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Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
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Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#82The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
That's profoundly disappointing, I agree, but in a sense perhaps we geeks only have ourselves to blame. We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security, despite having decades to do so. We also didn't start routinely educating the next generation of kids in how useful and powerful programming skills are. Consequently, for many people personal computing has been reduced to little more than a mechanism for consuming online content and for relatively simple communications using a few trusted channels.
The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#83The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…
2017 was the biggest year for blockchain by a huge margin by many metrics (see https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ ). there is now 200 billion dollars in this space, give it another year or two. Some things will shake out for sure, probably a lot of it, but many efforts will lead to production applications.
That's the thing. Blockchain tech is still pretty early stage in terms of reaching the general consumer. Yes, Bitcoin has been around for 8+ years now, but it takes a damn long time for a brand new type of technology to mature and work out the kinks. Ethereum has only been around for about 3 (2014).
It's easy to look at the space right now and see that it isn't currently viable, but that sentiment completely ignores the passage of time and the fact that we are moving towards the goal of general applicability.
Yes, there will probably be a 2000's style shakeout of all the failed or mislead or me-too attempts, but the fact that there are so many projects popping up should tell you that we are still trying to figure out what we can and should do with blockchain.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#84Segway and Code Morphing Software by Transmeta.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#85Spaced repetition is the most efficient way to learn associations. Thought, it's still barely.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#86I thought this was going to be 'The VR Thread.' I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable deci…
It depends on your metric for success. VR already has research applications and artists are using it for 3D modeling. VR gaming is neat, but in my expectations, not going to be the core focus of the technology.
Generally, VR is about natural control of a simulated environment. I suspect within a few years, when our hardware gets better/is stable and more groups are developing applications, you'll see VR become a central component of more systems.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#87Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#88The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…
yep. Haven't seen a single application that isn't primarily aimed at raising investment money. It's Ponzi's all the way down as far as I can tell.
That may change, of course.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#89Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#90Optical computing. I remember talking to a bloke working on it back in 1990, and he said they had a working optical transistor so all the hard bits were done. Soon we'd have computers that used multiple frequencies of light to process operations concurrently on the same hardware!
Still waiting...