callum85

That article is bullshit. You can't judge gov.uk by its homepage, because that's almost never where you land.

Now that we have gov.uk, whenever I google something about doing my tax, or registering to vote at a new address, or any other arduous governmental admin shit, I usually end up on a beautifully simple and focused gov.uk page, and I'm in and out in 2 minutes. That's what a government website is about.

I agree the homepage looks like a parked domain but whatever. Take a random page like this: https://www.gov.uk/alter-a-will-after-a-death

Look at how brief and clear the writing is. Look at how straightforward its URL is. Have a look at some more pages, look how consistent the design language is. This is exactly what a government website should be like.

"I guess I need to apologize to my parents, friends, and the staff at Chuck E. Cheese's for all the times I called the cops on them."

— title text from today's XCKD http://xkcd.com/1581/

Not a lawyer, but here's how I see it:

Lawsuit: "You approached me and gave me false information that has cost me money. Pay me to cover all my losses resulting from this false information."

How (or even whether) the defendent benefited from the losses doesn't even need to come into it, as far as I can tell.

It's a bit self conscious, but it's good natured and sincere, certainly not pretentious.

Getting slightly off topic, but I'm confused about an aspect of server push (maybe you can help). Even on HTTP/1, the client typically only downloads assets on the first page load for a given website, then it caches them. Subsequent requests for other pages are much quicker because the assets don't need to be downloaded again. With server push, would the server typically send all linked assets on every request? Or can it somehow keep track of which clients have cached which assets, and avoid wasting bandwidth?

I thought the above comment was funny and harmless. Why so harsh?

Those are metaphors and metonyms. MS Word is not a word. MS Office is not an office. Facebook Messenger is literally a thing that carries messages. Apple Watch is literally a watch.

But the £28 one comes with RAM, CPU, wifi sensor, camera, and it's two thirds of the price. Even if the other screen specs (brightness, viewing angle etc) are really terrible on the £28-tablet and incredible on the raspberry pi display, this still seems very expensive, and the difference seems like more than just an economy of scale thing.

Here's a good comment from a reader, which I think addresses a misunderstanding behind this article about what programming actually is:

> The thing that takes time is humans understanding what they want. Programmers are like therapists who help them crystalize their thoughts to the point where they are at least vaguely consistent. The program is just a representation of that idea.

This is disappointing. This screen is 7" at 800x480, so its sharpness is about 133 PPI (pixels per inch).

For comparison, my original Android G1 (several years ago) was 180 PPI, and it looked shit.

This is $60 plus taxes and shipping. I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

There's no way to take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out into a rectangle without distorting it in some way. It's called 'projecting' from 3D to 2D.

The projection used for the underlying map here is the Mercator, which stretches everything near the poles. It makes Greenland look almost as big as Africa, which it is not. It's the most common projection, but it's awful for accurately visualising the whole world at once.

But the Mercator is actually a really good projection for stuff like Google Maps, because it keeps shape and direction (not scale) accurate all over the world. Say you zoom into Iceland and then Ecuador... OK you'll need a different zoom level to get to the same real-world scale (e.g. to get to 10 miles per inch you need to zoom in closer to Ecuador than Iceland) but who cares. What matters is that, in either location, north is pretty much straight up, east is right, south is down and west is left. And also, a 10 mile road going east–west will look about the same length as a 10 mile road going north–south.

Other projections don't have these qualities, but are better for keeping overall scale the same all over the map, making relative sizes of countries look more like what you get on a 3-D globe. But most people just use Mercator for everything.

I agree. But startups shouldn't be expected to do this. Startups are experiments; you want to quickly determine if there's a market for the product (and fail fast if not, so you can alter the product or move onto something new). Being conservative with design is the perfect approach for this. If you experiment with unproven layouts, and it fails, how do you know if the problem was the product or your layout?

Interactive new stories, artists' portfolios, design agency websites, web apps, and websites that are themselves art - these are all good places to push boundaries in design. Not startup product promo pages.

All startup websites look the same. They all use this template because it perfectly addresses their goals (grab your attention, explain a new kind of product, convince you to sign up) while also being familiar and repeatable. That doesn't concern or surprise me.

Other kinds of web page with a standard design style include: shopfronts, forums and Q&A sites, search engine result pages, shopping carts, calendar apps, video sharing sites.

Trying to look irregular just for the sake of it is bad.

There was this explanation from an HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8901357

But Facebook made changes since then: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2908879/open-source-softwar...

I don't know much about it, just giving you links.