The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects | Hacker News Reader

The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

theuncomfortable.com

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Site is down, so Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240114144504/https://www.theun...

Site ist not down, just inconveniently slow.

One might say uncomfortably slow.

Site is, in fact down.

> 508: Resource Limit Is Reached

You did not get the joke. But joking asige, for me it is actually just very slow, not down.

I did not, but now I really want to read the site.

Opening archive.org link caused my laptop to start spinning fans.

Thank god for the Internet archive, hit that donate button while you're there and hope it never goes away.

Once I accidentally lost 3 poems on my blog as well as the linked Notion database, and weirdly there's nothing in the version history. Thanks to the internet archive that I found those poems back.

These reminds me of the PHP hammer:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

Similar:

Dysfunctional Luxury Products by Jeremy Hutchinson (2013)

https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects...

https://www.erratum.co/products/

I 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.

Not only was it for real, it is for real. Honda recently re-launched it: https://motocompacto.honda.com

But 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.

It 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.

Along the similar approach in defamiliarization, there's also Chindogu: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-inventions/

A Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, by Jacques Carelman 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-Expand...

> Resource Limit Is Reached

Starting with the website itself... :)

It's digital performance art.

This guy does this too and many are funny.

https://unnecessaryinventions.com/

I 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.

The broom would actually be useful for some applications. Top of objects, concrete texturing, etc.

Where's the J2EE API?

The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15191232 - Sept 2017 (26 comments)

Not just inconvenient but self defeating in a way - reminds me of Google Chat.

Reminds me of these furniture examples by Kai-Wei Hsu http://www.kwhfurniture.com/oneoffs

These 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?

Assuming 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.

It'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.

These kind of posts always remind me of a quote from the movie “life is Beautiful”…

“There is nothing as necessary as the unnecessary…”

Weird, I could've sworn this was a coffee table book with a lot more objects than only twelve.

I’d like to have that tea set...

Same, I guess taking a sip out of that cup will be funny, but otherwise it looks really cool.

What an excellent way to contemplate design.

took a second, but I thought that the ruler might actually be ok at first

What'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

And 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!

The 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-...

I wonder if the site is deliberately inconvenient as well, being so susceptible to an influx of requests (not functional atm). I appreciate the irony.

It would be really funny to limit a website to one user per hour

You 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.

Made me laugh out loud. I call it 'lol' for short. Why isn't web hosting as free as social media posts?

It is and always has been. Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities. Today, Neocities, Github pages, Wordpress.com.

People _chose_ to go to social media.

tripod <3 my whole high school class's website was on that.

Tripod is still around! https://ilovejarjarbinks.tripod.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tripod.com

this works only this good on sites with the famous "W" favicon

Is 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.

> I can’t understand why it’s so much used.

I used WP for the first time this week. Its value is in giving non-programmers the capability to build a functional website (so long as features are within the norms). If the user has a sense of design and moderate graphic design skills, the site will also look beautiful.

Copy it over to the university's Gopher server. It can handle twice that much.

/. Effect?

wow, that's a throwback.

and yes :)

Can anyone explain? ;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

The site is down because of us. It may be called HN effect but /. was the first who might do that with someone's website.

In 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.

Slashdot gets a not-insignificant portion of its content directly from top HN posts. That's what led me here to begin with - almost all of the reddit, slashdot, and other aggregator content I liked was being sourced here (with Phys.org being my second favorite source.)

Not 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%20....)

Hackernews was founded 2007.

Hug of Death

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