devilshaircut

It is unfortunate that you are so willing to consume as 'politics' whatever topic political strategists have decided to include in their party's talking points.

It is fortunate that said political strategists chose LGBT rights and not, say, the legality of JavaScript. Because then your Google search would have been a moot point entirely, JS having been made "political".

I have no comment about the paper itself.

You were bemoaning being downvoted, and I explained why.

I was commenting on the context which you provided inside of your original comment. If you actually don't care or don't wonder why such a comment would be downvoted, then disregard my post(s).

LGBT rights is not a topic inherently related to sex or sexual media. Just want to make that distinction.

It is discussed by people on 'political' tv != it is political.

You can politicize anything you want. But there is nothing inherently political about showing support for an LGBT human being. 'What neoconservatives want to make political issues of' is an entirely different matter.

"Both sides of the argument."

That Russia has a reasonable political platform regarding its LGBT citizens? I am not sure that it is possible to 'blow out of proportion' what is most certainly a human rights issue. This was your own assertion, not that of the paper's.

The topic was the Google Doodle showing support for LGBT people and your first impulse is to imply that the situation in Russia is in fact a non-issue.

That is why you were downvoted, man.

Agreed.

Showing support for LGBT people == politics? Give me a BREAK.

Admittedly, I do use Angular and I do love it. So take my comment with a grain of salt.

But from my perspective, I'd rather inherit a messy AngularJS project rather than a messy jQuery project. Or Backbone. With jQuery or Backbone, who knows what kind of stack they decided to use, or what kind of crazy hacks they implemented to get it to work? The same thing can happen in AngularJS, but at least it is more probable that they'll be relying on out-of-box tools for core functionality.

Now, I agree that in general, web software front end projects can be gross, but I find Angular to be the least gross solution.

I found your comments to be hugely insightful. I am working on a project in the same general area (education) with a business partner and I was wondering if you'd be so kind as to let me pick your mind on the topic and learn from your experience. I have my email available in my profile although I am happy to reach out to you if you're open to it. In any case, like I said before, I found your insights very valuable. Thank you for sharing.

"Does that mean that accuracy and accountability don’t matter for click-bait pieces about China that “feel” true?"

I suppose this photograph had the opposite effect on me. The moment I saw it surface on my FB feed, I had the immediate, almost impulsive, thought that this had to be a fabrication. I lumped it into the "Pope calls Genesis a metaphor" category.

I don't mean to sound like I disagree with the journalist though. Actually I would agree 100% that "Chinese dystopia" seems to be an over-represented theme in American news media.

Thanks for the laugh.

Also, I wonder what the definition for "traffic" is within the context of this research.

A great piece, I agree. Vanity Fair has some great content. I like Mayer. She does things her way, like any other CEO, yet imo much more charismatically.

What a shame, indeed. :/

Surely there is some limit to population growth. Certainly there are many countries whose populations are known to be in decline.

I absolutely agree with almost everything you've said here. You've essentially described the kind of company culture I want to build.

In particular, you nailed it when you talked about the difference between "capitalism" and "crony capitalism". I personally do not have a problem with capitalism in its pure form (as I understand it). At the risk of sounding like I am parroting a platitude - perhaps I am - I think that capitalism is too often understood to be a zero-sum entity.

I believe that the best way to do this is to set a standard of ethics by which you operate your company and then to be as successful as possible within that context. Be competitive; don't use competition as an excuse to contribute to the American economic divide.

And now I really will parrot the Buckminster Fuller quote that many people are intimately familiar with:

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest."

I think your assessment is more or less accurate.

I see it this way:

What practices have resulted in things being the way they are now? These practices are largely attributable to businesses whose policies are endorsed and enacted through government. Government politics are a complete morass and you've done an excellent job of painting how various parties might try and solve the problem.

So if government is a morass, how do you approach the problem? Certainly a career in politics is out of the question based on this presupposition. One might consider simply adapting how they act in their daily interactions with others. Personally I think this idea is too small-scale.

In my opinion, one strategy would be through the business side. Create a business whose policies create the type of change necessary for closing the gap between the mega-rich and "middle" class. The argument has been made in this thread that in order to compete, it is impossible to instate these types of policies. However, I believe this to be a false assumption. Certainly companies, even large ones, fall into a spectrum of "good" and "bad" practices. There appears to be no bound to either side. I take the David Deutschian view that any problem can be solved with the right knowledge¹. So the question is, can we think creatively, critically, and intelligently enough to solve this problem in business?

I believe the answer is yes.

¹ EDIT: Any problem whose solution is not explicitly prohibited by the nature of reality.

Well - he made it easy for you because based on how he phrased it, you only had to come up with one reason cars are good. You picked some low-hanging fruit (not an ad hominem attack; your reasoning is sound). Cars are a clear solution to certain problems.

That said, I think that these reasons tend to diminish when contrasted with the downsides (not that it matters, but I do own a car, and am not just trying to shill the other side). Example: having a car also contributes to the degeneration of the city. This is a point well-illustrated in the original article. Is it worth owning a car when it is intrinsically tied to urban sprawl and the decay of cultural vibrance? Ownership comes at a cost.

I actually agree with the view you express here. While I find the story to be positive - after all, it is apparent that someone did something nice for someone else and improved their life a great deal - I think you are right to say that it is a disservice to the gravity of homelessness in the United States. It is such a complex problem, as you said, rooted in extremely serious issues like mental health, wealth inequality, and lack of proper healthcare. While I love to talk about how code literacy is the solution to many problems, it really has almost zero salience to the topic of homelessness. Ultimately, what helped this guy was the kindness of a complete stranger. Not the education. Not the computer.

I understand the term. I was trying to underscore (unsuccessfully, apparently) that my original point was to be an entrepreneur whose principles depart from that of the current establishment. In other words, what I was suggesting was the exact opposite.

I could only interpret the response as a glib remark that to be an entrepreneur in any sense necessarily makes you an imitator of this establishment. My view on this, however, is slightly less cynical.

Photoshop chugs really bad on my 2012 MBA. Works great on my 2013 MBP though. I would say for someone who isn't creating assets (it sounds like you are a developer rather than a designer), a lighter tool is definitely preferable. That is, unless you are front-end and needing to open PSDs. Though I suppose you could use Elements for that.

> "PS and AI for asset creation"

Yeah - I agree - I think that PS is mainly a tool for the creation of assets rather than designing flows and information architecture. And even less so for interaction design.

I will however on occasion use PS to create wireframes when I need them to look presentation-quality.

I suppose that is a derogatory remark, but I never claimed that to be an entrepreneur is a new thing. It is demonstrably not. What I did try to suggest is that it is perhaps a good way to deconstruct this problem.

I am no sociologist, but I think it would be rather safe to say that to it is going to take a lot for this to change. We've clearly adapted to the divide between the mega-rich and the "middle" class, so I am not sure it is a matter of survival so much as a matter of principle.

I think it would take a lot of people collectively thinking and acting differently than we do now. I am just one person, but it is my goal to live my life with the intent of turning this situation around. I believe the spirit of entrepreneurship, which is generally well-supported on HN, is a piece of this - designing and building the next generation of companies who choose to conduct business in ways that support (rather than exploit) the middle class. Hence, I am an entrepreneur.

This is not a dig on you - use whatever process works best for you definitely - but I've found that designing in HTML/CSS can lead to problems. It's true that some changes are easier in HTML/CSS. For example, instead of having to copy/paste a layer style to several elements in your PSD, you can simply apply a new style rule to a class in your CSS. But overall I believe working in a design tool like Photoshop (or Fireworks, for example), allows the designer to focus more on the design itself. I've noticed that people who design in design tools like Creative Suite, as opposed to CSS, experiment more and on the whole produce better design. I don't mean to imply causation, it's just something I've noticed. And in particular, I think more graphically rich projects generally benefit even more from using design tools. Just a thought.

I was going to say the exact same thing about the kerning. Good eye.

I agree that ads can be garish. I just see this as a separate problem from design itself.

Recently XKCD made me think about how minimalism fits into design. For example, entirely text-driven:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_pace_of_modern_life.png

... and more visually oriented:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/balloon_internet.png

Obviously there are many ways to communicate ideas, and each in various contexts can be quite effective.

I couldn't agree with you more. It illustrates particularly well the fact that there is a line in the sand to be drawn and that it is ambiguous. His is just but one perspective on a site that serves up one type of content.

You are already able to do this; simply disable stylesheets or as you said use a reader app. We've already discussed using technology like adblocker.

Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.

I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.

I didn't say text is bleak and characterless. I said that having no design variation is bleak and characterless.

Having webpages that are not bleak and characterless is not a resignation to having webpages that are like highways with unending billboards.

Is it not self-obvious that if every page attempting to serve up content similar to that in the OP (pictureless editorial), the web would be bleak and characterless?

Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.