A Huskee Cup. Low maintenance, made from coffee husk, great seal with the lid, and I love that it can hold hot coffee but not burn your hands due to the fins running along the body. Many local coffee shops also give me a discount on takeaway coffee if I bring my own takeaway cup, and some offer a Huskee Cup swap program where you can leave your dirty cup with them if you've been carrying it around after drinking your last coffee and get a clean one for your next order (personally I prefer to just keep my own though).
Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
21–30 of 994 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#22Zorijushi rice cooker. It can cook rice perfectly and can hold cooked rice for days. Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook. Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone. Apple airtags. I often forget…
I'm curious about your thoughts on airtags. Had you tried Tile before? Are the airtags really better, and not just a knock-off product?
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#23Actual physical books.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#24Zorijushi rice cooker. It can cook rice perfectly and can hold cooked rice for days. Facebook portal. Yeah Facebook privacy and all that but that's a good product that allows me to call people without having to mess with the phone. The audio and video is super clear. I use it despite it's from Facebook. Work sharp knife sharpener. It's superior to sharpening the my knives with the stone. Apple airtags. I often forget…
I'm curious about your thoughts on airtags. Had you tried Tile before? Are the airtags really better, and not just a knock-off product?
I have owned both. AirTags are superior to Tile tags in several major ways: (1) the batteries are replaceable (although I understand newer Tile tags also have them); (2) when you get close enough, the Find My app can give you directions to the tag; and (3) there are far more iPhones/iPads out there than Tile users, so if you leave your tag somewhere, its location is much more likely to be found with pinpoint accuracy.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#25HP41C, s/n 2018A00505. Had it since the early 1980s, still works. PPC ROM still works.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#26Old can opener
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#27BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#28Atari 130XE - manufactured in 1986, works till this day (with some SIO mod), brings joy to me and to my kids.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#29Thermapen
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#30Everything from Valco Instruments, where the founder and CEO (Stan Stearns [0]) launched using his own engineering designs and continued to maintain a prototyping bench indefinitely, long after he had numerous gifted engineers employed.