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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
461–470 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#462A 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.
Yep came here to say exactly this.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#463Tiny Thief [0]. My kids loved that game.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#464Founder perspective: “avoid patents by staying 20 years behind” is the tragedy.
I published a 2-page CC0 initiative that splits protection into two layers:
• GLOBAL layer — fast, low-friction recognition for non-strategic inventions
• LOCAL-STRATEGIC layer — conventional national control for sensitive tech
Goal: cut admin drag/time-to-market while keeping sovereignty intact.
Brief (CC0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17305774 Curious: would this structure have saved any of the projects mentioned here?
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? Amen. Postel’s Law was wrong: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413 We stop at the first sign of trouble for almost every o…
Just to remind you that text [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal. I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead. [0]: By I mean and by I mean , and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be .
It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized.
XHTML allows you to use XML and are just XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and will always be and . Since the beginning.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#466- 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…
CICS is still going strong as part of ZOS. There are industries where green screen, mainframe terminal apps still rule and CICS is driving them.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#467- 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…
I’d argue a good comparison here is HTTPS. Everyone decided it would be good for sites to move over to serving via HTTPS so browsers incentivised people to move by gating newer features to HTTPS only. They could have easily done the same with XHTML had they wanted.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#468[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#469FirefoxOS
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#470The 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.
Plan9 also had some innovative UI features, such as mouse chording to edit text, nested window managers, the Plumber to run user-configurable commands on known text patterns system-wide, etc.
Its distributed nature should have meant it's perfect for today's world with mobile, desktop, cloud, and IoT devices all connected to each other. Instead, we're stuck with operating systems that were never designed for that.
There are still active forks of Plan9 such as 9front, but the original from Bell Labs is dead. The reasons it died are likely:
- Legal challenges (Plan9 license, pointless lawsuits, etc.) meant it wssn't adopted by major players in the industry.
- Plan9 was a distributed OS during a time when having a local computer became popular and affordable, while using a terminal to access a centrally managed computer fell out of fashion (though the latter sort of came back in a worse fashion with cloud computing).
- Bad marketing and posing itself as merely a research OS meant they couldn't capitalize on the .com boom.
- AT&T lost its near endless source of telephone revenue. Bell Labs was sold multiple times over the coming years, a lot of the Unix/Plan9 guys went to other companies like Google.