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Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
101–110 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#102James Orlin Grabbe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Orlin_Grabbe
His Digital Monetary Trusts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Monetary_Trust
The End of Ordinary Money https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/money1.htm
Cyc an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning.
The project was started in 1984 by Douglas Lenat at MCC and is developed by the Cycorp company. Parts of the project are released as OpenCyc, which provides an API, RDF endpoint, and data dump under an open source license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
Prolog, Backward chaining, forward chaining, opportunisitic reasoning.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#103SpaceX. Of course they still need time, work and funding. But they have a working product ahead of their competitors that clearly shows a path to the future of space exploration and colonization.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#104APL comes to my mind.
As in, it is still 20 years ahead of its time, or was it's moment somewhere in the 80s?
20 years ago they redesigned already built products to make them more consumer friendly (nothing wrong with that, pretty cool).
Now it's mostly lagging behind and making their products less consumer friendly.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can figure that out, let me know and maybe I'll loop you in on the billions generated :) Seriously though, most people could not conceive of what the internet of today would have looked like 20 years ago, so I'm thinking it's going to be something similar for crypto. Remember that some, like ethereum specifically, are applications platforms for running arbitrary code in a distributed way. Exactly what applicat…
Well, to be honest, search engines, emails, ICQ, amazon, porn, mp3s and DivX came pretty quickly! Facebook, Uber and Wikipedia come to my mind as a later thing that was difficult to predict. Today's internet is better, we can even use it from a toilet stall with a device that fits in one's pocket! But is it really that different from the late 90s? I'm not so sure.
From a business perspective, its worlds different. Snapchat (say what you will), with its multi-billion dollar valuation, wouldn't have existed until we had the ability to get internet from a toilet stall with a pocket-sized device. My company, a SaaS for farmers, would not have been as valuable to our customers had mobile devices not been around, and people still had to use dial-up.
The internet used to be a bunch of usenet forums for geeks, now everybody uses it to some degree, which means that lots of businesses with real-world value are possible where they weren't before.
For crypto, anonymous payments, speculation trading, and currency exchange are the immediate innovations, but the Facebooks and Ubers of crypto have yet to be created.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#106The various object-capability projects alive right now, like Tahoe-LAFS, Monte, Cap'n Proto, Sandstorm, and Genode, are all very much future technology. Imagine: * No accounts, no passwords, just secret keycaps * Instead of messy and complex role-based tables, capabilities always know exactly what they are capable of doing * No more confused deputies * Fine-grained trust
Here is a book of case studies of object-capability projects in the 1960s 70s and 80s, including several products from big computer companies: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
I didn't know you were on HN. Tangential to the discussion, thanks for your book The Way of Z. That was one of the first books I read in my efforts to understand and formal methods and specifications.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#107Lilium - The world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing jet. ( https://lilium.com/ ) Neuralink - Develops high bandwidth and safe brain-machine interfaces. ( https://neuralink.com/ ) Magic Leap - Mixed Reality ( https://magicleap.com ) Crispr-Cas9 - A unique technology that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence.…
Magic leap looks more, and more like smoke an mirrors these days.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow that all sounds awesome! Can you link to the Github repos with the code and spec?
Generally, reading MSDN docs is a much nicer experience than reading most OSS sources, or specs, not to mention collecting workarounds from the ocean of issue tracker comments. However I do agree OSS is important and great, especially when times that you do need to debug & trace into source code. Disclaimer: I have't developed around M$ platform for 10+ years now, not sure if the situation has changed
> Generally, reading MSDN docs is a much nicer experience than reading most OSS sources, or specs, not to mention collecting workarounds from the ocean of issue tracker comments.
This is a big part of what helped PHP take off in my mind. The documentation was fantastic! In the early 2000's reading php docs online was going to give you tons of clues and hints if you bothered to look at them.
EDIT: just for laughs I went and looked at the PHP manual. It still has some of the 13 year old references in there. That might be good or bad. I haven't spent much time with PHP in the last 3 years so YMMV.
No one values good documentation as much as they should.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in, it is still 20 years ahead of its time, or was it's moment somewhere in the 80s?
20 years ago they redesigned already built products to make them more consumer friendly (nothing wrong with that, pretty cool). Now it's mostly lagging behind and making their products less consumer friendly.
Woah dude I meant the programming language.