[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died befor...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time
and why?
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop
something new based on its ideas.
Author : ofalkaed
Score : 305 points
Date : 2025-10-11 22:16 UTC (1 days ago)
| snovymgodym wrote:
| ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT
| reimplementation.
|
| It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30
| years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing
| it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not
| abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt
| we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real
| users.
|
| It's too bad, because a drop in Windows replacement would be nice
| for all the people losing Windows 10 support right now.
|
| On the other hand, I think people underestimate the difficulty
| involved in the project and compare it unfavorably to Linux, BSD,
| etc. Unix and its source code was pretty well publicly documented
| and understood for decades before those projects started, nothing
| like that ever really existed for Windows.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Wine, Proton and virtualization all got good enough that
| there's no need for a half-baked binary-compatible Windows
| reimplementation, and I think that took a lot of the oxygen out
| of what could have been energy towards ReactOS. It's a cool
| concept but not really a thing anybody requires.
| ghssds wrote:
| They had no chance. Look how long it tooks for Wine to get
| where they are. Their project is Wine + a kernel + device
| drivers compatibility, and a moving target.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| ReactOS right now focuses on Windows XP era hardware and
| compatibility, also not guaranteed to work outside a VM.
| bitwize wrote:
| > ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows
| NT reimplementation.
|
| Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an
| interest and suddenly they leap ahead.
|
| MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone
| found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the
| emulation caught up until Windows ran.
|
| Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows
| 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after
| when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.
| znpy wrote:
| Not so long ago there was a leak of windows' source code, up
| to xp and 2003 server... the leak was so complete there are
| videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!)
| windows from there.
|
| And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).
| ranma42 wrote:
| IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had
| access to the windows source code in some way shape or
| form.
| cardanome wrote:
| They need to train an LLM with the windows source code
| and ask it to write an windows clone.
|
| Apparently copyright law only applies for humans,
| generative AI gets away with stealing because there is
| too much monetary interest involved in looking the other
| way.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wow, so you're saying "Windows but with even less
| reliability _and more_ security problems plus tech debt
| "?
|
| I don't think the world really needs that. :)
| alganet wrote:
| Leaks like this actually slow down ReactOS development.
|
| The project is supposed to be a clean-room reverse
| engineering effort. If you even see Windows code, you are
| compromised, and should not work on ReactOS.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20
| years behind.
| Qem wrote:
| 20 years behind get us back to Windows XP, that had a better
| experience than Windows 11 anyway.
| Austizzle wrote:
| 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
| devl547 wrote:
| RTM or SP3? When users talk about XP being awesome, they
| talk about SP3.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the
| project
|
| I don't think people do, it sounds like a nearly impossible
| struggle, and at the end you get a Windows clone. I can't
| imagine hating yourself enough to work on it for an extended
| period of time for no money and putting yourself and your hard
| work in legal risk. It's a miracle we have Wine and serious
| luck that we have Proton.
|
| People losing Windows 10 support need to move on. There's Linux
| if you want to be free, and Apple if you still prefer to be
| guided. You might lose some of your video games. You can still
| move to Windows 11 if you think that people should serve their
| operating systems rather than vice versa.
| restalis wrote:
| _" putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk"_
|
| Like what? I'm genuinely curious what personal risks faces
| anyone from contributing to ReactOS. I also am curious what
| kind of legal risk may threaten the work? I mean, even in the
| unlikely scenario that something gets proven illegal and
| ordered to be dismissed from the project, what would prevent
| any such particular expunged part to be re-implemented by
| some paid contractor (now under legally indisputable
| circumstances), thus rendering the initial effort (of legal
| action) moot?
| gmuslera wrote:
| Maemo/Meego. I know there is Sailfish still around, but things
| would had been very different today if Nokia had put all its
| weight on it back then.
| ajot wrote:
| They should have partnered not only with Intel, but with Palm,
| RIM or whatever other then-giant to rival Android. Those two
| went their own ways with WebOS and buying QNX, so maybe they
| could have agreed to form a consortium for an open and
| interoperable mobile OS
| estebarb wrote:
| WebOS died in HP, after they bought Palm. I'm genuinely
| impressed at HP: somehow they always have the future in their
| hands... and kill it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I loved my N900, and my N800 before that, and I would have
| loved to have seen successors. Ultimately, I ended up switching
| to Android because I was tired of things only available as
| apps. Since then, web technologies have gotten better, and it's
| become much more feasible to use almost exclusively websites.
| bitwize wrote:
| > it's become much more feasible to use almost exclusively
| websites.
|
| And that's precisely why companies nerf their web sites and
| put a little popup that says "<service> works better on the
| app".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In my ideal world, Maemo/Meego and Palm's WebOS (not LG's
| bastardization of it) would be today's Android and iOS.
|
| Apple would have inevitably done their own thing, but it would
| have been really nice to have two widely used, mature and open
| mobile Linux platforms.
| alance wrote:
| Worth remembering it was the Microsoft partnership with Nokia
| that intentionally killed it.
| javier2 wrote:
| I was gonna say Meego. They killed it just as it was getting to
| a usable state. One of the last chances we had to get a proper
| third option in the mobile market.
| goddaneel wrote:
| When I saw the title, my first thought was also MeeGo. While I
| don't believe it would have been all that great had it not been
| abandoned, MeeGo absolutely should not have been discarded in
| such a disgraceful manner.
| tehdely wrote:
| TITCR.
|
| Hit ctrl-f and typed Meego as soon as I saw this thread, hoping
| I'd be the first. Alas.
|
| The N9 was literally a vision from an alternate timeline where
| a mobile platform from a major manufacturer was somehow
| hackable, polished, and secure. Favorite phone I've ever owned
| and I used it until it started to malfunction.
|
| Had a Jolla for a bit, too. It was nice to see them try to keep
| the basic ideas going but unfortunately it was a pain in the
| ass to use thanks to their decision to go with a radio that
| only supported GSM/EDGE in the US. Had to carry around a MiFi
| just to give it acceptable data service.
|
| I think the idea with Jolla is that if Nokia ever did an about-
| face, they were ready to be reabsorbed and get things back on
| the right track. Unfortunately, though we do once again have a
| "Nokia", it's just another Android white label with no interest
| in maintaining its own leading-edge smartphone platform.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Riak
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Google Glass. Thanks society.
|
| People always fail to see something that is an inevitability.
| Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion
| given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
| bdangubic wrote:
| yea, crazy, I upvoted just now.
|
| google glass sucks though and glasses will never be a thing.
| google and meta and ... can spend $8T and come up with the
| most insane tech etc but no one will be wearing f'ing glasses
| :)
| shikon7 wrote:
| Google Glass was so much before its time, it might be
| reinvented a few more times and abandoned again before
| finally becoming a success.
| latexr wrote:
| I don't think people are downvoting for the _mention_ of
| Google Glass, but due to the rest of the comment making a
| value judgement many are sure to disagree with.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google Wear is pretty much Google Glass on your wrist, so you
| don't burn out your eyes looking up and to the side.
| JMiao wrote:
| nah, glass was impressive for a such a big org like google, but
| smartphones are popular because people use them like portable
| televisions. glanceable info and walking directions are more
| like an apple watch sized market, without the fashion element.
| meta is about to find out.
| spooky_deep wrote:
| At least with a smartphone it's pretty clear when someone is
| filming you. Google Glass was too much of an enabler for
| creeps.
| latexr wrote:
| "Inevitable" does not mean "desirable". Delaying bad outcomes
| is worthwhile.
| cr125rider wrote:
| 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.
| dpcan wrote:
| Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.
|
| Are you referring to the SWF file format?
| billrobertson42 wrote:
| I took it as sarcasm.
| netsharc wrote:
| The iPhone killed Flash, probably because it would've been a
| way to create apps for it, more probably because it would've
| been laggy in the 2007 hardware, and people would've considered
| the iPhone "a piece of junk".
|
| Interesting how Flash became the almost universal way to play
| videos in the browser, in the latter half of the 2000's (damn
| I'm old...).
| Froedlich wrote:
| As a Linux user, I hated Flash with a passion. It mostly didn't
| work despite several Linux implementations. About the time they
| sorted all the bugs out, it went away. Good riddance.
| iambateman wrote:
| I agree that the tooling was unbelievable...better for
| interactive web than anything that exists today AFAIK.
|
| I wonder why one one has managed to build something comparable
| that _does_ work on a phone.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I agree the tooling was great, .... for making apps/games for
| desktops with a mouse and keyboard and a landscape screen of at
| least a certain size.
|
| Maybe they could have fixed all that for touch screens, small
| portrait screens, and more but they never did make it
| responsive AFAIK.
| glitchc wrote:
| I for one am so glad Flash died. At one point I dreaded
| navigating to a new website because of it.
| bapak wrote:
| It's incredible to me that they killed the whole tool instead
| of making a JS/Canvas port. Even without "full flash websites",
| there's still need for vectorial animations on the web.
| bitwize wrote:
| Adobe Animate (new name for Macromedia/Adobe Flash) can
| output to JS/Canvas now.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| Can it really do interactive things though, like games? The
| main draw card of Flash was its excellent integration of
| code and animation.
| bdcravens wrote:
| There was the discontinued Adobe Edge suite, which was what
| you described.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge
| haunter wrote:
| Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no
| idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few
| months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US
| government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it
| to china.
| geoffpado wrote:
| In a world where Vine is as successful as TikTok ended up
| being, who's to say they get to a point where selling to
| Musk even happens?
| quinndexter wrote:
| guys when you invent fictional alternate realities,
| you're allowed to leave people out of them completely.
| Anyone you like.
| geor9e wrote:
| I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a
| platform so full of life
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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.
| tdeck wrote:
| Amusingly Periscope was their clone of Meerkat which was
| briefly popular before they killed it.
| heylook wrote:
| Periscope was in closed beta when Meerkat launched.
| Neither was a clone of the other. Just two teams with the
| same idea at the same time.
| bapak wrote:
| Whoever took the decision to kill Vine was an absolute moron,
| even without hindsight. It was square videos, how hard could it
| have been to shove an ads banner above it and call it a day?
| Incredible
| saurik wrote:
| They also killed Periscope right as the explosion of
| streaming online video happened... Twitter has always been
| pretty incompetent.
| edent wrote:
| There's an excellent write up at https://www.washingtonpost.c
| om/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...
| bazmattaz wrote:
| That is so fascinating. They completely ignored their most
| most valuable users and thus the users left and the site
| collapsed. Fascinating, the hubris of the leadership at
| twitter to think they knew better than their users
| dpcan wrote:
| Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app
| there ever was.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| It's a real shame its raster functionality wasn't integrated
| into Illustrator. Adobe really butchered the whole Macromedia
| portfolio, didn't they?
|
| (For those unfamiliar, Illustrator is a pure vector graphics
| editor; once you rasterize its shapes, they become uneditable
| fixed bitmaps. Fireworks was a vector graphics editor that
| rendered at a constant DPI, so it basically let you edit raster
| bitmaps like they were vectors. It was invaluable for pixel-
| perfect graphic design. Nothing since lets you do that, though
| with high-DPI screens and resolution-independent UIs being the
| norm these days, this functionality is less relevant than it
| used to be.)
| vyrotek wrote:
| Did not expect to see FW mentioned here. Absolutely loved it.
|
| Just barely stopped using my CS6 copy. Still haven't found
| anything as intuitive.
| bapak wrote:
| Gah. Fireworks and Dreamweaver were my "web designer"
| jumpstart. Ps and Ai had nothing on Fireworks
| donatj wrote:
| At my last job m our designer was a Fireworks holdout. It was
| very pleasant. As someone who has to implement UIs, I greatly
| preferred it to Figma, though with today's flat boring designs
| there's a lot less slicing.
| jcastro wrote:
| OS/2 my beloved.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Nah, that time has passed and there's not much to miss from the
| base OS. What would be interesting is for IBM to publish the
| source to the Workplace Shell and the underlying SOM code so it
| might get a new life running on one of the free *nixes.
| walterbell wrote:
| It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I was super excited for BeOS myself.
| walterbell wrote:
| BeOS-lineage Binder IPC continues in Android.
| Froedlich wrote:
| I'm booting and running Haiku on my Thinkpad. It's a from-
| scratch workalike of BeOS, and able to run Be software.
| Though, frankly, Be software is totally 1990s, so a lot of
| Linux software written for Qt has been ported to Haiku.
|
| In the end I wound up with basically the same application
| software as on my Debian desktop, except running on Haiku
| instead of Linux. Haiku is noticeably snappier and more
| responsive than Linux+X+Qt+KDE, though.
| antod wrote:
| I was a little surprised to have to scroll this far down to
| see BeOS come up. The first Amiga mention wasn't far above it
| either.
| walterbell wrote:
| OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Did an install of OS/2 3.0 recently, and it was just as
| wonderful as the first time I used it. That team got so much so
| right.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| In late September or early October 1996, Fry's Electronics
| places a full page promo ad on the back of the business section
| of the San Jose Mercury News for OS/2 4.0 "WRAP [sic]" in 256
| pt font in multiple places. Oops!
| Blackstrat wrote:
| OS/2 had the best API that I've worked with. We did major
| banking apps in the early 90s. OS/2 was vastly superior to
| Windows NT and Windows.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Non Daw. Its breaking up each function of the DAW into its own
| application gave a better experience in each of those functions,
| especially when you only needed that aspect, you were not working
| around everything else that the DAW offers. The integration
| between the various parts was not all that it could be but I
| think the idea has some real potential.
|
| https://non.tuxfamily.org
| marttt wrote:
| Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had)
| about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it
| mentioned.
|
| I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's
| public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format
| was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch
| of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total
| length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW --
| which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's
| "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips
| precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions
| to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via
| AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really
| fun times!)
|
| 1: https://aatranslator.com.au/
| dizhn wrote:
| I've never heard of this software before. Any idea why it's
| discontinued? There are a bunch of weird messages that point to
| sort of a hostile take over of the project by forking, but it
| doesn't say anything about why or how it was discontinued.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| From what I remember; it was mostly a one man project and he
| was writing it for himself, this upset some people and they
| felt his personal project should be democratic. It created a
| great deal of drama and he found himself having to deal with
| the drama every time he tried to engage with the community.
| Eventually he just walked away from it all. The fork died
| shortly after since the people who forked it were still
| dependent on him for development, all they really offered was
| a fork that was free of his supposed tyranny.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Midori, Microsoft's capability-based security OS[1]. Rumor has it
| that it was getting to the point where it was able to run Windows
| code, so it was killed through internal politics, but who knows!
| It was the Fuchsia of its time...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
| drnick1 wrote:
| The technical foundation seems interesting, but knowing
| Microsoft this would have just become yet another bloated mess
| with it's own new set of problems. And by now it would have
| equally become filled with spyware and AI "features" users
| don't want.
| ripley12 wrote:
| Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most
| comprehensive I've seen:
| https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
|
| I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but
| also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers
| on it at one time, including a lot of _very_ senior people.
|
| Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so
| it wasn't all lost, but still...
| sauercrowd wrote:
| > retention project
|
| Never heard this phrase before, but I can definitely see this
| happening at companies of that size
| justinclift wrote:
| Have you come across Genode (https://genode.org)?
|
| It's kind of in that space, and is still actively developed.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Where did you hear it could run Windows code? Everything known
| about Midori publicly says the opposite, it was specifically
| designed at every point to be totally incompatible with all
| existing code. Maybe a few people on the Midori team fantasized
| about a migration path but it was never going to happen. Midori
| was designed from the start without migration in mind.
| exp1orer wrote:
| It might be too soon to call it abandoned, but I was very
| intrigued by the Austral [1] language. The spec [2] is worth
| reading, it has an unusual clarity of thought and originality,
| and I was hoping that it would find some traction. Unfortunately
| it seems that the author is no longer actively working on it.
|
| [1] https://austral-lang.org/ [2] https://austral-
| lang.org/spec/spec.html
| khaledh wrote:
| Same with Vale: https://vale.dev
| alexeldeib wrote:
| ouch, last "recent update" in 2023. Any idea what happened?
| valorzard wrote:
| The author got hired by Modular, the AI startup founded by
| the creators of LLVM and Swift, and is now working on the
| new language Mojo. He's been bringing a bunch of ideas from
| Vale to Mojo
| alexeldeib wrote:
| Oh nice! I just had an excuse to try mojo via max
| inference, it was pretty impressive. Basically on par
| with vllm for some small benchmarks, bit of variance in
| ttft and tpot. Very cool!
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I played with Austral about a year ago and really wanted to use
| it for my projects, but as a hobbyist and mostly inept
| programmer it lacked the community and ecosystem I require. I
| found it almost intuitive and the spec does an amazing job of
| explaining the language. Would love to see it get a foothold.
| countrymile wrote:
| The IBM school's computer. Developed by IBM Hursley in 1967, it
| was years ahead in its design, display out to a television and
| storage on normal audio tape. Would have kick started an
| educational revolution if it had been launched beyond the 10
| prototype machines.
|
| Died due to legal wranglings about patents, iirc.
|
| More here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061680
| walterbell wrote:
| SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition,
| 20 years later.
| Lerc wrote:
| Boot2Gecko or whatever the browser as Operating system was
| called. This was a project that should have focused on providing
| whatever its current users needed expanding and evolving to do
| whatever those users wanted it to do better.
|
| Instead it went chasing markets, abandoning existing users as it
| did so, in favour of potential larger pools of users elsewhere.
| In the end it failed to find a niche going forward while leaving
| a trail of abandoned niches behind it.
| hamdingers wrote:
| I adored my Firefox Phones. Writing apps was so easy I built
| myself dozens of little one-offs. Imagine if it had survived to
| today, its trivial html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-
| device and be the ultimate personalized phone.
|
| Luckily it wasn't long after Mozilla abandoned it that PWAs
| were introduced and I could port the apps I cared about.
| znpy wrote:
| > Imagine if it had survived to today, its trivial
| html/css/js apps could be vibe coded on-device and be the
| ultimate personalized phone.
|
| That's actually an incredibly cool concept.
| toast0 wrote:
| It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone
| platform now.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| For a few short months circa 2016 or 2017, KaiOS was the
| number one mobile OS in India. This was probably because of
| all the ultra-cheap KaiOS-powered Reliance Jio phones
| flooding the Indian market at the time.
|
| I noticed the trend when I was working on a major web
| property for the Aditya Birla conglomerate. My whole team was
| pleasantly surprised, and we made sure to test everything in
| Firefox for that project. But everyone switched to Android +
| Chrome over the next few years, which was a shame.
|
| Today, India is 90% Chrome :(
| holysantamaria wrote:
| Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time.
|
| http://opalang.org/
|
| I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server
| at the time but other than that I don't really know why it didn't
| take off
| daxfohl wrote:
| I came to say Opa too. I liked the language but the meteor-like
| framework it was bundled with, while nice for prototyping, was
| a pain to work around when it didn't do what you needed.
|
| That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the
| language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.
| themerone wrote:
| Launching under AGPL was the kiss of death. They eventually
| went MIT, but the developers it steered away, probably never
| gave it a second chance
| walterbell wrote:
| Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human
| organization.
| kristianc wrote:
| Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where
| Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was
| given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and
| Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.
| walterbell wrote:
| Still around as "Here Maps"
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Started to suck pretty badly not long after getting acquired
| by German car companies. It used to be good.
| pzo wrote:
| Humane AI Pin. I think they launched 2 years too early and were
| too greedy with device pricing and subscription. Also if they
| focused as accessory for Android/iPhone they could reduce power
| usage and cost as well.
|
| Their execution was of course bad but I think today current LLM
| models are better and faster and there is much more OSS models to
| reduce costs. Hardware though looked nice and pico projector
| interesting concept even though not the best executed.
| Froedlich wrote:
| Wine predates ReactOS. It was basically a FOSS duplicate of
| Sun's WABI.
|
| I wrote a bunch of software in Borland Delphi, which ran in
| Windows, Wine, and ReactOS with no problems. Well, except for
| ReactOS' lack of printing support.
|
| As long as you stay within the ECMA or published Windows APIs,
| everything runs fine in Wine and ReactOS. But Microsoft
| products are full of undocumented functions, as well as checks
| to see if they're running on real Windows. That goes back to
| the Windows 3.1 days, when 3.1 developers regularly used OS/2
| instead of DOS, and Microsoft started adding patches to fail
| under OS/2 and DR-DOS. So all that has to be accounted for by
| Wine and ReactOS. A lot of third-party software uses
| undocumented functions as well, especially stuff written back
| during the days when computer magazines were a thing, and
| regularly published that kind of information. A lot of
| programmers found the lure of undocumented calls to be
| irresistible, and they wound up in all kinds of commercial
| applications where they really shouldn't have been.
|
| In my experience anything that will load under Wine will run
| with no problems. ReactOS has some stability problems, but then
| the developers specifically call it "alpha" software. Despite
| that, I've put customers on ReactOS systems after verifying all
| their software ran on it. It gets them off the Microsoft
| upgrade treadmill. Sometimes there are compatibility problems
| and I fall back to Wine on Linux. Occasionally nothing will do
| but real Windows.
| dheera wrote:
| Hard disagree. The Humane AI Pin ad was a classic silicon
| valley ad that screamed B2VC and demonstrated nothing actually
| useful that couldn't be done with an all-in-one phone app (or
| even the ChatGPT app) and bluetooth earbuds that you already
| have.
|
| Which reduces its innovation level to nothing more than a
| chest-mounted camera.
|
| You want real B2C products that people would actually buy? Look
| at the Superbowl ads instead. Then watch the Humane ad again.
| It's laughable.
| evbogue wrote:
| 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 are really good, someone should make the project again
| and run with it
| v3ss0n wrote:
| So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas
| znpy wrote:
| Drama has killed the technological progress in open source,
| if you ask me.
|
| Having seen what goes on in the foss world and what goes on
| in the large faang-size corporate world, no wonder the
| corporate world is light-years ahead.
| lifty wrote:
| It is a fundamental constraint of consensus based
| organizations. You need hierarchy to move faster but that
| has other disadvantages.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You don't need hierarchy, but you need some sort of
| process. "Consensus-based" just means that the loudest
| and most enduring shouters get their way, and when their
| way fails spectacularly, they leave in a huff (taking
| their work with them, badmouthing the project, and likely
| starting a fork that will pull more people out of the
| project and confuse potential users who just bail on
| trying either.)
|
| Those people need to be pushed out early and often.
| That's what voting is for. You need a supermajority to
| force an end to discussion, and a majority to make a
| decision. If you hold up the discussion too long with too
| slim a minority, the majority can fork your faction out
| of the group. If the end of debate has been forced, and
| you can't work with the majority, you should leave
| yourself.
|
| None of this letting the bullies get their way until
| everything is a disaster, then splitting up anyway stuff.
| lifty wrote:
| Hah. Naive take. I especially love this "Those people
| need to be pushed out early and often. That's what voting
| is for. You need a supermajority to force an end to
| discussion, and a majority to make a decision". We know
| what needs to be done, but it's not being done. There's
| no consensus. Consensus take time and effort and has a
| lot of friction. I am part of a coop and I have seen
| first hand how this goes. And it's fine, consensus based
| systems have other advantages, but they move slower that
| hierarchies.
| evbogue wrote:
| I can recall a distinct time period where us ssb devs
| were passing around the url to "The Tyranny of
| Structurelessness" via local-first encrypted direct
| messages. The essay helped us understand what was
| happening but alas we did not have the tools to stop it
| happening to us!
| znpy wrote:
| Nah, it is not.
|
| The core of the issue is that drama is a way to impose
| your views of the world.
|
| In foss software you quite literally don't have to agree.
| You can fork the software and walk your own path. You can
| even pull changes from the original codebase, most
| licenses allow that.
|
| Consensus is only necessary if you care about imposing
| your views of the world onto others.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| jzellis wrote:
| Google Reader. We could have had a great society, man.
| uzername wrote:
| The loss of Google Reader really does feel like the beginning
| of the end in retrospect.
| stavros wrote:
| There are plenty of clones, though. I use CommaFeed and it's
| pretty good, feels a lot like Google Reader.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| been using The Old Reader for years now
| bxparks wrote:
| 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.
|
| Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files there.
| They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.
|
| Google Finance: Tracked my stocks and funds there. Then they
| killed it. Won't trust them with my data again.
|
| Google NFC Wallet: They killed it. Then Apple launched the same
| thing, and took over.
|
| Google Chromecast Audio: It did one thing, which is all I needed.
| Sold mine as soon as they announced they were killing it.
|
| Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not know
| that until I started writing this..
| brandonb927 wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes. That was _the single worst business decision in Google
| history_ , as somebody correctly noted. It burned an enormous
| amount of goodwill for no gain whatsoever.
|
| Killing Google Reader affected a relatively small number of
| users, but these users disporportionately happened to be
| founders, CTOs, VPs of engineering, social media luminaries,
| and people who eventually became founders, CTOs, etc. They
| had been painfully taught to not trust Google, and, since
| that time, they didn't. And still don't.
| perardi wrote:
| Just think of the data mining they could have had there.
|
| They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched
| key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge
| graph you could have built out of what those people read
| and shared...
|
| They could have just kept the entire service running with,
| what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
| nine_k wrote:
| This would require the decision-maker to think and act at
| the scale and in interests of the entire company. Not at
| the scale of a promo packet for next perf: "saved several
| millions in operation costs by shutting down a low-
| impact, unprofitable service."
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| There is some truth in this. I fit into a few of these
| buckets and I don't think I could ever recommend their
| enterprise stuff after having my favourite consumer
| products pulled.
| eloisant wrote:
| Yes, Google killing Reader was probably the first time they
| killed a popular product and what started the idea that any
| Google product could be killed at any time.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Yes! I loved this product... it was our little social network
| for my friends and coworkers.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Yep came here to say exactly this.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr" ->
| "better google reader :-D) There would have been a clear
| change to fill this vacuum?
|
| The thing is: I guess they didnt see a good way to monetize
| it (according to their "metrics"), while the product itself
| had somehow relative high OpEx and being somehow a niche
| thingy.
| starkparker wrote:
| > I never understood why noone built a Copycat (like "bgr"
| -> "better google reader :-D)
|
| like theoldreader and Inoreader, which explicitly copied
| the columnar interfaces, non-RSS bookmarklet content
| saving, item favoriting, friend-of-a-friend commenting and
| quasi-blog social sharing features, and mobile app sync
| options via APIs? Or NewsBlur, which did all of that _and
| also_ added user-configurable algorithmic filtering? Or
| Feedly, which copied Reader's UX but without the social
| features? or Tiny Tiny RSS and FreshRSS, which copied
| Reader's UX as self-hosted software?
|
| theoldreader remains the most straightforward hosted ripoff
| of Google Reader, right down to look and feel, and hasn't
| changed much in more than a decade. Tiny Tiny is very
| similar, and similarly unchanging. FreshRSS implemented
| some non-RSS following features. So did NewsBlur, but as it
| always has, it still struggles with feed parsing and UI
| performance.
|
| Inoreader and Feedly both pivoted toward business users and
| productivity to stay afloat, with the former's ditching of
| social features leading to another exodus of people who'd
| switched to it after Google Reader folded.
| janwl wrote:
| There were a few copycats, but they 1) weren't as good
| (mostly because they wanted to do more than google reader!)
| and 2) they weren't free.
| tomComb wrote:
| I'm still using - free g suite - play music - finance - nfc
| wallet is just google wallet isn't it? - chromecast, video and
| audio-only I guess play music is now YouTube music, and doesn't
| have uploads, so that can be considered dead, but the others
| seem alive to me.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| YouTube Music still supports uploads.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522
| nja wrote:
| Chromecast Audio still works! They just don't sell them
| anymore. I use mine every day, and have been keeping an eye out
| for anyone selling theirs...
| bxparks wrote:
| Hmm, good to know. But given Google's history, I assumed that
| it would stop working.
|
| I also need to sell my Google Chromecast with Google TV 4K.
| Brand new, still in its shrink wrap. Bought it last year, to
| replace a flaky Roku. It was a flaky HDMI cable instead. I
| trust Roku more than Google for hardware support.
| lexicality wrote:
| In absolutely shocking news, it _did_ stop working and then
| Google went out of their way to fix it.
|
| I genuinely thought all the chromecast audios I owned were
| useless bricks and was looking around for replacements and
| then they just started working again from an OTA update.
| Astounding. I assume someone got fired for taking time away
| from making search worse to do this.
|
| (edit: https://www.techradar.com/televisions/streaming-
| devices/goog...)
| portaouflop wrote:
| They are still selling their remaining stock and vowed to
| keep supporting it with bug fixes and security updates:
| https://blog.google/products/google-nest/chromecast-
| history/
|
| Of course another question how long they will honor that
| commitment.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....
| bdangubic wrote:
| yup, losing 0.000087% year-over-year so in 865 billion years
| it'll be dead :)
| bxparks wrote:
| That was probably me, when I stopped using Google Search
| some years ago. :-) Got tired of the ads, the blog spam,
| and AI-generated content crap floating to the top of their
| results page.
| daxfohl wrote:
| That's more what I meant. Sure, lots of people still type
| stuff into the URL bar that takes them to
| www.google.com/search. But whatever you want to call that
| results page now, it's no longer Google Search in
| anything but name.
| bdangubic wrote:
| same can be said if you compare www.google.com search
| from 2012 and 2022, times are changing... I am not
| defending google search here, I haven't used it except by
| accident in long time now but to say google search is
| "dying" like you often hear (especially here on HN) is a
| serious detachment from reality
| marttt wrote:
| The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable,
| though, esp with notable operators like _inurl:this-or-
| that_. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google
| search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely
| a _tool_ (I worked in investigative journalism at the
| time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting
| fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well.
| </rant>
| vunuxodo wrote:
| Kagi has been a great replacement for me. Less blogspam
| I've found, plus it doesn't give me AI results unless I
| explicitly tell it I want AI results by adding a "?" to
| the end of my query.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| How did you go bankrupt?
|
| Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
|
| - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
| bdangubic wrote:
| I guess I've heard it all now... Google going bankrupt
| would not have made Top-1 Million list of likely things
| to read on Sunday morning...
| bigthymer wrote:
| I'm still upset that Google Maps no longer tracks my location.
| It was very useful to be able to go back and see how often and
| where I had gone.
|
| Is there another app where I can store this locally?
| bxparks wrote:
| Strava? :-) Half-joking, half-serious, I haven't used Strava
| in years, I don't remember all its capabilities.
|
| Edit: Missed the "locally" part. Sorry no suggestions. Maybe
| Garmin has something?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Nope, Garmin only tracks your location when you record an
| activity that uses gps, which is good, frankly.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Google Maps still tracks my location.
|
| The difference is they no longer store the data on their
| servers, it's stored on your phone (iPhone/Android)
|
| https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6258979
|
| That way, they can't respond to requests for that data by
| governments as they don't have it.
|
| I can look on my phone and see all the places I've been
| today/yesterday, etc
| sameline wrote:
| Apple Maps added a Visited Places (beta) feature recently.
| bapak wrote:
| Arc and its free Arc Mini companion. iOS. Been using it since
| Facebook eclipsed Moves app. A decade later, it's still not
| as good as Moves.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I heard about dawarich, open source, didn't have time to try
| it though or check the details... https://dawarich.app/
| forever_frey wrote:
| Check out Dawarich, it has an official iOS app and you can
| use a number of 3rd party mobile apps to track your data and
| then upload it to server: either ran on your own hardware
| (FOSS self-hosted) or to the Dawarich Cloud one:
| https://dawarich.app
|
| Using it on daily basis
| saagarjha wrote:
| I use this free and extremely bare bones app made by a
| friend: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/max-where/id1579123291.
| It tracks your location constantly, has a basic viewer, and
| lets you export to CSV. That's about it but it's all I need.
| dheera wrote:
| Isn't it "Google TV Streamer" now?
| bxparks wrote:
| From what I can tell (since I am just finding out about this
| today), they stopped manufacturing the old Chromecast
| hardware, and at some point, will stop supporting the old
| devices. The old devices may stop working in the future, for
| example, because they sunset the servers. Like their
| thermostats. Who knows?
| dheera wrote:
| I wish there was some law that requires open-sourcing
| firmware and flashing tools if a company decides to EOL a
| product ...
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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)
| bxparks wrote:
| 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.
| tdeck wrote:
| 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.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| You can say that for a fair few of the services mentioned by
| GP.
|
| Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more
| "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings.
| Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium.
|
| No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my
| phone that still exists and works?
|
| The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back
| my ones had an "update" to start using their newer AI
| Assistant system for managing it. Still works.
| jychang wrote:
| They stopped making the Chromecast hardware
| nine_k wrote:
| Picasa definitely went against the grain of Google, which is
| all about tying you to online services.
|
| Hangouts had trouble scaling to many participants. Google Meet
| is fine, and better than e.g. MS Teams.
|
| Legacy suite, free forever? Did they also promise a pony?..
|
| Play Music: music is a legal minefield. Don't trust anybody
| commercial who suggests you _upload_ music you did not write
| yourself.
|
| Finance: IDK, I still get notifications about the stocks I'm
| interested in.
|
| NFC Wallet: alive and kicking, I use it literally every day to
| pay for subway.
|
| Can't say anything about Chromecast. I have a handful of
| ancient Chromecasts that work. I don't want any updates for
| them.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Why did you keep on using so many Google products if those
| products get cancelled?
|
| Why didn't you quit Google after, say, the third product you
| used got canned?
| dlcarrier wrote:
| I used Google Talk than Hangouts, but once they switched to
| Meet, I gave up on them. By then my family was all using
| Hangouts, and we never settled on a new service, because one
| of my siblings didn't want to support any chat services that
| don't freely give user information to the government, and the
| rest of us didn't want to use a chat platform that does
| freely give user information to the government.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| > Google Play Music: I had uploaded thousands of MP3 files
| there. They killed it. I won't waste my time uploading again.
|
| You can argue whether it's as good as GPM or not, but it's
| false to imply that your uploaded music disappeared when Google
| moved to YouTube Music. I made the transition, and all of my
| music moved without a new upload.
| shakna wrote:
| You made the transition, under differing licensing terms. Not
| always an option.
| david_allison wrote:
| YouTube Music isn't available in all countries which Google
| Play Music was available in.
|
| My music was deleted.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Google Desktop Search (and also the Search Appliance if you
| were an SMB).
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| I think Chromecast has been replaced by Google TV which is a
| souped up Chromecast.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I still use PICASA it works fine. However, when google severed
| the gdrive-photo linking it meant my photos didn't
| automatically download from google to my PC. This is what
| killed google for me.
| stavros wrote:
| Immich is a great replacement for Google Photos, if maybe not
| Picasa.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before
| almost everything else, in a nice offline package.
|
| _Unfortunately_ the last public version has a bug that
| randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong
| persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the
| recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of
| family photos. 8(
|
| Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job
| done.
| flancian wrote:
| Immich is supposed to solve this nowadays:
| https://github.com/immich-app/immich
| arkensaw wrote:
| Immich is the closest thing I've found to Picasa. However,
| I would just point out you can still download and use
| Picasa 3.9 on Windows.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Am I the only one salty about Google Podcasts? For me that was
| the straw that broke the camel's back... I dropped Android,
| switched to iOS, and slowly phasing out the Google products in
| my life.
| electroglyph wrote:
| Google G Suite offered a free option after initially saying it
| was ending. just logged into my Workspace account:
| https://ibb.co/99jBLJnD
|
| still have many domains on there, all with gmail
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| Google finance was never killed by google?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _Google Hangouts:_
|
| Which particular thing called Hangouts? There were at least
| two, frankly I'd say more like four.
|
| Google and Microsoft are both terrible about reusing names for
| different things in confusing ways.
|
| > _Can 't keep track of all the Google chat apps._
|
| And Hangouts was part of that problem. Remember Google
| Talk/Chat? _That_ was where things began, and in my family we
| never wanted Hangouts, Talk /Chat was better.
|
| Allo, Chat, Duo, Hangouts, Meet, Messenger, Talk, Voice... I've
| probably forgotten at least two more names, knowing Google.
| Most of these products have substantial overlap with most of
| the rest.
| eloisant wrote:
| > Google Chromecast: Wait, they killed Chromecast? I did not
| know that until I started writing this..
|
| They have something called Google TV Streamer now, so for me
| it's more of a rebrand than really killing a product.
| Hobadee wrote:
| Except Google TV isn't the same. You _can_ cast to it, but it
| 's more akin to a Roku - it comes with a remote and has
| "channels" you install.
|
| Oh, and a metric crapton of ads it shows you.
| rgblambda wrote:
| Add Google Podcasts to the list. I switched to AntennaPod.
| Youtube Music has too noisy an interface.
| rhodey wrote:
| choojs
|
| All of the upside and none of the downside of react
|
| No JSX and no compiler, all native js
|
| The main dev is paid by microsoft to do oss rust nowadays
|
| I use choo for my personal projects and have used it twice
| professionally
|
| https://github.com/choojs/choo#example
|
| The example is like 25 lines and introduces all the concepts
|
| Less moving parts than svelte
| zdragnar wrote:
| You can get the same thing with lit-html and any of the add on
| libraries that flesh it out.
|
| For example, Haunted is a react hooks implementation for lit:
| https://github.com/matthewp/haunted
|
| Choo suffered from not having an ecosystem, same with mithtil
| and other "like react but not" also-rans.
| mwpmaybe wrote:
| I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a
| whole bunch of other stuff.
| stavros wrote:
| Worse is better.
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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 come up with all the
| different tech, if AI was just chugging through features
| efficiently, with consistent training data etc.?
| robertakarobin wrote:
| My company still uses Heroku in production actually. Every time
| I see the Salesforce logo show up I wince, but we haven't had
| any issues at all. It continues to make deployment very easy.
| samrolken wrote:
| As soon as they put a persistent Salesforce brand banner across
| the top which did nothing but waste space and put that ugly
| logo in our face every day, my team started our transition off
| Heroku pretty much right away.
| esperent wrote:
| > 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.
| edanm wrote:
| Yes. And fittingly, Docker was born out of a Heroku
| competitor.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Didn't they offer free compute? IIRC all free compute on the
| Internet went away with the advent of cryptocurrencies as it
| became practical to abuse the compute and translate it directly
| into money.
| znpy wrote:
| I think their main failure points were the following:
|
| - not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a
| super-huger margin profit, but they're largely irrelevant today
|
| - not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That
| would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more
| market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has
| seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know
| there's a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters.
| Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you
| can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a
| 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.
| reassess_blind wrote:
| I use the core product for my SaaS apps. Great platform, does
| what it needs to do. Haven't felt the need to switch. Sometimes
| tempted to move to a single VPS with Coolify or Dokku, but not
| interested in taking on the server admin burden.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| What are the reasons that make you want to migrate away?
| Cost, flexibility, support..?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I talked to some Heroku reps at a local tech conference a year
| or so ago; it was clear that they were instructed to not have
| any personal opinions of the shredding of the free tier, but
| they did admit in a roundabout way that it lost them a lot of
| customers - some they were glad to get rid of as they were
| gaming the goodwill and costing Heroku lots of money, but
| weren't sure if it was a good long term idea or not.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| > One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple
| plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward,
| no decision fatigue.
|
| I feel like this also describes something like Vercel. Having
| never personally used Heroku, is Vercel all that different
| except Ruby vs JS as the chosen language?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Was going to say, I still use Heroku, and it's been working ok,
| but I'm getting increasingly creepy vibes from it and fear that
| it could be abandoned. Starting of course with Salesforce
| acquisition.
| xnx wrote:
| OpenSocial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| Meteor
| vlasky wrote:
| It's alive and well!
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| Windows Phone
| Froedlich wrote:
| Windows Phone's UI is still with us, from Windows 8 onwards.
| Everything on 8, 10, and 11 is optimized for a touch interface
| on a small screen, which is ridiculous on a modern desktop with
| a 32" or so monitor and a trackball or mouse.
| Findecanor wrote:
| From Windows 10, there is a switch between desktop and touch
| mode.
|
| They stopped supporting small tablets some years ago though,
| and made it worse with every Windows update. I can only
| surmise that it was to make people stop using them. Slow GUI,
| low contrast, killed apps.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| False. The Metro design was abandoned long ago. No live
| tiles, no typography-first minimal UIs in windows 10/11. I
| pin an email app to taskbar/start, I don't see the unread
| count.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Fro me, DESQview. Microsoft tried to buy it in order to use its
| tech in their windows system. I wonder how things would be today
| if they were able to purchase it. But DESQview said "no".
|
| Instead it went into a slow death spiral due to Windows 95.
| Froedlich wrote:
| DESQview/X sucked the wind out of DESQview's sails. It was, on
| paper, a massive upgrade. I had been running DESQview for
| years, with a dial-up BBS in the background.
|
| But you couldn't actually _buy_ /X. After trying to buy a copy,
| my publisher even contacted DESQ's marketing people to get a
| copy for me, and they wouldn't turn one over. Supposedly there
| were some copies actually sold, but too few, too late, and then
| /X was dropped. There was at least one more release of plain
| DESQview after that, but by then Windows was eating its lunch.
| chipx86 wrote:
| Love seeing this one. My uncle was co-founder of Quarterdeck,
| and I grew up in a world of DESQview and QEMM. It was a big
| influence on me as a child.
|
| Got a good family story about that whole acquisition attempt,
| but I don't want to speak publicly on behalf of my uncle. I
| know we've talked at length about the what-ifs of that moment.
|
| I do have a scattering of some neat Quarterdeck memorabilia I
| can share, though:
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0ca1omn2kwda9op5go34e/ACpO6bz...
| abdulhaq wrote:
| I loved the Quarterdeck stuff especially Desqview
| mikewarot wrote:
| Memex, it was a solution to the biggest problem facing the
| scientific community just after WW2 and it still hasn't been
| implemented, 80 years later!
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Try the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook instead...
| mbirth wrote:
| wua.la ... the original version. You share part of your storage
| to get the same amount back as resilient cloud storage from
| others. Was bought and killed by LaCie (now Seagate). They later
| provided paid-for cloud storage under the same name but it didn't
| take off.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
| ggm wrote:
| X.400 we're approaching it by stepwise refinement. It had X.500
| which lives on as X.509 certificates and LDAP.
|
| ISO/OSI had session layer. ie much of what QUIC does regarding
| underlying multiple transports.
|
| Speaking of X.509 the s-expressions certificate format was more
| interesting in many ways.
| thequux wrote:
| OSI's session layer did very little more than TCP/UDP port
| numbers; in the OSI model you would open a connection to a
| machine, then use that connection to open a session to a
| particular application.
|
| X.400 was a nice idea, but the ideal of having a single global
| directory predates security. I can understand why it never
| happened
|
| On X.509, the spec spends two chapters on attribute
| certificates, which I've never seen used in the wild. It's a
| shame; identity certificates do a terrible job at
| authentication
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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 sucks.
| bdangubic wrote:
| wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Google sucked/s at executive function because they completely
| lack appreciation for proper R&D and long-term investment and
| also kill things people use and love.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Honestly a lot of the time they seem to be be in "what do
| humans want?" mode.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Yep. And rather than ask people, focus group, or look at
| the evidence, they just guess or do whatever they want.
| Not much leadership or community engagement appears to be
| involved.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I don't think that's an entirely fair characterization.
| They obviously spend a great deal of time focusing on
| what their (human) shareholders want.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Well, that's fair. Overpaid managers and principle
| engineers spun "secret projects" and products like Glass
| well to be an elitist experience for special people. But
| I won't forgive not letting Wave bake and mature.
|
| Q: Do they have non-human shareholders I don't know
| about, or do they have shareholders who lack qualities
| present in most living human beings?
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I've only met a few of their significant shareholders and
| based on that, I'd say the jury is still out.
|
| I remember being excited by wave when the demo hit but
| never had a use for what it offered at that point in my
| career.
| jwpapi wrote:
| Discord is function wise the best now...
| portaouflop wrote:
| 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?
| progval wrote:
| 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.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it,
| it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of
| having to manually check channels for updates except X 100
| (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw
| that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly
| updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack
| is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded. It'd be even
| worse.
| prisenco wrote:
| Wave was great for conversation with one or two other people
| on a specific project, which I'm sure most people here used
| it for. I can't imagine it scaling well beyond that.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Maybe one could have worked around that by embedding Yahoo
| Pipes, thus automating the X 100.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable
| alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and
| closed source) isn't.
| edanm wrote:
| 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.
| spooky_deep wrote:
| Is there a video or anything of this version of Wave?
| BirAdam wrote:
| I haven't found one showing what Chris showed. Most seem to
| focus on just communications with little demonstration of
| productivity or other features. This is sad to me because its
| most glorious asset was being open source with a rich set of
| plugins/extensions allowing tons of functionality.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Google wave was built on an awesome technology layer, and they
| they totally blew in on the user interface.... deciding to
| treat it as a set of separate items instead of a single
| document everyone everywhere all at once could edit.... killed
| it.
|
| It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased
| all the positives.
| vendiddy wrote:
| I think this is spot on. A document metaphor would have made
| a Wave a lot easier to understand.
| feketegy wrote:
| Google Wave was way ahead of its time.
| brap wrote:
| Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in
| hindsight you can tell it's just not a very good product. They
| tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn't
| work.
|
| In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple
| products, so I wouldn't say it's "dead". The tech that powered
| it is still used today in many of Google's popular products. It
| turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes
| is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.
| aftergibson wrote:
| I managed trips with friends and it was a great form factor for
| ad-hoc discussions with docs and links included. I thought it
| was the future and in my very early programming days wrote
| probably the most insecure plugin ever to manage your servers.
|
| https://github.com/shano/Wave-ServerAdmin
|
| It's been 16 years. I should probably archive this..
| delduca wrote:
| Slack is the new Google Wave, Wave was too much ahead of time.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It was smoke and mirrors, spiced with everyone letting their
| imagination run away.
|
| I downloaded the open-source version of the server to see if I
| could build a product around it, but it came with a serious
| limitation: _The open-source server did not persist any data._
| That was a complete non-starter for me.
|
| At that point I suspected it wasn't going anywhere. My
| suspicions were confirmed when I sat near some Wave team
| members at an event, and overhead one say, with stars in his
| eyes, "won't it be groovy when everyone's using Wave and..."
|
| ---
|
| Cool concept, though.
| coreyhn wrote:
| Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom
| workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but
| loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times
| already.
| benrutter wrote:
| I never used it, but Yahoo pipes sounds like it was awesome
| whenever I hear people talk about it.
|
| I don't know if it was Yahoo Pipes that died, or a mainstream
| internet based on open protocols and standards.
| Havoc wrote:
| It died because it was basically a cool hobby tech demo that
| happened to be on yahoo domain. There was never any real tie
| in to yahoo the company
| bapak wrote:
| Yahoo Pipes was what internet should have been. We're so many
| decades into computing and that kind of inter-tool linking has
| only barely been matched by unix pipes.
| _kidlike wrote:
| hey, but we got MCP...
| viraptor wrote:
| Many companies are working very hard to make that impossible
| unfortunately. For example you can't get posts from public
| Facebook groups automatically, although that would be a
| really good source candidate. They used to allow it, but...
| not anymore.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| If anyone with time, money and resources wants to revive the
| ideas of Yahoo! Pipes then I would suggest using Node-RED[^1]
| as a good starting point.
|
| It has the advantage of being open source, has well defined and
| stable APIs and a solid backend. Plus 10+ years of constant
| development with many learnings around how to implement flow
| based programming visually.
|
| I used the Node-RED frontend to create Browser-Red[^2] which is
| a Node-RED that solely executes in the browser, no server
| required. It does not support all Node-RED functionality but
| gives a good feel for using Node-RED and flow based
| programming.
|
| The second project with which I am using Node-RED frontend is
| Erlang-Red[^3] which is Node-RED with an Erlang backend. Erlang
| is better suited to flow based programming than NodeJS, hence
| this attempt to demonstrate that!
|
| Node-RED makes slightly different assumptions than Yahoo! Pipes
| - input ports being the biggest: all nodes in Node-RED have
| either zero or one input wires, nodes in Yahoo! Pipes had
| multiple input wires.
|
| A good knowledge of jQuery is required but that makes it
| simpler to get into the frontend code - would be my argument ;)
| I am happy to answer questions related to Node-RED, email in
| bio.
|
| [^1]: https://nodered.org
|
| [^2]: https://cdn.flowhub.org
|
| [^3]: https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| I loved pipes. I had rss feeds from all the sites where I was
| sharing content collected up and formatted via pipes into a
| single rss feed that was pulled into a php blog.
|
| Then all those sites I used to post on stopped supporting rss
| one by one and finally pipes was killed off.
|
| For a while I used a python library called riko that did the
| same thing as pipes without the visual editor. I have to thank
| it for getting me off php and into python.
|
| https://github.com/nerevu/riko
| pyromaker wrote:
| I missed Yahoo Pipes a lot so I built something similar
| recently for myself :) I know there are a few alternatives out
| there, but had to scratch my own itch.
|
| https://www.mashups.io
| la_fayette wrote:
| I can recommend Apache Camel (https://camel.apache.org) for
| similar data integration pipelines and even agentic workflows.
| There are even visual editors for Camel today, which IMHO make
| it extremely user friendly to build any kind of pipeline
| quickly.
|
| Apache Karavan: https://karavan.space/ Kaoto (Red Hat):
| https://kaoto.io
|
| Both are end 2 end usable within vscode.
| Havoc wrote:
| Also Apache Nifi
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Definitely recommend reading https://retool.com/pipes about the
| history of Pipes, with lots of input from the people who worked
| on it
|
| (It's not super obvious, especially on mobile, but once you see
| the site, just scroll down to see the content)
| tclancy wrote:
| Ah, this would get my vote too. I've seen a few attempts since,
| but I think you needed that era of "throw lots of money at any
| idea" to get it off the ground again.
| dunham wrote:
| The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com
|
| It was a series of experiments with new approaches to
| programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us
| Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went
| with it, but they wound down the project.
| cobertos wrote:
| Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using
| this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their
| github repository.
| KingMob wrote:
| I don't personally know, but I used to use the creator
| (Granger)'s previous work, the Clojure live-running editor
| LightTable.
|
| LT was cool, but they abandoned it with insufficient hand-off
| when it was 80-90% done to work on Eve.
|
| I know a bunch of people were unhappy that LightTable wasn't
| finished, especially because they raised money via
| Kickstarter for it.
|
| Maybe Eve was too ambitious. Maybe funding never
| materialized. Maybe they just got bored and couldn't finish.
| Maybe they pissed off their audience.
| cmontella wrote:
| I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main
| reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and
| we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At
| the end we were pursuing research related to natural language
| programming and reinforcement learning in that area (I
| recently blogged about it here: https://mech-
| lang.org/post/2025-01-09-programming-chatgpt), and were
| considering folding our small team into OpenAI or Microsoft
| or something. But we wanted to work as a team and no one
| wanted to take us as a team, so we called it.
|
| It didn't get far enough to be "used" in a production sense.
| There was enough interest and people were playing around with
| it, but no real traction to speak of. Frankly, language
| projects are difficult because these days they have to be
| bootstrapped to a certain size before there's any appreciable
| use, and VCs are not patient enough for that kind of
| timetable.
|
| Here's a postmortem Chris gave about all that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 /
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok
| veqq wrote:
| https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!
| cmontella wrote:
| I know about this one as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Progr
| ammingLanguages/comments/1ioij... but the author seems to
| have taken it private for now. I think he's the Gren author,
| which is a fork of Elm.
|
| As for me, I brought some eve-y ideas to my language project:
| https://github.com/mech-lang/mech
| crowdhailer wrote:
| I certainly know and admire eve. However I don't think I
| consciously took that many features from it into EYG. I'd be
| curios what the crossover is
| commandersaki wrote:
| Anyone remember Openmoko, the first commercialised open source
| smart phone. Was heaps buggy though, not really polished, etc.
| It's only redeeming feature was the open source software and
| hardware (specs?).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone and it's
| successor PinePhonePro. Bugginess and general impracticalities
| brought up to more recent standards. Inflation-adjusted, of
| course!
| megous wrote:
| Pinephone still is, and is set to be produced for next 3
| years, as promissed in 2018.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Fortress language. It suffered from being too Haskell-like in
| terms of too many, non-orthogonal features. Rust and Go applied
| lessons from it perhaps indirectly.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Fortress had great ideas, but I'd say the closest thing to in
| the real world now might be Julia.
| zem wrote:
| their operator precedence system was one of my favourite pieces
| of language design. the tl;dr was that you could group
| operators into precedence sets, and an expression involving
| operators that all came from the same set would have that set's
| precedence rules applied, but if you had an expression
| involving mixed sets you needed to add the parentheses.
| crucially, they also supported operator overloading, and the
| same operator could be used in a different set as long as
| everything could be parsed unambiguously. (caveat, I never used
| the language, I just read about the operator design in the docs
| and it was very eye opening in the sense that every other
| language's operator precedence system suddenly felt crude and
| haphazard)
| JimDabell wrote:
| Apple's scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate
| was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very
| different to how it actually worked.
|
| It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a
| huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-
| preserving as possible. I'm not convinced it's a great idea, but
| it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use
| today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead
| of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud
| hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was
| actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of
| existence by people who didn't care to learn the first thing
| about it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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. They would never have changed
| their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.
|
| We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and
| hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive
| smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve
| as a warning to the next person who tries".
| JimDabell wrote:
| I don't think you can accurately describe it as client-side
| scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon
| how you view it, false positives were either _extremely_
| unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And
| if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up 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. They would
| never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a
| debate.
|
| Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds.
| So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things
| apply here.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making
| Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where
| they do business?
|
| No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity
| that implements police scanning.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Forgot about the concept of bugs have we?
|
| No, but I have a hard time imagining a bug that would
| meaningfully compromise this kind of system. Can you give
| an example?
|
| > How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every
| government where they do business?
|
| They already are. So are Google, Meta, Microsoft, and all
| the other giants we all use. And all those other
| companies are _already_ scanning your stuff. Meta made
| two million reports in 2024Q4 alone.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Imagine harder. Apple has had several high profile
| security bugs in the last few years, and their OS is
| decried here as a buggy mess every release. QA teams went
| out of fashion.
|
| The onus is on you to prove perfection before ruining
| lives on hardware they paid for.
|
| 100x worse on the vulnerability front, as the tech could
| be bent to any whim. Importantly, none of what you
| described is client-side scanning. Even I consider
| abiding rules on others' property fair.
| btown wrote:
| 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."
| JimDabell wrote:
| > 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?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > I can't think of a single thing that's come along since
| that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?
|
| Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate
| backdooring individual client systems.
|
| Clients should serve the user.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Chat Control, and other proposals that advocate
| backdooring individual client systems.
|
| Chat Control is older than Apple's CSAM scanning and is
| very different from it.
|
| > Clients should serve the user.
|
| Apple's system only scanned things that were uploaded to
| iCloud.
|
| You missed the most important part of my comment:
|
| > 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?
| btown wrote:
| The problem isn't the system as implemented; the problem
| is the very assertion "it is possible to preserve the
| privacy your constituents want, while running code at
| scale that can detect Bad Things in every message."
|
| Once that idea appears, it allows every lobbyist and
| insider to say "mandate this, we'll do something like
| what Apple did but for other types of Bad People" and all
| of a sudden you have regulations that force messaging
| systems to make this possible in the name of Freedom.
|
| Remember: if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can
| also detect anyone who possesses _any_ politically
| sensitive image. There are many in politics for whom that
| level of control is the actual goal.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > The problem isn't the system as implemented
|
| Great!
|
| > the problem is the very assertion "it is possible to
| preserve the privacy your constituents want, while
| running code at scale that can detect Bad Things in every
| message."
|
| Apple never made that assertion, and the system they
| designed is _incapable_ of doing that.
|
| > if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect
| anyone who possesses _any_ politically sensitive image.
|
| Apple's system cannot do that. If you change parts of it,
| sure. But the system they proposed cannot.
|
| To reiterate what I said earlier:
|
| > The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how
| people imagined it worked, which was very different to
| how it actually worked.
|
| So far, you are saying that you don't have a problem with
| the system Apple designed, and you do have a problem with
| some _other_ design that Apple _didn't_ propose, that is
| significantly different in multiple ways.
|
| Also, what do you mean by "model"? When I used the word
| "model" it was in the context of using another system as
| a model. You seem to be using it in the AI sense. You
| know that's not how it worked, right?
| drnick1 wrote:
| There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying
| that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists"
| does not make it any more acceptable.
| eimrine wrote:
| Do you have any phones without spyware?
|
| I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any
| spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or
| monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but
| RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any
| products from the duopoly without even root access are free
| from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Graphene, Lineage and various Linux distributions for
| phones come to mind.
| zweifuss wrote:
| Silent SMS (Short Message Type 0) have been around since
| 1996.
| eviks wrote:
| > The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people
| imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually
| worked.
|
| But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as
| you say:
|
| > If you change parts of it, sure.
|
| Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will
| definitely change" knee-jerk.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm understanding you.
|
| Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their
| guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational
| discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works
| differently to Apple's system, you can complain about that
| imaginary system all you want, but it won't be meaningful,
| it's just noise.
| eviks wrote:
| You understand it just fine, you're just trying to pass you
| fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational while
| painting the obvious objections based on the real world as
| meaningless noise.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Your point did not come across. It still isn't. I don't
| know what you mean by _"pass you fantasy pod immutable
| safe future as rational"_. You aren't making sense to me.
| I absolutely do not _"understand it just fine"_.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If they are running safe mandatory scans on your phones
| for _this_ , you seem shocked and angry that anyone would
| imply that this would lead to safe mandatory scans on
| your phones for _that_ and _the other_ , and open the
| door for _unsafe_ mandatory scans for _whatever_.
|
| If you can't acknowledge this, it puts you in a position
| where you can't be convincing to people who need you to
| deflect obvious, well-known criticisms before beginning a
| discussion. It gives you crazy person or salesman vibes.
| These are arguments that someone with a serious interest
| in the technology would be aware of already and should be
| included as a prerequisite to being taken seriously.
| Doing this shows that you value other people's time and
| effort.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > you seem shocked and angry that anyone would imply that
| this would lead to safe mandatory scans on your phones
| for _that_ and _the other_
|
| Where have I given you that impression? The thing that
| annoys me is the sensible discussion being drowned out by
| ignorance.
|
| > If you can't acknowledge this, it puts you in a
| position where you can't be convincing to people who need
| you to deflect obvious, well-known criticisms before
| beginning a discussion.
|
| I cannot parse this, it's word salad. People who need me
| to deflect criticisms? What? I genuinely do not
| understand what you are trying to say here. Maybe just
| break the sentences up into smaller ones? It feels like
| you're trying to say too many things in too few
| sentences. What people? Why do they need me to deflect
| criticisms?
| friendofafriend wrote:
| Was recently reading about Project Ara, the modular smartphone
| project by Google/Motorola [1]. Would have liked to see a few
| more iterations of the idea. Something more customizable than
| what we have today without having to take the phone apart.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
| stavros wrote:
| It would have been very thick, too thick to compete.
| harel wrote:
| In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which
| was a place where people could spill the beans about startups
| (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good
| view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's
| not as focused on this niche.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| fuckedcompany was awesome but very much a product of the early
| stages of the .com bubble poppage
|
| I kind of expect we might see something similar if the AI
| bubble pops
|
| I wonder who owns the domain now
| JMiao wrote:
| creator now makes wild, bespoke headphones
| https://www.reddit.com/user/pudjam667/submitted/
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This is hilarious, thanks for sharing.
| stavros wrote:
| That is just fantastic.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| The closest sites I've found are Web3 is Going Just Great and
| Pivot to AI, which are newsfeeds of various car crashes in
| their respective hype arenas, although without any insider
| scoops/gossip.
| piskov wrote:
| 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.
| drnick1 wrote:
| I am happy this one died. It was just another attempt by
| Microsoft to sidestep open web standards in favor of a
| proprietary platform. The other notorious example is Flash, and
| both should be considered malware.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Did Silverlight have the same security issues as Flash?
| cube00 wrote:
| Yes, even using C# couldn't save them.
|
| > A remote code execution vulnerability exists when
| Microsoft Silverlight decodes strings using a malicious
| decoder that can return negative offsets that cause
| Silverlight to replace unsafe object headers with contents
| provided by an attacker. In a web-browsing scenario, an
| attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability
| could obtain the same permissions as the currently logged-
| on user. If a user is logged on with administrative user
| rights, an attacker could take complete control of the
| affected system. An attacker could then install programs;
| view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with
| full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to
| have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted
| than users who operate with administrative user rights.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-
| updates/securityb...
| klabetron wrote:
| Probably didn't have the level of adoption needed for the
| nefarious types to justify spending time finding
| Silverlight exploits.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Open web standards are great but consider where we could have
| been if competition drove them a different way? We're still
| stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it).
| Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that
| came sooner?
| motorest wrote:
| > Open web standards are great but consider where we could
| have been if competition drove them a different way? We're
| still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it).
| Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if
| that came sooner?
|
| Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough
| problem to risk destroying open web standards.
| piskov wrote:
| The same reason Typescript exists
| motorest wrote:
| > The same reason Typescript exists
|
| TypeScript exists for the same reason things like mypy
| exists, and no one in their right mind claims that
| python's openness should be threatened just because
| static typing is convenient.
| nurbl wrote:
| Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are
| some big differences though. Python with types is still
| just python. Typescript is a different language from JS
| (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large
| company could be considered problematic.
|
| I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the
| typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the
| typescript compiler would become something like mypy, an
| entirely optional part of the ecosystem.
| motorest wrote:
| > Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a
| different language from JS (guess it a superset?)
|
| No, it's the exact same thing. TypeScript adds support
| for type annotations, and removing these annotations
| leads to JavaScript. See how Node.js added support for
| TypeScript by implementing type stripping in v22.
|
| https://nodejs.org/api/typescript.html#type-stripping
| Rohansi wrote:
| It's not that it's a problem I just don't think it's the
| best place to be. It was not designed to be used like
| this. Yes, it's better now but it's still not great - you
| still ship JS as text blobs that need to be parsed and
| compiled by every browser.
|
| I don't see how alternatives to JavaScript are a risk to
| open web standards. WebAssembly is itself a part of those
| same standards. It's just a shame that it was built as an
| extension of JavaScript instead of being an actual
| alternative.
| piskov wrote:
| What web standards? :-)
|
| Stuff like angularjs was basically created for the same
| reason flash/silverlight went down -- iphone
| adabyron wrote:
| Flash & Silverlight were both ahead of the current open web
| standards at the time. They also didn't suffer as much from
| the browser wars.
|
| Flash's ActionScript helped influence changes to modern JS
| that we all enjoy.
|
| You sometimes need alternative ideas to promote & improve
| ideas for open web standards.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I loved silverlight. Before I got a "serious" job, I was a
| summer intern at a small civil engineering consultancy that had
| gradually moved into developing custom software that it sold
| mostly to local town/city/county governments in Arizona (mostly
| custom mapping applications; for example, imagine Google Maps
| but you can see an overlay of all the street signs your city
| owns and click on one to insert a note into some database that
| a worker needs to go repair it... stuff like that).
|
| Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns
| out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin
| from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than
| distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to
| date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use
| C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than
| the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.
|
| I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time
| custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that
| existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic
| desktop GUI development.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Sounds like a nice gig.
|
| > It turns out that getting office workers to install a
| blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is
| much easier than distributing binaries that you have to
| install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure
| pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI
| interface builder
|
| IIRC around that time, you could also distribute full-blown
| desktop applications (C# WinForms) in a special way via the
| browser, by which they were easily installable and self-
| updating. The tech was called ClickOnce
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/visualstudio/deployment/cl.... I think the flow was
| possibly IE-only, but that was not a big issue in a business
| context at that time.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Both a Silverlight and Adobe Flex fan here!
| tjpnz wrote:
| Back in the day Microsoft sent someone to our university to
| demo all of their new and upcoming products. I remember Vista
| (then named Longhorn) and Silverlight being among them. I also
| remember people being particularly impressed by the demo they
| gave of the latter, but everything swiftly falling apart when
| someone queried whether it worked in other browsers. This was
| at a time when IE was being increasingly challenged by browsers
| embracing open standards. So there was an element of quiet
| amusement/frustration in seeing them continue to not get it.
| catskull wrote:
| Google Inbox
| Towaway69 wrote:
| The information superhighway
|
| The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social
| media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or
| garages. The days when google slogan was "don't be evil".
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| That's the internet before commercialisation and silos.
| username223 wrote:
| AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to
| build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."
| Towaway69 wrote:
| And when no one knew you were a dog and neither did they
| care.
|
| Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar,
| until a one million were sold.
|
| And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.
| feketegy wrote:
| That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits
| those sites anymore.
|
| Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms
| like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like.
| Everything private.
| dannersy wrote:
| I mean, they're intentionally buried in the name of capital.
| If you need more than a Google search to find them, of course
| no one will go to them.
|
| I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a
| comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in
| forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because
| you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to
| find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very
| surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight
| forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week
| let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.
| username223 wrote:
| I guess my abandoned/dead project might be Usenet. Sure,
| there were very dark places, and a lot of it was just a way
| to distribute porn, but that pretty much describes the Web.
| Usenet was like Reddit not controlled by a single company;
| like the Fediverse with infinite channels; like all of the
| world's threaded web fora displayed in exactly the way you
| want. We had that in the 1990s, and we're slowly groping
| toward getting it back.
| donatj wrote:
| I really miss the like 8 year ago push where a lot of major
| projects were moving to IRC. It's too bad Freenode took the
| opportunity to jump the shark and killed the momentum.
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| Under construction gifs
| satisfice wrote:
| Betamax. Because I bought a player and it gave better quality
| video.
| latexr wrote:
| Technology Connections would like a word.
|
| https://youtu.be/hGVVAQVdEOs?t=693
| satisfice wrote:
| I bought my Betamax in the store having compared VHS to Beta
| side by side. When I say that Beta was better the main thing
| I'm referring to is the clarity during fast forwarding or
| reversing. When scanning through a video VHS was full of
| staticky noise, but Beta was clean. I don't recall that the
| quality during regular playback was particularly different,
| but I like to be able to see what's happening when I move
| around a video.
|
| It seems like a clear winner. Of course, this was comparing
| one particular beta machine to one particular VHS machine.
| rasengan0 wrote:
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
|
| and why? = UI/UX
| viraptor wrote:
| I feel like Zen (Firefox based) captures a few good things from
| Ubiquity. It could do more though. Zen + Kagi gets even more
| with the bang commands.
| patapong wrote:
| Visual Basic 6 - arguably the most accessible way of creating GUI
| apps.
| homarp wrote:
| you still have Lazarus, "a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE
| for Rapid Application Development."
| stavros wrote:
| Lazarus seems like a fantastic GUI builder, but the problem
| with it (and VB6) is that I have to use a language with 0.01%
| the ecosystem of Python.
| jamesu wrote:
| 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.
| paride5745 wrote:
| Gambas is a modern, open source Visual Basic dialect in the
| style of VB Classic.
| zweifuss wrote:
| twinBASIC tries hard to be a bug compatible successor.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Developer Ryan Flaherty's "Via" project, a novel approach to
| streaming large games in real time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5wAn-4e5hQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWsNFVvblLw
|
| Summary:
|
| >This presentation introduces Via, a virtual file system designed
| to address the challenges of large game downloads and storage.
| Unlike cloud gaming, which suffers from poor image quality, input
| latency, and high hosting costs, Via allows games to run locally
| while only downloading game data on demand. The setup process is
| demonstrated with Halo Infinite, showing a simple installation
| that involves signing into Steam and allocating storage space for
| Via's cache.
|
| >Via creates a virtual Steam library, presenting all owned games
| as installed, even though their data is not fully downloaded.
| When a game is launched, Via's virtual file system intercepts
| requests and downloads only the necessary game content as it's
| needed. This on-demand downloading is integrated with the game's
| existing streaming capabilities, leveraging features like level-
| of-detail and asset streaming. Performance metrics are displayed,
| showing download rates, server ping, and disk commit rates,
| illustrating how Via fetches data in real-time.
|
| >The system prioritizes caching frequently accessed data. After
| an initial download, subsequent play sessions benefit from the
| on-disk cache, significantly reducing or eliminating the need for
| network downloads. This means the actual size of a game becomes
| less relevant, as only a portion of it needs to be stored
| locally. While server locations are currently limited, the goal
| is to establish a global network to ensure low ping. The
| presentation concludes by highlighting Via's frictionless user
| experience, aiming for a setup so seamless that users are unaware
| of its presence. Via is currently in early access and free to
| use, with hopes of future distribution partnerships.
|
| I'm amazed the video still has under 4,000 views. Sadly, Flaherty
| got hired by XAI and gave up promoting the project.
|
| https://x.com/rflaherty71/status/1818668595779412141
|
| But I could see the technology behind it working wonders for
| Steam, Game Pass, etc.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Wait until you hear that almost all Unity games don't really
| have asset streaming because the engine loads things eagerly by
| default.
|
| I don't see how this could take off. Internet speeds are
| getting quicker, disk space is getting cheaper, and this will
| slow down load times. And what's worse is the more you need
| this tech the worse experience you have.
| j45 wrote:
| WebOS.
|
| Javascript/HTML based smartphone / app interface.
| docandrew wrote:
| I had a Palm Pre and really enjoyed this, shame it didn't make
| it.
| linguae wrote:
| 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-2000s. Unfortunately Vista was
| famously delayed, and in an attempt to get Vista released,
| Microsoft pared back features, and one of these features was
| WinFS. Instead of WinFS, we ended up getting improved file search
| capabilities. It's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for
| database file systems for desktop operating systems since.
|
| 2. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) was an Apple
| technology from the mid-1990s that promoted component-based
| software. Instead of large, monolithic applications such as
| Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, functionality would be
| offered in the form of components, and users and developers can
| combine these components to form larger solutions. For example,
| as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, there would be a component
| for the drawing canvas, and there would be separate components
| for each editing feature. Components can be bought and sold on an
| open marketplace. It reminds me of Unix pipes, but for GUIs.
| There's a nice promotional video at
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E.
|
| OpenDoc was a radically different paradigm for software
| development and distribution, and I think this was could have
| been an interesting contender against the dominance that
| Microsoft and Adobe enjoys in their markets. OpenDoc actually did
| ship, and there were some products made using OpenDoc, most
| notably Apple's Cyberdog browser
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog).
|
| Unfortunately, Apple was in dire straits in the mid-1990s.
| Windows 95 was a formidable challenger to Mac OS, and cheaper x86
| PCs were viable alternatives to Macintosh hardware. Apple was an
| acquisition target; IBM and Apple almost merged, and there was
| also an attempt to merge Apple with Sun. Additionally, the
| Macintosh platform depended on the availability of software
| products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, the very
| types of products that OpenDoc directly challenged. When Apple
| purchased NeXT in December 1996, Steve Jobs returned to Apple,
| and all work on OpenDoc ended not too long afterward, leading to
| this now-famous exchange during WWDC 1997 between Steve Jobs and
| an upset developer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o).
|
| I don't believe that OpenDoc fits in with Apple's business
| strategy, even today, and while Microsoft offers component-based
| technologies that are similar to OpenDoc (OLE, COM, DCOM,
| ActiveX, .NET), the Windows ecosystem is still dominated by
| monolithic applications.
|
| I think it would have been cool had the FOSS community pursued
| component-based software. It would have been really cool to apt-
| get components from remote repositories and link them together,
| either using GUI tools, command-line tools, or programmatically
| to build custom solutions. Instead, we ended up with large,
| monolithic applications like LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP,
| Inkscape, Scribus, etc.
|
| 3. I am particularly intrigued by Symbolics Genera
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)), an
| operating system designed for Symbolics Lisp machines
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics). In Genera, everything
| is a Lisp object. The interface is an interesting hybrid of early
| GUIs and the command line. To me, Genera could have been a very
| interesting substrate for building component-based software; in
| fact, it would have been far easier building OpenDoc on top of
| Common Lisp than on top of C or C++. Sadly, Symbolics' fortunes
| soured after the AI winter of the late 1980s/early 1990s, and
| while Genera was ported to other platforms such as the DEC Alpha
| and later the x86-64 via the creation of a Lisp machine emulator,
| it's extremely difficult for people to obtain a legal copy, and
| it was never made open source. The closest things to Genera we
| have are Xerox Interlisp, a competing operating system that was
| recently made open source, and open-source descendants of
| Smalltalk-80: Squeak, Pharo, and Cuis-Smalltalk.
|
| 4. Apple's "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1996 were filled
| with many intriguing projects that were either never
| commercialized, were cancelled before release, or did not make a
| splash in the marketplace. One of the most interesting projects
| during the era was Bauhaus, a Lisp operating system developed for
| the Newton platform. Mikel Evins, a regular poster here,
| describes it here
| (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-
| ba...). It would have been really cool to have a mass-market Lisp
| operating system, especially if it had the same support for
| ubiquitous dynamic objects like Symbolic Genera.
| w10-1 wrote:
| OpenDoc was mostly given to Taligent (the Apple and IBM joint
| venture) to develop. It was full-on OO: about 35 files for a
| minimal application, which meant that Erich Gamma had to build
| a whole new type of IDE which was unusable. He likely learned
| his lesson: it's pretty hard to define interfaces between
| unknown components without forcing each one to know about all
| the others.
|
| MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable
| data types.
| silcoon wrote:
| I'm intrigued by Symbolics Genera too. It would have been
| interesting seeing further development of Lisp OS, especially
| when they would have had internet connection. Rewriting part of
| your OS and see the changes in real time? Maybe web apps could
| have been just software written in Lisp, downloaded on the
| machine and directly being executed in a safe environment on
| top of the Genera image. Big stuff.
| lapsed_lisper wrote:
| 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.)
| raphman wrote:
| > OpenDoc
|
| For anyone interested in the Apple future that could have been,
| check out Jim Miller's articles, e.g. on LiveDoc
| (https://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.php)
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> It 's unfortunate that there's been no proposals for
| database file systems for desktop operating systems since._
|
| You can have one today if you want, although nobody knows about
| it.
|
| Step 1. Install a local Oracle DB
| https://hub.docker.com/r/gvenzl/oracle-free#quick-start
|
| Step 2. Set up DBFS
| https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...
|
| Step 3. Mount it via FUSE or NFS.
|
| Step 4. Also access the underlying tables via SQL.
| rickette wrote:
| Adobe Flex with Adobe Catalyst. Design a GUI in Photoshop, export
| it to Flex/Flash to add interactivity.
|
| Looked cool during demos. Got killed when Flash died.
| zyklonix wrote:
| I always thought Microsoft Popfly had huge potential and was way
| ahead of its time. It made building web mashups feel like playing
| with Lego blocks, drag, drop, connect APIs, and instantly see the
| result.
|
| If something like that existed today, powered by modern APIs and
| AI, it could become the ultimate no-code creativity playground.
| kumavis wrote:
| Keybase <3
| cymor wrote:
| Take a look at FOKS. Made by the people who made Keybase.
|
| https://foks.pub/
| LVB wrote:
| HP TouchPad
|
| Just on principle, I'd have liked to see it on the market for
| more than 49 days! It pains me as an engineer to think of the
| effort to bring a hardware device to market for such a minuscule
| run.
| ebbi wrote:
| webOS was so ahead of its time, and seemed like it would have
| been a really strong contender to iPad OS.
| zyklonix wrote:
| Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life.
| It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full
| backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you
| chose.
|
| It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it
| was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation.
| Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or
| Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.
|
| If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it
| could've become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
| dlcarrier wrote:
| It also had one of the best campy promotional videos ever
| produced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8GIwFkIuP8
| rzzzt wrote:
| I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU
| senderista wrote:
| This was my personal favorite:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWYwY8GpuO0
| Wistar wrote:
| Oh, that is simply fantastic.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition:
| stop converting data structures for database storage and just
| persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch
| or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it
| was too expensive, but probably long after it should have.
|
| VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for
| macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that
| workflow.
| veqq wrote:
| I have an optane drive with the kernel on it, instant boot!
| stanac wrote:
| How does that work? It loads kernel from drive to ram?
|
| Isn't windows fast boot something like that (only slower,
| depending on ssd)? It semi-hibernates, stores kernel part of
| memory on disk for faster startup.
| goku12 wrote:
| This one would have behaved more like suspend to RAM. In
| suspend to RAM, the RAM is kept powered, while everything
| else is shut down. The recovery would be near instant,
| since all the execution contexts are preserved on the RAM.
|
| Optane was nearly as fast as RAM, but also persistent like
| a storage device. So you do a suspend to RAM, without the
| requirement to keep it powered like a RAM.
| Gud wrote:
| 1+ for 3dxpoint.
|
| The technology took decades to mature, but the business people
| didn't have the patience to let the world catch up to this
| revolutionary technology.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| The world had already caught up. By the time it was released,
| flash memory was already nearing it's speed and latency, to
| the point that the difference want with the cost.
| Havoc wrote:
| >flash memory was already nearing it's speed and latency
|
| Kinda, but for small writes it's still nowhere near.
|
| Samsung 990 Pro - IOPS 4KQD1 113 MBytes/Sec
|
| P4800X optane - IOPS 4KQD1 206 MBytes/Sec
|
| And that's a device 5 years newer and on a faster pcie
| generation.
|
| It disappeared because the market that values above
| attribute is too small and its hard to market because at
| first glance they look about the same on a lot of metrics
| as you say
| tester756 wrote:
| Optane was impressive from tech standpoint.
|
| We were about get rid of split between RAM and disk memory and
| use single stick for both!
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Not only because of price. The 'ecosystem' infrastructure
| wasn't there, or at least not spread wide enough. The
| 'mindshare'/thinking of ways how to do, neither. This is more
| aligned with (live) 'image-based' working environments like
| early Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Look at where they are now...
|
| A few more thoughts about that, since I happen to have some of
| the last systems who actually _had_ systems level support for
| that in their firmware, _and_ early low-capacity optanes
| designed for that sort of use. It 's fascinating to play with
| these, but they are low capacity, and bound to obsolete
| operating systems.
|
| Given enough RAM, you can emulate that with working suspend and
| resume to/and from RAM.
|
| Another avenue are the ever faster and larger SSDs, in
| practice, with some models it makes almost no difference
| anymore, since random access times are so fast, and transfer
| speeds insane. Maybe total and/or daily TBW remains a concern.
|
| Both of these can be combined.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Systems are stuck in old ways in how they model storage, so
| they weren't ready for something that is neither really RAM nor
| disk. Optane did inspire quite a few research projects for a
| while though. A few applications emerged in the server space,
| in particular.
| AnonC wrote:
| Sandstorm: it seemed quite nice with a lot of possibilities when
| it launched in 2014, but it didn't really take off and then it
| moved to sandstorm.org.
|
| The creator, kentonv (on HN), commented about it recently here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44848099
| goku12 wrote:
| The actual problem with Sandstorm wasn't the era in which it
| was released. It will probably have the same problems even if
| released today. The problem was its application isolation
| mechanism - especially the data isolation (I think they were
| called grains). The mechanism is technically brilliant. But
| it's a big departure from how apps are developed today. It
| means that you have to do non-trivial modifications to web
| applications before they can run on the platform. The platform
| is better for applications designed to run on it in the start.
| It should have been marketed as a platform for building web
| applications, rather than as one for just deploying them.
| kentonv wrote:
| Agreed. The best apps turned out to be the ones written for
| the platform. And many of those took people an afternoon to
| write, since the platform handled so much for you. Porting
| "normal" apps into Sandstorm felt like it defeated the
| purpose.
|
| If I did it again I wouldn't focus on portability of existing
| apps. Especially today given you could probably vibe code
| most things (and trust the sandbox to protect you from AI
| slop security bugs).
| Geee wrote:
| Sandstorm was a great idea, but in my opinion it was targeted
| wrong. It should have been a platform and marketplace for B2B
| SaaS, not B2C SaaS. Specifically, all the third-party services
| which typical web apps use could have been Sandstorm apps, like
| analytics, logging, email, customer service etc.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Elm programming language. Arguably not dead but somewhat
| incomplete and not actively worked on.
| zem wrote:
| opa, along the same lines - really nice ML based language for
| isomorphic full stack web development.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Yeah, Opa was wildly ahead of its time, I actually just wrote
| a top level comment about it. Basically
| Next.js+TypeScript+modern ECMAScript features, but in 2011.
| spooky_deep wrote:
| A few commits recently.
|
| There are lots of competing MLs you can use instead:
|
| - F# (Fable)
|
| - ReasonML
|
| - OCaml (Bucklescript)
|
| - Haskell
|
| - PureScript
|
| IMO the problem with Elm was actually The Elm Architecture.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| What's "the Elm architecture"?
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| A simple UI programming pattern, with a circular,
| unidirectional data flow. It is very rigid by design, to be
| side-effect free, functional, unidirectional:
|
| https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
|
| I'm no frontend guy, but I think it did/was inspire(d)
| react (redux?) maybe. Corrections on this very welcome
| acemarke wrote:
| Correct - Elm was one of several inspirations for Redux:
|
| - https://redux.js.org/understanding/history-and-
| design/prior-...
| spooky_deep wrote:
| Yes it was too rigid. Too much boiler plate. The design
| space of functional UI is still being explored.
| davesnx wrote:
| OCaml / Reason (Melange)
| indy wrote:
| Try the Roc language https://www.roc-lang.org/
|
| It's at a very early stage of development but looks promising
| donatj wrote:
| It's been a number of years but my understanding was they kind
| of killed all the momentum it had by removing support for
| custom operators which broke everyone's code?
| protocolture wrote:
| Microsoft Courier.
|
| Dual screen iPad killer, productivity optimised. IIRC Microsoft
| OneNote is its only legacy.
|
| Killed because both the Windows team and the Office team thought
| it was stepping on their toes.
| hyperific wrote:
| RAM Disks. Basically extremely fast storage using RAM sticks
| slotted into a specially made board that fit in a PCIe slot. Not
| sure what happened to the project exactly but the website
| disappeared sometime in 2023.
|
| The idea that you could read and write data at RAM speeds was
| really exciting to me. At work it's very common to see microscope
| image sets anywhere from 20 to 200 GB and file transfer rates can
| be a big bottleneck.
|
| Archive capture circa 2023:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230329173623/https://ddramdisk...
|
| HN post from 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35195029
| robotswantdata wrote:
| soon will be able to buy a gigabyte AI Top CXL R5X4. PCI
| expansion card with up to 512gb RAM over four DIMMs.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| There's now a standard for memory over a physical PCIe
| interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link)
| and off-the-shelf products
| (https://www.micron.com/products/memory/cxl-memory).
| carstenhag wrote:
| You can do this in software, I tried it a few times with games
| and just other stuff ~10 years ago. Why would it have to be a
| hardware solution?
| arjvik wrote:
| I'm confused why this can't be done in software?
| mount -t tmpfs ram /mnt/ramdisk
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Products to attach RAM to expansion slots have long existed
| and continue to be developed. It's a matter of adding more
| memory once all of the DIMMs are full.
|
| What to do with it, once it's there, is a concern of
| software, but specialized hardware is needed to get it there.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Also battery backup (or at least some beefy capacitors).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Not really needed anymore on Linux with
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zram
|
| https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Zram
|
| for most purposes. (Assuming the host has enough RAM to spare,
| to begin with)
| chanux wrote:
| Everpix: Looked like good execution but they were probably ahead
| of time.
|
| Also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676494
|
| Redmart (Singapore): Best web based online store to this date
| (obviously personal view). No one even tries now that mobile apps
| have won.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/alibaba-lazada-redmart-con...
| Jean-Philipe wrote:
| ello.co - what a fun and pretty social media website that was.
| bdcravens wrote:
| RethinkDB. Technically it still exists (under The Linux
| Foundation), but (IMO) the original company's widening scope (the
| Horizon BaaS) that eventually led to its demise killed its
| momentum.
| alex7o wrote:
| Man I loves the original concept for demos but never build
| anything real with it. Curious if anyone did?
| tmtvl wrote:
| CLPM, the Common Lisp Package Manager. The Quicklisp client
| doesn't do HTTPS, _ql-https_ doesn 't do Ultralisp, and OCICL
| (which I'm currently using) doesn't do system-wide packages. CLPM
| is a great project, but it's gone neglected long enough that it's
| bitrotted and needs some thorough patching to be made usable.
| Fortunately Common Lisp is still as stable as it has been for 31
| years, so it's just the code which interacts with 3rd-party
| libraries that needs updating.
| silcoon wrote:
| Yeah I felt that Quicklisp doesn't have the same features as
| package managers in other languages, and https is one of them.
| Also it's run by a single person which doesn't have too much
| time to constantly update the libraries.
|
| In comparison I found Clojars^[0] for Clojure better and
| community driven like NPM. But obv Clojure has more business
| adoption than CL.
|
| Do you use CL for work?
|
| [0]: https://clojars.org/
| tmtvl wrote:
| It's funny, on one hand I wouldn't want to use CL for work
| because when money gets involved in something you enjoy you
| stop enjoying it. On the other hand, however, I would really
| hate doing any serious work with a language I can't stand,
| like Python or Clojure.
| nurettin wrote:
| Nokia smartphone line killed by Microshaft.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Yahoo Pipes
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Windows Longhorn. It looked cool and had some promising features
| that never made it into Vista, like WinFS.
| Gud wrote:
| XMMS
| Aldipower wrote:
| I miss it so much.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| https://maruos.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge
|
| Connect your phone to a display, mouse, keyboard and get a full
| desktop experience.
|
| At the time smartphones were not powerful enough, cables were
| fiddly (adapters, HDMI, USB A instead of a single USB c cable)
| and virtualization and containers not quite there.
|
| Today, going via pkvm seems like promising approach. Seamless
| sharing of data, apps etc. will take some work, though.
| zem wrote:
| VPRI, I was really hoping it would profoundly revolutionise
| desktop application development and maybe even lead to a new
| desktop model, and instead they wound up the project without
| having achieved the kind of impact I was dreaming of.
| bitwize wrote:
| The Amiga. Just... the Amiga.
| archargelod wrote:
| RIP the concept of owning your computer and user-written
| programs
| Animats wrote:
| - 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 about how to install and
| configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to
| mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it had
| to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to get
| Steve Jobs.
|
| - Transaction processing operating systems. The first one was
| IBM's Customer Information Control System. A transaction
| processor is a kind of OS where everything is like a CGI program
| - load program, do something, exit program. Unix and Linux are,
| underneath, terminal oriented time sharing systems.
|
| - 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. Channels could run simple channel programs, and managed
| device access to memory. IBM tried to introduce that with the
| PS2, but they made it proprietary and that failed in the
| marketplace. Today, everything has something like channels, but
| they're not a unified interface concept that simplifies the OS.
|
| - CPUs that really hypervise properly. That is, virtual execution
| environments look just like real ones. IBM did that in VM, and it
| worked well because channels are a good abstraction for both a
| real machine and a VM. Storing into device registers to make
| things happen is not. x86 has added several layers below the
| "real machine" layer, and they're all hacks.
|
| - The Motorola 680x0 series. Should have been the foundation of
| the microcomputer era, but it took way too long to get the MMU
| out the door. The original 68000 came out in 1978, but then
| Motorola fell behind.
|
| - Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon
| was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.
|
| - 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?
|
| - Word Lens. Look at the world through your phone, and text is
| translated, standalone, on the device. No Internet connection
| required. Killed by Google in favor of hosted Google Translate.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > - 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 other
| format, we do _not_ need lax parsing for HTML. This has caused
| a multitude of security vulnerabilities and only makes it more
| difficult for pretty much everybody.
|
| The attitude towards HTML5 parsing seemed to grow out of this
| weird contrarianism that everybody who wanted to do better than
| whatever Internet Explorer did had their head in the clouds and
| that the role of a standard was just to write down all the
| bugs.
| maratc wrote:
| Just to remind you that <bold> <italic> text </bold>
| </italic> [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 <bold> I mean <b> and by <italic> I mean <i>, 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_.
| JimDabell wrote:
| That caused plenty of incompatibilities in the past. At one
| point, Internet Explorer would parse that and end up with
| something that wasn't even a tree.
|
| HTML is not a set of instructions that you follow. It's a
| terrible format if you treat it that way.
| reactordev wrote:
| It's totally valid XHTML, just not recognized.
|
| XHTML allows you to use XML and <bold> <italic> are just
| XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and
| will always be <b> and <i>. Since the beginning.
| yoz-y wrote:
| The problem there is the order of tags not their names.
| reactordev wrote:
| Ooooo... now we're talking. Sloppy HTML that closes a tag
| out of order or just declared out of order? Or rendering
| bugs when bold is before italic? It's why XHTML should
| have been standard. Just dump, error out, make the
| developer fix it.
| simonask wrote:
| But the problem here is that our nice programmer-brained
| mental model does not match the actual requirements of
| text.
|
| Unless you know about tree structures, it doesn't make
| sense to the average person why you would have to stop
| and then restart a span of formatting options just
| because an unrelated attribute changed.
|
| And that's why XHTML failed - HTML is _human-writable_.
| maratc wrote:
| I've edited my comment to better present the issue.
| reactordev wrote:
| Out of order closure should definitely error out with an
| "unclosed italic tag detected at line:..." error.
| maratc wrote:
| > It's totally valid XHTML, just not recognized.
|
| Am I right in assuming that _even you_ didn 't notice the
| problem the first time you looked at it?
|
| > Out of order closure should definitely error out
|
| Hitchens's razor: "What can be asserted without evidence
| can also be dismissed without evidence."
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Nice list. Some thoughts:
|
| - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back
| to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone.
| iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like
| philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build
| something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS
| technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It
| doesn't have a command line, and installation is fine, so I'm
| not sure your line of reasoning holds strongly. One thing I
| think you might be hinting at though that is a missed trick:
| macOS today could learn a little from the way iOS and iPadOS is
| forced to do things and centralise configuration in a single
| place.
|
| - I think transaction processing operating systems have been
| reinvented today as "serverless". The load/execute/quit cycle
| you describe is how you build in AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run
| Functions or Azure Functions.
|
| - Most of your other ideas (with an exception, see below), died
| either because of people trying to grab money rather than build
| cool tech, and arguably the free market decided to vote with
| its feet - I do wonder when we might next get a major change in
| hardware architectures again though, it does feel like we've
| now got "x86" and "ARM" and that's that for the next
| generation.
|
| - XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff
| done. The forgiving nature of the HTML specs is a feature, not
| a bug. We shouldn't expect people to be experts at reading
| specs to publish on the web, nor should it need special
| software that gatekeeps the web. It needs to be scrappy, and
| messy and evolutionary, because it is a technology that serves
| people - we don't want people to serve the technology.
| donatj wrote:
| On XHTML, I think there was room for both HTML and a proper
| XHTML that barks on errors. If you're a human typing HTML or
| using a language where you build your HTML by concatenation
| like early PHP, sure it makes sense to allow loosey goosey
| HTML but if you're using any sort of simple DOM builder which
| should preclude you from the possibility of outputting
| invalid HTML, strict XHTML makes a lot more sense.
|
| Honestly I'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never
| materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam.
| detaro wrote:
| But a HTML5 parser will obviously parse "strict" HTML5 just
| fine too, what value is there to special-case the "this was
| generated by a DOM builder" path client-side?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _Honestly I 'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never
| materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam._
|
| The HTML Standard supports two syntaxes, HTML and XML. All
| browsers support XML syntax just fine--always have, and
| probably always will. Serve your file as
| application/xhtml+xml, and go ham.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > XHTML died because it was too hard for people to get stuff
| done.
|
| This is not true. The reason it died was because Internet
| Explorer 6 didn't support it, and that hung around for about
| a decade and a half. There was no way for XHTML to succeed
| given that situation.
|
| The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also cause
| JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really were a
| problem, it would have killed React.
|
| People can deal with strict syntax. They can manage it with
| JSX, they can manage it with JSON, they can manage it with
| JavaScript, they can manage it with every back-end language
| like Python, PHP, Ruby, etc. The idea that people see XHTML
| being parsed strictly and give up has never had any truth to
| it.
| troupo wrote:
| > The syntax errors that cause XHTML to stop parsing also
| cause JSX to stop parsing. If this kind of thing really
| were a problem, it would have killed React.
|
| JSX is processed during the build step, XHTML is processed
| at runtime, by the browser.
| throw_await wrote:
| Invalid XHTML woild have been caught in the test suite
| bsimpson wrote:
| Didn't Google already own Android when iOS was announced?
| troupo wrote:
| Yes, and they were going to position it against Windows
| Mobile.
|
| When iOS was announced, Google scrambled to re-do the
| entire concept
| giobox wrote:
| Not so much Windows Mobile, which never achieved serious
| market share. It was originally more planned to be a
| Blackberry competitor, and the early Android handset
| prototype concepts were all blackberry knockoffs with
| similar physical keyboard layouts.
|
| It has always appeared though like you suggest, that the
| project quickly pivoted to candy bar touch phones
| following the release of the original iPhone. It's
| worthwhile to remember that the industry wasn't nearly as
| convinced that touching glass was the future of mobile
| typing in 2007 as it later became, and the sales volume
| of Blackberrys back then was often incorrectly cited as
| evidence to support the case against touch.
|
| > https://www.bgr.com/tech/iphone-vs-android-original-
| google-b...
| troupo wrote:
| I clean forgot about Blackberry :)
|
| Android team ended up delaying Android release by a year:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/19/googles-
| reaction-...
| nrdvana wrote:
| I still hate touch and would still buy a keyboard phone
| if anyone was making a good one
| eloisant wrote:
| They would have gotten another modern OS instead of Next as
| the base for MacOSX (then iOS).
|
| Another possibility they were exploring was buying BeOS,
| which would have been pretty interesting because it was an OS
| built from scratch in the 90's without any of the cruft from
| the 70's.
|
| Also, the only thing specific to Next that survived in MacOSX
| and iOS was ObjectiveC and the whole NextStep APIs, which
| honestly I don't think it a great thing. It was pretty cool
| in the 90's but when the iPhone was released it was already
| kinda obsolete. For the kernel, Linux or FreeBSD would have
| worked just the same.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > without any of the cruft from the 70's
|
| By "cruft" you mean "lessons learned", right?
| eterm wrote:
| > Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly
|
| It would kill the approachability of the language.
|
| One of the joys of learning HTML when it tended to be hand-
| written was that if you made a mistake, you'd still see
| something just with distorted output.
|
| That was a lot more approachable for a lot of people who were
| put off "real" programming languages because they were
| overwhelmed by terrible error messages any time they missed a
| bracket or misspelled something.
|
| If you've learned to program in the last decade or two, you
| might not even realise just how bad compiler errors tended to
| be in most languages.
|
| The kind of thing where you could miss a bracket on line 47 but
| end up with a compiler error complaining about something 20
| lines away.
|
| Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game with
| respect to meaningful compiler errors.
|
| But in the days of XHTML? Error messages were arcane, you had
| to dive in to see what the problem actually was.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| If you forget a closing quote on an attribute in html, all
| content until next quote is ignored and not rendered - even
| if it is the rest of the page. I dont think this is more
| helpful than an error message. It was just simpler to
| implement.
| eterm wrote:
| Let's say you forget to close a <b></b> element.
|
| What happens?
|
| Even today, after years of better error messages, the
| strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says:
| Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but
| OMITTAG NO was specified
|
| What is line 22? </p>
|
| It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to
| find the un-closed 'b' tag.
|
| Back in the day, the error messages were even more
| misleading than this, often talking about "Extra content at
| end of document" or similar.
|
| Compare that to the very visual feedback of putting this
| exact document into a browser.
|
| You get more bold text than you were expecting, the bold
| just runs into the next text.
|
| That's a world of difference, especially for people who
| prefer visual feedback to reading and understanding errors
| in text form.
|
| Try it for yourself, save this document to a .html file and
| put it through the XHTML validator.
| <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
| "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
| <?xml-stylesheet
| href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-WD.css"
| type="text/css"?> <html
| xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"
| xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>test
| XHTML 1.0 Strict document</title> <link
| rev="made" href="mailto:gerald@w3.org" /> </head>
| <body> <p> This is a test XHTML 1.0
| Strict document. </p> <p> See:
| <a href="./">W3C Markup Validation Service: Tests</a>
| <b>huh Well, isn't that good </p>
| <hr /> <address> <a
| href="https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">valid
| HTML</a><br /> <a
| href="../../feedback.html">Gerald Oskoboiny</a>
| </address> </body> </html>
| chrismorgan wrote:
| For reference, observe what happens if you try opening
| this malformed document in a browser: save it with a
| .xhtml extension, or serve it with MIME type
| application/xhtml+xml.
|
| Firefox displays naught but the error:
| XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </b>.
| Location: file:///tmp/x.xhtml Line Number 22,
| Column 3: </p> --^
|
| Chromium displays this banner on top of the document up
| to the error: This page contains the
| following errors: error on line 22 at column 5:
| Opening and ending tag mismatch: b line 19 and p
| Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
| eterm wrote:
| Thanks for showing these. We can see Firefox matches the
| same style of accurate but unhelpful error message.
|
| Chromium is much more helpful in the error message,
| directing the user to both line 19 and 22. It also made
| the user-friendly choice to render up to the error.
|
| In the context of XHTML, we should also keep in mind that
| Chrome post-dates XHTML by almost a decade.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| If, on the other hand, you have some sorts of XSLT
| errors, Firefox gives you a reasonably helpful error
| message in the dev tools, whereas Chromium gives you a
| blank document and nothing else... unless you ran it in a
| terminal. I'm still a little surprised that I managed to
| discover that it was emitting XSLT errors to stdout or
| stderr (don't remember which).
|
| Really, neither has particularly great handling of errors
| in anything XML. None of it is better than minimally
| maintained, a lot of it has simply been unmaintained for
| a decade or more.
| JimDabell wrote:
| You can have catastrophic parsing errors with the "lax"
| HTML too. For instance: <!doctype html>
| <title>...</title> <p>Important: Do
| <strongNOT</strong> come into the office tomorrow!
|
| Or: <!doctype html>
| <title>...<title> <p>Important: Do
| <strong>NOT</strong> come into the office tomorrow!
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Rust ( in particular ) got everyone to bring up their game
| with respect to meaningful compiler errors.
|
| This was also part of the initial draw of `clang`.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I can "handwrite" C, Python, etc. just fine and they don't
| assign fallback meanings to syntax errors.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| > Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?
|
| Probably not, but what would be the benefit of having more
| pages fail to render? If xhtml had been coupled with some cool
| features which only worked in xhtml mode, it might have become
| successful, but on its own it does not provide much value.
| defanor wrote:
| > but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to
| render?
|
| I think those benefits are quite similar to having more
| programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing,
| other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined
| behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due
| to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user,
| you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough
| format), if anything at all, and additionally that
| discourages developers from shipping a mess. Then parsers
| (not just those in viewers, but anything that does
| processing) have a better chance to read and interpret those
| documents consistently, so even more things work predictably.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes
| and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for
| the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the
| user if it fails to to render some existing pages.
|
| It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support
| backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The
| interest of the customer is that the software runs.
| crote wrote:
| > there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to
| render some existing pages
|
| What if the browser renders it _incorrectly_? If a
| corrupt tag combination leads to browser X parsing
| "<script>" as inline text but browser Y parsing it as a
| script tag, that could lead to serious security issues!
|
| Blindly guessing at the original author's intent whenever
| you encounter buggy content is a recipe for disaster.
| Sometimes it _is_ to the user 's benefit to just refuse
| to render it.
| detaro wrote:
| and that's why HTML5 standardized the behavior, so both
| browsers will parse it the same, they just don't care if
| someone thinks it's "invalid" or not.
| lucketone wrote:
| if developer accidentally left opening comment at the
| start of the html.
|
| Rhetorical question: Should the browser display page even
| if it is commented out?
|
| There is some bar for what is expected to work.
|
| If all browsers would consistently error out on unclosed
| tags, then it would definitely force developers to close
| tags, it would force it become common knowledge, second
| nature.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards
| compatibility even with buggy software
|
| This was, maybe, true some 10 years ago. Now even old
| Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer
| Windows
|
| > The interest of the customer is that the software runs
|
| Yes, but testing is expensive and we are Agile. /s
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run
| on newer Windows
|
| Eh, that's a really weird example as those are components
| of the operating system that are replaced with the OS
| upgrade.
| detaro wrote:
| HTML5 was the answer for the consistency part: where before
| browsers did different things to recover from "invalid"
| HTML, HTML5 standardizes it because it doesn't care about
| valid/invalid as much, it just describes behavior anyways.
| thangalin wrote:
| XHTML is XML. XML-based markup for content can be typeset
| into PDF, suitable for print media. I invite you to check out
| the PDFs listed in the intro to my feature matrix comparison
| page, all being sourced from XHTML:
|
| https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I used to run an RSS feed consolidator, badly formed XML was
| the bane of my life for a very long time.
|
| If devs couldn't even get RSS right, a web built on XHTML was
| a nonstarter.
| archargelod wrote:
| > Modula. Modula 2 and 3 were reasonably good languages. Oberon
| was a flop. DEC was into Modula, but Modula went down with DEC.
|
| If you appreciate Modula's design, take a look at Nim[1].
|
| I remember reading the Wikipedia page for Modula-3[2] and
| thinking "huh, that's just like Nim" in every other section.
|
| [1] https://nim-lang.org
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3
| jasode wrote:
| _> - 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
| theme is that the _data itself is more important that the file
| format_. That 's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files
| written by buggy PDF libraries. And both 7-Zip and Winrar can
| read malformed zip files with broken headers (because some old
| buggy Java libraries wrote bad zip files). MS Excel can import
| malformed csv files. E.g. the Citi bank export to csv wrote a
| malformed file and it was _desirable_ that MS Excel imported it
| anyway _because the raw data of dollar amounts was more
| important than the incorrect commas in the csv file_ -- and --
| I have no way of contacting the programmer at Citi to tell them
| to fix their buggy code that created the bad csv file.
|
| (2) file types where the consumer can control the author
| (closed-loop): programming language source code like .c, .java,
| etc or business interchange documents like EDI. There's no need
| to have a "lenient forgiving" gcc/clang compiler to parse ".c"
| source code because the "consumer-and-author" will be the same
| person. I.e. the developer sees the compiler stop at a syntax
| error so they edit and fix it and try to re-compile. For
| business interchange formats like EDI, a company like Walmart
| can tell the vendor to fix their broken EDI files.
|
| XHTML wants to be in group (2) but web surfers can't control
| all the authors of .html so that's why lenient parsing of HTML
| "wins". XHTML would work better in a "closed-loop" environment
| such as a company writing internal documentation for its
| employees. E.g. an employee handbook can be written in strict
| XHTML because both the consumers and authors work at the same
| company. E.g. can't see the vacation policy because the XHTML
| syntax is wrong?!? Get on the Slack channel and tell the
| programmer or content author to fix it.
| crote wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| That would break decades of the web with no incentive for
| Google to do so. Plus, any change of that scale that they
| make is going to draw antitrust consideration from
| _somebody_.
| drob518 wrote:
| You're right, but even standards bodies aren't enough. At
| the end of the day, it's always about what the dominant
| market leader will accept. The standard just gives your
| bitching about the corrupted files some abstract moral
| authority, but that's about it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant
| files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted
| files
|
| This depends. If you are a small creator with a unique
| corruption then you're likely out of luck. The problem with
| big creators is 'fuck you' I do what I want.
|
| >"Chrome cannot guarantee the safety of your data on this
| website, as the website is malformed" warning message.
|
| This would appear on pretty much every website. And it
| would appear on websites that are no longer updated and
| they'd functionally disappear from any updated browser. In
| addition the 10-20 year thing just won't work in US
| companies, simply put if they get too much pressure next
| quarter on it, it's gone.
|
| >Your mistakes are painfully obvious during development,
|
| Except this isn't how a huge number of websites work. They
| get html from many sources and possibly libraries. Simply
| put no one is going to follow your insanity, hence why
| xhtml never worked in the first place. They'll drop Chrome
| before they drop the massive amount of existing and
| potential bugs out there.
|
| >And like it or not, Chrome is big enough that it can act
| as one for HTML.
|
| And hopefully in a few years between the EU and US someone
| will bust parts of them up.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| The opportunities to fix this were pretty abundant. For
| instance, it would take exactly five words from Google to
| magically make a vast proportion of web pages valid XHTML:
|
| > We rank valid XHTML higher
|
| It doesn't even have to be true!
| pixl97 wrote:
| Even more reason to break Google up.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| This is an argument for a repair function that transforms a
| broken document into a well-formed one without loss but keeps
| the spec small, simple and consistent. It's not an argument
| for baking malformations into a complex messy spec.
| layer8 wrote:
| > That's why Adobe Reader will read malformed pdf files
| written by buggy PDF libraries.
|
| No, the reason is that Adobe's implementation never bothered
| to perform much validation, and then couldn't add strict
| validation retroactively because it would break too many
| existing documents.
|
| And it's really the same for HTML.
| Timwi wrote:
| 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 doctype was all you needed. So
| everyone who tried to use XHTML didn't realize that it would go
| back to being read as HTML when they upload it to their
| webserver/return it from PHP/etc. Then, when something went
| wrong/worked differently than expected, the author would blame
| XHTML.
|
| Edit: I see that I'm getting downvoted here; if any of this is
| factually incorrect I would like to be educated please.
| crote wrote:
| Isn't that what the <!DOCTYPE> tag was supposed to solve?
| Timwi wrote:
| Yes, I covered that; everyone assumed that you _only_
| needed to specify the doctype, but in practice browsers
| only accepted it for local files or HTTP responses with
| Content-Type: application /xml+xhtml. I've edited the
| comment to make that more explicit.
| crote wrote:
| Ah, I see. Yeah, that's a bit silly. They should've gone
| for "MUST have doctype, SHOULD have content type".
| JimDabell wrote:
| > 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).
|
| None of that is correct.
|
| It was perfectly spec. compliant to label XHTML as text/html.
| The spec. that covers this is RFC 2854 and it states:
|
| > The text/html media type is now defined by W3C
| Recommendations; the latest published version is [HTML401].
| In addition, [XHTML1] defines a profile of use of XHTML which
| is compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may also be labeled as
| text/html.
|
| -- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2854
|
| There's no spec. that says you need to parse XHTML served as
| text/html as HTML not XHTML. As the spec. says, text/html
| covers both HTML and XHTML. That's something that browsers
| did but had no obligation to.
|
| The mismatched doctype didn't trigger quirks mode. Browsers
| don't care about that. The prologue could, but XHTML 1.0
| Appendix C told you not to use that anyway.
|
| Even if it did trigger quirks mode, that makes no difference
| in terms of tag soup. Tag soup is when you mis-nest tags, for
| instance <strong><em></strong></em>. Quirks mode was
| predominantly about how it applied CSS layout. There are
| three different concepts being mixed up here: being parsed as
| HTML, parsing tag soup, and doctype switching.
|
| The problem with serving application/xhtml+xml wasn't
| anything to do with web servers. The problem was that
| Internet Explorer 6 didn't support it. After Microsoft won
| the browser wars, they discontinued development and there was
| a five year gap between Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Combined
| with long upgrade cycles and operating system requirements,
| this meant that Internet Explorer 6 had to be supported for
| almost 15 years globally.
|
| Obviously, if you can't serve XHTML in a way browsers will
| parse as XML for a decade and a half, this inevitably kills
| XHTML.
| incognito124 wrote:
| > word lens
|
| I don't know if you know it, that's a feature of Google Lens
| elric wrote:
| I love this mismatched list of grievances and I find myself
| agreeing with most of them. XHTML and proper CPU hypervisors in
| particular.
|
| People being too lazy to close the <br /> tag was apparently a
| gateway drug into absolute mayhem. Modern HTML is a cesspool. I
| would hate to have to write a parser that's tolerant enough to
| deal with all the garbage people throw at it. Is that part of
| the reason why we have so few browsers?
| detaro wrote:
| Not really. HTML5 parsing is very well documented and quite
| easy compared to all the other things a browser needs.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _People being too lazy to close the <br /> tag was
| apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem._
|
| Your chronology is _waaaaaaaaaaaay_ off.
|
| <BR> came _years_ before XML was invented. It was a tag that
| didn't permit children, so writing it <BR></BR> would have
| been crazy, and inventing a new syntax like <BR// or <BR/>
| would have been crazy too. Spelling it <BR> was the obvious
| and reasonable choice.
|
| The <br /> or <br/> spelling was added to HTML _after XHTML
| had already basically lost_ , as a compatibility measure for
| porting _back_ to HTML, since those enthusiastic about XHTML
| had taken to writing it and it _was_ nice having a compatible
| spelling that did the same in both. (In XHTML you could also
| write <br></br>, but that was incorrect in HTML; and if you
| wrote <br /> in HTML it was equivalent to <br /="">, giving
| you one attribute with name "/" and value "". There were a
| few growing pains there, such as how <input checked> used to
| mean <input checked="checked">--it was actually the attribute
| _name_ that was being omitted, not the value!--except... oh
| why am I even writing this, messy messy history stuff,
| engines doing their own thing blah blah blah, these days it's
| <input checked="">.
|
| Really, the whole <... /> thing is more an artefact of an
| arguably-misguided idea after a failed reform. The absolute
| mayhem came first, not last.
|
| > _I would hate to have to write a parser that 's tolerant
| enough to deal with all the garbage people throw at it._
|
| The HTML parser is _magnificent_ , by far the best spec for
| something reasonably-sized that I know of. It's exhaustively
| defined in terms of state machines. It's huge, far larger
| than one would _like_ it to be because of all this
| compatibility stuff, but genuinely easy to implement if you
| have the patience. Seriously, go read it some time, it's
| really quite approachable.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > The <br /> or <br/> spelling was added to HTML _after
| XHTML had already basically lost_
|
| This is untrue. This is the first public draft of XHTML
| from 1998:
|
| > Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty
| elements, e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="karen.jpg"
| alt="Karen" />.
|
| -- https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-html-in-
| xml-19981205/#guidelin...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I said added to _HTML_.
| le-mark wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| CICS seems perfectly fine in problem spaces where
| requirements change slowly enough than one can trade
| development time for reliability (read: finance and
| insurance).
| ndiddy wrote:
| > 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 about how to install and
| configure things. Probably would have eased the tradition to
| mobile. A version was actually shipped to developers, but it
| had to be covered up to justify the bailout of Next by Apple to
| get Steve Jobs.
|
| You have things backwards. The Copland project was horribly
| mismanaged. Anybody at Apple who came up with a new technology
| got it included in Copland, with no regard to feature creep or
| stability. There's a leaked build floating around from shortly
| before the project was cancelled. It's extremely unstable and
| even using basic desktop functionality causes hangs and
| crashes. In mid-late 1996, it became clear that Copland would
| never ship, and Apple decided the best course of action was to
| license an outside OS. They considered options such as Solaris,
| Windows NT, and BeOS, but of course ended up buying NeXT.
| Copland wasn't killed to justify buying NeXT, Apple bought NeXT
| because Copland was unshippable.
| kanwisher wrote:
| Word lens team was bought by google, its far better in google
| translate then the local app ever was. You could repeat the old
| app with a local LLM now pretty easily but it still won't be as
| close in quality as using google translate
| dimal wrote:
| 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 plain text,
| that's useless. If you're rendering _anything_ with any
| semantics, then you need to know how to parse it. You're back
| where you started.
|
| Granted, _I_ could ensure that _my_ code was valid XHTML, but
| I'm a hypermeticulous autistic weirdo, and most other people
| aren't. As much as XHTML "made sense", it was completely
| unworkable in reality, because most people are slobs.
| Sometimes, worse really is better.
| markasoftware wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| Yes, you would be able to put an ad on your site that
| wasn't XHTML, because XHTML is just text parsed in the
| browser at runtime. And yes, that would fail, silently, or
| with a cryptic error
| jasode wrote:
| _> , 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 <style> tags nested
| inside <div> 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| If xhtml really took off, there would just be server side
| linting/html tidy. Its not that hard a problem to solve.
| Lots of websites already do this for user generated html,
| because even if an unclosed div doesnt take down the
| whole thing its still ugly.
|
| The real problem is the benefits of xhtml are largely
| imaginary so there isn't really a motivation to do that
| work.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Or you just wouldn't create xhtml with string
| interpolation.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Make the advertisement block an _iframe_ with the _src_
| attribute set to the advertiser 's URL. If the advertiser
| delivers invalid XHTML code, only the advertisement won't
| render.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| In practice things like that did happen, though. e.g. this
| story of someone's website displaying user-generated
| content with a character outside their declared character
| set: https://web.archive.org/web/20060420051806/http://dive
| intoma...
| mikehall314 wrote:
| But all it takes in that world is for a single browser
| vendor to decide - hey, we will even render broken XHTML,
| because we would rather show something than nothing - and
| you're back to square one.
|
| I know which I, as a user, would prefer. I want to use a
| browser which lets me see the website, not just a parse
| error. I don't care if the code is correct.
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| > - 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?
|
| IMO there's a place for XHTML as a generated output format, but
| I think HTML itself should stay easy to author and lightweight
| as a markup format. Specifically when it comes to tag omission,
| if I'm writing text I don't want to see a bunch of `</li>` or
| `</p>` everywhere. It's visual noise, and I just want a
| lightweight markup.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| > 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| > XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where
| the semantics for bad HTML were formalized?
|
| I actually have, and its not that bad.
|
| If anything, the worst part is foreign content (svg, mathml)
| which have different rules more similar to xml but also not the
| same as xml.
|
| Just as an aside, browsers still support xhtml, just serve with
| application/xhtml+xml mime type, and it all works including
| aggressive error checking. This is very much a situation where
| consumers are voting with their feet not browser vendors
| forcing a choice.
| mberning wrote:
| CICS and HATS are perhaps the most annoying pieces of
| technology I've ever encountered.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| +1 Copland
|
| BeOS. I like to daydream about an alternate reality where it
| was acquired by Sony, and used as the foundation for
| PlayStation, Sony smartphones, and eventually a viable
| alternative to Windows on their Vaio line.
|
| Neal Stephenson,
| https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt :
|
| > Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships
| are situated... (Apple) sold motorized vehicles--expensive but
| attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically
| sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
|
| > (Microsoft) is much, much bigger... the big dealership came
| out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows
| 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing
| block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous
| success.
|
| > On the other side of the road... (Be, Inc.) is selling fully
| operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and
| stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more
| technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything
| else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
|
| > ... and Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a
| business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and
| geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus.
| The people who live there are making tanks.
|
| It would be years before OS X could handle things that wouldn't
| cause BeOS to break a sweat, and BeOS still has a bit of a
| responsiveness edge that OS X still can't seem to match
| (probably due to the PDF rendering layer).
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| In addition to Photon, I would say QNX itself (the desktop OS).
| I ran QNX 6 Neutrino on my PIII 450 back in the day, and the
| experience was so much more better than every other mainstream
| OS on the market. The thing that blew me away was how
| responsive the desktop was while multitasking, something Linux
| struggled with even decades later.
|
| Similarly, I'm also gutted that the QNX 1.44MB demo floppy
| didn't survive past the floppy era - they had some really good
| tech there. Imagine if they pitched it as a rescue/recovery OS
| for PCs, you could've run it entirely from the UEFI. Or say as
| an OS for smart TVs and other consumer smart devices.
| suck-my-spez wrote:
| FireChat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat
| addaon wrote:
| The Lockheed D-21 drone. Supersonic ramjet without the complexity
| of scramjet or the cost of turbojet, hamstrung by the need for a
| manned launch platform (making operations safety-critical... with
| predictable results) and recovery to get data off it. Twenty or
| forty years later it would have been paired by a small number of
| high-cost launcher UAVs and had its cost driven down to
| disposable, with data recovery over radio comms... but twenty to
| forty years later there's nothing like it, and the maturation of
| satellites means there almost certainly never will be.
| Hobadee wrote:
| It's highly probable that a successor of this is in active use,
| we just don't know anything about it. :-/
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| Gentoo file manager.
|
| (Not the Linux distribution with the same name)
|
| I have used it for years.
|
| A two pane manager, it makes defining file associations,
| applications invoked by extensions and short cut buttons easy
| convenient.
|
| Sadly it is abandonware now.
|
| Slowly migrating to Double Commander now...
| speed_spread wrote:
| 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...
| jfadfwddas wrote:
| I really liked Ceylon. It was competing against Groovy, Kotlin,
| and Scala which all seemed to come out around the same time.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| Definitely Opa: http://opalang.org/
|
| In 2011, before TypeScript, Next.js or even React, they had
| seamless server-client code, in a strongly typed functional
| language with support for features like JSX-like inline HTML,
| async/await, string interpolation, built-in MongoDB ORM, CSS-in-
| JS, and many syntax features that were added to ECMAScript since
| then.
|
| I find it wild how this project was 90%+ correct on how we will
| build web apps 14 years later.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Wow, why didnt this take off?
| silisili wrote:
| I've argued this for years on this site...but AOL.
|
| At its best, having IM, email, browser, games, keywords, chats,
| etc. was a beautiful idea IMO. That they were an ISP seemed
| secondary or even unrelated to the idea. But they chose to charge
| for access even in the age of broadband, and adopt gym level
| subscription tactics to boot, and people decided they'd rather
| not pay it which is to be expected. I often wonder if they'd have
| survived as a software company otherwise.
|
| They were basically a better thought out Facebook before
| Facebook, in my opinion.
| spike021 wrote:
| I miss AIM, and that type of messenger in general, a lot.
|
| You could purposely choose to be online or offline.
|
| Much easier to draw a line back then about how often you were
| online.
| ValdikSS wrote:
| ZeroNet decentralized web platform:
|
| - Based on BitTorrent ideas
|
| - Completely decentralized websites' code and data
|
| - Either completely decentralized or controllable-decentralized
| authentication
|
| - Could be integrated into existing websites (!)
|
| It's not kind of dead, there's a supported fork, but it still
| feels like a revolution that did not happen. It works really
| well.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Same with Beaker Browser and Dat/Hyperdrive as its backend.
| Borg3 wrote:
| XenClient. I would really love to have some minimal OS HyperVisor
| running, and then you slap multiple OSes on top of that w/ easy
| full GUI switching via some hotkeys like Ctrl+Shift+F1.
| Additionaly, special drivers to virtualize Gfx and Sfx devices so
| every VM have full desktop capabilities and low latency.
|
| Unfortunately, it died because its very niche and also they
| couldnt keep up with development of drivers for desktops.. This
| is even worse today...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Positron - Firefox version of Electron. "Electron-compatible
| runtime on top of Gecko" https://github.com/mozilla/positron
|
| This would have changed so much. Desktop apps powered by the
| engine of Firefox not Chrome.
|
| Why? Not enough company buy in, not enough devs worked on it.
| Maybe developed before a major Firefox re-write?
| cube00 wrote:
| With more of Firefox's rendering migrating to Rust, there's got
| to be a market for a memory safe alternative to Electron now.
| znpy wrote:
| Looking at firefox memory usage, i'm afraid the issue there
| is not memory safety but rather the average javascript
| developer being completely and blissfully unaware of and
| careless about memory memory usage of the software they write
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| https://v2.tauri.app/start/
| cube00 wrote:
| I referred to secure rendering.
|
| _Tauri apps take advantage of the web view already
| available on every user's system. A Tauri app only contains
| the code and assets specific for that app and doesn't need
| to bundle a browser engine with every app._
|
| Rendering will still use Edge/Chromium on a generic Windows
| machine.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| You may be happy to hear that the new Fedora installer is using
| Firefox under the hood. Ephemeral profile dir on startup, plus
| custom userChrome.css to hide most of Firefox UI, and I
| couldn't tell a difference between it and Electron.
|
| https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda-webui
|
| I wish RedHat made an easy-to-use framework out of it.
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| Kuro5hin
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
|
| I was a hold out on smartphones for a while and I used to print
| out k5 articles to read while afk... Just such an amazing
| collection of people sharing ideas and communal moderation,
| editing and up voting.
|
| I learned about so many wierd and wonderful things from that
| site.
| MilanTodorovic wrote:
| Are there any spiritual successors?
| jlokier wrote:
| For me the progression was Slashdot -> Kuro5hin -> HN.
| senderista wrote:
| -> lobste.rs
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| Similar to jlokier's response, I ended up here after k5 went
| away. HN fills my geek interests pretty well, and over the
| last few years I've found that "long form video essays" on
| YT, audiobooks / podcasts fill my desire for learning about
| other random topics.
| habosa wrote:
| Rusty Foster (creator of Kuro5hin) is still writing!
| https://www.todayintabs.com/
| amanwithnoplan wrote:
| The candle that burned twice as bright was really adequacy.org,
| which sourced their trolls from Kuro5hin.
|
| (Archive here: https://www.inadequacy.org/)
| ssss11 wrote:
| Flickr - that was the future of photo storage, sharing,
| discovery.
|
| What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00's? I loved it
| and it fell off the earth. You could save your bookmarks,
| "publish" them to the community, share etc..
|
| What ever happened to those build your own homepage apps like
| startpage (I think)? I always thought those would take off
| lentil_soup wrote:
| >> What was the bookmarks social tool called from 00's?
|
| del.icio.us! Funnily, also killed by yahoo like flickr
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| wait, I am still using (and paying) Flickr ...
| Wistar wrote:
| Except it is now owned and run by the father and son who
| founded SmugMug. It probably has a chance of surviving under
| their leadership.
| al_borland wrote:
| I think the market narrowed a lot. I haven't been to Flickr
| in years, but I get the impression it's for more serious
| photographers now, like SmugMug. It was the Instagram of
| its day, with mass market appeal. I think that's what
| people miss. Not the site, but the community around it.
|
| In this same vein, I always thought Tumblr had a great
| design for a blog. It hits the perfect balance between a
| microblog like Twitter, and a fat blog like Wordpress. It
| had various stigma's around the type of people who posted
| there, which seems to have only gotten worse over the
| years. It is a shell of its former self and yet anther site
| that fell on hard times after Yahoo ownership.
|
| Yahoo really is where Web 2.0 went to die.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful
| due to bad performance and more security holes than anything
| else.
|
| I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
| Sankozi wrote:
| Flash performance is still better than current web stack's.
| Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games
| that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single
| browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.
|
| The 20 most common things you'd do with the tool were there
| for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced
| features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so
| you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about
| every file extension you could think of.
|
| Most useful feature of all was that it'd load instantly.
| You'd click the icon on the desktop, and there'd be the
| Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to
| 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a
| coffee while it starts, it's phenomenal performance.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Performance was way better than what we have now with modern
| web stacks, we just have more powerful computers.
|
| I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just
| shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem.
| I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been
| a web standard.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to
| be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games.
|
| Those did sometimes run really great, but most
| implementations were indeed very slow.
|
| I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then
| to help with web performance and when we measured page
| speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost
| always the worst.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Right. But that doesn't mean the performance of Flash was
| bad for what it was doing. Or that it was worse than the
| performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS
| now.
| Y-bar wrote:
| The default, and by far the most common, output from
| Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for
| network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today.
|
| You remembering a few optimised instances does not change
| the reality that Flash was bad.
| masfuerte wrote:
| You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware
| to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.
| Y-bar wrote:
| I am not and have never compared them in the way you say
| I did. You literally wrote "Or that it was worse than the
| performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS
| now." so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim.
|
| Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more
| powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse
| compared on the same hardware and network stack compared
| to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.
| nrdvana wrote:
| Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had
| graphic routines written in optimized assembly that
| simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of
| hardware.
|
| I feel like people are talking past each other a bit
| here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a
| document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not
| fast, but the people doing animations with it were
| getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations +
| SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of
| magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > more security holes than anything else.
|
| yeah it wasn't secure
|
| but;
|
| > bad performance
|
| I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was
| faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The
| issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast
| enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't
| get on with jobs when they were talking about custom
| versions.
|
| You have to remember that "apps" were never meant to be a
| thing on the iphone, it was all about "desktop" like web
| performance.
| Y-bar wrote:
| I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around
| 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was
| hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was
| definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website
| done without the plugin.
| hulitu wrote:
| > more security holes than anything else.
|
| Adobe was never known for its security or quality.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little
| games people created with them. There was the whole scene of
| non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just
| ceased to exist.
| rkomorn wrote:
| So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting
| Games.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more
| commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge
| scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/
| You can probably still make flash games and run them via
| ruffle.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday
| with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the
| original Flash because of superior security isolation
| mechanisms.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Are there any ways that I can make games or something
|
| Like I want to make websites about me similar to those in
| neocities right, those flashy nice (good?) artistic UI
|
| I suck at css. I don't know but I never really got a
| feedback attention loop and heck even AI can make it
| better than me
|
| But I want to show the world what I myself can make as
| well and not just what I prompt or get back.
|
| I want a good feedback loop, can flash be useful for this
| purpose? Like maybe I want a website like uh something
| early browser times. I am kinda interested in building
| something like netscape navigator esque thing even though
| I wasn't born in that era or maybe windows xp style.
|
| I have mixed opinions about AI tbh. I genuinely just want
| to learn things right now, it might take me more time, I
| have been beating myself over using AI and not feeling
| equal to if writing things by hand. So I want to prove to
| myself that I can write things/learn things by hand as
| well. Like I tried using it to study but the lure to make
| things right away and then trapping you later is
| definitely there, it feels easy in the start imo and
| that's the lure and I kinda want to stay away with that
| lure to develop my skills, maybe not right now, then
| later.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Flash is kind of dead now, i don't think the tools to
| create new Flash software are even released anymore. I
| would recommend learning Godot to make a game. There's
| some great tutorials like here - https://www.gdquest.com/
| library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire...
| neya wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| 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.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better
| though!
| donatj wrote:
| Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image
| Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and
| it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs
| in Image Ready
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
| snicky wrote:
| This post reminded me about the good time I had watching
| Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".
| sen wrote:
| Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and
| can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and
| browsers including mobile.
|
| It's far from perfect but I've been enjoying playing with it
| even for things that aren't games and it has come a _long_ way
| just in the last year or two. I feel like it's close to (or is
| currently) having its Blender moment.
| bombcar wrote:
| Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s.
|
| There hasn't been a replacement, yet.
| eloisant wrote:
| 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.
| acheron wrote:
| This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel
| like I'm taking crazy pills.
| big_toast wrote:
| I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I'm not
| sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galapagos
| Islands.
| sarchertech wrote:
| For the most part, people are talking about games and
| animation, not text based websites.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape
| games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the
| challenges and puzzles.
| 9x39 wrote:
| 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.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| It was really meant for animation and games but got misused
| as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow
| it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not
| use Flash.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Flash players had zoom built in. And I believe there were
| textareas that allowed people to copy and paste text if they
| wanted, though it wasn't very common
|
| Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web
| generally
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a
| simultaneous design + data + programming tool.
|
| These are terrible for maintainability, but _excellent_ for
| usability.
|
| On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater
| web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind.
| (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end
| javascript programmers...)
|
| Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have
| been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte
| to really create for the web.
|
| I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a
| hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host
| platform
|
| Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-
| end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced
| achisler wrote:
| Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed.
| Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game
| making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions.
| It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any
| 6y.o. can use it.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to
| pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs
| got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want
| something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.
| make3 wrote:
| it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was
| Wistar wrote:
| Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.
| al_borland wrote:
| The big issue with Flash was how overused it was.
|
| When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I
| worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out
| why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some
| horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should
| have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone
| made them in Flash.
|
| I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse.
| Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of
| hand.
|
| I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where
| once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people
| were sad to see it go.
| lynx97 wrote:
| LSR, the "Linux Screen Reader", an ambitiousy designed Python
| implementation of a GUI screen reader developed by IBM starting
| around 2006 or so. The project was ended 2008 when IBM ended all
| its Accessibility involvement in FLOSS.
| green-salt wrote:
| The DEC Alpha processor. DEC as a whole, really.
| hardwarepirate wrote:
| https://www.kite.com for python i first learned about it when i
| was working in an university group and had the task to transform
| a windowing algorithm already working on matlab to python. it
| felt like a modern linter and lsp with additional support through
| machine learning. i don't quite know why it got comparative small
| recognition, but perhaps enough to remain an avantgarde
| pioneering both python and machine learning support for further
| generations and wider applications.
| hardwarepirate wrote:
| https://www.kite.com for python
|
| i first learned about it when i was working in an university
| group and had the task to transform a windowing algorithm already
| working on matlab to python. it felt like a modern linter and lsp
| with additional support through machine learning. i don't quite
| know why it got comparative small recognition, but perhaps enough
| to remain an avantgarde pioneering both python and machine
| learning support for further generations and wider applications.
| abeyer wrote:
| Perhaps because their repeated bad behavior as a company
| outweighed anything good they put out.
| hardwarepirate wrote:
| how so?
| kesor wrote:
| Google Wave ; It had a bunch of agents participating in editing
| the text together with you, making spelling fixes, finding
| additional information to enrich your content, and so much more.
| kesor wrote:
| Pivotal Tracker ; Users loved it, it had an excellent model for
| tracking work and limiting work in progress on software projects.
| There is no real good alternative and the usual suspects for
| tracking project work are horrible in comparison.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I don't know about that. My employer was all in on Pivotal and
| we used it for several years. Then one day a dev stumbled
| across Linear, we all tried it, and switched the whole company
| within a month or so.
| b33f wrote:
| TrueCrypt. free multi-platform open source disk encryption that
| suddenly disappeared in mysterious circumstances
| mock-possum wrote:
| VeraCrypt is very nearly a drop in replacement.
| kesor wrote:
| Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" _Free_ web hosting back
| when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a
| rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple"
| page online.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 probably going to
| be Typepad (i.e. defunct) in a few years and Blogger is
| probably going to be there quicker than that.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It is between one and two orders of magnitude harder than
| geocities, and infinitely more expensive.
| gmac wrote:
| ... or just use Cloudflare Pages and upload a folder or zip of
| your static site via a web UI?
| donatj wrote:
| GitHub pages is frankly the closest in my opinion, as someone
| who used Geocities to host a domain for years longer than I
| probably should have.
| ZWoz wrote:
| There are few similar projects. neocities.org for example.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Github pages
| mrec wrote:
| Valid option - I used it myself for a very brief toe-dip into
| blogging earlier this year - but maybe worth noting that
| Google seems to flat-out refuse to crawl anything you put
| there. Won't pick it up by itself, won't read a sitemap you
| explicitly tell it about. It'll grudgingly index specific
| page URLs you tell it about, but that's kind of absurd. I
| don't know if it's because it's on a subdomain, or a
| Microsoft property, or because I was 100% ad- and tracker-
| free or what.
|
| I tried DDG (Bing-backed, I believe) and it happily found
| everything with no manual intervention at all. That was the
| point where I ditched Google Search after 30 years.
| dzjkb wrote:
| cloudflare pages
| funflame wrote:
| Neocities[0] is going strong, if you just want an alternative.
| Copy paste your html to the online editor or upload your files,
| and that's it.
|
| [0] https://neocities.org/
| alance wrote:
| I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with
| actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category
| tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with
| https://old.reddit.com and maybe twitter.
| dewey wrote:
| Isn't Pinboard (Who bought delicious) very similar? I also see
| bookmarks of my friend there, recently switched to Raindrop
| though as it's much more maintained.
| youngtaff wrote:
| it is but people are switching away due to lack of
| maintenance and the founders political views
| starkparker wrote:
| There's also Readeck, which is a similar self-hosted tool
| that also captures some text content it can discover (i.e.
| article text and images, video transcripts, highlighted
| sections) and can export collections to RSS feeds and epub.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Self hosted Linkding is a pretty great modern equivalent
| https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
| al_borland wrote:
| I was always confused my del.icio.us, and bookmark sharing in
| general. In my head bookmarks are sharing are distinct things.
| Bookmarks are things I want to save to visit again or a
| shortcut to easily visit often. Sharing is something I think
| someone else might find interesting, and thinks others will
| too, but I probably won't ever visit again.
|
| I will bookmark the site to pay my utility bill, but it's not
| something I'd ever share. I might share a link to funny YouTube
| video, but wouldn't bookmark it.
|
| I think social bookmarking didn't really know what it was,
| which is why the modern versions are more about sharing links
| than bookmarking. I don't post my bookmarks to Reddit, where
| people follow me as a person. I would post links I think are
| worth sharing to a topic people are interested in following.
| kesor wrote:
| 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.
| rkomorn wrote:
| They got bought by AOL in 98, long before most/all of this
| innovation happened?
|
| Edit: in fact I'd say they were irrelevant before pretty much
| all of those innovations. By the time AIM or MSN Messenger
| really became popular, ICQ didn't matter anymore.
| eszed wrote:
| 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.
| kesor wrote:
| Skype ; Because my R.I.P. grandma was using it to talk to her
| relatives overseas just like she would use a phone, but it didn't
| cost an arm and a leg (unlike phone calls).
| silcoon wrote:
| One of the best P2P software at the time. It was so simple and
| effective and allowed people to call real phones with Skype
| credit.
|
| A genius product ripped my Microsoft. Have you used Microsoft
| Teams recently? Bad UI, hard to configure external hardware and
| good level of incompatibility, missing the good old "Echo /
| Sound Test Service". At a point I even installed Skype of my
| old Android but was sucking up too much battery.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Not just "of the time" - if you need to call international
| numbers as of 2025, there's no good replacement for Skype
| from earlier this year.
| stn8188 wrote:
| I had a similar pleasant experience with Skype. Back in 2009, I
| was deployed to the Persian Gulf. This was before ubiquitous
| cell phones (at least, I left my cell phone back in the US).
| Phone cards worked to call home, but my cheap solution was to
| use Skype from my handheld PSP using Wi-Fi from a cafe. It
| worked out great for me at least, and I'll always appreciate
| that.
| klabetron wrote:
| Gawker.
| kesor wrote:
| CueCat it was an affordable barcode scanner that anyone could
| have connected to their computer, and it scanned barcodes. It
| took almost two decades before we could finally do it again with
| our mobile phones.
| emigre wrote:
| The Atom code editor. It was good to have a mainstream
| alternative to VS Code, it's a pity it reached end-of-life.
| _bent wrote:
| 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
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| gimenete wrote:
| Electron was originally named Atom Shell
| https://www.electronjs.org/blog/electron/
|
| Atom Shell/Electron was from the very beginning something
| you could use separately from Atom as a framework for
| creating desktop apps using Chromium/Node.js.
| latexr wrote:
| You're right, I misremembered that. Thank you for the
| correction.
| latexr wrote:
| Atom was by GitHub, and VS Code by Microsoft. As soon as
| Microsoft bought VS Code, Atom's fate was sealed.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The creators went on to make Zed.
| cymor wrote:
| Checkout Zed or Pulsar. Made by people who worked on Atom.
| croisillon wrote:
| Zenbe, a cute and practical webmail interface. Bought and killed
| by Facebook way too soon!
| manmal wrote:
| WebOS, the palm smartphone OS. It was beautiful at the time and
| predicted many of the swipe gestures iOS and Android adopted much
| later.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Now in LG TVs
| ghaering wrote:
| Mozilla heka. As far as data collection and processing goes, we
| are still stuck with Logstash after all of these years. Heka
| promised a much more efficient solution, being implemented with
| Go and Lua plugins.
| can16358p wrote:
| All those modular smartphones, and also Amazon's Fire phone.
|
| Why? Obviously close-to-zero market. It was unbelievable how
| those people though those projects would even succeed.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Sourcetrail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourcetrail
|
| People talk so much about how you need to write code that fits
| well within the rest of the codebase, but what tools do we have
| to explore codebases and see what is connected to what? Clicking
| through files feels kind of stupid because if you have to work
| with changes that involve 40 files, good luck keeping any of that
| in your working memory. In my experience, the JetBrains
| dependency graphs also aren't good enough.
|
| Sourcetrail was a code visualization tool that allowed you to
| visualize those dependencies and click around the codebase that
| way, see what methods are connected to what and so on, thanks to
| a lovely UI. I don't think it was enough alone, but I absolutely
| think we need something like this:
| https://www.dbvis.com/features/database-management/#explore-...
| but for your code, especially for codebases with hundreds of
| thousands or like above a million SLoC.
|
| Example:
| https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
|
| Another example:
| https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail/blob/master/doc...
|
| I yearn to some day view entire codebases as graphs with
| similarly approachable visualization, where all the dependencies
| are highlighted when I click an element. This could also go so,
| so much further - you could have a debugger breakpoint set and
| see the variables at each place, alongside being able to visually
| see how code is called throughout the codebase, or hell, maybe
| even visualize every possible route that could be taken.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| HyperCard
| Havoc wrote:
| Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context.
|
| Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring
| students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and
| all the basic programming building blocks you want students to
| grasp are present without language specific funkiness.
| le-mark wrote:
| Iirc Delphi didn't have threads, sockets, or OS integration
| (signals, file watching ...). So it wasn't suited to systems
| programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui
| applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads
| and sockets but imo it was too late.
| detaro wrote:
| Maybe not in the earliest versions, but by the late 90s, when
| I learned it, it certainly had those things.
| Havoc wrote:
| Not sure earlier versions, but Delphi 5 (~1999) definitely
| had all those. Plausible that it was added much later than in
| C/C++ world though
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I have written a number of services in Delphi, some 20 years
| ago, all works fine.
| rs186 wrote:
| Eh, sounds like that wouldn't be a problem for education
| purposes as the parent suggests? You need to be doing some
| really specific to leverage threads/file watching. And people
| probably use C to teach threads anyway.
|
| Of course, being a good teaching language probably doesn't
| make the language popular or even survive. Python is so
| widely used not necessarily because it's simple to learn but
| because of its ecosystem.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Delphi 2, the first 32bit version of Delphi, had all of this.
| Some, like threads, even had wrappers (TThread), but Delphi
| came with Win32 bindings out of the box so all Win32
| functions were available too - and it came bundled with
| documentation for the APIs. In addition, calling out to a DLL
| was trivial so even if a function wasn't available, you could
| just define it. Pretty much anything you could do with a C
| compiler was possible with Delphi 2 too.
|
| Free Pascal obviously has all of that stuff too.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Delphi isn't dead - ver 13 was recently released -
| https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi. It's even cross
| platform, uses Skia as its graphics engine, its all very nice.
| sph wrote:
| Delphi is like jazz - not dead, but it just smells funny.
| eloisant wrote:
| Apparently Python is now the language of choice for teaching
| programming, and I'm a bit worried about it because the type
| system is a mess.
|
| I think Pascal or ADA are better language to start learning
| about types with a good base.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Check out Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) an open-source
| spiritual successor to Delhi's development environment.
| ta12653421 wrote:
| ++1 for the lightspeed compiler
| donatj wrote:
| 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 that work. Working little GUI app in
| seconds.
|
| Apple hasn't touched it since 2016, I kind of hope it makes a
| comeback given Blender and more so Unreal Engine giving people a
| taste of the node based visual programming life.
|
| You can still download it from Apple, and it still _technically_
| works but a lot of the most powerful nodes are broken in the
| newer OS 's. I'd love to see the whole thing revitalized.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I loved quartz composer. It made it really easy to build all
| sorts of motion graphics. I'd see it used a lot at gigs to
| create audio-driven visuals. There was even a pretty cool VJ
| app built on it.
|
| I've tried things like Touch Designer and Max MSP but they're
| too heavy to just pick up and play with. QC was the right
| balance between simplicity and power.
| wfn wrote:
| > _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...
| albertoCaroM wrote:
| I loved onivim2
| G_o_D wrote:
| JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) Introduced by netscape navigator 4,
| never came into mainstream as people were reluctant to give up
| CSS
| pflenker wrote:
| 10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential
| of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished
| something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche
| concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.
|
| I'm not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think
| some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens
| would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that
| was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch
| screens.
|
| https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-
| rishabhd wrote:
| Metasploit Incident Response Vehicle (MIRV). Was super pumped
| when it was announced, it later died in obscurity.
| smokel wrote:
| The TUNES [1] operating system and programming language project.
| The reason for its failure are described perfectly on the
| archival website:
|
| _> TUNES started in 1992-95 as an operating system project, but
| was never clearly defined, and it succumbed to design-by-
| committee syndrome and gradually failed. Compared to typical OS
| projects it had very ambitious goals, which you may find
| interesting._
|
| [1] http://tunes.org/
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I had seen it before and I did find it interesting, as well as
| some other ideas from other systems (including Amiga, TRON,
| capability-based systems, etc), and I had some of my own ideas.
| (I had also thought of some similar ideas independently, but
| not all of them.) I do not completely agree with all of the
| ideas. Also, I think that a new computer hardware design can be
| made to support the new operating system (although emulation is
| also possible). (My own operating system idea currently does
| not have a name, and has some similar ideas from TUNES (and
| TRON, etc) and many differences.)
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| evgen wrote:
| I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a
| coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second
| generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions
| at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still
| have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I
| can get them into star mode.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I can totally see clabretro or cathode ray dude doing a video
| with you on this
| threemux wrote:
| Ricochet was super cool. Way ahead of its time. There's even a
| Joel blog post about it:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/12/20/the-ricochet-wirel...
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| Wow, I forgot about this.
|
| It was surprisingly great for the time. Apparently I was one of
| their 4 customers, too!
| tptacek wrote:
| I had a Ricochet modem in '98-99 living in San Francisco. Just
| 10 years later the iPhone was launched, on 3G networks that had
| integer multiples better performance. How would I have been
| better off had Ricochet survived? This seems like a place where
| technological progress went --- extremely --- in the right
| direction.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| CORBA, it got hopelessly complex but it's full potential was
| never reached as the greed heads took it over.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| ADSL in the UK.
|
| BT had this grand vision for basically providing rich multi-media
| through the phone line, but in ~1998. Think a mix of on-demand
| cable and "teleconferencing" with TV based internet (ceefax/red
| button on steriods)
|
| It would have been revolutionary and kick started the UK's jump
| into online rich media.
|
| However it wouldnt have got past the regulators as both sky and
| NTL(now virgin) would have protested loudly.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Dreamweaver or some other real WYSISYG web page editor that could
| maybe deal with very basic JavaScript.
|
| I just wanna make a mostly static site with links in and out of
| my domain. Maybe a light bit of interactivity for things like
| search that autocompletes.
| smashah wrote:
| Theranos
| symlinkk wrote:
| Have to agree. This whole procedure of booking an appointment
| with a GP who then books you an appointment with a lab who then
| takes your blood is a huge waste of time. The technology is
| largely there for people to continuously monitor their health
| in real time, you see this in smartwatches as feature by
| feature slowly trickles in.
| gtsnexp wrote:
| OS/2: the future that never was
| gjvc wrote:
| Google Wave
| hhh wrote:
| 0x10c, would be an amazing mmo.
| Aldipower wrote:
| MySpace, Soundcloud, etc..
|
| A place where artists and consumers could freely communicated and
| socialize without hazzle.
|
| Died because of: Stupidity, commercialisation and walled-
| gardening.
| csomar wrote:
| Namecoin and Decentralized DNS.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Web 3.0 in general is pretty much dead, federal services are
| not a replacement, we really needed decentralized services
| right about now
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)
| pards wrote:
| Tiny Thief [0]. My kids loved that game.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Thief
| UD_Pickups wrote:
| Founder 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?
| Qem wrote:
| FirefoxOS
| renehsz wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| tjchear wrote:
| What's stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the
| everything is a file philosophy?
| c0balt wrote:
| Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a
| file.
|
| One might want to, e. G., have fine control over a how a
| network connection is handled. You can abstract that as a
| file but it becomes increasingly complicated and can make API
| design painful.
| Someone wrote:
| > Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as
| a file.
|
| I would say almost nothing can be cleanly abstracted as a
| file. That's why we got _ioctl_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ioctl), which is a bad API
| (calls mean "do something with this file descriptor" with
| only conventions introducing some consistency)
| naasking wrote:
| Everything can be abstracted as a file, it just may not
| be most efficient interface.
| vacuity wrote:
| If everything can be represented as a _Foo_ or as a _Bar_
| , then this actually clears up the discussion, allowing
| the relative merits of each representation to be
| discussed. If something is a universal paradigm, all the
| better to compare it to alternatives, because one will
| likely be settled on (and then mottled with hacks over
| time; organic abstraction sprawl FTW).
| WD-42 wrote:
| They have to an extent. The /proc file system on Linux is
| directly inspired by plan 9 IIRC. Other things like network
| sockets never got that far and are more related to their BSD
| kin.
| cratermoon wrote:
| There's also /dev/tcp in Linux exec
| 5<>/dev/tcp/www.google.com/80 echo -e "GET /
| HTTP/1.1\r\nhost: www.google.com\r\nConnection:
| close\r\n\r\n" >&5 cat <&5
| Zambyte wrote:
| /dev/tcp does not exist in Linux. ls
| /dev/tcp
|
| It is an abstraction in GNU Bash.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Pardon, you're correct.
| WD-42 wrote:
| It's still really cool. I had no idea that existed
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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
| vacuity wrote:
| I think you have to standardize a basic object system and
| then allow people to build opt-in interfaces on top,
| because any single-level abstraction will quickly be pulled
| in countless directions for as many users.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The fact that everything is not a file. No OS actually
| implements that idea including Plan9. For example,
| directories are not files. Plan9 re-uses a few of the APIs
| for them, but you can't use write() on a directory, you can
| only read them.
|
| Pretending everything is a file was never a good idea and is
| based on an untrue understanding of computing. The
| everything-is-an-object phase the industry went through was
| much closer to reality.
|
| Consider how you represent a GUI window as a file. A file is
| just a flat byte array at heart, so:
|
| 1. What's the data format inside the file? Is it a raw
| bitmap? Series of rendering instructions? How do you
| communicate that to the window server, or vice-versa? What
| about ancillary data like window border styles?
|
| 2. Is the file a real file on a real filesystem, or is it an
| entry in a virtual file system? If the latter then you often
| lose a lot of the basic features that makes "everything is a
| file" attractive, like the ability to move files around or
| arrange them in a user controlled directory hierarchy. VFS
| like procfs are pretty limited. You can't even add your own
| entries like adding symlinks to procfs directories.
|
| 3. How do you receive callbacks about your window? At this
| point you start to conclude that you can't use one file to
| represent a useful object like a window, you'd need at least
| a data and a control file where the latter is some sort of
| socket speaking some sort of RPC protocol. But now you have
| an atomicity problem.
|
| 4. What exactly is the benefit again? You won't be able to
| use the shell to do much with these window files.
|
| And so on. For this reason Plan9's GUI API looked similar to
| that of any other OS: a C library that wrapped the underlying
| file "protocol". Developers didn't interact with the system
| using the file metaphor, because it didn't deliver value.
|
| All the post-UNIX operating system designs ignored this idea
| because it was just a bad one. Microsoft invested heavily in
| COM and NeXT invested in the idea of typed, IDL-defined Mach
| ports.
| mycall wrote:
| Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol lives on inside WSL2.
| cratermoon wrote:
| And kubernetes
| ajross wrote:
| 9P is used everywhere in the VM ecosystem. It's clean and
| simple and well supported by almost all guests.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _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.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937087>, and
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43641480>)
| EdiX wrote:
| 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.
| Shugyousha wrote:
| Strictly speaking, it's not dead. The code is now open source
| and all the rights are with the Plan 9 foundation:
| https://p9f.org/
|
| It's just unlikely that it will get as big of a following as
| Linux has.
| IshKebab wrote:
| And they fixed symlinks.
| Corrado wrote:
| I really liked Google Circles, a feature of Google+ social media.
| It allowed you to target content to specific groups of users. You
| could have a "family" circle or a "work" circle and not have to
| worry about cross posting something accidentally. It was a small
| thing but it made it really easy to manage your posts.
| zweifuss wrote:
| MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro (1997) and Sidewinder Force
| Feedback 2 (USB). You can buy similar today, but nowhere near the
| pricepoint. Also the out of the box support by Windows has
| vanished, and therefore the incentive of game developers to
| include force feedback.
| Hobadee wrote:
| I still have my MS Force Feedback 2, and it still works great!
|
| I heard that some patent troll got a hold of the patent for
| force feedback joysticks, and all manufacturers just gave up on
| them because of the troll. The patent expired recently IIRC, so
| hopefully people will start making them again soon.
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| Firefox panorama: showed a view all your tabs as thumbnails and
| let you organize them into groups visually.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Knowing when to say "no" to a project is an important skill.
|
| One always must define a one sentence goal or purpose, before
| teams think about how to build something.
|
| Cell processors, because most coders can't do parallelism well
|
| Altera consumer FPGA, as they chose behavioral rather than
| declarative best practices... then the Intel merger...
| metastability in complex systems is hard, and most engineers
| can't do parallelism well...
|
| World Wide Web, because social-media and Marketers
|
| Dozens of personal projects, because sometimes things stop being
| fun. =3
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| netflix falcor. the graphql hype killed a much better alternative
| for many usecases. there were only a few missing pieces and
| improvements such as a proxy based adapter layer for popular
| frontend frameworks. Im now the lonely last user hoping to find a
| way to reboot development
| alganet wrote:
| XUL
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Google Reader. Still would use it.
| kimchidude wrote:
| There was a virtual platform through which to learn Chinese
| called 'Zon'. Someone obviously put years of work into it but no
| one ever joined and it turned into this great looking ghost town.
| ozgor wrote:
| Lanyrd.com & slideshare.com
|
| Nothing ever came close to easily find conferences to attend, and
| find the slides and conversation around them
| lormayna wrote:
| * bzr: I always found git too much complex and not really
| ergonomic. I really liked bzr simplicity
|
| * Rethinkdb: I made some small projects with it in the past and
| it was easy to easy
| anticodon wrote:
| Plone CMS. When it appeared in 2001, there was nothing
| comparable. I'm not sure there still is. It was very flexible,
| allowed to build complex websites from components. Many ideas
| were pretty novel, at least I've never seen them in any web
| framework/CMS before. It still exists but nowhere as popular as
| it was in 2000-2010s.
| Chanderton wrote:
| First Class and Hotline. Server/Client.
|
| First Class had broader userbase, such as schools and
| organizations in the groupware/collaborative segment (but also
| Mac user groups and so on).
|
| First Class was a comercial product (the server). It had
| filesharing (UL/DL), it had it's own desktop, mail, chat, IM,
| voice mail and more. Started out on Mac, but later became cross
| platform. Still you can find presentations and setup guides on
| old forgotten University/Schools websites.
|
| Hotline on the other hand, was very easy to setup and also pretty
| lightweight. It had a server tracker. In the beginning it was Mac
| only. Lot's of warez servers, but also different (non-warez)
| communities. It had filesharing (ul/dl from the file area), chat
| and a newsboard. The decline came after it's developers released
| the Windows versions. Most servers became clickbait pron/warez
| with malware etc. People started to move away to web and it
| Hotline basically died out.
|
| Now, there was some open source/clone projects that kept the
| spirit alive. But after a few years, web forums, torrents and
| other p2p-apps took over. But there is some servers running still
| in 2025 and open source server/client software still developed.
|
| Compared to First Class. Hotline was the Wild West. It only took
| 15 minutes to set up your own server and announce it on a server
| tracker (or keep it private).
|
| When i use Discord and other apps/services, it's not hard to
| think of FC/HL. But then, they were solutions of it's time.
|
| More about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
|
| https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6691-hotline-connect-cli...
|
| https://github.com/mierau/hotline
|
| https://github.com/jhalter/mobius
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I ran a hotline server in my formative teenage years (on a
| server in my bedroom with a static ip), and we all hung out
| there. It was absolutely great.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| Google Stadia. I want to try games, but don't want to own a tv,
| desktop, or windows anything.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| Xbox cloud gaming works on Linux via a supported browser
| Angostura wrote:
| Google Wave. It was horrible from a performance point of view,
| but was really interesting to use. Some of its features have made
| their way into the Google docs etc ecosystem and Office 365. But
| not all
| Razengan wrote:
| All my ideas :')
|
| Also, I did not experience them personally, but I love watching
| computing history videos on YouTube, and a lot of the computers
| and operating systems from the 1980s and early 1990s got buried
| too soon, mostly because of their owners being short-sighted
| idiots in not realizing the full potential of what computers and
| video games could become, and having wildly successful hits on
| their hands with legions of faithful fans but not knowing how to
| build on that success or what the fans actually wanted to see in
| updated hardware.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| IPv6 - Everything was supposed to be flat, devices with just one
| unique IP addr.
|
| Nope.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It accounts for half of all Google's customer traffic. It's not
| dead, not by a long shot.
|
| If you have a mobile phone, you're almost certainly using IPv6
| today.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The flat Internet is dead.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Ah, I see the part you're emphasizing.
|
| Yeah. That still stings. It didn't have to be this way.
| _bent wrote:
| 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 capture, beyond the demos of "what if you could
| fix your focus after shooting" of back then.
|
| Beyond high tech, there's a big market for novelty kinda-bad
| cameras like Polaroids or Instax. The first Lytro has the perfect
| form factor for that and was already bulky enough that slapping a
| printer on it wouldn't have hurt.
| s3p wrote:
| Don't phones do this now? I remember Lytro cameras, they were
| really exciting.
| phire wrote:
| Phone cameras fake it.
|
| They don't capture a light field like Lytro did, they capture
| a regular image with a very deep depth of field, extract a
| depth map (usually with machine learning, but some phones
| augment it with stereoscopy or even LIDAR on high end
| iPhones) and then selectively blur based on depth.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| > 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.
| summa_tech wrote:
| In fact, the Lytro Illum (the big one) had a really nice,
| very flexible, bright super-zoom lens. If you ever wondered
| how that was achieved: having the microlens array and a light
| field sensor (1) allows relaxing so many aberration
| constraints on the lens that you could have a light, compact
| super-zoom.
|
| (1) it's not really different focal depths, it's actually
| more like multiple independent apertures at different spatial
| locations, each with a lower resolution sensor behind it -
| stereovision on steroids (stereoids?)
| teddyh wrote:
| I remember being quite disappointed that PowerPC did not,
| contrary to expectations, dethrone the Intel hegemony.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| Visix Vibe. It was a "WYSIWYG"-type visual programming
| environment for .. Java.
|
| It had its own cross platform UI and other frameworks too, so you
| could "write once in Java, and ship on all the things" .. well
| theoretically.
|
| It got abandoned too soon. But it was quite fun to build apps
| with it for a while, almost Delphi- like. I always wonder if it
| went open source, if things would have been different vis a vis
| Flash, etc.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| SGI Irix, and SGI hardware in general, should be revived and
| return to the scene.
|
| I'd love to have an SGI laptop.
|
| Or an SGI cell phone or VR headset.
| ibaikov wrote:
| Artifact by instagram founders. I discovered it (and thought it's
| great) by reading their termination announcement.
| hmcamp wrote:
| Came here to say Google Wave
| carlesfe wrote:
| 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.
| sidcool wrote:
| Google wave
| tuna74 wrote:
| I am the only one that liked stereoscopic 3D. Up the frame rate
| (like in games and some movies) and it looks great!
| devl547 wrote:
| Gnome Conduit software. Used to synchronize a lot of my local-
| first data (calendar, photos, music) to different online
| services. Nice to see in one place where everything goes and what
| is the sync status.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| killed more like it: but I miss the old Sun/Solaris/Sparc days.
|
| make hardware expensive again!
| esafak wrote:
| The prismatic news reader. It solved recommendations before the
| rest, but died because news died, and presumably made little
| money. Their attributed recommendations model is worth emulation.
| I don't remember if they supported both positive- and negative
| feedback, but Google news recommendation today do support
| attributed negative feedback.
| cyanbane wrote:
| Yahoo Pipes.
| teo_zero wrote:
| Gitless. I'm a fan of software that allows you to get your feet
| wet with simple concepts and progressively add complex ones when
| you feel you're ready. Gitless was my introduction to git.
| kmoser wrote:
| Prodigy (the online service). I'm not saying I wish it was still
| alive, but it contained some amazing technology for the time
| (mid- to late 1980s), much of which is now present in web tech:
|
| - Client software that ran a VM which received "objects" from a
| central server (complete with versioning so it would
| intelligently download new objects when necessary). Versions were
| available for IBM (DOS), Windows, and Mac. Think of it as an
| early browser.
|
| - Multiple access points and large internal network for storing
| and delivering content nationwide. This was their proprietary
| CDN.
|
| - Robust programming language (TBOL/PAL) for developing client-
| side apps which could also interact with the servers. Just like
| Javascript.
|
| - Vector (NAPLPS) graphics for fast downloading (remember,
| Prodigy started in the days when modems maxed out at 1200 baud);
| later they added JPG support.
|
| - Vast array of online services: shopping, banking, nationwide
| news, BBSes, mail (before Internet email was popular), even
| airline reservations.
|
| All this was run by a partnership between IBM, Sears, and CBS
| (the latter dropped out early). They were the Google of the time.
| Marsymars wrote:
| The Starling Home Hub. Best way to bring Google/Nest hardware
| into HomeKit. Killed by Trump's tariffs.
| Terretta wrote:
| 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_.
| chucky_z wrote:
| 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.
| raphinou wrote:
| Docker Swarm, so much easier to use than k8s. Still my preferred
| solution for hosting web apps.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| Zymotv
| tech234a wrote:
| Cooperative Linux (coLinux) seemed like a cool concept. It let
| you run the Linux kernel alongside the Windows kernel while
| allowing both full access to the hardware. Unfortunately it
| hasn't fully made the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Linux
|
| [2]: http://www.colinux.org/
| syncr0 wrote:
| Pocket. Never actually "read" anything later. But the dopamine
| hit of saving something with the click of a button to maybe find
| it later or tag. Yes there are solid alternatives, but Pocket had
| something sentimental about it.
| Linux-Fan wrote:
| The signature function of the German ID card ("neuer
| Personalausweis").
|
| Its 2025 and we still haven't solved secure online identification
| and we are still not using end-to-end encryption for e-mail, most
| e-mail is not even signed.
|
| Interaction with state agencies is still mostly via paper-based
| mail. The only successfully deployed online offer of the german
| state administration seems to be the online portal for tax
| filings "elster.de".
|
| The use of a private key on the national ID card would have been
| able to provide all this and more using standard protocols.
|
| At least for identification, there is an expensive effort to re-
| design something similar in a smartphone-centric way and with
| less security and not based on standard approaches called "EUDI
| wallets".
|
| For encrypted communication the agreed-on standard seems to be
| "log in to our portal with HTTPS and use our proprietary
| interfaces to send and receive messages"...
|
| Why did it die: Too expensive (~30EUR/year for certificate,
| >100EUR for reader one time) and too complicated to use. Not
| enough positve PR. Acceptance at state-provided sites was added
| too late. In modern times, everything must be done with the
| smartphone, handling of physical cards is considered backwards
| hence this is probably not going to come back...
|
| Edit: Anothther simiarly advanced technoloy that also seems to
| have been replaced by inferiror substitute smartphone: HBCI
| banking (a standard...) using your actual bank card + reader
| device to authenticate transactions... replaced by proprietary
| app on proprietary smartphone OS...
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| The Lisp machine. I love Lisp, and I love the idea of every part
| of the system being a Lisp program that can be patched and
| modified at runtime by the user. Obviously in this day and age
| some security mechanisms would need to be introduced, but the
| system design is my hacker's dream.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| - Apple AirPort. Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions
| that "just work" to fill its place, and those are the Nest/Google
| things that have bs attached like mic+assistant. Unifi is too
| hard for consumers.
|
| - Gnome2 dropped from Ubuntu in favor of Unity
|
| - Ford Crown Victoria
| sedawkgrep wrote:
| > - Ford Crown Victoria
|
| You can't just drop that and not say why...
| al_borland wrote:
| > Took a long time for advanced wifi solutions that "just work"
| to fill its place
|
| What is the modern-day successor? You only mentioned what isn't
| good.
|
| I loved the AirPort routers. I found it odd that Apple exited
| the market just as everyone else entered.
|
| I ended up getting a Linksys as a troubleshooting step when I
| was having internet issues. I don't think the AirPort was the
| issue, but after migrating, it didn't seem worth going back to
| a router that was effectively end of life.
|
| I still remember many years ago having a Sonos system and
| calling support due to some issues I was having. When they
| asked what type of router I had and I mentioned it was an
| AirPort, they immediately moved on to something else being the
| issue. The reputation was so solid that support wouldn't even
| bother troubleshooting it.
| educasean wrote:
| Google Stadia.
|
| They had built a solid streaming platform for low latency cloud
| gaming but failed hard on actually having interesting games to
| play on it. You just can't launch a gaming platform with a
| handful of games that have been available everywhere and expect
| it to succeed.
| modzu wrote:
| dials and knobs
| preezer wrote:
| Easy to answer.... webOS
| csense wrote:
| Java Applets.
|
| All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability
| to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with
| your server via WebRTC?
|
| Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999.
|
| If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more
| visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of
| integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a
| properly designed sandbox that wasn't full of security
| vulnerabilities?
|
| Java and the JVM could have co-evolved with JavaScript as a
| second language of the Web. Now Java applets are well and truly
| dead; the plugin's been removed from browsers, and even the
| plugin API's that allowed it to function have been deprecated and
| removed (I think; I'm not 100% sure about that).
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late.
| https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...
| Wistar wrote:
| I sure liked Aldus Freehand a lot more than Adobe Illustrator
| although it has been so long that I don't remember specifics
| other than I generally understood how to use it a lot better than
| Illustrator.
| Einenlum wrote:
| Maybe 10 years ago I discovered Stumble upon, a website which
| allowed you to randomly get a page on the internet based on your
| previous likes/dislikes and interests. I absolutely loved it. You
| could find some very niche pages. I guess this is what Kagi Small
| Web tries to achieve somehow, but without the personalization.
|
| They replaced StumbleUpon with "Mix", whatever it is. Probably
| because they didn't know how to earn money from it. Sad.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-12 23:01 UTC)