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brianwillison Simple user styles for popular websites

As a guy with a light-text-on-a-dark-background blog I've got to ask, is it really that bad? I've always thought that light on dark was easier on the eyes, not harder. This is especially true if you make the font size reasonable, which is something Daring Fireball isn't so great at.

Could those of you whose sight is starting to go comment on this?

brianwillison App.net’s new direction

The first wave of accounts is up for renewal on April 14 — just seven weeks from now. So App.net has seven weeks to convince its early adopters that it’s worth paying more money for another year of service.

I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. Those of us that signed up for the $50/year deal got our subscriptions extended when the price dropped to $36. My renewal date is April 9th 2014 (i.e. more than a year away).

Setting aside that piece of nit picking, Marco's completely right that in order for App.net to be useful to both end users and developers it first needs to be popular. It's a chicken and egg problem in some ways (no users without interesting apps, no interesting apps without a lot of users). Opening the doors with invite-only free accounts goes some of the way towards solving that problem without the scaling issues that would come with unrestricted free accounts.

brianwillison Why Developing Serious Relationships in Your 20s Matters

This is pretty personal stuff to say using an account that's tied to my real name, but hey, we're all friends here now, so why not.

I'm in the target demographic for this post (I turn 29 on Tuesday), and I'm seriously considering making a conscious decision to be permanently single.

I understand that people find a lot of happiness in relationships, but I just don't think I'm capable of making room in my life for another person, and I don't think I'd make a particularly good boyfriend. I'd have to become a dramatically better person - something I don't know if I have it in me to do.

Does this make me somehow broken? Are there others who feel this way too?

brianwillison Show HN: What colour is your IP address?

The work’s irreverent message appears discreet due to its small size and almost apologetic lower-case lettering; the blank expanse of the rest of the page, however, gives the words disproportionate weight and presence. This simultaneously self-effacing and assertive quality is typical of Creed’s work.

I don't know where to begin. If I didn't know any better I'd think this was a parody.

brianwillison A month after switching to Macs

No easy way to maximize window and full screen mode weirded me out. On Windows, I’d just double click on the window title. But on Macs, I had to carefully hit the green plus button.

I'm a Windows refugee who made the switch in 2006 and I'm very happy with my Mac, but I still can't wrap my head around the behavior of this button. There doesn't seem to be any method to its madness. Clicking it consistently results in the window's size being altered somehow, but I've never really understood how OS X decides what dimensions to resize to.

brianwillison Ask HN admins: please stop editing submission titles

This doesn't seem too bad to me. This message is straightforward, not nasty.

brianwillison Ask HN: What Git features would you like to know more about?

I'm still relatively new to git, but rebasing is something I'm struggling to wrap my head around.

brianwillison Announcing the App.net File API

Let me speak in App.net's defense and say that I'm really enjoying the service. I know that's not really a popular opinion around here, but there it is.

Yes it has a stupid name, yes it has fewer users than twitter/facebook, and yes it's hard to articulate to your non-tech friends why they should spend $36/year on this. But it's becoming a pretty positive place to hang out, and most of the people I care about listening to are there.

In practical terms, this file API means that if you want to post a picture you don't have to use yet another here-today-gone-tomorrow photo sharing service with no revenue model, which I would hope means there's a better chance of your photos sticking around permanently (or at least as permanently as anything ever gets on the web).

brianwillison How to pair socks from a pile efficiently?

To be honest I'd think nothing of wearing back socks and grey/khaki pants.

brianwillison How to pair socks from a pile efficiently?

I own ten identical pairs of black socks. Any sock can be paired with any other. I use a rotation system so they all wear out (approximately) evenly. Every 18 months or so I throw them all out and buy a new set. This reduces the amount of thinking required during laundry and getting ready each morning, which makes me happy.

brianwillison A new UI annoyance

Interesting. I haven't encountered this problem.

brianwillison A new UI annoyance

To select text in Mobile Safari you have to tap and hold, not double tap. WebKit views are only place in iOS where this is inconsistent.

I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.

brianwillison Sucking at Retina

There's a bunch of people in this thread making the case that developers shouldn't bother supporting retina devices because they represent such a small section of the market. Ordinarily I'd agree with that sentiment. I don't spend a whole lot of time making sure my work renders well in Internet Explorer 6, because IE6 represents less than a half of one percent of the traffic I receive.

But here's the thing - IE6 market share is shrinking, and retina display market share is growing. It seems inevitable that given enough time all Apple devices (and potentially many devices from other manufacturers) will come with retina displays. Which is why it makes sense to get out ahead of this trend before retina displays become popular.

brianwillison HTML5Wow

If you used this many gratuitous visual effects in a Power Point presentation I'd think you were an idiot with no sense of taste, but because it's being rendered in a web browser I think this is impressive for some reason.

brianwillison Amazon smartphone reportedly in production, set to go on sale in mid-2013

I don't have high hopes for the first generation of any Amazon product. The original e-ink Kindle was expensive, slow, ugly, and had an extremely limited range of books. The original Kindle Fire was slow and buggy too.

In saying that, Amazon could very well be the best company in the whole industry when it comes to iterating and improving. The current e-ink Kindles are pretty extraordinary products. When Amazon commits to building a product, they don't just give up if the first few attempts don't pan out, unlike some of their competitors (I'm looking at you Microsoft Zune).

brianwillison MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing

That last photo is just hilarious. A group of people wearing safety goggles so they can pour ketchup out of a bottle. Those lab coats also look brand new.

You can just imagine the photographer saying "quick! everyone! do science!".

brianwillison The Best

I agree with Dustin's point that life is "markedly better" by having the best available. In saying that, I'm often happier to outsource some of the responsibility for deciding what is the best product to someone else than do the leg work myself. I just can't bring myself to get excited about televisions, cars, and most household appliances.

Would I find a product that better matched my sensibilities by carefully researching the market? Sure, but buying a product that's a 97% fit for twenty minutes of work is better than buying one that's a 99% fit for twenty hours of work. Or at least in my head that's how the cost-benifit analysis works out (this sort of thing is deeply personal, and I'm prepared to accept that other people's values are different).

The Wirecutter is great for this sort of thing (http://www.thewirecutter.com). Need a set of headphones? What's your price bracket? OK, get this pair.

brianwillison We’re creating a culture of distraction

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one that goes back and checks their comments.

I know it's superficial, but it still gives me a buzz to wake up in the morning and see a bunch of up votes and replies to something I wrote the night before. It's equally frustrating when I say something I think is smart and it gets ignored.

Damn you internet, validate my existence!

brianwillison Tell HN: Let's Be Civil

Thank you for saying this. The comments I saw on yesterday's post by Marco Arment really upset and concerned me.

Hacker News is usually a pretty nice place to hang out, but that comment thread reminded me of the ten minutes hate from 1984.

brianwillison I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

Looking back, there seems to be a correlation between the times in my life when I've bought lottery tickets, and the times in my life when I've felt hopeless.

If I ever feel trapped by circumstances, depressed, lost, or I don't have optimism for the future, the less logical part of my brain will somehow rationalise the remote chance of winning millions as a perfectly justified excuse for buying a ticket. The author of this piece is right about how lottery tickets buy you a sense of hope, and prompt you to envision your life being better.

So these days I see it as a sign that something in my life needs to change when I take an active interest in this week's Powerball prizes. It's become a kind of signalling mechanism for my subconscious.

brianwillison Ask HN: Your best passive income sources?

I think you win the prize for the most creative idea in this thread.

brianwillison Keeping Your Company Asshole-Free

I was surprised to hear that they ask candidates to spend a couple of days working on a project, and then present that project to the company. That's a substantial time investment to ask someone to make on top of interviewing. If I was looking for work and every potential employer asked this of me, searching for a job could take weeks or months.

brianwillison App.net pricing changes

Instructions on how to do this: http://support.app.net/customer/portal/articles/760978-how-d...

brianwillison App.net pricing changes

Combined with the bonus time I got for signing up early, my renewal date is now in April 2014. That $50 went a long way.

brianwillison Samsung Galaxy S4 due in February

Pastebin of this article for anyone that wants to read it without the horrifying tooth repair advert: http://pastebin.com/5HnhXJWz

brianwillison App.net Gets First Dedicated iOS App, Passes 17,500 Users

If you're not sure about joining the app.net bandwagon, it really is worth your fifty bucks. It's become a fun place to hang out over the last few weeks. It's like twitter, but reading the global feed is actually possible, and the tone of the place is more geeky. No spam either, which is always nice.

brianwillison Ask HN: What are your coding vices?

Diet Coke is the sweet nectar of the Gods and has gotten me through many an afternoon.

I often wonder how much of the success that our industry has had can be attributed to caffeine.

brianwillison AMA with Barack Obama

If I was Steve Huffman or Alexis Ohanian I'd be feeling pretty good about myself today. You know Reddit's become a fairly important piece of infrastructure when sitting presidents are conducting interviews using it.

brianwillison 6-8 Weeks Until Bitcoin Debit/Credit Card, says BitInstant

When asked how long version 1.0 of Stack Overflow would take to produce, Jeff Atwood famously replied "six to eight weeks" without any sort of serious planning or consideration. It took quite a bit longer. Listeners of the Stack Exchange podcast got to hear Joel Spolsky make fun of Jeff for this many times.

brianwillison 6-8 Weeks Until Bitcoin Debit/Credit Card, says BitInstant

>6-8 Weeks

After Stack Overflow, we should really start referring to this as an "Atwood period".