YHK - yet another hacker news clone

What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

53 points soheilpro 1 hour ago 24 comments

jasonvorhe 1 hour ago | parent

A couple of screenshots would've been useful for the post-millennial generations that never got to see the "beauty" (cough) of XP.

moritzwarhier 54 minutes ago | parent

Here's a blog post from 2003 with beautiful pictures.

https://jakeludington.com/2003/12/17/create_your_own_windows...

CalRobert 47 minutes ago | parent

I thought it looked great :-/

Maken 41 minutes ago | parent

XP is Microsoft's prettiest OS by far.

mrweasel 29 minutes ago | parent

That's a matter of taste, but for many it was the Windows they used first and/or spend the most time on and there's a lot of love for that reason alone. I never used XP all that much, but I always changed the theme to the Windows 2000 look. I really didn't like the default, it looked unprofessional and clunky in my eyes. Upon release XP was also pretty universally mocked as a Fisher Price-like UI.

To me Windows 95/NT 4 is still the gold standard in Windows UI. It's certainly not the prettiest, that would be Windows 2000, but it was easy to use, easy to navigate and efficient with space.

TazeTSchnitzel 22 minutes ago | parent

The "Windows Classic" look on XP is exceptionally ugly, because those 3D-rendered icons just do not belong on a Windows 2000-style grey background for menus or buttons. (I have recently had to test both these OSes in VMs…)

mrweasel 16 minutes ago | parent

That is true, it looked completely off, as if no one really bothered to tests it and make it look nice. It got rid of the horrible window decoration of the default theme, but the start menu looked terrible.

Maken 12 minutes ago | parent

The first Windows I used was 98, and I sure didn't miss the blocky grey menus nor the pixelated icons. Maybe it was Fisher Price-ish but the new rounded buttons and borders were way more appealing to me.

sunaookami 14 minutes ago | parent

You mean 7 ;)

Maken 10 minutes ago | parent

Windows 7 fixed Vista a bit, but the Aero windows were never pretty and the non-Aero decorations were painfully obvious a placeholder.

PalmPilotProMax 30 minutes ago | parent

I don't see how that's relevant? Article is about the RNG implementation, it doesn't matter what the profile pictures are.

bhaney 53 minutes ago | parent

100 seems like a very unnecessarily low limit, even for the time

daveoc64 39 minutes ago | parent

It's well above the number of images that were in the applicable folder by default, so seems pretty appropriate to me.

moritzwarhier 52 minutes ago | parent

Some say the Admin account defaulted to a chessboard.

I think it's true, but not sure if I'm just falling victim to false memories... help?

abhinavk 32 minutes ago | parent

I remember it like that too. Or is it Mandela effect?

NitpickLawyer 26 minutes ago | parent

The Magnus effect? :)

bombcar 28 minutes ago | parent

It might be that the randomization code was bypassed in some cases - like creating an account in safe boot mode or similar.

bhaney 25 minutes ago | parent

There's no way my memory of this is reliable anymore, but I also remember my administrator account being chess pieces (and my user account being an orange fish).

xx_ns 21 minutes ago | parent

It makes sense. The chess piece is the first profile picture in the list.

TazeTSchnitzel 20 minutes ago | parent

The account named "Administrator" that Windows created for you always had the chess piece.

cgio 43 minutes ago | parent

The times when people spent an extra brain cycle to avoid billions of second passes.

bombcar 27 minutes ago | parent

Does it also check existing users so you don't match one?

mawadev 16 minutes ago | parent

That is a case I only become aware of when I read blogs like this. Technically I could solve it the same way, but these days you have so many tasks on your desk, you don't think about the problem and implications at all and that awareness/discipline is drowned in the noise/unlearned over time.

If someone only gave me 2 minutes for this, because they think it is very simple (as always), I'd have done a count of files of a specific pattern in the directory and then picked a random index, very naive and quick and dirty programming, no sampling at all, just to avoid discussions why it takes so long with people who don't want to hear it.

This reminds me of when I did a lot of C#, Java, JS, Python in my life, filling maps of strings and objects until I started with zig and noticed how expensive and complicated strings and data structure allocations can be. It kind of blew my mind how much memory and computation we waste when we try to get stuff done as fast as possible because of budget/time constraints.