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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?

#761

Post by starkparker »

ta12653421 wrote: post #708
brandonb927 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" -> "better google reader :-D)

like theoldreader and Inoreader, which explicitly copied the columnar interfaces, non-RSS bookmarklet content saving, item favoriting, friend-of-a-friend commenting and quasi-blog social sharing features, and mobile app sync options via APIs? Or NewsBlur, which did all of that _and also_ added user-configurable algorithmic filtering? Or Feedly, which copied Reader's UX but without the social features? or Tiny Tiny RSS and FreshRSS, which copied Reader's UX as self-hosted software?

theoldreader remains the most straightforward hosted ripoff of Google Reader, right down to look and feel, and hasn't changed much in more than a decade. Tiny Tiny is very similar, and similarly unchanging. FreshRSS implemented some non-RSS following features. So did NewsBlur, but as it always has, it still struggles with feed parsing and UI performance.

Inoreader and Feedly both pivoted toward business users and productivity to stay afloat, with the former's ditching of social features leading to another exodus of people who'd switched to it after Google Reader folded.

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

#762

Post by starkparker »

youngtaff wrote: post #390
dewey wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop though as it’s much more maintained.

it is but people are switching away due to lack of maintenance and the founders political views

There's also Readeck, which is a similar self-hosted tool that also captures some text content it can discover (i.e. article text and images, video transcripts, highlighted sections) and can export collections to RSS feeds and epub.

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

#763

Post by 1718627440 »

bawolff wrote: post #598
jasode wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it . The semantic data ("advertiser's message") is more important than the format ("purity of perfect XHTML"). Same incentives would happen with a jobs listing we…

If xhtml really took off, there would just be server side linting/html tidy. Its not that hard a problem to solve. Lots of websites already do this for user generated html, because even if an unclosed div doesnt take down the whole thing its still ugly. The real problem is the benefits of xhtml are largely imaginary so there isn't really a motivation to do that work.

Or you just wouldn't create xhtml with string interpolation.

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

#764

Post by nrdvana »

giobox wrote: post #657
troupo wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they were going to position it against Windows Mobile. When iOS was announced, Google scrambled to re-do the entire concept

Not so much Windows Mobile, which never achieved serious market share. It was originally more planned to be a Blackberry competitor, and the early Android handset prototype concepts were all blackberry knockoffs with similar physical keyboard layouts. It has always appeared though like you suggest, that the project quickly pivoted to candy bar touch phones following the release of the original iPhone. It's worthwhile…

I still hate touch and would still buy a keyboard phone if anyone was making a good one

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

#765

Post by 1718627440 »

eterm wrote: post #250
Animats wrote: post #230

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

> Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly It would kill the approachability of the language. One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see something just with distorted output. That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were put off "real" programming languages because they were overwhelmed by terrible error messages…

I can "handwrite" C, Python, etc. just fine and they don't assign fallback meanings to syntax errors.

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

#766

Post by janwl »

ta12653421 wrote: post #708
brandonb927 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There were a few copycats, but they 1) weren't as good (mostly because they wanted to do more than google reader!) and 2) they weren't free.

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

#767

Post by nrdvana »

Y-bar wrote: post #651
masfuerte wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.

I am not and have never compared them in the way you say I did. You literally wrote ”Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.” so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim. Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based)…

Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had graphic routines written in optimized assembly that simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of hardware.

I feel like people are talking past each other a bit here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not fast, but the people doing animations with it were getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations + SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG

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

#768

Post by daxfohl »

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 never had a real display API. I guess there was swing, but that was very ugly and stuck out like a sore thumb on a web page (or desktop for that matter). JavaFX eventually became a thing, and was probably better, but for whatever reason never really caught on.

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

#769

Post by daxfohl »

Blackberry. Back in the Blackberry days I never pined for anything resembling a smartphone. Other than built-in GPS, I'm not sure my life is improved or worsened by having a computer on my person 24/7.

That wasn't the case pre-internet or pre-cellphone, when I remember pining for something resembling those technologies.

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

#770

Post by reactordev »

simonask wrote: post #720
reactordev wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

That’s not what the H stands for though… but I get what you’re saying. Because they opened in order, closing in same defined order should be allowed and thus we have all that peeking code to check to see if the next tag is that so we don’t error out and now we no longer conform to XHTML. Because non-engineers are writing HTML. It’s like putting the tires on before the brakes, but brakes after, and expecting it to work.

However because you can be both bold and italic, these should just be flags and that’s how they are now which is why b or i can be closed before b or i. I doubt they are just flags in the code of the browsers though because tags support styles and stuff.

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