Hacker News Reader

oditogreon How to Destroy the Web 2.0 Look.

>Grunge-Retro Fonts

I was actually thinking a lot of the examples had an almost steampunk vibe to them. Others remind me of some of the music videos that came out in 2002 - 2005, when emo bands started playing with goth themes. I can't say I'm a fan of the cluttered clip art look or the 'stains' / Rorschach inkblots, but a lot of the other stuff I could really get behind. Reading dense text on bright backgrounds really sucks after a while, and having a few rough edges or variations in texture and colors keeps the eyes awake. I'd even be happy if more sites went to having a slightly darker background in the areas where text is like news.yc does (instead of solid white like Reddit).

oditogreon How to Destroy the Web 2.0 Look.

Looking at a couple of the examples and screwing with the text size a bit, everything seems to work fine except extremely big text (which makes any page look bad).

oditogreon Ask YC: Where's the best place for online discussion?

Depends on what you're discussing.

oditogreon Ask news.YC: what are you listening to right now?

"Orbital - Doctor?"

I'm at work, and my work playlist on anywhere.fm has a bunch of Orbital on it...very soothing. :)

oditogreon Inbox 2.0 isn't coming, it is here.

Ditto that - I'd love to give Xobni a spin.

oditogreon Is Aaron Swartz the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0?

>but this is not a case where anonymity is important.

How do you figure? There are enough people who like Swartz and have pull in the Web 2.0 world that a post like this could really hurt your career.

Personally, I think it would have been better if had been done in a less vicious way and not done it anonymously, or just not posted it on the internet, but now that it's done I think he(?) has very valid reasons for wanting to stay anonymous.

oditogreon Puzzle: 100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb

Along with all other relevant info for working with text in comments.

oditogreon Puzzle: 100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb

I now have Tool stuck in my head. Yes, it's related to the puzzle. Would probably be a better puzzle if you said they were aiming to get out ASAP (although you could fairly assume it...)

My solution, before I look at others' replies: One person is designated to turn on the light. The designated person should be the person with the most well-ingrained sleeping pattern in the group. If anybody comes in and it's their first time in the room and the light is on, they turn it off. If the designated guy finds the light to be on for 3 visits in a row and he's sure it's been 200 days since the first time, I think he can fairly confidently declare that all have visited the room.

oditogreon Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com

I like the site overall, but here's some initial gripes:

"20% off Everything and Free Shipping on All Orders"

Could probably stand to qualify this with 'Special Offer' or if it's something you always do, 'We always offer...' or something. Maybe it's just me, but the way it just sits there right now, my first thought was something like, "Is this place going out of business?"

Search results page is a bit confusing, and it would be really nice to have an advanced search so I could exclude fields (first search I tried was for Priest (example: http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo-Hyung/dp/15918201... - if somebody can tell me how to make a link into a single word on N.YC I'll clean this up). It doesn't appear you have the series anyways, but it would have been nice to specify that I was searching for a Title and get a 'No Results' page instead of browsing through 3 pages of 'Not What I'm Looking For'.

If buttons (like 'Subscribe To Issues') aren't going to be an actual link (i.e., your pointer doesn't turn into a hand when you hover over it), there should be some sort of mouseover effect to indicate it's not just a dead link (and maybe a click effect, too, for people with slower computers / connections that won't load the next page straight away.)

oditogreon The 21-Year-Old Behind Tumblr

Ye gods. I'm skinny, but somebody needs to pin that guy to the ground and pour some lard down his throat or something. Then again, if they ever decide to do 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' with real actors, he'd be a shoe-in for the lead role. :)

oditogreon Google's Response to Facebook: Maka-Maka

I always log in, check my mail, and log out...

oditogreon Ars Technica posts their lengthy and in-depth 10.5 review

Yeah, it took me all day to read (occasional bouts of reading between time spent doing actual work, I mean). Very well worth reading; I've been considering moving to apple for some time now, and this was a great overview of the kind of things I could expect from OS X.

oditogreon Ask YC: What's a reasonable share of equity to get as the first developer?

>you are not an "unofficial co-founder". You are employee #1. Big difference.

If you're not getting paid, how are you an employee? If your only compensation is equity, that means that you're putting as much on the line as the co-founders, with an equal level of odds of getting a return on your commitment. In that case, your payout on the gamble should be, if not the same, at least comparable. If they're unwilling to offer that, then there needs to be a fair salary from day 1.

oditogreon Forward 40: Where is LOGO?

I never liked LOGO. It was just one of the programs available for us to play with during 'computer lab time', and as far as I can remember we were never taught how to use it; commands were passed on in a sort of oral tradition from older schoolmates to younger. Since then, I've learned how cool it can really be and wondered about it often, though. Anybody know of a good, true-to-the-old-school-basic-program that's freeware for Win32?

*Edit: And while I'm at it with old games and such that I miss...anybody know where I can get ahold of a BASIC with the old nibbles.bas and gorilla.bas that came with QBASIC?

oditogreon Forward 40: Where is LOGO?

I seem to remember cholera being the big killer...

oditogreon Zombo.com - YC applicant - feedback wanted

Auto flash plus sound ftl. Thank God for Flash Block.

...Am I the only person reminded of a lame circus announcer?

oditogreon What reddit taught me about startups: "because it's your damn job"

I have two despair posters in my office:

http://despair.com/despair.html

http://despair.com/gettowork.html

I also had the despair calendar in '06, but not '07 because they took out the funny trivia. :-/

oditogreon Hacker Music?

Most anything Orbital, Sasha and John Digweed - Northern Exposure, most NIN remix / single releases, Any Tool (but mostly Lateralus), Enya, Sarah McLachlan - Remixed or Surfacing, sometimes other stuff of hers, Brian Eno, Yoko Kanno, sometimes Audioslave or APC's first albums, Mushroomhead, TCM's Vegas album, and as others have said, glitchy electronic stuff - I'm especially partial to Download's stuff and some other cEvin Key stuff.

oditogreon Ballmer Peak

I've experienced this, but there's a problem. I don't remember where I read it, but there's a programming rule I picked up somewhere. It's something along the lines of, "Debugging is harder than programming, so if you program the cleverest code you can, you won't be able to debug it." I've written killer code while moderately drunk, but if you need to modify or fix any, you may as well just do a rewrite. It'll save time.

oditogreon Ask YC: Have any girls applied to YC? Any get in?

Hah, I'd forgotten about likebetter. Just burned up about 20min. on it - the brain's gotten pretty good, hehe.

oditogreon What nine of the world's largest websites are running on

Nobody uses PostgreSQL?

oditogreon Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer )

I like light on dark, as you say, but not bright on dark, as whacked said. Light gray or grayish blue / green on on black or dark, dark red is my preferred. I keep a .txt on my desktop with html in it to make font exactly how I like it. On sites that have bad colors, I just paste the text in between the innermost tags in the .txt, save as 'blah.html', and read at ease. :)

oditogreon Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer )

I'm curious. What did it do?

oditogreon Ever wanted to withdraw an email you just sent?

Enh, I dunno. I kind of see this in the same light as /.'s way of allowing you to preview, but not edit or delete, a comment. On the average, I think it brings up the quality of posts on an individual basis, the longer a person has regularly posted there. The nearest thing to a feature like this that I would want would be biometrics in my keyboard / mouse / desk / chair that wouldn't let an email send if I was clearly enraged and / or drunk. ;)

oditogreon What do you think of my startup idea?

Of course. I only mentioned IRC because there are some similarities that seem to indicate your idea could work.

>only get recommended that content which has empirically shown is wanted by people that think like them

Seems like an OK idea, but I think the site might suffer if this is taken too far and the groups just become echo chambers, walled off from each other entirely. I just think a site could be more popular if it focused on finding common links in disparate groups instead of isolating them based on common differences. Think of it like radio: in my music directory, my biggest artists are The Crystal Method (41 songs), NIN (112 songs), and Sarah McLachlan (85 songs). No single radio station, AM, FM, or XM, that I am aware of covers a range like that. Wouldn't it be cool to find a place that let you keep close to your core group, but at the same time gave you tips on what other groups thought was cool, just in case you agreed?

oditogreon What do you think of my startup idea?

Sounds like IRC. Once you find a chan you like and kind of settle in, you realize that the actual convo rarely relates to the title of the chan, but is still of interest to the people who regularly go there.

IRC is pretty popular, I don't see why your idea wouldn't be among the less BitchX-inclined internet crowd. ;-P

You'd have to be brutal with the 'influence' system, though, to keep the trolls out of the 'ponies and barbie dolls' group.

The killer feature, to me, of an idea like this would be something like musicovery.com, where overlapping things lead you down new paths.

oditogreon Serious bug found in Excel 2007 ::: 850*77.1 = 100,000 and not 65535

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=307215&cid=207394...

That seems like the most plausible theory I've seen so far.

oditogreon Serious bug found in Excel 2007 ::: 850*77.1 = 100,000 and not 65535

Is the formatting for news.yc documented anywhere, btw?

oditogreon Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

I've never heard of anything like this, though I've thought of it quite a long while back for Reddit. The problem is that it won't solve anything. Most people will still downvote / leftvote things they don't agree with and upvote / rightvote things they do agree with. If the desire to silence a dissenting opinion could be controlled by the majority of people, free speech would not be such a rare thing, let alone need to be written into law.

oditogreon Ask YC News: Voting up vs. up and down

I disagree, as noted further up the thread. Preventing downvotes doesn't remove the dissenting opinion. In fact, it allows and encourages it. Downvotes allow groupthink to silence disagreement. If you disagree with something, instead of downvoting, post a comment explaining your position.