I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nokia N9 / Meego yet. Slickest mobile UX ever!
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
771–780 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#772Earlier quoted context omitted.
WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction. It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges. I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't mi…
I tried WSL briefly and discovered that the overhead of forking processes is annoyingly high, just like when I'd used cygwin in the past. (Maybe I should have expected that, but...) Try doing something like: time for i in $(seq 1 100); do /bin/pwd; done | wc Compare on Linux (or even Mac OS) vs WSL. I was disappointed.
I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
WSL is very, very slow. Be warned.
WSL is slow at creating processes, and pretty quick at everything else (in my experience). This can mean some git commands (for instance) run slowly due to all the processes launched in the associated bash scripts.
I posted this above, could be helpful: I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#774Dedicated server software and lanning.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#775Chrome Bookmarks Manager. Since its removal I haven't been able to find a good alternative for saving bookmarks on Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#776Sun Microsystems, especially after hearing more about the company, it’s culture and products from this [0] talk posted in this [1] comment in this [1] thread. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217952 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18217762
Good products, engineering. Badly managed. One of the crazier things Oracle found when they were buying them was that the sales staff were given commission based on the total value of the sale, with no requirement for a profit to be made. People in the sales team would merrily sell stuff that cost $200,000 for $100,000, and earn a tidy commission, even though it meant the company was hemorrhaging.
It was also great if you were an academic and needed equipment for a cool research project.
"What kind of discount will we need to give you to make sure you're doing all this work on SPARC/Solaris equipment?"
"100%"
"Done!"
...and then they'd send you the servers you need, and perhaps one extra that ....accidentally...fell off the truck.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#777Not the product itself, but there were only two features of Spotify around ~2010 that I used, which have both been removed: * Set as Current Playlist: would allow me, with one action, to set the next playlist, but not interrupt the current song. Song would finish playing, then only song from selected playlist would follow (until I'd set a new 'Current Playlist' again). * Empty Playlist: I used to have a plsylist call…
In order to achieve the NULL playlist you could have a playlist with one song which is silent.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords. This has become so frustrating as of late, especially when you search for something like "c++ map" and it decides to completely ignore the "c++" part of your search, leaving you with pages of actual maps. Slightly exaggerated example since I can't remember any concrete ones off the top of my head, but the actual situat…
google's "must include" feature is one of their worst features ever. it nearly always removes the most unique, defining search term. it has been showing up with increasing frequency. i can't remember a time where it was actually useful or wanted. and if i didn't want the word in the search query, i wouldn't have put it in there in the first place!
I have the same problem.
I think this is a function of trying to make searches more effective for unsophisticated users at the expense of users who know how to be more precise.
Similar to Apple and GNOME, it ends up penalizing the expert users to cater to non-expert users.
This is why you need to have the regular interface for people who shouldn't be expected to be experts, but have a separate interface for people who know what they are doing, because supporting both types of users is often mutually exclusive.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.
There was a good episode of the podcast Startup about the Grooveshark story. They didn't quite understand how strong the UX was. Too much of the episode's focus was on the exhaustive free library. But it was still cool to hear about it and made the loss sad again.
I brought a premium account, even though I was a student at the time. They had some music tracks that I still haven't found anywhere else. Groveshark introduced me to filk making fun of Scifi I didn't know existed.
Paying for music isn't an issue, but it sucks when copyright is used to control music.
I have google music, and it is good, the music they have is generally of higher quality, but the selection does not compare.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#780Come next March, I'm going to be missing Google Inbox. Completely changed how I use email for the better. I'm dreading going back to the tradition email workflow and hope to God that somebody builds something to replace Inbox in my life.
I also miss StumebleUpon from years ago. I don't even know if the site still exists, but for me it died when it forced me to pick interests. The great thing about that site was that it served me random things from outside of my bubble. I saw all sorts of fascinating stuff that I'd never have seen if I were trying to search for and curate content. I'm tired of algorithms trying to sell me a faster horse.