developer-modifiable - free software has been a complete failure.

There's certainly a net benefit in distributing software with free access to source code so it can be modified by experienced developers.

But that has never been Stallman's stated aim. If Stallman and the FSF really cared about users - not developers - they'd have spent more time creating software systems that were user-editable.

In fact the industry, including Stallman, has stampeded in the opposite direction.

It's harder for ordinary users to make modifiable software now than it's ever been in the past. We no longer have HyperCard, VB and VBA are dying arts, and the insides of all operating systems - including Linux - are absolutely horrible environments for non-developers to work in. We don't even have BASIC or those make-your-own game systems we had in the 8-bit days.

Those were bare minimum systems. Has it really been impossible to invent something better for more than 30 years?

No one knows. But for all the rhetoric, the question interests Stallman as little as it interests the rest of the industry.
Crystal Ball for Corn Crop Yields Will Revolutionize Commodity Trading
It would be a good thing if not for a policy of covering losses by importing large number of people from struggling societies that many affected countries have adopted.

Which BTW makes no sense when you look closer at demographics, since most depopulating areas are rural, but immigrants usually live compactly in countries' largest cities (where also existing youth flocks to), increasing population imbalance in fact.

Yes they get total head count stable but at cost of getting everything else wrong.
Twitter Ruled Not Liable for ISIS Tweets Leading to Attack
To add to this, dialect uses outside family context seem to be focused on adverting or special occasions like Carnival, radio competitions (describe your day in dialect), cabaret shows and similar.
For Africa to Grow, Agricultural Sector, We Need to Cut Down Post-Harvest Losses
Or: 'Yet again, cable lobbies succeed in legislating the market out of their way'
Not very much gain? Maybe you are able to write Python without introducing type errors, but I know that I can't keep track of it, and it's my impression that the rest of the world's Pythonists can't either. At least when the project reaches a certain size. Scripting is another matter.
Is it me or does 400k seems like pennies for the defense industry? Didn't she get 200k to do a talk at goldman? Does 400k really in debt these pols so much? How much media does 400k even buy?
Although I don't use WeeChat - I have heard great things about Glowing Bear
I wonder to what degree this applies to the DC city government and if it can be made useful for municipalities generally.
The biggest question is always: Who pays? It's in a company's interest to pay for a sleep coach for any worker with sleep difficulties. But sadly health is not yet seen as part of operations/productivity, even in the most modern companies. That's changing, and with incentives from Obamacare, but we're looking at a complete re-thinking of benefits and human resources. I'm excited in this thread because Huffington is exactly the person to help.
The complete list of sites with free stock photos
> underground city with high ceilings and taking advantage of physics

Ancient Iranian architecture was quite close to that, which you may be alluding to: http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Architecture/wind.htm

What people will do? Well, same as everywhere else, everything from agriculture to software. It's more a question of how many of them the local agriculture can support. The number of people who've fled Syria is more than its entire population was in 1950. Similar applies to places like Yemen. Malthusianism may not apply globally, but it can certainly bite locally.
Thanks, appreciated!

The difference between meta-heuristics and hyper-heuristics is that the former is a much broader concept, including such things as genetic algorithms. Hyper-heuristics is specifically about selecting among heuristics, which excludes e.g. evolutionary algorithms. Graham Kendall, one of the inventors of the concept, explains that they would have called it meta-heuristics if that name was not already taken.
Dare I say it - might envy / jealousy towards another culture actually help the Arab world get out of this slump? It is precisely because the Arab world is so closed off - in terms of trade, in terms of cultural exchange, to Western cultural and economic ideas that this widespread poverty remains. This closure means that autocrats are able to pit Islam against Western ideals, constantly - we're bad, but we can stay in power as long as we're not them, them being the decadent and greedy Westerners. Forget about the good ideals we bring - liberal democracy, decentralization of power. We haven't helped matters at all, what with our invasions, but to say it is just Western influence (which some are, not necessarily you) that has caused this morass, is oversimplifying matters and ignoring the huge role of religion and religious fundamentalism.

The fact that when given a chance to re-envision their society and culture, revolutionaries in these countries such as the Muslim Brotherhood keep choosing Sharia and other forms of theocracy means I think they will remain in a society strangled by the yoke of fundamentalist religion for the foreseeable future.

People in the Arab world aren't patients - they are agents, and have the power to change their circumstances.
>> in every country where natural resource mining is dominant, we see a rise of more despotism.

I think we're still doing reasonably OK in Canada... :->
How Feel When I Have a Conversation
Patents? https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO14... and https://www.google.com/patents/WO2014170646A1
Thanks! And wish I could do something about the blogspot UX.
This pretty much explained the difference between UI and UX Design
Picazzy – Photo Effects Redifned
Picazzy is a free IOS app which redefines the way people perceive photo effects. It boasts a completely unique and artistic range of photo effects for social media users.
While most of the photo effects in apps like Instagram apply basic filters, and some new apps like Prisma use server side algorithms to create effects, Picazzy applies core image processing and creative layer blending to create fundamentally unique high end special effects. Beyond diverse and unique range of creative effects, Picazzy delivers a highly optimized superfast experience to users by applying the effects offline – no internet required.
Do you have a source? I just searched and see no such pledge. All I'm finding are vague statements from her allies and advisors that they think she'll prioritize Syria.
There is no AI or hard logic based systems that humans will agree upon as fair, because inherently human beings don't realize that they may be have been, or continue to be the recipients of hidden benefits.

We also used to say statistics is what people should study (in the early 1970s? iirc). Not everyone has the inclination or bandwidth.

This is a problem that will only be solved by figuring out tools to help the human component.

And Unfortunately any tool created has immense scope of being misused. The power no man should have.

For example, a tool which can identify the intent of a speaker online by studying the sum total of all conversations they have ever had, would be vastly useful in in helping people build bridges with each other. IT would solve immense problems with law keeping, justice, and even mundane things like moderation on a forum.

At the same time knowing intent would be the scariest thing to see abused by an unscrupulous third party.
Microsoft Readies Azure GPUs
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph:

Though not required by the syntax of any language, paragraphs are usually an expected part of formal writing, used to organize longer prose.
Engineers try to solve problem of Helmholtz resonance in cars
Shelta, is a language spoke by the Irish travellers, came from Irish and English. It is pretty interesting : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta
But careful not to push too much your facebook argument:

> Would you like to live without fire? More humans lived without it than with it after all.

I reframed the context too much, it became bad.

There's a fundamental problem with communications we've all experienced, or at least for those of us who tried to teach someone something:

The thing coming out of my brain isn't the same as the one entering the brains of others. Hence why teachers repeat themselves a lot.
I also found his research intriguing! Here is a nice write-up for anyone unfamiliar: http://www.mostlyodd.com/death-by-utopia/
Computer languages are only very superficially similar to English. Like a whale is superficially similar to a fish. The syntax of ALL computer languages is completely unlike English. Computer languages don't have the phonology or morphology of English either (they don't have any phonology or morphology).
And in our times of hectic impatient noisy lives, 5 pauses to reflect, even on "old religious ideas" (I'm fairly biased against religion), isn't a bad thing IMHO.
Given the utter disdain for both major candidates, perhaps this year we can hope for a 3rd party candidate. Here is a nice visualization of the 4 top candidates and their stances on a wide spectrum of issues http://imgur.com/gallery/n1VdV
I passed the small museum of Turda ("unfortunate name", as the Lonely Planet Guide put it) in Transylvania.

Around when we were doing the 30 year war et al in Western Europe, the East Europeans of the area were writing edicts about religious tolerance. (Yes yes, a deplorable lack of fashion sense.)

That example sadly seems unlikely right now. But since soon all minority groups are thrown out of the Middle East, there won't be anyone left to hate (except for those that move to Western Europe).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Torda
This is insanely cool! I'm totally making a conversion of this into Elm my next pet project. One nice thing to see would be generation of terrain types (such as deserts or tundras) and the affect these have on the algorithms that place cities etc.

Will definitely share if I manage it
What use is the freedom of the press to someone who isn't a journalist?
Oh, you didn't get the extended, under chassis, warranty available from all dealerships? Well there's your problem right there.

j/k
Where is the modern day Murrow or Cronkite?

All over. The trick is to find them.

Our world is so much better because newspapers matter less and so much worse because cable matters more.
Simple explanation: communist occupation of East Germany by the Soviets brought there the "excellent" development opportunities also seen in the rest of Eastern Europe and Russia. Before that, Prussia was way ahead of Bavaria.
I lived in Western Turkey for a year, and while nearly everyone was Muslim (some atheists sprinkled here and there), there was plenty of alcohol and bars, <20% of women wore the headscarf, and I honestly can't remember any instance of someone praying, let alone dropping what they were doing to pray. In Canada, I have some Muslim friends who do that, though.

Granted, this was in the less religious parts of Turkey, but it's grossly unfair to the moderates to paint everyone with the fundamentalist brush. There's a billion Muslims out there.

The majority of Christians do not believe that the Earth was created 10000 years ago!

I strongly recommend the comic book Persepolis to anyone who wants a better understanding of life in the Middle East (or at least, Iran).
I am an Italian expat. I know from first hand experience (i.e. by trying to send a postcard to a friend) that some rural area of Sardinia do not have a postal address (even if there is a house there, not a nomad's hut that can be disassembled and moved).

Guess what? People living there can apply to have a P.O.Box at the closest town, where you can send them any kind of stuff and they just have to go to town (something they have to do regularly to shop at a supermarket or see a doctor) and check if there is anything for them.

I am sure it worked fine in the past for a lot of other countries too, and probably still does in places like NZ or Australia.

It also has the nifty advantage that even if you do live in a nomad's hut and so may happen to wander away from your original "address" of case.nightmare.beige your post office will stay there, and your post will be there, too, waiting for you to come and pick it up.
More properly known as African American Vernacular English: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_...
One of the least biased media sources on the internet :^)
> Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer

As a heavy user of IRC, I would say yes. At least, I wouldn't be able to use it without irssi running inside tmux on some server, and everyone I know does the same.

For a large Free Software project, we use Mattermost (a Slack clone with unlimited history) and it works great. There are a few features missing, but it has been a huge boost for engagement. As someone who has been using IRC for 20 years, I never thought I could get used to using a web-based client, but it's worth it.

Small annoyances, such as having to educate people not to use "@channel" because it will email a notification to 300 people, but it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.
>they'd focus on providing working, usable software first, and then the message second

This compromise is the exact reason why the 'open source' movement broke off from the Free Software movement. For proponents of free software, all software is political, and upholds one ideology or another. Refusing to acknowledge this, or downplaying it in favor of making software "usable" fails to address the fundamental problems of non-free software.
How to Become a Data-Driven Company
Free software fosters collaboration. You don't only benefit from being able to study and modify the source code yourself. You also benefit from others being able to do it. Because then they can help you.
"The Arab World" - What does that even mean? Arab is a language distinction, a language of which there are many dialects. As Arabic is spoken from Western Sahara all the way east to Oman that pretty much disqualifies Arab World from having geographical significance. Arab also does not denote religious faith as there are Arab Jews, Arab Christians(Coptic) and of course Arab Muslims.

There was once briefly a concept of Pan-Arabism but that died when Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970.

Does a Muslim Arabic speaker from Morocco really have any sense of kinship with an Arabic Christian(a Coptic) from Egypt? I am going to say probably not. Probably not any more than two Slavic language speakers in different parts of Europe do. Have the Saudis taken in any Arab refugee "brothers" from Syria and Iraq? No. Have the Arab Emirates? Again no.

So what is this "Arab World" that the NYTimes and the rest of the media are so fond of using as a point of reference? Countries carved up as part of the Sykes Picot agreement? Can they not come up with a more meaningful distinction? This matters.
...as if we've had better alternatives all along...

In the case of about 95% of the Flash that's been written, we have had a better alternative all along: Not writing Flash. Not animating the self-help menus at your ISP, not auto-playing music at every restaurant website, not cramming a megabyte of crap into the ads coming down your 56kbps modem connection, etc.
> a large part of the able-bodied workforce is excluded from contributing to the GDP

Could you explain? Recent policy seems to have been about pushing everyone possible into the workforce, even the not-able-bodied. By every means short of actually putting up wages.
I'm not convinced that they were a hive mind, but that's a discussion for another forum :P

(edit: in fact, I went ahead and posted the question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/4x7yin/i...)
All Libraries Should Follow a Zero-Dependency Policy
Prussia was also the last paganic part of Europe.
Tell that to (most) EU governments. They are selling mass-immigration as a solution to an aging population.
Since you won't risk any problems for implying that the Western countries are oppressive dictatorships, that warps the culture to hatred of others -- I'd say the West have gotten a little bit on the way. :-)

(assuming you live in the Western world.)
fortunately they are. This phenomena is just saddening, its the same thing on the other side and dialog become impossible.
Pied Piper IRL: Compress videos up to 80%
The GNU project boasts some of the most hackable software ever made. GNU Emacs is the most notable. RMS has been an advocate for languages like Lisp over languages like C because programs written in Lisp, like Emacs, are user extensible.
The link to charitywater.org is broken at the bottom of https://habitify.co/how.html

My advice: Since there's a Mac version Habitify does not depend on mobile device functionality, so it might be worth considering a web version to broaden the potential customer pipeline [I am assuming based on the donation model requiring Habitify to track users' points that there is already a web component].

To me, other advantages of a web implementation are challenging assumptions about users and pulling utility and functionality out from the rituals of programming against Apple's API's and for the constraints of iTunes Store.

Good luck.
Currently that's the "???" before "Profit!" but I'm sure they'll figure something out.