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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?

#661

Post by wfn »

donatj wrote: post #371

Quartz Composer - Apple's "patch-based" visual programming environment. Drag out a bunch of nodes, wire them together, build a neat little GUI. 10+ years ago I'd regularly build all sorts of little utilities with it. It was surprisingly easy to use it to tap into things that are otherwise a lot more work. For instance I used it to monitor the data coming from a USB device. Like 3 nodes and 3 patches to make all of th…

> Quartz Composer

Have you looked at https://vvvv.org/ ? Maybe it's still comparatively too heavy but imho it's not that heavy (cf. touch designer and the likes). I want to play with it some more myself...

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

#662

Post by Terretta »

Ray Ozzie's Groove, by Groove Networks, embraced and extinguished by MSFT:

Ozzie, who had previously worked at IBM, was particularly interested in the challenge of remote collaboration. His vision culminated in the creation of Groove, which was released in 2001. The software distinguished itself from other collaboration tools of the time by allowing users to share files and work on documents in real-time—even without a continuous internet connection.

Groove’s architecture was innovative in that it utilized a peer-to-peer networking model, enabling users to interact directly with each other and share information seamlessly. This approach allowed for a level of flexibility and responsiveness that was often missing in traditional client-server models. Asynchronous collaboration was a key feature, where team members could work on projects without needing to be online simultaneously.

https://umatechnology.org/what-happened-to-microsoft-groove/

We built some things on it, was like CRDT for all the things.

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

#663

Post by jfadfwddas »

speed_spread wrote: post #246

Ceylon, JVM language, developed by Red Hat, now abandoned at Eclipse. Lost the race with Kotlin but proposed more than just syntax sugar over Java. Anonymous union types, comprehensions, proper module system...

I really liked Ceylon. It was competing against Groovy, Kotlin, and Scala which all seemed to come out around the same time.

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

#664

Post by chucky_z »

systemd-fleet, by the original CoreOS folks. https://github.com/coreos/fleet

I used this when it was brand new for a bit and it was so incredibly smooth and worked so well. It solved the problem of controlling systemd units remotely so well. I'm pretty sure the only reason it never actually took off was kubernetes and coreos's acquisition, however it actively solves the 'other half' of the k8s problem which is managing the state of the host itself.

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

#665

Post by IshKebab »

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…

And they fixed symlinks.

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

#666

Post by eszed »

kesor wrote: post #310

ICQ ; It was the first instant messenger, the technology could have adopted voice (and not get disrupted by Skype) and mobile (and not get disrupted by whatsapp) and group chat (and not get disrupted by slack/discord). But they didn't even try and put up a fight.

The last time ICQ was mentioned on HN I could still remember my ICQ number. It's a benchmark for how much my memory has deteriorated in the last five years. I do still remember it fondly, though.

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

#667

Post by 9x39 »

acheron wrote: post #608
eloisant wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.

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

#668

Post by mock-possum »

pessimizer wrote: post #480
mock-possum wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bet you I could ask any LLM about it and have something launched within an hour. tumblr will practically let you do that for chrissake

tumblr is nothing like a webpage. LLMs were just invented 5 minutes ago and are losing money hand over fist until people are dependent, then will be very expensive to use; and you still have to figure out how to host, where to host, and how much it's going to cost you. So, I have no idea what you're getting at. You could have said Wordpress.com or something. It's not quite a website, but it's close. It's also probabl…

Ask the LLM about hosting too. I’ve literally gone through this process recently - setting up hosting, a domain, and a static html site from scratch, vibing from start to finish. It is not difficult.

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

#670

Post by IshKebab »

tjchear wrote: post #554
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…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

Probably the fact that it's a pretty terrible idea. It means you take a normal properly typed API and smush it down into some poorly specified text format that you now have to write probably-broken parsers for. I often find bugs in programs that interact with `/proc` on Linux because they don't expect some output (e.g. spaces in paths, or optional entries).

The only reasons people think it's a good idea in the first place is a) every programming language can read files so it sort of gives you an API that works with any language (but a really bad one), and b) it's easy to poke around in from the command line.

Essentially it's a hacky cop-out for a proper language-neutral API system. In fairness it's not like Linux actually came up with a better alternative. I think the closest is probably DBus which isn't exactly the same.

Maybe something like FIDL is a proper solution but I have only read a little about it: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/get-started/learn/fidl/fidl

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