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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#491

Post by bvrlt »

frontendstrong wrote: post #7

Google Inbox. It's still around, but not for long.

Same here.

There are alternatives to Google Inbox (Spark, Superhuman - that I just discover) but I don't want to add a third-party that can read my emails.

Given that Inbox is sunsetting and the trust issues I have with Google in general, it's the first time since I created my Gmail account that I'm considering moving to something different.

If Fastmail or Protonmail had the Inbox features such as Snooze and grouping of emails with the quick "Archive", I wouldn't hesitate a second.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#492

Post by nstart »

Glitch by the makers of slack. I had two usernames which I played under to experience the various talent trees. The game is in my opinion unique up to this day as a shared multiplayer world where the odds of meeting a random who was friendly and helpful was very high.

I would spend an hour or so each day meeting random people and we'd go off on random quests, exchange materials, grow things together.

The game may not have survived but the game itself certainly left a mark where it proved that a community based game could be peaceful, cooperative, and a metric ton of fun. Even more importantly, the game was amazing even if you met only two other real players in a single hour session. I could go on for hours praising everything that tiny speck made with glitch.

It would be a dream come true if Stewart used some of those millions from slack to revive glitch as a pay to play game so that the game is self supporting. There are a lot of us who miss the world of glitch terribly. Good times. Sniff. Good times.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#494

Post by orf »

lasagnaphil wrote: post #485
kgc wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is very, very slow. Be warned.

Yes, it felt quite slow in certain situations (the last time I’ve tried). Because the WSL works by emulating syscalls from Linux, anything related to I/O can be quite slow...

It's not quite the same as emulation, and the overhead is less. It natively supports these syscalls, and in some cases the syscalls trigger the same code as their windows counterparts

In others, like fork, entirely new and unique code is ran.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#495

Post by mih »

terryf wrote: post #340
fphhotchips wrote: post #6

Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.

I recommend http://inoreader.com/ - I'm not affiliated with it in any way, however I am a very happy user of it.

Seconded. With Google reader, I never really was a fan of their web interface and preferred the Feeddemon desktop client. Sadly it was discontinued after the death of GReader. Switched to Inoreader since then and I must say the web interace is much more to my liking.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#496

Post by kiksy »

ramses0 wrote: post #227
wishinghand wrote: post #202

The Macbook Pro chassis before the OLED touchstrip. I'm a web developer and learned on MBPs. The touchpad was the right size, the keys had the right amount of travel, the form factor and weight were perfect. Right now I'm considering moving to developing on a Galaga Pro and using Windows/WSL. I've got most things setup on my desktop how I like using HyperTerm (I had too much trouble with Cmder), VS Code, and ZSH. I c…

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 too use it daily on multiple machines (albeit Windows Pro with Hyper-V) and it's changed my day to day dev work dramatically.

Combined with Docker there is no reason for me to even look at MacOS or running Linux natively (which I have done before for years.)

For me it's the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#498

Post by pawelwentpawel »

Screenhero, which got acquired by Slack and integrated into it. It was great as a stand-alone product which I used not only for remote pair coding but also for just calling friends and family whenever we needed to share control of one screen.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#499

Post by knowingpark »

birchy wrote: post #382

The scripting language for the Macintosh's rolodex-type database (Hypercard) called "HyperText". I'm not aware of any more natural language scripting tool before or since. I can still write code in it, some two decades later... For example: 'put the first character of the third word of line 5 of card field "sometext" into theChar' or 'put the value of card field "typehere" * 1.25 into theValue'

When I saw this article in the HN list the first thing I thought of was Hypercard. I started using it a uni to do text analysis for my sociology thesis. I went from knowing nothing to a visual word mapping stack in 2 weeks, my only programming experience prior to that was apple2 machine code and AppleBASIC nearly 10 years prior. With that experience I was employed by the university to renovate their Stacks. Now I do programming everyday, and am constantly nostalgic for the something like the Hypercard experience. I search all the time for language alternatives and as interesting as it is, no languages are as intuitive as HyperTalk. Just as I was telling myself Hypercard could be my career, Apple discontinued it! There were some companies that jumped to 'replicate' it but I suppose they didn't have the genius of the Apple engineers, they weren't the same. Even today I have to build a web app and I'm agonising over having to do a HTML interface and hook up functions and the ajax in javascript and do all the sql for the database, its just so repetitive and boring and hard, not fun. Anyway nice choice.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#500

Post by dpflug »

avh02 wrote: post #438
chrisparton1991 wrote: post #206

Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers. Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.

the thing i loved with winamp was at one peak where it was fast and simple. You wanted to queue songs? middle click the heck out of your playlist. want to stop on end of queue? that was an option you want to add to queue on spotify it's like 2 cumbersome clicks, you can't just go gattling-gun i want "this this this to play next" jump to song was fantastic - with a global hotkey. audacious with the winamp skin gets cl…

If there are specific ways you can pick out to improve Audacious, open some issues: https://redmine.audacious-media-player.org/projects/audaciou...

Hotkeys and mouse bindings should be fairly easy to update.

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