Just use a Google voice number?

I just need search engines to have an option to "block" certain sites from my results for all future search queries. Getting rid of Quora would be a good start.

One of the main features of Kagi.

Google briefly had the functionality (perhaps only as an A/B experiment).

Given the recent revelations wrt the chrome search bar, I'm guessing that they found making their search work better for people lowered their income.

There are Chrome Extensions that do this. Search this site and I'm sure people have recommended good ones.

A common use case is blocking w3schools.

I thought that was to keep the electronics powered up. The 12V battery isn't enough to sustain them for too long.

A combination of both, I'd imagine.

In my experience (with cars, motorcycles and small boats), once a vehicle is started it tends to stay running.

That's my experience too. Maybe it's a chicken-or-egg problem.

The electronics and lights would certainly drain the battery, but the specific fear was that the car wouldn't start when needed. It was never specified whether that fear was of a dead battery or failed starter, but frequent starts and short trips will deplete the battery in any car...

Visual Studio 6 (1998) is an unappreciated piece of art for what it was back in the day and even by today's standards.

I'd respectfully disagree on VS 6. It was OK for its time, but hardly a piece of art, in my experience.

Please excuse me copying the relevant portion from my other comment.

VS 6's support of C++ back in 2005 wasn't that great, at leat the way I remember it now.

Code navigation was very primitive, and you were lucky if it didn't consider the code too complex to offer any navigation around it at all.

Its built-in debugger often wouldn't let you inspect a string's content because it was just another pointer from the debugger's perspective.

And there was a bug, where the editor would slow down so much it would be littery unusable -- e.g., it'd take a couple seconds to react to a key stroke. The reason was it kept a file with the workspace's (solution in today's terms) code metadata and that file grew too big over time. So you had to remember to delete it regularly.

But VS 6 had a great plugin -- Visual Tomato, if memory serves -- that made things so much better in terms of code navigation/refactoring/etc.

Compared to modern IDEs it won't do very well, but do you remember better alternatives back then, at least if you wanted a "friendly" UI instead of a command line one? Would you choose something different if you go back to 2005? how about 1998?

Oh, back at the time it was a good. IDE. There was also C++ Builder, but it had its own quirks, of course. Picking one of them was, I guess, a matter of personal preference, the project's requirements, etc.

Anyway, I sure see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others. Comparing a modern IDE to its old version in the context of software bloat is the whole point I'm trying to make.

I think bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than its old versions and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.

It was great for the context of 1990's IDEs, and most people would use plugins anyway.

Visual Assist being a well known one.

It isn't as if JetBrains products aren't full of plugins as well.

Yes, Visual Assist is the name, thank you.

I see how my comment may sound that way, but I didn't really mean to contrast JB vs others.

A better idea woud've been comparing a modern version of VS with VS 6, for example.

Anyway, my point is bloat is not the only reason for increased hw requirements. Modern software is often way more capable than the old and adding capabilities seems like a good use of added hw power.

This is a bit similar to the concept of accidental vs inherent complexity in sw engineering. There's accidental bloat and inherent "bloat", so to speak:)

My impression is people don't usually acknowledge the existence of inherent "bloat" in discussions like this one.

Also because there's no promo or bonus for writing good documentation. It's mostly a thankless task even for internal docs.

Yeah, a consultant can make more than an FTE just by spending a lot of time reading and writing lots of documentation. Especially if they can form a business around it.

> new API isn't complete enough and has warts in places where using one of the older ones is better/easier/safer

Describes Windows Forms vs everything else MS has been trying to do in the past 15 years.

In fairness, not that many people (including Microsoft) write native C++ apps for Windows anymore, certainly not without tried and tested libraries.

You can write C# code dealing with reading/writing files once and compile it on Linux/Windows/Mac and it'll work pretty much the exact same.

Microsoft does write native C++ apps for Windows all the time.

First of all, games are apps, second even if apps unit keeps mostly ignoring WinUI/UWP (written in C++), whatever they do with Web widgets is mostly backed by C++ code, not C#.

On of the reasons why VSCode is mostly usable despite being Electron, is exactly the amount of external processes written in C++.

Applications being written in .NET is mostly on the Azure side.

“Applications being written in .NET is mostly on the Azure side.”

You are of course, wrong about this. Most .Net/C# code is not Azure (yet anyway) -related; it is the billions of lines of enterprise application code across businesses around the world (for me, since 2001)…

You are not Microsoft apps unit, the subject of what is being discussed here.

Microsoft has literal teams with budgets of several millions USD just for the file open/save in Office which is written in C++.

But despite that they cannot fix it. Consistently they make perhaps the worst APIs of any major tech company.

Maybe for file handling in C++, but DirectX/HLSL is the best Graphics API I've worked with and C# is easily my favorite language to develop in. It's easy for us to talk shit about Win32 today, 30 years after it was initially developed, but there are myriad historical reasons why UTF-16 is used by Java, Windows, and other languages/runtime environments and why it's not simple to just break compatibility with decades of software running at hospitals and financial trading firms because the 32 year old armchair experts at HN said so.

According to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set

> The UCS has over 1.1 million possible code points available for use/allocation, but only the first 65,536, which is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), had entered into common use before 2000. This situation began changing when the People's Republic of China (PRC) ruled in 2006 that all software sold in its jurisdiction would have to support GB 18030. This required software intended for sale in the PRC to move beyond the BMP.

I will take Win32 over anything related to X Windows, OpenGL and Vulkan, with pleasure.

True. They broke the basic Windows search functionality some time in 2007 and broke Outlook search around 2013 and neither of which have been fixed since.

Those file/save dialogs are an application of their own, and with multiple versions across all supported platforms.

Now try doing this for Windows 98 or older, specially the non-ASCII file paths part (which was a common use case outside of the US).

> The MSLU was announced in March 2001, and was first made available as a compatibility layer for Unicode-supporting code written for the then-new Windows XP RC1 in the July 2001 edition of Microsoft's Platform SDK.

People had to deal with local language file names since Windows 3.1 at least and it became very common with Windows 95. Good luck if you wanted to deal with files named in more than 1 non-ASCII language (very common in Europe or the Middle East).

Not many people would take a day off or travel out of town if there's a high risk of not getting a ticket either.

An alternative could be online untransferable but voidable tickets, with in person payment.

Basically try to make it so money changing hands is inpractical and bears considerable risks.

As I said, the idea I posited _is_ impractical. It works fine if your band is playing small clubs and the like, but it admittedly falls apart at scale.

I see plenty of technical solutions being proposed. They might even work. Except each one seems to be exclusionary in some way or another at scale. Or they stomp on the tender feelings of libertarians, but I repeat myself.

Don't think small clubs suffer from scalping much if at all. Scalping makes sense when there's enough demand to justify the effort and risk.

I wish they had an option for me to always exclude certain sites from the resulrs