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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?

#751

Post by al_borland »

Wistar wrote: post #739
gorfian_robot wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the market narrowed a lot. I haven't been to Flickr in years, but I get the impression it's for more serious photographers now, like SmugMug. It was the Instagram of its day, with mass market appeal. I think that's what people miss. Not the site, but the community around it.

In this same vein, I always thought Tumblr had a great design for a blog. It hits the perfect balance between a microblog like Twitter, and a fat blog like Wordpress. It had various stigma's around the type of people who posted there, which seems to have only gotten worse over the years. It is a shell of its former self and yet anther site that fell on hard times after Yahoo ownership.

Yahoo really is where Web 2.0 went to die.

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

#753

Post by mike_hearn »

linguae wrote: post #156

I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS ). I was looking forward to this in the mid…

> It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for database file systems for desktop operating systems since.

You can have one today if you want, although nobody knows about it.

Step 1. Install a local Oracle DB https://hub.docker.com/r/gvenzl/oracle-free#quick-start

Step 2. Set up DBFS https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

Step 3. Mount it via FUSE or NFS.

Step 4. Also access the underlying tables via SQL.

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

#754

Post by al_borland »

morshu9001 wrote: post #696

- Apple AirPort. Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place, and those are the Nest/Google things that have bs attached like mic+assistant. Unifi is too hard for consumers. - Gnome2 dropped from Ubuntu in favor of Unity - Ford Crown Victoria

> Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work" to fill its place

What is the modern-day successor? You only mentioned what isn't good.

I loved the AirPort routers. I found it odd that Apple exited the market just as everyone else entered.

I ended up getting a Linksys as a troubleshooting step when I was having internet issues. I don't think the AirPort was the issue, but after migrating, it didn't seem worth going back to a router that was effectively end of life.

I still remember many years ago having a Sonos system and calling support due to some issues I was having. When they asked what type of router I had and I mentioned it was an AirPort, they immediately moved on to something else being the issue. The reputation was so solid that support wouldn't even bother troubleshooting it.

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

#755

Post by arkensaw »

flancian wrote: post #553
mikewarot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package. Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8( Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job don…

Immich is supposed to solve this nowadays: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Immich is the closest thing I've found to Picasa. However, I would just point out you can still download and use Picasa 3.9 on Windows.

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

#756

Post by throw_await »

troupo wrote: post #566
JimDabell wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff done. This is not true. The reason it died was because Internet Explorer 6 didn’t support it, and that hung around for about a decade and a half. There was no way for XHTML to succeed given that situation. The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed Reac…

> The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a problem, it would have killed React. JSX is processed during the build step, XHTML is processed at runtime, by the browser.

Invalid XHTML woild have been caught in the test suite

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

#758

Post by zweifuss »

eimrine wrote: post #359
drnick1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.

Do you have any phones without spyware? I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.

Silent SMS (Short Message Type 0) have been around since 1996.

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

#759

Post by Einenlum »

Maybe 10 years ago I discovered Stumble upon, a website which allowed you to randomly get a page on the internet based on your previous likes/dislikes and interests. I absolutely loved it. You could find some very niche pages. I guess this is what Kagi Small Web tries to achieve somehow, but without the personalization.

They replaced StumbleUpon with "Mix", whatever it is. Probably because they didn't know how to earn money from it. Sad.

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

#760

Post by motorest »

nurbl wrote: post #498
motorest wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same reason Typescript exists TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy exists, and no one in their right mind claims that python's openness should be threatened just because static typing is convenient.

Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic. I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become somet…

> Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?)

No, it's the exact same thing. TypeScript adds support for type annotations, and removing these annotations leads to JavaScript. See how Node.js added support for TypeScript by implementing type stripping in v22.

https://nodejs.org/api/typescript.html#type-stripping

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