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The 75% answer
- DLWormwood 17y ago> Georgia or Verdana. And never put black (#000) on white (#FFF) Uh... isn't this blog black on white?
- tomsaffell 17y agoNo, it is #333 on #FFF.
- mtinkerhess 17y agoAccording to Firebug it's #333 on #fff.
- noamsml 17y agoMost of this seems silly. OSX is the only laptop OS? Since so many people buy PC laptops, that answer is clearly wrong more than 75% of the time (unless he wants newbies to try and hackintosh). Also, what's with the "no black on white" thing? Can someone explain that to me?
- jodrellblank 17y agoOSX is the only laptop OS? No; If you want a laptop and don't know what OS to go for and don't have a strong preference already, pick OS X. Not "OS X is the only option". If you already want Windows or want the cheapest and therefore picked Windows then you're not asking non-questions on the web and you're not the target of the blog post.
- mtinkerhess 17y agoThe idea behind "no black on white" is that the contrast on most monitors is high enough that using the darkest color for text and the brightest color for background ends up being uncomfortable to read. So, use black on off-white (like HN), gray on white (like the posted article), or some similar combination.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- yaj 17y ago"In order for legibility to be achieved, a certain degree of contrast must exist between the background and foreground colors. However, it’s important to remember that computer screens have much greater black/white contrast than the typical printed page. To that end, many web designers prefer off-black to pure black on white backgrounds. Likewise, it is sometimes more elegant to use very light gray instead of pure white on black backgrounds." The above quote is take from "Elegant Web Typography" by Jeff Croft http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...
- madair 17y agoHe gave his 75% answers. The readers of this article will have their own 75% answers, and if they don't, then his are just fine for the demographic. It's pretty smart really, and subtle. They are not my answers, but that's very far from being the point. Well, actually, that IS the point!
- madair 17y agoDuh, I just repeated what jodrellblank said, more or less. Oops.
- zvikara 17y agoCan you really use hackintosh as a verb?
- ahpeeyem 17y agoNo, but you can hackintosh hackintosh as a hackintosh, if you hackintosh.
- stanleydrew 17y agoThis is particularly relevant given this "Ask HN" post today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603511 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603511
- randallsquared 17y agoEffect or affect? Use the following words, only: effect (noun), affect (verb), effective, affected, affecting (you’ll be right more than 75%). Accept their our other common misteaks people make, so its not at all clear that you'll get to 75%.
- costan 17y agoThanks so much for posting this! Now I know how to answer non-questions, and avoid endless pointless debates.
- sachmanb 17y agoWe could use more 'dealing with stupid people' submissions. I appreciate the help.
- jherdman 17y ago"Stupid people" is a bit harsh and not very accurate. It's more accurate to say that we need more quick answer guides for the less experienced. We were all there at one point in time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Allocator2008 17y agoThis is really good. I like the idea of using statistically relevant answers in lieu of absolute answers. Like in this case, 75% of the time, Linux servers may be the best type of server, but there is always that other 25% of time where there are exceptions. Reminds me of using the principle of mediocrity proposed by physicist Alex Vilkenkin to make cosmological predictions when dealing with things like inflationary theory. If there is a bell curve for some constant we are trying to establish, we predict this constant will be somewhere in the middle, chopping of the two extremes at both ends. Thus, say the theory is some version of Guth's inflationary theory, and it predicts a constant that varies over some spectrum. Thus we predict we will see that constant to lie somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Thus, if we observe or measure that constant to be somewhere around where we had predicted it, that lends weight to the theory we were working from. The idea being that we live in an average world, e.g. in an "average" inflationary bubble, hence the principle of mediocrity. The key point is that we CAN actually use statistics to make predictions about the world, and need not have to always make precise predictions, which, in some versions of string and/or inflationary theory, one cannot, simply because of the infinite number of bubbles in inflation or the near-infinite number of possible string theories (10^500 values for the false vacuum I think I read somewhere). Anyway the idea that there is no one right answer to a question that works everywhere seems sound in some cases.
- keefe 17y ago>>What programming language should I learn? C. What a horrendous answer, no new programmer should start with C in 2009, java or php or python or any damn thing but C and jockeying memory references.
- biohacker42 17y agoIf you don't know C, you are not going to be a great hacker. You might not want to start with C, but at some point, you better damn learn it.
- req2 17y agoAnd it's so much better to go "Oh, this is so much easier than C!" rather than "Oh, this is so much worse than Python!" later on. It also tends to be easier to learn a new, easier way to do something in a new language than figure out the harder way with the easy way looming on the top of your mind.
- lucastx 17y agoSo, why don't you learn assembly first? Better, why don't you start with logic circuits?
- slackerIII 17y agoThat's called reductio ad absurdum. Perhaps C offers a sweet spot of being able to accomplish something with minimal effort, but still gaining a deep understanding of what the computer is actually doing.
- scrod 17y agoThose are actually good ideas, and if you received a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon University, you may have witnessed first hand their actualization in CS 213, Introduction to Computer Systems: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f01/www/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-f01/www/ From the syllabus: 1. Int’s are not integers, Float’s are not reals. Our finite representations of numbers have significant limitations, and because of these limitations we sometimes have to think in terms of bit-level representations. 2. You’ve got to know assembly language. Even if you never write programs in assembly, The behavior of a program cannot be understood sometimes purely based on the abstraction of a high-level language. Further, understanding the effects of bugs requires familiarity with the machine-level model. 3. Memory matters. Computer memory is not unbounded. It must be allocated and managed. Memory referencing errors are especially pernicious. An erroneous updating of one object can cause a change in some logically unrelated object. Also, the combination of caching and virtual memory provides the functionality of a uniform unbounded address space, but not the performance. 4. There is more to performance than asymptotic complexity. Constant factors also matter. There are systematic ways to evaluate and improve program performance 5. Computers do more than execute instructions. They also need to get data in and out and they interact with other systems over networks.
- Aron 17y agoJust remember also that 'to effect a change' is the correct use of effect as a verb. That gets you to 95%.
- derefr 17y agoIs there a better 75% recommendation for fonts when you don't need web-safety? (For example, when you're taking plaintext and printing it.)
- thristian 17y agoHelvetica Bold for headings, Times New for body text. If you want to get fancy, Gill Sans and some variety of Garamond respectively. If you're printing code or data, Consolas is a very pretty monospaced font, followed up by Droid Sans Mono, Lucida Typewriter, DejaVu Sans Mono, or Andale Mono.
- madair 17y agoA 100% answer is like a zero-sum game. Good luck with that.