Theranos, hands down.
I don't understand why we need more than a drop of blood for medical tests. A drop is a lot of molecules.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#362I expected PCs to be in every home pretty much forever. Now a lot of non-tech people prefer phones and tablets.
This should be a good thing.
Hopefully now that the non-tech people are moving away from traditional PC/laptop, this trend of dumbing down for the "average user" (read: lowest common denominator) can be stopped.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#363I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging.
Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago.
But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" and results would come up. You could enter your data, interests, hobbies, etc. in the program and mark yourself as available (only if you wanted) and it was a really nice way to meet people. I collected stamps at the time so I remember I would search for people who were stamp collectors in countries for which I had no stamp, leading to stamp exchanges apart from some interesting conversation (as you could also throw some of your interests in in the search window).
I thought that was the future and the tech could only get better from there, but then came MSN Messenger, with really bare-bones features in general and in particular no "searchable" functionality, and displaced ICQ. And since then, nothing similar has appeared. Instant messengers are focused on talking to people you already know, and if you want to meet new people, you have to use specific-purpose communities or dating sites. But good luck finding someone who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music at the same time... That function of searching people by interests in a huge directory of people (not restricted, e.g., to a dating site) is what I thought would take the world by storm, and as far as I know it doesn't even exist anymore at enough scale to be meaningful, at least in the West (maybe in WeChat, QQ or one of those apps used in Asia they have something similar, I don't know).
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Kindle and it's e-reader kin are pretty successful? I think the problem is that a device with an e-ink display is necessarily single purpose. General purpose devices can't use e-ink, they need to support video playback and browsers with full colour.
I'd love an e-ink dashboard in my car so it's not so glary, e-ink tablet that does a bit more than a Kindle but isn't a full media player (super thin super light with basic browser for wiki, news, rss, and email), ~20" e-ink screen on the inside of my apartment door with calendar and notifications and todolist, there's so many cool things we could do with the tech if we could produce it cheaper and bigger. Not everyt…
I'd really love that too! And if it was for color, I would really appreaciate a photoframe as I just think a backlight is not needed for these things and is just annoying at night.
I really do not care about video, most relevant content is pretty static and does not even require the already possible 4-5 changes per second.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#365Space Colonies.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really destroyed my day. I really have a big problem staying positive for at least a day now that you've eloquently expressed what I've had a creeping feeling of but just quite couldn't word in any discussion. As computers become "locked app collections" they become appliances, appliances business and government institutions can control and regulate. "Can you make the iPad just not do that thing?"
ok honestly i dont understand this fear. isn't the open web the antithesis of the locked appstore?
For the point of the developer, maybe. From the point of the user, not really; at least for many of them I can disable updates and keep running them even if the company goes bankrupt. The ones that depend on cloud services are arguably the worst of both worlds, though.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#367Nokia + Belle operating system. It was a beautiful future I dreamed of.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I once heard somebody talk about analog computers who is old enough to have used them.
The impression I got was that they did work excessively well on a very narrow niche of problems (simulations, mostly). But "programming" them was a huge pain, and for the general purpose arena, they were not useful.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#369BBSes
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#370I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…
I had some succes with Omegle. They support a feature where you can select a topic you're interested in.