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> it does not go into any detailed analysis as to where that balance should lie

That's very much part of the point. From the article:

Without strict visual requirements associated with flat design, post flat offers designers tons of variety to explore new aesthetics – informed by the best qualities of skeuomorphic and flat design.

nsmartton Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google

It is recruiting, but it isn't just recruiting because it's explicitly targeting employees of another company, often a competitor.

nsmartton Attorneys for Barrett Brown want case on linking to hacked material dismissed

Adding "He had no malicious intent" would serve to make the asker's intention more clear, but still wouldn't add much to the discussion because it had already been established. I don't think asking why should be discouraged.

nsmartton With Free Version of Windows, Microsoft Gives In to the Google Way

I've used GNU/Linux for around 3 years. The only way I could even consider using Windows again would be with cygwin. The programs I use on a daily basis don't have easily available counterparts for Windows. It very much goes both ways.

nsmartton Jolla’s Sailfish OS has reached release 1.0

It seems like Jolla is going for a combination of #1 and #3. They're aiming to be compatible with existing Android hardware, they've made it easy to preview their OS on existing devices without making the switch outright, and they're targeting select countries first so that they can use their momentum to move into other countries (rather than overextending their reach from day one).

nsmartton Objective-C isn't what you think it is

Be careful with this kind of thing. You're inadvertently making the FP community look bad. A more constructive and less pushy approach would have been to recommend an enjoyable FP language and explain why you think it suits the parent.

nsmartton Jolla’s Sailfish OS has reached release 1.0

The compatibility with Android apps mitigates this to some extent.

nsmartton Prefer mercurial to git

> Git is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License version 2 (some parts of it are under different licenses, compatible with the GPLv2).

https://github.com/git/git

nsmartton Google enforcing Web store only extensions for Chrome

Coming back to Firefox from Chromium was a wonderful experience for me. The majority of extensions I used on Chromium were inferior to their Firefox counterparts, due largely to limitations of the extension API. Aside from that, load speeds are fine, the devtools are phenomenal, and everything is great. I actually enjoy using my browser.

nsmartton Ask HN: Skype, but properly peer-to-peer?

It says I need Chrome.

nsmartton What I learned from writing 750 words a day for 365 days

From the passage, it seems that Frank Herbert did have writer's block and chose to write anyway.

nsmartton Simulating a Market in Ruby

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-devel...

It's my understanding that this is the original article.

nsmartton Brushing your teeth: no longer the best thing for your teeth?

Why not? I find it to be fairly pleasant, albeit unnecessary.

nsmartton Australis is landing in Firefox Nightly

Firefox has looked awful on Linux for a long time. I'm excited to see a consistent design on every OS, and I've been primarily using the UX build for months.

A lot of people say this looks a lot like Chromium, but I don't find that to be the case at all. The background tabs aren't rounded at all, while tabs are shown to be rounded on mouse-over. It's a significant improvement over Chromium's approach. I'm not a tremendous fan of the rounded design, but it's certainly an improvement over the previous design.

nsmartton Protean Echo – Fuse All Your Cards into One

I'm pretty sure the others were posted in response to Coin. I'm also entirely uncomfortable with the notion that some problems are less real than others. Problems will have different levels of severity, but one problem doesn't invalidated another.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

The purpose may be communicated by the name, but the behavior can't (reasonably) be.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this. Hopefully we'll begin to reach a point where tabs are used and sites like GitHub adjust tab-width according to the developer's preference.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

Agreed. That's the purpose of the --help flag and equivalents.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

While it's true of some languages, it's certainly not true of all of them. I'm not sure most is accurate either. JSON is a subset of JavaScript, so it stands to reason that JavaScript could have as many indentation levels as JSON without a loss of clarity. It also stands to reason that any language with hashes, dictionaries, etc could feasibly exceed 3 indentation levels without it being a red flag, particularly if those hashes are in a method that is already indented more than one or two levels.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

I've always been conflicted on this. It's simply untrue that more than 3 levels of indentation indicates bad code. For example, HTML, XML, and JSON often benefit from deeper levels of indentation.

Tabs have the benefit of having a dynamic size, so I could simply adjust the tab width within my editor. Spaces also do not play as well with editors. Unfortunately, browsers offer no means to change the width of tabs, so it's impossible to properly display code using tabs. This is especially frustrating when reading the source of a page indented using tabs. It would be much easier to read with spaces, but not as easy to read as if I were able to set tab width.

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

The best argument I've seen here is that methods should be black boxes. Comments should reveal the input, output, and side effects of a method. There are two compelling reasons for this:

- I can add to my own code, even if it's years old, without re-reading every line every of every method I need

- I can contribute to a code-base built by multiple people without reading every line they've written

nsmartton Google's Shell Style Guide

The extension is unnecessary for syntax highlighting. Shebang lines are supposed to be used for detecting the file type.

As for knowing the file type at a glance, I'm not sure how often I need this. I'm normally looking for the file by name anyway. If I needed to determine the file-type, I'd write a script to parse the shebang lines of executable files in the current directory and generate a list of the files with their hypothetical extensions (based on a hash/dictionary/whatever). I don't need that very often, so, for me, the trade is worth it.

nsmartton Show HN : WebRTC helped me to launch my startup after 2 years of waiting.

Your site doesn't work without JavaScript. It should fail gracefully.

nsmartton The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones

Nicely said. I don't think we'll see the full conversion for a few years, but this is more or less how I think of it.

nsmartton Lime – Experimental Sublime Text clone

> I personally just don't see the value in bringing another text editor into the world

This isn't really a valid POV. There are many reasons to introduce solutions to problems with existing solutions. Is there any compelling reason not to open-source those solutions? Why does it matter whether there are competitors?

nsmartton Lime – Experimental Sublime Text clone

I haven't used ST3, but ST2 doesn't build based on shebang lines and won't hide the menubar on Linux. I'm sure there are many issues I've forgotten since moving to vim as well.

I can definitely see the argument that development slowing and a lack of transparency is a problem worth fixing.

nsmartton Ask HN: Have you considered switching from OS X to Linux?

Vagrant is available for Linux.

nsmartton Why I bike without a helmet

The cost of wearing a helmet is very low compared to the gain of having been wearing one during an accident (which could very well be caused by someone other than the cyclist).

nsmartton Ask HN: What literature do you read?

You saved me. Thanks.

nsmartton Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

> [W]e need reliability and predictability over a large variety of systems over many years. We need strong support by most of the world's software vendors and open source project. We need documentation, tools, and global resources for the most commonly used systems.

In which of these does Debain fall short?