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whiw

51 karma · joined February 5, 2016

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whiw··on Show HN: Are you playing your violin (viola, guitar, etc.) in tune?
Great idea, I love the idea of getting real-time transcription of what I'm attempting to play.

As others have commented, it seems to struggle with the low E and A strings of guitar. Thinking about this:

1. The smallest note interval is from open low E (82Hz) up to the next semitone (82*(2^(1/12) -1)), which is about 5Hz. This gives the maximum bin width.

2. The guitar range is approx 4 octaves, ie up to about 330Hz. The min sampling freq must be double this.

3.In practice the bin edges wont line up with the semitone boundaries, so we ought to aim for bin widths smaller than half of 5Hz above, say 2Hz. This guarantees that a bin exists that doesn't cross semitone boundaries.

4. As lower frequencies probably wont be sampled across an integer number of cycles, spectral smearing will occur. This can be reduced by making the binwidth even smaller, and by use of windowing in the time domain.

5. My environment has background noise (eg computer fan). Unless the noise is filtered out pre-sampling (which it probably isn't for most users) then this will fold back into the signal of interest. Sampling at a higher rate than 2 x 330Hz would allow separation of the noise from the signal. I'm not sure what sample rate is used in the app. If the noise goes up to 4kz (I'm guessing) then this implies a sample rate of 8kHz to remove it.

6. From the above: sample at 8kHz for 1 second, use a window funtion to reduce spectral leakage. 8192 samples is a handy power of 2. Smaller sized ffts are likely to struggle to identify the right bin at lower frequencies, and/or have more noise in the signal band to confuse the peak detector.

7. An oscilloscope display would be handy to verify that signal levels were ok, and that noise isn't too intrusive.

whiw··on Google has been testing a replacement for third-party cookies
1. Noise that looks like valid signal is the most difficult kind to remove.

2. They would have to track the noise over page requests to know that it was noise. The saving of and correlation of the saved state would be a pain.

whiw··on Google has been testing a replacement for third-party cookies
> it would even be another tool to identify you

How exactly? It seems like a difficult problem for a website to me.

whiw··on Ask HN: How do you work through large ideas?
Generally, rephrase the problem in abstract terms.

Abstraction gets rid of the irrelevent minutiae of the specific problem and gives us the opportunity to solve the more general problem first. There may be a series of increasingly abstract representations of the problem, like a hierarchy classes in OOP.

My (rather vague) understanding of mathematicians is that they have a menagerie of increasingly abstract math objects (sets, groups, categories), and are able to apply proofs from the more abstract objects to any of the derived objects. This seems to work well for them.

So, if possible, try to solve the problem at the highest abstration layer first. If you don't suceed there then try to solve it at the next layer instead. If you do succeed, then you have a general solution that applies to that abstraction layer and all layers below it (possibly with tweaks, like overridden methods in OOP).

Wrt the specific question ("what is the best way to organize a liberal democracy of >100M citizens?"):- This problem is already fairly abstract, but first, define "best", "organize", and "democracy".

-We can only know a solution is best if we first find all solutions. Depending on the problem, this might not be worth the effort, an aproximate solution might be adequate.

-In this context I assume that 'organise' means getting the population to do something.

-Quite a few countries have elections, are they all democracies?

Some relevent questions to consider are:

-Is the aim to get the population to all agree on an action?

-Is there a clear benefit to a proposed action, or is it subject to unknowns?

-Is the population rational?

-Do they understand the advantages of action?

-Are there any disadvantages of action? Do they understand those?

-In general any solution is likely to have a number of different aspects each with their own costs and benefits (monetary cost, time cost, health cost, ...)

-Are all members of the population equally affected by the advantages and disadvantages, or are subsets affected unequally? This is likely to be unanswerable, given that individuals are likely to assign different costs to different aspects.

-Can they be coerced? (Yes, liberal democracies coerce too! think taxes on carbon fuel for example).

In a problem that compares apples and oranges and shellfish and pyramids, "The best way to organize..." seems to depend on the whim of whoever happens to be pulling the levers of power; there is no best solution to this.

whiw··on Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces
A list of requirements to help make the OPs vision a reality might be:-

1. Separation of concerns (ie, make it trivial to separate the Data and the View components from the surrounding html clutter). Currently it can be a pain to extract data from the DOM.

2. Allow the Data component to express arbitrary data shapes, including at least: - 2-D tables - n-dimensional data tables - groups of related tables and schema (for a relational database) - sparse data sets - lists - trees - graphs

A lisp-like representation of data would provide adaptability to arbitrarily shaped data.

3. Make it easy to use:- The webpage coder would write <html> <head> <data name="data1">...lisp-like-data-structure...</data> </head> <body> <view name="view1" data="data1">...view-code...</view> </body> </html>

If no View-code was provided in the html then a default OS/browser View would be used.

3. Ideally HTML would provide native support for the Data and View primitives. Failing that then it could be provided by a script (hosted on a single website, to ensure consistency of interpretation).

4. Ideally the OS would provide support for the Data and View primitives, in the GUI and in the command line. Failing that then these could be provided as user programs.

5. Encourage webpage developers to use the new <data> and <view> primitives by deprecating <table> ;)

whiw··on Optical tracking and laser-induced mortality of insects during flight
God here.

So species 1 (in this case, mosquitos) is annoying species 2 (in this case homosapiens). I'm rather disappointed to know that species 2 has taken it upon themselves to maim species 1 by burning them. I may need to do something about this.

whiw··on Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
To clarify: 0.32 microJoules of energy are added to every 1 litre of the ocean every second.
whiw··on Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years
This seems to confuse Power with Energy. Watts measure Power, which is a rate of Energy.

The specific heat of water is 4182 Joules/kg and its density is close to 1kg/litre, so 4.128 kJ (Energy) will be required to heat 1 litre of water by 1 degree C.

The temperature rise of the oceans will be complicated to work out. Taking the OPs figures, 4.16x10^14 watts / 1.3x10^21 litres gives 3.2x10^-7 watts per litre of ocean, ie 0.32 microJoules of energy added to the oceans every second. The temperature rise of the oceans will depend on how quickly it can dissipate this heat. What are relevant the heat loss mechanisms? Evaporation just moves the problem to the atmosphere. Conduction just moves it elsewhere on earth. Radiation will shift some of it to space (and some reflected back to the earth), but radiation is a property of the surface of the ocean, not of the bulk.

whiw··on Sandboxie-Plus – a fork of Sandboxie with improved functionality
1. When you open a win10 sandbox it appears as a fresh install of windows. Only Microsoft Edge is pre-installed. If you like to tweak privacy settings etc then you'll need to re-tweak them every time you start up a win10 sandbox (as they too get forgotten)>

2. Everything gets wiped when you close a win10 sandbox (so installations can't survive beyond a login session). In Sandboxie you appear to get a copy of your existing OS, and the copy is only wiped when you choose to wipe it (so it can survive across login sessions). The win10 sandbox is wiped when you close it, and you have to close it to turn off the PC.

3. Win10 sandbox seems not to like making the camera or microphone available to apps (eg zoom, skype) whereas Sandboxie is happy with making them available.

4. Because of the above, win10 sandbox is probably more secure than sandboxie, but there is no indication of where the sandbox state was stored, so it isn't possible to secure delete it like you can with sandboxie.

whiw··on Sandboxie-Plus – a fork of Sandboxie with improved functionality
The Win10 sandbox requires win10 Pro or Enterprise (see https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windo...), so Win10 Home users will want Sandboxie.
whiw··on Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)
Having not used any of the following I may be wrong here, but don't dataflow languages (eg Labview?) come close to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

And isn't GNU Radio effectively a domain-specific language for plugging signal processing elements together?

whiw··on Ego Graphs – the Google ‘vs’ trick
Neat idea, excellent presentation. What a brilliant write-up, I was thinking "I wonder how this works", and then I got to the detailed explanation of exactly how it works.
whiw··on Forecasting s-curves is hard
>Many of us will have learnt in school that if there are three parameters to be found, you need three data points to define the function.

4 points are needed in my universe.

whiw··on Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
Speculating: IR interference might have jammed this vehicle's LIDAR for an instant as it sampled the vicinity of the hazard. Any power in the passband of the detector might have been sufficient to saturate it and make it less sensitive to the returning LIDAR signal. This could come from another LIDAR unit in the vicinity. Other possible jammers might include IR laser pointers, TV remotes, or IR camera illuminators.
whiw··on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
So if we swap our yellow and (say) blue cartidges then these dots will become more apparent?
whiw··on France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels
This will be a maintenance nightmare. The software concepts of Separation Of Concerns and Object Single Responsibility might be usefully applied to this domain.
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