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Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#431

Post by innocentoldguy »

enobrev wrote: post #419

My original cast iron pans. I bought this no-name set of three from a small family-run neighborhood hardware store in Brooklyn for $20 somewhere around 2002. The guy behind the counter was surprised by the price and that they even had cast iron pans. I've used them regularly since. They're the oldest cookware in my kitchen by a large margin. I've taken them camping, and I cook with then in my kitchen daily. I've cook…

I love that you mentioned pans. I have a set of Finex cast iron cookware and I can't imagine cooking on anything else. They're almost perfect.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#432

Post by wellthisisgreat »

Swiftpoint Z mouse. Such a joy to use. Alas they aren't producing anymore.

Obsidian.md - such a joy to use it for keyboard-based notetaking.

Zulip - group chat that is not Slack and not Teams and the threads actually work for comms.

Supernote A5X - a tangible upgrade over the pen-and-paper notetaking.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#433

Post by 0x264 »

jiggunjer wrote: post #420
guidovranken wrote: post #27

BitTorrent 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 e…

Why this over ipfs?

BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#434

Post by innocentoldguy »

kcplate wrote: post #70
wh313 wrote: post #61

My Aeropress coffee maker. It feels more convenient than a french press, and much cheaper than an espresso machine. https://aeropress.com/ Also a bidet. Americans really need to start using it more.

Honestly, I’d prefer my coffee maker to not do double duty as a butt washers, but maybe I am funny about these sort of things

You say that now, but just wait until you splash yourself clean with an Aeropress while sipping an espresso.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#435

Post by lostlogin »

cibyr wrote: post #361
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an espresso snob, I'm going to go with a Breville Double Boiler machine. Many espresso machine snobs used to crap on Breville as being "consumer grade", but they really succeeded with their Double Boiler machines, especially their more recent models that make it easy to descale the boiler at home. The BDB includes features that can cost literally 5X as much on Italian machines (stainless steel boilers, a preheatin…

I owned a Breville Dual Boiler for a few years, was always happy with the coffee it produced, and I thought it was very good value for the price... until it failed in a manner that caused it to constantly trip a GFCI. I brought it back to the shop where I bought it (who service all varieties of espresso machines), and they told me that Breville won't sell them parts for repair. I then contacted Breville, and they wan…

I used my fathers Rancillio Silvia for 10ish years after he used it for about that long. It’s still good but I have upgraded. It had a US$70 service after about 15k coffees and was still fine at 20k. It’s got a little surface rust on the drip tray. Fantastic machine.

This pales compared to some machines though - I was recently reading about someone has a ‘60s Faema e61 that has made nearly 5 million coffees.

https://www.home-barista.com/advice/faema-e61-original-vinta...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#436

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

jiggunjer wrote: post #420
guidovranken wrote: post #27

BitTorrent 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 e…

Why this over ipfs?

Because I pushed petabytes of data over it for the past 15 years and it never failed me, not once. Simple as that.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#437

Post by kuntau »

palijer wrote: post #362

https://www.mcmaster.com/ Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products. Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here" Like, from. The short url,…

Meh. Not so much. First time I opened it show half screen banner to download mobile app.

And the website wasn't designed for mobile at all.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#438

Post by mitemte »

smt88 wrote: post #291
langcalvin wrote: post #278

I'll go a game route: Mario Kart. It's just so perfect. All of them from the SNES to the Switch. I've played countless hours and never get bored. The level designs are all so interesting and unique I find myself discovering something new every time. It's social and I've seen it dominate dinner parties.

This is a fascinating response, partly because of how passionately I disagree. I loved Mario Kart for SNES and N64. After that, Nintendo seemed to have no idea what people even liked about the games. They added more characters, more cars, and more level interference, meaning that you were competing less and less on skill. Worse, your choices for character and car could have enormous and difficult to predict effects o…

MK64 was the first MK game I played. Having played titles proceeding it, I feel that MK Wii and MK8 are more balanced. MK64 has horrible rubber banding. It’s to the point where your level of skill can mean nothing if you make one costly error.

MK64 character driving attributes also vary, but the character select screen doesn’t inform players of this http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/N64/MarioKart64.html#Driv...

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#439

Post by kube-system »

brirec wrote: post #315
apendleton wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they meant that they default to making things that come in imperial-unit sizes (e.g., quarter-inch nuts instead of 6mm ones or whatever). It's not really practical to mix and match.

> It's not really practical to mix and match. Tell that to my computer, with both 6-32 and M3 screws.

Tell that to my computer, with a bunch of stripped out threads.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

#440

Post by wmwmwm »

eropple wrote: post #251
toomanyrichies wrote: post #155

One example of quality design which I gleaned from reading Don Norman's "The Design Of Everyday Things" is the metal plate I've frequently seen on doors which are meant to be pushed. The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all t…

I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle , and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.

There used to be a coffee shop opposite my office that had a pull handle on the push side of the double doors. The right hand side doors were also often locked. I once sat at the nearest table to the doors and watched a dozen people pull then push on the right door, then pull and finally push on the left door, and often end up visibly aggravated by the time they got in and joined the morning queue!

The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!

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