plainOldText

Indeed! I scrutinize door designs everywhere I go now. (:

Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things has indeed altered how I look at the world from a design perspective. It teaches you design awareness, and you'll find yourself noticing and understanding design elements all around you, that you didn't before. Even though it might seem a little old, the information presented in there is timeless, so I highly recommend it as well. It is in fact the first book I would suggest to anyone wanting to learn how to think like a designer.

I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.

I've toyed with various Rust web frameworks and I think rocket is one of the most promising. A thought out, high quality project. The person behind it strikes me as someone who pays attention to details, from the codebase, docs, all the way to the presentational website. Kudos!

I've recently taken a design class and I have a keen interest in design in general, and I would say your suggestions are on the money.

I would also mention the importance of layout and flow line, or how will you organize your elements in the page and how will your audience traverse them visually? This is something you really ought to think about very hard.

Also, learn about gestalt principles. For example: https://www.howdesign.com/resources-education/online-design-...

> I think we live in a culture that fetishizes socialization.

My personal take is that it's important to strike a balance between socializing with other people and solitude. Having said that, that balance might vary according to the individual. And I would emphasize particularly the socialization in the real world.

> [...] ultimately a decision should be taken when alone, I think.

I think I see what you're saying. I wouldn't take the A in HALT to be absolute. I'm certainly not in favor of group think when involving one individual's life. My interpretation is along the lines: Hey, it's an important decision involving a very complex situation, perhaps I should ask for a second opinion before I make up my mind. I think the preparation prior to the actual decision making, is part of the decision itself.

So you wouldn’t mind people parking the scooters in front of your house then, since you can just walk around them?

I’ve seen scooters literally blocking entrances and pathways, heck people even take them inside buildings up to the 5th floor; not to mention that at night they emit a high pitched disrupting sound. Some people are plain lazy and highly inconsiderate. We need some rules because some people lack common sense.

Good question! Perhaps because loneliness points to the difficulty of reaching out and the lack of other people who might give you a different perspective.

I think I've read this on HN once, in one of the comments: Don't make an important decision when you're in a HALT state (Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired). Note: Not to confuse loneliness with solitude.

Couldn’t agree more. Many times I find myself put off by some charting or visual library only because of stylistic/aesthetic choices the author(s) made. I think no or minimal style is the best approach. Having the feature to add your own is of course nice to have.

You are correct! It is a false equivalency. My comment's goal was to remind people that being mindful of one's time, and reallocating and juggling it could lead to more productive outcomes. I was too sloppy in how I phrased it.

I added the qualifier "little" for a reason. Unfortunately, you decided to misquote me and paint my views in more absolute terms.

The value you get from using Facebook comes at a cost, so you ought to offset that "incredible amount of value" you're talking about. Some people incur a huge cost, as they become addicted.

So many articles written about a company that adds so little value to human life (at least in its current form).

If you spend just 1h/day on Facebook, over the course of 10 years, that's approx. 150 days or roughly half a year. I'm sure plenty of people spend more than 1h/day scrolling through their pointless feeds.

So my question to you is this: What could you achieve if you could spend half a year of your life, fully immersing yourself in something meaningful and of value?

> A nice chubby complex system, on the other hand, is likely to be more resilient.

You should take a look at tardigrades then (aka water bears), which are approx. 1mm in length, obviously less complex than most living creatures, yet are some of the most resilient animals on earth; highly resistant to extreme temperatures, pressure, radiation, etc.

One way to look at resilience: a relationship between the system and its environment. So when you say resilient, you need to specify, resilient to what? I think a resilient system, is neither too complex, nor too simple, but rather, adapted to its environment.

Well, if you fail to see the limitations and assumptions upon which your decision making process rests, then there's nothing of value I could add. Your decision making model via-a-vis scissors purchasing is perfectly acceptable. But it's just one model. Would you use the same model if you were, say, a tailor?

> I mean we can just acknowledge that we have different worldviews rather than everyone having to agree that things are too complex to understand

Sure, we all have world views. When it comes to predictive power however, some world views are superior to others. At the end of the day, and at the level of detail we're currently capable of understanding reality, all of our models are wrong, but some are useful, hence why we keep pushing the process of scientific method, even though it has its limitations.

By acknowledging that something is complex, we can recognize we are limited in our ability to understand it – at least for now – which in turn leads us to question our current views and seek to discover and adopt better models, with even more predictive power.

Have they? Go to Amazon and search, say, for "scissors". Which one would you buy?

What we need is a revolution in how people think about complex systems.

People nowadays throw ideas around thinking they have a good understanding of how systems operate or should operate, when in fact most are clueless and fail to realize their ignorance.

Society, economy, biological organisms, climate, cognition, etc are all complex systems, and no single person can claim to understand how they work, or the types of laws/rules we should adopt to govern their behavior.

Not all is lost though, as we have slowly started to augment our cognitive power, by means of computation, and in the process have improved our capabilities to analyze and understand these ever evolving systems.

I for one, have began to fight my ignorance by studying more books on complex systems. Here's a good one I've discovered recently: "Scale" by Geoffrey West.

Also, a useful collection of resources, courtesy of Santa Fe Institute: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/ (HINT: Go to explore -> browse section)

... and bonus, one of the most underrated channels on YouTube, Complexity Labs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCutCcajxhR33k9UR-DdLsAQ

A very insightful comment. I have no idea to what extent your hypotheses describe reality, but the elegance of your line of reasoning deems this path worthy of further investigation.

I rarely downvote those I disagree with. And when I do, my goal is to have them reconsider and question their position and not at all to silence them.

I fail to see how I jumped to conclusions. You clearly stated that vis-a-vis regulation:

> I'm a big proponent. Everything from closed-source to monopolies and ads.

If this is not an extreme pro-regulation attitude then I don't know what is.

And just to be clear, comments are clearly superior to downvotes, though we'd hardly get any work done had we written replies to all comments we disagree with; thus, occasionally replying via downvotes.

You seem to have a very simplistic view of how voting works. Why would you assume downvoting is a feedback mechanism to signal negative posts only? People downvote for all sorts of reasons.

I for instance downvoted your comment, for supporting a blanket regulatory attitude across the IT spectrum. It's tantamount to proposing a single programming language across the whole stack. That portrays a very narrow view of the world. Not to mention it can lead to being counterproductive.

Do note, human communication is a complex endeavor. We employ all kinds signals and techniques for information exchange and a simple downvote in an online forum is a perfectly valid signal, albeit an ambiguous one.

I own many Apple products, and I like Apple as a company a lot; but I would have to agree with your observation. The reality does not agree with their marketing. I understand marketing can be employed as a tool to favorably present reality, but still, the edge-to-edge statement is quite a stretch.

The EU has already destroyed the web surfing experience for everyone, with their cookie laws. Now most sites require users to click on some banners that cover half of the screen on mobile, just to get to the content, on some random site they might only visit once. Argh!

I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".

Thanks for chiming in. I’m very pleased to see you engaged with your customers/potential customers; especially in a high stakes community such as HN.

I’m not going to comment any more on this situation as I don’t know all the details, I do hope I won’t see comments of unhappy DO customers on HN in the future, as that would be a sign you guys are not up to expectations.

P.S. I have been a happy DO customer for years; thus far (:

No question fraud exists on all these platforms, however, if anyone is wrongly flagged by an algorithm, reaching out to the company must be followed by a prompt and timely response, so any misfortune can be remediated. I would assume fraudsters wouldn't typically reach out to have their accounts reinstated.

In the digital age, startups and businesses rely on cloud providers for their livelihood. These providers must be reliable and trustworthy, otherwise they shouldn't get a penny.

Also, I'm not intimately familiar with OP's situation, my comments are just common sense generalizations; I think!

These are some serious allegations. If this is true then DogitalOcean needs to explain themselves.

I guess, one should also have backups off site. Relying on just one provider constitutes a single point of failure.

Nothing's wrong with Erlang per se. I personally found Erlang's syntax hard to follow, especially considering I'm working with multiple, more traditional languages on a regular basis. For instance in Erlang, variables are capitalized, whereas in other languages that's how you name a class. But hey, others swear by its syntax, so there's that.

For the record, I would prefer not to get into a programming language flame war. Having said that, I will add the following: It's much harder to reason in Rust, as there are many concepts one needs to keep in their head (borrowing, lifetime, pointers, etc). Plus Rust is much more difficult to read. Whereas Elixir, and I emphasize Elixir over Erlang here, is much easier to reason in, concise, and simpler to read.

At the end of the day, use whatever language you prefer, just keep in mind that software needs to be (1) shipped, (2) maintained (by multiple people who read each other's code) and (3) evolved. I would also add (0) experimentation; before one even ships any code, one ought to easily experiment with various ideas.

In addition, two other highly informative resources:

* http://spawnedshelter.com/

* http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/

Rust has too big of a learning curve, and it's quite complex for writing service oriented systems. Granted, having a static compiler eliminates many types of bugs found in other systems.

In my opinion a more sensible approach is Elixir + Rust (via rustler). Your get the elegance and productivity of Elixir, the concurrency and fault tolerance of Erlang/OTP, while still being able to writing super fast, low level code in Rust.

Plus, you shouldn't use a single language across your whole stack. When the only tool you have available is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I wonder how much each minute of downtime is worth in revenue numbers?