A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers | Hacker News Reader

A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers

betterexplained.com

24 pointsnickb6 comments

I loved this article.

PG: feature request - how about a way on news.yc for me to give points out of my karma to a submission/comment that I particularly like? Right now, upvotes are free so I can just throw them around. If they came out of my karma, maybe they'd be more valuable and presumably lead to better voting?

Instead of feeling like you have to labor and lose your karma points to make things right, why not extoll the virtues of the article in the comments, which will cause people to read it. Imagine if this article had these 4 comments about the karma system, and 200 points. People would skip the article because they would feel a few people must have voted it up. On the other hand, when people start a discussion about how good the article is, people will actually read it, and that will cause them to vote it up.

I was about to skip the article because all the comments were about YC karma.

Interesting idea.

Lots of people have also wanted to be able to give more than one upvote every now and then, say 5 extra upvotes in a day. Your idea may solve that elegantly as well. You can give as many as you want, but they come out of your karma.

The real challenge is to avoid complicating the UI.

It might also be a good idea to make downmods come out the voter's karma.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting +1/-1 mods come out of the voter's karma. That is an incentive against the transactions that are the life-blood of this network.

But if you want to do something special one way to do it is to pay for it in karma points. And yeah, that could be +n or -n.

Consequently, I remember reading something that tried to explain the fourier transform using the same geometric interpretation of a rotating vector with its complex numbers. I think waves can be thought of as rotations as any point on the wave is going through a cycle, and the FT can "pick out" different frequencies by looking at where the vector lands.

I should go back and look at it. To this day, I never really fully comprehended that and the butterflies in FFTs.

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