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Why is this trending #1 on HN? Granted, it's a cool tool and would likely save some people alot of time as they wouldn't have to invest necessary time and effor

Why is this trending #1 on HN? Granted, it's a cool tool and would likely save some people alot of time as they wouldn't have to invest necessary time and effort into setting up a virtual machine with an older version of Mac OS. What concerns me about this Saas is that Encoding/Decoding as a service is about a silly as Encryption/Decryption as a service. The project may as well say: "Give us your valuable information and intellectual property, we promise not to look at it and we promise that it will actually be immediately deleted." I don't mean to be altogether negative or pessimistic here. I have no beef with Joshua Stein and absolutely no evidence to suggest he isn't anything but a super honest and chill dude. I'm sure he is totally trustworthy and I think this is a really cool addition to his portfolio. I absolutely do not have anything negative to say with regard to him or his fantastic decision to host this Saas tool. My negativity and critique is solely focused toward the HN community that upvoted this Saas tool when it (to the best of my knowledge) cannot be either paid for as a commercial saas under a contract guaranteeing security considerations and custody of information or alternatively self hosted in either a distributed binary or source form. To be absolutely clear, I am absolutely not suggesting that security sensitive Saas tools should be open source of offer self hosted variants to merit upvotes on HN. I think it's great when creators are able to monetize their fantastic software. At the end of the day consider this meta comment to represent nothing more than my personal opinion on what any individual or organization should consider safe to outsource. A free Saas tool that decodes a deprecated archive format should never be used with anything sensitive regardless of who is offering the service. Astute readers should note that my game theoretic motivations with regard to sharing my contrarian views on the top trending link are clearly nothing more than a pathetic effort to seek attention and shouldn't be taken seriously. :)

tedunangst 6y ago
Perhaps some people are simply happy to learn more about computer history and the existence of emulators which make such projects possible even if they don't intend to use the service.
- dimassimo 6y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head! I wholeheartedly agree that showcasing cool technology is absolutely in the spirit of HN and that ReStuff merits exposure. As you described, I myself enjoyed reading the page and learning about it. :)
eyelidlessness 6y ago
In addition to the sibling comment about computer history, a lot of HN content that ends up front page is focused on preservation of aging content whose formats have gone out of vogue or whose content/platform has been replaced, edited or discontinued. I’m usually pretty meh on some of these (like, I found the recent Internet Archive stuff about Flash good news but not compelling to read about in depth), but this particular link struck me as a curiosity just by being an unusual niche for this site and audience... and because I was one of the tiny population who was raised with and (almost) never deviated from the Apple ecosystem. I’m fascinated and a little tickled by the fact that that old island still has someone in the lighthouse. It’s not a platform I have any interest in using anymore, but my inner child and teenager is glad someone’s still tending the garden. (Many apologies for the metaphor soup; credit to sleep deprivation)
- rvense 6y ago
  I also grew up on Macs, but I swore off Apple in 2009. I keep a few old systems around, though, since I'm a nostalgic person. I just got my Power Macintosh 7100 on the net yesterday. There's still a couple of Hotline servers up. Good times.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    I’m curious what in 2009 was the tipping point for you. In no way am I interested in challenging your switch, it’s just really interesting timing (as that was around the time nearly all of Apple’s product lines were growing rapidly even among the general HN audience).
    - rvense 6y ago
      Yeah, it was a weird time to do it. I'd been gravitating towards Linux for a while (including a lot of trying to get it to work on my iBook), and in 2009 I finally had the money for a decent new computer, so I got a Lenovo X200.

tedunangst 6y ago

Perhaps some people are simply happy to learn more about computer history and the existence of emulators which make such projects possible even if they don't intend to use the service.

dimassimo 6y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head! I wholeheartedly agree that showcasing cool technology is absolutely in the spirit of HN and that ReStuff merits exposure. As you described, I myself enjoyed reading the page and learning about it. :)

eyelidlessness 6y ago

In addition to the sibling comment about computer history, a lot of HN content that ends up front page is focused on preservation of aging content whose formats have gone out of vogue or whose content/platform has been replaced, edited or discontinued. I’m usually pretty meh on some of these (like, I found the recent Internet Archive stuff about Flash good news but not compelling to read about in depth), but this particular link struck me as a curiosity just by being an unusual niche for this site and audience... and because I was one of the tiny population who was raised with and (almost) never deviated from the Apple ecosystem. I’m fascinated and a little tickled by the fact that that old island still has someone in the lighthouse. It’s not a platform I have any interest in using anymore, but my inner child and teenager is glad someone’s still tending the garden. (Many apologies for the metaphor soup; credit to sleep deprivation)

rvense 6y ago
I also grew up on Macs, but I swore off Apple in 2009. I keep a few old systems around, though, since I'm a nostalgic person. I just got my Power Macintosh 7100 on the net yesterday. There's still a couple of Hotline servers up. Good times.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I’m curious what in 2009 was the tipping point for you. In no way am I interested in challenging your switch, it’s just really interesting timing (as that was around the time nearly all of Apple’s product lines were growing rapidly even among the general HN audience).
  - rvense 6y ago
    Yeah, it was a weird time to do it. I'd been gravitating towards Linux for a while (including a lot of trying to get it to work on my iBook), and in 2009 I finally had the money for a decent new computer, so I got a Lenovo X200.