sdsantos's comments

sdsantos | 13 years ago | on: Understanding The Fourier Transform

Yup, that's how I usually picture it, change the values to a collection of sin and cos functions.

When I started explaining it to some computer science students, it helped by giving a particular example of its usefulness:

Sound is composed of waves so, when you want to send a music to a friend it's all a bunch of values like [0, 1, 2, 1, 0, -1 , -2, -1, 0, ...]. If you know they're going to look like waves (sinusoidal functions) why not just send your friend how much they look like sin or cos? The values back there were just a 2sin(x) so why not just send them the value [2]?

You could save a lot of bandwidth. You just need to "correlate" sounds with a bunch of sin or cos functions everybody agrees on :)

Bonus: you can add the phase values, 2 sin(x + phase), to get the beats just right.

sdsantos | 15 years ago | on: You’ve Either Shipped or You Haven’t

It remembers me of another article, about producers and consumers: "The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself" http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2008/05/18/the-single-most-impo...

If you’ve been reading startup blogs for years and never started anything, it’s time to accept that your tendency is to be a consumer. It’s not to say you can’t break out of that classification by starting something, but if you haven’t done it thus far you’re not likely to do it soon without some external motivation (maybe this post?).

If you have 50 software product ideas and your hard drive is littered with folders containing 30 lines of code from each, you tend towards being a consumer (or at least a producer who has trouble finishing things).

And if you figure out that you are a producer, stop daydreaming about the day you’ll make things happen. Start making it happen in the next 30 days, or forever hold your peace.

Once again, is the ability to ship something the major distinction.

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