This is the perfect Hacker News article. I learned something new and mathematically-interesting about the natural world, the author came up with a clever hack to enliven backgrounds, and we learn how to apply that to improve our own designs.
pquerna's recent post about OpenSSL memory in node (and elsewhere) is another that comes to mind. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411144
keep 'em coming I say!
This article was truly awesome. I'm kicking myself for having not thought of it before because it seems like such a simple concept! Makes me wonder what else out there I haven't thought of... ;)
It'd be pretty awesome if we could have an HN that's just this sort of stuff (with a strong tendency toward false-negatives vs. false-positives—i.e. no "maybe good", only "definitely good.") I wouldn't mind even if it only had two or three new posts per day—fewer, guaranteed posts means I could actually stand to add it to my RSS reader, vs. the current HN which is more of a firehose: good to stick a bottle in every once in a while, not good to stand in front of.
Thinking on that, here's one way it could be implemented on top of the current HN: if there was some sort of "way, way up"-vote button that (besides being an actual "I wish I had N upvotes to give this" upvote-N-times button) worked as a sort of moral negative to flagging, such that when it had been hit [some threshold] times for an article, the article would get linked into the "/awesome" sublist, that might be enough to make it happen—if we trust the userbase to not abuse it.
If everyone started to way-way-up-vote everything they currently just up-vote, perhaps one could stick a CAPTCHA (or three) on it to make it just annoying enough to disuade abuse (at the cost of further false negatives from people now too lazy to use it.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=200
HN has loads of hidden features. I suggest judicious use of google's search operators to find them all.
Somebody should really put together a guide to all these half-hidden features, either as a wiki or an individual effort.
In summary, this article is far from what I would upvote. A good indicator of the relative weakness of it is the few interesting comment it triggered.
In fact, some month ago I would come to HN, and read the comments, and find a lot of savoury meat for my curiosity hunger, without even bothering to get check the original article that was only the starting point of high-level exchanges of views on the matter.
PS: Recent articles seem to focus on visual design (pixels and colors), which is very surprising on a website that is so obviously anti-design...