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

56•ofalkaed•6h ago
Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.

Comments

snovymgodym•6h ago
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_•5h ago
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•5h ago
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.
gmuslera•6h ago
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•5h ago
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
JoshTriplett•1h ago
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.
bad_haircut72•6h ago
Riak
fennecbutt•5h ago
Google Glass. Thanks society.

People always fail to see something that is an inevitability. Humans lack foresight because they don't like change.

nickthegreek•5h ago
Wild that people would downvote your low stake personal opinion given as a direct ask from OP. I am 100% with you.
bdangubic•1h ago
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•1h ago
Google Glass was so much before its time, it might be reinvented a few more times and abandoned again before finally becoming a success.
toast0•26m ago
Google Wear is pretty much Google Glass on your wrist, so you don't burn out your eyes looking up and to the side.
cr125rider•5h ago
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•5h ago
Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.

Are you referring to the SWF file format?

billrobertson42•5h ago
I took it as sarcasm.
netsharc•5h ago
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•3h ago
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•2h ago
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•1h ago
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•1h ago
I for one am so glad Flash died. At one point I dreaded navigating to a new website because of it.
haunter•5h ago
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•5h ago
I've thought about this too. Imagine all the drama the US government could've avoided if Vine had won over TikTok!
lazyasciiart•2h ago
With Elon running it? He probably would have actively sold it to china.
geoffpado•1h ago
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?
geor9e•5h ago
I will never forgive twitter for this catch and kill of a platform so full of life
burnt-resistor•1h ago
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•58m ago
Amusingly Periscope was their clone of Meerkat which was briefly popular before they killed it.
dpcan•5h ago
Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.
MontyCarloHall•5h ago
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•5h ago
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.

jcastro•5h ago
OS/2 my beloved.
hagbard_c•5h ago
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•5h ago
It ran lots of banking ATMs that were not hacked.
nickthegreek•5h ago
I was super excited for BeOS myself.
walterbell•4h ago
BeOS-lineage Binder IPC continues in Android.
Froedlich•2h ago
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.

walterbell•4h ago
OS/2 ISV Stardock gave us Win8 start button.
BirAdam•2h ago
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•1h ago
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!
ofalkaed•5h ago
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

dannyobrien•5h ago
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•1h ago
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.
exp1orer•5h ago
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•5h ago
Same with Vale: https://vale.dev
alexeldeib•4h ago
ouch, last “recent update” in 2023. Any idea what happened?
valorzard•1h ago
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•11m ago
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•5h ago
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•5h ago
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•5h ago
SMIL. Nothing comparable for seamless media stream composition, 20 years later.
Lerc•5h ago
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•38m ago
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.

toast0•32m ago
It lives on as KaiOS. Has limited success as a low end phone platform now.
holysantamaria•5h ago
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•5h ago
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•17m ago
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•5h ago
Lotus Agenda, Ecco Pro and Chandler. 1980s AI-like human organization.
kristianc•5h ago
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•5h ago
Still around as "Here Maps"
ahartmetz•5h ago
Started to suck pretty badly not long after getting acquired by German car companies. It used to be good.
pzo•5h ago
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•2h ago
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•1h ago
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•5h ago
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•16m ago
So much drama there too, but it's designed to attract drmas
jzellis•5h ago
Google Reader. We could have had a great society, man.
uzername•2h ago
The loss of Google Reader really does feel like the beginning of the end in retrospect.
bxparks•5h ago
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•4h ago
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.
tomComb•2h ago
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.
nja•2h ago
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•1h ago
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.

daxfohl•2h ago
Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....
bdangubic•1h ago
yup, losing 0.000087% year-over-year so in 865 billion years it’ll be dead :)
bxparks•1h ago
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•46m ago
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.
bigthymer•1h ago
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•1h ago
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?

socalgal2•1h ago
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•1h ago
Apple Maps added a Visited Places (beta) feature recently.
dheera•1h ago
Isn't it "Google TV Streamer" now?
bxparks•1h ago
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•21m ago
I wish there was some law that requires open-sourcing firmware and flashing tools if a company decides to EOL a product ...
socalgal2•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•56m ago
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.
nine_k•13m ago
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.

rhodey•5h ago
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•2h ago
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•4h ago
I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.
daxfohl•4h ago
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•2h ago
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•2h ago
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•1h ago
> 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•50m ago
Yes. And fittingly, Docker was born out of a Heroku competitor.
xnx•4h ago
OpenSocial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial
kurtis_reed•4h ago
Meteor
vlasky•1h ago
It's alive and well!
kurtis_reed•4h ago
Windows Phone
Froedlich•2h ago
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.
jmclnx•3h ago
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•2h ago
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.

mikewarot•3h ago
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!
mbirth•3h ago
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•2h ago
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.

BirAdam•2h ago
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•1h ago
wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing
burnt-resistor•1h ago
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.
jwpapi•1h ago
Discord is function wise the best now...
socalgal2•1h ago
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.
drnick1•1h ago
Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and closed source) isn't.
edanm•51m ago
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.

coreyhn•1h ago
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•10m ago
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.

dunham•1h ago
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•13m ago
Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.
commandersaki•1h ago
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?).
burnt-resistor•1h ago
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.
JimDabell•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•1h ago
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.

btown•1h ago
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•1h ago
> 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•31m ago
> 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.

drnick1•1h ago
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.
friendofafriend•1h ago
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

harel•1h ago
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.
piskov•55m ago
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•45m ago
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•24m ago
Did Silverlight have the same security issues as Flash?
Rohansi•24m ago
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?
catskull•53m ago
Google Inbox
Towaway69•39m ago
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”.

satisfice•4m ago
Betamax. Because I bought a player and it gave better quality video.

Meta Superintelligence's surprising first paper

https://paddedinputs.substack.com/p/meta-superintelligences-surprising
186•skadamat•5h ago•77 comments

Show HN: rift – a tiling window manager for macOS

https://github.com/acsandmann/rift
58•atticus_•4h ago•22 comments

Vancouver Stock Exchange: Scam capital of the world (1989) [pdf]

https://scamcouver.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/scam-capital.pdf
58•thomassmith65•5h ago•30 comments

Heroin Addicts Often Seem Normal

https://justismills.substack.com/p/heroin-addicts-often-seem-normal
51•surprisetalk•6h ago•33 comments

Is Odin just a more boring C?

https://dayvster.com/blog/is-odin-just-a-more-boring-c/
42•birdculture•9h ago•32 comments

China's New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten US Defense Supply Chains

https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-new-rare-earth-and-magnet-restrictions-threaten-us-defense-s...
99•stopbulying•3h ago•79 comments

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

56•ofalkaed•6h ago•136 comments

Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/11/0238213/microsofts-onedrive-begins-testing-face-reco...
499•dmitrygr•10h ago•185 comments

LineageOS 23

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/
121•cdesai•5h ago•45 comments

Google blocks Android hack that let Pixel users enable VoLTE anywhere

https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-ims-broken-october-update-3606444/
104•josephcsible•5h ago•28 comments

My First Murder

https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/skip-hollandsworth-new-book-she-kills/
39•speckx•5d ago•5 comments

Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/10/06/datablocks-white-label-drives/
160•thomasjb•5d ago•96 comments

How Apple designs a virtual knob (2012)

https://jherrm.github.io/knobs/
123•gregsadetsky•4d ago•78 comments

Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05096
21•jinqueeny•5h ago•1 comments

The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/twin-towers-construction-photographs/
207•kinderjaje•5d ago•100 comments

Windows Subsystem for FreeBSD

https://github.com/BalajeS/WSL-For-FreeBSD
230•rguiscard•21h ago•92 comments

How Kyoto, Japan Became the Loveliest Tourist-Trap

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/kyoto-japan-tourism-attraction-travel-tourist-trap.html
4•trevortheblack•2d ago•1 comments

The <output> Tag

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag
737•todsacerdoti•20h ago•166 comments

Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial

https://github.com/anthropics/prompt-eng-interactive-tutorial
49•cjbarber•10h ago•5 comments

The World's 2.75B Buildings

https://tech.marksblogg.com/building-footprints-gba.html
13•marklit•4d ago•4 comments

Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing
239•skevy•14h ago•113 comments

People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/people-regret-buying-amazon-smart-displays-after-being-bo...
238•croes•11h ago•123 comments

Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/09/superpowers/
318•Ch00k•21h ago•170 comments

A Guide for WireGuard VPN Setup with Pi-Hole Adblock and Unbound DNS

https://psyonik.tech/posts/a-guide-for-wireguard-vpn-setup-with-pi-hole-adblock-and-unbound-dns/
43•pSYoniK•9h ago•6 comments

GNU Health

https://www.gnuhealth.org/about-us.html
369•smartmic•13h ago•103 comments

Rating 26 years of Java changes

https://neilmadden.blog/2025/09/12/rating-26-years-of-java-changes/
169•PaulHoule•10h ago•188 comments

The story of X-Copy on the Amiga

https://spillhistorie.no/2025/10/10/the-story-of-x-copy-on-the-amiga/
20•onename•7h ago•1 comments

A quiet change to RSA

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/10/06/a-quiet-change-to-rsa/
111•ibobev•5d ago•35 comments

Beyond indexes: How open table formats optimize query performance

https://jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2025/10/8/beyond-indexes-how-open-table-formats-optimize-query-p...
31•jandrewrogers•3d ago•1 comments

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid

https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/neighbor-shielded-7-year-old-during-south-sho...
8•perihelions•1h ago•0 comments