511–520 of 818 posts
Yes, the thing in iOS that automatically clips SMS verification codes sent to you. It saves me from going to my messages and finding the code.
+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…
> + Google Chrome in 2008 : 10x quality-of-life since misbehaving websites crashing don't bring down all the other tabs in my browsing session like Firefox/Opera. Adding to this: just browser tabs themselves were a 10x improvement for me. I had actually forgotten what the world was like before tabs - a whole lot of unsortable windows, and a lot of clicks of the back button. It was a godsend to be able to open new lin…
I still miss some features in Opera like mouse gestures. No, plugins and add-ons can't reproduce the responsiveness of a native implementation, they all fall short.
Moving to Linux from Dos/Windows 3.1 in the 90's. (An OS that's both free and comes with development tools? I don't have to shell out a hundred dollars for Borland Turbo C++? What an exciting time to be alive.) The Internet / world wide web. Also in the late 90's I had a summer job at HP and was able to use their cad tools (ME-30 and Solid Designer) which put Autocad, which I was familiar with, to shame. Unfortunatel…
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I have multiple experiences with Toyota’s driven 200k to 300k miles with just standard repairs. A Corolla costs $20k? $25k? Let’s say $1k for new tires/brakes/oil changes/filters every 45k miles. That’s $333 per year for maintenance, and the car lasts 13 to 20 years at 15k miles per year for 200k to 300k miles, so let’s say $2k per year on the high end, $1,200 per year on the low end. Extremely high liability insuran…
Others have commented on other points, but I'll note "Extremely high liability insurance is $50 a month or less." – the cheapest liability only insurance I can find is $120/month, and I'm 32 & married with a clean driving record. $100–$150/month seems to be the norm, talking to my friends.
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TIL that Experts Exchange actually existed, rather than being a meme of "why you should consider how your business name will look as a domain".
It's still around: http://www.experts-exchange.com
+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…
Funny how Google went from user's hero to zero.
Otherwise it's the #1 browser by usage by far, which is saying a lot considering it doesn't come preinstalled on Windows or on Macs, so all those users are making a deliberate choice to switch.
So still the hero outside of HN.
Interactive terminals (over punch cards)
PLATO
Macintosh
Windows 3.11 (over DOS)
C++ (over C)
The Internet (over BBSes)
Windows 95 (over Windows 3.11)
The World Wide Web
Perl (over shell and C)
Python (over scripting alternatives)
Rust (over C++)- SSH. Maybe not in terms of performance or efficiency, but before SSH, we were using telnet everywhere and just sending passwords in plaintext all over the internet. Plus, you could give someone your public key and they could give you access to a server instead of the "here's a temporary password, change it as soon as you log in" approach. - Perl. This was at the time when the other languages available to me as a st…
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Do you realize that Firebug was the successor to the Venkman debugger and the original DOM Inspector for Mozilla/Netscape? https://web.archive.org/web/20051223164847/https://www.mozil... > https://web.archive.org/web/20050206082145/http://www.mozill... > https://web.archive.org/web/20050206185242/http://www.mozill... > (Joe Hewitt created DOM Inspector and checked it in to CVS while working at Netscape. Robert Ginda…
Venkman was hard to use, and mostly focused on the internals of Mozilla. Firebug wasn't just prettier; it was much more usable, and it focused on actual website code. Hence the difference in popularity.
Absolutely not.
> Firebug wasn't just prettier; it was much more usable
Venkman made some debatable decisions about UI defaults, as is the case with a lot of tools built by old school programmers trying to solve their own problems, but it was more customizable, flexible, and powerful (as is the case with a lot of tools built by old school programmers...). Aside from Firebug's template-based rich console, every feature implemented in Firebug's debug pane was implemented in Venkman, except Venkman gave you even more latitude and control. Firebug's debug pane was a basic UI over a subset of Venkman's APIs, after all, as previously mentioned. It was only many years later (much closer to Firebug's death than its birth) that Firebug got some improvements like showing a variable's value in the source window while stopped at a breakpoint without having to type it into the console (or set a watch on it, or look at its activation record entry). Venkman never had that, but it pales in comparison to all the things that Venkman could do that Firebug did not.
Firebug made its own share of dumb decisions, and the degree of dumb in those instances was higher.
> [Firebug] focused on actual website code
I'm not sure how it could be "focused on actual website code". Venkman was a straightforward JS debugger. (The only way this could possibly make sense is if you're referring to all the stuff baked into Firebug outside it's debug pane—style sheets, live view of document nodes, cookies, and so on; all things outside the purview of a language debugger—in which case it becomes an apples and oranges comparison. It would make more sense to criticize DOM Inspector for any of those things than Venkman. And once again—there were plenty of dumb decisions by Firebug in that comparison is concerned.)