Jamie Zawinski forks his business | Hacker News Reader

Jamie Zawinski forks his business

dnalounge.com

55 pointsandyv26 comments

I've been reading jwz since the link to his blog was embedded in Netscape, and it's interesting and relevant to HN to watch how a small business grows, but this title aggrandizes what's actually happening. The pizza shop next to DNA has, as I understood it, had a friendly relationship with DNA for years. Now apparently the owners want to sell it off. This is the kind of transaction that occurs tens or hundreds of times a day in the real world. Good on Zawinski for growing his business (at times over the last 5 years, I've half-expected to see the post where he announces he's walking away from DNA, and not just because of the permitting drama) like thousands of other small business owners.

> but this title aggrandizes what's actually happening.

Hey, I toned it down. Jamie's headline was "Wherein the Empire Expands"... Jamie has always been a good read over the years and I am amazed as well that he has stuck through all of the regulatory hurdles put in his way.

Zawinski isn't trying to convince everyone that something important is happening. That's just how he writes (i.e., "well"). But when you write your own headline, you are actually making a statement about the importance of the event.

Two options:

(1) Just keep his headline, in which case anyone who clicks through can see it's headlined that way because that's how the original source headlined it.

(2) Write the headline in the simplest way possible.

It's not a big deal or anything. But you commented, and that's my response. Thanks for posting the story!

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll buy a pizza joint.”

Now they have two problems.

Then they have two problems. (reference: http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247)

This is brilliant! Now he can offer a vertically integrated night out.

All he needs now is a motel next door or a cab service.

Strictly speaking, this is horizontal integration -- offering complementary goods as a package.

It would be vertical integration if he had bought (for example) a music company, a stereo manufacturer, a distillery etc.

Surely it's more of a merge than a fork?

Maybe he just sporked his business?

I'll be reading this for the rest of the day as it got burned on my retinas. Never use brilliant type on a black background.

I think that Jamie Zawinski cut his teeth on the Apple II series. Those had green-on-black monitors.

I agree, though. The contrast is a strain on the eyes.

The Apple II connected to a color TV set via an RF interface. When you were programming it it was usually fuzzy white-with-colored-fringes on black. Sharp green-on-black is from older terminals. The green phosphors were slower to decay, so the refresh rate could be lower. Same reason older oscilloscopes used green phosphors--so that you could see the trace.

I'm pretty sure the Apple II series all emitted NTSC analog video out, and the two common monitors pre- //c (Monitor // and Monitor ///) were green only.

As a child I remember piping the video out through our vcr to the tv and being quite disappointed by the fringe-tastic picture quality. Ahh, the bad old days. :)

Green screen monitors were very common with Apple II machines. My programming classes in high school were taught on Apple II and IIe machines hooked up to green screen Apple Monitor II monitors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Monitor_II).

This is one of the many reasons why instapaper is great.

Or readability for that matter.

Ctrl-A

It's a lot easier on my eyes than the white background used by 99% of all websites.

Then your monitor's brightness is set too high.

The only way to set a monitor's brightness so low that it doesn't cause eyestrain with an all-white screen over a 16 hour period is to turn it off.

With that use-pattern, the issue clearly isn't background color.

100% intensity white is overused all over the place in computing. You simply can't have the combination of (a) high total contrast (b) white that doesn't cause some level of discomfort when flood-filling the entire screen, and (c) evenly discernible relative shading differences at all levels of brightness.

Contrast flattens the total range, brightness shifts the range up or down, and gamma changes the shape of the curve to be more or less steep (accentuating relative shading differences at different levels of brightness).

When you're looking at a photo of a sunlit scene, the bright parts should be bright; there should be sufficient contrast to see into the shaded areas, which should be dark; and the photo shouldn't look murky or washed out. To get that effect, the contrast needs to be pretty high but evenly spread, with the brightest white being bright enough to shine out.

I run my own (Dell) monitors at 15/100 brightness - which happens to be pretty damn bright compared to the brightest laptop screen - but I still don't use white as the window background colour in my UI preferences - I use a sky blue with RGB:207,207,239.

If you're looking at code on a white background and experience any discomfort, turn down the brightness. Don't look at code on a white background, a blue background, or in the "haphazard mix of neon and muddy colors on a black background" color scheme for 16 hours a day.

Editing code is a completely different application from editing images, watching video, or playing games. On my work box, I'm simply not concerned with "evenly discernible relative shading differences at all levels of brightness", so I run a a pair of ViewSonics at 70% contrast and 75% brightness in a well-lit room. I don't experience any level of discomfort from white editor windows; the only problem I ever experience is shifting back and forth between dark-on-light and light-on-dark windows.

I use a grey on black scheme for editor windows, no discomfort either.

Who knew JWZ owned the DNA Lounge?!

Anyone who is familiar with the term "gruntle."

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