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

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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daxfohl ◴[12 Oct 25 00:13 UTC] No.45553954[source]▶
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.?

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1. znpy ◴[12 Oct 25 08:40 UTC] No.45556497[source]▶
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.