the-cakeboss

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?

The focus of my comment was never about the morality of pirating, but rather my perceived difficulty in having an intelligent and honest conversation about it. While I did briefly touch on my thoughts about its morality, I made sure to state that matter was up for debate.

When we are talking about piracy I am amazed that people entertain the notion that the Pirate Bay is somehow liberating oppressed peoples all over the world ( as was implied in the release... ). We aren't talking about leaked government documents here, we are talking about last night's episode of Glee. All of this nonsense merely detracts and distracts for the real issue at hand.

Furthermore, I have found time and time again that people become exceedingly argumentative and obtuse when these issues are discussed, denying and arguing every claim no matter how well accepted or understood it is. I mean, can we really not agree that the Pirate Bay is primarily dedicated to distributing copyrighted material illegally? Is it really necessary for me to dig up a source and provide a citation for that claim?

In direct response to your question, I would not be distressed by such a site, nor does the existence of the pirate bay cause me distress. What might irritate me about such a site however is if it were to claim that jaywalking laws were not in place to control traffic and provide safe crossing to pedestrians, but instead to oppress the people of a city or some other nonsense along the same lines. It would irritate me if its supporters some deep conviction for it and when questioned about their beliefs, immediately assume those unlike them derive their morality from law.

I pirate content a lot. I am a member of a private tracker, and for awhile I rented out a seedbox to maintain my ratio. Never once though, have I ever felt entitled to the things I downloaded. Never once did I try to justify my downloading with anything other than the fact that it is super convenient and free. Why you think I'm so dull as to never question the word of law is beyond me. I never once said anything to suggest legality is equivalent to morality. I may even go so far as to say this conclusion you've made is indicative to the very thing I'm speaking of. I mean, it takes some rather large assumptions to reach that conclusion based upon my comments.

Fair enough. Perhaps I should clarify, and say "the illegal distribution of material protected by copyright".

Its incredible how obtuse people become when discussing this issue.

Can you honestly say that the pirate bay isn't dedicated, and almost exclusively used for the distribution of material protected by copyright? Drawing attention to the fact that he hasn't cited any specific research on what is plainly evident for everyone does nothing to promote an adult discussion about the topic. Furthermore, claiming that the author hates extroverts due to some underlaying psychological issues is really unnecessary.

Why is it so hard to have an open, honest, mature discussion about piracy and the pirate bay? All the attempts to make P2P out to be some political statement, is highly disingenuous in my opinion. I pirate quite regularly. But it is never about some lofty ideals regarding personal freedoms, or commentary on corporate influence, in truth, I just want something, which happens to be easily and readily accessed, free of charge. Is this stealing? I'm not sure, but I'm inclined to think its a close cousin. Is it a plus for society, and something that ought to be fostered? Quite possibly.

Why not talk about this stuff and stop acting like piracy is some noble pursuit?

I find it hard to believe that anyone seriously believes that the pirate bay is an agent promoting peace within the world, and liberating oppressed peoples. Why do we kid ourselves?

I don't understand how a gestural interface would become a guessing game any more than physical buttons would be. Regardless whether your interface be gestural or physical certain actions would presumably do different things depending on the current context. Instead of remembering to press a particular button, one would remember a particular gesture.

Unless you are talking about guessing whether your gesture was recognized.

I mean, I don't think you need to be particularly tech-savvy to have come across the adage "never keep your eggs in one basket".

Having some people use the site for legitimate purposes does nothing to negate the evidence brought forward in the indictment.

Why should piracy just be expected and accepted to the detriment of an industry?

You don't need a huge budget to make great films, but why encourage an environment in which there is no choice but to make low budget ones?

"""Anyway, that's my take on it. I know that there are people who will always choose to steal rather than pay, but most of society would happily pay if only we were allowed to."""

I don't buy that. There is and will always be ( as far as I can tell ) the simple fact that I can get an album that costs x dollars for 0. Itunes and Amazon make the purchase of music about as easy as possible, but they still can't beat free.

How does the length of which the copyright is applicable affect whether copyright infringement is stealing?

Those are my feelings as well. I do understand the concern of a precedent being established, but I really do tire of all the hyperbole surrounding this bill. I can't tell how many times I've seen people make the claim that if someone where to post infringing material on to a site like whitehouse.gov, the authorities would have no choice to take it down. Bogus claims are bogus claims regardless of their intentions.

I think the most damage brought by this bill would not be manifested in legal cases, but rather a climate in which people are far more hesitant to take risks on the web, etc.