Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

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

#551

Post by leavethebubble »

jknoepfler wrote: post #111
Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #66

I am still waiting for all my favourite applications to be extendable in GNU Guile. On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general.

> On a more general note, I am still waiting for the world to fall for lisp in general. Gah, aren't we all? Watching John Carmack push Scheme for the Oculus Rift 2 [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs ] made me feel like something was right in the universe.

Why not just leave the lisp-bubble and admit it's a terrible type of language which is behind of ML languages in terms of productivity, safety and performance?

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

#552

Post by baldfat »

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…

I can get all the music I can listen to for $15 a month (Google Play Family which comes with YouTube Red) and share it with my wife and 4 kids. I think that people can get music on SoundCloud, Pandora or YouTube made the illegal less necessary. I personally prefer to just pay the money and get my music on all my devices and upload the music I have that isn't available.

I also LOVE YouTube Red and it helps the content creators multiple of times more then my little ad revenue. How is it that people flaged YouTube Red as anti-content creators and were going after Google with pitch forks and now content creators keep saying that Red Members give them so much more per person. One creator says 1/4 of his income is from YouTube Red (He makes a living on YouTube).

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

#553

Post by [deleted] »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #506
nathan_f77 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#554

Post by VLM »

Token Ring Networking as a protocol/concept (not so much physical IBM hardware, of course) rather than CSMA/CD.

It naturally makes sense that allocating BW via a token would be much more power efficient and faster than transmitting into the void and hoping for no collision. Its hard to get line rate traffic with CSMA/CD but the financial services co I was working at back then had very high util in the upper 90%s for hours.

I also miss ATM and its complicated and semi-obscure adaptation layers, pretty cool although toward its death it was just a weird way to send pt-to-pt ethernet frames. ISDN was like that too, a whole protocol stack, pretty interesting exciting ideas, toward the end it was just a 128K pt-pt interface for internet access and of course a voice trunk signalling protocol replacing old E+M signalling. Both could have been interesting/cool. X.25 switching never really took off either.

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

#555

Post by aalexgabi »

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…

I saw something like this in Star Citizen: https://youtu.be/ZsXnFzYu10k?t=21m2s

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

#556

Post by lucaspiller »

deusum wrote: post #471
wrinkl3 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2010 I assumed it would a matter of a couple of years until we were reading comic books on our Kindle Color ink tablets.

Still waiting on that E-Ink phone that lasts a month between charges.

The Motorola F3 is that phone, if all you care about are phone calls (it can’t really do SMS). You are probably better getting a similar era Nokia though, as the battery life was about the same and they were a lot more functional.

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

#557

Post by delgaudm »

The Lytro Camera[1]. The idea of refocusing a photo after the fact felt like an absolute revelation. Their initial camera was somewhat affordable, but ended up being just downright awful. The pictures were low res, low quality, and the camera was difficult to use and lacked basic, yet essential functions. I was a super-excited early adopter. After I got the camera I think I took, maybe 100 pictures with mine and it's sat in a box of disappointment ever since, because you couldn't actually do anything with the crummy pictures it took. All I wanted was a reasonably good 4MP image where I could refocus a picture on my kid's face when the camera focused on the wall behind her so I could send that picture to grandma, or post it to facebook. They clearly had something else very different in mind and the novelty of all the interactive-y stuff they added around the refocusing forgot that what we(I) actually wanted was a picture.

It's all fine that I ended up not taking more pictures becuase the one place you could see them is being shut down at the end of the month.

They appear to have pivoted to professional cinema.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/06/lytro-camera-lets-you-focus-ph...

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

#558

Post by mavhc »

dkersten wrote: post #360
btown wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance,…

> its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware For 2009 hardware running javascript in a browser, you mean? I was running much fancier native stuff much faster (including 3d games) on low-to-mid tier 2009 hardware. > So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do. I think it definitely accomplished its goals technically , but it certainly failed on adoption. I personally…

Seemed like the main place people would use Wave would be massive company email chains, and they killed it 3 months after adding it to GApps

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

#559

Post by baldfat »

IshKebab wrote: post #296
bsaul wrote: post #263

BeOS . That was the best os at the time by far, stellar performance, fantastic C++ api usable by a newbie, i still haven’t found a GUI as responsive as this one. DVD-audio. Great multi channel, high rate, high resolution audio. But it required the whole production chain to upgrade as well as new consumer equipement, and they competed with sony own format ( which was also a failure)... But it would have given the reco…

I'm not surprised DVD-Audio and co failed. Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe, and by the time they came out MP3 was clearly the future.

> Their quality is indistinguishable from CDs despite what audiophiles would have you believe

Well I blame the system. You needed upgraded headphones or speakers. I have $2000 studio monitors when I was an audio engineer and well I can 100% tell you in a blind test I can tell the difference.

95% of the reason why is people don't care about quality audio. It's something about human brains. MP3 sound horrible compared to a FLAC and good equipment. Instead people wear Beats Bluetooth Headphones listening to streamed Audio.

I also blame myself. I use $15 in ear bluetooth ear piece (Looks like a hearing aid) Inovate G10. I listen almost exclusively to podcasts or YouTube videos. The convenience is so much more needed than sound quality. I listen to music at home (When my kids aren't around because all they do is complain). I need to get a good pair of headphones.

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

#560

Post by ryanchants »

delgaudm wrote: post #557

The Lytro Camera[1]. The idea of refocusing a photo after the fact felt like an absolute revelation. Their initial camera was somewhat affordable, but ended up being just downright awful. The pictures were low res, low quality, and the camera was difficult to use and lacked basic, yet essential functions. I was a super-excited early adopter. After I got the camera I think I took, maybe 100 pictures with mine and it's…

In the same vein, I'm excited about the Light L16[0]. But with the hefty price tag, I don't know if I can get on it this early. If takes off, then the price is comparable to a DSLR and a few lenses, but right now I'm hesitant.

[0] https://light.co/

Post reply on HN