The Most Dangerous Writing App • Hacker News Board

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#91

Post by classic959 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #41

mirimir wrote: post #4

This reminds me of early versions of Microsoft Word. Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK. You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

Using kdenlive for video editing on Linux has served has a good reminder many times to save often.

Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.

Even clouds can get blown away some times.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#92

Post by Hitton » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:44 PM UTC

viach wrote: post #28

What's the business model? Paid extension to make no-typing interval longer?

One possibility would be to let user pay for the copy of the deleted text in case he fails.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#93

Post by mirimir » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:46 PM UTC

namelosw wrote: post #88

jiggawatts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

Man, this is so true. At least several times a week I press Command-S and unintentionally saved HTML from browser. I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.

Yeah, do that too.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#94

Post by mxuribe » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #45

mirimir wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn. I was almost going to guess that. One of my clients was still using WordPerfect for DOS in the late 90s. They didn't want to deal with the retraining cost for secretaries and paralegals. I always did like WordPerfect much more than Word. It was fundamentally a markup-style text editor. And you could switch to raw-text mode if necessary, and actually edit the markup. Word, on the other hand, is entirely opaque.

Word is pilcro hell. God knows where what formatting came in. Onenote is a disaster. There’s a reason these apps have a “format painter”.

TIL the name pilcro; thanks!

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#95

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

vmednis wrote: post #77

yoz-y wrote: post #38

I don’t think this is particularly useful as it does not let you to fully form an idea in your head. Granted, it forces you to spew out your mind but in that case I would prefer to have a voice recorder with good speech to text algorithm. Also I would like to have a mode when an amount of text, rather than the length of session would be considered because for things like this HN comment even 3 minutes is too long. No…

>Also I would like to have a mode when an amount of text, rather than the length of session would be considered because for things like this HN comment even 3 minutes is too long. It has a feature like that, just click on "Words" on the same thing that lets you change amount of minutes. If you want to do less than 150 words you can change the limit in URL to anything you want to too.

Oh, I missed that. Thank you!

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#96

Post by Timpy » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

lostjohnny wrote: post #53

jiggawatts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

I think everyone older than 30 does. I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it. I'm not even be sure that save will really save.

I ctrl-s or :w every time I take my hands off the keyboard. A friend of mine, considerably younger, was lamenting that their computer crashed while they were working on a 3d model in Maya and they lost an hour's worth of work because they hadn't saved. I was in absolute disbelief. I pressed the issue, there was no good reason to go without saving every time the file changed, it's not like the program got bogged down when they clicked the save button. They trusted the auto save feature. We had two completely different paradigms.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#97

Post by ajxs » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:55 PM UTC

First attempt: https://pastebin.com/axqVuzHU

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#98

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

Based on the title, I assumed someone might have implemented the notebook from Death Note. I'm both disappointed and much relieved that it's not the case.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#99

Post by ubermonkey » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:58 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #55

arethuza wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can remember Word on SCO Xenix from around '89 or so which I don't think was particularly unstable.

In '89, I was on DOS. It was unstable.

I don't remember Word for DOS (say, 5.0) being especially unstable AT ALL.

Re: The Most Dangerous Writing App

#100

Post by turk73 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

lostjohnny wrote: post #53

jiggawatts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have a habit of pressing CTRL-S intermittently...

I think everyone older than 30 does. I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it. I'm not even be sure that save will really save.

Not since I became an IntelliJ user. Auto-save, who coulda thought of that?

Oh wait, I did--in the DOS based editor I wrote in High School in 1991, mine auto-saved and flushed the data to disk. Not sure what was so hard about that feature. Although with caching in various places, it was still possible to lose data. I even demo-ed the feature in class by unplugging the computer.