I'm not sure if it is still the case, but HypeMachine used to have their default avatar be an angry looking picture of Dick Cheney.
I can only imagine the number of people rushing to upload their own image in place of our former veep.
Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures
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Re: Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures
#12Or do something cool with the default. At the NASA astrobiology institute they have little astronaut silhouettes for the default profile pic:
Re: Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures
#13This is insightful especially since we have thought about this problem and had not come up with a solution. I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion. Also, I believe people choose icons that they best identify with and if it is not unique their association with the icon may not be as strong. Another thing I have experimented with is if you can upload a picture and crea…
I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion
I think this might just be a programmer's way of (over)thinking it : "the users are unique, so the avatars must be unique, or chaos ensues". In actuality it will just be mildly confusing at best, but nothing earth shattering. You still have the name next to the avatar for reference, as well as the project, and with several dozens of them, most will be different still.
Re: Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures
#14Have the highest respect for the folks at 37signals, but this is definitely not a HN frontpage worthy post. I'm beginning to see almost every blog post by them on HN front page. No offense but it doesn't kindle the hacker's knowledge in any way.
Well, this is not a place for "hackers" with the hardcore definition of the term. The linux development mailing list or Lambda the Ultimate might be better candidates. There are people of all skills on HN, from hardcore C programmers, to front-end developers, to front end guys, to entrepreneur guys, to programming enthusiasts, to designers, to system administrators and operations guys.
The topic of the post is highly relevant to a lot of stuff, from thinking about UI problems, to iterating on a problem, to business decisions, to the avatar issue in specific, etc.
Much much better than the not so unusual fare of "Show HN: I made a clone of reddit in Visual Basic, come see" or "How we got burned storing customer credit card info in plain text on a in memory database on an old overclocked Pentium-III under a cupboard in our kitchen".
Re: Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures
#15Have the highest respect for the folks at 37signals, but this is definitely not a HN frontpage worthy post. I'm beginning to see almost every blog post by them on HN front page. No offense but it doesn't kindle the hacker's knowledge in any way.
I'm a hacker. It kindles my knowledge. Speak for yourself.