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thweston The Criminalization of Everyday Life

But how does an armored vehicle counter or deter bombs or a lone gunman? Their purpose is generally to get a handful of soldiers into an adversarial environment. Lone gunman are taken down easily enough with standard squad car kit.

I mean, there was that one bank robbery in LA where the perps had serious body armor and heavy rifles in the 90s. Other than that I'm really drawing a blank for how often this would be appropriate tactically.

thweston Cppquiz – Figure what a given C++ program does

Seriously declreftype would have been a much clearer way to signal intent here rather than making parenthesis significant.

thweston Empty Mansions: Don’t be old and rich in New York City

Because the slight of losing 0.001% of one's wealth in a non-violent manner is comparable to the loss of thousands of lives, right?

thweston Empty Mansions: Don’t be old and rich in New York City

The victim here is the masses of 19th century mine workers discarded in the production of her fortune.

thweston This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

Consider my eye batted. I don't think Jesus was a huge proponent of slaves.

thweston This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

Appropriately reflecting the cognitive impairment of bigotry

thweston Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github

`git submodule foreach` is capable using git alone.

thweston Clang is now feature complete for C++14

Many people prefer the error messages from clang

thweston Clang is now feature complete for C++14

There's some proposal people are calling concepts-lite that is more or less a cleaner enable_if. There won't be a static_if in 14 from what I hear.

thweston MacKenzie Bezos Writes Amazon Review for Jeff Bezos Biography

I really like this post, and I feel like the only incorrect response is to respond. (although 2nd thought is that Derrida's project is to show us that none of the recursive attempts to account for this phenomenon ("employing narrative") prevent it)

thweston Show HN: Resize images using the FFT

Sinc interpolation is usually also windowed with a dampening factor on the tails of your filter. I think the ringing on the left edge of the image shows the lack of windowing.

thweston A Critique of Lavabit

One time I hacked chromium to skip the socket and send the HTTP directly to the embedded python wsgi app. In the end we couldn't use it because we needed some 64 bit only code running behind the wsgi and chromium only builds 32 bit on windows. Not that it would really be ideal either. Your app is too easily confused for a legit chromium window.

thweston MacKenzie Bezos Writes Amazon Review for Jeff Bezos Biography

If a screenwriterly narrative is moving away from scientific history, how could we move closer? Simply publish historical data in table form? It seems like as soon as you employ verbs that imply causality you are subject to White's analysis here.

thweston Being alone

How does asking people to consider choices "make things harder or worse for those with privilege"?

thweston Being alone

Show me where people are advocating anti-white and anti-cis policies.

thweston Being alone

Perhaps the concepts of gender and race are so foreign that it is literally difficult to think about and therefore "debilitating".

thweston Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

I really want to read the engineering details of what it takes to add a self destruct on bad RNA checksum feature to your bug.

(I think your analogy hides the potential impact of a mutating virus. Fly by wire only puts air travel at risk.)

thweston Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

The day we're ready for that virus to mutate in the wild and target RNA it wasn't designed for?

thweston Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

For someone who opens complaining of teleology, your third paragraph relies heavily on the assumption that science will march forward. Where is the skepticism aimed at the assumption that we will be able to surgically genocide _all harmful bacteria_ faster than they can evolve?

thweston Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations

That feeling of having to keep GBs of Visual Studio 2008 installed merely to be use the most recommended python XML library (lxml). Alternatively you can just add a 2MB egg to the repo.

What is involved in getting a wheel file to pypi so that `pip install lxml` happens out of the box in windows?

thweston Formula 1′s Leading Team Has a Big Secret

Recumbents aren't ever going to be popular racing bikes. Fighting aerodynamic drag is a huge source of tactics and race dynamics that the races would be quite boring without. Recumbents are also laughable going up hills.

thweston Ask HN: What system programming language do you use and why?

We use both C and C++. C for our kernel module, and 8051 code. C++ is preferred for network messages (zeromq + protobuf), configuration (from ui or file), and mostly for the heavy math that produces our output. We use value semantics almost exclusively, and heavy on the generic implementations of our math because we support 1-bit, u8, u16, float and double precision outputs. Yet we still can provide template specializations to utilize low level processor intrinsics for SIMD optimization.

thweston A C++ Immutable String class

const_cast is undefined behavior? Can you cite the spec?

thweston CDC Threat Report: ‘We Will Soon Be in a Post-Antibiotic Era’

When you watch people lose jobs for sick time you tend to have that reaction.

thweston At Twitter

buy in to the koolaid, love your coworkers, and spend time with them before and after work too

A nice term for this is Affective Labor.

thweston Click here, save a life, for real

> Are we litigating modern capitalism through the lens of a tiny SF tech healthcare charity?

The author completely failed to do any real scrutiny here. Neocolonialism isn't about how awkward one westerner feels looking at pictures of others. Nothing was included about western Capital purchasing labor and resource rights from these countries, which could frame the need for the service in the first place. Namechecked indeed.

However, the rhetoric around start-ups places them as the fixers, leaders and disruptors of the economic order. Those claims invite and deserve critical analysis. It wouldn't be fair to have Watsi be a punching bag stand-in for the Dutch East India Company, but let's please not pretend that Watsi somehow stands outside of the economic order or that we shouldn't be skeptical of claims of disruption.

thweston First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature

> every complex AND specialized adaptation

The ones that stay around long enough to be studied perhaps.

thweston Why I’m Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo

I meant what is at stake in the victimization olympics framework that I was responding to. Downplaying violence against minorities was not intended.

thweston Why I’m Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo

No one is asking the government to censor Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade's own audience is asking Penny Arcade to stop being an asshole.

thweston Why I’m Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo

I don't read PA's critics as arguing from a position of having "been vicimized [sic]." Their status as survivors is incidental to their argument. I read the criticism as being about the lack of empathy of PA's authors for their audience. You could replace the critics' status with gender-minority, and you'll find a more recent incident where Gabe was unable to empathize with his audience (denying the existence of transgender). Some comedians bill themselves as jerks and carve out a niche for their audience, but Penny Arcade purports to provide laughs for all gamers.

While I am pleased that race-gender-sex-preference tensions are being discussed in public in the 21st century, but I find it highly questionable that this is a greater power struggle than the classic 20th century struggles of war and labor. Especially given that what is at stake here is mostly audience size and hurt feelings, compared to livelihood and physical anguish.