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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget to pair the Touch Button with a Minimalist design that gives no indication if a button has been pressed!

Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.

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Don’t forget the Uber-minimalist aesthetic, where there are no markings or textures to designate the touch regions, but instead you just touch or swipe different parts of the object for different functionality. That’s my favourite, especially after you haven’t used something for a few months.

Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.

Hell yeah! Let's change the active region to the upper left corner of the hamburger symbol and make sure that the hieroglyph itself doesn't reflect this in any way.

Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!

Samsung used to do this for some of their cheaper monitors. I remember I bought a couple of them for one of my early dual-screen setups (15+ years ago) and every day I would slowly and gently run my finger along the entire length of the monitor until it would power on. It had to be slow otherwise there was a chance I would power it off again going back the other direction. Even more fun because after turning it on, I would slide past some other button, unintentionally opening some menu and changing some random settings (most commonly changing the input from DVI to something else). If I was lucky, I would power it off after changing something and wonder why it wasn't powering on again (note: it was powered on, but set to the wrong input). How that monitor got past Q&A I will never understand. IIRC the buttons had tiny, nearly invisible (light grey on black) icon labels... I used to keep a flashlight on my table so I could figure out which invisible button to press to get things working again.

I see you also have a pair of Bose headphones.

At work we have a dishwasher that has a single LED pointing downwards. So the only indication that it is running is a faint red glow on the floor.

This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere.

But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!

Probably shares same design as "integrated" that is door covered version. Which certainly does look cleaner interior design, but trade offs any reasonable visibility of progress. Style over substance. I would also love to see time counter on front, instead not seeing dishwasher...

In my first times in that office I had to open all of the closets to find the dishwasher.

This type of dishwasher is made to be integrated in a kitchen with other cabinets (i.e. covered with the same door material as your other cabinets).

So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.

There are plenty of kitchen appliances that have a front panel but still let you customize the rest of the front face to match the cabinets.

Dishwashers are quite noisy. Honestly, have you had your ears cleaned recently? It could change your life.

Perhaps try a dishwasher that is newer than one from 1954 you apparently have?

And what if you're deaf?

Bosch?

We are semi-unhappy with ours. Our kids will open it to quickly grab a cup or bowl if nothing else is available, and forget to press the "Start" button to restart it. Our old washer would auto-restart after being opened. Oh, and the Start button needs to be pressed for more than a second, and there isn't really a tactile click when it succeeds. Which it doesn't always do. And if you press it twice it can reset and have to re-run the entire cycle.

The Sony WH-1000XM4 approach.

Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them.

More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause.

Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something).

But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off.

But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation.

God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?

Thank you! I have a pair of these and they recently started beeping occasionally and switching noise canceling mode on their own. I was not looking forward to digging through search results on this.

I had to install Sony's app for my headphones to disable automatically turning off noise canceling whenever it detected speech.

I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!"

Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling.

This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.

Indeed, that's exactly the problem I had with that mode.

The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.

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