I know it's easy to be negative about kittens because of the whole lol cats thing, but a service which provides free, sizable, placeholder images that are more than just gray boxes is actually pretty useful. Remember the days when people used to use "blah blah blah" for all of their text before the copy was in? Now we use Lorem Ipsum. These kittens may well be what we do for photographs in the future.
I agree. This (or a similar tool) is set to become a genuinely useful part of my web development toolkit.
If it used random CC images from flickr, rather than kittens, I wonder if there would be so much objection.
If you let the /b/tards' love of kittens forever bond the "kitten" symbol in your brain indelibly to the "idiocy" symbol, you are letting the /b/tards win. They are just mammals. (Kittens, not /b/tards.)
I was about to post the exact same thing. It would be cool if there was a service that pulled CC licensed photos from Flickr for this purpose and scaled them according to the user's wishes, pulling from an archive of photos based on aspect ratio, size, etc.
I would most definitely use a version of this that pulled random photos from Flickr. That's a brilliant idea. Would also give clients a much better view of a mockup than just the gray boxes, by seeing what a mixture of different coloured photos look like.
Agreed. This is something someone might find useful in a project they're working on. Unlike any Techcrunch or Gruber post.
If HN were my personal pet project, that would be my link litmus test. "Is this something that might be useful info for making something, and not just 'news' to jabber on about?"
Might be too restrictive at first blush, but that is what I come here for, not to read "news" stories that are posted everywhere else too.
The advantage of Lorem Ipsum is that it has zero intrinsic appeal. It looks right, but doesn't distract from the overall.
Unless you're a bloody dog lover, you're going to be distracted by the rather cute kittens. The client is going to think, at first: "Ha ha. That's funny and cute." and then they're going to think, "What am I not seeing?"
The most useful thing to come out of this post for me is the knowledge of dummyimages.com, and specifically the aliases for the IAB standard ad sizes such as http://dummyimage.com/leaderboard/E/C. Great work by Russell Heimlich on that site, and the source code is MIT too if you want to run it locally.
Thanks I'm glad you like the ad sizes. My goal was to make it pretty hard to get a 404 while sticking to a format that's natural and easy to use. Originally dummyimage.com only had size parameters then peopel clamored for color and custom text thanks to another Hacker News post.
I completely agree. I've been asking around recently for a decent source of imagery for placeholders, it's a stupid thing to spend time on every time I build a site where visuals are essential. This service is an interesting way of tackling the problem, and I think it's technologically interesting - and the image selection looks very high quality and professional compared to the random Flickr rips I was doing before.
One of the things I dislike about B2B is the lack of fine grain control.
With B2C, your revenue grows over time as you grow your userbase. It's pretty predictable, and not too risky.
With B2B, it's more binary. You might go months with 0 revenue, then get some deal and suddenly be profitable. But then there's added risk, as losing a single client can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
Sorry and this may get me downvoted, but this comment shows significant naivete about both B2B and B2C business models.
First, neither is easy. But "B2C is predictable and not too risky" is patently absurd. It requires attracting users, keeping them and figuring out a way to monetize them in some economically sensible way. And this is while competing with 1000s of other services trying to attract attention as well. VC portfolios are littered with carcasses of B2C startups that never caught on (and those are the well capitalized ones)
With regards to B2B, I think you're describing B2B in a consulting context vs. B2B SaaS. In SaaS if done right, you have people with a pain and with real money to solve that pain. As a result, you don't require millions of users to make good money.
Of course, one is not better than the other. Depends on what you know, what gets you excited, etc.
I like Google's Summer of Code program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code . If you can get programmers writing open-source code when they're still students, a fair number of them might continue to contribute to open source over their career.
I really like Gabriel's idea too. Donations to open-source (or groups like the EFF) are great for the net.
And a few of the students even donate all the money they get from Google Summer of Code program. Atleast one of my friend did this - http://www.python.org/psf/donations/ [ #2 Shashwat Anand ]
Also, a fair number of whole projects take the organization donation and donate that to organizations like the FSF and SFLC. (they get 500$ for each student they mentor)
> Also I'm not sure any big company 'completely depends' on FOSS. Yes it's an awesome thing, but big companies would survive just fine without it
The cost of non-FOSS is often a barrier to entry. I'd wager most companies would never exist without FOSS providing the initial setup. This is an assumption, but take DDG as an example with $20,000 in revenues. If they licensed all their servers from Microsoft, they might easily be in the red from that investment alone.
>Donating 10% of revenue away, wouldn't go down too well with average Joes pension scheme.
Presumably then "average Joes pension scheme" can go elsewhere to try and achieve a better return. What you're saying is that companies can't be generous because they have to satisfy the lust of the owners for more and more money.
Basically some are happy to ride on the coattails of others who more than likely see the innate Kantian imperative in aiding FOSS that has benefited them (and hence their dependents) in no small part. If no one gives anything (time/money/resources) to FOSS then it will die out.
10% of revenue may well be too much but some reflection of the saving made (if any) would seem reasonable and likely to produce future benefits.
Close, you do need to stop the world every once in a while to GC some of the harder stuff.
But it's true, there's flavors of Java that are certified for hard realtime. If you stop the GC for 100ms every 2s regardless if you need it or not, that's pretty nice and predictable behavior for a realtime system.
I very much disagree. It's an awesome way to capture the reader. I love it myself, not needed reloads, hunting for 'next' buttons, ... Yes you lose the relative position on the page indicator from the scroll bar, but it's irrelevant by the time you get to the bottom of the page anyway.
If the content is not truly infinite (#comments known?), just very large, you could solve the scrollbar issue by giving the page the right vertical size (or an estimation), but only populating the HTML if the user scrolls somewhere.
You'd use AJAX to load the elements, so it doesn't show as loading. And you make sure the user never sees the empty space, given normal scrolling speed, by loading the area around the visible screen. Certainly not worse than extending the page when the user reaches the bottom, as some sites do.
Perhaps time for me to move on.