skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having read some of the research the whole theory is based around a shawl found around the fourth victim belonging to Aaron Kosminski.

Now It could well be him but this "evidence" does not prove this. All it does prove is that the shawl belonged to Aaron (DNA from semen). Aaron Kosminski who by the way had a history with prostitutes. At best this merely confirms that he was acquainted with Eddowes, a prostitute.
NCD as a distance measure can be used for kNN and in this case actually was used for hierarchical clustering in the form of the unrooted binary tree.

As for how NCD compares to euclidian, manhattan distances and so on - it's interesting. One of NCD's strengths is that you can apply it even if your data is not readily representable as a uniformly-long vector of numbers, whereas most other distance measures require this and it's not always convenient to represent input data in that form.

For example, in this application games may be of widely-varying lengths. That doesn't matter when computing the NCD, but I'd have had to pad out the "missing" values from shorter runs to the lengths of longer ones, or truncated long ones, or resized them all with some smoothing.

None of those seemed like particularly good options for this application.

Also, with time series (which this essentially is), most compressors are good at recognizing patterns repeated in items. That means that 0, 0, 4, 7, 9, 4, 0 is very close to 0, 4, 7, 9, 4, 0, 0 under NCD and is comparatively distant under euclidian, manhattan and cosine distances as the elements of each vector are assumed to be independent.

In short, your mileage may vary and will depend on the application. I like NCD because it's super easy to throw it at almost any problem and get a quick understanding of how the data is structured.

The algorithms in complearn are slow. I'm experimenting with much faster ones that scale better at the moment.
"Amazon can be a jerk and unilaterally change the rules"

Just guessing, but they probably didn't change the rules, only started enforcing rules they weren't prior. Therefore commissions earned would still be "invalid".

Considering Amazon fulfilled the orders sent from this affiliate and most likely re-invested the profits in their business (which is the Amazon way), makes it a dickish move.
This does not happen on either OS X or Linux. I'm reasonably sure it doesn't happen on Windows with the JDK, either.
Not necessarily the same vein, but we may have similar enough taste in books that this isn't a useless recommendation. I've been wanting to read this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001P8M9FK/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl?...

I haven't yet but it's been recommended by sources with enough credibility
Salmon Cannon
I have also struggled for a long time to get what I want out of existing personal knowledgebase solutions, despite loving many individual elements of the products that are already out there like Evernote, Workflowy and Dropbox/.txt files etc. This pain was particularly acute in college while drinking from the firehose of information, and not having a tight solution, such that years on so much value was simply lost and forgotten. I have been building the product I wished I had - Naked Knowledge. It would be great to get interested parties' feedback. You can follow us and sign up for the beta here if you like: https://nakedknowledge.com
Show HN: API for color conversion, naming, scheming and placeholders
Do people not say "of X extraction" anymore?
Just found and have been using PriceZombie http://www.pricezombie.com/ ... does this effect them as well?
Think of it this way: If there weren't licensing issues, they would probably just package it into the IDE distro, and you'd still be "installing" it on your system, you just wouldn't know about it..

:-)
Java Money and Currency API
Formatting Basics Lay the Foundation for Landing Page Conversions
Twitter is testing a 'buy' button for tweets on mobile
A good landing page takes its readers on a journey. Long or short, its elements must combine to bring each visitor to the same final destination – a conversion. How the landing page is formatted either eases their way or throws up roadblocks. You want everything on your landing page to reduce the friction that might slow visitors down on their way to conversion.
All in all, I think it's too much of an experimental product to be spending $250 on. I'm not exactly wealthy to throw money away like that.
How  Google Is Leading and Apple Is Trailing
Pebble Steel looks great. If only it had a round display.
If you understand it to be a temporary venture and plan for the next step, you can still use API's etc. and create unique web apps that will attract users and give you either publicity or short term revenue.
Twitter Introduces “Buy” Buttons So You Can Shop from Tweets
I wonder if the radars they're using can do frequency binning, that is figuring out the relative velocity of objects they detect via Doppler as well as their distance?

Also, that 64 beam 360 degree lidar makes me drool a little bit.
It may be interesting, but my point was that there is nothing in this article to learn from with the exception of problematic code from a network vendor.

Yes - I am. I deployed a 4 state IPv6 overlay servicing 250k subscribers on one of the very first (fully rolled out) DOCSIS 3 HFC networks in the US. I was responsible for the security and performance of the architecture. This rollout started in 2010. The TCAM exhaustion was self inflicted based on the hints of design throughout the article and the original authors understand of MLD is, just generally, incorrect unfortunately.
Look man, we're not making this shit up to make you feel bad. I got absolutely nowhere on OKC when I still had "Indian" listed as ethnicity. (male born and raised in USA) For months at a time. Only when I left it blank did people start messaging me at all.
But... but... I thought Patricia Cornwell had proved the Ripper was British painter Walter Sickert in her book "Case Closed"!

Well, at least now the case is truly closed!
> Markers are also very useful, particularly paired with the functionality to pipe data to another file or shell command. E.g. to extract the instance of a server error plus some lines for context from an otherwise unwieldy log file. :) I use markers rarely enough that I invariable need to reread the man-/help-page, but being aware of the functionality is half the battle. :)

Isn't that just grep -C?
Looking Back: 50 Years of Computer Science at MIT
The Swiss embassy in Moscow, Russia[0] is Swiss territory. This is how Julian Assange got asylum as well.

[0]: http://www.eda.admin.ch/moscow
It looks like the lidar costs $75K retail, but none of the rest of the sensors look particularly expensive.
That was great. COngrats!
It looks to be only a matter of time before amazon seek out other targets, such as pricezombie.com, camelcamelcamel.com
"Wikipedia says that Amazon gets 40% of their revenue from affiliates"

It says 40% from affiliates and third-party sellers. The linked source says 40% from affiliates though. But it's 6 years old. I would love to see some current numbers.
The key concept to take away from legal theory is that in the end, judges decide.

The uncertainty and doubt that DannyBee comments seem to instill is a bit regrettable, since its not that complicated. A derivative work is a legal concept built on a few vague concept, neither which has been clearly defined, and the precedential case law for software derivatives is almost non-existent. What does exist is an industry standard, and a defined intent written in the license text.

When a judge look at a copyright case, intent and industry standards goes a long way. Judges does not seem amused when people trying to find loop holes or game the system. Add that with the commonly commercial nature of cases that get brought to court, and I would not bet on the infringer getting a pass.
Cross Compiling FFmpeg with X264 for Android
All of a sudden, the universe makes a helluva lot more sense now.
For me at least the main annoyance of using Java-based tools are issues like these: http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233 . Had to install a non-official patched JVM to get the fonts to look decent, when all the other applications on the system render fonts just fine.
Quit texting,start talking
Show HN: Paleo diet for busy hackers
wonder if he gives everyone 2 months notice they're thinking about layoffs?
Ask HN: Do you program in multiple languages in a day?
Which ones? Opinions about productivity?
Ask HN: SOMs instead of curating content for a personal KB
This is a follow-up of a previous HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759

I forwarded the HN link to a friend of mine - his answer was, more or less:

"The best product for building a personal KB was Autonomy at the end of the 90s... we linked it to various document sources (in his company) and it was awesome.
A local VAR created a plug-in extension that allowed Autonomy to basically inspect MS Office documents on the fly (i.e. while you were writing them) showing related documents on the side, a bit like what gmail is doing now with the advertisement.

The precision was fairly good... to the point that you could use a blank word document as a search engine... you wrote a sentence or two about what you were looking for, and Autonomy would start suggesting existing documents to match.
You could also index your own (desktop) filesystem with the same product, and the results would stay local to your machine.

Autonomy never cared to work on a personal edition, and we all know how things went after the HP buyout".

My friend speculates that the "secret ingredient" was some sort of SOM (see below for links) - what he remembers is that Autonomy was very good at identifying clusters of rare words and/or statistical-significant-sentences, and used these to get a "distance" from other documents having similar/related content - we are not talking of something like Copernic (http://www.copernic.com/) but of a more "aggressive" search for relevance.

This basically nipped in the bud any need for creating directory trees or tagging contents.
http://davis.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/soms/
http://www.cis.hut.fi/research/som-research/som.shtml
http://goo.gl/yH3zgb

Now to my questions:

- is there anything resembling the way Autonomy worked and that can be used on your own PC?
- do you think that this would be a worthwhile idea for a product? (considering that Autonomy probably patented everything they could).
iPhone Payment Security
My point is that, for the purposes of justice, the exact same standards should apply to government agents and private individuals in the matter of admissibility of evidence. Meaning that if they want to relax the standard for the government, then security analysts should also benefit.
You are correct that autosomal DNA would have been better option (if available), and would have provided more reliable results, yet to my understanding, mtDNA is being used in criminology.

This is a relevant case as well:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11210907
I admit that I don't know any more about DNA matching than can be gleaned from occasionally watching the news. But if there are, say, a dozen serious suspects and this matches one then isn't that persuasive? That is, searching an entire database of DNA samples requires more hits to be convincing, in my mind, than does matching among a tiny group.
There's actually more useful information in the Independent article submitted previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8281741
The Unbearable Uncoolness of Java
The problem is getting samples from the bodies. The mtDNA was sampled from direct female line relatives of both victim and suspect, the bodies of the original victim and suspect are no longer available for forensic work. It should be reasonably possible to recover some autosomal DNA if mtDNA is available, but what do you compare it to?
Title refers to a pivot that came to be because of a mistake, not that the pivot itself is a mistake.
What, no? Or have you heard of any DNA being extracted from the evidence and compared with living relative, recently?
> The existence of God is a given. Science does nothing to prove or disprove His existence and probably never will.

That completely depends on what you define "God" to be. If you define "God" to be the being named as such described in the Quran then scientific knowledge most definitely contradicts with that.

> So if we now know, for example, that the world was not created in 7 days, then what is it actually that the creation myth is trying to tell us?

The problem is that the "What is it actually that the creation myth is trying to tell us?" is a textbook begging the question fallacy. The same fallacy that underlies all of the pseudoscience done under the theology umbrella. It is the wrong question to ask. Critical thinkers (which is a superset of scientists) should instead ponder the question "is the creation myth trying to tell us something in the first place?". Unfortunately, pondering that question is dangerous and answering it with "no" implies apostasy under nearly all religions. And every school of Islam teaches apostasy means death. I think that really does make Islam particularly unfit for being a good reference frame from which to openly engage in critical thinking. Note that nearly all forms of religion have a tendency to oppose critical thinking, but Islam has the additional problem of the threat of death.
"we take an existing technology and attempt to shoehorn it into another."

Not financially, which is a HUGE problem for smart watches.

I'm considered an unamerican weirdo crazy, at least in part, because I dropped like four hundred bucks on a smart phone and pay only $22/month just for service, instead of paying $100 on a two year contract like a real American, who can just barely afford a $100/month callphone bill but could never financially survive a single one time $400 expense.

These watch guys think they're going to sell $300 one time expense watches to a people who as a group have already proven they would rather pay loan shark interest rates rather than pony up a couple hundred bucks to buy their phone. This is a recipe for disaster.

The only way smart watches can possibly survive is by being bundled into a contract with AT&T or whoever, say an extra $50 a month for two years on their existing contract which would be a modest 150% APR loanshark-grade loan. You "know" the consumers are not going to be able to pony up $300 cash because they're already self selected as loanshark victims.
Exactly the case, and it really undermines the whole article. The general floating point performance (non GPU) is entirely irrelevant for the general uses of this device. Other subsystems might be faulty, or it could be a faulty device, but it certainly isn't floating point performance.

One line in the article that gave me a chuckle was We can say that Android Wear looks much better on a round screen. The OS was clearly designed with circular displays in mind—every button is round, producing a cool circle-within-a-circle look on the 360. Contrast this with the Verge who said that Android Wear was designed and looks better on a square screen, and is forced onto a round screen.
If lots of these cars were on the road would these sensors interfere with each other?
I know a few people here, American and others, that will gladly buy him a drink. He's often toasted at parties.

Of course there's the pesky issue of him being an active intelligence agent when he was stationed in Geneva by the CIA. Some of his claims about bribing Swiss police seem made up though.
Show HN: Creddle – Paper-friendly web resumes
Better news article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2746321/Jack-Ripper-...
TINTAG, the First Rechargeable Item Tracker
I don't want an IDE. I want an IDE service. Something like GoCode for Go or Omnisharp for C#. IDE's miss the point. What a programmer edits code in becomes more and more personalized as time goes on. An IDE can never hope reach the level of customization we crave. But a service that our editor of choice can consume? That is where the future is at.

When JetBrains releases an IDE as a service then I'll be excited.

I do admit that of all the IDE's I've used IntelliJ was definitely the least annoying. But it still doesn't hold a candle to Emacs in Evil Mode for me.
I don't hate Java. I hate the Java installer, and the update manager. I was hacked maybe a year or two ago browsing a normal website, it was Java. Java installs itself into your browser and makes you vulnerable to every web page you visit (edit: during an open window for exploitation in an outdated Java plugin). In reality, I now uninstall Java on my browser and to this day I have not been to a website that requires it, other than shady pop ups and shady websites.

There's also the update manager, I don't know why but Java feels the need to update every other day or week, and then on top of annoying you by prompting a UAC (yes I know I can disable these) they add a toolbar into every update / install process, sometimes you just miss those check boxes and then all of a sudden you have toolbar hell.

I love Java, I hate the installer and the updater. I also hate the JDK itself, it's a horrible mess, try switching to C# for a year, then go back to Java. You'll hate it. I still love the capabilities of Java, but it needs a overhaul on a lot of things.
Wiki is incorrectly characterizing their cited source. 40% is from third party sellers. (Actually I believe it is much higher now, but the way amazon breaks it out makes it hard to tell how much of their total revenue stream it is, as they only report their commissions). I've made the wiki changes.

I believe Amazon has realized that with their dominate place in the market most people would have gone to Amazon anyways, and they no longer need to pay to get people in the door.
As long as it doesn't get forced onto 3rd party clients, even their own Tweetdeck, then I don't really care. For now...
Offtopic, but it kind of stood out for me in the text:

> driverless car (i.e. not "self-driving car")

> robotic chauffeur

Is it me, or the article is pushing some new terminology?
Came here to say the same thing. I got almost to the end of the article before I found out that he didn't regret the pivot.
It sure has not been from lack of trying new designs:
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/unusualICeng/unusua...

(Also: Big News! Douglas Self has been updating the Museum of Retro Tech again)
This is one of the places where I think there should be colaboration across companies. I'm not sure "not hitting pedestians" should be market differentiator.
I was also confused by the wording. The word 'mistake' makes it feel like a very negative article.
Show HN: Captain Up – Engagement Platform as a Service
To pick on Java is my point of contention. Every runtime has warts, If I did some digging I could find issues with any other environment. It just seems like folks pick on Java disproportionately. That might just be the HN echo chamber, but I don't see too many folks bitching about any other non-native runtime.
I only read it because I wanted to hear about how a pivot killed the company lol
Drone Startup Flirtey to Be First in Commercial Package Delivery
Blue Origin Debuts the American-made BE-3 Liquid Hydrogen Rocket Engine
Switzerland has a tradition of being a prison of choice.

http://www.nysun.com/arts/drrenmatts-prison-of-paradox/48164...
Hello: Videogames Are for Everybody
This animated circuit simulation can help students conceptually understand what is happening in the circuits they learn about in the first 2-3 college circuit courses: http://falstad.com/circuit/

(it's a java applet, but it was ported to ios/android with the icircuit app)

I tutored students with a modified version of this simulation and they learned in less than a half hour stuff they hadn't learned after 2 circuit courses.
<wikipedia>
Lint first appeared (outside of Bell Labs) in the seventh version (V7) of the Unix operating system in 1979. It was derived from PCC, the Portable C Compiler, which was included with that system. Lint and PCC were developed by Stephen C. Johnson, who also authored the parser generator yacc.

</wikipedia>
The USB Condom basically cuts the data ports to the endpoint device. So the host (or device) can't communicate at all.

They seem to be talking about making a device / application that causes a USB port to only talk to keyboards for example (or perhaps they'll get further in and that will become only HID devices).
Better title would have been: Unintential pivot became a success
The GNU C Library version 2.20
Probably a bit, yes, but there are ways to filter out the interference to some extent. Anyway, I'm strongly hoping that they'll make cars that talk to each other - so instead many cars adding noise to each other's readings, we'll have cars that share data and dynamically delegate the task of detailed region mapping to few cars that would not interfere with each other.
> There was also another company selling a similar product, that used to sell Lisp Machine software, but I don't recall the name any longer.

Are you thinking of Lucid and their "Energize" environment? If you're interested, Richard Gabriel (founder of Lucid) published a set of essays about the failure of Lucid. You can get them here (linked from the author's site): http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf The section on Lucid is called "Into the Ground".
Proving the provenance by testing the blood on the shawl against the victim was the first thing they did.
Well, the pivot itself was not intended.
Normally, you read data and decide to pivot in a direction you're aware of based on the data.

In this case, I had in mind building a mobile version of Beepl, NOT a trivia game. I never intended the pivot to happen and for some while I was lost as to what the hell had just happened.

I might even argue that its not a pivot in its right sense because the end products are absolutely unrelated. I mean, how is a trivia game the pivot of a CRM? :P
I didn't say that it's in the same league, I just mentioned that we do have censorship for opinions that the government thinks are dangerous.

That is _exactly_ the same way China justifies its censorship. It doesn't matter that the US censors less, since once the laws are in place to censor opinions, the government can always expand censorship activities later.

I stand by my opinion, that Chinese social networks would be censored here, if they were as widely used as Facebook. Just imagine the NSA being unable to reach all your private data while China can. This wouldn't be tolerated.
I equate bluffing in a startup with the "customer validation" part where it is advised to take preorders or signups for a product you don't have yet.

It's something that many startup gurus advocate, but I've always thought it a bit unethical (it's not like Kickstarter where you know it might not get built).
The title might have been in error but if he's hiring staff off the back of 23 people downloading a game each day, this might be a case of "truth in jest".