I used to put mine on my wallet, and it took ages to figure out why I kept dropping it: the moment you set it down, it would start sliding _incredibly_ slowly.

“Most people who attempt audio reactive LED strips end up somewhere around here, with a naive FFT method. It works well enough on a screen, where you have millions of pixels and can display a full spectrogram with plenty of room for detail. But on 144 LEDs, the limitations are brutal. On an LED strip, you can't afford to "waste" any pixels and the features you display need to be more perceptually meaningful.”

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690869

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Edit: I've also looked at parts 2 and 4, which also contain no mentions.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21314201/ is part 1, and talks about the artificially aged samples, but again doesn't appear to contain anything about LEDs specifically.

I'm not sure I want to spend a whole lot more time on this; everything I've read suggests they're looking at just plain old “light causes reactions, here's the specific reactions that occur with pigments containing these compounds, see how they're sensitive to these particular wavelengths?”, none of which is particular to the source of those wavelengths; specifically, I see no reason why an incandescent bulb of similar temperature light wouldn't also carry those same wavelengths, nor why it would be a property of LEDs, when the output spectrums of common LEDs vary widely.

Interesting research certainly, but not anything that supports the hn title.

[edit]: this is clearly not the paper, as it was published in 2025, and the hn link is from 2013. Regardless, it makes only passing mention of commercial LED, certainly nothing that supports the claims in the article, nor does it mention in the paper body anything that appears to be referencing previous analysis of the lighting, so the search continues.

Edit: oh jesus, this article is from 2013.

The point isn't that you won't have a calculator, the point is that you shouldn't need to pull out a calculator for every little operation. We drive everywhere, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to walk a mile if necessary. Failing to develop basic mental arithmetic skills is not a flex.

> but the first half was so good and original I'd recommend it just for that

Attension span so short you couldn't even make it to the second half of the sentence before dismissing it