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

591–600 of 1001 posts

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

#591

Post by baldfat »

faltad wrote: post #259
TrueDuality wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A close mentor of mine has been working on private cancer research for close to three decades and just recently retired. He was both incredibly hopeful and positively terrified of CRISPR. He explained CRISPR as "one of the crucial technologies we don't yet have the wisdom to wield" I recently learned (I believe on here, in the past week), CRISPR was used to develop a genetic treatment on the first human patient to so…

Are you speaking of the person being treated for his Hunter Syndrome via Gene-editing treatment (I think it was done this week)? It doesn't use Crispr but another tool named ZFN . Pretty exciting that we're not only trying those out in vivo but also in fully grown patients with a specific disorder!

"Like the newer gene-editing technology CRISPR, ZFNs can cut both strands of the genome’s double DNA helix at a specific location."

They are different technologies but zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) but they both do DNA editing.

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

#593

Post by marcosdumay »

hans_mueller wrote: post #416
johan_larson wrote: post #148

I'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.

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.

If only the native speakers would understand international English is different from the language they use every day.

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

#594

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Itaxpica wrote: post #417
krylon wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better. Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".

A comparable English expression is “the perfect is the enemy of the good”, which I think every software engineer should have engraved on to their monitors as a reminder.

A slightly different twist, but also a popular idiom, is that "excellence is good enough".

[I'm frantically resisting the urge to redraft that sentence]

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

#595

Post by ZirconiumX »

baldfat wrote: post #552
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…

From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist[1][2]. The Verge article I linked to states that artists are paid "somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084" per stream.

If we are very pessimistic about the royalties of a CD sale - let's call it 20%, and say a single CD costs $10, that's ($10 x 20%) / 0.0084 = 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD.

If you take audiophile-level paranoia like buying vinyls, SA-CDs or FLAC masters, I think there's an argument to be made that an artist could make more money from people buying high-quality editions of their work to pirate than from people streaming their music.

It's food for thought.

Disclaimer: I am a music student.

[1]: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/how-muc... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/7/9861372/spotify-year-in-r...

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

#596

Post by technofiend »

swyx wrote: post #250
technofiend wrote: post #124

Iridium held so much promise and was such a disappointment.

the radioactive element? what was the promise you were excited about?

The satellite phone provider that filed for bankruptcy.

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

#597

Post by marcosdumay »

krylon wrote: post #368
avian wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They would be comparing them with the digital computers of the same time.

There's a reason people used analog computers back them, and there's a reason nobody uses them now. Most of the reason is about how noise interferes with small components, and it's a physical reality that won't go away.

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

#598

Post by ufo »

albeebe1 wrote: post #589

I 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.

These still exist in many third world countries. A similar service is also available for PC gaming because even when people have a PC at home with internet, they might need a better PC with a better connection to be able to play their favourite games.

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

#599

Post by bitwize »

baldfat wrote: post #574
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…

> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC See how fast it felt. https://youtu.be/XwbrCYJcrKQ?t=4m34s No way and NO HOW! That statement is 100% false. The issue is you remember that it felt fast. My Amiga felt like lightening to me in 1985 and I still boot it up from time to time. The delays in everything is over the top and Mac 128k were horribly slow.

You're confusing throughput with latency. Those old systems were objectively more responsive because the keyboard and mouse were tied directly to high-priority IRQs which were serviced in the OS. Now we have USB keyboards and mice, which go on the same IRQ lines as every other USB device, and even if the OS could service them specially, it doesn't. So keyboard and mouse events go on a queue of things to do: disk accesses, network packets, etc. And the whole system feels slower because of the time lag between you sending a command to the machine via kb or mouse, and the machine actually receiving it.

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

#600

Post by tacoman »

jasode wrote: post #512
bsaul wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if you don’t believe in very high quality audio like me, the fact is we’re listening to stereo music, but viewing movies on 5.1 systems. This would have been different with dvd-a. I would have loved to listen to a live concert cd with surround sound.

>5.1 systems. This would have been different with dvd-a. I would have loved to listen to a live concert cd with surround sound. As to your specific DVD-Audio example, I think it didn't widely catch on because most music is consumed (1) with earphones (2) in the car (3) as incidental background while multitasking. The scenario of "purposeful" music listening by sitting in the center sweet spot of a 5.1 setup is very r…

>- satellite radio is higher quality sound than FM radio

I'm not an audiophile, but when I listen to SiriusXM it hear compression artifacts. I'd way rather listen to FM.

Post reply on HN