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Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#711

Post by mcculley »

Freak_NL wrote: post #635
mcculley wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. It didn't work. To this day, if you begin a plain text email message with the word "From", you'll confuse mail programs because there wasn't a proper encoding of the body of the message separate from the headers.

> To this day, if you begin a plain text email message with the word "From", you'll confuse mail programs […] RFC 5322: > […] The body is simply a sequence of > characters that follows the header section and is separated from the > header section by an empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding > the CRLF). What brain dead mail program interprets anything after the first empty line as a header?

Various MUAs have failed this over the years. RFC 5322 is dated 2008. Plenty of users moved to HTML payloads inside MIME attachments because of the mangling that would happen otherwise. Many MUAs would prepend a > before the word From at the beginning of a line so that it wouldn't cause problems for recipients.

Some that I used that I remember such problems with include the MUA inside Netscape Navigator and mutt.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#712

Post by agsamek »

AstroJetson wrote: post #491
agsamek wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at instadb.com

Interesting, but there are no docs in English, but Google translate does a good job if you go to the native site. Sadly it appears hosting with them is the only option, and no inkling of the price. I don't want to waste their time if it's thousands a month.

It's $150 per 50 users per month. You can use our hosting or get it installed on your server (Debian) for the same price. We have around a hundred paying customers in Poland of various size, one in USA. The biggest implementation is 10k users every day, around 200 tables. So it scales well. If interested drop me a line, agsamek at Gmail.

And BTW - the system works in English and has some documantation inlined in Schema Editor. We will also do English docs. In the meantime we will provide you with good human support :)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#713

Post by figushki »

projectramo wrote: post #667
hammock wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it/what does it do? (One of those names where a Google search doesn't exactly get you what you want)

Just to be clear: we all know this is humor and he literally means free time, right?

It was genuinely useful, though. I used to use it to compile my kernel. I couldn't run Gentoo without it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#714

Post by krick »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #325
frik wrote: post #302

Earlier 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…

"Smuggling", in the primary sense, is moving anything across a boundary without notifying the relevant authorities. It doesn't matter whether the stuff is generally legal or illegal; you're smuggling if you move it secretly when you weren't supposed to. For example, it's relatively common in the US to smuggle cigarettes from an area with low cigarette taxes to an area with high cigarette taxes. The legality of concep…

I'm pretty sure that this is at least the part of what he is talking about. I'm not sure if it's fair to refer to it as a "technology", but he is basically talking about laws being even more fucked up than they were some 30 years ago, and people (say, you) accepting it as it was OK. But for him, or for me it's not OK — for us it "seems" like money (cash included) is just a handy way to exchange goods and services without carrying a cow (or a witness of me working for someone for a day) around the city. The whole purpose of money for us, as we learned while growing up, is a confirmation of us being useful to someone, a "neutral goods" so to say. So we don't feel obliged to "notify" any fucking "relevant authorities" when we move somewhere while keeping these tokens of us being useful, which are accepted somewhere else as well. We don't want to have to rely on banks and lawyers to exchange something we make by our hands to a loaf of bread.

So it's understandable that he doesn't like somebody comparing of moving something you stole to moving something you earned. For him this is nothing but one more pair of shackles people suddenly have to wear — and are putting it on happily, because it surely helps them to live more secure and blissful life, yeah.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#715

Post by acrophiliac »

WordPerfect. A wordprocessor that used the user interface metaphor of a typewriter, and therefore behaved consistent with what people expect when they perform text formatting operations. Unlike modern word processors that use some strange object metaphor that never formats things the way I expect.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#717

Post by jgilm »

ge0rg wrote: post #114

Turbo Vision. It was the most sophisticated text mode UI ever created, with a stunning love to the little details (at least in Turbo Pascal 7). Today it would still make sense for server applications, but the C++ port was rather horrible and nobody is still using Pascal :(

> nobody is still using Pascal While certainly Pascal is not a cool language anymore, I beg to differ about nobody using pascal. I use it to maintain a 1MM LoC for several medical devices. Some state agencies still use it for their software.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#718

Post by alxndr »

dankohn1 wrote: post #549
Grue3 wrote: post #151

Google Reader. There are no replacements that a) update fast enough, and b) allow search for free. I know, I tried all of them. Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it. It was seriously better than anything that exists today. They stopped developing it for some reason. Tab Groups is another feature that's now aba…

I'm a huge fan of Inoreader. It is almost an exact clone, but with some extra features like subscribing to a Twitter feed, and filtering feeds.

Another huge fan here. I started paying for Inoreader out of appreciation, not to access any paid features.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#719

Post by lillesvin »

copperx wrote: post #571
lillesvin wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. Keep fighting the good fight. I still use Mutt and haven't gotten around to finding a way to handle Office365 meeting invites and such. I'm also the only one in the company that connects to Slack via an IRC client (irssi).

Programmers ought to get together and create CLI versions of clients of popular protocols (Exchange, for one).

There's actually a surprising number of CLI implementations of popular protocols out there. I recently started using Hangups (https://github.com/tdryer/hangups) for Hangouts. And there's one for Play Music too although I can't recall its name at the moment.

Only thing I'm really, really missing now is a CLI for KeePass, but I'm considering writing one myself in Go, since I've been looking for something to do for practice in Go anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#720

Post by tech2 »

TomDavey wrote: post #608
tech2 wrote: post #512

Directory Opus (prior to DOpus 5 when it all got a bit "special"). Two panes, amazing file recognition, I've missed it ever since.

I must have adopted Directory Opus after version 5, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing. DO is at version 11 now, and I absolutely adore it. It's the first thing I put on a new Windows system.

I keep meaning to buy it to give it another go, I lost touch after 5 but kept revisiting their website for some reason. Like going back to an ex's facebook page to see what they've been up to.

Windows explorer, the Finder, Gnome/KDE/etc. are all appalling. Maybe I'm gonna go back and look at that website again... sigh

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