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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
701–710 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.
Are there any ways that I can make games or something Like I want to make websites about me similar to those in neocities right, those flashy nice (good?) artistic UI I suck at css. I don't know but I never really got a feedback attention loop and heck even AI can make it better than me But I want to show the world what I myself can make as well and not just what I prompt or get back. I want a good feedback loop, can…
Flash is kind of dead now, i don't think the tools to create new Flash software are even released anymore. I would recommend learning Godot to make a game. There's some great tutorials like here - https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#703The 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…
> The reasons it died are likely: The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box. (As I have written many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539 >, https://news…
Strictly speaking, it's not dead. The code is now open source and all the rights are with the Plan 9 foundation: https://p9f.org/
It's just unlikely that it will get as big of a following as Linux has.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#704Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#705Adobe 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.
it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#706Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose. It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fiftee…
I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU
This was my personal favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that has other disadvantages.
You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely starting a fork that will pull more people out of the project and confuse potential users who just bail on trying either.) Those people need to…
I can recall a distinct time period where us ssb devs were passing around the url to "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" via local-first encrypted direct messages. The essay helped us understand what was happening but alas we did not have the tools to stop it happening to us!
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#708A 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…
Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D)
There would have been a clear change to fill this vacuum?
The thing is: I guess they didnt see a good way to monetize it (according to their "metrics"), while the product itself had somehow relative high OpEx and being somehow a niche thingy.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
tumblr is nothing like a webpage. LLMs were just invented 5 minutes ago and are losing money hand over fist until people are dependent, then will be very expensive to use; and you still have to figure out how to host, where to host, and how much it's going to cost you. So, I have no idea what you're getting at. You could have said Wordpress.com or something. It's not quite a website, but it's close. It's also probabl…
Ask the LLM about hosting too. I’ve literally gone through this process recently - setting up hosting, a domain, and a static html site from scratch, vibing from start to finish. It is not difficult.
It is between one and two orders of magnitude harder than geocities, and infinitely more expensive.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#710Google Stadia.
They had built a solid streaming platform for low latency cloud gaming but failed hard on actually having interesting games to play on it. You just can't launch a gaming platform with a handful of games that have been available everywhere and expect it to succeed.