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The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects
- Paddywack 3y agoThese kind of posts always remind me of a quote from the movie “life is Beautiful”… “There is nothing as necessary as the unnecessary…”
- hardlianotion 3y agoIt's good, but I was expecting to see something like a C++ library that seemed at first glance to be useful but is hard to use.
- paweladamczuk 3y agoI wonder if the site is deliberately inconvenient as well, being so susceptible to an influx of requests (not functional atm). I appreciate the irony.
- shreddit 3y agoIt would be really funny to limit a website to one user per hour
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- satisfice 3y agoWhat an excellent way to contemplate design.
- el_don_almighty 3y ago/. Effect?
- gorjusborg 3y agowow, that's a throwback. and yes :)
- SushiHippie 3y agoCan anyone explain? ;
- wenderen 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
- eimrine 3y agoThe site is down because of us. It may be called HN effect but /. was the first who might do that with someone's website.
- gorjusborg 3y agoNot that it matters too much, but the 'Slashdot Effect' existed before HN was online. Slashdot was founded in 1997, 'Slashdot Effect' (according to wikipedia) was coined in 1999 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#:~:text=This%20was%20known%20as%20the,traffic%20to%20sites%20of%20interest%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#:~:text=This%20was%20....) Hackernews was founded 2007.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIn the early 90s I worked for a place whose phone number was apt to be published in a news story about the Internet. So people who wondered what it was, and how to get on it, would call that number and reach us. We had 2-3 part-time employees answering phones, voicemail and email. As you can imagine, we were effectively DDOS'd and we knew it, every time a national news story hit the presses. Our #1 response to individual callers was to send them a list of dial-up ISPs. This list could be had on anonymous FTP, but since our callers were not yet online, we printed out the list, on demand, and popped it in the outgoing postal mail, each and every time. That printer was the most unreliable device in the office. Meanwhile, in the same office, we ran an ISP which offered dialup service to a few thousand users. The authentication server needed to read /etc/passwd sequentially, each time a modem answered. The usernames were often found at the bottom of the file. So at peak hours, our authentication server began timing out, backlogged with the requests and the ever-growing user roster. So I took the server code and introduced a RAM cache. It read /etc/passwd and held it in memory until the file was modified on disk. We swapped in the new code and it immediately smoothed everything out again. The operators all breathed a sigh of relief.
- grose 3y agoSite is down, so Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240114144504/https://www.theuncomfortable.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240114144504/https://www.theun...
- jansan 3y agoSite ist not down, just inconveniently slow.
- matkoniecz 3y agoOpening archive.org link caused my laptop to start spinning fans.
- boznz 3y agoThank god for the Internet archive, hit that donate button while you're there and hope it never goes away.
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- omgtehlion 3y agoI’d like to have that tea set...
- SushiHippie 3y agoSame, I guess taking a sip out of that cup will be funny, but otherwise it looks really cool.
- Severian 3y agoThe broom would actually be useful for some applications. Top of objects, concrete texturing, etc.
- timenova 3y ago> Resource Limit Is Reached Starting with the website itself... :)
- meepmorp 3y agoIt's digital performance art.
- sorokod 3y agoNot just inconvenient but self defeating in a way - reminds me of Google Chat.
- athom 3y agoRelated: A Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, by Jacques Carelman https://www.amazon.com/Objets-Introuvables-Catalogue-Fantastic-Inventions/dp/0584950292 https://www.amazon.com/Objets-Introuvables-Catalogue-Fantast... Perhaps best known for his Coffee Pot for Masochists, featured on the cover of Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654 https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...
- dnfehren 3y agotook a second, but I thought that the ruler might actually be ok at first
- 1970-01-01 3y agoWhat's the problem with a 0-10 mm ruler? I would clip that onto a keychain and use it to check gaps and alignments. In fact, I may steal this design and start 3D printing them for profit. OH, its already been done! https://www.printables.com/model/689367-1-cm-ruler-keychain https://www.printables.com/model/689367-1-cm-ruler-keychain
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAnd in the spirit of the Uncomfortable Ruler, this has the same frustrating design flaw: the scale doesn't start in the corner so you can't butt it up against something and use it like a depth gauge!
- omoikane 3y agoThese reminds me of the PHP hammer: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
- Apocryphon 3y agoWeird, I could've sworn this was a coffee table book with a lot more objects than only twelve.
- vdaea 3y agoYou guys have to understand that delivering static text and images over http is still an unsolved problem in computing so it's normal that web sites like this one go down when they receive more than one request per second.
- LordShredda 3y agoMade me laugh out loud. I call it 'lol' for short. Why isn't web hosting as free as social media posts?
- cooperadymas 3y agoIt is and always has been. Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities. Today, Neocities, Github pages, Wordpress.com. People _chose_ to go to social media.
- ikari_pl 3y agotripod <3 my whole high school class's website was on that.
- throwup238 3y agoTripod is still around! https://ilovejarjarbinks.tripod.com/ https://ilovejarjarbinks.tripod.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tripod.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tripod.com
- simoncodes 3y agothis works only this good on sites with the famous "W" favicon
- Lucasoato 3y agoIs there (in 2024) a better alternative to Wordpress, to the average Wordpress user? I’ve always been outside of that world and I can’t understand why it’s so much used.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSimilar: Dysfunctional Luxury Products by Jeremy Hutchinson (2013) https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects/ https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects... https://www.erratum.co/products/ https://www.erratum.co/products/
- Animats 3y agoI didn't know that the Sony Motocompacto scooter was for real. Those are available as Second Life vehicles, although not with Sony branding. Did the real one ever sell? It seems more practical than, say, a one-wheel, and I see one-wheels all the time.
- lukev 3y agoNot only was it for real, it is for real. Honda recently re-launched it: https://motocompacto.honda.com https://motocompacto.honda.com
- Animats 3y agoBut now it's obsolete. You don't need that much box space for the engine or battery any more. Powered scooters do the same job with less bulk.
- lukev 3y agoIt is a powered scooter. The box space is lightweight & mostly empty unless the seat and handlebars are folded in. It's basically a stylistic differentiation.
- doctorhandshake 3y agoReminds me of these furniture examples by Kai-Wei Hsu http://www.kwhfurniture.com/oneoffs http://www.kwhfurniture.com/oneoffs
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15191232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15191232 - Sept 2017 (26 comments)
- coldtea 3y agoWhere's the J2EE API?
- maxglute 3y agoI would save a lot of time using that tea set with high throughput spout. I remember filling a huge pot in a waterfall sink that gently dumped a shit load of water and being very pleased at how fast it filled with very little splash back.
- kej 3y agoThe double champagne glass reminds me a little of the double-spouted Native American wedding vase, and I could see it having a place in wedding ceremonies where the couple takes their first toast together or something. https://blog.kachinahouse.com/the-meaning-behind-the-native-american-wedding-vase/ https://blog.kachinahouse.com/the-meaning-behind-the-native-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- metaphorical 3y agoAlong the similar approach in defamiliarization, there's also Chindogu: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/ https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/
- kazinator 3y agoThese people are fools not to have a stock of some of these objects manufactured, and quick buy links next to everything. Some people looking at this cruft may want it. The Klein bottle guy sells, right?
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoAssuming an architect doesn't have the right kind of workshop needed to make them herself, the capital outlay to tool up any of those objects except the broom and the fork (for which you'd take existing products and modify) would be pretty enormous. The ruler probably would be the easiest - a company that already makes steel rulers could likely make it for a relatively modest set-up cost.
- fuzzythinker 3y agoThis guy does this too and many are funny. https://unnecessaryinventions.com/ https://unnecessaryinventions.com/