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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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351–360 of 912 posts

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#351
post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone. Is there another app where I can store this locally?

I heard about dawarich, open source, didn’t have time to try it though or check the details... https://dawarich.app/

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#354
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead. MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran. Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes o…

Not so long ago there was a leak of windows’ source code, up to xp and 2003 server… the leak was so complete there are videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!) windows from there. And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).

IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had access to the windows source code in some way shape or form.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#355
post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

Am I the only one salty about Google Podcasts? For me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back… I dropped Android, switched to iOS, and slowly phasing out the Google products in my life.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#356
post #176

Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when it launched in 2014, but it didn’t really take off and then it moved to sandstorm.org. The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099

The actual problem with Sandstorm wasn't the era in which it was released. It will probably have the same problems even if released today. The problem was its application isolation mechanism - especially the data isolation (I think they were called grains). The mechanism is technically brilliant. But it's a big departure from how apps are developed today. It means that you have to do non-trivial modifications to web applications before they can run on the platform. The platform is better for applications designed to run on it in the start. It should have been marketed as a platform for building web applications, rather than as one for just deploying them.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#357

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#358
Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail

People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains dependency graphs also aren't good enough.

Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely think we need something like this: https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-... but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of thousands or like above a million SLoC.

Example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...

Another example: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...

I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so, so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe even visualize every possible route that could be taken.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#359

Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…

There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.

Do you have any phones without spyware?

I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.

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