the Escape key, Apple
Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#782Chrome Bookmarks Manager. Since its removal I haven't been able to find a good alternative for saving bookmarks on Chrome.
Agreed, I loved it. I moved to Firefox with their Quantum release, and I barely even use bookmarks now because it's such a clunky UI for it.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#783orbitz, those guys who made those weird drinks with floating things
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#784More mentality than product, but I’m tired of companies not focusing on solving problems well and focusing more on generating a religion around their tech. I feel like prior to the iPod, things either worked well or didn’t. Now, you can put out the most half ass tech, generate a religion and have an “argument” against well matured tech and call for its death by fire. Looking at you NoSQL-anything.
Maybe it’s always been this way, I’m only 31. I just feel that making a real attempt at solving a problem is now a discontinued goal. It’s all about that religion. And you know what, tech geeks are extremely religious. At times, I feel there are fundamentalist terrorists that’d tell Apple and NoSQL folks to chill out and have a cup of tolerance.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#785Altavista. I miss it every single day. Searching for technical (unix, programming, etc.) content is so much easier when you can use nested parens and proper boolean language. This is in contrast to google where searches return things that don't even contain your keywords. This is in contrast to google where the modifiers like allinsite: and '+' and "quotes" are not respected or change their behavior over time. Man I…
Oh man I used the shit out of altavista! I swear I could find anything on there no matter how obscure, it seemed like magic at the time.
Yeah, Altavista was the shizzle back in the day. I miss it, too.
IIRC, it didn't even have its own domain name for a long time, it was altavista.digital.com. There's another company I miss, having used Vaxen back in college.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#786Crashplan for home. Still haven't found another unlimited plan with linux client.
Yeah, same boat here. Currently using the discounted small business version. Not sure what I'm going to do once that expires. I haven't decide whether it's worth the time investment to use something open source like https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy with eg Backblaze B2, or if I'll just bite the bullet and pay the full $10/month for Crashplan SB.
After using the discounted small business version till this month I finally moved my backup to: restic [0] + B2.
It was really just a 30m job and I have a setup that backups 4 times a day and prunes etc twice a week. You might want to checkout their forum if you need any help. I had tried Borg and duplicity [1] too but found restic to be perfect for my need.
I also have Tarsnap[2] for the double backup of my most important data.
[0] http://restic.net https://github.com/restic/restic. This project also lists alternatives with supported feature list https://github.com/restic/others
[1] http://borgbackup.org, http://duplicity.nongnu.org
[2] https://www.tarsnap.com and has a simple but functional Qt GUI https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
I settled for an Amazfit Bip, which is not a Pebble but in some respects it's the closest thing there is right now AFAIK. Battery lasts a month, screen is not e-ink but it's always on (I believe LCD), watchfaces are customizable but there's not a lot of good ones since the resolution of the screen and the colors aren't great. Functionality is pretty limited, but good enough for time, gps and notifications. I have one…
Have you tried it as a running app? I want to compare it to Tomtom Spark 3.
When I go for a run I usually bring my phone with me and use it as a gps recorder, but I also use the watch as a backup. I haven't checked how accurate it is. It usually takes a minute to get a good gps signal, and sometimes there's a lot of noise at the beginning of the route. It vibrates at each km mark, which is nice.
I believe there are some online reviews with better info about the physical activity recording.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#788Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
Honestly, ever since Reader was killed I have way more free time on my hands. Maybe it was my poor time management but it was a time hole for me, I'm actually glad that, at the time, nothing as good was around to make me stick on the endless RSS feeds I was subscribed.
I have the opposite issue: I love newsblur so much, because I can fast forward through RSS feeds and read them quickly, which means I don't have to keep going to the sites.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#789Come 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…
The content on su was too old sometimes :( 10 years was not an exception
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#790Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion. Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and…
I used the Sansas hard for about 6 years, and bought all my kids one. Rockbox had the best interface of any music player ever (along with WinAmp), and even though having all my music in the cloud is great, neither Amazon nor Google seem to have taken into account that you might actually have a large music collection when designing their Android players. Both are often insanely slow.