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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

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141–150 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#141

I really wish RethinkDB the company with all founders and engineers would have survived. Their documentation, polish, and web admin interface was heads and shoulders above. The concept of changefeeds at the database level was super powerful. ReQL was nice to work with and using a ORM such as thinky[1] was a pleasure. If only (I know it's not easy) they could have inked some enterprise deals and focused on the busines…

RethinkDB was forked by some members of the community as RebirthDB and now it is being merged back to the original repository. Lot's of exciting stuff is going on on that front and those guys need help pushing the newest release.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#143

Video game arcades. They were amazing during their heyday, but I was also young. I want both of those things back!

Douglas Adams:

> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

> 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

> 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#144

I really wish RethinkDB the company with all founders and engineers would have survived. Their documentation, polish, and web admin interface was heads and shoulders above. The concept of changefeeds at the database level was super powerful. ReQL was nice to work with and using a ORM such as thinky[1] was a pleasure. If only (I know it's not easy) they could have inked some enterprise deals and focused on the busines…

Me too, do you think you could use it at all in production now or would you not touch it?

I was looking forward to trying out FoundationDB before Apple shut it down.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#145
post #41

Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.

It ticks me off to this day. I can’t imagine it being terribly difficult to maintain, particularly with Google’s limitless resources. They burned so much good will with their developer base just to save a few bucks.

It would have been amazing if instead of having Google Plus be an entirely separate thing, they had added Google Plus's sharing and discussion features onto Google Reader and grown from that as a base. Something like that could very well still be a thriving product today.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#147

Grooveshark had a better interface for managing "currently playing" than anything I've used before or since. Most apps don't even track what's currently playing in an intelligent fashion. Similarly, rockbox was really great mp3 player firmware, when I used to use one of those. It had a funny feature I've never seen elsewhere: multi-lingual article-ignoring sort. I had German band "Die Prinzen" on that mp3 player, and…

My wife still rues the loss of Grooveshark. She’s never recovered. I don’t blame her. All other streaming services suck horribly.

Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?

#150
I have a lot of love for Sidecar. When I first moved up to SF, 'ridesharing' was truly in its infancy as Uber was still Black-car/Taxi only and Lyft was still a part of Zimride. Uber might have taken most of the market while Lyft might have won as the 'not-Uber' but, having had all three in the early days, it really stood out to me how much Sidecar was innovating ahead of the other two product-wise, only to be immediately copied thereafter and eventually driven out of business. Off the top of my head, they were the first to debut real time price quotes, line/pool service, some kind of delivery integration, and if I am not mistaken was the original 'rideshare' wherein a regular person could pick up passengers. Might be a few more I'm missing. I've always held the belief that they had the best product team of them all in the early days.
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