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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?

#731

Post by csense »

Java Applets.

All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with your server via WebRTC?

Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999.

If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a properly designed sandbox that wasn't full of security vulnerabilities?

Java and the JVM could have co-evolved with JavaScript as a second language of the Web. Now Java applets are well and truly dead; the plugin's been removed from browsers, and even the plugin API's that allowed it to function have been deprecated and removed (I think; I'm not 100% sure about that).

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

#732

Post by matt_heimer »

csense wrote: post #731

Java Applets. All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with your server via WebRTC? Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999. If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a properly designed s…

Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...

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

#733

Post by Wistar »

senderista wrote: post #706
rzzzt wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU

This was my personal favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0

Oh, that is simply fantastic.

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

#734

Post by latexr »

gimenete wrote: post #722
latexr wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Indeed (and the names are a clue). More specifically, Electron came out of the ideas in Atom, not the other way around.

Electron was originally named Atom Shell https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/ Atom Shell/Electron was from the very beginning something you could use separately from Atom as a framework for creating desktop apps using Chromium/Node.js.

You’re right, I misremembered that. Thank you for the correction.

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

#735

Post by symlinkk »

smashah wrote: post #433

Theranos

Have to agree. This whole procedure of booking an appointment with a GP who then books you an appointment with a lab who then takes your blood is a huge waste of time. The technology is largely there for people to continuously monitor their health in real time, you see this in smartwatches as feature by feature slowly trickles in.

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

#737

Post by cratermoon »

Zambyte wrote: post #656
cratermoon wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

/dev/tcp does not exist in Linux. ls /dev/tcp It is an abstraction in GNU Bash.

Pardon, you're correct.

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

#738

Post by vacuity »

naasking wrote: post #715
Someone wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If everything can be represented as a Foo or as a Bar, then this actually clears up the discussion, allowing the relative merits of each representation to be discussed. If something is a universal paradigm, all the better to compare it to alternatives, because one will likely be settled on (and then mottled with hacks over time; organic abstraction sprawl FTW).

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

#739

Post by Wistar »

gorfian_robot wrote: post #614
ssss11 wrote: post #280

Flickr - that was the future of photo storage, sharing, discovery. What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00’s? I loved it and it fell off the earth. You could save your bookmarks, “publish” them to the community, share etc.. What ever happened to those build your own homepage apps like startpage (I think)? I always thought those would take off

wait, I am still using (and paying) Flickr ...

Except it is now owned and run by the father and son who founded SmugMug. It probably has a chance of surviving under their leadership.

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

#740

Post by al_borland »

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.

The big issue with Flash was how overused it was.

When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash.

I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand.

I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.

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