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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?

#681

Post by gwbas1c »

BirAdam wrote: post #68

Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…

It was smoke and mirrors, spiced with everyone letting their imagination run away.

I downloaded the open-source version of the server to see if I could build a product around it, but it came with a serious limitation: The open-source server did not persist any data. That was a complete non-starter for me.

At that point I suspected it wasn't going anywhere. My suspicions were confirmed when I sat near some Wave team members at an event, and overhead one say, with stars in his eyes, "won't it be groovy when everyone's using Wave and..."

---

Cool concept, though.

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

#682

Post by pixl97 »

hulitu wrote: post #449
bazoom42 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages. It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.

> Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software This was, maybe, true some 10 years ago. Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer Windows > The interest of the customer is that the software runs Yes, but testing is expensive and we are Agile. /s

>Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer Windows

Eh, that's a really weird example as those are components of the operating system that are replaced with the OS upgrade.

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

#683

Post by ethbr1 »

eloisant wrote: post #539
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe 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.

Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a simultaneous design + data + programming tool.

These are terrible for maintainability, but excellent for usability.

On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind. (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end javascript programmers...)

Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte to really create for the web.

I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host platform

Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced

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

#684

Post by tech234a »

Cooperative Linux (coLinux) seemed like a cool concept. It let you run the Linux kernel alongside the Windows kernel while allowing both full access to the hardware. Unfortunately it hasn't fully made the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux

[2]: http://www.colinux.org/

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

#686

Post by ofalkaed »

dizhn wrote: post #373
ofalkaed wrote: post #13

Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own application gave a better experience in each of those functions, especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration between the various parts was not all that it could be but I think the idea has some real potential. https://non.tuxfamily.org

I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.

From what I remember; it was mostly a one man project and he was writing it for himself, this upset some people and they felt his personal project should be democratic. It created a great deal of drama and he found himself having to deal with the drama every time he tried to engage with the community. Eventually he just walked away from it all. The fork died shortly after since the people who forked it were still dependent on him for development, all they really offered was a fork that was free of his supposed tyranny.

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

#687

Post by tmtvl »

silcoon wrote: post #412
tmtvl wrote: post #206

CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client doesn't do HTTPS, ql-https doesn't do Ultralisp, and OCICL (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable. Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31 years, so it's just the code which interac…

Yeah I felt that Quicklisp doesn't have the same features as package managers in other languages, and https is one of them. Also it's run by a single person which doesn't have too much time to constantly update the libraries. In comparison I found Clojars^[0] for Clojure better and community driven like NPM. But obv Clojure has more business adoption than CL. Do you use CL for work? [0]: https://clojars.org/

It's funny, on one hand I wouldn't want to use CL for work because when money gets involved in something you enjoy you stop enjoying it. On the other hand, however, I would really hate doing any serious work with a language I can't stand, like Python or Clojure.

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

#688

Post by rgblambda »

bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

Add Google Podcasts to the list. I switched to AntennaPod. Youtube Music has too noisy an interface.

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

#689

Post by Linux-Fan »

The signature function of the German ID card (“neuer Personalausweis”).

Its 2025 and we still haven't solved secure online identification and we are still not using end-to-end encryption for e-mail, most e-mail is not even signed.

Interaction with state agencies is still mostly via paper-based mail. The only successfully deployed online offer of the german state administration seems to be the online portal for tax filings “elster.de”.

The use of a private key on the national ID card would have been able to provide all this and more using standard protocols.

At least for identification, there is an expensive effort to re-design something similar in a smartphone-centric way and with less security and not based on standard approaches called “EUDI wallets”.

For encrypted communication the agreed-on standard seems to be “log in to our portal with HTTPS and use our proprietary interfaces to send and receive messages”...

Why did it die: Too expensive (~30€/year for certificate, >100€ for reader one time) and too complicated to use. Not enough positve PR. Acceptance at state-provided sites was added too late. In modern times, everything must be done with the smartphone, handling of physical cards is considered backwards hence this is probably not going to come back...

Edit: Anothther simiarly advanced technoloy that also seems to have been replaced by inferiror substitute smartphone: HBCI banking (a standard...) using your actual bank card + reader device to authenticate transactions... replaced by proprietary app on proprietary smartphone OS...

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

#690

Post by morshu9001 »

acheron wrote: post #608
eloisant wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.
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