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

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

#521

Post by maratc »

reactordev wrote: post #465
maratc wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to remind you that text [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal. I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead. [0]: By I mean and by I mean , and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be .

It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized. XHTML allows you to use XML and are just XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and will always be and . Since the beginning.

I've edited my comment to better present the issue.

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

#522

Post by username223 »

dannersy wrote: post #362
feketegy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits those sites anymore. Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.

I mean, they're intentionally buried in the name of capital. If you need more than a Google search to find them, of course no one will go to them. I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in…

I guess my abandoned/dead project might be Usenet. Sure, there were very dark places, and a lot of it was just a way to distribute porn, but that pretty much describes the Web. Usenet was like Reddit not controlled by a single company; like the Fediverse with infinite channels; like all of the world's threaded web fora displayed in exactly the way you want. We had that in the 1990s, and we're slowly groping toward getting it back.

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

#523

Post by pzmarzly »

thinkingemote wrote: post #274

Positron - Firefox version of Electron. "Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko" https://github.com/mozilla/positron This would have changed so much. Desktop apps powered by the engine of Firefox not Chrome. Why? Not enough company buy in, not enough devs worked on it. Maybe developed before a major Firefox re-write?

You may be happy to hear that the new Fedora installer is using Firefox under the hood. Ephemeral profile dir on startup, plus custom userChrome.css to hide most of Firefox UI, and I couldn't tell a difference between it and Electron.

https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda-webui

I wish RedHat made an easy-to-use framework out of it.

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

#524

Post by rs186 »

le-mark wrote: post #477
Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.

Eh, sounds like that wouldn't be a problem for education purposes as the parent suggests? You need to be doing some really specific to leverage threads/file watching. And people probably use C to teach threads anyway.

Of course, being a good teaching language probably doesn't make the language popular or even survive. Python is so widely used not necessarily because it's simple to learn but because of its ecosystem.

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

#525

Post by anticodon »

Plone CMS. When it appeared in 2001, there was nothing comparable. I'm not sure there still is. It was very flexible, allowed to build complex websites from components. Many ideas were pretty novel, at least I've never seen them in any web framework/CMS before. It still exists but nowhere as popular as it was in 2000-2010s.

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

#526

Post by Chanderton »

First Class and Hotline. Server/Client.

First Class had broader userbase, such as schools and organizations in the groupware/collaborative segment (but also Mac user groups and so on).

First Class was a comercial product (the server). It had filesharing (UL/DL), it had it's own desktop, mail, chat, IM, voice mail and more. Started out on Mac, but later became cross platform. Still you can find presentations and setup guides on old forgotten University/Schools websites.

Hotline on the other hand, was very easy to setup and also pretty lightweight. It had a server tracker. In the beginning it was Mac only. Lot's of warez servers, but also different (non-warez) communities. It had filesharing (ul/dl from the file area), chat and a newsboard. The decline came after it's developers released the Windows versions. Most servers became clickbait pron/warez with malware etc. People started to move away to web and it Hotline basically died out.

Now, there was some open source/clone projects that kept the spirit alive. But after a few years, web forums, torrents and other p2p-apps took over. But there is some servers running still in 2025 and open source server/client software still developed.

Compared to First Class. Hotline was the Wild West. It only took 15 minutes to set up your own server and announce it on a server tracker (or keep it private).

When i use Discord and other apps/services, it's not hard to think of FC/HL. But then, they were solutions of it's time.

More about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

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

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-cli...

https://github.com/mierau/hotline

https://github.com/jhalter/mobius

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

#527

Post by justinclift »

dannyobrien wrote: post #15

Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows! It was the Fuchsia of its time... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29

Have you come across Genode (https://genode.org)?

It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.

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

#529

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #495
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.

Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.

Are there any ways that I can make games or something

Like I want to make websites about me similar to those in neocities right, those flashy nice (good?) artistic UI

I suck at css. I don't know but I never really got a feedback attention loop and heck even AI can make it better than me

But I want to show the world what I myself can make as well and not just what I prompt or get back.

I want a good feedback loop, can flash be useful for this purpose? Like maybe I want a website like uh something early browser times. I am kinda interested in building something like netscape navigator esque thing even though I wasn't born in that era or maybe windows xp style.

I have mixed opinions about AI tbh. I genuinely just want to learn things right now, it might take me more time, I have been beating myself over using AI and not feeling equal to if writing things by hand. So I want to prove to myself that I can write things/learn things by hand as well. Like I tried using it to study but the lure to make things right away and then trapping you later is definitely there, it feels easy in the start imo and that's the lure and I kinda want to stay away with that lure to develop my skills, maybe not right now, then later.

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

#530

Post by lifty »

pessimizer wrote: post #492
lifty wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.

You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely starting a fork that will pull more people out of the project and confuse potential users who just bail on trying either.) Those people need to…

Hah. Naive take. I especially love this “Those people need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a decision”. We know what needs to be done, but it’s not being done. There’s no consensus. Consensus take time and effort and has a lot of friction. I am part of a coop and I have seen first hand how this goes. And it’s fine, consensus based systems have other advantages, but they move slower that hierarchies.
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