This is a pipe. (Something dear to me.) | Hacker News Reader

This is a pipe. (Something dear to me.)

blog.200nipples.com

55 pointswmeredith30 comments

I love it, but I'm not a "T-Shirt" kinda guy. I wish they would do something other than just T's.

I can send you a High Quality PDF of the 11x17 poster mentioned in the post if you'd like to print it out.

Just shoot me an email at wade |at| 200nipples |dot| com.

in a similar vein, i have a print of http://www.threadless.com/product/543/This_is_not_a_Pipe hanging on my wall, over my wii & xbox. feels very appropriate

mmh... something is wrong tough. I always thought of a unix pipe as a conduct. The word "pipe" in french is correct for the smoking item (and also to describe a sexual act) but it does not refer to a conduct.

The conduct you call a pipe in english is a "tuyau" in french.

conduct

Conductor or conduit?

I meant conduit, thanks for pointing out

Right. To pipe something is to use it as a conduit. A pipe is a tube for piping fluids. A pipe is also a typographic character: |

The pipe character is used to indicate that the output of process A is piped to process B. I guess it's a pun. My apologies for horribly overexplaining.

I'm a programmer, so I have a tendency to sit on my ass and snack. Why would I want a shirt that draws attention to my waistline?

Does anyone ever buy the $100 shirt?

Looks like someone did.

Have to say this is 1) a brilliant tshirt, 2) a brilliant business model. Just placed an order. :-)

Now it appears that they didn't purchase it, as it's available.

If I could get it cheaper, I'd buy one.

What's that snarky quote, modern art is 90% justification?

Not sure why that popped into my head whilst reading seven paragraphs about his t-shirt with a vertical bar...

I hate to look really amateurish, and please correct me if this is irrelevant to the thread, but would the following python code equal to the amount of money received if each shirt was sold for one design?

(It's python, and I'm very new to programming. Criticism is welcome.)

    a,b = 1,1
    while a <= 100:
        a = a + 1
        b = b + a
    print(b)

Nope, that ends up with $100 too much. The proper way is documented here: <http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_sum_of_the_first_100_p....

One way of computing it in Python, using a loop approach like you did, is like so:

    sum = 0
    for p in xrange(101):
      sum += p
    print (sum)

This uses better variable names, and a simpler looping construct. The reason for the 101 is because it starts at 0.

Very neat, thank you for your reply.

I knew of the shortcut to increment a variable, but I had no idea you didn't have to declare one for a loop. I also didn't not know of xrange, I will have to look that one up.

Shouldn't that be

   print ((n-1)*n)/2

That's not entirely right. It should be: print ((n+1)*n)/2

(fold the sequence in half, which gives you 100 + 1 on one end and 50 + 51 on the other.)

Ah right, sure.

I took the 'n' to be the 100, not the 101. A little too quick on the submit there, I should have run it :)

But anyway, that seems to be a damn sight faster than to run a loop to add a bunch of numbers in a fixed interval.

Especially for large 'n'.

Probably much faster, but also doing half the work yourself. It'll depend on the situation which is the better solution.

you could use a list comprehension to do the same thing:

print sum([x for x in xrange(101)])

although the n(n+1)/2 is probably the best, I'd just like to point that out because I wish someone would have pointed out list comprehensions to me earlier :)

reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, xrange(101))

"When in doubt, try it out!"

You could easily verify the answer by hand for small numbers of shirts, then run your debugged code to compute the answer for 100 shirts.

Correct answer should be $5050 as per Dr. Gauss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss

Its good to know there are more typography geeks out there reading HN.

I'd say it has to do more with the use of the pipe character on the command line than the typography angle of it, but I could be wrong.

Unix pipe was my first thought.

^ mildweed is behind Tiny Sauce

Indeed. And proud of it.

Fabulous post, wmeredith - thanks.

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