Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Which boring technology do you still use?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

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

#61

Post by rakoo »

bilekas wrote: post #34
rakoo wrote: 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!

The base bittorrent protocol basically hasn't changed in more than a decade. Innovation happened at the periphery, to allow peers to discover themselves (pex, dht), to improve bandwidth management (utp), and now even to scrape in a decentralized way. There is a new version of the core protocol that solves many problems but unfortunately it's safe to say that no one will pick up on it.

p2p is indeed exploding, but it's a field that is plagued with money-grabbing schemes and so many pipe dreams only a professional plumber can conceive them. Bittorrent (and its extensions!) has stood the test of time as a protocol that does what it says on the tin and doesn't need "improvements"

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

#62

Post by eimrine »

the_third_wave wrote: post #59
eimrine wrote: post #4

Button phones + laptop instead of sensor phone for everything. Cash instead of banks (cryptocurrency is an exception). Email + forums + IRC (sometimes) instead of Telegram or similar. Arc lamps instead of LED if it is possible. Singlespeed bicycle instead of ones with gears. 3-way stereo with paper diffusors and class-A amplifier instead of wide-band 1-way with plastic diffusor and class-D amplifier. And listening to…

Arc lamps... Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries THE GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is o…

Cudos to Netherlands riders! I've heard of insanely good design of your bicycles, compared to rest of the world. Don't you have a coaster brake hubs? What wheels/tires are the most common in your country?

And do not confuse an arc lamp with fictional light sources, despite of the starting arc light is really doing that kind of impression you have described.

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

#63

Post by b3orn »

icemelt8 wrote: post #24
muzani wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mac has preview.

And some of the Preview features for editing/annotating images and pdfs are now included in Quick Look.

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

#66

Post by JeanMarcS »

bilekas wrote: post #47
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Well I went from MC in the old days that was what I got used to and so when moving to Windows enviornments I found TotalCommander - But after a few years it was a little bit annoying having to extend it myself for things like sftp support, while looking for a better solution I came across SpeedCommander and haven't looked since.. FAR is new to me though - I'll check it out though ! Thanks, might be my new favorite af…

If it was on DOS, may be you are referencing to Norton Commander ?

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

#67

Post by the_third_wave »

eimrine wrote: post #62
the_third_wave wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arc lamps... Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries THE GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is o…

Cudos to Netherlands riders! I've heard of insanely good design of your bicycles, compared to rest of the world. Don't you have a coaster brake hubs? What wheels/tires are the most common in your country? And do not confuse an arc lamp with fictional light sources, despite of the starting arc light is really doing that kind of impression you have described.

Yes, coaster brake hubs - "terugtraprem" in Dutch - are standard on the more traditional bikes. Those tend to run on 28"x1½" (40-635) tyres. The most common size is 28x1⅝x1⅜ (37-622).

As to arc lights that quote is somewhat - but not entirely - tongue in cheek. There is a metal-halide lamp in most video projectors (except for the more modern LED-equipped versions) and they're there for a reason, this being their wide colour spectrum. They do have quite a few disadvantages though ranging from their often relatively short life (in projector applications around 1500 hours) through the potential for self-destruction - older lamps run at higher currents and temperatures which eventually can lead to explosions - to the copious amount of heat they produce and the long startup time. Do you have a reef aquarium or do you use them as grow lights?

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

#69

Post by selfhoster11 »

Aardwolf wrote: post #40
selfhoster11 wrote: post #20

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 btrf…

I would use PAR2 for this. It's not the most integrated approach to dealing with bitrot like ZFS, but it feels much more composable - very Unix-like in a sense. PAR2 has one job (protect against bitrot with sidecar parity files) and does it well, and so does ext4 (store files without losing everything).

I certainly wouldn't use btrfs. It ate my data at one point, and misbehaves without any provocation. I don't trust it, and am quite vocal about that whenever it's mentioned.

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

#70

Post by eimrine »

the_third_wave wrote: post #67
eimrine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cudos to Netherlands riders! I've heard of insanely good design of your bicycles, compared to rest of the world. Don't you have a coaster brake hubs? What wheels/tires are the most common in your country? And do not confuse an arc lamp with fictional light sources, despite of the starting arc light is really doing that kind of impression you have described.

Yes, coaster brake hubs - "terugtraprem" in Dutch - are standard on the more traditional bikes. Those tend to run on 28"x1½" (40-635) tyres. The most common size is 28x1⅝x1⅜ (37-622). As to arc lights that quote is somewhat - but not entirely - tongue in cheek. There is a metal-halide lamp in most video projectors (except for the more modern LED-equipped versions) and they're there for a reason, this being their wide…

Thank you for the answer with numbers, as another lifetime rider I consider wheels as the most important part of the bicycle and Youtube bloggers I have seen do not tell much information about wheel sizes.

I use MHL at kitchen because it makes food to look delicious and also at my workshop because sometimes I do some paint work. But a friend of mine uses MHL on growing phase and Sodium lamps while flowering because a proper use of LED requires a lens and sometimes even an active cooling.

Post reply on HN