Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 912 posts

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

#111

Post by bxparks »

socalgal2 wrote: post #96
bxparks wrote: post #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. Go…

I used Picasa and loved it, until I realized I want all my photos available from all my devices at all times and so gave in to Google Photos (for access, not backup)

I use SyncThing for that purpose. It syncs across my phone, my laptops, and my Synologies. But I don't sync all my photos.

I don't like the thought of providing Google thousands of personal photos for their AI training. Which will eventually leak to gov't agencies, fraudsters, and criminals.

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

#112

Post by JimDabell »

btown wrote: post #107
JoshTriplett wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives. > I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. The…

This. No matter how cool the engineering might have been, from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… Apple was very much creating the Torment Nexus from “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

> from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for…

I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?

I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?

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

#113

Post by esperent »

daxfohl wrote: post #45

Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…

> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.

Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling.

Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx

Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx

This is why Heroku lost popularity.

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

#114

Post by glitchc »

cr125rider wrote: post #8

Macromedia Flash. Its scope and security profile was too big. It gave way to HTML’s canvas. But man, the tooling is still no where near as good. Movieclips, my beloved. I loved it all.

I for one am so glad Flash died. At one point I dreaded navigating to a new website because of it.

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

#115

Post by tdeck »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #95
geor9e wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life

Perhaps because they already had Periscope that no one used. It was a "buy competitor to kill it" play that didn't have the desired effect.

Amusingly Periscope was their clone of Meerkat which was briefly popular before they killed it.

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

#116

Post by tdeck »

bxparks wrote: post #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. Go…

I'm still amused that they killed Google Notebook and then a few years later created Google Keep, an application with basically the same exact feature set.

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

#117

Post by piskov »

Microsoft Silverlight.

Full C# instead of god forbidden js.

Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier).

MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup.

Excellent tooling, static analysis, debugging, what have you.

Rendered and worked completely the same in any browser (safari, ie, chrome, opera, firefox) on mac and windows

If that thing still worked, boy would we be in a better place regarding web apps.

Unfortunately, iPhone killed adobe flash and Silverlight as an aftermath. Too slow processor, too much energy consumption.

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

#119

Post by edanm »

BirAdam wrote: post #68

Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…

Immediately thought of this.

Even the watered-down version of wave was something I used at my host startup, it was effectively our project management tool. And it was amazing at that.

I don't know how it would fare compared to the options available today, but back then, it shutting down was a tremendous loss.

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

#120

Post by edanm »

esperent wrote: post #113
daxfohl wrote: post #45

Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to…

> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue. Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling. Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx This is why Heroku lost popularity.

Yes. And fittingly, Docker was born out of a Heroku competitor.
Post reply on HN