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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?

#561

Post by znpy »

lifty wrote: post #460
znpy wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drama has killed the technological progress in open source, if you ask me. Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the corporate world is light-years ahead.

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

Nah, it is not.

The core of the issue is that drama is a way to impose your views of the world.

In foss software you quite literally don’t have to agree. You can fork the software and walk your own path. You can even pull changes from the original codebase, most licenses allow that.

Consensus is only necessary if you care about imposing your views of the world onto others.

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

#562

Post by troupo »

markasoftware wrote: post #558
dimal wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plai…

if the world was all XHTML, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, the same way you wouldn't import a python library that's not valid python.

Yes, you would be able to put an ad on your site that wasn't XHTML, because XHTML is just text parsed in the browser at runtime. And yes, that would fail, silently, or with a cryptic error

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

#563

Post by WD-42 »

tjchear wrote: post #554
renehsz wrote: post #470

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

They have to an extent. The /proc file system on Linux is directly inspired by plan 9 IIRC. Other things like network sockets never got that far and are more related to their BSD kin.

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

#564

Post by kentonv »

goku12 wrote: post #356
AnonC wrote: 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…

Agreed. The best apps turned out to be the ones written for the platform. And many of those took people an afternoon to write, since the platform handled so much for you. Porting "normal" apps into Sandstorm felt like it defeated the purpose.

If I did it again I wouldn't focus on portability of existing apps. Especially today given you could probably vibe code most things (and trust the sandbox to protect you from AI slop security bugs).

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

#565

Post by habosa »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #277

Kuro5hin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting. I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.

Rusty Foster (creator of Kuro5hin) is still writing! https://www.todayintabs.com/

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

#566

Post by troupo »

JimDabell wrote: post #434
PaulRobinson wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

> XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. This is not true. The reason it died was because Internet Explorer 6 didn’t support it, and that hung around for about a decade and a half. There was no way for XHTML to succeed given that situation. The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed Reac…

> The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed React.

JSX is processed during the build step, XHTML is processed at runtime, by the browser.

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

#567

Post by s3p »

_bent wrote: post #559

Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able ca…

Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were really exciting.

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

#569

Post by troupo »

bsimpson wrote: post #534
PaulRobinson wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

Didn't Google already own Android when iOS was announced?

Yes, and they were going to position it against Windows Mobile.

When iOS was announced, Google scrambled to re-do the entire concept

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

#570

Post by mycall »

renehsz wrote: post #470

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol lives on inside WSL2.
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