skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to Wikipedia, "Propylene glycol is considered generally recognized as safe (GRAS) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and it is used as an humectant (E1520), solvent, and preservative in food ... It is also used in pharmaceutical and personal care products."
It may be simpler than that. Even if Snowden has walked away from this service, the publicity may have attracted a lot of people the authorities find interesting, including legitimate (whatever that means) persons of interest.
Hilariously it was dropped with no real notification, and one day my account just stopped working. I had to make a new one, because there was no way to access my previous account.
Often ideas only sound great in retrospect.
Yep. Also, re: the small players getting pushed out, this is exactly what the big boys are trying right now. It stinks as the "big players" produce crappy tasting, low quality devices. The smaller makers put out some beautifully engineered devices that deliver much better flavor and much more vapor.
Take it up with PG
Talk to people. People love to complain, especially about their jobs. They'll complain about their pain points. Listen for one that seems interesting.
This is a fine article, as are the other front page stories on e-cigarettes in New York and cycling in the Netherlands. It's submitted by one of HN's most respected participants from a major US media source. While obviously "of interest to Hackers", it's far from exclusively so. It's also currently the top story on Reddit. I like the discussion of this topic better here than Reddit, but there are some good points on Reddit as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1jy7xa/dr_sanjay_g...

Thomas: how does this article accord with your comments here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6158093

As this is also a contentious legal, social, and political issue, I worry that the currently 'better' level of discourse will be hard to maintain.
Sounds like any country willing to guarantee a snoop free environment could have a lot of servers hosted there. I'm thinking the Caymen islands of data. Set up a shell company and a shell server in the Caymens to protect your money and your customers.
Propylene glycol is indeed a major component of antifreeze, such as what is used to de-ice airplanes. It's also a major component of automobile antifreeze.

It's also true that automotive antifreeze is generally toxic to humans and animals. It's especially concerning because the propylene glycol helps make them sweet, which makes them attractive for kids and animals to drink.

However, the toxicity of these liquids has more to do with the methanol and ethanol glycol in them than the propylene glycol. The first two are generally known to be toxic: The third is generally recognized as a safe food additive, and is indeed used as coolant/antifreeze around food processing where the potential for leaks and ingestion exist.
Ever wanted a quick way to code 3D animations? It's there
More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6181081
Dear Google guy: better give it up, you're only digging your hole deeper.
Email service used by Edward Snowden abruptly shuts down
Wow, this is an amazingly great post.
The difference is that the authorities in Germany don't have the legal framework to force someone to do this and threaten them to stay silent.
> “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”

Now that's a generalization if I ever heard one.
Somebody call the Samwer brothers!
Cue the obligatory PHP-bashing whenever the word 'PHP' appears in a post.

Honestly, isn't there something more productive people can do besides come up with even more arguments about PHP being the lame stepchild of programming languages?

PHP has warts, more so than many other languages, and has a heritage that is in many ways the cause of it's crippled nature. But recent versions of PHP, and especially the frameworks and applications built on top of it, are actually not so bad. Really.

Plus, since there is so much chaff in the ocean of PHP developers, good developers really do stand out in most organizations—these devs are usually also the ones who are good in any language, and probably prefer working in other languages as well... but they also see the upsides to using PHP for certain things.
From first-hand experience I can say that the second-hand smoke of an ecigarette is not pleasant. I had a dry throat and coughed.
This is really cool!

I'm interested in creating daemons that, for example, forwards SMSes to my email and records made voice calls. Is API good enough to do that?
If your job is to talk about stuff on TV, then you do the best with what you've got.

I've written Perl code. Really, really bad Perl code. I would've loved to throw my hands up and say "let someone who knows their shit do this" but I was the only person, and the job needed to be done.

You have to understand that for media personalities, offering their opinions... that's their work output. You can shut up and still keep earning a paycheck. Their job is to keep talking.

Essentially what you're advocating is to have TV channels just broadcast dead air most of the time. Maybe that's what you want. But it's not really a reasonable suggestion. I guess we can have a laugh about it though.
...which is why you encrypt the contents before you send it, yes?
Are there any countries, anywhere, where a person can store data outside the reach of the US government's illegal overreach?

Any countries friendly to the US are right out. They can tap the lines, but there are ways around that.

I just want to be able to park data where some twit with a piece of paper that says "NSA" on it can't get it retrieved or deleted. Any suggestions?
If nothing else, branding certainly kicks in once you consider the market for edibles. We have brands for store-bought brownies right now; we'll have brands for store-bought pot brownies too.
I think Persona does solve that, or at least, is designed to. Could you say more about what you're thinking?

(Persona always prompts you with a completely free-form email input field and routes you to the appropriate provider based on that.)
That's certainly one reasonable way to interpret what's going on.
Kobe Jordan Lebron
Well, that's it. I am now going to move everything onto my own infrastructure. I signed up for lavabit a while back, and I like them as a secondary email service; and now they just shut down!
What? I don't think this is true at all. Plaintext data, email or not, can be protected with robust encryption. Your end security is the main consideration, but that has nothing to do with the protocol or content, really.
If Congress has passed laws abridging the freedom of speech, then those laws are illegitimate. Unfortunately, it feels as if speaking favorably of the Constitution is enough to get put on a watch list anymore.
Evergage, The Disrupt Finalist, Launches A B2B Service For Improving CTR
They should open source the whole thing. We can bring it to Germany. I believe we are legally allowed to tell the NSA to GFYS.

Any people who have businesses in the US need to take a serious look at the risk now posed by their own government on the success of their business.

One rogue customer and business could go down the toilet, or you'll be forced to bend your morals to suit a rogue secret fiefdom.
Run your own server, on your own hardware?
This is also a great indictment against our elected representatives who represent the wealthy and powerful, not the people. If our reps truly were out to serve the American people this would have been solved years and years ago.
I don't think it would be any different from holding you in contempt for doing something. The court notices that your inaction caused you to contravene a court order, and the court then holds you in contempt.
I have the same question. It's very odd for a court to compel positive action.
Oh good, because Google will never be subject to an NSL.
My father -- a chemistry professor who has published in Organometallics and worked in Zurich (where this article originated) about 35 years ago -- says he thinks it's very likely the "make up" came from a Swiss-German speaker and meant "put together".

It's very embarrassing that an article would get published with a clear lack of proofreading (and presumably missing data), but based on his comments I'm willing to hold off on suspecting fraud for now.
Yeah, but individual apps on a screen is the very desktop model that we're increasingly moving away from. You have some special purpose programs (games, tools) on your computer, and most services have moved to the internet. Imagine you had to download a hacker news exe, and a google exe, and a reddit exe, etc.

By making customers download individual apps, your product becomes harder to implement/less profitable for stores which do not have an app with broad customer adoption. That makes you miss out on the long tail, which in this case could be considerable.

The locationally dependent browsing over in store wifi doesn't have this downside. It could leverage exsisting web technology, which makes the development off these apps a lot easier. It might work like this:

1. You walk into the beacon range. The beacon sends you the url: int.somestore.com/locationx?val=123094&locationy?val=594952&locationz=40389
2. It sends you the connection data for the internal wifi which serves up the stores webapplication.
3. The webapp is shown in the estimote app.
4. Profit.
DOMA was just ruled unconstitutional by Supreme Court.

Even if we put Portugal in the "legalized" category (which the source I cited does not), that puts the list 3, possibly 4 when Uruguay passes their law.
One should be aware of the risks of developing a dependence on a job which may become redundant, because of corporate layoffs or technological progress. One example of this is that if you were a biochemist who got a PhD in genome sequencing, machines put you out of a job.

A consequence of reducing your long term career risk may be that you will have lower income (at least in the short term). You may believe that individuals have the right to maximize their short term income; but does this desire impose a responsibility on their employer not to fire the profit maximizing individual?
This is somewhat true. RFC3207[1] describes opportunistic TLS encryption for SMTP communications. Our postfix deployment uses this and a fair amount of our email is sent over TLS-encrypted SMTP.

Of course, an MITM attack could hide the STARTTLS option and there are questions around the strength of the CA cert infrastructure, but SMTP is not just plaintext.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3207
If you're German, would you prefer to be surveilled by the German government or by both the US and German governments?

If you're in the US it seems kinda pointless to try to move to overseas hosting; the NSA will probably just focus on the client side.
So.... what should we use now?
Okay. Hold me to it. Seriously.
>Causality is a notoriously hard thing to prove.

That doesn't make it okay to invoke Chewbacca. The authors made the strongest argument they could. Some take that and bolster it as if it were concrete proof. If they really want to strengthen the connection, show some studies that reject the self-medication hypothesis.

>I have also seen how people can get really messed up from pot and how it goes away when they stop (although occasional episodes and mood swings can persist long after stopping).

People sometimes get really messed up without any drugs at all. As far as personal anecdotes go, I know more people who are recreational cannabis users whose lives are just fine than I do users whose lives are in turmoil. Of the recreational users I know who have suffered due to their drug use, the suffering can often be attributed or related to some punitive drugs policy.
Yes, absolutely. Everyone here should do this.

Never have your identity tied to a mere provider.
Can we get a list going of non-US alternatives of popular apps most of us use?

Let's start with Dropbox. What's the alternative?
...from a public terminal.
I really would want to donate to them. But you know I kind of feel weary now connecting my PayPal Account with them. I hope some kind of organisation is standing up for them. Like EFF or something. Not because I don't trust them. But because I don't trust the NSA. They might flag me as a terrorist or something. Then again I'm probably already on this list for having some technical involvment with something the US gov doesn't like.

I guess it purely a coincedence that Snowden used a lavabit address the last few weeks. I guess there is no relation at all.
The issue is that developers can't really update their app just yet for a number of reasons. First of all, if you update your app now the launch image and other things may look weird on ios 6. Also things may change in ios 7 between now and the final release.

Also bear in mind that (at least up to beta 4) there were quite a lot of bugs in ios 7 that the developers couldn't do anything about.

Pretty much every app will need to be updated for ios 7. It's a real shitstorm. Apple has created a bunch of work for every ios developer and broken all existing apps, and it's not really an improvement in my opinion.
Encrypting is a given - obviously you'd want to only be using Saas services in Germany etc that are fully encrypted. The problem in using USA services is that even if everything is fully encrypted, the USA can and will send goons around to take your data. Encryption is simply useless when dealing with a company in the USA who is forced to hand over the keys and whose data-centers can be legally entered and modified by thugs. Once someone has physical access to the server, the game is over.

Germany is a better bet. While they are no doubt tapping lines, Germany and the EU have made no moves to actually perform hostile interventions into data-centers or private servers. This means that encryption is still a very viable security measure for protecting your data in the EU. The EU simply has a far better track record with privacy related issues.

It's not about perfect security, it's about getting the best security you can hope for - and that means moving away from anything USA hosted.
Considering that most other people don't use email encryption, no.
Line tapping is pretty much a given. Looks like the BND has the possibility to do so. But this is still not officially confirmed. However a german blogger (fefe) had some examples for overly detailled dementi from german companies. E.g. no foreign intelligence service can read your traffic...

But in regards to cryptography and chances for legally fighting against such orders it could be better. At least on paper. The most likely outcome if lavabit would be hosted in germany would be a police raid that would take all servers for investigation with them. This happenend e.g. for poeple running Tor exit nodes.
Thanks - that's a very useful answer. So what do you have to work through in order to get a product in the enterprise door? Especially from a startup? For a startup providing analysis and visualization for enterprise software development, on what do you think that company should invest early sales efforts in order to turn leads into actual sales?
This is a really great way to get their PayPal account frozen for sure. Abnormally high rates of Visa gift cards will absolutely trip all the fraud alarms.
Strange Names As A Service
Someone really should implement the third party legal notification address cc which publishes all, and particularly interesting, mail. If your NSL comes in on a published address ("for quality control and screening purposes"), and gets published as a matter of routine ops, it is out of your hands, and fuck them.
AWS Web Identity Framework Playground
This is why I contributed to Mailpile(http://www.mailpile.is/)'s fundraiser and hang out in their IRC channel. We need more, better, easy-to-use distributed, crypto-friendly mail software, and we need them yesterday. :/
This would imply that the court can order you to lie to your customers. I think this is not the case.

If there is any precedence for any US court requiring public citizen to lie I definitely want to know about it.

If the courts are acting like they have this power then it will greatly change my perception of how the courts, NSA, and congress are currently acting.
Im saddened by this. But on the other hand, our good friend Oracle is trying to change it by trying to motivate developers to search for a non-Java language.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130626/00193023622/suppo... is pretty chilling (but at least it has an entertaining picture) if you haven't seen it.
This is the primary reason I moved from development to product management. At many companies, developers are seen as implementers only, and the ideas should come from a different group. Not saying it's right or wrong, it's just the mentality you'll find. Instead of fighting the mentality, I adjusted my career to take advantage of it. I still love to code and solve engineering problems, but I do it outside of work now. It would be wonderful to find a job where one can do both "definition" and "delivery" but those opportunities/companies seem to be rare.
Iceland should be OK
"Pavel Durov, founder of Russia's biggest social networking site, offers Snowden a job" could've worked. Of course "Americans" aren't to be blamed for this. I'm merely suggesting that they deserve better from media that is giving them a false culturally-superior image.
Hi I would love to see the source code. You did a very good job.
Man, I have never seen an article where one side of an argument seemed so consistently silly. Really, you're banning it because people might see it and decide to light a real cigarette?

And how does one figure that this "turns back the clock on public health advances"? It has the potential to turn countless potential smokers to a way safer (and perhaps even negligibly dangerous) alternative. How many otherwise nonsmokers would have to start using ecigs to cancel the benefit of one otherwise smoker using them?

I feel like this is what happens when a newspaper feels the need to present "both sides" of an issue that maybe has 1.1 sides.
Well, that's NOT the meaning of procedural. That's why Minecraft is infinite AND procedural, because they're different things (often the former requiring the latter).
More likely he was compelled to turn over emails relating to the case, and he doesn't want to have to be forced to do that again, so he's shutting down the service.
While I don't disagree, they also haven't updated their design in 6 releases (and as many years). The changes mostly aren't breaking ("it looks weird/old" is better than "it's broken"), and a refresh is much needed to reenergize the ecosystem.
Thank you. This is a good clarification.

I believe attaching the names of people like Nathan Myhrvold to this is key. Being associated with him and Intellectual Ventures needs to be seen as an embarrassment. (Think of how people react to Zynga.) Myhrvold's clearly interested in being some sort of public icon of brilliance, given his cooking books, appearance on the Colbert Report, and Intellectual Ventures inclusion in the (not so good) SuperFreakonomics book. Take that away from him.

Or, at least, make the patent trolling stuff such a giant part of his public persona that the other stuff won't override it. So every article prints his name as "Nathan Myhrvold, noted patent troll..."

This isn't a total solution, but we've got to run people's names through the mud who do this. Especially to make the bar higher for scumbags who are considering getting into this line of work. Really make them think about what they're giving up.
Former head, and he was talking about the extremists who might attack Google or Microsoft, not lobbying groups like the EFF.
I think there is a difference here though. By buying cheap bikes which might have been stolen, you can be supporting criminals which then see it as a profitable activity. If you buy a new bike you are not encouraging crime,because nobody will steal it if there is no place to sell it.

And I am pretty sure the police haven't given up on that crime, it's just easy to get away with it. When my bike was stolen a police officer came over and took the frame serial number,a picture of the bike and I do know they look around - I have been stopped on my bike before by the police who were looking for stolen bikes. It's just that those bikes can be easily packed on a truck and taken to another country,where no one will care, and there is no method to track a bike abroad, there should be a database with frame numbers that would be shared internationally.

Edit: And those charities are not just for poor people. The one where I live has all the bikes for sale arranged neatly in a shop, the only difference is that all of them have been donated, they fixed them and now they are selling them for reasonable amount of money to help people in need.
Do you mean Lavabit? There's a donation link at the end of the post.
By definition, if there are numbers which are chosen more often than those randomly generated, then there must also be numbers which are chosen less often. I'm not saying that those numbers are 1,2,3,4,5,6 - just that they exist.

So we are left with an exercise in psychology - should you pick a sequence that seems common, because the people thinking about it will pick something else because it seems common? Or should you not pick the sequence because people will pick the sequence because they think that people thinking about it will pick something else because it seems common?
Some actual data would solve this, but I imagine the lottery folks would be reluctant to release it.
This is sort of what Sealand data haven was supposed to be.
I'm sure they would argue that you weren't supposed to reveal that you were under an NSL, and that your inaction did reveal it, so you violated the terms. As the grandparent says, it probably just a cute legal trick that wouldn't impress a judge.
Having been a user for awhile now I am sad to see this go. I too would encourage everyone who can to donate.
Got me too.
Euclid chose Amazon Redshift over Shark, Hive, Impala, and BigQuery
I've had a lavabit email as one of my main emails for years (close to when they first started) and this is a major inconvenience. I'm not sure I'll be able to change the email address associated with a lot of my various accounts now that they're offline.
Potentially a population density thing?

Public transport makes more sense if people are more packed in, because the stations are more likely to be 1) close to the things you wants to go to and 2) close to your house.

Meanwhile, private transport becomes less attractive because of traffic jams.
It would be criminal negligence if I didn't mention Michael O'Church's seminal work on this issue [1]. There is surprising depth and complexity to the power dynamics in companies, both large and small. What you've discovered first hand is that, unfortunately, politics determine the fate of nations and companies alike.

1. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-princ...
Mass unemployment ensures that there is always someone who will trade their labor for the lowest possible price so that they don't starve.

It's built into the system, less of a plague and more of necessary requisite for capitalism.
Under data sharing agreements, if the NSA takes an interest, your data will probably go to them without questions or oversight. Drone bases (Ramstein) and listening stations (Dagger Complex) are located in Germany, and Germany was one of the most targeted locations in the boundless informant set of slides. It's probably illegal, and hopefully will be challenged in court, but it does apparently go on on a massive scale, with or without our consent.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bild-908609-515222...
These people are in for another rude awakening.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_activists
Perhaps such a request is why they have shut down?
Don't forget a physical shell to keep the U.S. marines at bay.