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The Flat Sink

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Re: The Flat Sink

#91

Post by JacksonGariety »

eduardordm wrote: post #48
crazygringo wrote: post #32

I stayed with a friend in a then-new building designed by Philippe Starck, in New York. The bathroom sink faucet handles were very cool -- just smooth steel cylinders sticking out, that you rotated. Until I tried turning them with my now-soapy hands... and discovered that they were impossible to turn, because there was nothing to grab onto! His stylish cylinders turned out to be completely useless. Turns out knobby h…

Still, someone will eventually call this a feature, because it might force you to dry your hands before turning the knob - keeping it cleaner/dry. Designers will always find a way to justify their crap.

It actually seems like a correct justification. It's greener, and forces a more logical way to use a product, even if it isn't familiar. That isn't a sin.

Re: The Flat Sink

#92

Post by delluminatus »

ebf wrote: post #87
thaumaturgy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Citation needed" is intellectually lazy. It is middlebrow dismissal's slightly more popular cousin. "Citation needed" is never a counter-argument, but often stands in place of one. It is the rhetorical equivalent of burying your opponent in discovery: it is a challenge that consists solely of expecting someone else to do more work than they would like to. If you have a question about something, ask. If you disagree…

If someone pushes a statement as a fact and not as their opinion then they better be prepared to back it up it with evidence. End of story.

Do you have evidence to support this claim? Citation needed.

Re: The Flat Sink

#93

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

progrock wrote: post #77
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the US. I have never seen such a thing.In any case, most people who own homes have dishwashers.

I didn't even think about dishwashers. I've only lived in one house with a dishwasher out of the ten that I've lived in. Are they that common place? I have two Belfast sinks in my house.

Yes, they are. Inexpensive and trivial to install (replaced the one at my last house: probably less than an hour to get everything done).

Newer models will use less water than the average person doing the same amount of dishes.

Re: The Flat Sink

#94

Post by vacri »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #10
gyardley wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat (edit: okay, flat ish ) kitchen sinks, as opposed to bathroom sinks, are ubiquitous in North America too. In the kitchen, the flat sink is useful for dish-stacking.

They're not flat, they slope slightly down to the plughole. It's a design compromise that allows for both dish-stacking and for drainage.

They're not spirit-level flat, but they're flat as far as the comparisons in the article are concerned.

Re: The Flat Sink

#95

Post by Semiapies »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #74
arscan wrote: post #9

I'm not going to comment on the message as a whole, since this whole flat aesthetic thing has been argued up and down on HN over the last few months. But there was one line that stuck out to me as being a little off: > Get rid of all texture, and you might end up with cold, sterile designs that scare users away. I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows neces…

He said might end up.

The "might" there is simply a weasel word for the opinion presented.

Re: The Flat Sink

#96

Post by vacri »

njharman wrote: post #25

Zen and minimalism must vary by the observer... A curve or spheroidal section is zen and minimal (1 stroke, 1 surface) A box with 5 sides, 4 corners, etc is not. There are zen circles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D , few to none zen squares.

Only if you're defining minimalism as 'the literal least amount of noticeable features'. The picture in your link is a terrible example of 'minimalism' by that definition - while it describes a circle created in a single stroke, the actual pattern is extremely complex. Then there's also writing and three chops.

Re: The Flat Sink

#97

Post by vacri »

randallsquared wrote: post #27
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen those in restaurant lavatories. The disadvantage is that when filling a sink e.g. for shaving, the water pools at a line rather than a point. this is obviously not a problem in a restaurant. See the third illustration "With a flat sink, you need more water to get the same depth" - an angled flat surface would be somewhere between the two in efficiency of water use.

I think if I were going to shave this way, I'd use a bowl instead of putting a lot of water into a presumably-not-perfectly-clean sink. You could wash a bowl and put it away after, whereas you'd have to wash the sink immediately before each shave. If the designer of the sink expected using a shaving bowl, the flat bottom would make a lot of sense.

The piping hot water used for shaving is going to kill most wigglies.

Re: The Flat Sink

#98

Post by baddox »

delluminatus wrote: post #90
baddox wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a skeptic (i.e. scientific skeptic), then you default to not believing a claim until evidence is introduced to support it. Is it intellectually lazy to say "citation needed" to someone that is accusing someone else of being a witch? I firmly believe that I have no obligation to prove that I am not a witch, and moreover that such attempts would be impossible. The person who makes a claim that has not been wi…

Thoughtlessly saying "citation needed" is a recipe for an insidious confirmation bias. It is always intellectually lazy, in the same way that blindly accepting provided claims is intellectually lazy: it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. Citing a study is not a panacea for bad ideas, and lacking citations is not a death sentence for truth. Hacker News saw an article just the other day o…

> it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question.

There is nothing to think about when there is no evidence, except how to gather or find reliable evidence. No amount of solitary mental rumination will yield a revelation about how effective certain UI features are with users. My own anecdotes are just as useless as my opponents'. This isn't laziness. I'm not being lazy when I ask accusers to provide some evidence that someone is in fact a witch.

And sure, the scientific community may be out of date or downright wrong, even half of the time. That's not an argument against the need for evidence. It's an argument for thoughtful analysis of evidence after it is presented, and more and better techniques for gathering evidence.

Re: The Flat Sink

#99

Post by thaumaturgy »

ebf wrote: post #87
thaumaturgy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Citation needed" is intellectually lazy. It is middlebrow dismissal's slightly more popular cousin. "Citation needed" is never a counter-argument, but often stands in place of one. It is the rhetorical equivalent of burying your opponent in discovery: it is a challenge that consists solely of expecting someone else to do more work than they would like to. If you have a question about something, ask. If you disagree…

If someone pushes a statement as a fact and not as their opinion then they better be prepared to back it up it with evidence. End of story.

Oh. Well, since you said, "End of story", I guess you're right after all.

That was a powerful argument there, I am in awe.

Re: The Flat Sink

#100

Post by thaumaturgy »

baddox wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Citation needed" is intellectually lazy. It is middlebrow dismissal's slightly more popular cousin. "Citation needed" is never a counter-argument, but often stands in place of one. It is the rhetorical equivalent of burying your opponent in discovery: it is a challenge that consists solely of expecting someone else to do more work than they would like to. If you have a question about something, ask. If you disagree…

If you're a skeptic (i.e. scientific skeptic), then you default to not believing a claim until evidence is introduced to support it. Is it intellectually lazy to say "citation needed" to someone that is accusing someone else of being a witch? I firmly believe that I have no obligation to prove that I am not a witch, and moreover that such attempts would be impossible. The person who makes a claim that has not been wi…

Do you really expect "citation needed" to prompt a useful discussion? How often do you think that happens? Here, click through the search results for comments with "citation needed" and tell me how many great discussions followed from it: http://hn.shomisearch.com/#comments+with+citation+needed

Don't you think it's boring? Don't you think there might be a better way of asking a question about a claim than merely throwing down "citation needed" after a comment, like an e-peen on the dinner table?

Now that I have replied with a comment lacking a single claim, preventing another stupid use of "citation needed", do you see how ridiculous and twisted that vapid phrase could make conversation in forums full of silly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlike this one? Should we all begin using Platonic dialogues just so that we can avoid having to bring a database of references along for any claim, lest we get molested yet again by people so intellectually lazy that they hilariously refer to themselves as "scientific skeptics" despite lacking the curiosity to research a claim on their own?

edit: Bah, I can't put quotes around "citation needed" in the search link above, and I don't feel like fixing the parsing for %codes tonight. You'll have to put the quotes in yourself to get the appropriate results.

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