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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?

#881

Post by teo_zero »

follower wrote: post #807
teo_zero wrote: post #636

Gitless. I'm a fan of software that allows you to get your feet wet with simple concepts and progressively add complex ones when you feel you're ready. Gitless was my introduction to git.

Just mentioned this in another reply but Jujutsu may be of interest as a maintained alternative to gitless: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/blob/main/README.md#introductio...

Thank you. I've just run through a jj tutorial and it indeed mirrors my mental model of commits, just like gitless did. I'm sure I'll become a fan!

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

#882

Post by hbogert »

brandonb927 wrote: post #52
bxparks wrote: post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

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.

It was so freaking no-nonsense, loved it!

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

#883

Post by bigthymer »

socalgal2 wrote: post #91
bigthymer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location. It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and where I had gone. Is there another app where I can store this locally?

Google Maps still tracks my location. The difference is they no longer store the data on their servers, it's stored on your phone (iPhone/Android) https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979 That way, they can't respond to requests for that data by governments as they don't have it. I can look on my phone and see all the places I've been today/yesterday, etc

Is it just me or has the amount of data collected changed? Last I checked, the locally stored data just identifies known business locations that have been visited. In the past, when I clicked a business location in the app, it would show when I last visited. Google maps no longer does this. In the past, I could do a hike and see exactly how long I walked and how fast I went. However, this info is no longer collected to this degree.

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

#884

Post by dizhn »

ofalkaed wrote: post #686
dizhn wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.

From what I remember; it was mostly a one man project and he was writing it for himself, this upset some people and they felt his personal project should be democratic. It created a great deal of drama and he found himself having to deal with the drama every time he tried to engage with the community. Eventually he just walked away from it all. The fork died shortly after since the people who forked it were still dep…

That's a shame. For some reason a lot of projects are forked by people with not enough skills to do any continued development. And some people seem to thrive on the ethical high horse side of free software.

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

#885

Post by andsoitis »

dlcarrier wrote: post #218
andsoitis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those products get cancelled? Why didn’t you quit Google after, say, the third product you used got canned?

I used Google Talk than Hangouts, but once they switched to Meet, I gave up on them. By then my family was all using Hangouts, and we never settled on a new service, because one of my siblings didn't want to support any chat services that don't freely give user information to the government, and the rest of us didn't want to use a chat platform that does freely give user information to the government.

I was more thinking about all the many Google apps (outside of messaging) that you say you used. It seems weird to keep on trying new ones if you keep on getting burnt. Just sayin' :-)

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

#886

Post by AfterHIA »

mike_hearn wrote: post #832
AfterHIA wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist hist…

OK, go use Windows then, it's the dream architecture you always wanted ;) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/com-tech...

Dichotomizing the world as either UNIX based or Windows is pretty myopic. I want the computer architecture Douglas Engelbart dreamed of. I want a realization of the ideas of Seymour Papert and Brenda Laurel.

We're still after 50 years using Xerox Alto clones fundamentally. What would a, "modern Alto" play like? What if we spent X,XXX,XXX's of dollars to create a, "in to the future time machine" like they did at PARC? What if the project had the high ethics of Bush and Engelbart as an operational paradigm?

...and yes Lisp is the best programming language. Suck it.

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

#887

Post by xnx »

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…

> - Word Lens

Google Translate's lens feature works offline.

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

#888

Post by atgreen »

tmtvl wrote: post #206

CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client doesn't do HTTPS, ql-https doesn't do Ultralisp, and OCICL (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable. Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31 years, so it's just the code which interac…

ocicl does do system-wide packages!

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

#889

Post by knotie »

badsectoracula wrote: post #560
le-mark wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.

Delphi 2, the first 32bit version of Delphi, had all of this. Some, like threads, even had wrappers (TThread), but Delphi came with Win32 bindings out of the box so all Win32 functions were available too - and it came bundled with documentation for the APIs. In addition, calling out to a DLL was trivial so even if a function wasn't available, you could just define it. Pretty much anything you could do with a C compil…

I had the pleasure/pain of maintaining a Delphi 2 app for 6 months in 2014... It was buggy as hell and crashed all the time. All the things you've mentioned were indeed included out of the box. The IDE was pretty much a direct recompile of the of the Delphi 1 IDE with some minimal additions to support Win32. Oh, there was no interfaces (or COM, obviously).

The only reason the company hadn't moved off Delphi 2 was that they hadn't bought the code for a couple of 3rd party components before the 3rd parties went bust... So they were stuck. I had rewritten chunks of it to remove those dependencies before I left, after I had fix the hundreds of thousands of hints and warnings (!).

Delphi 2 was late, and it was rushed out before it was finished. Delphi 3 was rock solid and was the true successor to Delphi 1.

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

#890

Post by francou »

Avamander wrote: post #867
cymor wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at FOKS. Made by the people who made Keybase. https://foks.pub/

Very interesting, unfortunately their blog has no RSS feed :D

https://blog.foks.pub/index.xml
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