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

Post by ajross » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

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.

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #586

markasoftware wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it . The semantic data ("advertiser's message") is more important than the format ("purity of perfect XHTML"). Same incentives would happen with a jobs listing we…

Post by whalesalad » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #532

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 loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.

Post by DrewADesign » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:32 PM UTC

burnt-resistor wrote: post #621

DrewADesign wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by summa_tech » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

bobmcnamara wrote: post #584

_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…

> unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't. It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.