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

Post by pvillano » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

dendrite9 wrote: post #462

OccamsRazr wrote: post #331

20+ year old farm equipment. They are easy to use, simple to maintain, often repairable by the farmer on-site (with perhaps a trip to the store to buy a small part). I often found myself marvelling at the complex things that could be achieved by an arrangement of gears, such as the contraption on a square baler that wraps the bale with two pieces of twine and ties two perfectly tensioned knots that will hold the hay…

Is this still true, or is it 20 years from when you started thinking about how good things used to be? I ask because somewhere in there I assume there is a period where ICs were introduced but all the kinks might not have been worked out. It maybe that I have the time scales wrong myself though.

Post by alpaca128 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #201

erikschoster wrote: post #51

Legos; also the ender 3d printer. I had a nostalgic time putting the ender together. Felt like a lego set. That's not saying it was trivial (it challenged me) but that I trusted it every step of the way not because of previous experience, but because of the obvious well-designed aspects of the experience as I was putting it together. For example: I put on a part sloppily, and trying to attach anther part was the firs…

I'm sorry, but 3D printers, while quite an innovation allowing cheap and fast prototyping, are not well designed things. I own three, and talk to friends who collectively probably own close to 100. They, including models with great reputation (e.g. Prusa printers), break all the time. Also the mere fact that there are thousands of mods for all of them on sites like Thingieverse to make them better is another indicati…

Post by urbanmiffs » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 8:47 AM UTC

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #484

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…

But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.

Post by akjssdk » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 8:48 AM UTC

z2 wrote: post #302

quadrifoliate wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, the water starts out cold (because the water in the hot water pipes are cold) No, this should be considered a failure condition for a constant temperature shower. I don't care how they do it, just bleed the cold water into a separate pipe off to the side or something. We have sent people into space, I want actual uniform temperature water.

I've seen a few apartments in Asia have small electric water heaters right before the faucet. They provide instant hot water until the main boiler's hot water arrives.

Post by hermitcrab » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 8:49 AM UTC

raz32dust wrote: post #130

Google flights is fantastic. Don't know if it is "the best-designed thing I've ever used", but it is on top of my mind as I just used it yesterday. Google doesn't get enough credit for the things that they did do well - including Search and Maps. Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great…