The Complexity of 'Simplicity'

Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off with some mandatory complexity. Most people simply don't appreciate the miracles they see around them every second of every day. Miracles that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Miracles that happen everyday on a consistent basis. Miracles that they curse and abuse.<p>If people could just see and understand how complex one Google query actually is then maybe the world would be a better place.

The classic line from St. Exupéry’s <i>Wind, Sand, and Stars</i> (in French, <i>Terre des hommes</i>) is “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.”<p>For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole thing, and for hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.

What were the results of Google's experiment?

A good example of the authors specific notion of simplicity, can be our own Hacker News. On one end of the HN machine you submit a post or a comment or a question and around 2000 people see it in a day. After that you receive a nice little discussion (if your original input was good enough), as the output. A little noisy sometimes but has a form of natural filtering.