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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?

#621

Post by burnt-resistor »

DrewADesign wrote: post #515
burnt-resistor wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And rather than ask people, focus group, or look at the evidence, they just guess or do whatever they want. Not much leadership or community engagement appears to be involved.

I don’t think that’s an entirely fair characterization. They obviously spend a great deal of time focusing on what their (human) shareholders want.

Well, that's fair. Overpaid managers and principle engineers spun "secret projects" and products like Glass well to be an elitist experience for special people. But I won't forgive not letting Wave bake and mature.

Q: Do they have non-human shareholders I don't know about, or do they have shareholders who lack qualities present in most living human beings?

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

#622

Post by cmontella »

cobertos wrote: post #133
dunham wrote: post #75

The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.

Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.

I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At the end we were pursuing research related to natural language programming and reinforcement learning in that area (I recently blogged about it here: https://mech-lang.org/post/2025-01-09-programming-chatgpt), and were considering folding our small team into OpenAI or Microsoft or something. But we wanted to work as a team and no one wanted to take us as a team, so we called it.

It didn't get far enough to be "used" in a production sense. There was enough interest and people were playing around with it, but no real traction to speak of. Frankly, language projects are difficult because these days they have to be bootstrapped to a certain size before there's any appreciable use, and VCs are not patient enough for that kind of timetable.

Here's a postmortem Chris gave about all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok

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

#623

Post by Hobadee »

addaon wrote: post #240

The Lockheed D-21 drone. Supersonic ramjet without the complexity of scramjet or the cost of turbojet, hamstrung by the need for a manned launch platform (making operations safety-critical… with predictable results) and recovery to get data off it. Twenty or forty years later it would have been paired by a small number of high-cost launcher UAVs and had its cost driven down to disposable, with data recovery over radi…

It's highly probable that a successor of this is in active use, we just don't know anything about it. :-/

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

#624

Post by cratermoon »

mycall wrote: post #570
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.

And kubernetes

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

#625

Post by esafak »

The prismatic news reader. It solved recommendations before the rest, but died because news died, and presumably made little money. Their attributed recommendations model is worth emulation. I don't remember if they supported both positive- and negative feedback, but Google news recommendation today do support attributed negative feedback.

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

#626

Post by tptacek »

myself248 wrote: post #407

The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly. They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001. All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet. T…

I had a Ricochet modem in '98-99 living in San Francisco. Just 10 years later the iPhone was launched, on 3G networks that had integer multiples better performance. How would I have been better off had Ricochet survived? This seems like a place where technological progress went --- extremely --- in the right direction.

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

#627

Post by Hobadee »

zweifuss wrote: post #474

MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro (1997) and Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 (USB). You can buy similar today, but nowhere near the pricepoint. Also the out of the box support by Windows has vanished, and therefore the incentive of game developers to include force feedback.

I still have my MS Force Feedback 2, and it still works great!

I heard that some patent troll got a hold of the patent for force feedback joysticks, and all manufacturers just gave up on them because of the troll. The patent expired recently IIRC, so hopefully people will start making them again soon.

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

#628

Post by cratermoon »

WD-42 wrote: post #563
tjchear wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also /dev/tcp in Linux

    exec 5/dev/tcp/www.google.com/80
    echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nhost: www.google.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" >&5
    cat

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

#629

Post by 1970-01-01 »

kstrauser wrote: post #613
1970-01-01 wrote: post #552

IPv6 - Everything was supposed to be flat, devices with just one unique IP addr. Nope.

It accounts for half of all Google’s customer traffic. It’s not dead, not by a long shot. If you have a mobile phone, you’re almost certainly using IPv6 today.

The flat Internet is dead.

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

#630

Post by cmontella »

veqq wrote: post #190
dunham wrote: post #75

The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.

https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!

I know about this one as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1ioij... but the author seems to have taken it private for now. I think he's the Gren author, which is a fork of Elm.

As for me, I brought some eve-y ideas to my language project: https://github.com/mech-lang/mech

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