Agree with focusing on doing it because you enjoy it, something gets lost when we try and impress others; I'm sure we can all remember being a child and doing things purely because we enjoyed it.
However, I disagree with the personal style part of things, or trying to make things look good. These things don't have to be about impressing an audience. It can be just as much about enjoying the process.
The way I read “personal style” was, don’t make it your whole personality.
And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism.
For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.
But the second you want to make things for anyone else is when UI/UX matters.
Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.
People say this but I never saw it matter like you say. I know many ux/ui people in my network who I ask for feedback and help; I have never seen any difference in uptake from the vanilla theme version I did myself through to months of tweaking these guys did. Sure it looks tons nicer but it doesn’t reflect at all in (measured) user satisfaction, signups or usage. The default themes these days (shadcn etc) don’t make any of the mistakes you mentioned and users that are not obsessed with tech don’t really care ‘it looks like everything else’. Maybe it’s because I never do b2c and only b2b, but I never saw the difference, not in the last 30 years anyway. Even when these design systems and widgets etc didn’t exist, people didn’t care because there was nothing better; now there is ‘more than good enough by default’.
Would it change anything if Hacker News was redesigned to look exactly like Reddit's UI? Because a lot of people would not want that. Behind the scenes, there are a lot of similarities between the two sites - but doesn't the fact that they look so different actually make them different?
If you're saying design doesn't matter at all then changing the look of Hacker News to be like Reddit should have no effect on user satisfaction, signups, or usage.
I sense a bias toward minimalism (that I share) but that's still intentional design.
Yes, you have a good point. And you are right about minimalism; I think though this is different in the way you state this example; reddit is now made to be annoying to make money with ads and data collection: I believe no one likes that. A better example would be: how about remake hn with shadcn ; I don’t think many would mind if it was still fast (which is not design anyway); it’s functional and clean. Reddit (new) is functional nor fast… that is not all design but js and all kinds of browser functionality hijacking to make it more likely you click on ads, lose your track so you go browse other things etc.
Design and branding matter a lot more than people realize. Not just in terms of appeal - it sets the stage for everything that follows.
Half the social media apps are the same thing: Feed, like, block people, follow, post (with image/video, etc.), hash tags, etc. but the slightest difference in design and branding sets forth a different content platform.
UI/UX isn't just aesthetics, it's utility and a huge part of what the thing is.
There are myriad of software that have been super popular despite having dodgy UI. But the whole point is not to care if your app is popular or not if the whole point is enjoying the process of building the app more than seeing it used by many.
Yeah, I think another way to think about this is "don't get distracted with cultivating and maintaining your brand", rather than "don't find any particular way that you enjoy doing the thing."
One of those is performative and creates pressure and expectation, often at the expense of personal enjoyment and rest. The other is just finding the bit that's interesting to you.
I think the sentiment is ok, but like you, I think the overall message is completely nonsense. It’s obviously fine to do things you aren’t enjoying as part of a process of to achieve your goals, and that doesn’t need to be about outside validation at all. I’m not very good at design, I don’t too much enjoy the process. Well I do enjoy parts of it when the hyperfocus sets in, but as a whole I don’t enjoy the process. I still do it, not because I care what anyone else will think about the end result but because, I, care about what, I, will think about it.
I’m sure the author is doing some sort of simplification of things. A lot of learning processes aren’t necessarily enjoyable and almost none are enjoyable all the time. I spend years learning how to airbrush while absolutely hating the process because I wanted to be able to do certain things. Now that I can actually make the stuff I envision I enjoy the process, but sucking at the beginning? Yeah that sucked. Hell, even if your end goal, is, outside validation… go for it!
But I do agree with the whole “life is short, so what you love” sentiment. It’s just that you could put it so much better and less condescending than the author does here.
It might be better to interpret in the context of the subtitle: “Advice for myself around leisure activities.”
If my advice is to myself, I don’t see how it is condescending. It seems by definition that it can’t be. I cannot pretend to be above me.
My summary of the sentiment would be “don’t allow the weight of imagined judgmental eyeballs to steal your joy in trying or pursuing your personal creative endeavour”
There is an irony in the blog now being seen at HN scale and judged.
I think more people should keep chickens in back yards. They’re good pets, they recycle scrap foods and they keep insects off your veggies. Nobody should be buying cage eggs in the shops.
Theres still some kinda difficult ethical problems with those. People generally want female chickens, since that's where the eggs come from (and I think there are problems with having multiple males in a flock). Unfortunately naturally you get a 50:50 ratio of males and females in the eggs. The males are usually killed shortly after hatching.
Its worth pointing out that there are methods for avoiding this, by detecting the male chicks when they're still essentially a foetus in the egg. These work so well that France, Germany and Italy banned culling chicks a few years back. Unfortunately they're more expensive than determining the chick's sex after they are hatched so other places don't do it.
Are there? I think that all animal suffering is bad. And I think that in general more living creates is a moral good. But I'd argue the right to remain alive once alive only really kicks for animals that can make plans about the future. So I'd feel qualms about euthanizing a raven or parrot, but not a chicken.
I think that in the absense of a "god" to tell us, everyone has to come to their own conclusions about where they draw moral lines. For me specifically I think that being able to make plans about the future is a superficially appealing but pretty bad way to decide. For a start there are humans who (because of brain-damage or whatever) lack the ability to make meaningful plans.
I thought that the traditional way, with traditional breeds of chicken, was to allow the male chicks to grow large enough to be slaughtered for their meat.
Industrial farming use different breeds for egg-laying and meat, so they would find early culling more economical.
I believe that is how things traditionally were, but I think it is rather rare today. It will depend on the specific breeder what they do with them. I'm sure some smaller breeders keep the males around but this is not the case with large-scale breeders.
Eggs aren't fertilized (no roosters :|). If you really want to get down to the ugly truth of eggs, you're essentially eating chicken menstruation...And there's no ethical problems when it's in a backyard or the chickens are free ranging. I agree that commercial poultry operations are gruesome and psychotic but that's what happens when you build these things out at scale and it's largely a result of the great-depression and the new deal machinations to end hunger. Good intentions pave the path into hell.
> And there's no ethical problems when it's in a backyard or the chickens are free ranging.
I believe there are. The people buying the chickens for their lovely free range or backyard thing are specifically only buying female ones. The males get killed, usually in somewhat gruesome ways shortly after hatching.
That might not be an ethical problem for you but it is for me.
While I agree with you, as already mentioned by other poster it is likely that the practice of killing the males will be banned in most places and it will disappear, because now there are means to detect the sex of the eggs, so the male eggs can be selected for egg consumption.
I'm very far from qualified to talk about the economics of the egg industry but quoting from Wikipedia
> On 18 July 2021, French Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, announced chick culling would be banned from 1 January 2022.[70] Both maceration and gassing will be prohibited, and the French government would grant chicken breeders subsidies of 10 million euros combined in order to acquire in-ovo sexing machines instead (leading to extra consumer costs of about 1 eurocent per box of six eggs).
My 3 big hold-ups are not wanting to annoy my neighbors, since I live on a corner and behind my house would be next to their back yard. Then not being sure how my dogs would handle the chickens. One has a lot of herding instinct and the other has guardian instincts, but they both react to wild animals strongly. And finally the current bird flu going around bird populations worries me.
I’ve been doing this for a year and it’s been great. 3 currently laying hens, which means about 3 eggs a day. 4 younger hens also. Getting an automatic coop door is helpful.
There exists quite a few of vegan egg replacement products already.
I've found egg replacement based on lupinus seed flour to be perfectly adequate for baking sponge cake and frying crepes.
The problem is that a replacement product that doesn't contain the identical substance can replace the original only in some recipes. With "vegan products" in general, you'd have to pay more attention when cooking because it will often not cook exactly the same way as the product it imitates.
> Without eating animal products society would collapse.
I'm not a vegetarian (I eat an egg every day!), but wow, what a confident assertion. I'm open to your evidence behind this, but it seems absolutely preposterous to me.
Imagine going to a part of the world ravaged by starvation and explaining to them that we're throwing millions at growing egg whites in a lab because the chickens are sad. The amount of privilege needed for this is incomprehensible.
I mean, you realise that one of the major long-term goals of this sort of thing is a _cheaper product_? Theoretical efficiency for something like this is far higher than for a chicken, because, well, you don't need to sustain an actual _chicken_. The egg-laying chicken itself is largely a rather expensive byproduct in the egg production process.
Further, "long-term" is a weasel word that is meaningless to people starving right now. The hungry want to hear food is coming, not some hifalutin agriculturally illiterate fantasy thought up by hung over trust fund kids.
Short if giving a specific date and objective success criteria, long-term means never.
What this company is doing is not zero-sum with providing food aid, and it's certainly not taking any food sources out of circulation for the hypothetical country being posited. Why is it one or the other? The money put into this research is not coming from the budgets for food banks. Is all R&D in this space, even from private investors, a waste in your eye?
I mean, long-term would want to be soon, or the company will go out of business. From the article, and I do realise that it is considered most improper to actually read them on this website:
> Onego Bio plans to sell Bioalbumen to companies that would then create the food products.
The processed food industry is very cost-sensitive and both industrial egg albumen and various substitutes are already available; if they're not price competitive they'll die quickly.
It doesn't seem at all unlikely that they'lll get to being price competitive quickly. They're producing a single protein with a fungus. There's another well-known example of this; quorn. Quorn's actually a bit more complex in that, once they've produced their protein they need to add stuff to make it palatable, and their processed output still comes in at about the same cost as processed chicken, and generally a bit cheaper than other processed meat. These people seem to be literally just producing albumen, so it's close to an ideal case.
I think the idea that there’s still so much about nutrition we don’t know is a very reasonable take and a good argument against removing animal products from our diet
Of course there is a conversation to be had, though I think there's pretty clear evidence individuals can function just fine without animal consumption. But the idea that "society would collapse"? That seems to be going just a tad bit beyond what I would consider a "very reasonable take".
I think it would be easier to argue that our addiction to meat consumption is one culprit fueling society's collapse already given the environmental and ecological impact that meat production creates.
If everyone stopped drinking alcohol, society would also collapse.
By monetary valuation, the global alcohol market is over 30x the size of the global meat market. Does this mean we should discourage people from replacing getting drunk with healthier alternatives?
Well, I had sources yesterday but I didn't save them. Today all I can find is that the alcohol industry is a little bigger, but not 30x (maybe closer to 20%). I'm not sure why there is so much disparity in these kinds of figures. Every source I can find today still seems to indicate the meat industry is at least somewhat smaller, though.
> Without eating animal products society would collapse.
... Wait, how does that follow? Like, if everyone stopped tomorrow, sure, maybe; it would at the very least be a massive economic shock, and would likely lead to critical shortages as well. But phased out over time, it's not clear why this would be the case.
As a junior having only started two years ago, I am worried. I am very behind on what I need to know to be valuable beyond creating CRUD apps.
It feels like I need to either have an idea and build it myself or change careers. Perhaps this is overly pessimistic, but the rate at which everything is changing is alarming.
