[HN Gopher] The Uncomfortable - a collection of deliberately inc...
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The Uncomfortable - a collection of deliberately inconvenient
objects
Author : throwup238
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-01-25 18:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theuncomfortable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theuncomfortable.com)
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| 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.
| shreddit wrote:
| It would be really funny to limit a website to one user per
| hour
| satisfice wrote:
| What an excellent way to contemplate design.
| el_don_almighty wrote:
| /. Effect?
| gorjusborg wrote:
| wow, that's a throwback.
|
| and yes :)
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Can anyone explain? ;
| wenderen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
| eimrine wrote:
| 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.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 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.
| grose wrote:
| Site is down, so Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240114144504/https://www.theun...
| jansan wrote:
| Site ist not down, just inconveniently slow.
| freels wrote:
| One might say uncomfortably slow.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Site is, in fact down.
|
| > 508: Resource Limit Is Reached
| jansan wrote:
| You did not get the joke. But joking asige, for me it is
| actually just very slow, not down.
| omgmajk wrote:
| I did not, but now I really want to read the site.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Opening archive.org link caused my laptop to start spinning
| fans.
| boznz wrote:
| Thank god for the Internet archive, hit that donate button
| while you're there and hope it never goes away.
| omgtehlion wrote:
| I'd like to have that tea set...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Same, I guess taking a sip out of that cup will be funny, but
| otherwise it looks really cool.
| Severian wrote:
| The broom would actually be useful for some applications. Top of
| objects, concrete texturing, etc.
| timenova wrote:
| > Resource Limit Is Reached
|
| Starting with the website itself... :)
| meepmorp wrote:
| It's digital performance art.
| sorokod wrote:
| Not just inconvenient but self defeating in a way - reminds me of
| Google Chat.
| athom wrote:
| Related:
|
| 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...
| dnfehren wrote:
| took a second, but I thought that the ruler might actually be ok
| at first
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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
| omoikane wrote:
| These reminds me of the PHP hammer:
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Weird, I could've sworn this was a coffee table book with a lot
| more objects than only twelve.
| vdaea wrote:
| 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.
| LordShredda wrote:
| Made me laugh out loud. I call it 'lol' for short. Why isn't
| web hosting as free as social media posts?
| cooperadymas wrote:
| It is and always has been. Angelfire, Tripod, Geocities.
| Today, Neocities, Github pages, Wordpress.com.
|
| People _chose_ to go to social media.
| ikari_pl wrote:
| tripod <3 my whole high school class's website was on that.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Tripod is still around!
| https://ilovejarjarbinks.tripod.com/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tripod.com
| simoncodes wrote:
| this works only this good on sites with the famous "W" favicon
| Lucasoato wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Copy it over to the university's Gopher server. It can handle
| twice that much.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Similar:
|
| _Dysfunctional Luxury Products_ by Jeremy Hutchinson (2013)
|
| https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects...
|
| https://www.erratum.co/products/
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| lukev wrote:
| Not only _was_ it for real, it _is_ for real. Honda recently
| re-launched it: https://motocompacto.honda.com
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Reminds me of these furniture examples by Kai-Wei Hsu
| http://www.kwhfurniture.com/oneoffs
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Uncomfortable - a collection of deliberately inconvenient
| objects_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15191232 - Sept
| 2017 (26 comments)
| coldtea wrote:
| Where's the J2EE API?
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| kej wrote:
| 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-...
| trhway wrote:
| The rain boots reminded me about how in our high school back in
| USSR (specialized school for advanced math and physics studies
| located in the region's capital city, so we lived in dormitories)
| we had a word that one of the teachers - the drunkard retired
| navy officer who was teaching Civil Defense - would pierce with
| the thin needle the condoms that he would find in our dormitory
| lockers (the lockers had no locks).
| metaphorical wrote:
| Along the similar approach in defamiliarization, there's also
| Chindogu: https://www.tofugu.com/japan/chindogu-japanese-
| inventions/
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(page generated 2024-01-25 23:00 UTC)