sixtofour

Thanks, taking an Epic walk through it now. Nice of you to have done this.

It's a great idea, I hope I can find it in my bookmarks again when I can swing around to it. :)

Didn't Google recently patent the front page/changing doodle idea?

That's an excellent point, and should sometimes be considered in our decisions.

I'm guessing if such a conversation happened at Google, the end would be something like "Can the degree of life changing importance be measured? No? Make the change."

Doing it 1000 times may show you a few ways that automation can screw that up.

Also you may see someone you know.

Hopefully somebody knowledgeable in these questions will speak up.

I am not knowledgeable. Here is where I might start if I had your questions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmology Read the page and follow the links outward, according to your questions and interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Portals#Natura...

Good luck. Report back when you have an answer. :)

What part of the business did you know without a doubt that you could do, and which part did you know without a doubt that you couldn't do (but you did it anyway)?

Is the original business idea living in the current site, or did you significantly pivot? How did you recognize when and in what direction to pivot?

How did you all and the business stay alive before profitability? Jobs? Credit cards? Sold your antiques?

Link to the eventual article or its location? 75% of us will probably miss the HN post as it floats down the new stream.

That's interesting, I had the exact same thought when I saw this "what's that?" post.

The odd scroll thing on the left is interesting, but it just seems to be directly tied to the browser scroll bar. Is there a practical, or at least non-redundant, use for such a thing?

I went to the library.

"I prefer code that can be quickly scanned, and hard wrapping at 80 columns (IMO) doesn't facilitate this."

Then you shouldn't hard wrap at 80. Subject to any agreements with your team members. :)

I'm just speculating on why some people recommend to break at 80, which was originally the length of a physical punch card and so has nothing much to do with readability in and of itself. Fundamentally, 80 is likely just the most likely common denominator (MLCD).

Personal preference can confound any rule of thumb.

Cherry picked from here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=readability+%22column+width%22

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_%28typography%29

"For best legibility, typographic manuals suggest that columns should contain roughly 60 characters per line.[1] One formula suggests multiplying the point size of the font by 2 to reach how wide a column should be in picas[2] — in effect a column width of 24 ems. Following these guidelines usually results in multiple narrow columns being favored over a single wide column.[3]"

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Readability

"Ease-of-reading is the result of the interaction between the text and the reader. In the reader, those features affecting readability are 1. prior knowledge, 2. reading skill, 3. interest, and 4. motivation. In the text, those features are 1. content, 2. style, 3. design, and 4. structure[1]. The design can include the medium, layout, illustrations, reading and navigation aids, typeface, and color. Correct use of type size, line spacing, column width, text-color-background contrast and white space make text easy to read. "

It's easier to read something quickly if your eyes don't have to travel far. This is why newspapers (remember them?) are written in multiple columns across the page.

This may be less of an issue with code, due to its structure, but I still find it much easier to read 80 column code than code that stretches across the screen.

If I'm reading code in an 80 column terminal I prefer the line breaks to come from the human that wrote it, to show and reveal structure, rather than having it arbitrarily broken at 80 columns by the editor.

Another reason is that most of your code won't stretch across the screen, but you need your window sized for the small amount of code that does, losing a bunch of screen estate to empty space.

But I don't worry too much about it.

If you move to a new apartment, on the third floor, it's "more efficient" to carry all your stuff up on one trip. But there's a limit to how much you can bring up on that one trip.

If you make a lot of smaller trips, there's almost no limit on what you can have once you take the "final" trip up.

Also, if you drop something on one of those trips up, you don't lose all your stuff (and you) at once.

"Funny, but sort of a low blow. Virtually everything in a modern X server installation is autoconfigured based on hardware detection."

No, that's why he can be so happy. He's not bashing X itself, but the config file. Because of autoconfiguration, he hasn't had the need to go into the file for a long time.

That makes me happy too.

If you borrow from your 401K, you're borrowing from yourself, and you eventually have to pay it back. It's money that you owe, to be paid with funds that can either be used to buy jelly beans or put back in your 401K.

If the government borrows from Social Security, it takes that money out of itself and spends it out in the economy. SS and the government has a smaller pile of cash, and the government owes itself. When the money is put back, it's with funds that could either be used to buy bullets or put back in SS.

tl;dr: "Lee [Microsoft] and Rubin [Google] must be nervous."

And don't have anything that obviously competes.

And to Rubin's "you shouldn't be communicating with a phone." Assuming he's talking about personal assistant-like communication, which personal assistant am I personally supposed to be communicating with? The one I can't afford and don't have?

The Django tutorial is pretty good. You build up a very basic polling application as you follow the tutorial and learn the basic chunks of Django.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/intro/tutorial01/

Any good intro book is going to have something similar. "Python Web Development with Django" includes a number of example projects. You can either follow along in the book and type in the examples (the "Hard" way) or download the projects and see/run them at once in their finished form (the "Common" way).

http://withdjango.com/

http://withdjango.com/readers/source/

The $500,000 floor seems to be a benefit for people who have $500,000 houses to sell. Doesn't do much for Joe Sixpack while he's deciding whether to stick or walk away.

Thunderbird hits every one of wccrawford's items, except it's not itself web based.

I use Thunderbird with a cheap fastmail.fm account. You can access your fastmail account from anywhere with their web interface. You can access it from any imap client.

It all works good enough for me. Not fantastic, but good enough.

"I appreciate a good hack, but just can't get past the idea that this is a solution in search of a problem."

I had exactly the same reaction: good hack, where's the problem?

The solution to the problem of too much email already exists, and that solution is ... email. Email is asynchronous, and you get to decide when and what to do with it.

"The day Facebook, or Google, or anyone actually decides to do something evil, it will look ugly. Will they ? Don't know. Don't want to find out."

Yes, they will. And when they do, it won't be evil, it'll just be business. Which is evil.

That's a law I can [Like].

I'm referring back to Facebook, who would probably like to not follow the privacy laws if they aren't convenient.

If it's lame, then someone who wants to count must instead throw up his hands in exasperation as they obey the law and don't count.

Until a few years ago it was illegal to sell liquor on Sunday in Colorado. That was lame, but I never saw a liquor store open on Sunday. If any did, they'd probably get fairly good public support and letters to the editor in favor, but they would still lose their liquor license.

"Why is this not a 'just don't use the service if you don't like it' deal?"

Because that's the law in Europe (according to the complainer). It doesn't matter that you're free to not use the service, the law says that if you do use it you have certain rights.

You're free to not use any service anywhere in the world. But if you do use a service in some jurisdiction, that service is subject to the law in that jurisdiction.

Facebook, being Big Boys (TM), must follow the law of the land. If they do business in Europe, that law (it seems) will be more favorable to consumers than they're used to here. Tough.

Personally, I think they'll get away with it. Corporations are becoming their own law. Facebook may have made that calculation too.

Nicely done, very clear and concise.

A question: is lxml what we would use today instead of Beautiful Soup?

An enjoyable read, with good food for thought.

One disagreement:

"We’re pretty nice guys to work with, as long as you love cats like us of course (dog people need not apply, sorry!)."

Having "need not apply" in a job description can be off-putting. You might be in violation of the ADA (Americans with Dogs Act), and you unnecessarily antagonize people with dogs and people without dogs.

If Amazon dominates publishing, to the point of driving a noticeable number of publishers out of business, we'll have fewer choices in books. There will be more titles, and we'll find less worth reading.

Amazon sells an uncountable number of products because other companies make those products. Amazon cannot make all those products themselves.

Similarly, Amazon cannot shepherd within an order of magnitude the same number of more or less worthwhile books into the market as current publishers are doing today.

"Self publish yadda yadda whatever." Yes, Amazon will offload much of the production of books to the authors. And yes, Amazon can just say "yes" and print any book on demand. Paradoxically, I have a lot of books actually available to me because publishers have acted as gatekeepers/curators. I can't possibly find as many mostly-self-published printed on demand or kindle Amazon books worth my attention as I can currently by choosing from the pre-filtered publisher-produced books of now.

</old man>