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End-of-life dates (endoflife.date)
219 points by chynkm on Feb 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments



I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see, but all there is is a pitch for an end of life app and a link to GitHub and other supporting sites that talk about a project vaguely but don’t provide any content or examples.

Is there an issue with a data store or does the site not work in Safari (iOS)?


At least in Firefox (Android) if you tap in the top right corner (there is nothing visible there, but just tap in the very corner) a list of projects appears.


what on eartg


Peak minimalism


This works!


Same for me, using Firefox on Android. The navigation is not visible. Quick workaround: Enable desktop mode in your browser.



Thought the same. Chrome mobile rendering doesn't have a menu to browse by. Hopefully they will fix it soon.


This is a bug, we’re working on fixing it: https://github.com/endoflife-date/endoflife.date/issues/886


Past discussion:

"Show HN: Endoflife.date – Site with EOL dates of everything" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033728 (248 points | May 2019 | 80 comments)


That name. I clicked thinking it was about people in a hospice dating. Glad it's nothing so morbid.


Me too, mostly because it's literally one of the projects on my project idea list. I wouldn't call that morbid though; I think it'd be beautiful to support terminally ill people finding love with less worry about leaving the other party behind.


I expected this to be a form where I could put in some personal data and it would calculate the date of my death. I'm slightly disappointed.


I thought it was dates in which people prophesized end of the world, including dates of actual end of world (e.g. heat death of universe)


Me too.

Reading other comments, it appears once again that it's unfortunate that date designates both a reference to a particular day, and a romantic encounter.


EOLdates may have been a more easily interpreted name to tech people.


I occasionally see some hospice queries leading to the website in search console. I hadn’t considered the other meanings till I noticed these in the reports.


Not EXACTLY sure if applicable, but here goes:

* I used to manage EOL notifications for a semiconductor co. There is an industry-std process for doing so.

* EOL announcements came with pre-warning timelines. 12 months' warning, for example.

* EOL dates were usually shared only with verified customers to keep the churn to a minimum. Alternative suppliers (with SKUs) were encouraged.

* Product lines with EOL data was kept on a firewalled site for sales & customer lookups.

* There were a couple of 3rd party & startup cos that tried to aggregate EOL dates, with minimal success.


Small nitpick - the search form doesn't stand out as input, it just looks like random header text.


Ah, the joys of the English language. I read the headline and thought

“Now that’s a creative twist on marriage.”


The mobile version of this is unusable on Firefox for Android.


Same on iPhone/safari.


Workaround (FF/Android): Switch to Desktop mode.


The bricks my house is made of are now 119 years old. They haven't received any updates or substantial maintenance. The guy who made them is dead. His company is gone.

Yet they are still functional and secure. They still work with the latest screws. If I had to switch out my bricks every 5 years, I don't think I'd have any time or money left for the rest of life.

Can we make software that's a little more like my bricks?


Do you really want to? Your house probably didn't have electric lights when it was made. Your house probably didn't have telephone, much less cable TV wires, or ethernet. Note that wired telephone is a technology that came and went during the life of your house, today you may not care, but 50 years ago that would have been an issue. I'm not sure if your house would have had plumbing or not, even if it did the bathroom (singular - today most families want several) and kitchen were at best outdated. I have no doubt that your house has poor insulation. I suspect that your house has had several major renovations over the years, and the basic facts of the original structure limit what you can do and so it is still dated (though maybe in an endearing way)

I'm starting to think the Japanese have the right idea: build the house to last 20 years and rebuild often. Some parts of modern house design are fads that I hope to see die, but there are a lot of parts about modern houses that make them much better than old ones.


A single brick is more like a line of code than an application or library.

Applications are more like buildings which need to be maintained. Perhaps you could consider it a multi-use building with many tenants and sometimes under attack.


While not 120 years old, we have code in production that was written 30 years ago and runs just fine.

It will be replaced this year however, not because there's anything wrong with it besides code quality, but because it generates files for a system that'll be changed to something entirely different this year.

If the ground around your house physically changed completely every 5 years, then maybe you'd switch out bricks more often as well...


> Can we make software that's a little more like my bricks?

Excellent. This is a great analogy!

- Did the weather in your area change? Maybe you live in Texas and experienced an abnormally huge freeze in 2020 which cause most people to have to replace plumbing and water heaters?

- Maybe you are experiencing more hurricanes than normal and so flooding has become more likely. Now you need to put your house up on stilts?

- What about that new Tesla you might have bought that needs a 240v charger? Can you do this without ripping open the wall?

Software entropy is not just because the software changes, but because the environment changes.


- Did your neighborhood become a war zone?


That's easy. Just write software that doesn't do anything.


A little more related in my opinion is enterprise hardware. I recently started a new career managing software and hardware acquisitions, including their maintenance, for a very large organization. When OEM support and maintenance is required by policy, the EOL renders that associated hardware useless unless you're willing to maintain 3rd party maintenance. Which, from my understanding, even patches for vulns such as the recent log4 vuln would not be covered. One could argue that this limitation is created by such organizational policies, I guess, but it makes the whole industry look more like a leasing structure with purchase prices to me.


Everything has a lifetime. Individual bricks just have a pretty long one. Your building overall probably has a much, much shorter lifetime than you think, and likely has received updates and substantial maintenance over the decades, if anything at least to keep it up to code.

Maintenance is one way of extending the lifetime of things. Otherwise, your building would regularly be torn down and rebuilt. This is often the case, when maintenance is no longer enough. That's the best case scenario, too, as the worst case is it collapses of its own volition, potentially with you in it.

Everything has a lifetime: https://tildes.net/~talk/109v/thoughts_on_lifetimes_limits_a...


The bricks may be fine another couple of centuries or more. Brick walls eventually become piles of bricks if they are not maintained, though. How many times do you figure someone has done tuck pointing on the mortar in 12 decades?


Perhaps if you follow Unix philosophy, you can write such software.


Related: I hate that Apple doesn't give end of life dates for their OS releases. Especially since Safari is artificially tied to them IE-style.


It's cool; honestly, I didn't know Python 3.6 support ended two months ago while I was still using it.


Would be nice for this to have some sort of iCal integration.


We have a PR open for this, so it should be coming soon. Along with RSS feeds.


Nice to have this as an aggregate of EOLs. Also didn't realize AL2 was hitting EOL so soon. I hope they have a better upgrade path for AL2022 than they did for AL2, which was "I don't know, figure it out" if I recall.


This is a super useful resource for anyone writing libraries that need to be compatible with a range of "all currently-supported versions" of something. I use it all the time.


I don't know why I was expecting Hospice Tinder.


Very very nice. Confirmed a few dates I knew and some I wasn't aware of.

Maybe helpful note that Windows 7 is not technically EOL but ESU

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/extended-secu...

January 10, 2023


With the caveat that ESU (Extended security Updates) cost companies increasing $$$ for every year after extended support ended.


So, whos gonna find the longest concrete date right there? I have one for 22 years...

3.5 SP1 14 years ago (19 Nov 2007) Ends in 6 years and 10 months (09 Jan 2029)


Very handy. Will keep it bookmarked for reference.


thought this was a dating app for hospice patients


there's a unicorn idea right there


Meta: perhaps hyphenating 'end-of-life' or including 'EOL' in the title might make it clearer to the reader on what this is about. I don't know if it was just me trying to figure out what those 'life dates' were from the title.


Interesting that you read it as "end of life-dates". I read it as "end-of-life dates" and thinking it was about very old people or terminally ill people dating each other and supporting themselves up through the end.


Yeah I thought someone was capitalizing on the trope that old folks homes are basically orgy shacks and making a Tinder competitor for the space. You get a lot of people together dormitory style that have lost their life partner already, can't get pregnant, in a lot cases take a 'well it won't last that much longer anyway' approach to STIs, and have modern access to boner pills, and you have a recipe for a lot of casual hookups.


Exactly what I thought it was as well.


“Support cycles” or something would be more self explanatory.


I thought it was dating for people who were terminally ill...


Hyphenated above. Thanks!




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