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Dammit not inbox. I've been using it since the beginning. You know this is the kind of stuff that prevents me from diving too deep into there tech and products.

Dammit not inbox. I've been using it since the beginning. You know this is the kind of stuff that prevents me from diving too deep into there tech and products. I love flutter but I'm scared about its fate. Flutter, Dart, Fuchsia these are some great technologies but they might end up in bin some day. In the end, I tell myself, I'm just a user. Imagine what must be the state of developers who spent years working on these products but then this happens in entire industry. It's just I expected better from Google.

dingdingdang 8y ago
This is why we need truly distributed webapps rather than monolithic tied-to-domain apps. Doing this right is a hard problem and many of current solutions are still essentially centralized despite their reliance on certain aspects of P2P.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Open standards are superior to the complexity of distributed webapps. I can port my Gmail account to Fastmail with a few clicks. There's no lock in with my email data. I can put my mail anywhere! That should be the goal of all hosted data; portability, so you're never beholden to a SaaS provider.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    But this is also starting to not be true. Gmail is very slowly adding features not in smtp/imap and one day they might just break away and have their closed email. This happened on multiple occasions with xmpp. At one point you could write from icq to hangouts to facebook messanger. After companies gathered critical mass of users they turned off federation. This is one of the main reasons people use facebook messanger (almost everyone has it) and this might happen to gmail quite easily. Almost everyone had gmail at some point so this idea is pretty possible. Many people would then keep gmail account just to comunicate with people who dont have email.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I hate to beat the dead horse as I often do on HN, but the support of open standards requires constant vigilance. If Gmail begins to "wall the garden off", you must move to a more open provider (such as Fastmail, but any provider providing standards compliant email works).
rch 8y ago
These things come and go. One could have been just as wrong to focus on Silverlight, OpenSolaris, SmallTalk, etc, etc, etc, or even your own company's ABI.... And is it really wrong to spend a couple of years becoming an expert Plan 9 user just because it doesn't take over the world? I still think it's all (mostly) time well spent.
- bluehazed 8y ago
  It is never a waste of time to become a Plan 9 user!
- chaostheory 8y ago
  The risk is less when the technology is open source. With open source, at the very least you or someone else can help steward the technology if it's that important to your company.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >And is it really wrong to spend a couple of years becoming an expert Plan 9 user just because it doesn't take over the world? I still think it's all (mostly) time well spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
  - sterlind 8y ago
    it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail. I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed. Google's tech stack was pioneered by systems programmers who built their career writing for supercomputers, forced to target commodity hardware. Patterns have a much longer shelf-life than their originating products.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail. It might be hard but it's also necessary. That's true for many other things that are hard. What would the opposite be? Have people adopting any new technology and losing several years of their lives studying a doomed fad because without evaluating its long term potential and opportunity cost because it's "hard" and "architectures fade in and out of popularity"? Instead, we should encourage people to do the hard thing, and evaluate things that they intend to study and their opportunity cost before they devote any substantial time with them. Some will still get it wrong and invest in the wrong tech, but overall doing due diligence before jumping in will be better than just blindly going for whatever catches their fancy or is hyped. >I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed. That was their job and they were paid for it. And Plan9 was also their own creation and original research. That's not the same as some third party devoting themselves to a new technology just because it looks cool, it's hyped at the moment, etc.
h1d 8y ago
These days, I dig for self hosted version for all my needs. It's an interesting task to find there are many interesting projects. I would build one if something is completely missing.

dingdingdang 8y ago

This is why we need truly distributed webapps rather than monolithic tied-to-domain apps. Doing this right is a hard problem and many of current solutions are still essentially centralized despite their reliance on certain aspects of P2P.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Open standards are superior to the complexity of distributed webapps. I can port my Gmail account to Fastmail with a few clicks. There's no lock in with my email data. I can put my mail anywhere! That should be the goal of all hosted data; portability, so you're never beholden to a SaaS provider.
- omnimus 8y ago
  But this is also starting to not be true. Gmail is very slowly adding features not in smtp/imap and one day they might just break away and have their closed email. This happened on multiple occasions with xmpp. At one point you could write from icq to hangouts to facebook messanger. After companies gathered critical mass of users they turned off federation. This is one of the main reasons people use facebook messanger (almost everyone has it) and this might happen to gmail quite easily. Almost everyone had gmail at some point so this idea is pretty possible. Many people would then keep gmail account just to comunicate with people who dont have email.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I hate to beat the dead horse as I often do on HN, but the support of open standards requires constant vigilance. If Gmail begins to "wall the garden off", you must move to a more open provider (such as Fastmail, but any provider providing standards compliant email works).

rch 8y ago

These things come and go. One could have been just as wrong to focus on Silverlight, OpenSolaris, SmallTalk, etc, etc, etc, or even your own company's ABI.... And is it really wrong to spend a couple of years becoming an expert Plan 9 user just because it doesn't take over the world? I still think it's all (mostly) time well spent.

bluehazed 8y ago
It is never a waste of time to become a Plan 9 user!
chaostheory 8y ago
The risk is less when the technology is open source. With open source, at the very least you or someone else can help steward the technology if it's that important to your company.
coldtea 8y ago
>And is it really wrong to spend a couple of years becoming an expert Plan 9 user just because it doesn't take over the world? I still think it's all (mostly) time well spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
- sterlind 8y ago
  it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail. I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed. Google's tech stack was pioneered by systems programmers who built their career writing for supercomputers, forced to target commodity hardware. Patterns have a much longer shelf-life than their originating products.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail. It might be hard but it's also necessary. That's true for many other things that are hard. What would the opposite be? Have people adopting any new technology and losing several years of their lives studying a doomed fad because without evaluating its long term potential and opportunity cost because it's "hard" and "architectures fade in and out of popularity"? Instead, we should encourage people to do the hard thing, and evaluate things that they intend to study and their opportunity cost before they devote any substantial time with them. Some will still get it wrong and invest in the wrong tech, but overall doing due diligence before jumping in will be better than just blindly going for whatever catches their fancy or is hyped. >I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed. That was their job and they were paid for it. And Plan9 was also their own creation and original research. That's not the same as some third party devoting themselves to a new technology just because it looks cool, it's hyped at the moment, etc.

h1d 8y ago

These days, I dig for self hosted version for all my needs. It's an interesting task to find there are many interesting projects. I would build one if something is completely missing.