PC Outline (PCO) was very good in its day. I was using it under DOS in 1985 and some people are still using it today in a Windows DOS box. It gave me the opportunity to move over from a long-form prose approach to 'writing things down' to something far more concise and well-structured. Nowadays the Outliner functionality space is very full of product but it seems that PCO itself led nowhere.
Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
621–630 of 891 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#622Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cash was never a good store of value. You could easily lose everything to fire or theft over night. And governments can create inflation to erode the value of cash pretty quickly if they really want to. There is no erosion of the idea of ownership. As someone who is renting in London I can assure you that quarterly inspections and thick, dirty carpets are an effective reminder of the fact that you are either an owner…
Out of curiousity, why don't they allow inflation protected cash? It's certainly physically possible through some kind of bearer bond system.
I'm not sure it's not allowed. I can make a bit of paper saying "I, Tim will pay the bearer on demand US$1 * the current CPI / 238" and sell it to you for a dollar.
Some reasons why inflation free currencies don't work very well in practice are if there is a lot of debt in society and the economy turns down it can be useful to inflate the debt away a bit. Otherwise you get Greece. If they were still on the Drachma with debts in that they could just print a bunch more and have the economy back to normal. Instead they owe Euros which have about zero inflation and are basically bankrupt.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#624Gtalk.
Did the job well. Worked amazingly fast with slow internet. Very reliable.
Then Google Hangouts happened.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#625Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#626RPN HP calculators: HP29C (my first one) and HP41C (did university with it). A long time ago, some demon soul from hell decided to kill them product lines. The world never was the same, afterwards.
HP 11C, light saber of our time.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#627Ethernet port on my god damn macbook 'pro'!!!!!
The Thunderbolt adapter is $30. USB adapters are even cheaper. Given how rarely I find myself actually using Ethernet on my MBP, I'm perfectly happy to trade off the need for a dongle for a laptop half as thick as it would have to be to fit an internal Ethernet port.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best part of this: The native for loop is what lodash uses. It's the fastest way to do it.
The issue is the callback, it introduces significant overhead because it is a new context with its own scope on a per callback basis.
Yes, exactly. I suppose if you registered the callback as a named function expression, a good js engine might be able to optimize on it and inline it, but I also don't like leaning on compilers so much.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#629Adobe Fireworks. Technically, it still exists. But, it's been abandoned for years, so it no longer "exists" than any more than the bytes of any other defunct program. Sketch is far superior to Fireworks, so it no longer matters, but the abandonment of Fireworks actually caused me to completely stop designing websites, for years. It was too painful to use anything else, so I just gave up on it and started using Bootst…
I still use Fireworks (CS6 on Windows). It does the job.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your rhetoric is off, "smuggle" is the term for illegal stuff. Don't use it for legal stuff. And don't make cash money look like it's bad - that's just the propaganda that started after the Davos conference to bad mouth cash money in the interest of a small elite. We all know better: You transfer legal stuff. Cash money is valid money form, you just carry money around in your wallet. While it's already true, some sta…
I live in Italy. Nobody ever used €500 bills for anything else than crossing the Swiss border with as much cash (cash unknown to tax authorities, of course) as possible. I have never ever seen a €500 bill, and if someone has to give you, say, €1000, it will be 10 * €100 or more likely 20 * €50.
I used some in Spain for tax avoidance stuff. They don't seem to be used much for everyday spending.