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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?

#501

Post by vlehto »

PeachPlum wrote: post #305
grahamburger wrote: post #134

3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.

Adidas breaks the mould with 3D-printed performance footwear https://www.adidas-group.com/en/media/news-archive/press-rel... And it's not all plastic The patents for laser sintering are running out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering my colleague at my Uni 3D printing society showed me a fully working planetary gear unit about 30mm x 30mm x 30mm yesterday, made from titanium and printed in one pas…

Metals can only be SLS printed in a vacuum. That makes it cost prohibitive for home use. It's cheaper to buy a small CNC machine and that's good enough for 99,9% of everything.

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

#502

Post by oblio »

lucozade wrote: post #381
tuomosipola wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that the right timing of English-speaking political dominance in 19th and 20th century combined with global information technology boom has contributed a lot here. It could have been French (and in a sense was) if they had had movies and Internet earlier. To me English doesn't feel logical at times (maybe a subjective observation) but at least we all can agree that the ortography with its historical…

I think your point about cultural dominance, and specifically youth culture, is the key one. I travel a fair bit and it still surprises me how often I hear English, usually lyrics, regardless of the local language. English isn't particularly logical. This is partly because it is a hodge-podge of Germanic and Latin roots. I think its also because it's so widely used. It's accepted a ton of vocab from around the world…

French did take off in many places. In Romania for example we even borrowed something like 20% of our current vocabulary from it. However English became popular in the age of mass literacy, mass transport mass media and the Internet. Huge expansion vectors for a language.

Also English had multiple support points instead of 1 (France): UK, US, British colonies.

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

#503

Post by donaltroddyn »

danmaz74 wrote: post #453
bantunes wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still an official language in the EU because Ireland (and Cyprus and Malta, to an extent). Right?

Actually, Ireland chose Gaelic as their official language, and I think the same thing is true for Cyprus and Malta. So, when the UK leaves, there could be no member with English as its official language (the UK is still part of the EU until 2019).

In Ireland, both English and Irish (Gaeilge in Irish - not Gaelic) are our official languages, and both are also official languages of the EU.

English is also an official language in Malta, but not Cyprus.

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

#504

Post by vlehto »

cheeze wrote: post #264
chx wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the problem is the sort of plastic used. You need structural strength in most things and filament pieces melted together is just not cutting it.

Absolutely. One area that they have revolutionized is casting. Hell, even Jay Leno's crew used a 3d printer to create prototype parts that were no longer made and then cast the plastic printed part into a sand mold using aluminum.

The next step would be to 3D print the sand mold directly.

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

#505

Post by Cthulhu_ »

arkh wrote: post #212
fsloth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh oh, I think I'm about to rant. Scuse me. Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc. To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I…

> The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels. I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for grante…

I think a Word 1.0 with current tech would be awesome. Unfortunately, few parties seem interested in delivering fast applications anymore, instead focusing on cross-platform availability - you can't release a desktop app anymore without a mobile counterpart.

In theory things have gotten a lot faster, doubly so if you consider UI and logic can be distributed over multiple cores, and even moreso considering file access is a factor 10-100 faster than back then, and memory size has increased by over 9000.

But it'd be poor on features and nobody would want to use it because of Feature X. I had been looking for a lightweight Slack client alternative, but the only thing I could find looked like shit.

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

#506

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #372
Animats wrote: post #92

Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.

I agree with that. I think it just suffers from stigma, like online dating a few years ago. It's very easy to make fun of Second Life. For example, there's a scene in The Office where Dwight has an account, and Jim signs up in order to prank him, but then he ends up taking it too seriously and gets made fun of. All the articles I've read about Second Life paint a sad picture of lonely people in their basement or bedr…

> It would be interesting to play a multiplayer game where you communicate with voice, body language, and facial expressions.

Simple applications already exist; look at Rec Room for example. That's got voice, limited body language (mostly hands) and I think even simple facial expressions that it infers from... idk, something. Voice chat too.

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

#507

Post by datenwolf »

captainmuon wrote: post #454

Peer-to-peer file sharing. There was a time when Napster, Kazaa, eMule were king. The content industry fought against it, but developers came up with decentralized solutions like DHTs or supernodes. I was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of you…

> was convinced the next step would be friend-of-a-friend sharing. You only share files with your direct friends. But they can pass on these files automatically, so their friends can get the files, too. The friends of your friend don't know that the file is originally coming from you, it is completely transparent. The goal is to not let anybody you don't trust know what you are down- or uploading.

This very thing exists and readily available for use in form of Freenet https://freenetproject.org/

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

#508

Post by perlgeek »

Dowwie wrote: post #447

The semantic web . It spawned an entire generation of academic study, but aside from assuring job security for researchers hasn't amounted to anything beyond their ivory towers.

I get the impression that "dumb" crawling and machine learning have turned out to be more practicable.

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

#509

Post by henrikeh »

swyx wrote: post #234
eklavya wrote: post #11

Memristor. I thought that will reshape the entire industry.

these things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor why didn't they? (at a high level... im not too smart about these EE topics)

AFAIK very difficult to manufacture/effects guarding its behavior are poorly understood.

Another issue is that memristors are not part of any standard curriculum and thus limits the number of people who will work on it.

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

#510

Post by ryandrake »

OpenGL: For a brief, glorious period, we had the promise of a truly cross-platform general-purpose graphics API. Then Microsoft began its relentless assault on it, ran its tried-and-true 1990s playbook on it and eventually FUDded it into irrelevance on the Windows platform. For a short while, it at least held up as a Linux/Mac solution, and survived on Windows as a second-class citizen. For the last few years, however, Apple seems to have even abandoned it for their own proprietary technology, dooming developers back to the bad-old-days of needing to support N platform-specific APIs if they want to support N platforms. As Trump would say: "Sad!"
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