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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?

#601

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

> Gah, aren't we all?

Since I found Haskell, no. Not anymore.

And I don't expect Haskell to take over the world either. I do expect a large crop of new languages that extend on the concept, and some of them to take over the world.

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

#602

Post by vortico »

tajen wrote: post #537
vortico wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that e-readers actually do need reasonably low latencies. The reason I still read books is because I can flip through pages quickly and glance over 20 pages a second as I look for the page with a certain pattern of text or an image.

but you don’t need that for signage, calendar on your door, paper decorations on your bedroom walls, meeting room reservation sheets...

Are those use cases significant enough to make e-ink "take the world by storm"?

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

#603

Post by ufo »

jabretti wrote: post #590
dandare wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the spelling difficulties have more to do with English not having phonetic spelling than with it having many loanwords, prefixes or suffixes. I speak Portuguese and we have lots of loanwords as well but after a while they are all spelled like the rest of the words are instead of copying the original spelling. And every once in a while there is a spelling reform to replace archaic spellings with more modern forms (this never happened with English because it was politically unpopular)

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

#604

Post by marcosdumay »

the_decider wrote: post #6

Semantic ontologies that would totally change the nature of search.

Ontologies don't scale.

There were plenty of people warning about that by then (I wasn't). And time showed them right.

Interestingly, now we have Google pushing for the opposite extreme. There is absolutely no objective reality on its searches. Even the meaning of the words are linked to your persona.

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

#605

Post by mannykannot »

perlgeek wrote: post #508
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.

It is definitely more practicable in the sense that no-one has figured out how to implement the vision of the semantic web.

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

#606

Post by shove »

WebGL. I spent ~10 years doing Flash / ActionScript and when Jobs nixed the mobile Flash plugin, I figured everything would shift to HTML5 / WebGL. Nope. The era of fancy, interactive websites faded into the rearview mirror.

I'm sure most of you don't miss it, but there was so much amazing work. Rather than the budgets shifting to Three.js etc, it went to apps or dried up completely.

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

#608

Post by taneq »

vortico wrote: post #136
kobeya wrote: post #39

The 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.

Eventually at some point, you have to get some work done, and you just can't do that with a tablet screen or a touch interface. The mouse and keyboard will reign, and even if the concept of a non-sanboxed system goes away, the future will still have hardware which look like desktop computers and laptops. The OS filesystem won't go away because applications on these personal computers need to be able to talk to each o…

> Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future.

But that's the thing, there's no "os market" for appliances. ChromeOS won't 'take over' computing devices any more than toasters will take over your kitchen.

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

#609

Post by SyneRyder »

andai wrote: post #452
Double_a_92 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever played gameboy as a kid?

Transflective LCDs are another tech that didn't go anywhere. It lets you use LCDs outdoors by reflecting the natural light, which solves the problems of color and video. There were even models with solar cells embedded, so not only you get longer battery life but recharge in the sun.

I think that's what the Pebble Time watches used, a transflective Sharp Memory LCD (that Pebble calls "e-paper"). In direct sunlight, the screens are actually easier to read, and the colors are really vibrant. Indoors, it's a bit dim without using a backlight, though still better than a blank screen. It seems to be the key to the Pebble's 7 - 10 day battery life even with an always-on display.
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