alsomike

But there's a sense in which minimalism is highly ornamental - it uses space, proportion and texture as ornament, rather than treating them as containers for ornamentation. Lots of designers shy away from minimalism because it's a very unforgiving style, and you need to be something of a perfectionist to get it right.

How is it hyperbolic? Your definition of a "professionally-designed" logo excludes the normal professional process for identity design. Then you conclude that engineering always beats aesthetics.

In other words, a lot of time is spent attacking straw men that don't resemble what professional working designers actually do. The attitudes and beliefs attributed to designers sounds more like it comes from people who pass themselves off as designers because they have a pirated copy of Photoshop, so the only lesson here is that people who are clueless about design hire clueless designers.

You sound like Dilbert's boss.

Bing has run ads. Google too, at the last Superbowl.

Eharmony has been profitable since 2004, with $250 million annual revenue.

Another counterexample: Ancestry.com

Counter examples: Meetup.com and dating sites.

Possibly not the third reality, but the only reality. What if pleasure and control are always two sides of the fascist coin? The totalitarian master isn't only saying "Sacrifice yourself for the good of the Nation, discipline yourself, follow the rules and give up your pleasures." He also says "We will break all the rules, no restrictions, all pleasures are permitted - we can kill some Jews, rape some slaves, lynchings and torture are OK!" The obscene underside of the control and discipline in the KKK and Nazism is the orgy of violence, throwing off the normal repressive rules of society that control our impulses.

Why is fascism so closely associated with control and discipline? The purpose is to conceal the totalitarianism inherent in our own society, like how we were taught that American society is free because individuals can enjoy their consumer pleasures, while people in the Soviet Union are subjected to discipline and control.

That's much trickier than you think, because people's reactions are highly contextual. Imagine if someone went on the dance floor who you wouldn't expect to have any dance moves at all, but they are pretty good. They would get extremely positive reactions, so an alien posing as a human watching this would imitate this, but suddenly get a negative reaction because it would be seen as mocking. It's also possible to dance so well that it generates negative reactions like jealousy. Or you can have geeky Napoleon Dynamite dancing - cheesy, inappropriate and flawed, but somehow able to succeed despite itself. This is because quality of dancing isn't wholly intrinsic to the dance itself, it depends on other social factors, like the social identity of the dancer, the self-perception of the audience, the social meaning of the music and the type of dance being performed. For an alien, this would be the hard problem of dancing. What it boils down to is that when knowledge is highly contextual, it's very hard to learn it as a neutral external observer, you have to become a participant - in a way, before you can learn to dance, first you have to learn to be the audience for dance, to become embedded in the social meanings. This might also be the significance of being a good listener before you can become a good conversationalist.

"Science advances one funeral at a time." -Max Planck

Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard

Dialectic of Enlightenment - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno

The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek

Sources of the Self - Charles Taylor

This "cause and effect" argument strikes me as incredibly shallow thinking. Do you seriously believe that the only way people learn cause and effect is from spankings? Appealing to cause and effect is extremely misleading because a punishment is not a natural effect of the cause of misbehavior. This is true almost by definition - you have to create a punishment because there is no natural negative consequences to whatever they did. That's why no-one punishes kids for falling and skinning their knee - the effect proceeds naturally from the cause. So the punishment is by definition an artificial manufacturing of a negative consequence to enforce the behavior of the parent's choosing -- not only is this objectively true, every child knows this. If you ask a kid why they get punished, how many would say "That's the way the universe works, it's like gravity."? None. They all realize that it's the parent's decision and choice, and are well-aware that other parent's make different decisions.

The reason this is important is that attempting to elide the parent's choice in how and when to punish is an attempt to avoid responsibility for being an authority, with all the questions of legitimacy, responsibility, transparency, appropriateness & fairness that that entails. Saying your actions are natural consequences like gravity means you are making yourself into a tyrant who cannot be questioned. This failure to accept the responsibility of being an authority is also a mark of the permissive parent, who refuses to set any limits at all. Even though they seem like opposites, they have something in common.

I have been studying continental philosophy for a few years now, mostly Kant, Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger. I think it's extremely interesting and rewarding and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel intellectually challenged. I read a book about Maurice Merleau-Ponty that included excerpts of his writing in both English and French, and I thought that the French was much clearer, even with my limited knowledge of the language, and it made me want to improve my French and learn German so that I can better understand what they're saying.

So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process - I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly) tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks, because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it - it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too, you have a head start.

One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically, continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically, it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists, it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.

If you think postmodernism comes from Hegel, I'm not convinced you know what continental philosophy is.

Some of the more interesting data is when beginner and advanced use of a feature is similar, but intermediate use is way different. Scroll vertical up is 16.7 and 14.4 for beginners and advanced users, but 54.9 for intermediate users. So beginners don't scroll up and advanced users use the page-up key? Reload is similar, beginners don't reload as much as intermediate users and advanced users use F5.

Harder to explain is why location bar clicking goes down once users become intermediate, and then goes back up when they become advanced users.

This quote, plus the author's misuse of Buddhist concepts reminds me of a quote from the book Zen at War, attributed to a prominent Buddhist priest: "If ordered to march: tramp, tramp or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest wisdom of enlightenment."

In other words, loyalty and absolute submission to military leaders and the state was seen as a sign of egolessness and enlightenment.

In your restaurant example, I'd say there's no distinction between the second and the third option. Even though there is a dynamic market of different restaurants, by virtue of the fact that they are in competition with each other, they are homogeneous at a different level. Obviously not in the same way where all restaurants are collapsed into one enormous food court under centralized control, but in the sense that they all draw from the same pool of patrons, suppliers, employees, infrastructure, the same legal and monetary system, etc. This fact means that it is, in principle, always possible to game the system through those avenues. By virtue of the fact that there is a playing field, it can be tilted. The possibility for abuse of power still exists, although it's a different type of abuse than the arbitrary whims of the chef at the one giant restaurant in town. One important difference is that it's much more abstract and esoteric. It's easy to identify power when the chef refuses to cook eggs because he hates eggs and you have no other choices - this is a transparent kind of power. But when your favorite seafood restaurant goes out of business because market manipulations behind the scenes caused prices to suddenly spike, we don't see that as a result of power, it's even naturalized as the market at work. An important point is that at the naive, everyday level, everyone appears to have made a free choice - the restaurant owner, the patrons, the newly unemployed workers, etc. A concrete example of this is credit default swaps - some homeowners in California default on their loans, and suddenly people in Iceland have to pay double for food.

In the example of restaurant reviews, you could indeed create another competing aggregator if it had been corrupted, but then you would need some kind of aggregator aggregator, possibly a search engine. The example here is torrent sites - its a decentralized system, but for that to be usable, torrent search engines sprung up so that you could find things. You can't possibly track down and sue everyone seeding a torrent, but you can shut down the handful of search engines which is just as good. Further decentralization just creates the same problem at a different level.

File sharing is also a good example of what I'm talk about with the different kinds of power. If the cops raided your house because you borrowed some books from a friend, that would immediately appear to you as an expression of power. But the absence of a backup option when you put a DVD into a computer doesn't (OK, unless you are technically savvy). Notice how this is operative at the level of language: if you ask someone to backup a DVD, they will try and then tell you: "You can't do that." But as we know, you can do it, it's been disabled. Here again, power is naturalized, prohibitions and controls are thought of as inevitable or physical impossibilities.

My point is that we are concerned about the overt forms of power, and pay very little attention to the covert forms of power, those which determine our very perception of freedom vs. non-freedom. One of the effects of network decentralization is to make power more abstract, which is part of the reason we have so many conspiracy theories today. Conspiracy theorists are like creationists, they see complex phenomena emerge and attribute it to someone behind the scenes coordinating it and pulling all the strings, which puts a face on it, naively unabstracting it. A paranoid DRM conspiracy theorist might believe the MPAA sent operatives into his house and installed software that disabled DVD backups. There's some kind of twisted truth in it, but the problem is that his mode of resistance is all wrong. Now he thinks he can just hole up, board up the windows, buy a gun and he will be safe.

So this is another reason why developers are important - they can see and resist power without naively unabstracting it.

Despite all the enthusiasm around decentralization, I think it's a failed option. It creates the illusion that power doesn't exist, when it's only been hidden, making it harder to fight. I've written about that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389356

I agree on accountability. There will always be elites and the people need strong collective institutions to hold them accountable. The fact that government hasn't always acted in our interest is no reason to hand over everything to the elites.

Social responsibility needs to be imposed on those in positions of power. Or would you rather we trust elites on their assurance that they are good and kind and just? That's how the old feudal monarchies used to work.

This is certainly true, which is why the libertarian bent of some developers who disavow any notion of social responsibility is so disturbing.

Written by marketers? You mean something like "An error occurred! Oh, and have you signed up for our promotional newsletter? It's FREE!"

Maybe he's pulling up the ladder after he climbed it!

Yes, way to buck the system and advocate neoliberal ideas from political outsiders like Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Clinton, Blair, W & Obama.

The only publishers that this will affect are the ones that ignore readability and user experience. That's the only time you'd use this feature. I think letting users punish poor design is brilliant way to create the right incentives.

Two things about this strike me as very strange:

- putting creativity and constraints in opposition, rather than seeing constraints at the heart of creativity. This is the ultimate justification for doing nothing, it says "I can't be creative, the authorities don't allow it!" Why not just simply take the risk, break the rule and do a U-turn? Oh, you might get in trouble? Sorry, but that's the nature of taking risks. Wishing for risk-free risks is a deeply conservative move.

- misunderstanding the nature of authority. Here, the authority is overt, it's clear that they are giving orders. A much more interesting authority is the hidden one which structures what you perceive as freedom vs. constraint. Continuing the metaphor, the opposition is between being able to make a u-turn vs. u-turns being forbidden, but the real anti-authoritarian question is who built the road and where is it going, regardless of which direction you drive?

But why can't free software compete without the government mandating it's use? Without licensing costs, it should have an advantage. The answer is that free software is often unresponsive to user's needs, and telling users to scratch their own itch is an example of that. Open source has achieved huge success among developers, because as a community of developers, they deeply understand those needs. It's been much less successful at developing products for non-technical users because it doesn't understand them, and has no strong incentives to try.

Maybe he is Big Brother, but is that a bad thing? Today's authorities wrap themselves in "anti-authoritarianism", constantly demanding that we express ourselves creativity, think for ourselves and be unique. Far from being subversive, this reflexive self-fashioning and self-expression is harnessed to create profit for the powerful, from the simplest blog post generating page views and advertising dollars, to the creation of new tech start-ups innovating new products to periodically revitalize the aging bureaucratic global corporate status quo.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman claimed that Huxley was correct and Orwell was wrong: we're being oppressed by being drowned in irrelevant, trivial entertainment, not through censorship, explicit control and regulation. For the internet age, this idea is out of date. Today's form of control isn't making us passive, instead, it makes us active in ways that further the interests of power. We're told our creativity is subversive, even radical and revolutionary and therefore deeply significant, and yet nothing really changes. What's most interesting about all this supposedly disruptive change is how in the end, it's purpose is for the exact opposite: the smooth functioning of global capitalism.

Perhaps you can argue that this is a good thing, but it's impossible to argue that anything truly revolutionary is happening. Steve Jobs and Apple are not necessarily good, but they are a kind of progress because they demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes - the supposed revolutionary, world-changing potential of technology is a sham, it's the same old capitalism as usual.

But isn't it strange that many climate deniers are skeptical of global warming, yet have total faith in a much more implausible idea: a coordinated group of scientists are systematically suppressing dissent to further their ideology.

This reminds me of a story in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams illustrating psychological denial. It's about a man who returns a borrowed kettle that had been broken to his neighbor. To explain the damage he says "It's not broken; when I borrowed it, it was already broken; I never borrowed it!" In other words, three mutually incompatible explanations for what happened to try to avoid the facts. Here, you say that Wikipedia is not an oligarchy; and also, it is an oligarchy, but it's justified. The claim against my argument is that it's both too superficial and also an elaborate conspiracy theory, a complicated mindfuck that defies logic. Are these arbitrary outbursts not evidence in themselves of a refusal to consider the facts?

This logic of "Democracy is great! But of course we have to have some standards..." has been used to conceal elite power for centuries. In the US, political participation was originally reserved for white, male property owners, because it was thought that the standard for voting is rationality, which women and lesser races don't have. The elites permit democracy, but they reserve the right to decide what the standards for participation should be. Who decides what "good-faith" means? This isn't conspiracy, it is ideological delusion: elites become corrupt because they're convinced of their own benevolence, that because they stand for Democracy and Decentralization (today's empty signifiers, replacing God, Nation), preserving their elite position is justified. It is definitely not because they cynically manipulate, pulling the strings behind the scenes while laughing at the deluded masses. It's a natural human tendency to see yourself as acting only for the greater good, and to adopt an ideology that explains why what's good for you is good for all.

As I mentioned before, my preferred solution to elite power is not some fantasy of "true democracy", which only ends up concealing real power. Nor do I think that elite control is necessarily a bad thing, only concealing elite power behind mask of democracy. Scientific knowledge is an obvious arena where we are best served by having an elite. But if they abuse their power, we should be ready with the (metaphorical) guillotine. In the case of Facebook, the real response is not a different, more decentralized system, but the guillotine of strong privacy regulations. Or government enforcement of net neutrality, and so on. The libertarian & anti-government leanings of the tech community is more evidence in favor of my argument. Is this not just another way to defend an oligarchy? I think many sincerely believe that this is the best arrangement, but avoiding the facts might cast some doubt on this.

Wikipedia is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because it's controlled by a very small number of elites with no accountability. This is true of Britannica, but the difference is that Wikipedia editors have perversely managed to co-opt populist democratic rhetoric in order to justify what is effectively an oligarchy. The presence of the edit button on each page functions as an ideological mystification to conceal the where the real power lies. What's happening is that we are provided with the illusion of power, on condition that we never actually use it. As soon as you actually try to become a wikipedia editor, you are immediately confronted with a co-ordinated power bloc that is virtually impossible to penetrate. So far, these elites have been benevolent, but the case of one poweful Wikipedia editor who was a member of a cult and deleted any criticism of the cult leader on his page illustrates that abuse of power is possible.

Another example of this is restaurant reviews. The basic argument is familiar: a single restaurant reviewer in a newspaper is an elite, and this creates the potential for abuse of power. He could demand kickbacks from restaurants to ensure positive reviews or promote his friends' restaurants at the expense of competitors, and so on. Decentralization is proposed as the solution: instead of a single restaurant review, individual patrons review restaurants on a web site and it averages the reviews, and even if a few of them are corrupt, it's much harder to subvert the system. So problem solved, it's a much more trustworthy system. Except for one minor problem: Yelp implements this idea, and restaurant owners have complained that Yelp has abused their power by trying to extort advertising dollars from them by threatening to delete positive reviews and post negative reviews.

The pattern should be clear: moving from a centralized system to a decentralized network doesn't eliminate power, it just moves it to a different place where it can be potentially abused by a different group of elites. That position of power comes from controlling the protocol which aggregates each individual node on the network. The nodes can be decentralized and distributed, but the cost for this is that they must all speak the same language to connect to each other, which is a centralization at a different level.

That's why further decentralization doesn't solve the Yelp problem. We could imagine a federated system of restaurant reviews where individual reviews are stored on servers controlled by individuals, so they can't be deleted. But this just moves the power to a different level - the system for aggregating the peers on the node becomes the position of power, which could potentially be exploited for power and money to an elite. A similar relationship exists between Facebook and Diaspora. This is why Google promotes decentralization, because it is the centralized place you have to pass through in order to get to all that decentralized content, and there's lots of money to be had in owning that position. The handful of multinational corporations that control the internet backbones are also in a similar position of power, control and profit. This is ideal position to hold power, because the average person is completely clueless that these are positions of power. Think of how few people are aware of the importance of network neutrality, for example. Evgeny Morozov makes similar points in his TED talk entitled "How the Net aids dictatorships."

Really, the people promoting decentralization as a moral imperative are the ones who are profiting from it, from VC backed startups who stand to make millions or even billions of dollars to global multinationals who already are. Here again, the idealistic hacker ethos and ruthless corporate capitalism turn out to be one and the same, a nice example of the Hegelian coincidence of opposites.

On the contrary, his only mistake was that he didn't see that the naive idealistic pseudo-democratization which co-opts the people's creativity to become conduits for advertising is one and the same as corporate capitalism.