Ask HN: What are some things you cannot help but over-engineer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some things you cannot help but over-engineer?

5 pointstextread10 comments

It could be your car, kitchen, editor, food supplements, chrome extensions,...anything really.

Cleaning my cats' litter boxes.

I turn the vacuum cleaner on and put the hose into the box so it sucks all the bad air out. It also sucks all of the dust out when I'm scooping and when I put in new litter. I also set the air purifier at home to max. I put on gloves and I put on a mask before cleaning. I also buy the best unscented litter money can buy at my local pet store. Over time I've found out which cat food leads to less stinky poos (on going process).

I'm open to some good suggestions.

sugestion: get dog who poops outside

Bicarbonate Soda powder in the litter box (dumped in and shaken around) entirely eliminated any smell of urine, at least with our two bengals. We started looking into odour treatments, we were tipped off by another savvy shopper at the pet store. Became part of our litter box routine very early on. My backyard science hypothesis is that it reacts with the odour-causing compounds in the urine (urea or uric acid?), which neutralises the smell.

Login screens in the apps I build. I love animating the response. If there's a success, fade out, fade in a welcome screen, maybe a fun spinner... It's the door to your app, so it feels like it's time well spent. It gives the feeling of sophistication if done tastefully and well.

Do you have an example? I'm not a massive fan of animations or effects on functional apps and websites.

Breakfast. Sometimes I go to bed early just so I can get to breakfast sooner.

What do you have for breakfast?

Time management tools. Calendar, gantt chart, waterfall chart, etc.

I had stopped at GTD. Its interesting to see your even deeper rabbit hole.

Home improvement stuff. I overthink stuff, get into analysis paralysis, and then go back to basics before implementing something that's rather overkill for the application.

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