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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate his position but I have trouble taking advice on UI from somebody whose blog is eye-burning neon green text on a black background and has been since 1995. We know you're l33t, Jamie, you are a living legend. Can I get a readable color scheme already?

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>Can I get a readable color scheme already?

Yes. In your OWN blog. This one is retro styling for the intended audience, and we won't have it any other way.

"Eye-burning"? Maybe lower your brightness? I have -3.00 diopters myopia and can read it just fine.

Not to mention people worked for 15+ hours on green on black displays and you didn't see them complaining -- and that was with phosphor displays, with an electron gun blazing, and tons of others issues, from flickering to v-sync.

Complain? We had options to change the intensity or use amber/black or white/black. No one in the day would have used intense green characters for a whole shift, it would have "burned" the CRT.

Er? There were metric-f'tons of green-phosphor terminals in use "back in the day", and I don't recall anybody ever adjusting them to reduce brightess... I'm not even sure if most them were even capable of easy adjustment.

E.g., the green model of the H19/Z19 (super popular), various IBM synchronous terminals (the ones I remember from the system/34 had a particularly saturated green phosphor), the later H29 (a very pleasant bright whitish-green), various cheapo Wyse models from the final days of dedicated terminals (though usually these were pretty adjustable), the original PC monochrome monitor (adjustable, but typically quite bright and saturated green), etc.

[Not that I actually like jwz's blog style, mind you...]

If I recall correctly, you could adjust the brightness on the VT 100 series through one of the setup modes. The VT200 had choices other than green. The TRS-80 Model 4 had white and I used a 4p as a terminal to remote mainframes and minis. The Xerox 820 was white. Most of the early Apple/IBM PC monochromes were green, but there were some really nice amber third party monitors.

"didn't see them complaining"? Here in Europe, laws were passed, in most countries, forcing employers to pay for eyeglasses and regular visits, because people were literally going blind.

I think you got just a very bad monitor, if it doesn't have a green / amber switch. Simply go and buy a better one. Btw. Blog is completely missing the lovely slow phosphor trailing effect, it could be added with js. I was great that you were able to read text from monitor about 5 seconds after powering it off. - After quick Googling, I couldn't find pre-existing javascript to do it. It would be nice to make one.

A green / amber switch are you serious? Are you in a time machine?

Of course he's serious. Green for hacking code, amber for reading Usenet.

It might be nice to replicate the 8 x 8 pixels (on a 640 x 200 screen) of the CGA 80 x 25 characters text mode.

I was thinking the same thing. The text is way too sharp, so it's rather anachronistic to see the right color scheme with modern fonts. There has to be a slightly pixelated font out there, based on the pixel pattern of the green CRTs. Of course, it wouldn't be practical on the blog, but it would look cool on his home page (jwz.org).

Just for the record, all the people complaining about jwz's green text have no idea what they're talking about. It might be old-fashioned and out of style, but it's totally readable. There are way worse websites, even among designers who should know better. What's funny is that it never fails that someone criticizes the green color, and says something about not taking the content seriously, every time jwz's posts get hackernewsed.

Might be hard to do in JS; http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emu... apparently uses OpenGL to get its phosphor effects.

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that someone's complaining about UI of the source when the stuff under discussion already cleans up things for you and makes it readable?

Almost nobody uses feed readers, which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place. You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority.

what kind of geek doesn't have EZRSS and a few other torrent feeds fed into Sickbeard or FlexGet for automatic television/movie/game downloading?

I didn't say I don't use RSS; I just don't use it for news (or any kind of reading). I plumb it into automation quite often, though.

and you use google reader for your plumbing? does that not seem a little robust for such an activity?

Me.

I have never watched much TV, skip most movies, and am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick. Plus I think that I should respect copyrights.

Let me turn it around. What true nerd would consider consumption of mass market media a defining characteristic of nerdom? As opposed to, say, burying your nose in a math text for fun?

> [...] am unable to play any first shooter from Doom onwards without getting motion sick.

Wow, I thought this was just me! This prevents me from playing even the good stuff like Portal, which is a terrible pity.

Try increasing the FOV.

I tried to watch a video of Portal. I failed.

It was clear to me that increasing the field of view would not help.

Thank you for calling me on the No True Scotsman fallacy, then perpetuating the same in your reply. :)

Shame about your respect for copyright in the digital age; I'm in full agreement with you otherwise.

I'd say that is a fairly mainstream geek kind of thing, I associate it with the kind of video game playing, reddit frequenting geek. (Yes overly broad stereotypes).

I would never participate in automatic torrenting; I am pretty discerning about what I watch.

Additionally, RSS feeds just seem pointless to me; I visit web sites when I want to consume information from them. I dislike the idea of turning my computer into a television.

You can still be discerning in your automatic torrenting. For instance, Flexget has an option to download S01E01's of television, and the ability to check Metacritic ratings for Games/Movies before downloading (I have a threshold of 75% or above). While I tend to find a bunch of tripe television (the wife enjoys it, and I built her media center out of love), I happily delete the awful stuff, and don't add it to the list of "automatically download this title" shows I've curated.

> You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority.

24-36m people is a vocal minority?

"Almost nobody uses feed readers" - prove it. I'll read that as "I stopped using it, therefore how could anyone else possibly want to?"

"which is why Google shut down Reader in the first place" - nope, Google wants to stuff us all into their walled Google+ crap and feed us ads. Notice the lack of RSS feeds for updates.

"You guys are a small but INCREDIBLY vocal minority" - this is a discussion that involves Google's cack handed behaviour with Reader, what do you expect. If you don't use RSS then why the hell do you care, stay out of the discussion.

Add this to your bookmark bar - https://gist.github.com/autarch/5856172 - it's quite handy.

That is super useful! Thanks!

Hear, hear. I just spent 5mn reading his post and then a few comments, then switched back to Hacker News and for about 20 seconds, my eyes were popping greed dots on my retina like fireworks.

Very, very painful.

I thought I'm the only one who hates his color scheme. Use stylish chrome extension to fix it, because jwz will never change it.

jwz's blog is't a product, doesn't exist to sell a product, or to sell jwz as a product -- which is why his ugly green color scheme is fantastic.

His blog's color scheme also has no bearing on evaluating actual products' UX.

False, jwz is selling himself on this blog. He's addicted to the attention, very much like a heroin addict.

That's really, really uncalled for.

"addicted to attention like a heroin addict"

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