Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

news.ycombinator.com

281–290 of 428 posts

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#281
post #9

Cheap attachable toilet bidet

Is there some issue with the cold water? If you live in a cold climate? Asking for a friend :D

You would think having cold water applied to your underside would be uncomfortable, but it's not really. Sure, its a bit of a shock sometimes but you get used to it. And honestly, not having to wipe (and wipe and wipe) is 100% worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#282
Ditching my laptops for desktop workstation.

Got rid of all my USB C dongles, no concerns about heating, amazing performance, and I'm not the type who codes from a cafe.

Work from cafe is for light chats, emails and occasional writing / jotting down of ideas.

It's trivial to keep things synced between devices, even without using proprietory software.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#283

App "Scanner Pro" - feels like a professional scanner, always available on the go and auto-uploads to GDrive. Use it extensively. Google Voice (until it stopped working well) - I could not have lived overseas for 3yrs w/o Google Voice. An absolute lifesaver while I was making 12-15 transnational trips a year doing both business and grad school at the same time. Google Fi would have been great, but the overall system…

I've found the extended features of paid Lose It, mainly protein tracking, to be worthwhile but I wish it wasn't a yearly subscription.

Go to your account and tap on "Switch to lifetime".

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#284
Not that small but my Bose NC 700's ($399)

They drove me mad until maybe the last 6 months, the firmware was atrocious but recently it has much improved, I also bought the USB link for times that there is a lot of interference.

What most people dont realise is that yes they have noise cancelling for you (e.g, they reduce the noise you can hear), but they also use their external microphones to cancel the noise in the room for the people on the call, you can be in a noisy room / office and it sounds silent on the call - crucial when working at home with other people during lockdowns or in noisy open plan offices.

The best purchase I have made in the last 2 years by far

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#285
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex-Magnet user here, try Rectangle. It's faster than Magnet, doesn't cause weird bugs, free, open source AND has more features. It's the whole package.

I've never understood why Apple doesn't make the features Rectangle offers native to macOS. Snapping windows shouldn't require a third-party app, but yet here we are.

Microsoft patented it

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#286

An electric toothbrush and floss. Brushing with a regular toothbrush doesn’t give me the clean/fresh feeling my electric toothbrush does. The model I have was maybe $25 or $30. Using the electric toothbrush and flossing before bed every night, I feel like in my morning my mouth actually still feels fine. Of course I would never start my day without brushing, but my mouth doesn’t feel icky when I wake up in the mornin…

A plastic tongue scraper. Just brushing my teeth didn't provide the satisfactory result until I started to also brush my tongue. And the scraper does a much better job of it.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember hearing a long time ago that brushing before eating is better. Sugar reacts with plaque to form acids and brushing temporarily removes plaque. So eating straight after brushing doesn't really do anything.

I've heard this also but it doesn't make much sense to me. If you brush after you eat, wouldn't it remove the plaque, sugar, and any possible acid? Any plaque that remains will have little to nothing to eat. If you brush before eating, there will still be some plaque left and once you eat there should be copious amounts of sugar and food for it to snack on and quickly multiply + produce acid.

The way I understood it the acids in the food make the enamel softer. Brushing while the enamel is softened can result in brushing away the outermost layer of enamel. Waiting until 45-60 minutes supposedly allows the saliva to normalize the pH level so that the enamel is at full strength again.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#289
Really good heaphones. It's been years since I bought them and I'm still amazed almost daily just how good music can sound.

I'll admit that the cost upfront was not exactly cheap, but if you divide the price by the useful lifespan (my previous headphones lasted for 8 years) it becomes a no-brainer.

Re: Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

#290

Mail processor. I spend $20/month, they receive all of my mail, open it, and digitize it. They discard the junk mail if I want. I never have to visit a mailbox again. I can even register it as my address on my driver's license and for my vehicles. EDIT: The service I use is https://www.sbimailservice.com/ .

That's interesting. Seems like an expensive /dev/null
Post reply on HN