Earlier quoted context omitted.
This problem is solved in China. Blame your local incumbents.
Could you give more info please?
Alipay and Tenpay.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#422erlang. As a programmer it was a revelatory thing of beauty. When we tried to spread it within our org we found that the 'typical' (even relatively strong) programmer resisted its concepts and found it hard to learn. Therefore it didn't scale for us.
How very odd. That's one language I found intuitive.
Yeah, me too. It's an interesting thing. The C syntax and imperative mindset is hard for a lot of people to get. Especially if they're not motivated by the effort.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#4233D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.
I feel like that technology needs more time. Give it a few more decades, a couple of breakthroughs and lots of small incremental advances and we might yet see something resembling the Feed from Diamond Age.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
as a web developer i am bemused at every other comment on here that seems to agree with your sentiment that the world is walling up. yes, app stores will be a control mechanism for ever and consumers may not understand what they are opting into. but equally the open web will never go away and that's what general purpose computation has shifted to, thats basically all we've done this century. am i misunderstanding wha…
Can a program written for the web access all the great sensors on your Android or iPhone? Can it access new movies and TV shows? The web is a big success story, but it's not all there is in computing.
I think it can , but if your website needs to use these things, then it essentially locks itself in the "app garden" we 're talking about escaping from.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#425I 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…
Facebook Graph search was like this (and creepier as people didnt always know _how_ they are searchable) nur Facebook heavily crippled this in the Last years.
Graph Search always surfaced relevant information that explained why they matched a search. For example “Friends who visited London” might say “Checked in at Tower Bridge” below a result.
You’re right that people didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy model. People assume that privacy by obscurity is a guarantee. Never mind that anyone could write a bot that did what Graph Search did. Graph Search was actually more conservative than it needed to be to avoid surprises.
In the end that all mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem people had.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#426The 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.
It all started with laptops. Wish we could do something to the direction of personal, components-based workstations. Gaming does that.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#427Online accredited bachelor degree in CS, it seems there is a lot of resistance in this area too, why it takes so long for Coursera/Udacity to implemented this?
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#428Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.
As I've previously mentioned, it turns out that natural language processing on the natural language webpage that users see is a better way rank pages than invisible metadata.
It wasn't just about "pages". For example Nokia had a prototype of a PIM software that could handle very natural queries like "What are the emails of people who participated in a meeting on Monday?" not by a static planner but by dynamically mapping the terms to any semantic graph.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#429Earlier 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…
Have you seen reMarkable? Doesn't seem to have a browser from what I can see but more capable than a kindle.