A lot of these pdfs contain steps which are optional or only apply in certain situations. Does that decrease the complexity because there are less steps to do? Or does it increase.. the cyclomatic complexity!
Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
61–70 of 94 posts
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#62A lot of these pdfs contain steps which are optional or only apply in certain situations. Does that decrease the complexity because there are less steps to do? Or does it increase.. the cyclomatic complexity!
My parser is unfortunately not fancy enough to detect optional steps - but it's a great point!
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> piss easy to assemble Sure, it’s not hard, but if there are a lot of steps it’s still going to take longer. A fully specced up pax double wardrobe with drawers, sliding doors, and lighting is made up of hundreds of parts, so does take a good amount of time to put together even though it’s not difficult per se. It’s also made up of many different SKUs so you get dozens of boxes turn up and it takes a little while to…
The Pax with sliding doors took me a really long time to put together. Long enough that when my brother in law (who doesn’t like assembling stuff) asked if I recommend them, it was a solid No.
Yeah, we ordered a double width pax with sliding doors, drawers, shelves and lighting, plus another half wardrobe with a mirror door, shelves, and lighting.
I’m fairly handy and quite enjoy putting things together so it never crossed my mind to use IKEA’s assembly service, but I did notice they were offering it for £300, which I took as a signal that it would take a while.
In the end it took 12+ hours over the course of a weekend. I reckon I’d be faster if I did it again, and maybe if I did it enough times I’d be able to half that, but the problem is, how many fully spec Ed pax wardrobes + ancillaries are you really going to assemble in your life?
With bigger orders, depending on how you value your time and want to spend it, maybe paying for assembly makes sense. I reckon 2 people would have had it done in a morning if I’d paid.
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#64This is a fantastic way to quantify just how bad a consumer experience this is. Flat pack furniture tends to be very awful compared to alternatives that are also often cheaper and without assembly requirements. Everything that has come in box from a store like IKEA (or assembled in the back from a box and presented as non-flat-pack) has lasted me less than a decade. I've got a bedroom set that was built out of proper…
In most places (certainly here in Europe) the alternatives to flat-pack furniture are not cheaper, quite the opposite. Unless we're talking second-hand, which is obviously the most sustainable option.
On quality, I have an apartment rented to students and the Ikea furniture in it is still going strong after years. I make sure to tighten the screws and bolts periodically, but otherwise it's as good as new. I would not have bought "disposable" furniture, no matter how cheap. Conversely, my experience of furniture (and lighting and other fittings) from department stores and hardware stores is that it's three times as expensive as Ikea, three times heavier, and yet obviously poorer quality.
My theory is that if you want quality you are better buying from Ikea. That's simply because any given product will have been bought by millions of other people. By definition, a lot of thought has gone into it and design flaws will likely have been eliminated long ago.
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and if you're using an assembly driver or not Not a good idea on modern Ikea furniture that's basically engineered wood and cardboard. Way too easy to strip out the threads.
Any drill nowadays would have a clutch. Use it, so it limits the torque. It applies for pretty much any kind of work (e.g. including mounting intake manifold on a lawn-mower, but then it's likely to use a torque wrench too)
> Any drill nowadays would have a clutch. Use it, so it limits the torque.
The problem is, unless it's an actual torque wrench these clutches are allll over the place. There's a reason they give only some arbitrary scale, and often enough they're so unreliable that the same electric screwdriver / drill will produce different torques for the same setting depending on the battery SoC, the power setting and the cleanliness of the thread in the wood.
I've found the most reliable way for IKEA furniture is to use an electric screwdriver for the bulk of the work and use a manual screwdriver for the final 1-2 turns. Everything else is just asking for trouble, especially the screw "overshooting" because the particle density at one hole is randomly (markedly) less than at the hole you calibrated the screwdriver with.
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to disassemble some furniture as well recently. It had one and a half million screws and whatnots and since it was going to recycling center anyways I figured out sledgehammer was as good tool as any. Turns out it was better than _any_, ultrafast (take that claude!) and a ton of fun.
I’ve used a reciprocating saw on a couch before.
JD? That you?
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have nightmares of these, I’ll gladly pay someone else to do it next time
I hate building IKEA furniture, my wife loves building IKEA furniture. Problem solved :). Same with shopping at IKEA. I know all the shortcuts in our local IKEA so that I can exit the store as quickly as possible.
That sounds like a good match! I learned with an ex partner that I could assemble furniture, or she could assemble furniture, but if we tried it together we'd both get fustrated and snappy.
Easily solved, but surprising considering how well we were otherwise able to act and interact, even in stressful and difficult circumstances.
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#68IKEA once was selling good quality items. Now it's an example of enshitification. All furniture is made of cardboard instead of plywood or other type of board. That's less for more money
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Flat pack furniture tends to be very awful compared to alternatives that are also often cheaper and without assembly requirements. I don't particularly like my ikea furniture. But one big reason why I bought this instead of alternatives that come fully assembled is the price: it's much cheaper. Then again, I live in France, there aren't many Amish around AFAIK.
Same here, in Germany. Some categories are especially exaggerated: when needing a number of new wardrobes a few years ago, we struggled to find anything that was remotely similar in price or value to IKEA. The big retail park furniture stores were 2-4x the price for similarish quality (i.e. chipboard; modular construction). Smaller higher quality stores (e.g. plywood/real wood rather than cardboard or chipboard) were…
There's something wrong with their site, all their prices have an extra digit for some reason.
Re: Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index
#70Cool! I had codex have a go at calculating "effective price" on a few items, that prices in the assembly labor, and then also calculates the delta between price and effective price. Obviously very depended on how you value your time, but here are some items at $30/hour: BRIMNES storage bed + headboard, Queen $549 + 320 min labor = $709 (delta: +$160 / +29%) HEMNES 8-drawer dresser $380 + 236 min labor = $498 (delta:…
If an ALEX drawer unit takes them over an hour and a half to build, IMHO they're doing something wrong. Many others on that list seem suspiciously high (the BRIMNES comes to mind). Curious how it came up with those values.
Sloppily. I doubt there's much information on the web that says "mounting a BRIMNES takes five hours, twenty minutes." So what's an LLM to do? Produce any number in the semantic vicinity of the sequence "mounting"+ "BRIMNES" + "takes". So that can be anything that says "building an IKEA closet cost me" or "climbing mount Bayimes takes on average" or perhaps even "building a mountain bayke [spelling error] can take". And then from all sentences that get close to that point, it takes the next likely token. So 320 minutes it is.