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Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

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Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#231

Post by makx »

paledot wrote: post #220

My wife and I both work, but our lifestyle does not require two incomes. So we've tried to find trustworthy charities to entrust my salary to. It's harder than it sounds, and we're only about 60% of the way there, but it has measurably improved the quality of life of many people - not just us. I also "purchased" a 4-day work week, which has had a substantial impact on my own quality of life.

While not technically a "purchase", I also must say that this year, no single product even came close to the donations I made to those who protect the environment and fight climate change.

Now, every time I consider a purchase I ask myself: "do I really need this?" and if the answer is no, I forgo the purchase and donate the same amount of money instead.

This "negative consumption" turns my feelings of gloom and helplessness into a sense of purpose and power.

I can only imagine how awesome it must be to be able to donate almost a whole salary!

Can you please share some of the charities you've found to be trustworthy?

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#232

Post by dirtnugget »

I have a very minimalist lifestyle, lining by myself in a 30sqm one-room apartment.

However:

Water filter (Amazon Basics) Dimmable remote controlled light bulbs Good 2.1 speaker set

I was especially surprised about the water filter. Living in Germany I am used to drinking tap and not having to clean the leftovers of lime from the kettle is a nice thing.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#233

Post by [deleted] »

smaslennikov wrote: post #18

Automated cat infrastructure: automatic USB water fountain[0], food dispenser[1], Litter Robot 3[2] (as of recently, with a homebrew controller[3]). These allow me a good four days of absence from the house - for camping or whatever else. Doesn't happen often that both the wife and I are MIA, but when it does, these things are indespensable. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WGLYV22/ [1]: https://www.amazon.c…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#234

Post by moltar »

barrkel wrote: post #212

- Bouncing hammock for the baby. The baby would flap his legs when he was a bit upset, and then the flapping would wake him up. But with the bouncing hammock - a cloth hammock spread open with a piece of wood and suspended from a spring - he just causes the hammock to bounce up and down, which lulls him back to sleep again. After a while he learned to do it deliberately with a hip thrust, as a form of mechanical self…

Could you please share a link for the hammock? Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#235

Post by sliken »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #22

Tesla Model 3. 'Measurably' is subjective, but I graduated from a BMW 328i, which I loved dearly. The Model 3 is more fun in almost every way, and costs far, far less in maintenance. No gas stations, diamond lane, cost to operate is far less.

Same here. So fast it's more of how fast do I want to go, where do I want to be instead of working the clutch, shifter, and trying to plan ahead in a much slower car. I quite enjoy waking up each day with 300 miles of range instead of trying to figure out when/where to add a gas station to my errands. My Subaru was quite needy, oil changes, checking the oil, head gasket problems, gas filling, brake pads, engine maintenance, warming up before pushing it, taking it easy before you turn it off (because of the turbo) etc. I'm at 14,000 miles on the Tesla, and I'd have done 4 oil changes, 56 gas fill ups, and I suspect a few other scheduled maintenance trips already.

I moved to a new city and a nice big map has been a great way to visit a city and the being able to speak my music selections, destinations, etc has been a pleasure. I now regularly visit 3 nearby cities (all within 30 minutes) for entertainment, tasty food, and hiking. I look forward to time in my model 3, I wish everything worked as well. I'm surprised at how primitive other nav systems are, is it really that hard to match top of the line Android/IOS touch screens and graceful handling of things like pinch to zoom?

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#236

Post by sliken »

amelius wrote: post #188
faebi wrote: post #175

My own car. I had a driving license all my life but never bothered to buy one because public transport in switzerland is cheap and good enough for a single person. The situation changed now: I am not alone anymore and Corona happened. I do not plan to use public transport on regular basis in my life anymore. It is unimaginable to me how we did groceries before. Also we can save some money by buying more in bulk. It's…

Just beware: owning a car is linked to less physical activity and weight gain ...

Yup, ideally commute on bike (or e-bike), and use cars for bigger errands/trips.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#237

Post by Yetanfou »

A farm.

Room to roam, largely self-supporting due to our own forest for heating and building, own water well, own waste water facilities, no building permit needed for farm buildings, own land to grow whatever we please. My children get to grow up in the countryside, where city-dwellers have empty syringes and crack heads on their doorstep we have elk, deer and wolves. Where they hear police sirens at night we hear owls and foxes. Meanwhile we have a gigabit glassfiber connection feeding into a rack I built which houses enough cpu and storage to be mostly self-reliant on that front as well - no external cloudy services for me, thanks.

The more independent we get, the less money we need. I just built a new 230m² barn which will be used partly as a new stables, partly as a veterinary clinic (my wife is a horse vet). On top of that barn I'll put enough solar panels to make us mostly electricity-neutral through overproduction in summer (which will be fed into the grid) which will be another step towards self-reliance.

If you're mechanically-inclined, have two left hands (I'm left-handed, get it?), not afraid of some honest blood & sweat and able and willing to take up such a project you won't regret moving to the countryside and taking up farming, part-time or more.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#238

Post by neurostimulant »

pgt wrote: post #153

1. Apple Watch Series 5 w/GPS: - Surprisingly, my iPhone Xs battery lasts longer because I'm checking it less. - Counter-intuitively, I'm spending less time on my phone because I'm less likely to get sucked into my Watch than my phone. Now I just read non-urgent messages and Dismiss them. - I use the compass all the time now that I'm travelling[^1] in the UK and I use the compass all the time to learn the city layout…

My mbp 2012 is very slow when used to compile stuff these days, and struggles to build react projects and docker images. So I built a small server out of secondhand parts to offload those tasks away from my old laptop.

Using vscode's remote development support (which lets you mount a remote machine in the editor as well as doing port forwarding), there is almost no change to my usual development routine but massive improvement to build time and battery life, for ~$300 in parts. I guess I will postpone upgrading my laptop again.

This setup also works outside of my home network because I use zerotier on both the laptop and the local server, though I also configured my router to expose the server's ssh port in case I can't use zerotier for some reason. I also configured autossh to connect to my small vps server and port-forward the local server's ssh port there as an additional fallback because my isp sometime doesn't assign a public ip when the modem is restarted.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#239

Post by paledot »

makx wrote: post #231
paledot wrote: post #220

My wife and I both work, but our lifestyle does not require two incomes. So we've tried to find trustworthy charities to entrust my salary to. It's harder than it sounds, and we're only about 60% of the way there, but it has measurably improved the quality of life of many people - not just us. I also "purchased" a 4-day work week, which has had a substantial impact on my own quality of life.

While not technically a "purchase", I also must say that this year, no single product even came close to the donations I made to those who protect the environment and fight climate change. Now, every time I consider a purchase I ask myself: "do I really need this?" and if the answer is no, I forgo the purchase and donate the same amount of money instead. This "negative consumption" turns my feelings of gloom and help…

Our main causes are environment, poverty and homelessness, and disability. Most of our charities are local, such as each of the major homeless shelters in our city. Medicins Sans Frontières and Sierra Club are our two international-level charities, but I hesitate to offer endorsements. Due diligence is important when donating larger sums.

Re: Ask HN: What did you purchase that measurably improved your quality of life?

#240

Post by seniorivn »

paledot wrote: post #220

My wife and I both work, but our lifestyle does not require two incomes. So we've tried to find trustworthy charities to entrust my salary to. It's harder than it sounds, and we're only about 60% of the way there, but it has measurably improved the quality of life of many people - not just us. I also "purchased" a 4-day work week, which has had a substantial impact on my own quality of life.

to be fair it didn't improve your quality of life MEASURABLY
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