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Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

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31–40 of 93 posts

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#31

I still use a typewriter for daily correspondence (both personal and business). This reduces the procrastination of editing and allows for more meaningful, personal, and distraction-free writings. Using a modern word processor definitely allows for better revision / saving / duplication, but most writings shouldn't require so much thought / preparation. Not having a display to distract while thinking definitely allow…

> This reduces the procrastination of editing and allows for more meaningful, personal, and distraction-free writings.

I experience a similar kind of perfectionist-anxiety-induced procrastination when I write, and it’s always bothered me that none of the “distraction-free” writing apps (I use Ulysses) that come with typewriter modes[1] don’t have an option to disable backspace or even re-map it to strikethrough.

1. https://ghost-staging.ulysses.app/typewriter-mode/

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#32
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could not agree more. Sure, full stack JS might be nice and fancy but sometimes good old web technologies do the job.

You can pretty well integrate Django with any JS framework you want.

This is exactly what my new team project is doing. We need features from both Django and a frontend JS framework to accomplish our MVP.

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#33
post #19

Microsoft Paint. Yes, photoshop can do 10,000 more things, but sometimes you want quick and dirty and it has all the basics you need.

I wish Mac and Linux had some equivalent to MS Paint. It seems like such a pain just to try to draw crop screnshots and draw circles sometimes.

Kolourpaint is exactly that for Linux. It's a classical MS Paint clone, and it can take screenshots and crop. Is Qt based but works just as well in other window managers than KDE

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#34
post #21

RSS IMAP Bittorrent I lost my mojo for brand new technologies and frameworks and languages, and I can't ignore the amount of energy and resources that new shiny tech requires, so I stick to low-tech, proven stuff that has been there for eons and will be there for eons, as much as I can.

RSS & IMAP I can maybe understand are a bit 'boring' and stale but is bittorrent/p2p ?

I always see some really clever usages still popping up!

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#35
All of them!

* C, because it is so easy to implement anything you can imagine, there are libraries for everything, and the resulting code runs very fast (although I deliberately limit myself to safe constructs only).

* C++, because many things are so much easier (and often safer) to do in C++ than in C, and again you have libraries for everything, and the code runs fast. Modern C++ is quite nice. And you don't have to know all of C++ to write reasonably efficient code.

* Python, because there is nothing faster when you need to prepare a prototype, and sometimes the prototype is good enough, especially in io-bound code.

* PHP, because you can quickly code practically any web solution extremely quickly (and integrate with any JS framework you like), and the deployment is a breeze. Again, modern PHP has very little in common with the old language you may remember from 2000.

* Bash and traditional Unix tools as they allow me to do my job in no time. I took time to learn what each one is for and it just saves time. Yes, I could use Python to grab the first fields from a CSV file but normally I'll do it faster with AWK etc.

That said, I love experimenting with new languages like Nim, they are a breath of fresh air and quite fun to tinker with. Nevertheless, in my day to day work, I find myself using proven tools most often.

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#36
Vim.. I do like VSCode to be fair but I find after so many years nothing has been able to compete for me. I'm not particularly stubborn either with trying new things, but the learning curve versus the reward just don't trump Vim still..

Edit - Midnight Commander - Although i did upgrade to the SpeedCommander.

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#39
post #36

Vim.. I do like VSCode to be fair but I find after so many years nothing has been able to compete for me. I'm not particularly stubborn either with trying new things, but the learning curve versus the reward just don't trump Vim still.. Edit - Midnight Commander - Although i did upgrade to the SpeedCommander.

> Edit - Midnight Commander - Although i did upgrade to the SpeedCommander.

AFAIR MC is for Unices only, whereas SC is for Windows. Out of curiosity: why did you decide to use a commercial product when open alternatives are available, such as FAR?

Re: Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

#40

CLI over browser apps. There is simply less latency than doing anything using browser tech, and sometimes less clicking than with GUI apps. The ext4 filesystem. Yes, there is no bitrot protection and no snapshots etc, but it's rock-solid as a main OS partition.

Do you happen to know if there's a linux filesystem that has bitrot protection, but doesn't need snapshots?

- ZFS is not in the Linux kernel so I don't want to use it for a daily work machine

- btrfs works fine but its tools to undelete/recover files when something did go wrong are pretty bad

- XFS looks ancient, not sure how good it is

- ext4 is also pretty aged by now, but is what I use now after my attempt at btrfs. It doesn't have any bitrot protection though

Is there anything else viable today? The above are basically the same choices as I also had 10 years ago

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