Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

401–410 of 912 posts

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

#401
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is function wise the best now...

I don’t get the downvotes. Discord for all its flaws is amazing. I never experienced wave so maybe the comparison is not a good one?

It's indeed not a good one. Discord refined instant messaging and bolts other things on top like forums but isn't fundamentally different. Google Wave was (and still is) a completely different paradigm. Everything was natively collaborative: it mixed instant messaging with document edition (like Google Docs or pads) and any widget you could think of (polls, calendars, playing music, drawing, ...) could be added by users through sandboxed Javascript. The current closest I can think of is DeltaChat's webxdc.

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

#402
post #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 ar…

I tried it twice and the onboarding experience was insurmountable. Never managed to achieve a critical mass of followers or whatever they call it, so things were permanently read-only for me. I'd reply but nobody saw it.

It was a fascinating protocol underneath, but the social follow structure seemed to select strongly for folks who already had a following or something.

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

#403

I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS ). I was looking forward to this in the mid…

Re: obtaining a legal copy of Genera, as of 2023 Symbolics still existed as a corporate entity and they continued to sell x86-64 laptops with "Portable Genera 2.0". I bought one from them then, and occasionally see them listing some on Ebay. (This isn't intended as an advertisement or endorsement, just a statement. I think it's quite unfortunate that Symbolics's software hasn't been made freely available, since it's now really only of historical interest.)

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

#404

- 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

I don't know if you know it, that's a feature of Google Lens

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

#405
post #367

- 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…

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

The problem is that group (1) results in a nightmarish race-to-the-bottom. File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files. In practice this means a large proportion of documents are going to end up corrupt. Does it open in Chrome? Great, ship it! The file format is no longer the specification, but it has now become a wild guess at whatever weird garbage the incumbent is still willing to accept. This makes it virtually impossible to write a new parser, because the file format suddenly has no specification.

On the other hand, imagine a world where Chrome would slowly start to phase out its quirks modes. Something like a yellow address bar and a "Chrome cannot guarantee the safety of your data on this website, as the website is malformed" warning message. Turn it into a red bar and a "click to continue" after 10 years, remove it altogether after 20 years. Suddenly it's no longer that one weird customer who is complaining, but everyone - including your manager. Your mistakes are painfully obvious during development, so you have a pretty good incentive to properly follow the spec. You make a mistake on a prominent page and the CTO sees it? Well, guess you'll be adding an XHTML validator to your CI pipeline next week!

It is very tempting to write a lenient parser when you are just one small fish in a big ecosystem, but over time it will inevitably lead to the degradation of that very ecosystem. You need some kind of standards body to publish a validating reference parser. And like it or not, Chrome is big enough that it can act as one for HTML.

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

#406
post #357

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.

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.

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

#407
The Ricochet network. A packet mesh network providing ISDN speeds in the dialup era, wirelessly.

They burned through $5B of 1999 dollars, building out a network in 23 cities, and had effectively zero customers. Finally shut down in 2001.

All their marketing was focused on "mobile professionals", whoever those were, while ignoring home users who were clamoring for faster internet where other ISPs dragged their feet.

Today, 5G femtocells have replicated some of the concept (radically small cell radius to increase geographic frequency reuse), but without the redundancy -- a femtocell that loses its uplink is dead in the water, not serving as a relay node. A Ricochet E-radio that lost its uplink (but still had power) would simply adjust its routing table and continue operating.

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

#408
post #388

- 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…

The reason XHTML failed is because the spec required it to be sent with a new MIME type (application/xml+xhtml I believe) which no webserver did out of the box. Everything defaulted to text/html, which all browsers would interpret as HTML, and given the mismatching doctype, would interpret as tag soup (quirks mode/lenient). Meanwhile, local files with the doctype would be treated as XHTML, so people assumed the docty…

Isn't that what the tag was supposed to solve?

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

#409
post #192

Visual Basic 6 - arguably the most accessible way of creating GUI apps.

you still have Lazarus, "a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development."

Lazarus is nice but both its apis and the ui feel like they're still stuck in the early 00's. It's not enough to look like VB6 / Delphi these days; you've got to keep up with what kinds of conventions we expect now.

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

#410

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.

Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now.

On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.

Post reply on HN