Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 583 posts

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#421

Post by kragen »

jvanderbot wrote: post #418
kragen wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book should be called The Misinformation. It omits crucial safety information and other details about many of the processes it mentions, and the author doesn't maintain a public list of known errata; it's entertainment, not education. Three better alternatives: the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, the Boy Scouts Handbook, and Wikipedia, which you can download as .zim files for offline reference. Other re…

Very good references! Thank you! I do think the author tried to relay concepts and hints, rather than recipes. Given the compactness, a group of people starting largely from scratch and taking the book on faith could figure out a lot of stuff.

If they took the book on faith they would halt progress until they all died of methanol poisoning.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#422

Post by Balgair »

eternalny1 wrote: post #366
jvanderbot wrote: post #247

Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times. Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances. Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting…

> Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times. I was recently in the hospital and was shocked at how often they used the hand-sanitizers. The staff at all levels used them after literally everything. I'm a former commercial pilot so I get the idea of having stuff drilled into your brain.…

I volunteered in a hospital. They have competitions with 'secret shopper' nurses and admins. The prizes can be pretty good. A co-volunteer got ~$100.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#423

Post by jayess »

AWildC182 wrote: post #391
tgv wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a layperson can understand even the basic principle behind AM, let alone the actual device. It's not as "simple" as washing your hands.

Back when radioshack existed they used to sell kits where you could assemble a crystal radio out of a handful of simple parts. This was the first real project my dad and I ever did and I was just a little kid at the time.

Wow, that brings back some memories. I built one of those too. It was a crystal radio with no need for batteries. I used that little radio for years to listen in bed until I fell asleep.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#424

Post by yellowapple »

AWildC182 wrote: post #391
tgv wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a layperson can understand even the basic principle behind AM, let alone the actual device. It's not as "simple" as washing your hands.

Back when radioshack existed they used to sell kits where you could assemble a crystal radio out of a handful of simple parts. This was the first real project my dad and I ever did and I was just a little kid at the time.

One of those kits ended up being a growing up story of mine, and a lesson in unchecked hubris.

I was maybe 8-ish years old, and trying to follow the instructions to wire together a crystal radio with one of those Radio Shack electronics kits. My stepdad - who had only recently become such, and to my assumption at the time was just some dumb hick mechanic - volunteered to help me troubleshoot.

Being the bratty child I was, and being frustrated by my inability to figure it out even with the "easy" diagram (let alone actual schematics, which might as well have been hieroglyphs to me), I snapped back at him "I'm ten times smarter than you!" and stormed off.

Not 5 minutes later he calls me back in, triumphantly presenting a working crystal radio.

Turns out my "dumb hick mechanic" of a stepfather was actually once upon a time a technician for Nakamichi, and specialized in fixing their receivers. That little crystal radio was trivial compared to the sorts of circuits he used to repair for his day job.

That was 20 years ago and he still gives me shit for it, lol

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#425

Post by TomMckenny »

The cargo container: it has changed the entire planet culturally, economically and geopolitically. It would be hard to count the percentage of every day objects most people use world wide that owe their availability or existence to that standardized metal box.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#427

Post by dsfyu404ed »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #186

The surface plate. Modern precision all stems from the concept of a flat reference. However, the technique to make a surface as flat as possible (which is based on simple geometry) was first discussed in the early 19th c. In terms of profound impact on modernity, the metal screw-cutting lathe.

I disagree. The modern (read:1800s) horizontal milling machine was really what enabled the industrial revolution. The kinds of parts you can make cheaply on a lathe is much less diverse than on a mill with proper tooling. Don't get me wrong, you need parts with circles but all the other shapes are what really enabled the industrial revolution. Mills and the complex shapes they can quickly create allowed us to cheaply crank out the tooling to make all sorts of things.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#428

Post by frutiger »

rriepe wrote: post #177
ajuc wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically there would be ~2 times less people on Earth and over half of them would work in farming if not for this one invention.

For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.

Surely the three most common elements (by any measure) are hydrogen, helium and lithium?

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#429

Post by RandallBrown »

greggyb wrote: post #276
puranjay wrote: post #184

The humble ball point pen. People forget how cumbersome and/or expensive it was to write before cheap ball point pens became a thing. You had to use fountain pens. The cheap ones leaked and were an absolute mess to carry around. The ones that didn't leak were expensive. I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years and just stash them everywhere I want

And now you can get a cheap fountain pen that won't leak and writes delightfully. Financially, you're probably better off with hundreds of cheap Bics, but fountain pen ink lasts a long time.

> and writes delightfully

If you're right handed.

Fountain pens simply don't work for lefties, without writing in a completely unnatural way.

Re: Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

#430

Post by [deleted] »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #197
todd8 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago I was going through some stuff in our storage unit and found an originally very nice suitcase. It's of no value to me now because it has no wheels. Imagine how much more difficult air travel would be without the wheels!

Imagine it? I've been living it and it's so much better. Try to get from one side of O'Hare to the other for your connection leaving in 20 minutes with a rolling suitcase vs with a comfortable medium-large backpack. Boarding flights is easier, getting around outside is easier (try rolling your suitcase around the cobble streets of Paris), fitting into tight restaurants is easier. Look into /r/onebag if you want to le…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN