The 75% answer

http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/05/the-75-answer/

by old-gregg • 17 years ago

75 41 17 years ago

lbrandy.com

DLWormwood• 17 years ago

> Georgia or Verdana. And never put black (#000) on white (#FFF)

Uh... isn't this blog black on white?

tomsaffell• 17 years ago

No, it is #333 on #FFF.

mtinkerhess2• 17 years ago

According to Firebug it's #333 on #fff.

noamsml• 17 years ago

Most of this seems silly. OSX is the only laptop OS? Since so many people buy PC laptops, that answer is clearly wrong more than 75% of the time (unless he wants newbies to try and hackintosh). Also, what's with the "no black on white" thing? Can someone explain that to me?

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

OSX is the only laptop OS?

No; If you want a laptop and don't know what OS to go for and don't have a strong preference already, pick OS X. Not "OS X is the only option".

If you already want Windows or want the cheapest and therefore picked Windows then you're not asking non-questions on the web and you're not the target of the blog post.

mtinkerhess2• 17 years ago

The idea behind "no black on white" is that the contrast on most monitors is high enough that using the darkest color for text and the brightest color for background ends up being uncomfortable to read. So, use black on off-white (like HN), gray on white (like the posted article), or some similar combination.

yaj• 17 years ago

"In order for legibility to be achieved, a certain degree of contrast must exist between the background and foreground colors. However, it’s important to remember that computer screens have much greater black/white contrast than the typical printed page. To that end, many web designers prefer off-black to pure black on white backgrounds. Likewise, it is sometimes more elegant to use very light gray instead of pure white on black backgrounds."

The above quote is take from "Elegant Web Typography" by Jeff Croft

http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/elegant-web-typography-...

madair3• 17 years ago

He gave his 75% answers. The readers of this article will have their own 75% answers, and if they don't, then his are just fine for the demographic. It's pretty smart really, and subtle.

They are not my answers, but that's very far from being the point. Well, actually, that IS the point!

madair3• 17 years ago

Duh, I just repeated what jodrellblank said, more or less. Oops.

zvikara• 17 years ago

Can you really use hackintosh as a verb?

ahpeeyem• 17 years ago

No, but you can hackintosh hackintosh as a hackintosh, if you hackintosh.

stanleydrew• 17 years ago

This is particularly relevant given this "Ask HN" post today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603511

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Effect or affect? Use the following words, only: effect (noun), affect (verb), effective, affected, affecting (you’ll be right more than 75%).

Accept their our other common misteaks people make, so its not at all clear that you'll get to 75%.

costan• 17 years ago

Thanks so much for posting this! Now I know how to answer non-questions, and avoid endless pointless debates.

sachmanb• 17 years ago

We could use more 'dealing with stupid people' submissions. I appreciate the help.

jherdman• 17 years ago

"Stupid people" is a bit harsh and not very accurate. It's more accurate to say that we need more quick answer guides for the less experienced. We were all there at one point in time.

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

This is really good. I like the idea of using statistically relevant answers in lieu of absolute answers. Like in this case, 75% of the time, Linux servers may be the best type of server, but there is always that other 25% of time where there are exceptions.

Reminds me of using the principle of mediocrity proposed by physicist Alex Vilkenkin to make cosmological predictions when dealing with things like inflationary theory. If there is a bell curve for some constant we are trying to establish, we predict this constant will be somewhere in the middle, chopping of the two extremes at both ends. Thus, say the theory is some version of Guth's inflationary theory, and it predicts a constant that varies over some spectrum. Thus we predict we will see that constant to lie somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Thus, if we observe or measure that constant to be somewhere around where we had predicted it, that lends weight to the theory we were working from. The idea being that we live in an average world, e.g. in an "average" inflationary bubble, hence the principle of mediocrity. The key point is that we CAN actually use statistics to make predictions about the world, and need not have to always make precise predictions, which, in some versions of string and/or inflationary theory, one cannot, simply because of the infinite number of bubbles in inflation or the near-infinite number of possible string theories (10^500 values for the false vacuum I think I read somewhere).

Anyway the idea that there is no one right answer to a question that works everywhere seems sound in some cases.

keefe3• 17 years ago

>>What programming language should I learn? C.

What a horrendous answer, no new programmer should start with C in 2009, java or php or python or any damn thing but C and jockeying memory references.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

If you don't know C, you are not going to be a great hacker. You might not want to start with C, but at some point, you better damn learn it.

req2• 17 years ago

And it's so much better to go "Oh, this is so much easier than C!" rather than "Oh, this is so much worse than Python!" later on. It also tends to be easier to learn a new, easier way to do something in a new language than figure out the harder way with the easy way looming on the top of your mind.

keefe3• 17 years ago

I certainly agree that learning C illustrates some extremely useful compsci principles. I also believe you can be a wizard at solving computational problems with very little practical programming experience - I met many such algorithms phds in my failed journey to become an algorithms phd. That being said, I made this comment because the title of the post is "The 75% answer to all newbie questions" C is not a language that a newbie who needs a 75% answer is going to do well with! There's a reason they don't use C for CS1.

wheels• 17 years ago

There's also just an assload of code out there in C. Regardless of what you think of getting close to the hardware, since most of the stuff running our desktops / servers is C / C++ / Obj-C, it's quite useful if you want to be able to dip into that world.

Aron• 17 years ago

Just remember also that 'to effect a change' is the correct use of effect as a verb. That gets you to 95%.

derefr• 17 years ago

Is there a better 75% recommendation for fonts when you don't need web-safety? (For example, when you're taking plaintext and printing it.)

thristian• 17 years ago

Helvetica Bold for headings, Times New for body text.

If you want to get fancy, Gill Sans and some variety of Garamond respectively.

If you're printing code or data, Consolas is a very pretty monospaced font, followed up by Droid Sans Mono, Lucida Typewriter, DejaVu Sans Mono, or Andale Mono.

madair3• 17 years ago

A 100% answer is like a zero-sum game. Good luck with that.

The 75% answer

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