Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

scottlawsonbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 175 posts

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#41

Post by squirtle24 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #26
samlinnfer wrote: post #23

I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.

> I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind. One product many have at home (if they've got a wife or if they're a woman): nail polish remover. This is a magical tool for it's ubiquitous. Sure, you can go and buy the proper stuff: but this one many already have some at home. It works also should sticky stuff fall from trees…

I would add a word of caution before using nail polish remover (which is acetone).

Acetone can damage and melt certain plastics. It can cause clear plastic to become cloudy. Using a hair dryer to soften the adhesive, or a bottle of Goo Gone, is often a better alternative for peeling off stickers.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#42

Post by paulmooreparks »

Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides.

Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle.

This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#43

Post by squirtle24 »

I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system doesn’t have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies on the categories being static. Let’s say a box of resistors grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories; reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult.

Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#44

Post by fgfarben »

sudonanohome wrote: post #38

A lazy wall of AI slop: > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale. > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale. > That's not a failure. That's the system working. I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with…

Learn how to skim?

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#47

Post by Karuma »

sudonanohome wrote: post #38

A lazy wall of AI slop: > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale. > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale. > That's not a failure. That's the system working. I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with…

Yeah, I've been just slowly blocking all these domains, users, etc. But nowadays it's just unbearable. We have already lost this war.

And seeing every day this kind of crap at the top of the front page of the websites I used to love, with hundreds of comments of intelligent people not even noticing all this useless AI slop... Very sad future ahead.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#48

Post by scottlawson »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #46

This sounds great, except: how do you know if you've already labelled a box today or not? How do you prevent double, triple, or quadruple labelling? BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!

short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a lot.

Re: A dot a day keeps the clutter away

#50

Post by scottlawson »

squirtle24 wrote: post #43

I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot…

it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact, I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers. Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and so the dots weren't really conveying information about those migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at first.
Post reply on HN