skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(from http://www.google.com/loon/faq/#pilot)

Q: WHAT STEPS IS PROJECT LOON TAKING TO BE ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE?

A: We are taking several steps to ensure Project Loon does not negatively impact the environment:

- We’re working to guide all balloons to collection points upon descent, so we can reuse, recycle, or dispose of the parts responsibly

- When balloons do not make it to one of these collection points, we will be offering a reward for reporting the location of the balloon so we can collect it

- We can track where the balloons land and we have a team of people who focus on recovering the balloons

- We'll have a boat for recovering balloons that go into the sea close to New Zealand

- We've started looking into using biodegradable films for our balloon envelopes

- Our balloons’ electronics are entirely solar powered.
Perhaps they are 'sort of' competitors, but both are owned by Condé Nast, so probably more a friendly corporate rivalry.
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All this conspiratorial thinking is all very X-Files "I Want to Believe" and stunningly short on rational thinking. Consider:

1. Let's accept that Facebook, Google, Yahoo et al are rapacious profit-oriented corporations who could give a crap about anything but their own self interest. Fine.

2. At this point, given the statements made, in order for there to still be some kind of "back door" direct access to all of their DBs by the NSA, it would involve direct, bald-faced, massive lies to the public about its existence by top management.

3. What would the cost be to these companies be if these were revealed to be massive lies? I'm not talking about the government granting immunity from prosecution, which most commentary seems to focus on. I'm asking, how would customers react?

Answer: Their business would blow up. Revelations of lying at this scale, completely destroying their credibility, would literally threaten the entire existence of their companies. It would be a stupendous business risk to take on.

4. What is the probability that such a massive lie would be revealed? Consider that to facilitate broad access to company datasets there would need to be a bunch of technical staff in on the conspiracy -- and not just at one company. This allegedly involves most of the major Internet companies. A whistleblower at any one of them would blow it for everyone.

So, in order for any one company to participate in the conspiracy, they would need to take a bet-your-company risk that all the other companies would keep a lid on it.

5. Finally, now that we've reviewed the downsides, what's the upside? What would the benefit to these companies be of lying? Some commentary has suggested they obtained privileged information about competitors or foreign attackers (e.g. Google & China). Ok. How does that benefit compare to the risk of nuking billions of dollars in value overnight if your company's credibility with customers is utterly destroyed?

I am all for more public oversight of the secret courts governing these requests for data. The Verizon order is extraordinarily broad, and we can't have much confidence that even the relatively small number of monitored Facebook accounts aren't abuses. But this idea that Facebook, Google etc. are lying to the public about their role just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
What are you celebrating about? What they do is deliver advertising, nothing more, nothing less - ADVERTISING.
Android is a huge,complex codebase. doesn't this mean it's hard to verify it's security ?
Internet giants call for transparency in government surveillance requests
examples, which websites you use? Normal websites have better visibility/clarity in call to action buttons.
I was just bringing the point to light for discussion.
Again, can you point out what you mean with an example?
Those who do not understand Roman concrete are destined to reinvent it badly ;-)
Google's Project Loon: Balloon-Powered Internet For Remote Areas
I could easily rattle off a dozen Google products I'd see killed if it meant another project with the the potential impact of Loon.
> "We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved, and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive"

God Damnit! When did we start using the total number of violations of the fourth amendment as the yardstick by which we measure it's importance or relevance to a reasonable expectation of privacy? "Hey, hey, hey... we ONLY violated 'x' number of people's rights. Not the 'x' times 'y' you are accusing us of doing, therefore..."

Putting that aside for just a moment, their response lumps in and equivocates the well-intentioned, and IMHO well-justified, search for a missing child with fourth amendment violations of millions of American's under the guise of national security and terrorism.

They still don't get it. The government still doesn't get it. Feigning outrage is not a good transparency policy.

I've never once considered myself a Libertarian. It's never so much as crossed my mind. I'm not even an excitable or rash person. But the recent exposure of the breadth and scope of the shielded activities of the NSA has caused me to give a long, hard, well-reasoned review of how I vote.
Not really. If enough people audit the code at random times, then the host would not be able to get away with serving malicious code for very long.
Seconded. I think it would be just as interesting to see the projects that they've killed. They've said before that one of the goals of Google[x] is to fail fast. I imagine they've already accumulated quite the graveyard of crazy proposals.
A Briton’s Bitter Farewell to China Echoes Loudly
[EXCLUSIVE] Intel 2014 Haswell-E to pack 8 cores, DDR4, X99 PCH and more
Inverse TL;DR: "Read Williams Hugues bio of pitt the younger to see what I mean."
Oh no, a company is building out a network of Internet-connected balloons, but I might have to look at some text advertising links. The horror. You see ads everywhere, t-shirts, bus stops, billboards, your friends/family, etc. It's a trade-off I'll take.
So there doesn't seem to be a video of the helicopter, but I found this, apparently by the same team: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eW9Xs...

I didn't know what an "Ornithopter" was, so at first I thought it was just some form of glider. That is, until it started flapping its wings - pretty cool! :)
New rule: anyone who uses a computer for a technical reason may be in on the conspiracy.
Can anyone involved in this project shed some light on how altitude is controlled?
Maybe. 700-pound rocks 'floated' by ice, though? I'm inclined to think about ice build-up on the ground on the windward side. Note the pancake-sized hillocks with valleys between that can fill with water. When it freezes, the rock lifts. Hmmm. Anyhow, the interaction with that 'special' surface is more complex than just 'sand'.
People were discussing the legitimacy of this release. I read the release, googled the authors name and I thought his history relevant to the conversation. Not just ties 'deputy assistant to President George W. Bush'.
being a public company, Google can't really justify altruistic endeavours to its shareholders unless they will also benefit from the project.
In this case, Mike (Gabe) has been using Glass for a couple of days (week?). He actually posted his thoughts on it and one of the issues was the rudeness in pointing a camera an mike at everyone.
How is your favorite example even relevant? I'm not seeing the connection.
Ahh the timeless warning of the Internet.
Can you add C?

I prefer C for critical parts, reserve the option to use Python for stuff that Python is good at and use mostly Javascript in the front-end usnig a MD* Framework.

My clients mostly just ask for PHP though. That's my problem though, I need to find new clients.
Next up, Loon servers? I can't wait having my torrents served from the stratosphere. I believe TPB was already considering having drone-based servers - balloons just seem so much cheaper.
Steve Wozniak explains how cloud computing is turning us into Soviet Russia
Hackers built Facebook. They hire hackers. If there's a group that's hardest to pigeonhole in terms of beliefs it's hackers.

The idea that a company composed if hackers could have not a single whistleblower, no single person that objects so strongly that they must speak up regardless of their personal situation is betting against human nature. Nay, hacker nature.

Freedom ain't looking good nowadays, but this is not the vast conspiracy it may seem.
It would be a piece of evidence to counter the prosecution's evidence against him. If his DNA is on the money, it won't help much. But if the prosecution has no hard evidence, it could form reasonable doubt of guilt.
> I still find these numbers fairly high. If cops need a warrant to get into my home why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?

The COPS do - they are required to get warrants for data requests and those warrants can't be overly broad.

The NSA are not cops, though, and somehow ended up with different rules.
A couple of days ago I read that 'As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government.'

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...

That might be another reason that TOR isn't safe. You don't ever know who any of the other servers belong to ... and the staff at the Exit Node can (and has) read anything. I wouldn't bet my life on software 'originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory'.
> but they mention nothing about the allegation that NSA didn't need to submit these requests.

That's because everyone has already denied that claim. If you didn't believe them the first thousand times they said they don't do that, why would you believe them if they said it yet again?
Buy your own private domain and point it at MailDrop. If/when they start blocking on MX IP, install MailDrop on your own cheap VPS somewhere.
Making things more difficult to read is a valid argument for regression. Even if it is for some people (where previously it wasn't) that should be pointed out and complained about (as you are rightly doing ).

The whole brouhaha in the armchair designer community over icons, colors & design is simply nuts though. "Designers" are coming out of the woodwork in droves to prove that they can do better in 1 hour what Johny Ives & Co took many months to do.
Honestly, who do they think he is, John McAfee?
I would suggest offering the ability to plug custom allocators.
AndroidHttpClient has a executor method, which take your HttpGet object and a transformator and the default one will give you a string, which is the body of the request.

That is about 4 lines, and a try finally statement around that and a try catch statement around that again and that is all that is required. 15 lines maybe, a bit more if you want to move it of the main thread (but then you are, IMHO no longer just doing a get request).
You're saying Kinkos was acting as a dumb copy service and was sued for copy right infringement. But your linked case explicitly says this is wrong. Rather, they lost because:

Kinko's has periodically asserted that it acted at the instruction of the
educational institution, that is, as the agent of the colleges and is without
responsibility. Yet, Kinko's promotional materials belie this contention
particularly because Kinko's takes responsibility for obtaining copyright
permission while touting the expertise of its copyright permissions staff (a
"service [which] is provided at no charge to all Kinko's customers.").
"Copyright Information Letter to Faculty Members," in Kinko's Copyright and
Professor Publishing Handbook, at 40.
What are you looking for? The statements have all been made by those companies, and they all deny that any sort of broad data access by the NSA happens.

Either FB|Microsoft|Google|Yahoo|etc... are all lying, or Snowden didn't understand what he leaked. I'm betting the later.
Google deserves a lot fo credit but let's give something to Jerry Knoblach and his team:

"His plan: Beam it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space.

This isn't just hot air. His company, Space Data Corp., already launches 10 balloons a day across the Southern U.S., providing specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies. His balloons soar 20 miles into the stratosphere, each carrying a shoebox-size payload of electronics that acts like a mini cellphone "tower" covering thousands of square miles below.

His idea has caught the eye of Google Inc., GOOG -0.22% according to people familiar with the matter. The Internet giant -- which is now pushing into wireless services -- has considered contracting with Space Data or even buying the firm, according to one person."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...
Google bought them? They have been doing it since 2008, at least http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...
> The government has already shown us how they are fully capable of lying, and even worse - forcing companies under their control to lie.

The government can, and does, lie.

The government can NOT force other companies to lie. Nor is the claim that Facebook & others are under the governments control remotely supported by anything resembling evidence.
NSA's Talking Points Defending NSA Surveillance
Pretty sure the NSA isn't that stupid to leave that loophole wide open.

Similarly Google probably isn't allowed to disclose the past 6 months even in aggregate since they already published specifics.
Actually that is the company now known as AT&T Wireless. The company now known as AT&T was one of the 24 'Baby Bells' that were created when antitrust regulators broke up AT&T (the one that created Bell Labs) in 1984.

The company used to be known as SBC Communications but changed it's name to AT&T after acquiring what was left of AT&T (mostly long-distance phone services) in 2005.

Through a long series of acquisitions AT&T now owns 11/24 Baby Bells.

Sources:

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#History

[2]My grandfather worked for AT&T for his entire career and I've involuntarily listened to a minimum of 100 hours of company history throughout my life.
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Personal opinion: sometimes Google is just simply awesome.

I really hope every word they've written in there, reflects some of what their top management feels at a high level.
IOS 7 and Skeuomorphism
Woz talks iOS 7 and PRISM in an off the cuff airport interview [video]
Perl should be listed here, I use Dancer 2.0 at work.
I guess pretty good wasn't quite good enough.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4432368/google-opts-out-of...

Apparently, it was an agreement based on negotiating between the companies in question and the US Government. It makes me sick to my stomach that in spite of the relative uselessness of the exact count of requests, that the Government is just as interested in presenting a positive spin as they are claiming that the acknowledging the mere existence of the requests presents a risk to national security.
Because during part of the year it's actually a shallow lake, and the rocks only move one year in three, which is a fairly low chance of it happening.
It is interesting to note what the number of requests is, however, it shouldn't put anyone's mind at ease. This is as much about what the government can do than it is about what they have done.

Even if the program has been used "judiciously" by the government to this point (if such a case can be made), it is ripe for abuse. Our protection should come by the law itself, not by the judgment and whim of the Executive (i.e. those executing the law).

Otherwise, we are not much different than a monarchy, hoping for a just king or queen.
I immediately thought of "loon" as part of "balloon" and also "loon" as in insane or ridiculous. It's a perfect name for something so ridiculous with the potential to be ridiculously awesome.
Most links I encounter on the internet are underlined in addition to colored.
you can simply run a node yourself and make your client use it.
Ask HN: anyone interested in this contrarian idea?
Take the PPC (pay-per-click) model and apply it to the door-to-door sales model.

It is completely legal to knock on people's doors and try to sell them something face to face. Why are there no tech companies taking advantage of this?

BTW, I've done door-to-door sales, and I know how effective it can be. If companies are paying as high as $100 for a CLICK, how much would they pay for a face-to-face marketing pitch?

anyone interested?
Apple has historically changed almost nothing between the developer previews and the public releases. There's no reason to think they will start now.
Tapping into an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
I suspect that it was much like the "too big to fail" scandal. President Obama was new to the game and let the people who said they knew what they were doing run the show. On one hand he's got the feel-good speeches he made as a candidate and on the other hand he's got agencies and contractors with billions of dollars of budget on the line all pushing as hard as they can to justify their existence and their budgets. The inertia alone was probably impossible to defeat given how divided his focus was (the economic collapse and the two years of obamacare politics come to mind).
Great to see these numbers from Facebook - hopefully now Google can do the same, and report numbers that should have been public in the first place (and that they probably would have liked to make public). I can't see any justification for saying that they're lying, and frankly think it is verging on conspiracy theory to say they are, why would they bother releasing anything at all? Though broader in scope than many (including myself) would like, this tallies with their initial statements, and with a system as described in the PRISM documents (which are pretty vague anyway). Of course this isn't the entirety of the information the NSA is collecting, and probably not the entirety of data from FaceBook if they are also harvesting traffic, but it could very well be everything FaceBook knows about.

The thing that worries me most about all this collection is that the NSA probably never deletes any of its data (as evidenced by their massive storage facilities being built), so eventually they can build up quite a large store of complete data on people if they just keep collecting from various sources gradually over time.
It's nice that you made these available. You might also want to look at queue.h from BSD (see http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/sys/queue.h) and tree.h (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/sys/tree.h), single-file "libraries" that can generate a few different kinds of linked list and binary tree. These don't require typecasting at all, since they generate functions for your particular type. They are also intrusive data structures, meaning you control your own allocation.

With regard to OBString: don't. Really. C strings are very flexible and powerful with just what's in the standard library. You don't need charAtStringIndex, for example: you have rindex and index. You don't need splitString; you have strtok_r. You don't need findSubstring; you have strstr.

If you think you need regexes, consider fnmatch, a libc function which matches shell wildcard patterns. It's always there, it's simple, and it's fast. Or you could bring in something like PCRE. In general, if you need full regexes in a small program, it might be worth rethinking whether your program should be in C anyway.

For some reason, I don't find myself using resizable array utility code much in C. It's pretty easy to do it yourself with realloc-- that's really one of the first things they should teach people learning practical C. Perhaps a small, minimal set of macros could wrap the reallocs and make it a little bit nicer.
"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe

Google is taking this global, but I believe they bought the company behind this. They have been working on this for over 10 years!

" But Space Data says its plan to create America's first floating wireless network -- by putting disposable transmitters on government weather balloons -- has already undergone successful testing and is economically viable.

A trial run with text-messaging service in the Phoenix area is slated for this summer. The official launch of the messaging service would begin next spring in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, extending nationwide by the end of 2003. Cellular phone service could be added a year later if the company secures more funding. "
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/LIS/archive/wireless-tech/in...

At&T has no incentive, this probably would help new incumbents and they'll hate that. Google is not going to do something that helps a search competitor, so why should AT&T helps theirs?
Strong selling point WAS consistency.

It clearly isn't now, as iOS 7 is hilariously inconsistent with itself even within a single screen.
the document and translations are all very unclear and unprecise.

Note that they would also claim that they can decode SSH, ie SSL.
Google, Microsoft ask German government to address spying during Obama visit
10 tools to make your shell script more powerful
"The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning..."

How do yo know that? What if I have friends, relatives or clients in the middle east and I'm known to be unhappy about particular political issues but never swim in shark infested waters?
Overlooking for the moment all of the lost Japanese gold in the Philippines. (Which isn't really lost, just remaining where it's safest.)
I was under the impression they only needed to get a warrant, or, broadly speaking, gave a *k about the privacy of American citizens.

Anyone else, world wide, could have their data accessed without any need for special secret orders.

Am I mistaken? I honestly thought that was the case.
Thanks for your reply! Also I agree :)
This has also been widely reported in German media, unfortunately this was the best English article I could find.

German:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/treffen-mit-minis...
Really nice! Kudos!

I am working in a non-technical non-profit organization and I'd love to see something like etherpad integrated in this. No REPL, but simply only writing texts collaboratively.
There is not a video included in the article, but one can be found here: http://vimeo.com/51320244
AFAIR the GSM radius was about that (35-40km) I imagine more recent technologies may have some more. But of course this suffers a lot from topography.
I would be interested in what Facbook and other internet companies (or anyone else who has a clue) have to say to this article:

"PRISM: Here's how the NSA wiretapped the Internet"
http://www.zdnet.com/prism-heres-how-the-nsa-wiretapped-the-...

It's a very convoluted and speculative article, but I wonder how much of it is realistic.
Gradle - Build Automation Evolved
Replying to myself here...

Not sure why this is getting down voted, it isn't hard to understand or show evidence of. You may not agree with it, but it is fact. For example a Columbian drug lord can break American laws without ever stepping foot on US soil. A hacker in China can violate wiretapping laws. The sovereignty of other nations has given way to extradition, extraordinary rendition, or even drone strikes.
IMHO, this is part of basic parenting. When I was growing up, my parents went out of their way to make sure I could be self sufficient. They called them "chores." I learned to cook, clean, do laundry and do basic house maintenance (plumbing, sheetrock, scraping and painting). At the time, I hated every minute of it and didn't see why I would bother with any of this stuff. Now, I like that I know how to take apart a sink, replace the seals and stop the $@#$* thing from dripping. I can do it now instead of waiting days or weeks for a repairman.

Then again, I grew up in a traditional family from a rural area. Self sufficiency was highly valued there. Specialization tends to be more highly valued in urban/suburban areas.