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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?

#901

Post by OkayPhysicist »

sen wrote: post #483
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.

Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile. It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.

> even for things that aren’t games

This is a slept-on feature of Godot, IMO. It's been my go-to native UI library for all my C# projects since I tried making a game with it 2 years ago. It perfectly straddles the line between drag-and-drop WYSIWYG and software defined layout.

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

#902

Post by hulitu »

friendofafriend wrote: post #103

Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than what we have today without having to take the phone apart. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara

> Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone project by Google/Motorola

This was a huge idea. A lot of companies tried to develop modules for it. This could have been the modern equivalent of the PC. But Google killed the child, before it could say "mama".

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

#903

Post by veqq »

crowdhailer wrote: post #673
veqq wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!

I certainly know and admire eve. However I don't think I consciously took that many features from it into EYG. I'd be curios what the crossover is

Oh, scratch that. I misremembered.

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

#904

Post by qingcharles »

haunter wrote: post #9

Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.

Elon said they found the archived data and are going to relaunch it as an AI slop output for Grok, ala Sora 2 feed.

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

#906

Post by pneumatics »

Transmeta Crusoe, it would be very useful today for running Docker containers built for different instruction sets without being as slow as QEMU. The performance penalty was only about 20% and the power efficiency was actually better than native x86.

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

#907

Post by nvarsj »

al_borland wrote: post #746
alance wrote: post #309

I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.

I was always confused my del.icio.us, and bookmark sharing in general. In my head bookmarks are sharing are distinct things. Bookmarks are things I want to save to visit again or a shortcut to easily visit often. Sharing is something I think someone else might find interesting, and thinks others will too, but I probably won't ever visit again. I will bookmark the site to pay my utility bill, but it's not something I'…

It was the best way to find niche websites at its heyday. Performed better than Google for general website search too. Then yahoo nuked it. Now everything is centralised on eg Reddit.

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

#908

Post by Andrex »

dimal wrote: post #549
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…

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plai…

Exactly. Pandora's box was wide open by that point. XHTML would have been a good idea at the start of the web, but not ~2000 during/after the dotcom boom. And if you can't mix existing web content with XHTML stuff it defeats the point.

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

#909

Post by PeterisP »

tjchear wrote: post #554
renehsz wrote: post #470

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

Abstractions are inherently a tradeoff, and too much abstraction hurts you when the assumptions break.

For a major example, treating a network resource like a file is neat and elegant and simple while the network works well, however, once you have unreliable or slow or intermittent connectivity, the abstraction breaks and you have to handle the fact that it's not really like a local file, and your elegant abstraction has to be mangled with all kinds of things so that your apps are able to do that.

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

#910

Post by Foden23 »

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