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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?

#871

Post by burnt-resistor »

DrewADesign wrote: post #647
burnt-resistor wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's fair. Overpaid managers and principle engineers spun "secret projects" and products like Glass well to be an elitist experience for special people. But I won't forgive not letting Wave bake and mature. Q: Do they have non-human shareholders I don't know about, or do they have shareholders who lack qualities present in most living human beings?

I’ve only met a few of their significant shareholders and based on that, I’d say the jury is still out. I remember being excited by wave when the demo hit but never had a use for what it offered at that point in my career.

Hard to say what Wave could've become, but in Google fashion, they didn't really try and threw it away. Maybe it could've become a Discord-like meets Zoom platform but with more integrations.

Honestly, I'd like to see something like a hosted FOSS Hubot (bot) for Signal that can tap into zillions of IoT and cloud integrations.

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

#872

Post by spartanatreyu »

Minor49er wrote: post #638
eloisant wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

Flash players had zoom built in. And I believe there were textareas that allowed people to copy and paste text if they wanted, though it wasn't very common Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally

> Flash players had zoom built in

The zoom was limited to the frame that the flash player sat in, so you'd end up with different parts of the website at different zoom levels.

Also flash wasn't responsive and couldn't flow like real website content can.

> Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally

That's only because all the capabilities were new, now they're built into the web itself. See:

- https://ciechanow.ski/airfoil/

- https://slowroads.io/

- https://photopea.com

- https://superspl.at/view?id=1eacd61c

- https://itch.io/games/platform-web

- https://alche.studio/

- https://ruinergame.com/ (scroll down)

- etc...

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

#873

Post by WD-42 »

pjmlp wrote: post #819
WD-42 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to an extent. The /proc file system on Linux is directly inspired by plan 9 IIRC. Other things like network sockets never got that far and are more related to their BSD kin.

Not at all, /proc comes from Solaris.

Looking into it we are both wrong. Plan 9 implemented /proc after 8th edition Unix. Solaris and Linux both implemented it at the same time in 1992.

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

#874

Post by Hobadee »

LVB wrote: post #170

HP TouchPad Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule run.

My dad had one. He was an HP employee and they opened them up to internal purchases when they took them off the market.

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

#877

Post by morshu9001 »

JimDabell wrote: post #97

Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked. It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread us…

Was the backlash actually what ended this project? As much as I'd like to pat myself on the back, there must've been another reason.

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

#880

Post by lexszero_ »

w10-1 wrote: post #172

Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for somet…

I haven't heard about Optane before, but the concept of persistent memory reminds me of PhantomOS[0], which is based around the idea that from the app perspective everything is already in memory and the kernel/runtime (JVM-ish, so object-aware) takes care of {,de}serialization to a non-volatile storage by virtue of a highly sophisticated virtual memory manager so the app programmer doesn't have to think about it. I remember seeing it being presented at some conference around 2012 and the live demo running Tetris game slowed down to a crawl and crashed after a few blocks due to bugs in GC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_OS

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