If you had to buy a clothes washer recently, top load is better than side load, agitator is better than no agitator, analog buttons or dial is a plus, et al. Old is better than new. The rude design choices have compounded. Nobody needs an app to know what cycle their washer is at. Anyone using a washer, listens for it. When your display goes out, all the functionality is gone. It's just mind boggling.
The 2024 Hyundai Tuscon with 10 year warranty (on top of the manufacturer's 2 year warranty) means this will probably be our last car. It has all the best features of 2019 and has very few rude problems - eg turning off the engine and opening the driver door locks the rear doors. That's not helpful.
IMHO it doesn't matter which kinds of bugs bubble up to daily use. I have no interest in purchasing something at full price when it's stuffed with buggy software that's harvesting my family's data for profit [0].
a bug in a routine to record our private, intimate conversations could put someone's life in danger, and for what? it's revolting enough to put in the work finding and maintaining 20 year old cars.
it'd be one thing if they were like smart TVs - pay $300 for one with a mile long privacy policy or pay $600 for a solid commercial display. but paying $20k+ and having no other option? abso fucking lutely not
I'm on team front-loader for sure. When I got my first one (about 30 years ago), I immediately noticed a significant reduction in dryer lint with no other changes. I attributed that to the washer doing less damage to the clothes and did later get a strong sense that my clothes were lasting correspondingly longer. (I couldn't detect any change in cleaning power.)
Completely agree that I don't need any WiFi connectivity on it.
I agree that older is better, especially in avoiding the data harvestng of newer cars (and everything else)
However, I would disagree that top load washers are better than front load. Front load uses less water and causes less wear of garmets. I bought the last several I've owned used, because odler is better (and cheaper)...
The bearings on a front-loader live a hard life and eventually fail, often as a result of the seal failing. I will give a typical top-loader a longer projected life without significant mechanical maintenance. (I’ve changed two sets of bearings on my own front loaders and one for my in-laws. It’s doable DIY but takes several hours, making it expensive to have a tech come do it.)
Currently, I have to set a timer on my phone to go check the washer and dryer because my laundry is in the basement and I'm probably on the 2nd floor or outside.
I would love it if these things would run on my network with simple, published APIs exposed to tell me status so that I could know that I could have automated alerting and know that they wouldn't fail in the future when their manufacturer drops support.
You can! Get an energy-monitoring smart plug[1]. Set it up on Home Assistant[2] or another smart-stuff system. Then create an Automation which sends an alert when it drops below 25 watts for 3 minutes.
It's all-local, and requires no integration with the washer. 220V dryers may be a little trickier, but still easy enough if you're comfortable with basic electrical stuff. You can put a sensor on an indicator light, or put a current clamp on one of the wires. Usually you only care when the washer is done though, so you can move your clothes over.
This is exactly what I did. It sends a text when it’s done. I forget some times even with the text, so I added repetitive alerts. That got annoying, so I added a door sensor to the washing machine to silence repetitive alerts if you open the door after a cycle is done. Total cost was negligible. A cheap $20 smart plug that I never use except for monitoring and $10 for the door sensor.
> I would love it if these things would run on my network with simple, published APIs
Then we could run botnets from those things, too. And ransomwares! I would love it if all the connected crap in my city went down at the same time, so that maybe people would think twice before buying a connected fridge.
I hate laundry. I still have no idea how to do it; I referred to detergent as laundry sauce a few years ago after forgetting the word. (Thank you, subconscious of mine.)
The new machines with screens are a nuisance. Apparently to you, somebody competent. But also to those of us for whom listening to one’s washing machine sounds like advice from a laundry Lorax.
Have you considered spending some time to understand how these machines work? I promise you the operational part in the manual that came with them is probably 10 pages long, and designed to instruct folks with an eighth grade reading level how to do laundry.
> Have you considered spending some time to understand how these machines work?
Yes, and I really don’t care to. I get some joy out of cooking, small mechanical jobs and even doing dishes. I do not from laundry.
My point isn’t that people should love or hate laundry. It’s that the modern technology seems to add no value to either the experts nor amateurs. I vastly prefer simple dials and buttons to the ISS docking procedures some appliances demand for socks.
I’ve seen one recently. It’s about 60-200 pages long book (multiple languages) worth of legalese. Same with most appliances and child car seats (which is especially cruel when you had a baby, no sleep for days and try to install one).
Laundry is not hard. Go watch a YouTube video. When it doubt, sort by color and size, wash on cold, hang dry. Heat can keep things white or dry things faster, but has higher potential to damage clothes.
All mass produced clothes of any value have a care tag that at least has symbols, if not outright written Instructions.
EDIT: Reading your bio makes me think of someone who has probably never had to do their own laundry.
I'm an expert at doing my laundry but boy it is hard.
Remembering which clothes I need to wash cold and hang-dry to prevent shrinkage vs. which can be washed warm and dried in the dryer.
Enough detergent that it cleans effectively but not too much that it leaves an irritating layer on your clothes -- obviously the detergent companies are trying to fool you into using too much so that you buy more. Learning to use the "+1 rinse cycle" button to fully get rid of the detergent residue.
Learning not to use fabric softener or dryer sheets. Learning that fragrance-free detergent is an option so your clothes don't smell like a horrid cheap air freshener. Learning how to use bleach and which kind (there are many formulations!) and in which part of the cycle and how much to keep your whites, well, actually white. But not so much it unnecessarily damages them.
Or using a laundry loop to ensure you identify all your white cotton t-shirts that you want to wash and bleach together with your white socks washcloths etc., but then separate so you hang-dry the tees so they don't shrink, without accidentally leaving any in the dryer with your socks etc. and ruining them.
Learning that you should unbutton your shirts so the buttons don't get pulled off, but zip up all zippers so the teeth don't produce wear and tear catching on other garments. Learning to turn certain pants and other items inside out when washing and drying to lengthen their life, learning to throw in a couple of tennis balls when drying something bulky, and so forth. Or learning to check my dryer every 15 minutes in case my duvet cover has decided to twist itself into a kind of rope, where it turns into this weird boa constrictor that's eaten 3 of my pillowcases that will never every dry until I untwist it and remove them.
It's seriously actually kind of shockingly complicated.
Hacker news, creme de la creme of technologists, don't know how to do laundry. What a joke. It must be some kind of class signal: I don't have to know how to do laundry.
I don’t, not anymore. But even when I could jot afford to outsource the task, I hated it and literally changed my closet to optimise my time at the task.
I’d venture that most people have a chore they hate, and that they trade off elsewhere to minimise. (Common one being cooking.)
You can ignore everything and just throw things in a cold wash with a little bit of detergent and then hang them out to dry. Things will probably be fine.
Separating whites (if your clothes are particularly prone to running colour) is a mistake you only make once.
While I greatly appreciate the coinage "laundry sauce" I think the great majority of people know how to do this stuff and it's not hard to find out how.
I think it has to do with learning styles and mental database structures.
I design complex medical implants, can build a car from scratch, and even understand some of the polymer chemistry of fabrics, but still struggle with laundry despite doing it for 20 years.
I have settled into the heuristic of warm wash & repeat until clean + dryers destroy anything but socks.
> The new machines with screens are terrible. Apparently to you. But also to those of us who have no idea what you’re talking about with this Lorax for the laundry talk.
I think it's just a simple statement that, for example, an app that proudly offers to tell you when your drying is done is really offering no service, since you can just hear from the fact that the dryer's not running that it's done—not that we're performing some delicate sound-based diagnosis.
(That's, of course, presumably referring to people with in-unit dryers; I can imagine this being a useful service if one were using shared units, say in a common room in an apartment complex, or in a laundromat. But that's assuming that the app is intended actually to do its advertised job rather than to provide a vector for manufacturers to shoehorn in some other unwanted behavior, which is an assumption decidedly in need of supporting evidence.)
What the hell are you talking about about? It's not complicated you dork, you put in clothes, select a wash size, pick the right temp (hot for whites, med for lights, cold for darks/special care) put in soap (and oxyclean if you're feeling fancy) and push the button. It's takes like 45 minutes and you throw the shit into the dryer.
The hardest part is folding the goddamn fitted sheets and matching up the socks at the end. If this is too complicated for you I recommend taking a technology fast for a week. Freaking bugmen.
If I want a boiled egg, chances are I want it soft-boiled (runny yolk but cooked white) which is the custom here in the UK. (As children we are given a softboiled egg in an egg-cup along with rectangles of toast called "soldiers" to dip in the yolk. I guess it's an Edwardian thing, redolent of Nannies and Nurseries.)
In all my 50 years I still cannot reliably produce a softboiled egg, regardless of the method. Do I bring the water to the boil with the eggs already in the pan, then count from when it reaches the boil? How do I judge a "rolling boil"? Or do I wait for the water to boil then put the eggs in, risking cracking? How do I adjust the timing if I want to boil multiple eggs?
I can hardboil them but sometimes overcook them and get that sulphurous green yolk edge, or I forget to set an alarm and underboil them leading to an unpleasant surprise later of a partially-cooked egg white spilling out of my inedible egg.
For fried eggs in my stainless steel pan (I don't have any non-stick pans) unless I pre-heat for ~20mins, the egg sticks and I often end up having to chisel it out with the spatula and breaking the yolk which depending on my morning mood can be a real downer. Added to which the underside is usually cooked way before the top, and the egg white in the thickest part is still clear and snotty, so I will try to flip the egg, doubling my chances of breaking the yolk and killing my morning.
Scrambled eggs are nice but easy to overcook to a dry pebbly consistency, and unfailingly create a quarter-inch layer of crusted egg in the pan which goes to soak in the sink and return later in the day as a jellyish monstrosity to cling to my hand or be clawed dripping out of the plughole catcher.
I love a filled omelette, but again it's a crapshoot - too hot a pan and the egg goes hard and rubbery on the outside, too cold and the folding is difficult, especially with solid items in the filling.
My point is, boiling eggs is undeserving of its status as a byword for simplicity. It's getting to the stage (for me) where it's an object lesson in how much I can fuck up a seemingly simple thing.
> Do I bring the water to the boil with the eggs already in the pan, then count from when it reaches the boil?
Safest, most fool-proof method: bring the water to a boil, kill the heat, gently lower the eggs into the water and cover. Remove at your preferred time and transfer to an ice bath.
Water boils at a consistently precise temperature (at a given altitude). If you're cooking indoors, you probably also have a somewhat-stable air temperature around the pot. This means the heat curve from ~100°C is remarkably stable across boilings. Given an egg sets between 63°C (whites thicken) and 73°C (yolk cooks), you will always--eventually--wind up with a hard-boiled egg. (You're also cooking in still water, which is obviously less violent.)
There are various guides online for this, but it's an easy-enough expermient to pull one out every minute from ~3 minutes to 15. (Presumably over several days. But not a bad brunch set-up. And you already have an ice bath for the wine!)
> For fried eggs in my stainless steel pan
Steel-clad pans aren't all steel, they're aluminium clad in steel. That means you can't get the steel safely to the ripping-hot temperatures that keep the albumen from binding to the iron.
For the frying, we never have any grief on our cast iron. I usually give it a little spray of oil, but you can successfully fry an egg even if you don't. We have a couple stainless calphalons that are pretty effective at filling space inside the cupboard and that's about it.
Really? I just bring water to a boil, put eggs in and set a six minute timer. Move them to cold water and peel. Perfect soft-boiled eggs every single time.
I’m more than happy to spend an afternoon figuring out the times and temperatures that get me various stages of runny and jammy at my altitude, on my range, in a way I couldn’t be bothered to for the benefit of having clothes again.
I have a very intelligent friend who has the same attitude towards personal finances and refuses any help. It is very sad but there's apparently nothing I can do about it.
> friend who has the same attitude towards personal finances and refuses any help
Funny, me too. Despite working in finance. (It’s quite common.) I outsource that task, too, in part because I don’t want to be day trading, in part because index funds are near bulletproof nowadays and in part to hide the money from myself.
Would note that there is a difference between hating a task and not doing it, and hating a task and managing it.
The 2024 Hyundai Tuscon with 10 year warranty (on top of the manufacturer's 2 year warranty) means this will probably be our last car. It has all the best features of 2019 and has very few rude problems - eg turning off the engine and opening the driver door locks the rear doors. That's not helpful.