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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?

#631

Post by SilasX »

tim333 wrote: post #623
SilasX wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Yeah, I know there are benefits to the government if it can expropriate people's liquidity; I'm wondering why there aren't mechanisms to fight that.

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

#632

Post by nojvek »

sly010 wrote: post #435
brownbat wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquity was amazing. It was sort of like a launcher in a browser combined with IFTTT. You could use it to chain together APIs and reduce them to natural language commands. You could highlight "abogado," translate it, get a map to the nearest one, shorten the url to that map, and email that shortened url to a friend all with one nearly natural language command. I'm not that great at coding, but even I was able to wri…

Ubiquity was ppioneered by Aza Raskin (son of Jess Rasking, designer the original Mac interface). I always had the feeling that uqiquity never was a Mozilla project per say, it was more his personal project that he happened to do inside Mozilla. Perhaps he left or got promoted and the project stopped. I am only guessing.

Ubiquity was really awesome. May be I should build an electron app and resurrect it.

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

#633

Post by exDM69 »

hollander wrote: post #218

Writing, with a pen. I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and if I do it's cramped.

I swear by wooden pencils and 5x5mm graph paper. I have a nice flipboard with a notepad, a pencil, a sharpener and an eraser attached with velcro.

Measured in straight up typing speed, a keyboard is faster but when you're talking note taking mixed with thinking or something that involved equations or diagrams, I can't get anywhere close with a computer. And there are no distractions on paper.

And why wooden pencils instead of a mechanical one? The smell. The smell of fresh shavings from the pencil sets my brain in the right gear.

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

#634

Post by tim333 »

donatj wrote: post #396
op00to wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to transfer value anonymously. Purchase gold.

You get to a border with a bunch of gold and I promise there will be more than questions.

Yeah - maybe go with bitcoin.

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

#635

Post by Freak_NL »

mcculley wrote: post #561
avar wrote: 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. 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?

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

#636

Post by forgetsusername »

developer2 wrote: post #544
frik wrote: 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…

>> some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream This unfortunate reality extends to pretty much all products. Manufacturing is nothing like it was 20 years ago; quality is down across the board. Products used to be well made, but are now mass produced using the cheapest materials possible. Go buy a Scrabble board. The unfolded board won't lay perfectly flat on the table because t…

>Compare it to a board made in the 70s or 80s.

I can buy Scrabble for $20, rather than $40 in 1985 money.

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

#637

Post by lj3 »

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…

Ubiquity reminds me of quicksilver.

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

#638

Post by Razengan »

Tomte wrote: post #359
nanoverge wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft IntelliMouse was so good. This was something I realized at the time and hoarded them. I now have a wonderful stash of that mouse.

MS hardware was always good. Their joystick offerings (Sidewinder) were top-notch, for example.

The Dual Strike was innovation ahead of its time: https://www.google.com/search?q=SideWinder+Dual+Strike&tbm=i...

Before MS gutted the PC gaming hardware division to focus on forcing the Xbox on us..

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

#639

Post by exDM69 »

frik wrote: post #238
kome wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note Good fucking riddance. It just was a gift to criminals.

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 eur note is most value in the least volume and mass of any (?) bank note in the world. That's why it's preferred by international crime. They say an honest man never saw a 500 eur bill. I sure never have.

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

#640

Post by coreymaass »

There was a music "tracker" called Jeskola Buzz tracker. I used it to write music for 8 years. It was the perfect mix between DAW and experimental tool. It technically still exists, but the source had been lost for ages before I even started using it. It was buggy, and PC-only.
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