I thought videocalls and live video-shopping would be ubiquitous (and I put my money where my mouth was).
I still think we're due more interactive shopping experiences.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#582I 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 met my wife on ICQ after using the same search method you described. :)
Met my first love but didn't get married. Congratulations!
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#583CRISPR. My naivete surrounded me. I didn't realize that even though there was a high output of genetic marker tests that very few if of them would result in viable CRISPR targets. There's 60K genetic marker tests on the market. 8 to 10 new ones come out each day. Humanity has little hope of figuring out the sort of "druggable targets." Genome Wide Association Studies aren't like websites or apps waiting to be optimiz…
"For the first time, researchers have infused a person’s blood with gene-editing tools, aiming to treat his severe inherited disease.." http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/human-has-been-inject...
We are on the cups of this being an actual treatment. My niece and mife's MS might be next.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#584The 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.
That's not entirely true. It's perhaps a far cry from the original goal but Schema.org markup has definitely caught on mostly thanks to use by Google for rich snippets.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#585E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
For me it was transflective LCD. Very low power compared to IPS panels, high contrast in direct light. Not quite as low power as e-ink, but it looked like e-ink and had a high refresh rate.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#5861. E-book and products like evernote/google keep. I rarely write things on paper now because I often experience the difficulty of copying/searching. On computers copying/searching is a breeze.
2. VoIP, Skype, WhatsApp, etc. Many years ago I thought they can totally replace traditional phone calls, at least for 99% users. But that didn't happen.
3. Technologies for telecommuting. Less congestion, less pollution. And it saves both time and money. But it's still not so popular. (In Asia, it's very rare.)
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#587I'm disappointed none of the various constructed "universal" languages (like Esperanto) ever took off. Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful. As it is, the closest we have is English, but it's a natural language and therefore complicated and difficult to learn.
Globish is one attempt at a simplified English.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#588I thought videocalls and live video-shopping would be ubiquitous (and I put my money where my mouth was). I still think we're due more interactive shopping experiences.
Aren't video calls pretty ubiquitous now? (Facetime, Skype, etc.) Not in connection to shopping though.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#589I remember going to a cafe in Harvard Square called Cybersmiths in the mid 90s. You got a card, loaded some money on it, then you could surf the world wide web at high speeds. I thought you were going to see these types of cafes everywhere, but high speed internet to the home put them out of business.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, but the English spoken by most non-natives is actually something like an Esperanto. the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is almost normalized and an artificial dialect. i think English is a very good compromise. the only problem are French people and other communities who disdain English for patriotical, historical, or political reasons.
English is considered to be very difficult language and I find it to be a historical tragedy that English became the lingua franca of the world. I remember that as a child I could not wrap my head around the "spelling competitions" I saw in English cartoons. What is the deal with spelling words? If you can say it you just spelled it, if you can read it you just pronanceed it. And that is only one of many things that…
Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so.
The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like.
After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.