Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#471

Post by clairity » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #290

pharmakom wrote: post #11

- all matching socks. No more time spent pairing. - clothes drying racks that hook onto radiators. Reduces drying time and clothes crumpling - wired mechanical keyboard. Wired is simpler than wireless. Quality ones have n-key support - bicycle fenders - digital wrist watch so that I check my phone less.

I made all the clothes hangers in my house match. A simple change, but it felt so much better and more organized.

yah, i bought 100 flat black hangers a few years ago (~$15 at ikea back then) so i could hang all of my casual clothing (rather than folding, which is more time-consuming). the flat ones allowed me to hang like 50% more stuff in the same space. my fancier clothes go on wooden hangers (also ikea) so they have more room to breathe.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#472

Post by dehrmann » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

wintermutestwin wrote: post #292

A pair of running shoes that actually fit human toe shape (Altra). Years of wearing pointy shoes gave me a Morton's Neuroma and severely limited my aerobic activity.

Why foot-shaped shoes are so rare is beyond me.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#473

Post by mperham » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

A back roller, like this:

https://www.amazon.com/RumbleRoller-Texture-Massage-Self-Myo...

I've had lower back pain for 10 years now. Rolling on top of this for a minute once per day was painful at first but after 4-5 days it felt fine and I've had no back pain since. I believe it realigned my vertebrae. Now I roll once a week or so to keep things aligned.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#474

Post by freediver » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

srvmshr wrote: post #280

D13Fd wrote: post #123

Kagi search engine subscription is easily my top choice ( https://kagi.com ). I'm really glad something can finally, truly replace Google search and be just as good or better (neither Bing nor DuckDuckGo were good enough when I tried them). If we're talking physical products, I'd probably go with the Apple Magsafe wallet. It's a little thing but I love not having a separate wallet to keep track of every day.

It really bothers me that Kagi sample search is a canned response. If you would carefully look at "Best headphones" example, the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old. Similarly the Sennheiser headphones results card shows $379 on Amazon, when its actually $400 today. No offenses to how well it works, but if I had to be sold to get a subscription, I would rather like to…

Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations.

I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts.

Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use.

If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#475

Post by satvikpendem » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #142

Space heater, 20 bucks. In the past I chose to heat the bedroom a little on cold days and otherwise suck it up and dress while shivering (no point burning a ton of gas to heat an entire bedroom). Now, I use 1.5 kW for ~3 minutes (0.01 kWh) to have hot air be blown on me while getting dressed in the morning. Because it changes how warm I feel while going downstairs, I also don't need downstairs to be as warm to get wa…

When I used to mine cryptocurrency, I ran the miners as my space heater too. Now with gaming PCs and GPUs pulling up to 1.5 kW as well, I just use my computer, running GPU tasks, plying games, etc, when I need some warmth. It works well and at least the miner and computer were doing useful work rather than simply shedding heat.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#476

Post by kornork » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

wintermutestwin wrote: post #333

pharmakom wrote: post #11

- all matching socks. No more time spent pairing. - clothes drying racks that hook onto radiators. Reduces drying time and clothes crumpling - wired mechanical keyboard. Wired is simpler than wireless. Quality ones have n-key support - bicycle fenders - digital wrist watch so that I check my phone less.

>all matching socks. I have 12 pairs of the same lightweight Darn Tough socks that are perfect for year round use (I don't live in snow). I've had them for ~10 years now and when a given sock gets a hole in the bottom, I put them in a pile and wait until I have 4 then send them back for two new pairs of socks. They were initially expensive, but after each being replaced a couple times, they are dirt cheap (even when…

I tried this. I ended up with 11 pairs of threadbare socks and 1 new fluffy pair.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#477

Post by FatActor » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

Winco fish spatula. Super flexy and thin. I can now make eggs the way I like them (over easy, zero browning) without destroying the egg or chasing it around the skillet like when I use bigger spatulae. Plus also much better for fish, oddly enough: the flexibility matters a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#478

Post by jessekv » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #322

Havoc wrote: post #146

Sodastream. Has significantly increased the amount of water i drink and conversely decreased other crap being drunk High end ricecooker ended up getting more use than expected. USB KVM style switch to change mouse/kyb over between work and personal device

I came here to say rice cooker as well. I got a $15 one years ago and it's still my most-used appliance. What high end one do you have? I've been considering an upgrade given that I use it so often.

Zojirushi are not usually sub $200, but I am very happy with mine. Now I wish I had not put off upgrading so long.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#479

Post by snapplebobapple » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

nerdawson wrote: post #288

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #154

An air fryer. It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids. It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop. The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.…

> It’s really a badly marketed product. I think the marketing is really smart. It's positioned as a new category of product. Oven on steroids won't sell because people already own ovens. It has to be a distinct appliance otherwise it's competing against a full sized oven. That's not the comparison you want a consumer to make.

I think you and the op are wrong (or maybe right?) for different reasons. Positioning it as a new category with less oil was right initially to get the thing off the ground but now it's maturing into a broader market with an installed base and that installed base has produced a ton of content, most of which is not for use as a less oil fryer, it's for use as a quick oven for when you aren't making enough of a dish for a family bigger than 4 people/aren't making something that will have leftovers for days.

The next wave of people buying these things are not going to be fryer junkies looking to cut oil, it's going to be people like me that looked at it and realized instead of waiting 20-40 minutes for my oven to heat up I could throw enough food in the air fryer to finish a dish in 7-12 minutes, which changes the dynamic of how I live my life culinarily for the better by a large margin. With the airfryer I can plan meal timing way less, have less pressure to be in the kitchen earlier, have flexibility to cook something like a roast in the oven on lower heat while polishing off fancy veg or multiple fancy veg (because the run time to cook is so low) in the air fryer, plus I save a lot on cleaning at the end because there aren't multiple big dishes to wash.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#480

Post by JohnBooty » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

LarsDu88 wrote: post #224

Samsung T5 SSD, a short USB c cable, and a sticker pocket to attach it to my 2016 MacBook. Why get gouged by apple on storage when you can just duct tape an SSD to your laptop?

Heck yeah. I do this too. I honestly like the slightly nerdy frankenstein look.

    sticker pocket

Can you recommend a sticker pocket? I looked, and I'm not sure which ones might be suitable for holding a hard drive to a laptop.

What I've always done is: a clear acrylic ~$15 shell for the MacBook. Which is something I do anyway. And then I velcro-tape the drive to that shell.