12 ms·

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 l

• taude 14y ago
  I was complaining to someone the other day about how needlessly complex washing machines, driers, and other home appliances have gotten. I bought a luxury refrigerator (LG) about 5 or 6 years ago. The motherboard/controller unit had to get replaced 3 times in the first year. I'm still using a washing machine and dryer from the early '80s that I somehow inherited. No one's ever said to me my clothes aren't clean. When it comes time to replace them, I'm going to get the basic models without all the fancy stuff... ...but no smart phone? Blasphemous.
  • philjohn 14y ago
    On the other hand, I've got an 8 year old fridge freezer that's still going strong, and a 5 year old dishwasher that's still going strong. Sounds like you got a dodgy model that had problems, but don't tar every modern appliance with the same brush. I also haven't seen a dishwasher with 40 buttons, as claimed in the parent post, and my modern Bosch washing machine doesn't look any more complex than the Miele one my mother had 25 years ago.
    • fmax30 14y ago
      I have got an LG washing machine that is 10 years old and works. A 20 year old sony tv that works. And a General fridge and a microwave bought in 1985 that still works. So basically the new pieces of technology keep breaking and we have to use these backups. At least the get the stuff done. Alas! , we cannot say the same for old software .... ( actually the older it is, the crappier it is).
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >needlessly complex washing machines, driers, and other home appliances // Presumably the companies don't want to compete on longevity as shareholders want short term returns and so aren't interested, generally, in long term stability and good stewardship of resources. That just leaves quality and features to compete on. Quality costs money and features are relatively cheap. So the companies stuff in features and pretend it's a quality product all the while hoping it breaks down the second it's outside warranty ...? Too cynical?
  • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    I have a mid-90s washer and dryer, which is the exact same design as the 80s versions. In 15+ years, I've had a few problems with them, but every time it was a relatively straightforward for me to figure out and to fix because they are so simple. If you have a voltmeter and an ammeter, you are set. The inability for me to fix them is what keeps me from upgrading. As the OP noticed, everything is broken, so I expect I will have to get anything repaired. I'd prefer to save some money and do it myself.
  • count 14y ago
    My 'new' dishwasher isn't needlessly complex. It's very complex because it uses less than half of the water per wash my older model did, so it has to filter/cycle. And no issues with it in 5 years. It replaced a dirt cheap, super simple 1980s style single-lever, single button model that failed after <1 full year of usage. Not everything is broken, it's just cheaper and possible to make shitty things en masse. You can still pay for quality (see: Porsche reliability vs. Chevy reliability).
• TeMPOraL 14y ago
  I would seriously reconsider Kindle. It beats any kind of screen for reading, and beats any kind of paper materials in logistics. For me, personally, it's pure value; something I can't say about most of other electronics I own.
  • ganley 14y ago
    Definitely. Like the grandparent commenter, I don't use any technology that frustrates or annoys me, which means that I don't use a whole lot of technology. The Kindle, however, has been great and fairly frustration-free - definitely a net positive. Related aside: The world seems to be making it more and more difficult not to have a smart phone (or, almost equivalently, to have a dumb phone). This sucks.
    • thebigshane 14y ago
      Has the Kindle become the new Kleenex and Google? Are the alternatives so insignificant that they aren't worth mentioning? I'm not talking about the Nook, I'm talking about a $50 Alturek e-reader that you can read text files and PDFs on. I think it's fantastic (but small).
      • prof_hobart 14y ago
        Depends on what you're after. The Kindle is backed up by Amazon's huge catalogue of books, and has a ridiculously easy purchasing mechanism (sometimes too easy...), along with almost fault-free syncing to the iPhone/iPad apps for those 10 spare minutes when I'm waiting for a bus and wanting something to read. Don't know about the US, but certainly in the UK there's nothing that I've come across that comes even close to the Kindle for my usage patterns - and I'm prepared to pay that little bit extra for that level of usability.
      • redthrowaway 14y ago
        .txt and .pdf are the absolute wrong formats for e-books. .pdf formatting is usually broken for eReaders, and .txt has no formatting whatsoever. Also, you'll really only ever get those formats if you're pirating, which usually entails transcription errors. I used to pirate all my books, but it got to the point where I realized paying $6 for the pleasure of a properly-formatted, error-free book was a better deal than pirating and ripping them.
• pinaceae 14y ago
  So you're a luddite then? All that minimalism but still using an iPod? What is real value? Why is value important? Is fun a part of value?
• jmduke 14y ago
  Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.) > - No Facebook There's a huge meme of 'Facebook is worthless' both on HN and on Reddit and other tech-oriented communities that I fail to grasp. There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    Maybe we don't feel the need to talk to three or more people simultaneously? I'd rather give proper attention to each, even if it takes a little more time.
  • AgentConundrum 14y ago
    > You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this. DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated. It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive. It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time. Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :) I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable. Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files. This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable. My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs. (That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)
• creativityhurts 14y ago
  Why 2 laptops though? So you can bitch about crappy Skype or email clients twice? :-) Your setup is quite radical in my opinion although I know that are even more extreme ones and this is not a way for most of us. Several years ago we used to memorize contacts and birthdays or keep them in a (paper) notebook but that's not an alternative for most of us nowadays. I keep my setup as minimal as possible and I'm still frustrated by these bugs and limitations.
• fmavituna 14y ago
  Funny enough in countries like Turkey there are plenty of washing machines, dish washers with literally one or two buttons that costs only 200$ Somehow I can't find this kind of machines in places like UK or Netherlands.
  • tripzilch 14y ago
    Dishwashers aren't that expensive in NL: http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/900/vaatwassers.html?orderField=prijs&orderSort=asc http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/900/vaatwassers.html?orde... (and since tweakers.net pricewatch mainly covers computer hardware, I expect there's better deals out there, too). I forget how much mine cost, but I don't think it was more than $300.
• flexie 14y ago
  Smart phones add so much value. In fact, I think it would be hard for most who have lived through the iphone age to go back to the world before. Almost like going back to the times before electricity :-)
  • conradfr 14y ago
    I don't have a smartphone (yet) and the only thing I really miss is GPS/Maps (I suck at direction ...). But I agree they are fantastic, except the prices for the high end are usually ridiculous.
  • tonyedgecombe 14y ago
    I just got rid of mine and went back to a dumb phone. I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.
    • stfu 14y ago
      This mirrors my own experience. I had one up to about 5 years ago. And then decided that I my personality is to addictive for things like these. Having not the option to "exit" any boring situation lets me experience the world around me much more.
    • pyre 14y ago
      Then disconnect your data plan. To me, just having the Android Calendar & Contacts interfaces is a huge improvement over most dedicated 'dumb' phones. I guess that you still have to have the discipline not to connect wifi, but I don't think that would be too much of an issue. Disabling/enabling wifi on Android is fairly easy. This barrier, though small is probably enough to help keep you in-check.
      • danielweber 14y ago
        I haven't verified this myself, but friends tell me you can no longer get "free" phones from AT&T unless you get a data plan. At $15/month for 2 years and 2 lines, that's 720 bucks. And phones just aren't durable enough to last for 4 years. It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.
• jasonkostempski 14y ago
  I assume you're just doing your own dishes. I went without a dishwasher for about a year with a family of 3. I wish I could get that 220+ hours of my life back.
  • Smudge 14y ago
    I only ever wash dishes by hand when I need some time to clear my head and relax. The other 5 or 6 days of the week I'm incredibly glad I have a dishwasher. I think this appliance saves me more time than anything else (in the kitchen).
• acqq 14y ago
  Why in the world do you think you need to buy new laptops every &@! year? Is it because "it becomes slow" after you installed too much? The performace of my notebooks or PCs doesn't degrade that fast.
• SanjayUttam 14y ago
  I don't think the OP is being serious. Wash dishes by hand? Call me optimistic but, I kind of thought we perfected the craft of producing dishwashers.
  • jws 14y ago
    We will have perfected it when you can again expect them to last 20 years without failure and at failure there is a diagnostic code that tells which reasonably priced part needs to be replaced.[1] They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit. Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always. EOM [1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.
    • genwin 14y ago
      > They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit. I suspect you mean they've been optimized for the shareholder's benefit.
    • icebraining 14y ago
      Not to plug or anything, but our Miele dishwasher is still working fine after 18 years, and the clothes washer only required a cheap fix a couple years ago. That said, they're definitively more expensive. We only got them because they came with the house.
    • maxerickson 14y ago
      It's fun to chase consumer benefit in a circle. At least some of the drive towards more features and low upfront price comes from consumers giving more weight to those aspects of the design (rather than reliability and lifetime cost). I would still agree that cost optimization has certainly done its part in trampling all over maintainability.
  • john_flintstone 14y ago
    My dishwasher was broken for months - never got around to fixing it - and the reality was, it didn't take noticeably longer to clean up after a meal or after a day's meals. Might be different if you have a big family, but from what I remember growing up, the actual washing of dishes was the least time consuming part of cleaning up.
• icebraining 14y ago
  Wash dishes by hand. (Fuck the 48 buttons on the dishwasher.) There are one button dishwashers out there.
  • genwin 14y ago
    Yep, the 10+ year-old ones. Might last a lifetime too.
• windsurfer 14y ago
  May I ask what laptops you recently purchased?
• alexholehouse 14y ago
  Clearly some of these are life choices, and important ones which almost certainly make sense to you, but one thing; No dishwasher? I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to grasp how an example of a bad dishwasher user interface is a barrier to all dishwashers (at least in terms of UI - clearly you may have environment reasons).
  • mej10 14y ago
    Yeah, mine literally just has a dial that is only used to turn it on and off. No buttons, switches, anything. You just turn the dial like 0.2cm and it turns on. I can't imagine being OK with wasting time washing dishes by hand.
    • irishcoffee 14y ago
      It's therapeutic, for me anyway.
      • mej10 14y ago
        It is funny that you describe it as therapeutic. I have several manual tasks that I would describe that way. Just not washing dishes. :)
        • SkyMarshal 14y ago
          After coding all day, almost any manual labor will do. Washing dishes, mowing the lawn, helping a friend move, etc.
      • joverholt 14y ago
        I agree, wife and I wash most of our dishes, she washes, I dry. It's a great time to let your mind wonder and think about problems. Mindless tasks like drying dishes and scooping the cat box give me a chance to actually think about things in a no pressure environment.
• rimantas 14y ago
  I don't think you will ever experience non-horrendous human design with attitude like this.
• yequalsx 14y ago
  A lot of people are surprised that you don't use a dishwasher. This I find surprising. I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned way; stirring constantly so that nothing burns to the bottom of the pot. I don't use a dryer. After washing clothes (no I don't do this by hand!) I put clothes on a drying rack. I fold clothes right away after they dry. Overall these little hacks have made me less lazy and have given me a feeling of having more energy.
  • antidoh 14y ago
    Or, overall your non-lazy and energetic personality makes you more likely to want to do these manual things, and use that time for those things instead of other things. Which is all good, either way.
  • timc3 14y ago
    You could have saved the time and gone outdoors instead. Washing dishes or going for a walk - I know which I choose.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • peterhajas 14y ago
    > I do dishes as a fitness hack. What does this even mean? How is this a "hack"? Is vacuuming a "fitness hack"? How about sit-ups? Or walking?
    • sliverstorm 14y ago
      The time has come to give up on the word "hack". I let go a year or two ago. We're at a point where in general use it is inches away from a synonym of "modify" or maybe even simply "non-default".
• uniclaude 14y ago
  Before reading the replies to this post I didn't realize how important could something as basic as a dishwasher be useful to HN members. Living in Japan, I see this sort of appliance as a total waste of space, and honestly, washing my personal dishes by hand is not tough. As some others said, I would reconsider the "No Kindle" though. This cheap device saves a lot of space for me.
• danielweber 14y ago
  Who sells laptops these days that aren't loaded up with a bunch of bloatware? I'd like to look at the System Process List right after boot and have there be no more than 20 entries, knowing exactly what each thing does.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    Sellers of preloaded Linux laptops. LinuxCertified, System76, etc.
    • WildUtah 14y ago
      And to mention the obvious: Apple.
  • yoshamano 14y ago
    Vizio http://www.vizio.com/notebook/overview http://www.vizio.com/notebook/overview
• obi-nine 14y ago
  You could make your life even simpler and more active by dumping the car for a bicycle. Agree with you on the dishwasher - always thought them to be noisy wasteful appliances. Of course I grind my own coffee by hand too for the same reason.
• runjake 14y ago
  Yes, I'll single out the dishwasher item. Mine has a couple dozen buttons. I only care about two: Start and 4-Hour-Delayed Start. I couldn't even begin to tell you what the other buttons do. Sometimes it's also about focus, too. Same with my digital camera, Microsoft Word, Excel, et cetera. Don't master. Learn what you need to get the job done. Twist ending: I do the dishes a lot, and I end up washing them by hand anyway. Why? Because it's tedious labor that gets my mind away from coding and technology. I consider it meditation. My wife hates that I don't use the dishwasher.
• larrys 14y ago
  "got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design" Is that really true Ed? Or is it possible you suffer from the same syndrome that prevented certain people from programming their VCR's? (Especially older people). Perhaps you've noticed that even the youngest kids are really good at working the TV and the remote. Their desire to watch TV seems to increase their intelligence (and acts to prevent frustration) to the point where they are motivated to overcome any and all obstacles and can often (from my experience) do things with those remotes that older people find very difficult. I say don't give up. In fact to me it's the opposite. Dealing with those things is actually good for your brain and keeping you young.
• bicknergseng 14y ago
  I can understand the frustration when things aren't intuitive (to you), but at what point does your attitude become counterproductive? The obvious points being the dishwasher, laptops, and smartphones (there are many kinds of dishwashers without 48 buttons [I've never seen one that has 48 buttons], what could possibly be the reason for buying new laptops every year, my grandma has managed to use her iPhone for pictures and contact management quite efficiently, even if there are small bugs). It seems to me you've adopted a "I don't understand this particular item, so I'm against using anything of the type." At what point do you become a luddite?
• zem 14y ago
  what leaps out at me from that list is that you have systematically ruled out every good way to read ebooks. as a heavy fiction reader, my smartphone and later my kindle have added value to my life that far outweighs any design flaws they might have had.