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analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

So you think people should be prosecuted for something they might do?

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

I'm sorry but vigilante justice and civil disobedience are quite different concepts.

My comment advocated neither. I merely pointed out that pubic prosecutions should only proceed if they are in the public interest. Hardly that radical.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

You're describing civil disobedience, not vigilante justice.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

Well, before the squatting laws were changed, effectively yes. You had to go to court, get a court order, then if they ignored that then bailiffs and possibly police.

Edit: squatting was I believe a special case as squatters gained rights as residents. If you are asked to leave and don't, I believe the police could then be asked to remove you.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

I don't think I am proposing vigilante justice, are you confusing comments here perhaps?

The intent is absolutely a factor at the decision to prosecute stage.

You're trying to equate an act in the public interest (freeing academic information), with an act with clear criminal intent (credit card fraud). They simply aren't treated the same way and nor should they be.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

Ah thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Squatting was a bad example then, but in general if you have no criminal intent it would still be a civil offence.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

"imagine he had downloaded loosely protected private emails or credit card account lists"

Respectfully I don't think that's a great argument. That what he did is in the public interest (imo) is central to the issue. You can't just ignore that.

analogon DOJ Admits Aaron's Prosecution Was Political

For what it's worth in the UK that would still be trespass, a civil offence. If you had intent to burgle that would be a crime, but if you had no criminal intent it would stay a civil matter.

Edit: removed incorrect example - thanks seebee

analogon Carmen Ortiz: A Case Of Prosecutorial Diligence Or Legal Overreach?

Sorry, you misunderstood me on the MAC address point. I was saying only that some here have stated that this should be illegal, which I found a surprising attitude for a technical community.

Thank you for the explanation of the difference between Federal and State offences though.

analogon Spotify and Facebook: Is that phishing?

Ok, if we added some text saying 'Login with Facebook' to our login form and then did the above it would be exactly what Spotify are doing. And still illegal.

analogon Spotify and Facebook: Is that phishing?

Oh ok, so the issue is that the person who joins last has information published about them that they may not want published. I can kinda see that but it's not something that would bother me personally. An app like Grindr yeah, but not Quora.

analogon Spotify and Facebook: Is that phishing?

I agree that it seems illegal.

We have thousands of usernames and passwords for users on our services. If we then tried using these to log into our users facebook accounts in order to install an app of ours we'd be rightly prosecuted. Yet this is exactly what Spotify are doing.

analogon Spotify and Facebook: Is that phishing?

Is this true? I hadn't seen this. I've found Facebook specifically don't let you access the emails of a user's friends. Quora could easily receive higher access of course, but this still seems like it shouldn't be possible.

analogon Carmen Ortiz: A Case Of Prosecutorial Diligence Or Legal Overreach?

You may well be right. I missed the first discussion when the appeal for legal funds was made.

It is disturbing that some are still claiming he broke into the closet when it was unlocked [1], and others here apparently believe that changing your MAC address should be enough to trigger federal charges.

[1] Swartz broke into a closet in the basement of a building at MIT http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

analogon Spotify and Facebook: Is that phishing?

Well yes of course, you shouldn't use the same user:pass for different sites. But a lot of people do, and that opens them up to being hacked if the password for one site is revealed.

Spotify are knowingly logging into the OPs Facebook account without OPs permission. Shouldn't this qualify as unauthorised access, as in a Federal offence?

analogon Carmen Ortiz: A Case Of Prosecutorial Diligence Or Legal Overreach?

I believe no-one here at the time knew how aggressively he was being treated. If we had known I'd like to think people would have been more supportive.

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

None of those links actually cite a disadvantage. In fact from the second:

"Finally, the authors reiterate that even if you consume “unnecessarily high protein intakes” like 1.3 grams per pound of body weight per day, this still isn’t a risk to your kidneys unless you already had kidney disease."

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

I cycled competitively in my teens, and got a few ok results in my speciality (hill climb) at a national level, but not good enough to want to take it any further. Some of the friends I trained with went pro.

I trained 400 - 500 miles per week, riding anywhere from 10 to 140 miles per session. I'm 40 now and still cycle but just for pleasure and getting around now, slower than I was before but riding centuries is still no problem.

In short, I know exactly what the knock feels like.

I expect you are carb loading either the day before or in the morning before your rides, and that could easily give you enough stored glycogen to see you through a 2 hour ride.

I however was cycling to burn off fat that I'd built up during a few months of strength training, so the last thing I'm going to do is gorge on pasta the night before.

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

Those studies all focus on trained individuals. As a novice you would be putting on more muscle than a trained bodybuilder or strength athlete.

It's worth pointing out as well that there is no disadvantage to consuming too much protein.

Strength standards for beginners.

http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards....

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

A short bike ride that burns about 1250 kcal, which is another 50% on top of my normal daily requirements. So not that surprising that I'd need to take in 450 kcal really.

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

It's 1g per lb of lean weight. That would be for a beginner, trained athletes aren't going to be putting on so much muscle so won't need so much protein.

Correct on the steroids and fasting though.

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

Absolutely this. Everybody's body is different and respond in different ways. You have to work out what works for you.

analogon What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

There's a little more to it than that. When you're in a ketonic state your body burns stored fat rather than carbs. [1]

For example for me, normally on a 2 hour bike ride (@ ~120bpm) I would need to drink ~2.5 bottles of glucose drink to keep my blood sugar levels high enough. When I'm on a keto diet I'll only need 0.5 bottles of glucose drink during the ride to stave off the knock. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_the_wall

analogon Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

Yes, a web development agency, though really any profitable business that could use this.

Each hour you spend improving/interating/integrating your DIY app is an hour of developer time that you can't bill for.

You'd easily spend over an hour per year on a DIY app. Agencies charge at least $120 per hour so the choice between building yourself or paying someone else to do it is a no-brainer.

At the enterprise level $500 is the amount employees can generally spend themselves without getting approval, so there should really be a plan at that level of pricing too.

analogon Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

Build, deploy, host and maintain for an hour per year? I think that might be a bit optimistic.

Certainly for an agency to do this will cost them more than an hour of developer time. $120 per year is a steal, OP should add different pricing brackets to capture more value from bigger agencies.

analogon BBC demands DRM for HTML5

You're right about the time it takes to copy. Whenever I've encoded video it's always been a time-consuming process so I wouldn't see this as a major obstacle.

As for picture and sound quality being terrible, simply not true. Recording from a projected image is one way to do telecine, and it works fine if you can set it up properly. [1] A half-decent telecine is very different from surreptitiously recording a film in a cinema.

The stream will be re-compressed but this isn't such an issue as many people think. Back when TV was recorded on analog tape in the 90s, you were allowed 8 generations of copying and it would still be considered acceptable for broadcast (for news).

[1] "The quality of a good telecine is generally comparable to a DVD without any post-processing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)

analogon BBC demands DRM for HTML5

It's easy enough to copy a stream with DRM. Point your camcorder at your laptop stream, press record on your camcorder, press play on your laptop.

analogon Ask HN: Which hosting company to use for a small SaaS product?

Well, the Cloud Server is basically a VM that you have full root access to, so yeah install apache and mysql, varnish whatever and off you go. But performance seemed better than the equivalent AWS instances that I tried, and I've had no outages in the 3 or 4 years or so I've been using it. Which compares well with AWS.

Cloud Sites are a totally different product. My first complaint was no ssh access so you can't deploy with version control. FTP like it's 1999.

Second issue, was we would see random null responses that did not come from our application (medium sized Drupal site). It was a while ago, but here's a more recent post recounting the same problems. [1]

And another post on Reddit from a couple of days ago with a couple of other people. [2]

Drupal is possibly similar enough to Wordpress that you'd see similar issues.

For a SAAS I'd be looking at the most reliable hosting I could get if I were you. Outages are going to cost you both your time and customer trust.

[1] http://mavergames.org/content/drupal-rackspace-clouds-cloud-...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/18bcbb/is_it_time_fo...

analogon Ask HN: Which hosting company to use for a small SaaS product?

Rackspace Cloud has been good for me. Rackspace Cloud Sites not so much. Seemingly random errors coming from the infrastructure level, not much fun to debug.

analogon Test drive: DC to Boston in a Tesla Model S

Yes, he picked a fight. This is an effective PR method, though it would be better if it wasn't.

It will make some people rally to his cause more, and it will turn some people off (likely the ones who wouldn't buy the cars anyway).

If you wanted to criticise the response you could call it cynical, but I think you'll agree that's a long way from being childish.