Google Glass. Thanks society. People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
“Inevitable” does not mean “desirable”. Delaying bad outcomes is worthwhile.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
601–610 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games. Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow. I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.
Right. But that doesn't mean the performance of Flash was bad for what it was doing. Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.
The default, and by far the most common, output from Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today.
You remembering a few optimised instances does not change the reality that Flash was bad.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#603Google Glass. Thanks society. People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
I don’t think people are downvoting for the mention of Google Glass, but due to the rest of the comment making a value judgement many are sure to disagree with.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#604- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
> XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized?
I actually have, and its not that bad.
If anything, the worst part is foreign content (svg, mathml) which have different rules more similar to xml but also not the same as xml.
Just as an aside, browsers still support xhtml, just serve with application/xhtml+xml mime type, and it all works including aggressive error checking. This is very much a situation where consumers are voting with their feet not browser vendors forcing a choice.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#605Earlier 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.
In practice things like that did happen, though. e.g. this story of someone's website displaying user-generated content with a character outside their declared character set: https://web.archive.org/web/20060420051806/http://diveintoma...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#606- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly It would kill the approachability of the language. One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output. That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages…
> Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with respect to meaningful compiler errors.
This was also part of the initial draw of `clang`.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#607The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.
The creators went on to make Zed.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#608Adobe 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.
I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.
This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever took the decision to kill Vine was an absolute moron, even without hindsight. It was square videos, how hard could it have been to shove an ads banner above it and call it a day? Incredible
There's an excellent write up at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...
That is so fascinating. They completely ignored their most most valuable users and thus the users left and the site collapsed. Fascinating, the hubris of the leadership at twitter to think they knew better than their users
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#610Pivotal Tracker ; Users loved it, it had an excellent model for tracking work and limiting work in progress on software projects. There is no real good alternative and the usual suspects for tracking project work are horrible in comparison.
I don’t know about that. My employer was all in on Pivotal and we used it for several years. Then one day a dev stumbled across Linear, we all tried it, and switched the whole company within a month or so.