Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

301–310 of 891 posts

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

#302
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain me more. You fall for the propaganda without background knowledge. The statistics says otherwise. Fake money is mostly smaller notes (like 20, 50, 100 notes). Higher value notes like 1000 francs note won't get eliminated anytime soon. Criminals already use electronic money, real estate, fake companies, etc.

500 € Notes are a gift to criminals because they allow large amounts of money to be smuggled easily - e.g. to a country where no questions are asked when you deposit large amounts of money with your fake company.

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 state limited the amount of cash one is allowed to cross the border, another artificial limitation imposed.

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

#303
post #200

Graffiti on Palm handhelds. I owned the original PalmPilot and a couple of other models up to the Vx, and can still write Graffiti faster than I can type on a touch screen. Discounting the Newton (which I tested but didn't own), there still isn't anything else that even came close in terms of practical "handwriting", and even though there's an Android keyboard that does Graffiti, ACCESS is sitting on the IP and has d…

While over at Android there already is. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...

Oh, wow --- thanks so much! I thought Graffiti got lawyered to death...

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

#304
post #142

* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…

Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad,…

Whoa, I never tried any of the old Thinkpad. I think the keyboard in Lenovo's Thinkpad is already better than other cheap laptops, and the old one is even better?

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

#305
VisualHub - super simple video converter

Songza - they had some great curation and introduced me to a lot of new music

Starsiege: TRIBES - while not a tool, the amount of enjoyment I got from this game is rivaled only by Goldeneye and MarioKart with friends on n64

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

#306
post #157
post #116

A few things: Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens. Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current standard good enough for movies is. The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML when edited externally. Console g…

> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war. I am still fighting, and the war is not over.

The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess

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

#307

Logitech Mouseman+ ( http://2a.zol-img.com.cn/product/117_500x2000/44/cepKXmRt1Cs... ) Best ergonomic mouse ever made. Fitted my hand perfectly. The extreme slant looks terrible but works far better than every handed mouse I've used in the 20 years since. There was a matching trackball if you preferred that. Unlike every modern Logitech mouse made it did not break after a short life. It was thrown away because it was…

My best mouse has to be the Microsoft Explorer. Smooth as ice. Sadly, the quality of optical sensors seems to be regressing.

I've recently been using the Razer Naga - the optical sensor comes close and it fits perfectly in my hand - I barely notice that it's there. It's worth a try if ergonomics is important to you. YMMV, my ergonometrics aren't the same as yours.

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

#308
post #14

The xBase family of languages/development environments. They are still around - Harbour (open-source multi-platform Clipper implementation) and Ashton-Tate dBase which changed many hands and is now dBase LLC. They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based database…

Fox Pro was so muchas better than anything we have on the web to work with a database.
Post reply on HN