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Comment by DavidSJ | Hacker News Reader

This post is not really about robot vacuums and laundry racks, but about how simple ideas can elude human beings for long stretches of time, and then in retrospect look obvious.

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I experienced this together with a friend while we were CS students. I went with him to a store to get several pieces of carpet. We needed each to be sized roughly about 1 meter by 3 or 4 meters. For some reason, both of us were quite worried about the long pieces not fitting in the car easily. Even when the person in the store had cut the pieces and they were on the floor in front of us we were looking puzzled at the lengths not fitting in the car. Then we were amazed to see our friendly salesperson stacking the pieces on top of eachother and rolling them up on the short end, creating a thick roll of carpet of about 1 meter long that would fit in the car without any issue. We were both laughing and feeling a bit ashamed that neither of us had thought of this simple solution and that we were really worried for nothing all this time.

I suspect you were high… how high were you two… -_- LOL

Haha, the simple explanation is usually correct.

What's also really cool is that people are willing to share these small discoveries in a format (the web) that means they can help others. How many people's pain will be alleviated by this tip, and others like it, thanks to the simple impetus to share freely? (And, more darkly, when should you choose to keep it to yourself?)

For a long time I felt like keeping on top of the laundry was a constant struggle because we would generate a new porch-load of wets almost as fast as it took the load on the porch lines to dry. If we had one or two days of rain, or were too busy to swap the loads, we'd get behind and it would take a few days to catch back up.

Finally I bought more clothesline and doubled the amount of hanging space on the porch. Now we have plenty of margin - but why didn't I try this years ago? The extra hooks were out there the whole time.

At least it only took me a few months with our tiny washing machine to realize that I could collect several wet loads in one laundry basket and hang them all up on the porch in one big batch, instead of waiting for the first load to be hung up before starting the next one in the washer.

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

I think also, the idea that once you buy something in one configuration, it's a finished product that you can't change or improve afterwards.

I found it more to be about how stupid robotic equipment currently still is.

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