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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?

#691

Post by ams6110 »

figushki wrote: post #580

Free time. I used to use it to sleep, read books, listen to music, watch movies, play video games, do laundry, exercise, talk to my family, and cook my own food. I can do some of those things on the commute to and from work with apps, but it's not the same as when I had free time. I think google or facebook bought it and quietly obsoleted it in 2006. I'm still looking for a replacement. Someone suggested Activity Blo…

Pretty easy to get it back. Cancel your home internet, mobile phone, and maybe even cable TV. You'll be back to the 1990s when you had hours of spare time.

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

#692

Post by developer2 »

forgetsusername wrote: post #636
developer2 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Please let me pay $40, or $100, for something that will last a lifetime. That 70s-80s board my mother has is still in near pristine condition, and it has been used a hell of lot over 30 years. My friend owns one that is a couple of years old, rarely gets used, and yet some of the letters are nearly illegible; more than a few of the point values have rubbed away. The board is cheap, the tiles are junk, and the racks move every time you touch them (rather than sitting firmly on the table from the weight of real wood).

Throwing quality out the window for the sake of racing to rock bottom pricing? No thanks.

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

#693

Post by patates »

agsamek wrote: post #279
kschua wrote: post #221

Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton Commander. I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks. Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.

Far manager is great replacement for Norton commander and is free. Works in console, so ctrl+o works fine. Ctrl+f is also handy.

exactly. also, it is perfectly integrated with conemu, which also is a strong recommendation.

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

#696

Post by ams6110 »

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).

I manage my email in emacs, though it's delivered to the Exchange server at work. I deliver it to a local maildir with fetchmail, and use notmuch to index it. Searching is better and faster than GMail IMO.

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

#698

Post by Karunamon »

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…

"Weren't supposed to" implies illegal, yes?

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

#699

Post by ams6110 »

jlgaddis wrote: post #457
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…

This is one of my two biggest pet peeves when it comes to e-mail. Top posting is the other. > E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.

I have mostly succumbed to top-posting, but I do generally try to trim the quoted message history to only the one I'm responding to. That way in a long thread I don't end up sending a ten-page message that only include one sentence of new content.

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

#700

Post by x0x0 »

hoof_marks wrote: post #469
anexprogrammer wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions 2 decades ago it being fine, so I presume not India. The advice to only drink bottled in India was common 20 years ago too.

India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking. These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.

Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)
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