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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?

#561

Post by no_time »

Buttons840 wrote: post #50
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…

Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.

A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.

EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead of hidden away in a notification icon on hover.

I wonder if intellectually "property" groups thought of this playing out.

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

#562

Post by kortilla »

carlgreene wrote: post #485
grech wrote: post #151

This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone cal…

I agree, unfortunately however I've recently developed worsening tinnitus that I've attributed to them. There appear to be several others who have a similar experience[0]. I've stopped using them in favor of my over-ear VModas the past couple weeks and my tinnitus is significantly better. I rarely listen to music loud and the volume only seldom goes over 50% so I'm having a hard time attributing it to excess listenin…

I’m curious, did the amount of time you used go up significantly with the airpod pros? I enjoy mine so much I use them for multiple hours every day, which is quite a shift in usage compared to the other awful earbuds I would use before.

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

#563

Post by kortilla »

csomar wrote: post #530
javajosh wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I returned my airpod pros because I kept losing them and/or their case, and had anxiety until I found them. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I didn't find them again. Also, the audio quality on the other end of my calls was actively bad. I've reverted to wired earbuds with a mic in the cable, and am (very) grateful I was stubborn about keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on whatever phone I'm…

If you are losing them at home, they can make a small sound through the Find iPhone page in iCloud.

Does that actually work when they are in the case? I haven’t gotten it to…

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

#564

Post by indrora »

Four things come to mind:

* The AK-47. Love or hate guns, the AK was designed with tolerances that encouraged simultaneously good maintenance patterns and using it as a gorram hammer if the need came to it. * Nalgene bottles. Impact resistant, infinitely screen printable, polycarbonate body, cheap and everything you could want. * The venerable aluminum drinks can: The sheer amount of engineering that has gone into making a bit of aluminum for canning but with the design constraints of pressure and temperature, it's a very neat design. * Fluxx, the game. Fluxx has one rule, the only base rule: Draw a card, play a card. There's no resolution order, no many pages of legalese text like Magic. There is Fluxx.

And that's one of the things that makes Fluxx well designed. I can teach someone how to play Fluxx in 30 seconds: "Draw a card, play a card. When the conditions for winning have been achieved, the game ends." The one thing I don't like about Fluxx is the later addition of Creepers, but those are easily one of the most write-off-able types of cards ever created.

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

#565

Post by baalimago »

The osthyvel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_knife#Cheese_slicer

Creates slices of cheese. Very cheap, very efficient at what it's supposed to do, and the more you use it the better it gets (it gets slightly more bent = more cheese per slice).

Buy one for 2€, use it every day for 10 years.

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

#566

Post by eps »

Thermapen

Unfold, stick in, see the temperature.

If it's dark, it will highlight the screen, If it's upside down, it will flip the screen.

Very fast, because it uses gradient descend and not linear estimation.

Pull it out, place it down and it switches off. Move it, it switches on.

Single moving part, no buttons. You want it in Farneheights - open it up with a screwdriver, flip a microswitch.

Fairly big in size for no other reason but to be convenient to hold and to read.

Battery last for ages.

And on top of all that it is also very well made.

https://www.thermoworks.com/thermapen-mk4/

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

#567

Post by indrora »

yumraj wrote: post #393
stephenfin wrote: post #222

I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets

I know a lot of people seem to love Chromecast, but for some reason using a phone to control TV never made sense to me. I prefer the physical remote. And for sending screen to the TV, the quality was never good. Our Chromecast and the one included with TV haven’t been used for years.

That was never the point, though.

The Chromecast meant "oh I want to watch a movie tonight" becomes:

1. open chromecast on TV 2. open stream app on phone 3. push chromecast button 4. pick movie

* it creates social actions: A bunch of friends sitting around can share youtube videos with each other. * it vastly simplifies streaming audio (e.g. spotify)

I bought a chromecast so I could put videos on my tv while I eat dinner. That's legitimately 90% of what I use it for. The other 10% is streaming video from Plex/YT/etc or to dunk my screen for jackbox.

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

#569

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

no_time wrote: post #561
Buttons840 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.

A major browser supporting torrents would be a disaster for public torrent culture. Since everyone closes their browsers, people would seed substantially less. I have a theory that a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally. EDIT: closes their browser is a bad way to phrase it. The problem is that the fact that they are seeding would be more in their face instead…

> a good chunk of people seeding any given torrent on a public tracker are doing it unintentionally.

a person i know (totally not me) only seeds the rarer things. for more popular stuff they only seed for a couple of days.

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

#570

Post by Zanni »

javajosh wrote: post #185
grech wrote: post #151

This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone cal…

Interesting. I returned my airpod pros because I kept losing them and/or their case, and had anxiety until I found them. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I didn't find them again. Also, the audio quality on the other end of my calls was actively bad. I've reverted to wired earbuds with a mic in the cable, and am (very) grateful I was stubborn about keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on whatever phone I'm…

Yes! They're so easy to misplace. I lost my first pair of Airpods Pro, so I picked up a Catalyst Case [0] for them that I can clip onto my belt loop or messenger bag. Much more peace of mind. Haven't come close to losing them since.

[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HP0B2ZM/A/catalyst-waterp...

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