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

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711–720 of 912 posts

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

#711
post #311

Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).

I had a similar pleasant experience with Skype. Back in 2009, I was deployed to the Persian Gulf. This was before ubiquitous cell phones (at least, I left my cell phone back in the US). Phone cards worked to call home, but my cheap solution was to use Skype from my handheld PSP using Wi-Fi from a cafe. It worked out great for me at least, and I'll always appreciate that.

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

#713
post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

++1 for the lightspeed compiler

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

#714

Kuro5hin https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation, editing and up voting. I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that site.

The candle that burned twice as bright was really adequacy.org, which sourced their trolls from Kuro5hin.

(Archive here: https://www.inadequacy.org/)

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

#715
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file. One might want to, e. G., have fine control over a how a network connection is handled. You can abstract that as a file but it becomes increasingly complicated and can make API design painful.

> Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file. I would say almost nothing can be cleanly abstracted as a file. That’s why we got ioctl ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl ), which is a bad API (calls mean “do something with this file descriptor” with only conventions introducing some consistency)

Everything can be abstracted as a file, it just may not be most efficient interface.

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

#716
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because they already had Periscope that no one used. It was a "buy competitor to kill it" play that didn't have the desired effect.

Amusingly Periscope was their clone of Meerkat which was briefly popular before they killed it.

Periscope was in closed beta when Meerkat launched. Neither was a clone of the other. Just two teams with the same idea at the same time.

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

#717

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.

Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now. On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites…

This post reminded me about the good time I had watching Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".

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

#718
post #309

I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.

Self hosted Linkding is a pretty great modern equivalent https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

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

#719

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…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

The fact that everything is not a file. No OS actually implements that idea including Plan9. For example, directories are not files. Plan9 re-uses a few of the APIs for them, but you can't use write() on a directory, you can only read them.

Pretending everything is a file was never a good idea and is based on an untrue understanding of computing. The everything-is-an-object phase the industry went through was much closer to reality.

Consider how you represent a GUI window as a file. A file is just a flat byte array at heart, so:

1. What's the data format inside the file? Is it a raw bitmap? Series of rendering instructions? How do you communicate that to the window server, or vice-versa? What about ancillary data like window border styles?

2. Is the file a real file on a real filesystem, or is it an entry in a virtual file system? If the latter then you often lose a lot of the basic features that makes "everything is a file" attractive, like the ability to move files around or arrange them in a user controlled directory hierarchy. VFS like procfs are pretty limited. You can't even add your own entries like adding symlinks to procfs directories.

3. How do you receive callbacks about your window? At this point you start to conclude that you can't use one file to represent a useful object like a window, you'd need at least a data and a control file where the latter is some sort of socket speaking some sort of RPC protocol. But now you have an atomicity problem.

4. What exactly is the benefit again? You won't be able to use the shell to do much with these window files.

And so on. For this reason Plan9's GUI API looked similar to that of any other OS: a C library that wrapped the underlying file "protocol". Developers didn't interact with the system using the file metaphor, because it didn't deliver value.

All the post-UNIX operating system designs ignored this idea because it was just a bad one. Microsoft invested heavily in COM and NeXT invested in the idea of typed, IDL-defined Mach ports.

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

#720
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there is the order of tags not their names.

Ooooo… now we’re talking. Sloppy HTML that closes a tag out of order or just declared out of order? Or rendering bugs when bold is before italic? It’s why XHTML should have been standard. Just dump, error out, make the developer fix it.

But the problem here is that our nice programmer-brained mental model does not match the actual requirements of text.

Unless you know about tree structures, it doesn’t make sense to the average person why you would have to stop and then restart a span of formatting options just because an unrelated attribute changed.

And that’s why XHTML failed - HTML is human-writable.

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