skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Separate from the realm of rights, witholding credit is a dick move. I mean, the guy can afford a dozen cars and a helicopter, but he won't hire a decent copywriter?

Fucker.
The above example is at least academically interesting since you can reason through it with a bit of programming experience and intuition about operator precedence.

Does plus or pre/postfix increment have higher precedence?
Probably increment.
Does prefix or postfix have higher precedence?
They're probably the same -> evaluate from left-to-right.
Code is equivalent to num1++ + num2;

But the examples like "what is the difference between substring() and substr()", "What is the lowest cross-browser increment that [setInterval()/setTimeout()] can accurately use" is just trivia and is boring.
I still have my doubts about their privacy practices, I would love to see a detailed technical article on how the actual PKI infrastructure works.

I could register and (apparently) generate a private RSA key, which was sent to mega.co.nz as part of a HTTP POST payload. I wonder if that's only used for the current session, which I guess is mandatory, but I'd like to understand more: how does the model work for sharing, for instance.
> Are you suggesting that every programmer should know about relativistic effects of time dilation in controlled scientific experiments?

No, he's declaring that not every programmer can afford to ignore these.
Currently needed: a heatmap of the area around the superbowl that tweets and/or instagram photos are coming from and a streaming twitter feed.
Digital Strategy: 20 Federal Agencies, 76 data API and 75 Mobile API Initiatives
Greetings from Startup Weekend! MySemester: College. Together.
MySemester is the new, hot college productivity tool. We're making learning the group activity that it should be.
If you are opening their app for the first time, it doesn't matter since you are going to download the content anyway. He has only one page, so navigation doesn't reload the content.

Not using Gzip is obviously a big mistake.
> Opera has always been outmanned and yet consistently been close to or ahead of the curve.

No, not the last three or four years.

Although Opera has been doing great in minor areas due to the sheer brilliance of individual engineers, the topic of every single roadmap meeting in the Core department has been "How can we catch up to the competition? Which missing feature hurts the most right now?".

Given the resource constraints, they've done _great_. But it's not sustainable. When I left a year ago, there were about 60 developers and 30 testers working on the actual engine, supported by a pitiful array of hardware. Upper management could have played their cards differently five years ago, but now it's too late.

(I used to be core test manager of this fine organization.)
Wonderful poem, and I like how it's presented. The public domain and the inexpensiveness in hosting allows for this.
According to Kim, over a 100,000 users registered in under an hour (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292702999078387712).
Pretty impressive, and it explains the slow responsiveness of the site.
I'm not a programmer, but it's a little silly to expect someone to use examples from outside their domain expertise. It did seem like he derailed his own point into a weird cultural commentary on programmers though.

I like the comments about how to avoid being depressed and anxious about not being perfect. No one likes admitting they're fallible initially... it takes practice =) And I've had lots and lots of practice.

In grad school it sounds like it is not unlike his description of silicon valley (minus the piles of cash, dominance of Caucasians, and lack of women, of course). If you're confident, aggressive, and think you're good at what you're doing, you will probably end up being so eventually. At least if you are able to take your own fallibility in stride.

I remember trying to explain things to younger students (and often postdocs too) and asking often "does that make sense?" and "do you know what I mean by ..." and getting rapid nods. I wasn't asking because I'm trying to make them look stupid, I'm asking because the subject material is legitimately really hard, and no one knows all of it offhand. No one. And then this is followed up a week later by them clearly obviously definitively not having understood a word I said. Whereas if they had admitted to not knowing what I was talking about, I would have stepped back a bit further and explained it from an earlier stage with no problem.

One of my biggest domain examples of my own was when I was like "oh, the melting point of copper is really high, surely it will work okay as a conductor at 500C". Do'h. Man that was stupid. On the plus side, now I know all about oxidative corrosion...
Maybe because they don't really have any exciting, innovative products on the horizon for consumers, and that's the best they could do right now.
Isn't it true that ANY web storage and file-sharing company could be raided and shut-down tomorrow?

What's different between Megaupload and Dropbox or any of the others? If the Feds (and the Motion Picture industry) decide that Dropbox is hosting pirated works they could suffer the same fate, no?

I am not focusing on Dropbox here. They are just a place holder for any storage/sharing service you'd care to name. I use Dropbox almost exclusively and love it.

The point here is that, unless I am wrong, your data isn't safe anywhere outside your own four walls. So, if data loss is your concern, be sure to back it up locally.

If you do things right it should not matter if Mega (or any other service) implodes overnight. Set yourself up to not loose anything if that were to happen. If you do that, then you can use any service and sleep well knowing that such a failure (or confiscation by the Feds) is of minimal or no consequence to you.
Ok, so I try to upload a.exe to Mega. They make a hash, detect someone has already uploaded it. They don't upload my file, and instead they place a link in my account to that "a.exe" of some other user. How can I access it then? Because it's encrypted with a key which is not mine.
I'm not saying that it is, mr_eel claimed that Glee's version wasn't illegal.
Possibly convergent encryption, basically when you encrypt the file you use a hash of the file as the key.
This key can then be encrypted with several different passwords meaning that several people can decrypt this file.
I don't think it does. I think that is just there for legal reasons.
A much more mature LaTeX JavaScript interpreter is MathJax [1].

The projects fill somewhat different niches, however. MathJax's ideal use case is adding math support to a CMS like a blog or wiki. This project looks like it's better for offering a Web-based LaTeX-to-PDF compilation service for articles with 100% compatibility with the original implementation.

Also, this project is a great resume-builder if the author is looking for a job that involves wrangling build systems or cross-compiling to JavaScript!

[1] http://mathjax.org
Got to wonder if this is a bit of copy and paste from the old terms, although you would think they would have checked this quite thoroughly! Good spot.
I assume they paid six million dollars for it.
I hadn't noticed that, it's pretty slick actually, if you keep pinching it also zooms out to show you all of the tabs you have open.
The hashing is done by the client before upload.
So if all clients use the same hash algo they will generate the same hash for the same file. So it is encrypted with a key that you know because you have the original file.
According to Ars, the public sharing works by bundling the encryption key with the link to the data [1]. I don't have reliable access to the site, so I don't want to speculate too much, but I suppose there must be a way to export your keys so you can view your files from different computers.

I agree with the sentiment, though, that this is security theater. It's subject to the same problem as Hushmail, where they could be forced to snoop on their customers by modifying client code.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goe...
It freezes during the registration process in both FF and Chrome.

EDIT:

It's because AJAX return "500 server too busy" error.
Really? I'm on FF3 and I didn't get a notice, which was quite surprising.

File upload didn't work though....
At a more coarse-grained level, "Calendrical Calculations" by Dershowitz and Reingold is very interesting. It describes many different world and historical calendar systems, and includes lisp code to convert between them.

Among many other problems, converting between calendar systems requires that you define when a day starts; there are many ways to define that among the systems.

I think I have the latest, the third edition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780521885...
I think it's not kinda sad, but outright offensive. I understand the commercial value of a fully identifiable and tracked person online, but there has to be a line to draw.

Every transparency feature is opt-in by default. Privacy is slowly becoming a dirty word for people who have something to hide. And those who fight for it are marginalized and made look as villains.

It is really bizarre to witness. At some point this rush for user identities reminds me of the Wall Street and their unregulated lust for profit despite the consequence.
I don't know anything about the Smith case, and I am not saying you (and Cullen) are wrong to draw the comparison and ask questions about it.

However, it is very difficult to make this kind of backseat-driver judgment. I'm not arguing that people shouldn't look into it. They should. But different cases are often treated very differently. Perhaps Smith's case would have been harder to prove to a jury. Perhaps he had better procedural objections. It doesn't just come down to how bad anyone thinks the crime is.
Yeah, any reader of Omni was right on board - I know I was. My mom worked at the post office (rural carrier) and I blew her mind telling her that email would largely supplant postal mail. She just reminded me of that last year, actually.

We all knew it was coming.

Also - yeah. I kind of miss Turbo Pascal. But I'd never give up CPAN for it. Ha.
There are lots of bugs and incomplete features, I'll tackle most of them - in next few days. So after a week, I'll open source it :) my github username: rkjha
There is a divide in academia between admin and faculty. His supervisors supported the work, but admin and their lawyers did not. Admin typically has no idea about research until it turns into something they actively have to admin. Admin's primary interest is protecting the corporation, whereas the faculty's is protecting their students.
100k users just confirm the fuss. Another question is if there is any real value to this service.
Just tried it, crashes in the exact same way:

1. Hitting "Compile" does whatever it should do successfully.
2. Then hitting "Open PDF" opens a new tab which stalls out and crashes

I would almost say its actually a PDF thing that is crashing Safari vs a JS thing.

At least, that's what has happened consistently on my machine with latest Safari and WebKit nightly.

Edit: However, taking the generated PDF from Chrome and dropping it into Safari loads it fine, so maybe it is a JS thing.

Edit 2: Upon further inspection it appears the new tab is being opened with just a data URL representing the entire PDF. It wouldn't surprise me if that's the problem (Safari not being able to handle huge data as a URL). I recall running into a similar crash in MobileSafari because of that a while ago.
This?
http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/729/is-convergent-...
http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/storer-storagess08.pdf

It seems really interesting, so they can check for duplicates while keeping files secure. Thanks!
>Not using Gzip is obviously a big part of his marketing plan.

I think this is the only time I would use the words "FTFY" on HN, but I do think it's obvious, that with kim's bragging about bandwidth usage, gzip has been disabled intentionally.
This article hits a nerve for me.

There's in particular a sentence right at the start. "If you're young and think you're hot shit, and there's some reason to believe you are, you can go far, very quickly."

When I think back at my time prior to going to University, I really did think this way. And I had reason to. Even during my time at University, that feeling never escaped me.

Once I entered full-time employment (almost by accident. I had started my own limited company at this point), my attitude changed completely. I was surrounded by so many people so unbelievably more clever than me, I was humbled. It wasn't just their abilities, but their "maturity".

Now I cringe to think of my attitude as little as 5 years ago. And I think I have reason to. Where I used to take pride in "fixing your 6-month problem in 4 days", I now realise I failed on a lot of aspects. I am now much more focused on doing things right. I focus on listening and understanding, on being tolerant and empathetic. I measure my work in quality, maintainability, measurable evidence. Every day I try my hardest to learn and to be a pioneer.

I do think this is a positive improvement. But when I come across an article like this one, and recall my youthful naivety and enthusiasm, I do worry if I haven't perhaps lost something more important.
Maybe they use block deduplication on the storage arrays? Particularly looking at the "our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload". In other words, you already uploaded it encrypted and they're just serving out the de-duplicated bits.
Voxer and Facebook: Keep Your Enemies Closer
woot!?

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292707119424229376/phot...
Deriving the key from the plaintext + the ciphertext is called a known-plaintext attack [1]. AES isn't vulnerable to this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known-plaintext_attack#Present_...
Piece is the keyword here.
Can anyone recommend any good documentaries or other media on the subject of North Korea? This was fascinating!

Edit: thanks all :)
Very cool -- I'm glad someone else could use the data!

BigML seems useful. The BigML decision tree looks quite a lot like the J48 tree result. I wonder if the performance (ROC) is closer to J48 than logistic regression. I couldn't see an option to cross-validate on BigML.
I would like them to question her why after 2 yrs of holding this over Aaron's head, depleting his finances, that they didn't think a plea deal for a misdemeanor instead of felony counts would be sufficient deterrent? When I read below Fri. Jan18th, I was incensed even more at how they treated Aaron:

"Last Friday, on the same day that Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, prosecutors from Ortiz’s office stood in a Boston courtroom and allowed a former state representative named ­Stephen “Stat” Smith to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for rigging absentee ballots in three elections. Swartz’s lawyers asked for the same consideration, that Swartz be allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Prosecutors refused.

So, given that Ortiz will not explain herself, we’ll just have to presume she believes that illegally manipulating the outcome of elections, which are the essence of our democracy, is less serious an ­offense than downloading an online archive of obscure academic articles." (Excerpt fm article by Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe). http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/18/taking-heat/L1rfSF47...
The ones I've met have been friends, friends of friends, or co-workers of friends. It takes me a lot longer to trust the value a business person will add than a developer, but if someone you know recommends them and can attest they were the top sales person in their startup for instance, then I'm more interested in working with them.
Note that they are likely to use something like 4MB chunks of the file rather than whole files. This prevents things like metadata/name differences creating a different hash for the whole file.
They run all their taxes through the country they stamp the discs in.
registered. confirmed. nothing after that.
I'll also chime in to complain that it's just a cutesy oversimplification of Git. Git's a really powerful tool, and you should learn it. If you don't feel like incurring the cost of mastering pure Git, and want to use some abstraction layer on top of it to get your work done, then it's on you when those abstractions break or the workflows become far too restrictive. You can plan workflows as much as you want, and they'll work about 85% of the time, the there's 10% of the time you'll need to do crazy shit with Git, and another 5% of the time you may have to do some actual disaster recovery with the reflog. Unfortunately, the percent of time it takes to really master these skills are inverted. But if you're using Git's core functionality, it's a lot better practice in conceptualizing the harder functionalities.
They take a hash of every X MB of your data before upload. If the hash already exists, then they don't upload it. You just get added to the access list for that particular chunk along with the others who have uploaded it.
"A node token ("magic cookie") grants access to a subtree of the issuing user's filesystem. An associated symmetric key is required to decrypt and/or store decryptable data."

https://mega.co.nz/#developers

Apparently, they use unsalted symmetric key encryption which allows them to discover [hash(file), password] duplicates. By comparison, the old Megaupload would apparently deduplicate based on [hash(file)] matches.

Suppose Alice and Bob have files [D, E, F] and [F, G, H], respectively. If MEGA discovers that Alice and Bob share a duplicate file F and Alice to reveals her password (through password frequency analysis or to the Government), then all of Bob's files are compromised.

I would personally feel unsafe storing private documents on Mega due to the lack of public/private key encryption, but that's me.
http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-n...
| Each user account uses a symmetric master key to ECB-
| encrypt all keys of the nodes it keeps in its own trees.
| This master key is stored on MEGA's servers, encrypted
| with a hash derived from the user's login password.

The key is stored encrypted on their servers, but is unlocked with your password. Technically they could capture your password and unlock the key, gaining access to the files.
Would a milestone release checklist be useful?
I'm considering building an OS app so you can manage a checklist for things to do before a milestone release. When ready, it will automatically import them into GH issues. Would this be useful for you?
And at the time (this is pre OS X) apples OS was not preemptive multitasking which is sort of required for a useful window based GUI
the lesson absorbed by authorities will be "don't piss off the tech community when it comes to tech crimes."

If that actually happened, that would be a major improvement on the legislative and legal front for everyone in the world, not just tech people.
wow, that's even weirder.

btw thanks for the downvote, whoever that was.
Well, the choice of GMT certainly made picking the international date line earlier. Certainly useful that 180 degrees around the world is mostly water.
How much storage does the free version allow is my question... Couldn't find it any where
And how the law will use it. Seems like a great way to find criminals and activists at scale
Hackernews has "business-y" folks who might be active. You want people who can show that they've done marketing or hustled in things before. They probably have a blog which would give you an idea of what they are about. They should be on twitter engaging and basically have a good online presence because thats important to spread the word for any business.
Apparently some 100 million users found his previous file sharing service to be of some value, until it was shutdown that is. What's difficult to see, however, is what value your pointless dig brings to this discussion.
Auburn University Spring 2010 Commencement Speaker Tim Cook
It is if you know that the key is derived directly and deterministically from the plaintext itself.

Of course this will only give you the key to that one particular file, not any other files that you do not have yourself.
To everyone asking about the encryption, it isn't really about protecting your data its about protecting themselves. They have created a service that is billed as a drop box competitor but it's not. This is megaupload2, they just need it to not look like they are marketing it as that.

They needed a way to deny any knolage of file sharing and have found a two pronged attack. The encryption means they can deny any knowledge of what they are serving, and marketing it as a drop box type tool means that they aren't marketing it as a blatant tool for illegal file sharing.
Yup, that is for sure it. I took the Chrome generated PDF, turned it into a data URL, then copy-pasted the data URL into Safari's URL bar. Crash.

Drag and dropping the file itself into Safari, works fine.
On visiting a download link in Firefox (latest) posted in this thread (https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudf...) I got the same message - however I can't click anywhere to hide the modal. If you are gonna have such a message at least let me close it!
[By 'it' in the 2nd paragraph, I mean Surface, btw.]
This would be crazy useful -- if I used iOS. ;) Why not a webapp (aside from the obvious reasons). A responsive UI that does the same with a nice jQuery twist would be workable on most webkit browsers and would work on Android, iOS, and the new Blackberry 10.

Sounds good, no?
Wouldn't this allow MEGA to also get a copy of the key so they can decrypt your data?
Yeah, it's a really good point.

I haven't played with automatic parameter selection much (but have been seeing more papers on it recently) so I hadn't really considered it all that closely.

While I'd like to give people a fair amount of control over model parameters if they want, it probably is very important that I make things as turnkey as I can. Shouldn't be too tough to hack something together and make it an option during training.

While I'm trying to start things off relatively simply, the overall goal really is towards allowing people to create models that act as parts of much larger systems, maybe larger neural nets themselves. A sort of genetic algorithm that spawns new neural networks with random parameters and random connections to previous networks could be kind of neat, and making the base elements of those types of architectures (a single fully connected deep net, for example) easily accessible is a first step towards that goal.
A Game of Pots and Gold
That was a great article, but why did it look like crap on Chrome for mobile? You would think Google would have made it easier to read.
Why Mega will change the status quo
Ask HN: Review my lockscreen newsreader startup
Frontpage launched last week and is very much a minimum viable product at the moment - it only has minimal functionality and there is still lots to do. Its bootstrapped by myself building the frontend and my cofounder developing the backend.

Frontpage allows you to browse your favourite news and social feeds right from your lock screen without having to enter any passwords or fumble through multiple apps.

Once installed, simple activate Frontpage from Frontpage's settings tab, turn the screen off, and when you turn it back on you can begin browsing content.

Frontpage currently only supports the New York Times (remember, its a MVP). Frontpage is also only available on Android due to the fact that iOS does not allow lock screen augmentation.

We'd love to hear your thoughts!

http://www.frontpageapp.com