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

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

#531

Post by joconde » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:07 AM UTC

raffraffraff wrote: post #501

Garmin Fenix 5s Sapphire: notifications from my phone with custom replies, 6 day battery life, buttons. No touch screen (operate it "blind" and in the wet), waterproof, scratchproof. You do need to pay extra for the sapphire screen. Swiss Army knife (they're sooo well made) Under armour underwear: no seams, last ages, extremely comfortable. Darn tough socks: extremely comfortable, last forever, never smell. Altra Lon…

> Docker. People like to hate a winner, and they've gone the paid route, and they did just take already-available kernel features and wrap them up... But man, they did it well and they revolutionised software development and deployment.

They made design decisions that prevent simple things like "installing a .deb package from the host filesystem without keeping the package in an image layer", then fixed some of these with that weird buildkit thing that you need to enable in the settings.

It's very useful for sure, but I wouldn't call its CLI interface well-design.

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

#532

Post by ptidhomme » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

I'm fond of OpenBSD, especially because of its clean design (user-facing at least, can't speak of internals).

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

#533

Post by nicbou » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

MDN and the NHS website are some of the best knowledge base websites I know. Each do a really good job of communicating information. They put a lot of thought into the language they use and it shows.

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

#534

Post by thn-gap » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

stillblue wrote: post #166

The Apple Ecosystem. I've invested a lot of hard earned money into it. I have an ipad, iphone, a macbook air, an apple watch, airpods pro and a mac mini. Bought these over the years. Just the way these things work so cohesively to me is pure magic. The attention to detail on extremely minor things is pretty impressive. I haven't had to think about "doing" anything with tech ever since I bought apple products. You jus…

At the same time, the interoperability of these devices outside the ecosystem is stupidly useless.

Just this year I figured out that I can't send an image without internet from my Android phone to the iPad. I could receive images over Bluetooth between two phones more than 10 years ago, but not today with the iPad.

I also can't seem to transfer images or videos from my Windows PC to the iPad with just a cable.

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

#535

Post by sincarne » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

My Withings Steel HR. It is just enough smart watch for me. Fitness tracking is good, sleep tracking is okay, app works better than the FitBit app, and has better Apple Health integration. Battery lasts weeks. And I think it looks pretty nice. I think it fits into the category of “calm technology”, which is tough to do for a device that has notifications as part of the core functionality.

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

#536

Post by Paul_S » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #473

squarefoot wrote: post #357

I loved the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip players I owned during past years. They needed to be reflashed with the RockBox firmware (but tbh pretty much every portable player firmware is inferior to RockBox) however hardware wise they were fantastic: light, well shaped, buttons in the right places, very readable display despite the small size, audio was excellent, FM reception too, battery lasted hours and hours. I brought t…

I forgot about this. Sansa with RockBox was the best.

Same here, I bought 4 more when they discontinued it, gave away a couple and the rest died by now. Why can't a company make something like this again?

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

#537

Post by jcims » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

Toutouxc wrote: post #509

jcims wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So happy to see the Fiskars mentioned. Grew up with farmers in the midwest US but love my fancy little splitter hitter from across the pond. I find a subtle lift on the handle right at the end of the stroke, almost like a whipping action, seems to help a little. It may be in my head, but it seems to stick less. Use the full length of the handle, the horn at the end provides a positive grip and you get more speed. On…

> start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side I have no professional background, so maybe I'm totally wrong, but I would advise against that, because if you aim a bit too far or the wood gives too easily, most of the impact will be against the haft instead of the head, and the haft can break this way. I usually start at the near side and then work towards the far side, which is only dangero…

Good to call this out because it’s something people should think about.

> because if you miss the near side, the axe is flying towards your feet.

Had a close call here once and have gone the other way ever since. I’ve missed long and broken old wooden handle splitters this way, but the Fiskars are incredibly tough and just sting the shit out of your hands if you miss.

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

#538

Post by dijit » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:15 AM UTC

dheera wrote: post #516

Datagenerator wrote: post #387

ZFS. Complete research companies unknowingly depend on the utmost reliability and flexibility ZFS has to offer. Started right with the first version included in FreeBSD in production use and never failed once while being the central storage connected to multiple HPC clusters with millions upon millions of rather small but also some vary large files. While offering five nines of uptime we even had to ability to send e…

The documentation is shit though, I spent a full hour digging through forum answers trying to increase my swap space. All this bpool zpool crap. And then my system /boot got full of some snapshot (wtf I never asked for this), apt-get failed to live up to its promise of magic, got more hell about a 20% preservation rule (again wtf). Was cutting and pasting some zpool zsysctl zc -a -f -foo -bar and then some sudo zfs d…

Solaris used to come with a user manual, it was easily the best thing about the buying experience because it was so detailed and obviously written for engineers.

If you can find one of those manuals on the internet you will be set for life on understanding ZFS and dtrace.

There’s also a C, C++ and ASM manual that is bundled too, but you can skip those.

If you can’t find any, I’ll send you mine.

I know it sounds like I’m asking you to RTFM- but the experience of reading these manuals is really a joy.

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

#539

Post by pfortuny » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #457

amarshall wrote: post #239

The Kinesis Advantage keyboard [1]. The height of the keys in each column are different because, well, the length of each of our fingers is different. It’s so naturally comfortable that it goes unnoticed and one’s fingers just fall into the right position. Placing one’s fingers offset left or right is so obviously uncomfortable that it’s basically impossible to have off-by-one typos. There is a lot of subtly well-des…

> Contoured keyboard designed to provide maximum comfort and productivity for Windows and Mac users. As a Linux user this leaves me really second guessing.

I use it with linux+emacs and definitely the best keyboard ever. Already 15 years old.

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

#540

Post by quartesixte » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:16 AM UTC

johnwalkr wrote: post #497

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,…

Drilling down into different categories is better than any other site I’ve used. And like Costco, they curate pretty well and just have one supplier for each part, although the supplier may change. If you need a type of gear or screw, there is one option only, no need to compare various brands. It was just as good 15 years ago too! And it’s probably not true not but it used to be the least possible friction to order…

> Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.

This feature RIGHT HERE is probably what lends to McMaster’s retention. No futzing around with account numbers, customer IDs, etc. Nope. Just a real accounting department talking to your company’s accounting department. Onboarding 20 new engineers today? No problem, just tell them to make an account with the company email and fill out the billing info with accounts payable and the finance guys will take care of all the rest.

McMaster honestly is such a gem of a company. Quadruply so if you so happen to live within the same-day delivery distance of one of their regional centers. Then McMaster turns into a super power.

Only downside is that McMaster fails some more rigorous sniff tests on part traceability/quality/reliability for certain kinds of engineering orgs but honestly so much manufacturing is held together by the glue of McMaster.

And if in the odd case they ever fail to deliver, there’s always Grainger!