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Ask HN: How to generate product docs E2E?

2•sarabande•1h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

271•jshchnz•4d ago•379 comments

Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space?

26•pkdpic•19h ago•28 comments

Ask HN: Worth leaving position over push to adopt vibe coding?

69•NotAnOtter•1d ago•85 comments

Go-msquic: v0.11 is out

2•noboruma•5h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

437•david927•1w ago•1374 comments

Ask HN: How many communities HN it devs in C language?

6•FerkiHN•1d ago•9 comments

Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2025)

84•whoishiring•5d ago•202 comments

Proposal: GUI-first, text-based mechanical CAD inspired by software engineering

2•thinkmachyx•1d ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)

268•whoishiring•5d ago•379 comments

Tell HN: A fake, highly obfuscated Solidity VSCode plugin found on marketplace

14•navad•1d ago•1 comments

Why did not numpy copy the J rank concept?

14•jrank•1d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2025)

128•whoishiring•5d ago•361 comments

Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?

224•jamesxv7•6d ago•120 comments

Looking for Early Testers for a AI Assistant Inside Zotero

10•jie6•2d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How do you sell to B2B in current state of AI?

4•salesdo•23h ago•4 comments

Ask HN: What clever tools/scripts do you use to manage development environments?

9•sebst•1d ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Is there a business for extracting US tech talent?

27•Arubis•2d ago•36 comments

Super Simple "Hallucination Traps" to detect interview cheaters

29•EliotHerbst•3d ago•36 comments

Ask HN: Requests for Software – have something you want built?

8•NewUser76312•1d ago•5 comments

If Emacs is not a text editor, then what is it really?

4•hushangazar•2d ago•2 comments

1KB JavaScript Demoscene Challenge Just Launched

114•babakode•5d ago•31 comments

Ask HN: Are there any good WASM-based sites for learning Bash, Linux and CLI?

8•brightbeige•2d ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Can't Figure Out Where to Go Next Career Wise

4•OulaX•1d ago•3 comments

Ask HN: What are the best resources to help with health insurance denials?

10•cigna•3d ago•11 comments

OT Devices Exposed Online Without Authentication – Research Disclosure

3•hacker_might•1d ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why there is no demand for my SaaS when competition is killing it?

33•drvroom•4d ago•32 comments

Ask HN: What are non-social media ways to share photography/art

6•rPlayer6554•1d ago•9 comments

Ask HN: How do companies like OpenAI, Perplexity fine tune rich output?

6•agaase19•2d ago•3 comments

Ask HN: If AGI were invented tomorrow which countries would fare better?

28•mattigames•11h ago•61 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?

22•prisenco•10h ago

Comments

aleksjess•9h ago
Good question. There's a ton of libraries that do what I want to do, but not updated anymore.
webdevver•9h ago
bluetooth
torunar•9h ago
X11
dogman1050•9h ago
Winamp with the classic skin. Old but not outdated.
Metalnem•9h ago
ClickRepair (https://archive.clickrepair.org/software_info/clickrepair.ht...)
j-krieger•9h ago
Anything that lets me manipulate the volume of different apps on MacOS feels outdated or doesn't work properly.
lproven•9h ago
Outliners, in general.

The single most powerful tool available for a long-form writer (in any (human) language.) Equally useful for fact, fiction, academia, documentation, anything. Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Maps very well onto HTML, XML, etc. As such, maps onto AsciiDoc etc.

But forgotten. Almost no modern versions and what exist are almost unbelievably primitive, far far below the capabilities of the mid-1980s -- for example, Emacs OrgMode or LogSeq. Almost too braindead to use.

I keep copies of 20-30Y old MS Word binaries around on my 64-bit Linux boxes, just for this.

AstroJetson•8h ago
Can you say more about outlines in older versions of word? I use Word2019 (local install) and it works for me. What am I missing?
dialup_sounds•7h ago
Second!

Outliners are a very underserved space, eclipsed by overwrought note apps that treat outlining as formatting rather than a fundamental tool for organizing thought and communication.

Indigrid (https://innovationdilation.com/) was extremely promising but is presumed dead.

Bike on Mac (https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/bike/) is probably the best living example.

...and there's not much else.

treetalker•5h ago
I broke down and bought Bike. I use it almost exclusively for drafting complex legal briefs: I like that it makes it easy to make any node at any level a heading. Its system of changing the format of nodes (to heading, body text, checkbox, unordered or ordered list, etc.) is fast, easy, and unique in the space. But printing leaves much to be desired.

Otherwise I end up using OmniOutliner. The filtering can be useful (and it's a feature not really available elsewhere) but often OmniOutliner can feel slow and overly feature-heavy. Printing is also not great.

cagey•4h ago
> Technologically simple, was done well on MS-DOS in a few hundred kB of code and data.

Exactly. The outliner feature in Borland's Sidekick Plus was my all-time favorite, but its lifetime was brief (due to the entire product being a TSR), so I used Symantec's Grandview 2.0 sporadically over the decades, even in DOSbox out of desperation (as recently as 5-6 years ago!).

john-tells-all•3h ago
I've had good luck with (service) Workflowy -- https://workflowy.com/

Type to create items at different levels. Drag and drop to rearrange. Click triangle to fold.

FrojoS•9h ago
Skype’s international VoIP phone calls for dirt cheap.
greatgib•8h ago
Try Viber out, I'm not that fan of Viber as a messaging app but for phone calls it was great value for the price.

I was looking for a solution when in Asia trying to call locally lines in Europe. I tried Skype first but the quality of phone calls was really deep shit. I was saved by Viber.

ok1984•8h ago
Total commander
6mian•8h ago
Why is it outdated? Still perfectly functional on my gaming PC.
ok1984•7h ago
Question was about old or outdated, total commander is old ;)

Don’t get me wrong, I love it! and I don’t think there is anything close to it.

6mian•2h ago
Oh, you're right! We're definitely on the same page :)
goodthink•8h ago
Graffiti
devilbunny•7h ago
I’ll see your Graffiti and raise you Swype.
EdwardCoffin•8h ago
Inception the App [1], a movie tie-in app for the iPhone which played theme music from the movie selected based on your accelerometer data and the ambient sounds it could sense.

[1] http://inception-app.com

FerkiHN•8h ago
Open Office. I don't know why, but I make presentations there despite the alternatives, it's like native, without ads, subscriptions, etc. I like the primitiveness and in general I'm already used to it.
duffyjp•4h ago
Have you given Libre Office a try? I use their spreadsheet all the time. You can paste in data and actually get it into cells the way you want. Excel is terrible at this.

Development Comparison: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffi...

FerkiHN•2h ago
Unfortunately, I have a Windows 8.1 PC and I downloaded the update for it from the official website, but unfortunately the installation LibreOfice failed , so I stayed with OpenOffice.
dradra67•7h ago
Apple Aperture.

Never liked Lightroom and it is subscription-only now.

I use DarkTable here and there but never recreated all the albums and metadata I had in Aperture.

Apple pulling the plug was a major punch in the gut and I'll never invest so much effort again in curating a digital collection with proprietary software.

pulvinar•5h ago
Absolutely. I'm taking good care of the last hardware that still runs it.

Wonder what it would take to convince Apple to bring it back. It's not like there's a shortage of talent and money to do this now. And it would be immensely appreciated, unlike some of their other projects.

kingkongjaffa•6h ago
Command and conquer games, especially 3 tiberium wars,

There’s really no modern equivalent of build a base, gather ore in ore trucks, make base defenses and units, and fight in formations and garrisonned in buildings

seuraughty•6h ago
Have you tried Tempest Rising?
delduca•6h ago
Turbo C with conio.h
fat_cantor•6h ago
Dark Sky
nocoiner•3h ago
I cannot believe they didn’t replicate the Dark Sky functionality 1:1 in the Weather app.
austin-cheney•6h ago
I stopped maintaining one of my personal applications 6 years ago and people still use it in the browser almost 5,000 times a month and download it more than 4,000 times a month. It’s called Pretty Diff.
browningstreet•6h ago
Neat — I used to use that.

Out of curiosity, why did you stop maintaining it? Have you considered giving it to someone to keep up? Apologies if this is addressed in a blog somewhere.

austin-cheney•3h ago
I stopped maintaining it because it required a stupendous amount of time. That's fine except I had mostly stopped using it myself for the last 2 or 3 years I was maintaining it and I wanted the freedom to use that time to explore other unrelated projects.

Simultaneously the visibility around that project got me hired more than once, but my interest in doing JavaScript for employment was fading as well. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript in personal projects to this day, but I do completely unrelated work now for employment.

mikewarot•6h ago
Picassa - Google took it over, and left a bug in it that renders it unusable. It randomly swaps face tags, so I can't use it. 8(
pesoneto•4h ago
MacFlow by MainStay. The only flowcharting software with an intuitive user interface. Only works on original Mac OS. Don't try it, you will never be happy current products ever again.
lobsterthief•4h ago
Have you tried Whimsical? It’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me. It’s web-based though.
duffyjp•4h ago
Image Composite Editor. It's a panorama maker from Microsoft Research. I'm a hobbyist photographer and nothing I've tried can come close.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/image-compo...

alok-g•3h ago
Have you tried Serif Panaroma Plus? It's an outdated product, but worked the best for me, better than ICE as far as I recall.
mmh0000•3h ago
My software of choice for this has always been Autopano Giga, still "outdated", but does its job very well:

https://hdrmaps.com/blog/autopano-giga-is-now-free/

alok-g•3h ago
WinSplit Revolution. It's a minimalistic but powerful Window manager for Windows. Some forks exist but all seem stalled. https://github.com/dozius/winsplit-revolution There are many alternatives, but none as good. WinSplit used to work fine until a few years back.

Microsoft Money. I moved to GNUCash, but still miss Money.

Winamp, as another comment here noted, cannot be considered outdated. I have tried many alternatives but find none to be as good. Sonique was a good alternative which stalled a long time back. Thankfully Winamp still works.

bjourne•3h ago
Logisim Evolution. And I'm telling you, whoever can make a replacement addressing all its pain points, while being easy to use for students and grading teachers can become very very rich.
Rotundo•3h ago
XFig