Minimalism | Hacker News Reader

Minimalism

ihumanable.com

86 pointsihumanable43 comments

The "minimalist" staircase in the picture accompanying the article is a horrible design, IMO. Each step is a very thin pure cantilever. In order to prevent the step from sagging and sloping unsafely towards the edge, it would have to be extraordinarily stiff and strong as compared to readily available building materials. This problem is compounded by the lack of guard rails. This is not a matter of form following function. This is form defying the primary function, while leaving out secondary ones, like safety.

A better design with almost the same effect: use a transparent panel, diagonally following the free edges of the steps, perhaps 1 foot wide, with cable support form the ceiling at the top. (Or a column from below.) This preserves the stark effect of the thin cantilevered steps jutting out from the wall, but gives us a more favorable geometry for structural support. The transparent material doesn't have to be extremely strong, since the geometry is favorable. Most of the force can still be borne by the step, but we can prevent sagging and discourage people from sitting on the edge.

Alternatively, cables can be used to transfer load to the step above and eventually to the landing, which can be supported by a single column or a cable to the ceiling. Since the steps will be much stronger cantilevers in the horizontal direction than in the vertical, due to their geometry, we can take advantage of this by converting part of their load into the horizontal direction. The cables will be inexpensive, very strong, and will also discourage foolish people from sitting on the edge.

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You describe a more efficient design. If sufficiently strong material is affordable and used, and safety is not a concern, yours is not necessarily a "better" design. A transparent panel wouldn't be entirely invisible, and the visual effect of the staircase would not be the same (or as striking).

IMO, both the cable supported and transparent beam versions would be nearly as striking.

Of course, this is all down to aesthetics and judgment about what the design should prioritize. The designs I describe can be just as strong, or stronger, and cheaper at the same time, with additional safety features.

EDIT: To clarify, in my designs, there would be only one cable running to the ceiling, attached to the landing. Alternatively, one could use a transparent column.

Believe it or not, that type of staircase design is used for pets. I only know this because my coworker encountered a problem with his aging cat and found that there are many solutions (some pre-made, some custom)

Photo #1

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/pet-decor-2006-news/my-de...

And there is a photo blog..

http://catladder.blogspot.com/

Plastic transparent panels have a way of becoming more and more opaque with the years, and will therefore look terrible shortly, unless made of glass. If glass, then either it will be so thick as to have noticeable edges, or thin enough to be dangerous if struck. The cable solution is more interesting, though it also sacrifices the visual minimalism in the design.

I don't think Jeff Atwood was asking for additional features, merely fixing some of the obvious issues with the original specification: anyone who has used it a couple of times will have run into the weird_filename_italics_thing.

If the down button on the Apple Remote didn't work, that wouldn't be 'minimalism', it would be broken.

And a case in point: I reckon that the word 'simply' in the first sentence of the blog article should be 'simple' (ok, so it could make sense with either word, but 'simple' would be more readable).

Now, should the author correct the mistake? Or would that not respect the 'minimalism' with which it was written? We wouldn't want to have to produce a feature-bloated version 2 of the article, would we?

You are correct, I should have typed simple, it is fixed now, thanks for the correction.

Anyone who has been bitten by that one a couple times will just do the sane thing and escape the underscores or use backtick code tags around the words you need to have underscores in.

It would only be _obviously_ wrong if it didn't even let you workaround the format characters.

I'm not sure why you think escaping is an obvious and suitable concept for a simple markup language like Markdown.

When trying to write a grammar that describes Markdown escaping is the obvious and suitable solution.

Its because its so simple that it causes the surprising behavior. But it is only surprising the first time. After that you realize that everything between two underscores means highlight that section of text. If you actually wanted the underscores you have to do it manually, whats wrong with that?

The common case should be simple. How often do I want to italicize part of a word? That's what should require escaping.

This confuses a minimalist result with a minimalist process.

Minimalism doesn't necessarily mean it takes a minimum amount of time to arrive at a good solution. It is an aesthetic ideal for the end product where what can be eliminated is eliminated. It might take quite of bit of trial and error to get there though.

Favorite quote time: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead" wrote Blaise Pascal (or possibly Mark Twain, or Churchill).

Wasn't that Groucho?

Pascal wrote it first, though not very shortly. He actually wrote Mes Révérends Pères, mes lettres n'avaient pas accoutumé de se suivre de si près, ni d'être si étendues. Le peu de temps que j'ai eu a été cause de l'un et de l'autre. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. which in English is My Reverend Fathers, my letters have not usually followed so closely, nor been so long. The small amount of time that I have is the cause of both. I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter. (Source: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=177502)

Heh. Hobbyhorse time: this is one case where we definitively know the answer. It was indeed Pascal.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769624

What's not so well known is that the line had a polemical edge to it. The next sentence is, "You know the reason of this haste better than I do", which I assume is related to the fact that police searches were being conducted to try to prevent the Letters from being published. Considering that the first line of this letter is "Reverend Fathers, I now come to consider the rest of your calumnies," one imagines that the addressees weren't particularly pleased about it being "a long one".

Let's use a word other than minimalism and perhaps the confusion will be removed.

>It is an aesthetic ideal for the end product where what can be eliminated is eliminated.

That's part of what elegance is.

The best example demonstrating that I've seen for how easy it is to just not "get" minimalism is the famous "what if Microsoft designed the iPod box" video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=36099539665548298.

The whole goal of Markdown is to be a simple, easy and stable piece of syntax that lots of websites can converge on. The last thing you need is to have multiple versions of it and users having to think about which markup rules a given site is using.

You do know that that video was done by MS as an intentional self-parody, right?

http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/Microsoft_Confirms_i...

I did not know that. However the article you pointed to says that they made it to convey a very serious point through humor. Since I have never seen that point made more effectively, kudos to them and I'll continue to recommend the video when the underlying point is appropriate.

How can publishing something like that help their efforts?

Likewise, were they responsible for the "Windows 7 Launch Party" video?

The idea is obviously to communicate to the people who are part of a broken marketing process exactly how their well-intentioned efforts to improve Microsoft's marketing are failing to work.

With the hope, obviously, of reforming the process.

The flip side of this is when overenthusiastic minimalism makes something useless, like in The Onion's ad for the revolutionary (hah!) Apple laptop with no keyboard, the "MacBook Wheel" (http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revol...).

The whole point in my mind is that Apple goes just so far to make minimalism useful, but not so far that it is irritating. That is what I like about Apple products, that they are usefully minimalist.

The "MacBook wheel" is not a product Apple would make because it is unbalanced to far in the opposite direction.

...which is amusing in the context of the recent media buzz about Apple creating a tablet computer that doesn't even have a wheel. :)

In four lines of code he's hidden a ton of complexity and can now completely avoid thinking about all the low-level garbage.

Markdown similarly hides (automates) all the details of how it generates HTML from source, and in exchange you give up control over (many) aspects of what the target HTML looks like.

My car abstracts away from me the details of fuel-air mixtures, gear shifting, battery recharging, and so forth.

In all of these cases if I want more control I can go get it. The point is that I don't _have_ to: I can drive the kids to school, document something in reasonably nice HTML, and get a damn window on the screen without having to think (as much) about it.

Sometimes I like to have more fine-tuned control of what is going on in my code without having to rely on a wrapper between me and the code.

I feel that if everyone uses markdown it will lead over time to less understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. You have to understand the low level access before you can properly use a high level library.

Am I the only one irked by the use of the non-word 'minimalistic', when the shorter 'minimal' or 'minimalist' is what is really meant?

It seems like a serious blow to one's minimalist cred. :)

Minimalistic is a word meaning: of or pertaining to someone or something advocating smallness

"minimalistic." Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon. Dictionary.com, LLC. 30 Dec. 2009. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/minimalistic>.

Interesting, that's the first dictionary i've ever seen that lists it - Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Websters all claim it's not a word. (As well as google - "Did you mean: minimalist")

In any case, all three are adjectives with what appear to be interchangeable meanings, so using the shortest suitable word seems most in the spirit of minimalism.

I've noticed a trend in people calling themselves minimalists. Well, there's nothing in the minimalist movement that dictates making block quotes obnoxious to read.

This trend also extends to any new framework or library someone writes. The code is always "fast and lightweight".

"am a minimalist at heart, I like simple things with clean lines and no clutter."

Judging from the design of his blog, this must be a guest post.

It's stupid. He's comparing low-level Win32 API to a high-level wrapper called Qt.

Notice how in his Qt example he lost control of the window style, icon, brush, cursor, styling of the message box, and a dozen of other little things that you can do with low level win32 api.

Whoosh, you missed the point. The point is that we can build abstractions to make our code smaller and more elegant, this leads to greater productivity.

I intentionally picked these examples to show how good programmers are at making nice abstractions to reduce the amount of work we have to do.

You can do all those things with QT, the point is that you don't have to.

I hope QT do error checking for you too then.

DH0 + weak DH4

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

QT has techniques for accomplishing all those little details like icons. But it also has the defaults already built in. So it is not necessary to set them up for a simple Hello World application. Later if he wants to change them he can add the extra code.

Comparing a low-level API like Win32 with a high-level toolkit like Qt FTW.

HelloWorld using C# and Windows Forms is about 10 lines if you do it by hand.

The author didn't know how to use it's/its correctly.

The lesson I am taking from all this is to promise less and deliver more.

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