the-cakeboss's comments

If it helps, I am running chrome 20.0.1132.47 on OSX 10.6.8.

Without being a registered user and thus not able to experience the rest of the site, I will say that the home page looks decent, but ultimately far too cluttered and loud. The ineffective/limited utilization of white space leaves the elements of the page fighting for my attention and dominance.

On a more minor note, the cursor in the login inputs at the top left of the page is too tall and intersects with the input's edges.

He may be recognizable in a design discussion on HN, but hardly out of this context. Same goes for this guy.

That of course is not to say that these sorts of efforts should be avoided, but I do think you are overestimating their impact.

And how are they going to recoup the heavy loses incurred when they release it for free?

How can people say things like this? Do you seriously believe that if Santorum were to be elected, the US would begin to participate in religion fueled executions? Or more importantly, do you think Santorum supports these actions?

I tend to agree. I love Zappa and the Mothers, but it seems as though anything and everything decrying the state of the music industry is fair game on HN now. I mean, is it really news to anyone that these companies are more interested in profits than they are in furthering an art form?

I won't dismiss this outright. I do find it to be fairly interesting. If a system like this were to gain wide spread usage, I think many invaluable insights on reading ( and all those behaviors associated with it ) would be realized regardless of how effective a system this proves to be.

Have the search results degraded that much in your opinion? I still find their results the most useful.

I don't understand this mentality... At least by judging from your response, it would appear that Google offers superior service for you. Why not use it then?

Is the promise of no tracking/bubbling a big draw for you?

I suppose, depending upon your aim.

(And by long-form, I assume you are talking about an article or something rather than a book.) If you aren't concerned with people actually reading your text then yes, thats probably a good idea. But prefacing in this manner generally tends to disuade meaningful consumption, "why read in 4 pages what was summed up in 4 sentences", a reader might think. I think prefacing could arguably contribute to effective communication, but it stifles engagement significantly.

Just my 2 cents...

While I think that is one response to this, you seem to be diminishing the importance that extra cruft has upon the effective message conveyed. Simpler is more economic, but it also eliminates those ephemeral things communicated implicitly. A TLDR is certainly an adequate substitute for those not interested enough, but an abbreviation can never capture the full expressive thought contained in a larger, well written text.

Effective visual communication, whether it be anything from body of text to an icon, is not necessarily contingent upon its complexity.

I don't know of anything analogous to codeschool and the like, and I am having a hard time imagining such a thing. Design is in many ways comprable to coding. It encompasses many different skill sets and disciplines. Designers are like programmers in that they must research, understand a problem, visualize, iterate, organize, implement, optimize, etc etc etc. Design can be hugely complex or rather simple, just like coding.

I am not that familiar with the offerings of codecademy etc, but I tend to doubt that anything taught there can replace experience and serious study of algorithms and patterns. So while I suppose there could be a site teaching about fundamentals of composition, line, form, color, typography, etc, I'd think you'd be better off reading a book on those than anything else. Any exercise you would do would have to be evaluated algorithmically, which seems very hard judging by the subjective nature of design.

Like coding most growth in design happens through actually doing it. This means developing drawing skills, rapid prototyping skills, and most importantly your eye. I don't think any of this can be adequately taught through an interactive website. My suggestion to you would be to simply begin designing.

Hope that helps...

Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know that I really like where you are taking the design of this site. It is really a breath of fresh air considering the typical interface often seen around the start up crowd. Its feels very light, and intentional with bold accents calling for attention. In a word, I might call it crisp. However, I do think you could rework some of the user generated elements such as the clusters and the inserted images. They feel oddly out of place considering the rest of the UI.

With that all said however, the page offering explanation leaves much to be desired. I think there should be more doing and less talking so to speak. Even the text though feels unstructured and out of place, its placement seems rather haphazard, and the rag is especially rough. While I do realize this blog post isn't the product, the typography is seriously lacking there.

I'm not trying to say that it isn't very effective, its just that when looking at it you are presented with a lot of information simultaneously, I'm sure that after learning it, using it won't be as difficult.

But with that said, being able to reduce the amount of data confronting you would most likely be an invaluable asset. I'm no musician, nor do I have much experience with DAWs, but the ideal environment, and this is true for many things, would be one that is both expressive and easy to use. I just can't see how exploding all the components in such a manner is reaching those said goals. Why can't you just explode them when need be?

Also, why is the quality of immersion important to you? Immersion as it is well known does not make for effective or powerful interfaces. Its simply a further unnecessary abstraction between a user and the data. Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't seem that things like BumpTop have really caught on.

I don't understand the point of the 3d element. It seems like a great way to further complex an already overwhelming interface.

There needs to be a way to encapsulate the different components of a synth, and expand them as needed. Furthermore, there need to be ways to better organize an instrument set.

Even so, I as a user who comments quite infrequently will often times want to, after reading an article, look at the discussion about it. On an almost daily basis I have difficulty finding that link because it has been so heavily obscured.

On long threads it usually becomes difficult to determine who a particular response was directed to.

There is no way to differentiate quoted text in your response.

The size of navigational elements are particularly small and hard to use on mobile devices.

You make the point that HN has clear brand identity, but that isn't much of an accomplishment. HN sticks to a four color palette ( Orange, Tan/Bright Desaturated Orange, White, and Black ), and places the YCombinator logo at the top left.

As someone else said, I think you are being far to critical. While I personally don't like the design of the site either, I wouldn't begin calling HN a good example. Sure HN is functional, but that is only one aspect of good design. Functionality in and of itself really isn't that difficult to achieve. It is when you are able to strike a balance between expressiveness, beauty, and functionality does a design become good.

Sure, but then again, so is Google's, Wikipedia's, Reddit's, Mozilla's, The Pirate Bay's, Torrentfreak's etc...

While I do believe Mr. Sherman isn't coming from the best of places, I think that there was quite a large amount of misinformation coming from various interested parties, and I have always felt comparing SOPA with China or even censorship is nothing more than alarmist rhetoric.

Oh, ha! I completely missed the sarcasm in that. Yeah,I can see it as being uncivil.

What was arrogant about the comment? He merely stated that he doesn't find the solution to be aesthetically pleasing. Are opinions contrary to those of the majority now to be considered arrogant?

Serious question: What might you want to reuse on the client side?