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

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31–40 of 912 posts

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

#31
post #12

OS/2 my beloved.

Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.

It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.

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

#32
Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power usage and cost as well.

Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector interesting concept even though not the best executed.

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

#33

It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality, and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it. [1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-lang.org/spec/spec.html

I played with Austral about a year ago and really wanted to use it for my projects, but as a hobbyist and mostly inept programmer it lacked the community and ecosystem I require. I found it almost intuitive and the spec does an amazing job of explaining the language. Would love to see it get a foothold.

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

#34
Secure-Scuttlebot (the gossiped social network) died circa 2019 or 2024 depending who we ask. It died before it's time for various reasons including:

1. competing visions for how the entire system should work

2. dependence on early/experimental npm libraries

3. devs breaking existing features due to "innovation"

4. a lot of interpersonal drama because it was not just open source but also a social network

the ideas are really good, someone should make the project again and run with it

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

#36

Google Glass. Thanks society. People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.

Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.

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

#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.

Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.

Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.

Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same thing, and took over.

Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed. Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.

Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know that until I started writing this..

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

#39
post #3

Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its weight on it back then.

They should have partnered not only with Intel, but with Palm, RIM or whatever other then-giant to rival Android. Those two went their own ways with WebOS and buying QNX, so maybe they could have agreed to form a consortium for an open and interoperable mobile OS

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

#40
choojs

All of the upside and none of the downside of react

No JSX and no compiler, all native js

The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays

I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice professionally

https://github.com/choojs/choo#example

The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts

Less moving parts than svelte

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