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wanderful

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Co-founder of a startup bootstrapping with a 50/50 split of contracting/product development

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I see the horseless carriage as part of the evolutionary product journey to what is now known as the car, from the horse-drawn carriage to the horseless carriage, to early automobiles, to now.

I would take your statement further than unfair and say the analogy is inaccurate and confused about how products evolve over time.

The article itself shows only an incremental improvement on the UI by exposing a system prompt, rather than reaching for the modern car from the era of the first horseless carriages.

So you manage outsourcing? Might I recommend saying that? I've noticed throughout the comments that you tend toward drawn out explanations. Make it simple and then people will fill in the missing details. If they miss a few, no worries, because they get the gist. You don't need to give them all of the details up front, because that makes it complex, hard to understand and boring. Try and fill in as many details as you can with imagery and the structure of the site.

"Wave hello to the future" also captures the connotation of welcoming to the future, as well as providing a more concrete indication of what the app does. I think one of the biggest challenges with copywriting is hitting all of those notes at once, the visionary, the concrete, the solution, the problem, etc. And like other forms of art, some pieces just come together better than others.

Not necessarily. Popularity makes something more likely to be exploited. Compare PCs to Macs re: viruses. Also, many security issues were due to conventions in early versions of the language, e.g. register globals.

I wouldn't say he's saying spending less time on them. He's saying that they are the exception, so don't make the whole interface depend on the possibility of them. Proceed assuming the optimal case and when they do happen, provide a safe, friendly means of dealing with them.

Consumers have shown that they are willing to pay a premium for a well designed user experience. Problem is, Apple doesn't have much competition.

"Creeping SEOization" could also be stated as keyword space filling up—a natural effect of the web growing—so queries are getting more specific.

Another possible factor is that users are becoming more savvy search users, or even trusting that they will get meaningful results for novel queries (e.g. Vietnamese Restaurants in Saskatoon).

I'm Canadian. So embarrassing. The graphics. The copy. The tone of his voice. How he kept repeating "look at the detail" as if identifying counterfeit bills compared to real ones that we've never seen is self-evident.

Many people here are creating a false dilemma out of mousing and keyboarding. The argument isn't even necessarily about mousing vs. keyboarding, it could be about GUI vs. command line/hotkey. GUIs provide a discoverable profile of all actions (with the most common tasks optimized visually, hopefully). Hotkeys package the common actions to save time.

In any interface, there is a learning curve. Some users never progress beyond the most basic stages, and each time they interact with the software it's as if they are starting over. Other users develop further along the learning curve to the point that using a hotkey becomes cheaper. Many users bring overlap from other interfaces (which is what makes an interface intuitive — it fits the user's expectations). As more hotkeys are defined they will be for less and less common actions, which fewer users will learn, remember, and use. People will also move up and down the curve depending on their frequency of use with the software.

A useful product should have both. The more complex a product gets, the more the user skill stratifies (from newbs to pros), the more necessary both a GUI and hotkey interface is. The GUI provides a scheme for organizing the myriad features and functions as a fallback interaction layer, while hotkeys allow the user to leap ahead.

HN users are overwhelmingly savvy, which is shown by the support of keyboard interactions.

I don't know if the Earth's climate is as delicate as we fear. Our infrastructure is far more delicate when it comes to the Earth climate. The Earth is able to function within a homeostatic range (say, established over the past billion years) far more effectively than our infrastructure (established over the past few hundred years). The biosphere may also be involved with this, which has been raised in the Gaia theory line of argumentation.

I think of it as getting in a feedback loop, which people often call iterating. Practicing is also close. The idea of iterating is simple and can be seen in anything from education to genetics to investing.

The challenge often is getting over the personal hangups which prevent one from facing honest feedback. There is a general narrative where a person's will to achieve a particular goal finally overcomes the fears related to identity and the outcome, and progress accelerates.

Except there is much more to a sport than, for example, shooting a basketball. There's offense, there's defense. There's fundamental skills, there's game strategy, there's different sorts of matchups. It goes on and on to subtler and more intricate detail. It's not simply whether one can skateboard or not, program or not, and it would seem that is what the author of the article was getting at.

In your visual arts examples, there is a much simpler explanation. The reason there are more pages devoted toward layout principles is because the medium of expression (i.e. the web) fundamentally uses layout principles. Drawing doesn't express using the web. It's a selection effect, just as it's more likely that you will find soccer players in Brazil, and hockey players in Canada, rather than the other way around.

True, although he may still feel like giving up in that moment, which is what I think the post was about. There will always be moments as an entrepeneur where one feels like giving up, but the wind of desire and ambition returns to fill the sails.