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I enjoy nice-looking UIs with smooth animations too, but first they have to cover the basics. That's why I like HN's UI a lot - it's not fancy but it has the rare property of being usable, which already places it in the favorites of UIs in my personal ranking.

I don't think it's meant as a "filter", just built for its target audience of people with high enough standards to dislike blinking notification icons, cookie popups and website loading screens.

> with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.

I don't think I've ever witnessed someone expressing this opinion. It just seems to be a rarity that a budget covers both function and form. And if I have to choose then I prefer to not throw my PC out the window.

> This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.

There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc.

Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenet of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.

Good points.

Nit / correction (for helpfulness not pedantry)

tenant: renter or occupant vs tenet: guiding principle

Nice catch, fixed.

> Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenant of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual

Jobs loved skeuomorpism, which isn't inherently bad, but having iOS UI elements reproduce the stitching from seats in his private jet skews close to "purely visual". Also, the (early) iOS date picker was unforgivable - I assume Jobs was aware of its existence & approved of its rubber-stamp-like, user-hostile skeuomorphic design

Extreme skeuomorphism I would agree is purely visual, but I think there’s a lot of functional value in buttons looking like buttons and other visual indicators of function.

> Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies”...

No. Hold up.

This interface has 1 obvious reason that I see that no fancy polished interface can ever come close to: loading speed.

The day HN starts running that awful "squares on squares" JS design method where everything is a button with no borders is the day I leave HN. Luckily I don't think that day is coming.

You can absolutely have both. A little CSS would go a long way here, there is no reason to go full JS SPA to make a page look nice. In fact many times it’s the opposite.

I prefer HN website design for an entirely different reason: readability.

More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.

> Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish.

I certainly don't hold it up for any gatekeeping nonsense, and frankly I despise that anyone even uses the word "normies". What I like about this site's UI is that it places function over form and isn't built on a pile of trendy garbage and designed by people who never use it.

Why is it garish? I see it as the opposite and I am curious to hear another perspective.

It would've been fine, but it would not have been "perfect". Evidently some markets grossly overvalue quality of the product more than anything else (in comparison to other markets).

> You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all.

I 100% agree. "Good taste" is just another phrase that means "style that I prefer". There is no such thing as an objective ideal of good taste. It's all about human preferences, and that gets very complicated very quickly.

> "Good taste" is just another phrase that means "style that I prefer". There is no such thing as an objective ideal of good taste.

Strongly disagreed overall. I agree that there are plenty of situations where it is indeed just a matter of preference and is very subjective. But it is disingenous to claim that there is never such a thing as an objectively better preference.

Literally the specific example we are talking about in this thread - plastic prototype iPhone screens and keys scratching them. Is it really not objectively better to have a screen made of materials that don't get scratched by keys in your pocket easily? I don't think it is subjective at all.

"Taste" refers to aesthetics. The plastic screen example isn't related to taste, it's related to functionality.

I would say it is a good taste to consider this a problem important enough to address it, while all you competitors are aware of it and just don't think of it as something in need of a solution.

I think we aren't using the same definition of "taste" here. I think that considering that problem important enough to address was good business, but not related to "taste".

Going with the vision of one man, and the "style that he prefers" is often better than design by committee, or data-driven decisions that end up in the best case being a bland product that nobody hates, and in the worst case in a crappy product designed with the interest of the companies that produces it and its partners before the interests of the users/customers.