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djahng

234 karma · joined February 24, 2009

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djahng··on All of Bach
http://youtu.be/olW6-jhSgMg

BWV 1003 Fugue on classical guitar. This is one of the most amazing things I've heard and seen.

djahng··on I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable
Well private gun sale laws vary from state to state. For instance, in Oregon private transfers of firearms are perfectly legal without background checks or going through FFL dealers. So anyone can side-step a background check in a state like Oregon by asking someone else to purchase the gun legally and then give them cash for it. Does that mean we should expect more gun violence in states like Oregon?
djahng··on I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable
Please excuse my ignorance on this matter, but why are people so concerned about "untraceable" guns (i.e. guns without serial numbers)? IF a gun is used in a crime, how important is it that there's a serial number stamped on the receiver? As opposed to, say, ballistics showing that a particular gun was used in a crime because of the rifling marks found on the bullet fragments and the firing pin indentation on the shell casing?

Sure a serial number will tell who the original purchaser of the firearm was, but that in itself does not necessarily prove that the original owner is the one who committed a crime.

djahng··on Amazon Officially Announces The New Kindle Paperwhite
I'd upgrade to the Paperwhite just for the built-in light. I backpack a lot, and reading my Kindle with a headlamp is really annoying...
djahng··on What's a $4000 Suit Worth?
That's a made-to-measure (MTM) suit, which is a completely different animal than a bespoke. I get MTM suits for myself, but I have a cousin that buys bespoke. They're so nice...
djahng··on Salary$hare - How do you compare against your co-workers and friends?
So if you wanted to see the actual salary of a particular coworker, all you would have to do is create a pool, enter in 3 bogus salaires yourself, and give the link to the other person?
djahng··on Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
Asking the world to change/ boiling the ocean... Plenty of people get drunk without sticking their hands up women's skirts. The "logical conclusion" is not to remove the women from the equation.
djahng··on Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
It's pretty clear that the issue at hand is harassment, not merely being hit on.
djahng··on Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
What you're saying is this is how men behave and women should either put up with it and stop complaining, or stay home?
djahng··on How the NYT paywall is working
One site, I think the LA Times, would show your the entire article but then redirect you to their pay page after a few seconds. I just turned off javascript and it solved that issue...
djahng··on Malaria is no excuse for patent trolling, Mr. Myhrvold
The article does mention Etsy. There's even a link to a research report on the workings of IV.
djahng··on First full-resolution images of the Martian surface
More megapixels isn't necessarily better. The sensor was probably chosen for a specific reason, one reason may be that the sensor was matched to the optics (lenses) they decided to use...
djahng··on New York Times Set to Sell About.com for $270 Million to Answers.com
It says in the article About was bought by the New York Times for $410 million in 2005.
djahng··on Jack Daniels writes the politest cease and desist notice ever.
It's nice to see a company and law firm that not only acknowledges its fans, but doesn't treat them like criminals.
djahng··on Teenager dies after playing Diablo III for 40 hours without food
People don't die after only 2 days without food. The title is misleading and the article is full of speculation.
djahng··on Apple patent: Method and apparatus for executing program code
It is, the problem is "trained professionals in the field" don't review patent applications. Having a patent attorney file the application all but ensures that just about anything is patentable (provided you're willing to pay the legal fees).

Check this out: http://www.google.com/patents?id=OfwkAAAAEBAJ

djahng··on I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
Yes, given that C major is the most popular key, it follows that C, F, and G are the most popular chords. That's called a I-IV-V chord progression, and is the basis for most blues, which rock (and subsequently pop) evolved out of.

Oh, and a G chord isn't any easier to play on a guitar than a C# chord.

djahng··on Mark Zuckerberg married
The title is fine, I had no trouble understanding it. The ambiguity of "married" did not lead me to believe that Mark acted as officiant in a wedding ceremony, nor did the open-ended past tense of of the term lead me to believe that Mark was married 150 years ago. If you can't access the page that the link points to, and are really concerned about the truthiness of the title, then there's this website called google.com that makes finding answers fairly simple. If you think that this is celebrity gossip and that searching for the truth would be a waste of time, then don't...
djahng··on Ask HN: What kind of chair do you have?
Definitely. Take care of it and it'll last, probably got mine 7 years ago now. If it were to break on me today I'd get another one.
djahng··on Ask HN: What kind of chair do you have?
I have a Herman Miller Aeron with PostureFit. I used to sit on one of my wooden kitchen table chairs all the time and always had lower back pain. A good chair is expensive but well worth the cost.
djahng··on Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb
You wouldn't even notice any flickering at a PWM frequency of 120 Hz. Linear (resistive) dimming is just not done anymore. Just about all lighting fixtures these days dim by either PWM or chopping the AC signal.
djahng··on Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb
The LEDs are typically blue with a phosphor that is energized by the LED light. It's the phosphor layer that starts to glow and produce the white light.

If you "paint" a surface a particular color to alter the light transmitted through it, you're effectively creating a filter. If you want something to appear more yellow, you need to increase the amount of yellow wavelengths transmitted through the filter by reducing the other wavelengths. But if you have a single color LED, such as blue, there are no other wavelengths present (at least not in any significant amount). So if you put a yellow filter over a blue LED, you see nothing...

djahng··on Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb
Voltage fluctuations don't matter since they're driven by a switching constant current supply. The voltage drop across one high brightness LED is only a few volts.
djahng··on Reverse engineering the Mac ‘breathing’ LED
Generating a PWM signal based on a particular LED's characteristics is similar to designing the gain of an amplifier circuit around a particular BJT's beta. It's just not done. That's also the whole reason behind controlling LED brightness through PWM. By PWMing the drive current, you can ensure that the LED is being driven far into its conducting region, and therefore not relying on controlling dimness by varying current around the LED's "knee" (which literally is different for just about every LED in existence, even same part numbers). This way you also avoid other stuff like wavelength shifts that tend to occur near the knee.
djahng··on Reverse engineering the Mac ‘breathing’ LED
It would be more like at least 10x the PWM frequency, if you wanted to see a square waveform.
djahng··on Reverse engineering the Mac ‘breathing’ LED
The patent they reference in the article states that the LED's current is PWMed, where the modulation function is sinusoidal.
djahng··on The betrayal of Bntr
"Bnter was so star-struck by Spark, the company hadn’t widely pitched itself to other investors, but told the ones that it had talked to it’d be going with Spark."

That seems like a pretty big mistake. It sounds like Bnter could have probably still come away from this with VC backing.

djahng··on Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10
The point of probability is to describe uncertain events. Coin flips aren't described by uniform distributions, they're binomial. Human intelligence can be modeled by a Gaussian distribution. And this site's experiment seems to suggest that picking a number between 1 and 10 can be modeled by a bimodal random variable with means around 4 and 7. Point being: random doesn't necessarily mean uniform.
djahng··on Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10
The site asks you to pick a random number, not mentioning anything about trying to achieve a specific distribution.

EDIT: Downvotes and no comments, nice. You guys seem to be misunderstanding something. If asked to picked any number ("random") between 1 and 10, to suggest that the outcome is "wrong" because the distribution isn't uniform doesn't make any sense at all. It would be a completely different experiment if we were asked to pick a number between 1 and 10 such that the outcome after x number of independent trials has a uniform (or gaussian/exponential/etc) distribution. This seems to be what some people are assuming.

djahng··on Results for: Pick a number from 1 to 10
How do you be "better at picking random numbers"?
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