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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?

#132

Post by williamscales »

narrator wrote: post #69
the_decider wrote: post #6

Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.

The problem with user supplied metadata is users lie. For example, the "keywords" meta field was mainly used for SEO spamming.

I dunno, I think as long as you do statistical analysis that's vulnerable to adverse inputs you're going to see the same problem. Meaning that you can infer the keywords and prevent obvious lies only until the users figure out how to trick your keyword machine into inferring the wrong keywords.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#133

Post by pimmen »

realrocker wrote: post #99

Smartwatches. I was convinced enough to bet two years of my life working on them.

I have two big reasons why I didn't get a smart watch. Number one is the price, I just don't think it's worth hundreds of dollars not to pick up my phone when I get a notification.

The other is that the interface is too small to do anything but consuming notifications or looking at a compass. And, I just don't see the problem being solved by speech recognition either, I don't want the rest of the bus to know that I have to Google "where do I buy bigger condoms?".

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#136

Post by vortico »

kobeya wrote: post #39

The 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.

Eventually at some point, you have to get some work done, and you just can't do that with a tablet screen or a touch interface. The mouse and keyboard will reign, and even if the concept of a non-sanboxed system goes away, the future will still have hardware which look like desktop computers and laptops. The OS filesystem won't go away because applications on these personal computers need to be able to talk to each other somehow, and the current iOS method of "launch a file in this application from this other application" is too limiting. The only thing that will change is the application packaging, which will become optionally centralized and have permission levels just like Android apps. I think overall, future computers will be just as pleasant to use, just as programmable/configurable, and just as easy to download software from decentralized sources.

Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future.

Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?

#138

Post by avian »

btown wrote: post #130
marcus_holmes wrote: post #90

Optical 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...

These computers do exist on tabletops in labs; the problem is that it's comparatively difficult/expensive to mass-produce and miniaturize these components compared to silicon (where you can etch billions of transistors at once on a modern CPU). There are really cool things you can do, especially in terms of continuous/non-discretized-time computations, but I wouldn't hold your breath for this to become mainstream.

Are you talking about analog computing? We tried that both with electronic and mechanical computers and it obviously didn’t work out since nobody uses them anymore. What benefits do optical computers have in that regard?
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