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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?

#581

Post by latexr »

_bent wrote: post #544
emigre wrote: post #326

The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.

iirc Atom was the original Electron project. Eventually VS Code came along and took all the good ideas - the modularity through extensions, and Electron / web based cross platform, but made it really fast and added IDE like language support through LSP. Atom may be dead now, but the idea lives on in VS Code and the new project by the original developers of Atom: Zed

> iirc Atom was the original Electron project.

Indeed (and the names are a clue). More specifically, Electron came out of the ideas in Atom, not the other way around.

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

#582

Post by latexr »

emigre wrote: post #326

The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.

Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom’s fate was sealed.

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

#583

Post by devl547 »

Austizzle wrote: post #479
Qem wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years behind get us back to Windows XP, that had a better experience than Windows 11 anyway.

I've heard people say this, and believed it myself for a long time, but recently I set up a windows XP VM and was shocked by how bad the quality of life was. I think nostalgia is influencing this opinion quite a bit, and we don't realize the mountain of tiny usability improvements that have been made since XP

RTM or SP3? When users talk about XP being awesome, they talk about SP3.

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

#584

Post by bobmcnamara »

_bent wrote: post #559

Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers. But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able ca…

> unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

I always wondered about that - since it works by interleaving pixels at different focal depths, there's always going to be a resolution tradeoff that a single-plane focus camera wouldn't.

It's such a cool idea though, and no more difficult to manufacturer than a sensor + micro lens array.

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

#585

Post by carlesfe »

I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had:

- Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR.

- Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut.

- It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction

- Memory (facts database)

- Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc.

Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college.

Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.

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

#586

Post by jasode »

markasoftware wrote: post #558
dimal wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

if the world was all XHTML, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, the same way you wouldn't import a python library that's not valid python.

>, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML,

You're overlooking how incentives and motivations work. The gp (and their employer) wants to integrate the advertisement snippet -- even with broken XHTML -- because they receive money for it.

The semantic data ("advertiser's message") is more important than the format ("purity of perfect XHTML").

Same incentives would happen with a jobs listing website like Monster.com. Consider that it currently has lots of red errors with incorrect HTML: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.monster.c...

If there was a hypothetical browser that refused to load that Monster.com webpage full of errors because it's for the users' own good and the "good of the ecosystem"... the websurfers would perceive that web browser as user-hostile and would choose another browser that would be forgiving of those errors and just load the page. Job hunters care more about the raw data of the actual job listings so they can get a paycheck rather than invalid tags nested inside tags.

Those situations above are a different category (semantic_content-overrides-fileformatsyntax) than a developer trying to import a Python library with invalid syntax (fileformatsyntax-Is-The-Semantic_Content).

EDIT reply to: >Make the advertisement block an iframe [...] If the advertiser delivers invalid XHTML code, only the advertisement won't render.

You're proposing a "technical solution" to avoid errors instead of a "business solution" to achieve a desired monetary objective. To re-iterate, they want to render the invalid XHTML code so your idea to just not render it is the opposite of the goal.

In other words, if rendering imperfect-HTML helps the business goal more than blanking out invalid XHTML in an iframe, that means HTML "wins" in the marketplace of ideas.

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

#587

Post by bobmcnamara »

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…

> IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU.

TIL: what microchannel meant by micro and channel.

Also it had OS independent device-class drivers.

And you could stuff a new CPU on a card and pop it right in. Went from a 286+2MB to a 486dx2+32MB.

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

#588

Post by EdiX »

teddyh wrote: post #573
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…

> The reasons it died are likely: The reason Plan 9 died a swift death was that, unlike Unix – which hardware manufacturers could license for a song and adapt to their own hardware (and be guaranteed compatibility with lots of Unix software) – Bell Labs tried to sell Plan 9, as commercial software, for $350 a box. (As I have written many times in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412539 >, https://news…

Version 1 was never licensed to anyone. Version 2 was only licensed to universities for an undiscolsed price. Version 3 was sold as a book, I think this is the version you are referring to. However note that this version contained a license that only allowed non commercial uses of the source code. It also came with no support, no community and no planned updates (the project was shelved half a year later in favor of inferno)

More than the price tag the problem is that plan 9 wasn't really released until 2004.

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

#590

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

mikkupikku wrote: post #410
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.

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…

Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
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