Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye non-KISS appliances

willbush.dev

441–450 of 499 posts

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that hyperbole regarding fridges, or is it really that bad in the USA? Here in Germany, the vast majority of fridges are still just fridges.

A person over here https://slrpnk.net/comment/4749319 said >The EU just made it so that any new major appliance must be repaired by the maker for 10 years I'm not sure how true that is, but I set by VPN Dublin, Ireland and did some shopping to see what brands are avaliable. Lot of interesting brands I ran across: BEKO BOSCH CANDY HOOVER HOTPOINT INDESIT LIEBHERR MIELE NORDMENDE NORKO POWERPOINT SIEMENS TCL WHIRLPOOL…

There’s more of a difference than just smart/not-smart, though. US tends to have those giant two-door fridges, we usually have single-door, stacked, fridge-freezer combinations.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how often do you experience power outages … I think in the last 15 years it only happened to me once. You must not live in Texas or California. or other things that lead to weird temperature changes? You're a lot more upbeat on current fridge reliability than I am. LG lost a class action suit regarding their junk "linear" compressors a few years ago, and despite multiple supposed revisions you can still find…

Its not just their linear compressors, its the fact that they use very thin aluminum tubing on the high side, and apparently have had assembly issues where weld material has splattered on the tubes, which after a bit of thermal cycling (or maybe its just galvanic corrosion) they start leaking. I to had a LG refrigerator declared "unfixable" and bought back by LG, but I actually decided they were idiots and fixed it m…

So it was unfixable, without disabling an essential feature?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#443
post #131
post #23

My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit. My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be st…

That dryer will probably use a shocking amount of power. Depending on local power costs a modern compressor dryer will easily pay for itself in a couple of years compared to sticking with the old one.

Are you factoring in the more frequent repair costs incurred when the "smart" features fail and incapacitate the whole device?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#444
post #132
post #23

My parents have a clothes drier from the 1970s and a fridge from the 1990s. They have needed repairs, but they were infrequent and not so costly as to necessitate buying a new unit. My A/C is only four years old and the maintenance guy is telling me one of the fans is drawing too much power and will need to be replaced soon. Despite the part being free under warranty, they want $600 to replace it. This seems to be st…

Watch out for survivorship bias. How many of those old appliances had to break and fail in the first 10 years for these two to survive.

My appliance repair guy, who repairs appliances all day and has seen it all, told me to hold on to my (relatively old) appliances as long as possible because they are more easily repaired than the newer ones. Sure, it's his job to fix things so he has incentive to repair rather than recommend a replacement (in which he would make $0) but I trust him: when my 20-year-old microwave oven recently died, he said it would be several hundred dollars to fix and would not be worth the money (I agreed).

So yes, many old appliances have broken and were likely not worth repairing, but on average all the evidence points to newer devices being more finicky, easily broken, and harder and more expensive to repair than older, simpler devices. Every engineer worth their salt knows that simpler is usually more reliable.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just their linear compressors, its the fact that they use very thin aluminum tubing on the high side, and apparently have had assembly issues where weld material has splattered on the tubes, which after a bit of thermal cycling (or maybe its just galvanic corrosion) they start leaking. I to had a LG refrigerator declared "unfixable" and bought back by LG, but I actually decided they were idiots and fixed it m…

So it was unfixable, without disabling an essential feature?

The yoder loop on a fridge is designed to prevent condensation near the door seals. Depending on your climate you may be able to get away without one.

When I'm talking about the heater on mine not working, I'm talking about the heater for the evaporator. Without a working heater I'd get enough ice built up on the evaporator within a week to cause problems with the evaporator fan. If the fan doesn't work you're not gonna get much in the way of cool air into the fridge or freezer compartments.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how often do you experience power outages … I think in the last 15 years it only happened to me once. You must not live in Texas or California. or other things that lead to weird temperature changes? You're a lot more upbeat on current fridge reliability than I am. LG lost a class action suit regarding their junk "linear" compressors a few years ago, and despite multiple supposed revisions you can still find…

Its not just their linear compressors, its the fact that they use very thin aluminum tubing on the high side, and apparently have had assembly issues where weld material has splattered on the tubes, which after a bit of thermal cycling (or maybe its just galvanic corrosion) they start leaking. I to had a LG refrigerator declared "unfixable" and bought back by LG, but I actually decided they were idiots and fixed it m…

Yeah I had a top freezer model, something that should be dead nuts simple and yet everything was still electronically controlled. That means you've got all sorts of onboard diagnostics. Even so the LG tech couldn't figure out the problem. In general though I can totally get why someone employed by the manufacturer wouldn't want to go off script. Too much liability.

One of many problems with LG is that they seem to have a rotating cast of metrics driven clowns running LG America. Junking a fridge is almost certainly more cost effective than spending the time to fix it, train their techs in depth, and get their logistics in order. The tech that came out had previously worked for GE and had worse things to say about their brand of chaos.

Funny enough the Whirlpool that replaced it did have exposed insulation (and gobs of epoxy everywhere). It would've been worse than the LG, except it actually kept things cool.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there should be one. I also think that everyone that has come up with their idea is misguided, and all that tried to implemented one was/is a authoritarian psychopath who should be stripped of any power as soon as their nature got revealed.

So then we float aimlessly, pointlessly and meaninglessly towards nothingness?

Do you think that all the great artists from the past were motivated by technological progress in itself? Do you think Michaelangelo would make even more impressive works if he had better chisels or brushes? Do you think that The Beatles' would be even more popular if they could compose their songs on a computer?

Or even in a more mundane situation, do you think that someone volunteering on a hospital to entertain sick kids do not find meaning in what they do because they are not effectively helping to cure cancer?

There is another thread where you say you are not religious. I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if you are bowing down to the Altar of Technology to find meaning for your life, maybe religion is not so bad after all?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then we float aimlessly, pointlessly and meaninglessly towards nothingness?

Do you think that all the great artists from the past were motivated by technological progress in itself? Do you think Michaelangelo would make even more impressive works if he had better chisels or brushes? Do you think that The Beatles' would be even more popular if they could compose their songs on a computer? Or even in a more mundane situation, do you think that someone volunteering on a hospital to entertain si…

At times before now there was no indication that we could be seeing an acceleration of tech as is happening now. So there was no hope for people to see what is possible for us now. They sure were trying to figure out life. They just didn't have the right knowledge at the time.

But now that we do, I do think we should figure out what is going on here. I don't knownif you can call it religion or whatever, but the point is completing this puzzle and tech is necessary to do that.

You don't care about what is behind all this?

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#449
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the backlash against SPAs doesn’t make any sense. Server side rendering is fine for documentation etc. but full applications don’t want to be simulated on a server, client-server makes complete sense.

I don’t share this position. Webservers shall create and provide the readily HTML so browsers can render the website without JavaScript. Actually text-browsers should render it and also allow disabled persons using it without hassle. Instead SPA (or more direct JavaScript) is used to force the browser to assemble the HTML and it is slow and waste resources. Creating website which create load on the client-site is bad…

I agree you’re right in that the current tech stack is bad. But the answer is to fix that, and I think (very) slowly we will.

JS was a terrible language but nowadays it is pretty good in some areas, passable in others, with some horror shows left in. The ecosystem and tooling are the real problems. I don’t understand why these issues haven’t been addressed by Google et al.

Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain. Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync. People expect collaboration as table stakes, which makes that task even harder.

I agree accessibility is a problem.

Ironically the Java applet had the right idea, as a compromise between our positions, but wrong time and maybe wrong language? Its Swiss cheese security didn’t help either.

Re: Goodbye non-KISS appliances

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think the main goal of humans should be to understand what is behind all that. Why do we exist. It seems to me the best way to do that is to develop tech, and I would hope quick as otherwise I personally will obviously die before finding out. What do you think the goal is? I just think that at some point we will find out anyway and why not quicker then? Why let 5 or 10 more generations of humans go on if at s…

> I just think that at some point we will find out anyway and why not quicker then? Because you and the corporations you support are making the lives of people worse now, and you are trading their wellbeing for your very minimal, personal comfort, and rationalizing it away with Pascal Wager-style of technocracy where "tech" could save you from dying.

Which people's lives are they making worse?
Post reply on HN