3 ms·

Sigh. Obviously, if you're working on a website that is just ludicrously simple, you want to pretend that simplicity is difficult. Get behind the search algorit

Sigh. Obviously, if you're working on a website that is just ludicrously simple, you want to pretend that simplicity is difficult. Get behind the search algorithms at google or the scheduler in Windows NT and tell us about how "hard to build" simplicity is.

jraines 18y ago
Pretty hard, right? Isn't that his point?
- mynameishere 18y ago
  Three people have upmodded you, which means that there are at least three people here incapable of reading and processing very simple sentences: Complexity is easy to build That is what I am refering to. The search engine behind google and the scheduler in NT are COMPLEX, and to suggest that they are EASY TO BUILD for that reason is a suggestion of almost blinding stupidity.
  - jraines 18y ago
    He's saying simplicity FOR THE USER is tough to build. I'm sure even more so when they are backed by complex logic that make them magic for the user. Maybe you should work on your own reading comprehension skills before you go insulting other people's.
    - pg 18y ago
      Looks like sometimes that 140 character limit is a problem.
      - ivankirigin 18y ago
        I've seen a funny result of the 140 limit + the stack of comments. People will leave three part tweets, often numbered, but will need to do number 3 first. One thing people love about twitter is the ability to push updates to everyone. Everyone wouldn't tolerate it for long messages, but the desire is clearly there on behalf of the senders.
    - mynameishere 18y ago
      It still doesn't make sense. To extend my example, the interface into all search engines, google or otherwise, is naturally simple. The more complicated interfaces, like that of clusty.com or a9.com, are surely not easier to create.
      - mlinsey 18y ago
        Sure they are! Complicated interfaces make it easy to: 1 - avoid forcing yourself to really prioritize your feature set, something that's really hard to do and requires really understanding your users. 2 - push a bunch of effort from you to the user. For example, you cited A9.com. If I do a search on A9.com, the search results window is split (by default) into two parts: one that lists web search results and one that lists book search results. At least by default, it appears that both sections are always there. If I do a search on Google, than Google will usually only display web search results, but if it senses I'm searching for something about a book (example: do a search for "Charles Dickens"), you'll sometimes see some book results up at the top. Google's method of only showing you book results when it suspects you are looking for something having to do with books is both much less complex for the user and much more difficult to build.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
orib 18y ago
That's the point. It's far easier to simply tack on more code to special case something than it is to come up with a simple solution that will gracefully handle all input. To take your example of the Windows scheduler, I would expect that the reason that they made it special-case the foreground app instead of coming up with a more generic, algorithm with better interactive performance was because it would have required more hard thinking. (Of course, I can't say this for sure without seeing their code) This is also the same reason that a beginner's code will be so convoluted. They try to handle everything through adding more complexity in special cases, instead of stopping and thinking about how to orthogonalize the code, making a simpler algorithm. The same argument applies to UIs -- its far easier to add an option than to make a tool more generically useful. It would be far easier for google to add textfields to their UI for specifying the sort of searches you want to do more clearly than it would be for them to improve their pagerank algorithms. Things need to be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and simplicity is usually far harder to achieve than complexity for a given problem.

jraines 18y ago

Pretty hard, right? Isn't that his point?

mynameishere 18y ago
Three people have upmodded you, which means that there are at least three people here incapable of reading and processing very simple sentences: Complexity is easy to build That is what I am refering to. The search engine behind google and the scheduler in NT are COMPLEX, and to suggest that they are EASY TO BUILD for that reason is a suggestion of almost blinding stupidity.
- jraines 18y ago
  He's saying simplicity FOR THE USER is tough to build. I'm sure even more so when they are backed by complex logic that make them magic for the user. Maybe you should work on your own reading comprehension skills before you go insulting other people's.
  - pg 18y ago
    Looks like sometimes that 140 character limit is a problem.
    - ivankirigin 18y ago
      I've seen a funny result of the 140 limit + the stack of comments. People will leave three part tweets, often numbered, but will need to do number 3 first. One thing people love about twitter is the ability to push updates to everyone. Everyone wouldn't tolerate it for long messages, but the desire is clearly there on behalf of the senders.
  - mynameishere 18y ago
    It still doesn't make sense. To extend my example, the interface into all search engines, google or otherwise, is naturally simple. The more complicated interfaces, like that of clusty.com or a9.com, are surely not easier to create.
    - mlinsey 18y ago
      Sure they are! Complicated interfaces make it easy to: 1 - avoid forcing yourself to really prioritize your feature set, something that's really hard to do and requires really understanding your users. 2 - push a bunch of effort from you to the user. For example, you cited A9.com. If I do a search on A9.com, the search results window is split (by default) into two parts: one that lists web search results and one that lists book search results. At least by default, it appears that both sections are always there. If I do a search on Google, than Google will usually only display web search results, but if it senses I'm searching for something about a book (example: do a search for "Charles Dickens"), you'll sometimes see some book results up at the top. Google's method of only showing you book results when it suspects you are looking for something having to do with books is both much less complex for the user and much more difficult to build.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

orib 18y ago

That's the point. It's far easier to simply tack on more code to special case something than it is to come up with a simple solution that will gracefully handle all input. To take your example of the Windows scheduler, I would expect that the reason that they made it special-case the foreground app instead of coming up with a more generic, algorithm with better interactive performance was because it would have required more hard thinking. (Of course, I can't say this for sure without seeing their code) This is also the same reason that a beginner's code will be so convoluted. They try to handle everything through adding more complexity in special cases, instead of stopping and thinking about how to orthogonalize the code, making a simpler algorithm. The same argument applies to UIs -- its far easier to add an option than to make a tool more generically useful. It would be far easier for google to add textfields to their UI for specifying the sort of searches you want to do more clearly than it would be for them to improve their pagerank algorithms. Things need to be as simple as possible, but no simpler, and simplicity is usually far harder to achieve than complexity for a given problem.