Ask HN: How can I get better at design? - <AUTHOR> While for larger projects it makes most sense to partner with a designer, I would like to be able to make my own hobby projects/sites look a bit better (http://vowsjs.org/ is a fantastic example - I wouldn't even know where to begin). The problem is, I'm not terribly artistic. I understand HTML/CSS fine, and I can tell what (I think) looks good, but I wouldn't have a clue how to do it myself. Is this something I can improve at, and if so, how? Thanks. <comment><USER4> I'm a designer. Many sites I see that are made by non-designers suffer from two major flaws:

\- Lack of white/negative space: You need room for your elements and type to breathe. Along this same line, you need to give generous padding and margins to things. If you ever have type squished up against the edge of a box, that's guaranteed to look bad. Have a repertoire of spacing that gets used in multiples: 5px, 10px, 20px, etc.

\- Lack of hierarchy/scale: I think these two go hand in hand. One of my typography teachers in school had a saying: "Don't just make it 60pt, make it 600pt." Rather than bumping the heading up 10px, bump it up 30 or 40.

Bonus tip: Read about Gestalt Theory and you'll start to understand the psychology behind design. Might work for you if you're a techie: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology>

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Allow me to add a few "avoids:"

For me, biggest tell-tale of a new designer is overuse of design elements and frills. Adding gradients, shadows, faux 3D, outlines, images, etc. should not be done without a good reason, and sparingly.

Your user's attention is limited. Plan for this. Visually emphasize only the most important thing(s) on the page — 2 or 3, maximum. This often means not using many saturated colors (ever notice how much there is grey in OS X? It stays out of the way. I find Aero Glass unbearably distracting at times.)

You don't have to make your content (as opposed to nav) hyperlinks use a color from your branding palette. In fact, don't, as rule of thumb. Make them a decent blue (not super saturated like #0000FF), and do vary them for :visited.

If it sounds like I am saying "don't have fun," I apologize; I tend to be overly minimalist. _Do_ the fun stuff, just use them as demos, not in production (music band sites excepted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A book I've found to be very useful for picking the absolute basics of graphic design (which applies to web design in many ways) is "The Non-Designer's Design Book."

It covers the basic principles of graphic design:

Proximity

Alignment

Repetition

Contrast

It also covers the basics of using color in design.

Universal Principles of Design is also a fascinating read.

I've found that reading these books, then trying to design something is helping. It helps if you've tried to design something before reading the books as well.

<comment><USER7> Helped me a lot too.

Amazon link: [http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book- Typographic-...](http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic- Principles/dp/1566091594)

<comment><USER8> For a design book that is an _ugly_ cover.

<comment><USER9> yes - they just a lost a sale for me. The yellow and the purple tones are too close.

<comment><USER10> That's the publisher's house style, I'm pretty sure. Author's rarely have control over book covers or book titles--publishers think they know more about such marketing issues than authors do.

<comment><USER11> That sounds reasonable, but Steve Krug's _Don't Make Me Think_ is a design book that embodies its own principles, from cover to cover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A nice piece of advice I've seen is to start in black and white (and shades of grey) and get the contrast and lines and so on right first. Once that looks good, either leave it, or then add colour and texture (and maybe remove some of the lines and borders if the colour or texture changes make them unnecessary.)

Sketch designs on paper on a grid, with a nice pen. It's easier to try out ideas and evolve when they only take a minute.

Practice.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm pretty bad at design but what I have found has sufficed for me in the past [1][2] is:

\- bold colourful blocks

\- tend towards minimalist

\- use no more than 3 colours in a design

\- use colourlovers.com for palettes

\- copy nice bits/ideas off other people (obviously without ripping off entire designs)

\- avoid gradients

EDIT: oh, one other thought. One or two fancy bits of design or JS magic == good. Too many == very bad :)

1\. <http://www.errant.me.uk> (minamilist) 2\. <http://www.startupwiki.co.uk> (bold colours, blocks)

<comment><USER14> In design for the _real world_ , absolutely avoid gradients. But in design for the screen, subtle gradients can help add a nice shade of realism or texture.

For example: Holiday Inn Express just redesigned their logo to look like some Web-2.0-style icon thing with gradients and drop shadows. They look absolutely _horrible_ on signage. They look like gas station signs now.

<comment><USER13> Yes; I wouldn't disagree... in general.

But as a "pretty bad designer" gradients tend to be territory that is destined to fail. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When thinking about getting better at design, do not think making things pretty.

Instead, think how you can solve problems, how you can make your users' life easier. And this actually begins with a lot of thinking.

I cannot recommend you any specific sources but most of the people learn design by trying. If you want to improve your visual skills, look at other designers' works. Try to copy them (do not steal :), read tutorials.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a terrible designer too, so I'm really not in any position to give advice, but I can share my process. I figure, like any other technique, the way to get better is to do it a lot. I usually get so frustrated after trying to make a decent design for one website that I don't do it again for several weeks. Anyways:

0) learn new design techniques. Try to do this regularly. Its like adding new tools to your toolbox. A list Apart has a bunch of great tutorials, and checking out design galleries (<http://html5gallery.com/> has some nice sites) helps to give you inspiration and give you something to try to duplicate on your own. I don't mean to duplicate good designs for your own work, but to duplicate good design so you can learn the techniques used.

1) Sketch a design on paper. I don't focus on making it look cool or pretty because I don't know how. I try to focus on solving the user's problems. I do several sketches, and ask friends to glance at each. At the very least to see if they get the idea of the website from looking at, but also to know which ones they like best.

2) Graphical Mockups. I use the gimp or adobe fireworks. Again, I make several different mockups from my best sketches (between 2-4). And again, I have friends and colleagues review them and get their feedback. I put as much detail as I can into each - hover effects, shading, et cetera. I try to make a pixel-for-pixel mockup of what the actual html/css will look like.

3) Finally write the html/css for my best design.

</comment><comment><USER17> A slight tangent, but something I did recently:

1\. Apply Eric Meyer's CSS reset to strip _all_ presets from your site.

2\. Fix your site.

It doesn't necessarily help you to reach _good_ design, but it forces you to consider how many things you need to worry about.

Link to Meyer's reset: <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset- reloaded/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Learn about typography. This will start to change how you think. A fantastic and accessible starting point is:

"Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works", by Erik Spiekermann

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stop-Stealing-Sheep-Find- Works/dp/02...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stop-Stealing-Sheep-Find- Works/dp/0201703394)

<comment><USER19> Another good typography resource: <http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I believe in free trade for the most part: everyone doing what they do best.

Focus on what you're good at. Design is serious trade that takes designers years to get good at. If you need a quick design then check out some free css template sites or the many sites that will sell you a prefab design for cheap.

About the only thing you need to be able to do is edit the design with a program like Photoshop or Fireworks so you can make minor changes if you need to.

Again, focus on what you do best and be resourceful instead of trying to become a designer yourself. Also, once you have a good design in place don't forget to make use of PSD to HTML services like w3-markup.com or psd2html.com. They're cheap and will save you a lot of precious time.

<comment><USER21> Specialization is useful, but it's also useful to have some minimal level of design competence, just so that you can make a prototype and not have people reject it just because the design is lousy.

(Also, having a basic grasp of design will help you decide whether your designer is doing a good job.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. " - <USER2>

Seriously... probably looking at examples of beautifully design sites and getting some 'insipration' from them. Articles on smashing magazine are pretty good, <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/>

And I've recently found <http://www.metalabdesign.com/>

I reckon it just boils down to practice and lots of redoing your design over and over again. I don't like doing it because it seems like a waste of time compared to the amount of code I could have written.

</comment><comment><USER23> I gave a talk on the subject at DjangoCon.EU recently, so shameless self-plug:

<http://blip.tv/file/3685673> \- Design for developers: Making your frontend suck less.

<comment><USER23> Also the slides for the talk: scribd.com/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> While I'm not an amazing designer by any means, my design skill have improved drastically in the last couple years. I'd say the most important things are practice, iteration, and inspiration.

Practice - Get a tool like Photoshop. Make a mockup, then turn it into a real website using HTML/CSS. Design _at least_ 4 or 5 sites. You'll get better at Photoshop, better at HTML/CSS, and better at design.

Iteration - Don't expect to get a mockup right the first time; don't be satisfied with a mediocre first revision. Keep iterating on a design, tweaking it and changing it until it looks great. This part always takes me longer than both the initial design and the coding.

Inspiration - Coming up with designs from scratch is difficult. Instead, hang out on design-related websites (I especially like SmashingMagazine.com). Check out the numerous web design galleries online. There are also some cool UI galleries out there. Make note of what inspires you, and mix and match elements from different designs to create designs of your own. Or, just blatantly steal haha. I laugh, but I'm not kidding -- copying someone else's design is decent practice. And once you start iterating, it will become your own.

What's important is to realize that becoming a good designer is a path you must traverse; it's not a destination you can simply teleport to. So start walking!

</comment><comment><USER25> Pick a colour scheme and try to keep it consistent. One or two core colours and then black, white and/or grey. Select one colour and use it as your action colour.

Padding has been mentioned also. One common mistake made by non-designers is to pack everything in. Have fat padding on bordered boxes or separating elements.

But something I didn't see in a skim through the comments was alignment. The single biggest improvement you can make with your work is with horizontal alignment (ErrantX, if you spot this comment, you could easily do this with the URLs you provided as examples). It will make your design appear neater and simpler - less chaos can mean that your target-points are more obvious. So, in a simple design, make sure your top-left logo is aligned with your H1 down the page which is aligned with your paragraphs.

FWIW, I co-wrote Web Graphics for Non-Designers around 2002/03: [http://www.amazon.com/Web-Graphics-Non-Designers-Nick- Boyce/...](http://www.amazon.com/Web-Graphics-Non-Designers-Nick- Boyce/dp/1590591712)

My chapters were Color Theory, Visual Elements, Layout and maybe another one - can't remember. Parts of the Color Theory chapter were put online as a sample when it was published:

[http://www.webreference.com/authoring/graphics/color/nondesi...](http://www.webreference.com/authoring/graphics/color/nondesigners/chap2/1/)

If you're in South Australia, I have a few spare copies of the book lying around if you want one (too lazy to post, sorry!). As I said, it's ancient in Internet-years now, but might be more useful to someone than it is to my bookshelves.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing to keep in mind is that "graphic design" and "user interface engineering" tend to get conflated. They are not the same thing, but pretty closely related.

I find that the best way to proceed is to design an "overall style" for the site first. That means, pick a color scheme, typography, and base layout according to the principles mentioned in other comments (e.g. CRAP). Thereafter, the problem becomes user-interface engineering (which, in turn, may lead you to change your design).

I found this talk to be really helpful: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1952-i-gave-a-talk-on-ui- fund...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1952-i-gave-a-talk-on-ui-fundamentals- for-programmers)

Also, +1 on The Non-Designer's Design Book.

I've also found many useful articles here: <http://www.azarask.in/blog/>

In particular, [http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/know_when_to_stop_designing_...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/know_when_to_stop_designing_quantitatively/) and [http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/how-to-critique-an- interface...](http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/how-to-critique-an-interface/)

<comment><USER27> I saw Ryan Singer's UI Fundamentals talk in person at Windy City Rails. It was worth the cost of admission by itself, and I can't recommend it enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meta-comment: I really dislike the trend of abbreviating "web design" to "design". In a software context, I take "design" to be "software design", though even this abbreviation is usually unnecessary. Why pollute the namespace?

</comment><comment><USER29> 1\. find an existing design you like, e.g. the vowsjs website. use it as a starting point.

2\. find another existing design you like, e.g. the designiskinky.net - <USER3> doesn't have to be related.

3\. try to combine them. what do you like about each of them? what do you dislike? try to replace the parts you dislike with your own variations. get inspiration from other sites. also, change some of the basics: color scheme (there are online color scheme generators), fonts and -sizes, spacings, ...

4\. cobble it all together.

5\. it will look horrible, so change a few things and iterate.

6\. it will still look horrible. the color scheme doesn't fit somehow. the font - looking good on its own - is still terrible for headlines. the menu is not where others expect it. you notice that the one cool gimmick you invented is not only useless, but totally distracting. you'll find you took a great website, took all the good parts out, replaced them with other good parts that totally make no sense in this context and that the result is horrible. also, the site will look boring. you'll want to throw it away and start again. you'll start to notice those sites were made by experienced designers and there was a reason their sites were built that way. now your website is ugly, your motivation is gone and also time ran out. you'll put it online anyway because you don't have an alternative, but it wont cost you any money because the site sells nothing and - be honest - it's still better than most of the sites out there.

great, you learned a lot of valuable lessons!

but i tell you as much: you'll never be happy with your designs. they will always look dull and boring - that's because you made them and stared at them for hours. don't worry, just put them online. you can always redesign them in a year.

</comment><comment><USER30> Most of my design comes from 4 basic ingredients:

\- <http://colourlovers.com>

\- <http://0to255.com>

\- border-radius

\- text-shadow

</comment><comment><USER31> These were some of the books which taught me a lot about Design were:

Don't make me Think by Steve Krug [http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think- Usability/dp/032134...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think- Usability/dp/0321344758/)

Non-Designer's Design Book [http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book- Typographic-...](http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic- Principles/dp/1566091594)

Universal Principles of Design [http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles- Design-Revised-Up...](http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design- Revised-Updated/dp/1592535879/)

Also make sure you go through design's everyday on Behance.net, they have some really amazing designers and design.

<comment><USER32> Non-designer's book is really a great introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> First of all, don't get locked into Photoshop tutorial mode. Tutorials can be helpful, but unless you understand the reasoning behind what you're trying to achieve, you're only going to be learning how to do that one thing.

For a broader perspective that will serve you well, I recommmend:

1\. Take an art history course - Or watch a video survey of the subject

2\. Learn to draw - Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a good introduction

3\. Learn the basics of typography - Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is a classic

4\. Visit museums of art and design

Since you're talking about web design in particular, I'd recommend reading Jakob Nielsen, as well as Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think to make sure your design ideas don't clash with usability.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm no great designer, but a few things I did:

1\. Read "Non Designer's Design Book" (amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Non- Designers-Design-Book-Robin-Willia...](http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers- Design-Book-Robin- Williams/dp/0321534042/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277896513&sr=8-1)).

2\. Subscribed to a lot of web-design blogs (try Six Revisions, NetTuts etc.).

3\. Learned to work well with Photoshop. I especially loved Lynda.com's Photoshop courses.

4\. Designed, designed, designed. As with everything else, actually doing is the most important thing.

</comment><comment><USER34> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103578> \- Check this out. Has pointers to lots of good resources.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's how I was able to get pretty good at design:

Every day, visit a variety of CSS galleries and make sure to view at least 100 designs, saving the ones you like the best.

Start a personal website if you don't already have one, and begin creating mockups in Photoshop or Fireworks of what you want it to look like. Most likely, you will be unhappy with what you create more often than not, but it's important that you keep iterating.

When you finally create a design you personally like, subject it to outside criticism from designers who know their stuff. Do not take anything they say personally. They will probably rail on you about typography, whitespace, the grid system, proper color matching, and so on. Go through the process of fixing your design to address those critiques.

Last, and most importantly, redesign. Although I think that there is an element to design that's innate, I would argue that it's mostly about practice and pattern recognition. It's all about being able to pick out the best designs and have your opinions match up with the largest percentage of the population as possible.

Most of good design is just re-applying the best elements of other people's designs. Truly innovative design is a rare thing and hard to pull off. It's a bit like fashion or modern art - most people will balk at truly creative stuff, but it can make it into the mainstream with enough persistence.

TL;DR view css galleries obsessively and save your favorites, perpetually redesign a personal site, frequently ask for feedback from other great designers, accept criticism gracefully, practice, practice, practice.

</comment><comment><USER36> _Practice, experiment, and get feedback_

Especially if it doesn't come naturally to you, getting good at design takes a ton of practice. But if you do practice, you can _definitely_ improve your design sensitivities and skills.

Make sure you're getting feedback--and not feedback that says "I like that" or "I don't like that". Specific feedback is really really essential to improving what you're doing.

 _Purpose and focus_

I think purpose and focus are the key to a good design. _Never_ do something without a reason. Remember that the reason you're doing design, at a very high level, is probably not to make something pretty. It's to help whatever you're designing better accomplish its purpose. Making pretty might be (and likely is) part of that, but it's _not_ all of it. Always keep that in mind.

 _Typography_

The other stuff mentioned here is also essential to know, but don't forget type. Type can (and will) make or break a design. I recommend taking a look at Typography for Lawyers (<http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/>) to get a start, even if you're not a lawyer. It has a good overview of a lot of the things you need to be thinking about, and you can ignore the lawyer-specific details. Type, like everything, takes practice. I recommend finding a couple of fonts (1-2 sans-serif, 1-2 serif) and getting _very_ familiar with them.

If you'd like more help, or feedback on something you're doing, feel free to send me an email--it's in my profile. I'm far from an amazing designer, but I am pretty good at giving feedback.

</comment><comment><USER37> Good topic & advice. Tangential question:

Will Photoshop/GIMP be necessary for web developers now that we have HTML5? The various components of HTML5 can create many of the things we've used images for in the past - buttons, layout, etc. Do us non-designers still need to learn photo/image tools, or can we just focus on HTML5/CSS3/Javascript?

<comment><USER38> What are you going to do? Design your logo or your icons in HTML5? Make adjustments of your photos with HTML Canvas?

Of course, layout designing in Photoshop always seemed a strange habit to me, ever since I tried it 8 years ago ... because fonts rendering doesn't match; many HTML designs have fluid elements that aren't properly captured by Photoshop/Gimp; and in general you tend to make overly complex designs when working in an image editor.

Good practices transcend fashion IMHO.

<comment><USER37> Well icons and buttons can all be done in CSS3 now:

[http://nicolasgallagher.com/demo/pure-css-social-media- icons...](http://nicolasgallagher.com/demo/pure-css-social-media-icons/)

Photos obviously can't, so I guess that's a reason to keep photo editors around. But is that all?

And yeah, I never liked mocking up sites in photo editors either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For starters, read "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" by Joseph Muller-Brockmann and "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst.

After that, practice all the time. Do a ton of self-initiated projects or design for friends pro-bono. Always be looking at designers who you admire and figure out what about their work is so admirable!

</comment><comment><USER40> Read <http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/>

<comment><USER41> As a designer, I highly recommend this book. It's beginner level but very comprehensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well one important thing I would have to say is to first pick a style!

It's easier to mature and gauge your progress when you choose a style and then mature it progressively. The through constant practice and maturation, you willl become better at the process. Both a drawing with great detail and one with lack of therefore can be drawn by the same "talented" artist.

I'd say the three basic places to start are typography, proper padding, and _style_ (which can be use of borders, rounded corners, sharp edges, or minimalistic as long as it's consistent). There defiantly is always a style that can be identified with each artist's work. And even with someone with the greatest portfolio you can usually identify elements that reveal the artist art work. So what you will have to do is iterate and experiment with the above until you develop.

1\. A style to commercial (or your) liking.

2\. Basic sensibility when it comes to web design or your relevant project space.. the sensibility changes with the medium at least to a small degree (design common sense).

Just like you use your judgement to decide to at least a small degree who's advice is worth listening to in this post, you need to build that same common sense up for design. I suggest doing mini front page fake products up to build up your skills. When you get better at that (you should notice significant improvement after 6-10 projects) try to go a little further and create an FAQ or about page for that product with that style it will become alot easier since you've already gave "definitions" to how some elements should work and the overall spirit of the project.

(One thing to note is it helps to have at least SOME Photoshop and Illustrator skills, at the very least you might want to add some texture to your products and custom gradients. IMHO it's alot easier to get great work out when you can over kill the project. Just barley getting through it with hard "Crusty the clown" colors will bleed your project. This is coming from someone who taught himself good web design)

I'd be glad to show you my latest projects for you to judge for yourself. Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER43> Time and practice are the best teachers. If you can tell what (you think) looks good, then you have already solved half of your problem. Spend a few hours tweaking and improving on a design until you are able to come up with a design that you like. Look for inspiration on movies, photographs, nature or other websites.

I remember spending a couple of days on my old website design. I listened a lot to soma.fm and I noticed that the music kept me focused on the design I was working on. I remember dreaming about what I am going to tweak/change the next time I opened Photoshop.

Also, learning to imagine and think ahead on "how to do this and that in HTML/CSS" will save you a lot of time and effort.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm doing the same thing right now, and I'm approaching it the same way I learned to code in the first place: look at something someone else has done and try to duplicate it. This is a good starting point but a horrible end point.

</comment><comment><USER45> Consider working with a designer even on small projects, because it's a low- cost and low-risk way to get to know designers and filter out the ones, you'd love to work with on bigger projects.

Also, I don't have proof for this, but based on my experiences, designers need to be less analytical, and a little more intuitive. While programmers need to try to be as analytical as possible (while programming at least). So, I think it's not really easy to be good at both (again, my opinion).

Advice: develop an eye for design, so you know what's good and what's not, and learn how to communicate with designers more effectively than most programmers.

</comment><comment><USER46> I always recommend Mark Boulton's book:

[http://fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide- designing-f...](http://fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide-designing- for-the-web)

It's more about the theory of design, but presented in an accessible style and 'web' context.

There's also the Pragmatic Programmer's 'Design for Developers' book, but I haven't gotten around to anything more than skimming that one yet.

[http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bhgwad/web-design-for- develop...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bhgwad/web-design-for-developers)

Hope these help.

<comment><USER47> I've been meaning to read Web Design for Developers myself and was going to recommend it as well. I've heard good things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think something you need to consider is to use design tools for designing - paper and pencil, then gimp/photoshop.

The best designed sites out there aren't designed on the web, but rather designed for the web. Try to make a good design first and then use your html/css skills to adapt it to the web (and obviously since you know the limits of html/css you can keep yourself from going to far in a direction that would be overly complicated to implement).

Also, keep it simple to start and make incremental changes.

</comment><comment><USER49> I feel you here, I am a terrible designer. I just redesigned and relaunched my blog with no content. It is a huge step up from what I had before.

Do you have any friends who are designers? What I have been doing is when I see designs my friends make, I ask them constantly(they must be getting annoyed by me now) why they make particular design decisions. Using this knowledge helps me make better design decisions going forward. I'm still super terrible, but I am slowly getting better.

</comment><comment><USER50> I like this question as I have had an interest in design for many years, but largely hired designers to work for me, and focused on technology.

One thing that separates good designers from hacks (in my opinion) is their appreciation of the history of design. Say you take your text, shrink the font down, and then jam the paragraphs far away from each other in a two column layout leaving a giant gutter (is that the right word?) in the middle and no left or right margins. That's (whether you want to or not) referencing a period in design history; if my memory serves, starting with some reasonably high-concept magazines in the late 1960s.

Same idea, but add thin borders as if you cut the text out of a block of paper, rotate randomly and slightly, and you're referencing fanzines of nearly the same era, a little bit later.

Now, distress the text horribly, and make everything bigger like you photocopied on 'enlarge', and you've got '80s punk.

Now, sharpen filter it all, crisp the whole thing up, stylize the borders and cut-aways, choosing a font with built-in crispy distressing, add a muted dark distressed background with a large image pattern (and probably a little pink) and you've got some sort of 2010-era crispy new proto-punk / ironic nod to punk design.

All that to say, you still want to have some understanding of the 'rules' of design, and typography, but they will be nearly worthless to you without some experience of the mental and emotional connections people make with existing significant design movements.

Luckily, this experience is pretty easy to get. <http://www.designhistory.org> seems pretty cool, although I just found it for purposes of writing this response.

With some of that experience, you will be able to 'parse' design in a technical way alongside your own artistic sense -- and since you're a technologist, you'll be able to understand how the changing technology allows new design looks to spread as well on the web, and that will put you ahead of 95+% of 'designers' on the web. Early web 2.0 was puffy letters, reflections, and large fonts for forms -- all this enabled by browser changes, and design needs of the time.

Late web 2.0 looks like we're going to have a lot of rounded boxes, shadows, and browser-based gradients, since those things are getting easier to do; whether or not that's what happens, I will be able to assess the online designs when they come about with some sense of what's come before, and appreciation for what people are doing now.

On Typography: all this goes for typography as well, one of my pet nerdy subjects. I really love The Elements of Typographic Style by Bringhurst. Design's 'rules' are far less codified than typography's rules; despite that, there continues to be amazing work and amazing font design happening, in fact, maybe more and more high quality font design. A thorough understanding of typography is a great joy for anyone who reads, in my opinion. Check it out. [http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Brin...](http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert- Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/)

p.s. I was thinking about what design group HN falls into in my head while I wrote this, and I decided "neo-Greenspun". Thoughts anyone?

<comment><USER51> > a lot of rounded boxes, shadows, and browser-based gradients, since those > things are getting easier to do;

Interesting question: since they're easier to do, more people will do them, and they won't stand out. So the 'cool kids' will move on to something else?

<comment><USER50> That's always the way; design definitely evolves for fashion reasons as well as new technologies / needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Practice. Try copying designs you like...add your own spin; Get proficient with design tools (Adobe suite or equivalent).

I also personally use lynda.com - they have great tutorials for all the adobe programs - also some good general videos about color theory and design principles.

I also liked this PDF by Massimo Vignelli: <http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER53> Sometimes you need to find a mentor to give you a direction. Additionally, surround yourself with smart and talented designers.

</comment><comment><USER54> Find designs you like, then try to imitate them. Look at common elements among them and implement them into your own design.

</comment><comment><USER55> The best way to improve is to practise and to look at the sites that you think are nicely designed , get inspired but never copy. Some of the best designed sites that i can think of are 37signals (all there sites are designed simply but elegantly), zengarden, mint.com

</comment><comment><USER56> My approach was to find some designs I really admired and then recreate them in Photoshop from the ground up. That's a great way to learn PS itself, but more importantly in the process of (re-)creation many subtle design choices in the original are revealed.

</comment><comment><USER57> You can also read about design and user interfaces, it will not help you directly in making "pretty interfaces" but it will help you make "interfaces that just work".

Believe it or not one book that helped me with designing web/desktop interfaces was a game design book.

<comment><USER47> What book?

<comment><USER57> Game Design: A Practical Approach - [http://www.amazon.com/Game-Design- Practical-Approach-Develop...](http://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Practical- Approach-Development/dp/1584504714) and for more focus on the interface (the obvious point of this thread): Game Interface Design - [http://www.amazon.com/Game-Interface-Design-Brent- Fox/dp/159...](http://www.amazon.com/Game-Interface-Design-Brent- Fox/dp/1592005934)

Both books teach interesting stuff about designing interfaces and the game itself that can be translated to software and web, specially the first book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is a good set of tutorials to get you started : [http://www.noupe.com/tutorial/the-ultimate-collection-of- bri...](http://www.noupe.com/tutorial/the-ultimate-collection-of-brilliant- web-design-tutorials.html)

<comment><USER12> They are all very Web 2.0-ey, which is fine but it's hard not to make something look nice when you pull in a lot of pretty visual elements (as long as you don't overdo it.) I felt as though the OP was more concerned with layout and how to present information and use columns and so on, especially since the sample he posted looked pretty enough but was just one long column of text in sections.

Also the only corporate looking tutorial "Design a Professional Business Web Layout Use drop-shadows and gradients to create a stylish 3-D look." (about a third of the way down) looks terrible! Unbalanced, unfinished and instead of professional just looks deliberately boring and stereotyped.

Having said all that, they are a nice set of tutorials, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The books suggested by SimpleBits were good for me, [http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/191-2738847-5476816?_...](http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/191-2738847-5476816?_encoding=UTF8&node=8).

</comment><comment><USER60> [http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/inspiration/teach- yourself-...](http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/inspiration/teach-yourself- graphic-design-a-self-study-course-outline/)

Outlines a self study course.

</comment><comment><USER61> You could try Microsoft .toolbox <http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/school/default.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER62> How do I get better at drawing in photoshop or illustrator? I feel like I have a good aesthetic but a newb grasp of those tools.

</comment><comment><USER63> Travel the world.

<comment><USER63> This is actually a serious recommendation, and as a building architect, helped me a great deal in designing in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> the same way as everyone else.

study and practice.

you might never have the creative drive to be able to make something really interesting, but you'll be able to understand and apply trends and concepts. how artistically inclined do you think you have to be to create a nice looking gradient-based design?

</comment><comment><USER65> Do it a lot, then talk to people.

</comment><comment><USER66> If you have a design school nearby take some continuing ed. classes.

</comment><comment><USER67> subscribe some design feeds like smashing magazine. Read them a few times a week and practice, you will get much better in few months.

<comment><USER68> i love smashing magazine too. also try to read some design books, e.g. Universal Principles of Design, The Non-Designer's Design Book

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> practice

</comment><comment><USER70> Steal.

</comment><comment><USER71> anyone have any thoughts on the best aspect ratio for portraiture?</comment>


Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736 <comment><USER2> Keep in mind whenever you see these "we have X <timeframe>" quotes, they're usually an attempt to fit a complicated series of graphs into a short English sentence/headline, so they will _always_ be wildly reductive. If your knee jerk reaction is to take the contrarian/devils-advocate counter point because you assume it can't be that reductive or simple, you are failing at media studies in the 21 century 101.

The context for the quote is, roughly speaking, the graph in the bottom left corner of this infographic put out by the IPCC in their Special Report on 1.5C:

[https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/SPM1_figure- final-e1541758557589-947x1024.png)

The most important thing to understand about that chart is that it is considered a baked in assumption that we will do either the blue line if we're smart (mostly just climate refugees), and the grey line if we're dumb (loooots of climate refugees and probably a bunch of famines and wars).

Every person, every family, every town, city, village, state, and country, every company, every non-profit, every board of every thing, needs to be putting their "how we get to zero by 20X0" plan in writing _NOW_.

<comment><USER3> But the grey line assumes that we as a species act like responsible adults. There is something darkly comical about the IPCC emission scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm listening to Walter Isaacson's biography of Ben Franklin, and climate change reminds me of a more daunting version of the challenge faced by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. One Franklin quote, in particular, stands out in my mind: "Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best."

This voice of benevolent uncertainty is strangely silent in the conversation on climate change. Every talking head "knows" the answer and speaks prophetically to their followers who already agree. I believe it is this preaching to the choir (by both sides) the keeps progress on hold.

It's worth noting that Franklin was not typical among the delegates at the convention. He was a minority voice of humorous and pragmatic compromise that helped to cool tempers and foster agreement.

If we want to see action on climate change promptly, we need both sides to cede a bit of certainty and humor their opponents. A climate change skeptic can get on board with solar and EVs (see Ford prototype pulling a train). Likewise, a climate advocate can get on board with geoengineering as an essential tool that caters to who we are rather than who we should be.

Carbon awareness has backfired, becoming so widely conversational that both sides have advocates with strong opinions that don't know a thing. I'm too damn naive to figure out what the middle path is, but it's there, and I believe we'll find it. However, we may find it more suitable to kill off our ideological enemies in war, being fought openly or prosecuted through a justice system coopted by a radical majority.

Sadly, I see each side fantasizing about absolute power. Wouldn't it be great to cut down and bury the deniers in shallow graves? Wouldn't it be great to see those tree-huggers hang from their beloved trees?

I don't want this. It horrifies me.

No matter how you look at it, humanity will need to perform a daring escape. Why not solve our problems with the same ingenuity that got us here in the first place? It sure as hell won't be my ingenuity, but with the right public conversations, we may be able to cultivate it sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my opinion we are at the planning stage for a battle of a war we have already lost.

</comment><comment><USER6> I feel like unless they have extremely high confidence in this number, this statement will do more harm then good. If 18 months comes and goes and it isn't the end of the world, it will only feed climate change deniers with "see! I told you they don't know what they are talking about."

<comment><USER7> That's not what the article says, if you read it you will see it's suggesting the _decisions_ made in the next 18 months are crucial for saving the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20519357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20519357)

<comment><USER9> Anyone know why that submission was flagged to death?

<comment><USER8> It's clickbait. This is a quote from Prince Charles with a hard deadline of 18 months to save the planet.

<comment><USER10> Ah malvosenior. You were the author of the funniest comment on that thread! "This is a statement by Prince Charles of all people, might as well have Taylor Swift chime in while we're at it" but the comeback from hirundo "That's not fair. As the Prince of Whales it's his duty to protect the environment of marine mammals" was a close second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Let's face it, we are fucked.

<comment><USER12> Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> True or not, even if all nations of the world decided today to make honest attempts to reduce emissions, it wouldn't happen within 18 months. So if the timeline is that short, what's the point of doing anything. We're doomed. If it's not truly that short, it'll be another prediction that fails to come true and gives further ammunition to those who don't believe climate change is happening or believe the danger to be overblown. Either way, such pronouncements don't seem to be helpful in achieving the ultimate goal of stopping or controlling climate change.

<comment><USER14> Please read the article. That's not what it's saying at all.</comment></comment>


A Short History of Chaosnet (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html <comment><USER2> Its quite interesting to observe that the trace of Chaosnet can be found in Richard Stallman's original GNU Manifesto, written in 1985. Though it's not a surprise since he worked extensively at the MIT AI Lab at that time.

> _GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. > [...] We will try to support UUCP, MIT Chaosnet, and Internet protocols for > communication._

[https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html)

The mention of UUCP at a separate protocol in parallel to IP was also interesting. Since the 90s, UUCP is running on top of TCP/IP which runs the Usenet, but in the 80s, UUCP was used on point-to-point dialup links.

<comment><USER3> I was around during that time period. UUCP was used over dialups well into the 90's. Many early ISPs offered UUCP email and news feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the LispMs designers might have originally intended a network-based file system over Chaosnet and a network-based shared terminal configuration, in the end the LispMs each had sufficient local storage for standalone operation, and dedicated displays. (Though using long cables so that the machines could be in a machine room.)

 _Moon wrote that the Chaosnet routing scheme "is predicated on the assumption that the network geometry is simple, there are few multiple paths, and the length of any path is quite short. This makes more sophisticated schemes unnecessary."_

In the end, the whole network at MIT was effectively a single physical run (I managed the EECS portion) of the old-style thick coax. What a nightmare to manage and debug across a whole campus! (Memories of crawling in ceiling cavities with a TDR...)

</comment><comment><USER5> Did anyone actually deploy Hesiod? I haven't heard about it for a long time. I remember implementing experimental support for it in lookupd when I was an intern at Apple in 1998 ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> Oddly, absolutely no mention of the current use of the CH class in DNS: The "version.bind." CH TXT query, which often gives the server version of the Bind DNS server.

</comment><comment><USER7> This was previously discussed at: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18107136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18107136)</comment>


What is meant by a "Zero-Sum Game"? - <AUTHOR> https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/balm-for-soul.html <comment><USER2> > I am talking about a made-up phrase, coined more than seventy years ago by > John von Neumann – zero-sum game

> I shall now explain to you exactly what "zero-sum game" means in several > thousand well-chosen words.

... several thousand words of dubious quality ...

> Under these very restrictive and special conditions – a two person game with > a finite set of outcomes in which the players have strictly opposed > preferences for compound lotteries of the outcomes – it is possible fairly > easily to show that the sum of the utilities assigned by the two players to > any outcome or lottery of outcomes will sum to 1.

> In particular, no game or game-like situation with three or more players can > be a zero-sum game.

Bullcrap.

Just because von Neumann used "zero-sum game" to describe his conclusions about a certain 2-player game doesn't grant permanent monopoly of the phrase to that _exact_ situation.

\---

I shall now explain to you exactly what "zero-sum game" means in several well- chosen words: A zero-sum game is one in which summation of utility among participants is fixed, regardless of choices made.

(The definition exists despite that fact that -- like everything else in economics -- utility aggregatation or utility itself are controversial concepts.)

<comment><USER3> I skipped to his last paragraph or two, which in only a few hundred words summed up his point. Your sentence is much better -- this man seems to think that he's far more intelligent than the rest of us, and yet he admits to being a Marxist.

I find this to be interesting, since every real-world instantiation of anything resembling Marxism has resulted in widespread famine and poverty. I practice engineering, which deals in applications, and I find it difficult to understand those who cling to a theory without concern for how well practical applications of the theory work out. That's an attitude of willful ignorance, which doesn't strike me as particularly intelligent ... but maybe that's just because I'm so far below his level :).

<comment><USER4> Ooh, is it ad hominem time already?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's amazing that there are people that cannot accept that trade is not a zero sum proposition.

If country A produces rice and country B produces meat, country A can trade some rice for some meat from country B. Now both country A and B can enjoy meat with rice which is better than just eating meat or just eating rice. They are both better off than when they started by engaging in trade (the sum is greater than zero).

Now add country C who only produces salt and country C trades salt to both countries A and B in exchange for meat and rice and now they can all enjoy seasoned meat with rice.

<comment><USER6> Similarly, a ton of financial trading, especially derivatives. What people fail to realize is that these exchanges of value exist because the buyer often values something more than the seller does, not the exact same amount. In that sense, trade is creating value by allowing that difference to "realize itself," so to speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meaning is simply usage...in the mathematical sense, Von Neumann's definition may be what is technically a zero sum game, but in general political and economic discussions, zero sum game does have a clear and fairly precise meaning.

In general discussion then, a zero sum game is some game or other activity in which resources are not grown or created but simply moved between different parties or re-allocated such that when someone wins, someone else loses.

I would argue that it's EXTREMELY important that we understand that meaning as I think it's the cornerstone of Trump's world-view. He comes from a deal- mentality driven business i.e. you negotiate to your advantage. For most of his real estate purchases, no value was created, his value was simply that he negotiated a better deal. He has negotiated some amazing deals from what I have seen, ridiculously cheap prices for some properties.

The problem with this worldview is that you see the world in terms of winners and losers, not as a dynamic shifting environment. So if you ban coal, for example, then coal miners have lost out...you don't see that they could all and probably do have jobs in solar energy, which incidentally is work that doesn't severely cripple their health. It's a mentality that you can negotiate your way to wealth. While that can work for an individual, it will not work for a country let alone the world!

<comment><USER8> Don't be silly, the guy is a constructor. He did make money by creating value, which a -well planned building- is a prime example of. The "deals" are to create a lot of value with as fewer resources as you can.

<comment><USER7> Yes, some of his deals are where he built buildings. Even there, it was a matter of getting some tax credit or very good deal on the land or something that essentially transferred resources to him instead of to someone else. It's not easy to get the buildings built that he's done...he's definitely added value in many cases, but many of them were structured in ways such that he could not lose money (i.e. no real risk, zero sum thinking).

Many of his deals were simply buying existing properties which is what I'm referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The point that I would stress is that 2-player and n-player zero-sum games have very different properties.

2-player zero-sum games are interesting because it's one of the few cases where game theory makes a unique prediction. In general 2-player games there can be multiple Nash equilibria, and the theory does not tell us which one will be chosen. In a zero-sum 2-player game, the only equilibrium strategies are the minimax-ones, which can be directly computed. Also, by inspecting the minimax strategies we can tell that there is no possibility of bargains, there is no role for cheap talk, etc etc. This is where the informal connotations of a "zero sum game" comes from: it's dog-eat-dog and cold hard randomness.

But in n-player games, assuming that the payoffs sum to zero does not lead to any particularly interesting consequences. Any general n-player game can be encoded as a zero-sum (n+1)-player game[0], so all the general subtleties of game theory comes back into play.

For example, consider n pirates that need to split a chest of gold. The sum of payoffs is fixed (it's the number of coins), but still there is a large rule for "politics", i.e. talk to form coalitions, etc. There are a lot of Nash equilibria of the "the three of us gang up on the two of them", and no way a priori to figure out which one will be chosen.

[0] [http://people.csail.mit.edu/costis/6853fa2011/lec3.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/costis/6853fa2011/lec3.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The discussion continues here as well:

[https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial- respons...](https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-response- questions-for-i-m-flaud.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Globalization is Zero-Sum

</comment><comment><USER11> Umm, so what other connotation or inference could there be to the phrase "zero sum game?"

What he's really saying, in a roundabout fashion, is that the economy and trade _are_ zero sum and that Obama and Krugman are (respectively) wrong.

I'd say Wolff is the one who's wrong. But he does agree with Trump.</comment>


Tell HN: Read the FAQ before submitting - <AUTHOR>

There's an FAQ, with submission guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The list isn't long, it isn't hard to follow.  Yet several recent submissions have managed to ignore even this short list of examples of what not to do.
For instance:
- politics
- titles with "10 great ways to do X", when "ways to do X" is enough
- titles that include the name of the source web site (redundant)
- not using the original source (submitting a duplicate URL automatically forwards you to the original post, so we shouldn't be able to see the same topic 4 times)
My mouse is worn out from all the "flag" clicking. :)  Please, be kind to your community, and read the half-page of guidelines. <comment><USER2> If you're flagging because of inappropriate titles, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER3> If flags are only for "spams and really egregious trolling", it would be nice if there were some other way to bring deceptive titles needing admin edits to moderator attention.

<comment><USER2> Comment, and then let it go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since the site is getting popular I think we might need a karma barrier to upvote. Meaning, the newbies would not be able to vote up a story or if they were able to the vote would not count. It would just be saved without pushing it onto the front page.

This policy would help attenuate the effects of the people that do not know the rules to the front page. Worth a thought experiment at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about putting a link to the submission guidelines on the Submit form itself? It seems like that might increase the chances that folks would read (and heed) the guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER6> It bothers me that I can't sarcastically deride meta-glop without being a hypocrite.</comment>


Is 'More Efficient' Always Better? - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/is-more-efficient-always-better/?src=twr <comment><USER2> Summary of the article:

Pareto improvements are changes in allocation that harm no one. State A > State B if A is a Pareto improvement on B, i.e. if no one in State A is worse off than in State B and at least one person is better off.

This is a partial ordering, which means that for some states "A > B == undefined". The example is that (2,2) < (2,3) == TRUE (and similarly, (2,2) < (3,2) == TRUE), but (2,3) < (3,2) is undefined.

Since Pareto efficiency can not evaluate all states relative to each other, economists must define a total ordering which introduces subjectivity and ethical choices.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Astute readers will have figured out by now that literally every point falling on the entire solid curve in the graph must be "Pareto optimal" by the economist's definition of that term..."

Isn't that wrong? I can see how it could be true for the points on the curve between Y and Z. It's obviously not true for R and U, which result in decreased happiness for someone.

What is the curve supposed to represent, anyway? Or to put it another way, why is it on the graph? What does it mean? What purpose does it serve?

<comment><USER4> Y and Z are Pareto improvements on X, and they are also Pareto optimal. Points on the line between X and Y are also Pareto improvements on X but not Pareto optimal.

R and U are not Pareto improvements on X, because as you note some people lose happiness, but they are Pareto optimal, since according to the model, no further Pareto improvements can be made on those positions.

The point of the article, as I understand it, is that everyone would prefer Pareto improvements, but these are often infeasible. Economists seem to prefer Pareto optimums over non-optimums even when they are not Pareto improvements, perhaps because the word "optimum" and "efficient" have such positive suggestions.

I think the curve is sort of relevant to making this point, but the harder I think about it, the more wrong it seems. It's meant to be (I guess) a theoretical model for what different public policies can achieve. But we would all prefer points between Y and Z to X, so why don't we enact policies that achieve that? If those policies are impossible or undiscovered, we should instead redraw the curve of optimality to reflect that, i.e. it should connect R, X, and U.

<comment><USER5> _But we would all prefer points between Y and Z to X, so why don't we enact policies that achieve that?_

It seems to me that that becomes a whole lot more difficult in a society with more than two members.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a question I've been giving a lot of thought to over the last 6 months or so. My conclusion:

We should be attempting to create an ethical, moral set of rules first, and then optimizing for efficiency, rather than creating an efficient system and then moralizing it.

Not that I have any answers for how to do this yet, but that's where I've decided my priorities lie.

<comment><USER7> Fortunately, this is a topic that has been widely discussed in academic philosophical circles. Read Rawls' "Theory of Justice" - he goes into great detail on how one ought to balance the competing forces of efficiency (e.g. maximal utility) and distributive justice.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I'll check this out.</comment></comment></comment>


How texting is changing the world [infographics] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nexmo.com/post/11340724199/how-texting-is-chaging-the-world

<comment><USER2> What's their obsession with blonde people not texting?</comment>


Idiocracy in the AppStore - <AUTHOR> http://www.kosertech.com/blog/?p=327 <comment><USER2> Considering that a major demographic of iphone users are highschool/college students, I'd say the fart/entertainment apps are just catering to demands, not idiocracy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go read Shakespeare...it's filled with fart jokes and much worse. Society isn't going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> Quick write an "Ow my balls!" app and you'll make millions!

</comment><comment><USER5> This sounds like a person who has never uttered a shameful giggle after hearing someone rip a loud one in an unacceptable circumstance or something.

<comment><USER6> funny shit = money; I would be proud if I built any app making that kind of money..</comment></comment>


Show HN: Datastack.tv – concise screencasts for data engineers - <AUTHOR> https://datastack.tv/ <comment><USER2> Subscribed. Airflow is such a pain. Hoping that you can cover some of the newer pipeline tools like prefect and dagster.</comment>


In Missouri, Fewer Gun Restrictions and More Gun Killings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/health/in-missouri-fewer-gun-restrictions-and-more-gun-killings.html <comment><USER2> I'm a web developer. I'm really interested in leaving the US. What would be the easiest, best place to move?

<comment><USER3> It depends on too many factors. The easiest is probably Canada or Mexico. But "best" depends on you. Why do you want to leave the US? What kinds of life do you want? What do you want to avoid?

For example, if you're an avid Frankophile then it's silly for me to suggest Japan. If you hate the big city, then Singapore is right out. If the thought of learning a new language and culture puts shivers up your spine, then you're looking more at the English speaking countries, and even a place like South Africa with a mix of many cultures and languages might be too much for you.</comment></comment>


A crisis. Not a remote movement - <AUTHOR> https://soapboxhq.com/blog/employee-motivation/managing-in-a-crisis <comment><AUTHOR> Personally, I'm getting sick of listicles of remote tips.</comment>


Why Biometric Data Breaches Won't Require You to Change Your Body - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/why-biometric-data-breaches-wont-require-you-to-change-your-body/ <comment><USER2> Okay, so we just have to force Apple to change the way our fingerprint/faceprint is stored, when that biometric information gets stolen?

Would it not be easier to actually change my fingerprints or faceprint than to try to force Apple to make that kind of a change?</comment>


What Being on the Front Page of Hacker News Does to Your Indie App - <AUTHOR> https://hackernewslater.com/posts/post-launch-front-page-hn/ <comment><USER2> Wow, 17000 visitors and only 100 installs.

With a web app, and a link directly to it, all 17000 visitors would have tried it. That's 170 times more. Staggering.

One of the reasons I prefer web apps and recently started adding the benefits of progressive web apps to my sites.

<comment><USER3> Doubtful. For many types of apps, the moment I catch wind that it's a web app, I close the window. I have no need for anything that adds to my already sky high pile of tabs.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I've been prompted by Reddit to download the app many, many times (to the point that it's basically brainwashing), yet I've closed it every single time. It's annoying actually.

The web app is great, I don't know why they want me to fill up my phone's hard drive with another useless app.

<comment><USER5> The Reddit app for iOS is 55.8MB. Not exactly a bloated app.

<comment><USER6> For perspective, imagine installing such a low-utility program spanning _39_ high-density 1.44MB diskettes... and considering that _not_ bloated.

(Isn't that more than the entire original Linux distributions from the copyfest era?)

<comment><USER5> That reminds me, imagine installing it on my first Mac with an 80MB hard drive. My entire SoftPC install with a disk image was only about 10MB.

And Windows 95 was only 55MB install.

[https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1060820-how-big-were- the-...](https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1060820-how-big-were-the- different-windows-versions-95-19-mb/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a similar experience getting Dependabot onto the front page of HN as a "Show HN"[1], all be it with less attention than this post (congrats on that!).

\- Made it to #10 or thereabouts, and hung around on the front page for ~2 hours

\- Got around 10 (free) signups directly from it on the day. At the time we were averaging 10 signups a day, so it doubled that day's attention

\- Lots of encouraging feedback, which was great, and a good gauge of what (very) prospective customers might be interested in. No substitute for the learning from direct "sales", though (even when giving the product away for free)

\- Harder to measure the long-term awareness effect, but people very rarely mention they saw Dependabot on HN (they're much more likely to have seen it working on an open source repo)

\- Getting onto the front page was hard work! You can see from my submissions[2] how many times I tried!

Overall my advice to anyone with an indie app would be to do the hard work of selling / building word-of-mouth referrals. Working on marketing-style blog posts looks easy and effective when you see others doing it, but very few people talk about the numbers that come out of it, and all of the "misses" where your content isn't picked up at all.

\-----

[1] Original post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15953694)

[2] My submissions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=greysteil)

</comment><comment><USER8> I like sharing what I've learned from building Cronitor with the HN community and have been fortunate to be on the front page a few times but honestly I think this website has generated more clones than customers. I'm sticking with it though and plan to make up my losses on volume.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hacker News is in a big part responsible for the success of my Open Source project.

I posted a screenshot with a one line caption on Reddit one evening then went to bed. The next morning, I noticed that my project had a lot of stars (it went from like 10 to 500 overnight) and I noticed that the numbers kept going up every time I refreshed the page. Then I found out that all the traffic was coming from news.ycombinator.com (not Reddit as I was thinking).

When I got to work that morning, I asked my colleague what Hacker News was and I told him about my GitHub stars. He was shocked when he saw my project on the front page on HN. By his face I understood that it was like winning the lottery.

My open source project is still doing well almost 5 years later so I can say that it was a really big deal in my case. Getting all those GitHub stars helped to create trust at the beginning and gain adoption.

</comment><comment><USER9> A rule of thumb for Hacker News submissions used to be that when getting to the front page, every score point translates to about 100 sessions/pageviews. In this case (17000 sessions for a 315 point submission), it was only about half that ratio.

That new ratio has been the case for a few of my recent submissions as well. I wonder if something changed in the HN demo?

<comment><USER10> If I had to guess I would say that the changes a while back that made submissions linger on the front page have made the site less addictive. So there are less users constantly checking to make sure they don't miss out on something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hmm, 100 installs for 17,000 sessions. Seems kinda low, though it maps pretty well to the old 1% rule, with 0.5% of those who visited seemingly installing the app.

Still, I do wonder how it compares to other apps/sites advertised here. Personally, I'd guess that targeting Hacker News users in particular will get you more traffic/points/signups than advertising a normal app or startup here might. That seems to be the rule with 'companion' sites and apps these days.

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see that in the context of mobile/desktop visitors. My hunch is that HN has a disproportionately high number of desktop users (when compared to other "news" sites) and that there is a very high bar for a desktop user to pull out their phone and download a mobile app as opposed to a web app that incorporates an oauth based registration option.

The mobile app experience of a) downloading the app and b) going through a potentially lengthy registration process using a mobile keyboard - is a big turnoff imo.

<comment><USER13> I might be an anomaly, but I only read HN on mobile, usually when I am waiting for something. If I am at my desktop, I have real work to do while on mobile, I am usually passing time waiting on something or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related: I wrote this post showing the number of stars that GitHub projects get after being featured on the HN front page:

\- [https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in- seconds-...](https://medium.com/google-cloud/big-data-stories-in-seconds- hacker-news-abe52bc5caad)

</comment><comment><USER15> Here were my results from being on the top of HackerNews for a day: [https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974](https://imgur.com/a/CeOJ974)

8% of visitors signed up (goal 1). Numbers before were fewer than 5 visitors a day with ~0 signups.

</comment><comment><USER16> why not just use a text file?? or... paper

</comment><comment><USER17> I gave up trying to land the front page on HN. It just doesn't have the same quality of traffic or discussions from 5~6 years ago when HN was at it's peak.

What's more there are a lot of false positives in the comment sections from a demographic that isn't 100% representative of your target market.

<comment><USER18> That's quite a claim without numbers.

It looks like part of the point of this post is to illuminate/explore that hypothesis. Or, is that how you're interpreting his findings?

<comment><USER17> 100 installs from 10,000 visitors for starters.

<comment><USER19> I think most visitors, like myself, visit a lot of these posted links to read up on the project/end-result, out of curiosity and for expanding my knowledge on various subjects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists discover fractal patterns in a quantum material - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-scientists-fractal-patterns-quantum-material.html <comment><USER2> Magnetic domain transtitions are phase transitions, just like the solidifcation of a snowflake. It's not that surprising to me that magnetic domain structure could be fractal, many phase transitions can look fractal in the right conditions, of which water solidifcation into snowflakes is just one example.

Despite the fact that several versions of this story claim this is the "first ever" observation or discovery of fractal domains, it seems to have been reported at least a decade earlier [1], in a similar but somewhat more complex ternary neodynium compound.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3515](https://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3515)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. I knew I'd read about this before some time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Copied (with permission, but so far as I can tell without a link) from MIT's press release at [http://news.mit.edu/2019/fractal-patterns- quantum-1016](http://news.mit.edu/2019/fractal-patterns-quantum-1016)

Actual article in _Nature Communications_ : [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12502-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12502-0)

PDF version of article: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12502-0.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12502-0.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> DNA is packed in a fractal-like manner as well.

That's actually one of the most important things we've learned about genome in recent time. Everyone knows that the content is important (ACGT, etc.), but what's also extremely important is the way it is packed. Particularly, it being a certain kind of fractal ensures that the parts of the densely packed DNA can go move around as needed efficiently.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/tag/fract...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/tag/fractal- globule/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes sense. Fractals are a cheap way to achieve complexity on a larger scale with relatively little code. The ancient alien timelords who are running our universe simulation had to be efficient.

</comment><comment><USER7> As someone who's studied fractals, written commercial fractal art software, given talks about fractals, etc... it amazes me how the topic is such a magnet for pseudoscientific types, the sort who would get a high score on the Baez crackpot index.

They come to you after the talk etc and excitedly say that whatever was in your talk proves their theory that, say, "time is a fractal", or "life is a fractal", ... of course never with any rigorous quantitative justification.

<comment><USER8> I am not the OP but I like the challenge so I will entertain the thought.

I guess in some ways, socially, you can see a person embodying certain behaviors and values. And this can spread out in a fractal-like pattern.

Let's say this person is violent and sometimes shouts swear words at other people. Then we look at a family whose members say bad things about another family. Then we look at a village and see it having graffiti on its walls, bad words about another village. Same thing with sports fans. Same thing with countries, having a sort of trade war with each other. Let's now go the other way, perhaps the micro organisms in your body are having a conflict right now, spurting out this liquid and that gas and so on.

In some ways we can consider this to be a fractal.

<comment><USER9> > In some ways we can consider this to be a fractal.

Except, of course, we can't.

The term _fractal_ is a well-defined mathematical object. There might be "self-similarity" there, but (just a fun fact) fractals are typically _not_ self-similar, so it's not a very good litmus test.

<comment><USER10> I would like a word that means 'exhibits self-similar structure at different scales '. This is a useful definition because people outside of math can notice this pattern in our world.

If not _fractal_ , then what word?

<comment><USER11> > _If not fractal, then what word?_

 _self-similar_?

<comment><USER12> Sorry to polute your pure and precise word but outside of mathematics people will continue using fractal to mean self similar. As with many mathematical words the colloquial meaning is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone with only a very passing knowledge of fractals and quantum mechanics... my first thought was that I'd be surprised if there _weren 't_ fractal patterns in quantum materials.

It would be insufficiently weird :)

</comment><comment><USER14> My favorite thought experiment: if you think you've found the smallest thing in the universe, then what is it made out of?

<comment><USER15> Considering the whole difference between classical and quantum is continuous vs discrete numbers, it's kind of like saying "how many whole pies are in a half of a pie"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait, they can focus x-rays?? Wouldn't that be amazing for lithography for making chips?

</comment><comment><USER17> Im going to spend the day matching demos just because of this. pouet.net here i go...

</comment><comment><USER7> Getting some deja vu here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_butterfly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_butterfly)

<comment><USER18> "In condensed matter physics, Hofstadter's butterfly describes the spectral properties of non-interacting two dimensional electrons in a magnetic field. The fractal, self-similar, nature of the spectrum was discovered in the 1976 Ph.D. work of Douglas Hofstadter[1] and is one of the early examples of computer graphics. The name reflects the visual resemblance of the figure on the right to swarm of butterflies flying to infinity. It is one of the rare non-random fractal structures in physics, along with KAM tori.[citation needed] The Hofstadter butterfly plays an important role in the theory of the integer quantum Hall effect, and D.J. Thouless has been awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 2016 for the discovery[2] that the wings of the butterfly are characterized by Chern integers[3], the quantized Hall conductances discovered in 1980 by Klaus von Klitzing for which he has been awarded the Nobel prize in 1985. The colors in the diagram reflect the different Chern numbers."

Thanks, that's pretty interesting, and somewhat relevant to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole universe is fractal. Like a hologram. You do the math.

<comment><USER20> Here's some: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- filling_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a potential avenue for developing critical memory systems which can survive an EMP. Hope that pans out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Everything is a fractal, even socially

<comment><USER22> Well, a sine wave is not a fractal, for one...

<comment><USER23> Random interesting (to me) tangent - couldn't you find a recursive function that, at its limit, was a sine? Could any function be generated this way? And throw some variant of Kolmogorov complexity metric on this class of function- generating fractals and this becomes a neat mathematical area.

<comment><USER24> Here is one in Python. Uncomment the if statement if you want it to terminate.

        def sin(x):
            def recur(x, n, s, p, f):
                #if n > 9: return s;
                return recur(x, n + 2, s + p/f, -p*x*x, f*(n + 1)*(n + 2))

            return recur(x, 1, 0, x, 1)

Of course maybe it's cheating from your intent because it's really just implementing the Taylor series, and it has too many arguments. I believe any analytic function could be defined this way if you can figure out the pattern for its derivatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The identity crisis in Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.cs.identity.crisis.html

<comment><USER2> This is a nice essay.

However, the page does not seem to be intended to be linked to directly, as it is missing some vital context. In particular, the author is apparently Douglas E. Comer, a professor of computer science at Purdue. I can't tell when it was written, but it does mention the iPhone, so it's not too awfully old.

\-----

One paragraph in the essay worries me a bit.

> Discard the idea that "thinking about computing" in the abstract is somehow > more prestigious than "thinking about novel ways to design and build > computing systems".

Strictly speaking, I agree, but I get the sense from the rest of that paragraph that he wants to take things too far: that his solution to the mathematicians vs. engineers face-off is "let the engineers win". But I think that a great strength of C.S. is the short path we have from theory to practice. We can take crazy-abstract stuff like category-theoretic-based typing or the number theory behind modern encryption, and design production systems based on them.

So, yes, he is right that, if we didn't have the engineers, then none of the wonderful computing stuff out there would exist. But if we didn't have the mathematicians, then so many subfields (encryption, authentication, compression, typing, optimization, compiler design, search ranking, ...) would be dead in the water. We'd be tossing around raw bitmaps using tweaked versions of Fortran IV, and hoping fervently that no one intercepts our network packets. (Or, more likely, something even worse.) Let's acknowledge that we need both kinds of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> The identity crisis is aggravated due to "textbook" view points about Computer Science. Here's some which I have heard. Others may add more.

CS is a [1] branch of EE [2] branch of Mathematics [3] is not the real deal for research</comment>


Apple is the only major manufacturer losing market share in wearables - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/853722/apple-is-the-only-major-manufacturer-losing-market-share-in-wearables/ <comment><USER2> Not surprising. They're providing wristbands only for petite women and children. Any man or athlete will have bigger wrists and won't be able to fit an Apple Watch on.</comment>


Apple Products May Have Been Compromised by CIA Mass Surveillance Program - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/10/apple-products-may-have-been-compromised-by-cia-mass-surveillance-program/ <comment><USER2> I guess "Big Brother" is alive and well.</comment>


What's it like to intern at an Indian startup - from an IIT student - <AUTHOR> http://dnihitunplugged.blogspot.com/2011/05/day-from-startup-diary.html

<comment><USER2> I was recruited as a fresher at Infosys and had to leave the company after training in Dec. 2008 due to recession starting to set in by the time i completed my 6 months training.

I thought finding a new job would be very hard as the market was not so good but to my surprise, i found a new job within 1 month and started working at an Ahmedabad based startup as an iPhone Developer and now after 2 years, i have developed more than 15 iPhone apps and have learnt enough at my company to start my own.

It was painful to leave Infosys then but looking back, i can say that it is the best thing that has happened to better my career. My friends at Infosys who joined along with me now have mixed reactions about the company as not all of them got into desirable roles and many ended up doing support work and they often tell me that you got out of the company at the right time.

So yes, from my own experience, i can say that a startup is a much better place to work even if the salary is low (the learning experience more than makes up for it) than some large MNC where you wont even know how the module you worked on is being used (or not used at all).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm digressing a bit here, but with regard to the last paragraph:

> __we were writing a gender classifier to categorize people as males/females > based on first name and last name (this forms an important part of any > social media monitoring product). The most common way to achieve this is > through Machine Learning approaches. Gunaa tested his algorithm on a random > data set (~22000 unique names if I recall correctly) and achieved 62% > accuracy on the classification (awesome!). although THAT meaning might seem > less apparent from the conversation above :P

Isn't 62% ridiculously bad? I would expect a naive Bayesian classifier trained on first names to do much better than that. Am I missing something here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is really bad. Turns out, the test data we were using was not clean and correctly categorized and that's why such low accuracy.

<comment><USER4> The para now, is different. Did you edit it? Its always good etiquette to write that this is an edit. Good luck with the names, and the girls.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Interviews: Balsamiq Studio LLC - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/04/13/startup-interviews-balsamiq-studio-llc/

<comment><USER2> Nice -- I really like Peldi. I've spoken with him a couple times, done a review for him. They really have a good vibe going for them. These are the startups I love reading about</comment>


Lyft Drops Below IPO Price in Second Day of Trading - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/technology/lyft-stock.html <comment> nevi-me Share prices fluctuate, and IPOs are notorious for over-subscriptions by the banks/underwriters because their fees are often percentage based.

I don't know why it would be news that price dips below IPO. If the stock plummets over 50% after a few weeks/months like Facebook did, then that could/would be interesting news.

Sure, ride-hailers are loss-makers that would be watched with interest, but the author alluding to investor confidence with 1 day's worth of data is a bit foolish.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, we need to let a pattern emerge before jumping to conclusions about where Lyft stock is headed

There are many interesting criticisms and observations to be made around this IPO, but I don't think second day stock movement is one of them

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In 2019, where IPOs are all the rage, please repeat after me:

IPOs are bad investments!

[https://www.safalniveshak.com/3-reasons-ipos-are-bad- investm...](https://www.safalniveshak.com/3-reasons-ipos-are-bad-investments/)

[https://money.usnews.com/investing/investing-101/articles/20...](https://money.usnews.com/investing/investing-101/articles/2017-10-31/ipos- often-are-more-hype-than-substance)

For every Apple IPO, there is a pets.com IPO: [https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo- flops4.htm](https://money.howstuffworks.com/10-biggest-ipo-flops4.htm)</comment>


The Elements Of Style: Unix As Literature (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://theody.net/elements.html <comment><USER2> "Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." – Dennis Ritchie

As someone who has been shell programming for the most of their life; I really enjoyed that article. At the local ruby group I am invited to talk frequently on automation and depending on the group; remind the current generation on the sheer power they have at their fingertips.

It really is an empowering operating system. Yielding power of the user with minimal tokens and dependencies provides it's elegance and beauty in simplicity.

<comment><USER3> I've been using Unix in some form or another since maybe 1986. It is an enormously effective lever. But the grody cruft isn't getting better -- there's an upper boundary on how happy I can be using it, but it's an aesthetic and not a technical one.

Partly this is nostalgia, and partly it's diminishing marginal returns. Nothing that happens to me is going to be as jarring a leap into the future as sitting down in front of a PC RT was, and I guess that's sad.

<comment><USER2> I read your "[http://homonculus.net/blog/2012/11/11/what-shell-should-i- us...](http://homonculus.net/blog/2012/11/11/what-shell-should-i-use/) post. I wanted to comment though you may or may not be interested. I use ash (Almquist Sh) for my 'non-interactive' script executions. For interactive flow I use zsh. For root on my BSD boxes I use tcsh and bash on my Funtoo boxes simply because I don't care to alter or customize the root account. I would be interested in what your inferring to with reference to `grody cruft`.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See Neal Stephenson's IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE. It's all symbol manipulation.

<comment><USER5> Full text: <http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html>

TL;DR:

"Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously."

<comment><USER6> That whole essay is eminently quotable. You've picked up one of my two favorite sections (with "Ronald Reagan is your Web browser" being a close third).

Describing operating systems, using the inevitable automobile analogy. Windows (mopeds, crappy station wagons, and lumbering SUVs), Apple (stylish Euro- sedans), BeOS (batmobiles), and ...

"Linux ... is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Huh. I'm a Linux-using, liberal-arts CS major and I had no idea that this was even a thing.

I suspect that a large part of this trend is pragmatism vs idealism. From what I hear of days gone by, using *nix wasn't ever really a pragmatic decision. It may suck to be boxed into a GUI, but an engineer might be more inclined to make the compromise and get the job done than a liberal arts major.

<comment><USER2> His references where mainly to *BSD and Bell Labs UNIX. In 1998 the open source ecosystem was something everyone was looking at from artisans to engineers. Also the landscape was different as we where all inside an economic bubble at the time whereas the article explores the discontent of administering Microsoft products over working with the shell and posix system utilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The couldn't even spell 'creat' right!

<comment><USER9> > The

Really, now.

<comment><USER8> I saw that right after I posted... kept it for irony sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> cat file | grep searchterm ? Really? <shivers>

<comment><USER11> reads better than `<file grep searchterm` and is minimally wasteful.

<comment><USER12> I think the point was that you could write it with no io redirections, since grep lets you pass a filename as an argument:

grep pattern file</comment></comment></comment>