Google's advertising algorithm is horrible. Stackoverflow is paying good money to have their advertisements served to me. The worst part about this is that I found almost every single one of these Stackoverflow pages as a result of Googling, and I'm logged into Google and Youtube. Google knows that I visited Stackoverflow this many times, yet they have the audacity to charge Stackoverflow money to show me these advertisements. There is no excuse for this. Google is committing objective fraud here and is stealing Stackoverflow's advertising dollars for no good reason. Google should be ashamed. Stackoverflow should sue.
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. :)
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. :)