Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ideas that have been beaten to death

ruky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 130 posts

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#61

Post by fellowniusmonk »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #21

Could it be that bookmarking is something people often think they need, but actually, even if they remember to bookmark something they will rarely revisit their bookmarks. What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.

Bookmarks used to be useful with Opera up until at least version 12 (around the time they killed m2, their JS perf fell behind and chromes process isolation made it overall more stable.) because the entire bookmarked page was indexed.

Chrome's poor bookmarking must be intentional to push people to search – other browsers poor bookmarking I can't as easily explain – but some browsers used to have better/more useful interfaces for these kinds of things.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#62

Post by [deleted] »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #18

The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what…

[deleted]

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#63

Post by causi »

giorgioz wrote: post #60

> Bookmarking is broken in all browsers The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers. I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it. So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.

I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar.

That's like saying "I'm pretty happy with the address bar. I try to only click links and avoid ever typing in a URL."

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#65

Post by timoth3y »

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine.

What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do.

We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.

Bookmarking is not broken. We are.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#66

Post by maze-le »

jhkiehna wrote: post #64

He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?

For me they are just piling up. I usually don't delete them and have a seemingly endless list on all of my "bookmark folders" that just keeps on growing -- after a few years some url schemas change or sites go down and the bookmarks don't work any longer.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#67

Post by rotten »

reactspa wrote: post #27

100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game. I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it. I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now. Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me. I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as ps…

Why do you have to create the folders for your bookmarks yourself? Can you use a classification AI to automatically put the bookmarks in a variety of categories based on the contents of the page?

You would then only need to add tags such as "read this on the weekend", "send to my wife later when I'm not at work" or "use this one in my upcoming blog post".

Otherwise, having them organized would be really handy when you are browsing your bookmarks or trying to find something you saw a few months back but can't remember the right keywords for it to show up in a search again.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#68

Post by JohnDeHope »

jhkiehna wrote: post #64

He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?

My biggest issue is that they don't interoperate across browsers. The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy. I don't use a single browser on one device on any of the devices I use. If the browsers treated themselves less like silos, people would be more encouraged to use them for this sort of note taking.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#69

Post by soheilpro »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #10

The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we'r…

I wrote this extension years ago when Delicious was still around. Whenever you searched for something on Google, it also did a search on Delicious and displayed the matching bookmarks on top of Google's search results.

It worked extremely well for me.

https://github.com/soheilpro/deligle

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#70

Post by fellowniusmonk »

Someone wrote: post #38
jonathanstrange wrote: post #10

The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we'r…

> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks What about: - browser saves content of each bookmark - browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine - browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about t…

Opera used to do this and I can confirm it was awesome, haven't used Opera since v12 so I don't know anymore. Made the switch back in the day because chrome's process isolation and js engine made it overall faster and more stable.
Post reply on HN