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thwest

681 karma · joined September 27, 2011

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thwest··on 24/192 music downloads make no sense
There's a reasonable argument that fits within DSP theory that frequencies sampled above audible range could have harmonics down in the audible range.
thwest··on Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?
Or perhaps a functional international regime, pretty much the opposite role that the WTO and TPP fulfill.
thwest··on Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
Interesting post here: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=17566
thwest··on Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Just 10 Days
Good luck in your work, but unfortunately it wasn't the tech stack that prevented NYT from publishing the warrantless wiretapping story in due time.
thwest··on The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
Go to a smaller vendor like Cricket, they will still do cash prepaid.
thwest··on Entrepreneurs are redesigning the basic building block of capitalism
Nor are they addressing the reproduction of the classes shown by historical materialism to be just as fundamental a building block as the legalistic ones.
thwest··on The Drone Papers
The AUMF declared the entire globe an active war zone.
thwest··on Perceptual Image Compression at Flickr
There are a few human quality estimate corpuses out there. I know a year or two ago they were re-running the quality assessments with RED camera footage. Check out the NYU/UTexas/Waterloo labs working on SSIM, I bet you can download it.
thwest··on Rejuvenating the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler
CMake comes with its own drudgery, but I find it better than trying to keep Visual Studio project files in source control.
thwest··on 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
I also travel with custom imaging equipment that sometimes has exposed PCBs. My recommendation is to carry it on, so that you can open it and explain it. Twice I have approached the gate well ahead of my flight, and offered to show TSA the equipment. Both times they took only a cursory glance at it.

I'm surprised they don't just mandate the spectrogram swab on every piece of electronics that comes through, consumer or custom.

thwest··on The Most Misread Poem in America
You might enjoy Barthes' "Death of the Author". (not trolling)
thwest··on Yankees Suck: The punks who made the most popular T-shirts in Boston
Why didn't you join up with ARA or some other Antifa?
thwest··on Do rent controls work?
You can no longer afford the tithing rate of profit to Capital in San Francisco, and you're forcing someone else to pick up your tab instead of revolution.
thwest··on Upstarts raid giants for talent in Silicon Valley
You shouldn't be so quick to buy into the myth that the Luddites were anti-technology.
thwest··on The fixed_point C++ Class Template
The negative exponent bothers me. Every implementation I've used specifies either mantissa bits or exponent bits, as a positive value. The extraneous '-' everywhere feels like a waste
thwest··on How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
This is exactly how we keep intentionally misunderstanding Das Kapital on internet forums.

Class is not a minor outcome of a social moment. It is not a mere symbol that can be quickly turned on or off by a culture, the way a culture might shift from enjoying boxing to preferring mixed martial arts.

Class has arisen as an essential structure in the reproduction of society since the dissolution of European fuedalism. The same business logic that produces all our material wants, from coats to bushels, comes hand in hand with the logic that every business must give the profit (surplus labor) back to capital. Culture is a material basis, but class is the overdetermining superstructure.

Shifting from a class based society to a classless one would require a fundamental shift in the economic relations where workers would own the means of production. This shift would tear apart the material basis of our culture. MTV/Viacom, MSNBC/Fox/CNN, RCA/TicketMaster/C3, WaPo/NYT/WSJ, TWTR/Facebook/Google: all of these cultural production centers would shatter into cultural microcosms if the workers at these firms weren't bound to profit maximization.

On the other hand, it is trivial to manufacture new cultures without a whiff of change to class.

thwest··on How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
Marx being the economist in my post. My confusion is why the arguments presented here are being called "cultural". People are trying to frame left economics as a mere happenstance of a cultural moment (hippies or hipsters), in order to exclude it from the scientific register when we debate it.
thwest··on How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
Cultural-Marxist? I thought he was an economist.
thwest··on How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos
The overlap between communitarian student protesters and Wall Street focused old money elite isn't zero but I find it very odd that you would paint them as a joint monolith. There are important tensions between those two cultures that you erase with such a claim.

(Also the timing is bizarre, the hippie image was already solidified in the summer of '68, but the old money came in increasing tides of the 80s 90s and 00s.)

thwest··on Strange C Syntax
I was under the impression that C11/C99 only guaranteed that the most recently assigned union member would have an initialized value.
thwest··on I noticed some disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10
Do you remember how much training time you had to spend on Dragon Naturally Speaking?
thwest··on New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto
Ah yes it is reasonable that several other characteristics make the sensor less likely to register photons from the field of view here. (The sensor/lens could also have some spatial frequency response characteristics that filter out non-diffused stars). I don't find it reasonable that there are no stars in that field of view though :)
thwest··on Iran Nuclear Deal Reached
> Yes, it is militarily aggressive and has to be considering the neighborhood.

Citation needed. If we grant Israel its claimed borders, it has only ever witnessed domestic terrorism, never territorial aggression from neighboring states.

thwest··on Iran Nuclear Deal Reached
The US very publicly supported the FSA, and while under the advisement and training of the CIA, the FSA fizzled out and most anti-Assad fighters left and joined Daesh or al Nusra.
thwest··on Iran Nuclear Deal Reached
Greenspan's autobiography goes over this. US DoS/DoD define Middle East "stability" as the stability of the energy markets, not the stability of Middle Eastern national polities.

Foreign Affairs treats this as an implicit assumption. FA wouldn't tarnish their place in the NATO clerk vetting process by making a claim like this explicit. Their profit model depends on it.

In case you missed it, OPEC dumped on the market months ago and US shale production well counts have plummeted.

thwest··on Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API
You see, humans have judgement, and obvious presence. I don't mind George and Jim remembering I was at the pub on Tuesday, because they will consider who to reveal that information to before they do. (A pub I don't think anyone would be at if there were two guards photographing everyone). These giant piles of databases are open for everyone.
thwest··on Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API
AIR being active infrared as opposed to passive (or a particular waveband)?

Anonymity is a more interesting problem than "can distance sensors uniquely identify a passerby among 500M North Americans" as your reply implies. What if you are the roundest or tiniest person in town? All the sudden you are uniquely identifiable.

You're early in development, and I bet whoever did the circumference estimation has more in mind. I imagine you could make a good estimation of a person's height from your data: whether the profile sees knees hips or hands. Can you identify the asymmetric waist bulge of a CHL carrier? Does your infrared band penetrate polyesters but not cotton? I hope the reader's feature-vector blood is flowing at this point.

Your page needs to have way more formalization around the concept of anonymity (outside of the registration required area) for me to feel that you are appreciating the problem from an engineering perspective and not a marketing one.

thwest··on New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto
Perhaps no significantly bright stars. I find it unlikely that there are zero stars in that field of view, especially since the probe and planet are most likely roughly in the plane of the galaxy.
thwest··on Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API
Incredibly accurate and anonymous seem to be at tension here. A discussion on your signal processing would be illuminating.
thwest··on Ask HN: Why use Docker and what are the business cases for using it?
My current workflow is similarly VM oriented and I've just started playing with docker, so an experienced user can feel free to chime in.

Docker is more about process isolation using LXC than having a whole VM for a particular app. You still need some operating system underneath your docker deploys, so it feels redundant in a world where I already have a VM for each project. However I could see it shining at hosting a half dozen to few dozen services from the same machine.

One thing I don't like aesthetically is the tendency to expose local folders to the container. I prefer complete encapsulation.

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