

Simplicity - brianchu
http://francispedraza.com/simplicity

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gklitt
I found it quite a stretch to call manufacturing exactly identical iPhones
"truly one of our civilization’s greatest accomplishments". An impressive
feat, to be sure, but pretty far down there on my "greatest accomplishments of
civilization" list, after democracy, basic medicine, space exploration, etc.

The general point is a good one though! It's true that simplicity is often
invoked as an excuse for laziness, and authentic simplicity can be very
difficult to achieve. I think that developers/designers sometimes confuse
simplicity of their process with simplicity of the end result. The latter is
really all that matters.

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francispedraza
Hi, I'm the author. Thanks for your thoughts. Think about it less literally.
Remember the part where the machine choses from one of 725 variations on a
part? Think about all that goes behind that. It's the accumulation of decades
of hard work that has led to technological advances in manufacturing processes
and hardware designs to lead to this moment. No other civilization in history
could have dreamt of manufacturing something so refined on this scale, so
(relatively) cheaply. And think about the historical macro-scale of the iPhone
and Mobile in general. The Massai warrior in Kenya has more information in his
phone than Nixon did in the White house. That is a civilization-scale
accomplishment.

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ShirtlessRod
If you want to point to general manufacturing processes and advancements as
one of "civilization's greatest accomplishments", that's one thing, but you
appear to be specifically talking about the iPhone as if that product itself
is anywhere near a greatest accomplishment of civilization.

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r4dius
I didn't read it as such, but can understand how it could have come off that
way. The author seemed to be speaking with enough generality that each example
was just a pit stop along the much broader thread of the post.

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bithive123
How are readers supposed to approach this piece? The tone reminds me of
Morpheus from The Matrix. I know we live in the age of "tl;dr", but the
formatting demonstrates the piece's assertion that "Less, for the sake of
less, is not more."

I should probably regard it as a poem of sorts, but as a series of assertions
it basically tells us that in order to advance the state of the art (which has
come so far that things once thought impossible feel simple) we must be
willing to spend a lot of effort solving hard problems. The rest of the piece
tries so hard at profundity that it ends up being mundane.

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jakejake
I don't claim to have ever achieved perfection with anything I've done. But I
can say from experience of designing a lot of systems, that the initial
designs are usually messy and complicated. A lot of developers stop there and
start building. But if you keep going, at a certain point things start to
become simple and obvious. That's how I know I've managed to get to the core
of some certain problem. It's a great feeling when all of a sudden the design
or approach seems to just fit perfectly.

I don't really know how to get there except to just continue re-working things
until that magic moment happens.

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6ren
1\. Simplicity is removal of redundancy.

2\. More redundancy can be revealed by expanding scope.

3\. The ideal scope size is what can be reasoned about independently and
specified independently from the rest (there's a global optimisation problem
here, of trade-offs between the scopes of adjacent parts).

4\. The scope for _measuring_ redundancy can also be expanded, to include all
things reasoned about and specified by a person. This enables us to account
for specification techniques which are complex in themselves (in an absolute
sense), but which improve simplicity overall, by being applicable in many
situations (generalised) - they can remove redundancy across unrelated domains
by factoring it out.

 _an information-theoretic perspective_

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jhuckestein
The author quotes Jony Ive on simplicity. There's a great interview he did
with the telegraph on simplicity:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan-
Ive-interview-simplicity-isnt-simple.html)

My favorit quote is "Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a
consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the
purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a
clutter-free product. That's not simple."

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weavejester
I prefer the definition of simplicity proposed by Rich Hickey in Simple Made
Easy: <http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy>

It's a more concrete and historically accurate definition than the vague
description supplied in the article.

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adrianhoward
I don't claim this as any great insight - but I've been finding using 'sharp'
or 'precise' as a description useful instead of 'simple' when talking with
clients about UX and UI design.

It doesn't cover quite the same ground as 'simple' - but it seems much easier
to talk about. Simple is one of those words that means radically different
things to different people. Minimal. Easy. Monotone. Etc.

Folk who liked the OP would probably find the book The Laws Of Simplicity by
John Maeda of interest <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/laws-simplicity>. It's
more a series of extended blog-post style essays around simplicity than it is
a unifying framework of laws - but I still found it a thought provoking read.
Short too ;-)

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Osmium
"Albert Einstein achieved simplicity. He dared to unravel the mysteries of the
universe. He arrived at E=MC²."

What does this even mean? Einstein's theories are perhaps elegant, but simple?

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michaelkscott
The best

Simplicity

Loving all the great minimally titled posts coming out of sbvtle lately.

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francispedraza
Thanks to whoever added this to Hacker News! Great to find it here.

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brianchu
My takeaway was that simplicity = precision, not elimination.

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queryly
love the article. I would add that simplicity is just the right amount of
abstraction. a little more becomes complex. a little less becomes
incomprehensible.

