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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how many of those product links are dead just 6yrs later.

Electronics (or any "hardware") companies suck at maintaining links. Which is bad for SEO and bad for potential customers. Even if the products are old, at least mark the page as older.

It's not like people stopped using those old products and I can still find almost all of them for sale on craigslist. Particularly the audio equipment.

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As the person who runs usesthis.com, let me tell you it's a massive pain in the ass (I have a JSON file for every item I link to, and so many just... die.)

Have you considered linking to a Wayback Machine archive page instead?

It's funny, I was seriously considering doing just that a day or so ago. I think I might.

You could have a service that runs in the background (say once a week) on all outbound links that checks for 404s and then automatically updates the outbound link to the archive.org link. That or have both links.

Have you considered automatically submitting the links to the archive.org save API? Unfortunately it doesn't support HEAD anymore, only GET but basically just request this URL:

https://web.archive.org/save/$URLoflink

Ooh, neat!

The Sinology NAS was 404 by Nov. 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20131124124623/http://www.synolo...

Sad.

Joe did talk about wanting a web where addresses are directly associated with an exact piece of content (i.e. addressable via a hash) and be able to live forever through some sort of distributed web.

I really hope that one day that vision becomes a true reality, I know there are lots of projects trying to tackle it !

The vision of the mentioned chandler project captured my interest. http://www.chandlerproject.org anyone knows if there exists continuation in spirit?

Not a direct answer to your request, but you may also be interested in this book called “Dreaming in Code” [1] which documents the reasons and the whys of why the Chandler project failed, a book written by some of the people directly involved (if I remember right) and a book that I’ve also heard that is quite excellent (I’ve personally didn’t read it yet even though it has been on my to-read list for quite some tome, I did read though in real time the blog posts of some of the developers working on the project).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcenden...

A start: https://joearms.github.io/#2018-12-26%20Fun%20with%20the%20T...

And what happened to these interesting projects. Chandler was one that excited me as a teenager.

Who's thinking differently today?

Well, where did "thinking differently" got the Chandler team?

Nowhere. But that does not say there's no merit in thinking differently.

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