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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?

#661

Post by shove »

antjanus wrote: post #648

Adobe Air. HTML/CSS/JS in a native executible with access to native methods? It sounded like a dream. ANd yeah, you can do Adobe Air without Flash. You could build desktop apps and phone apps with the same tools on top of it. I really liked the desktop stuff. I made a couple of apps and used a ton of Adobe Air apps (non-Flash) back in the day. Thought it was the future. It failed, for some reason. ^^^^ this is the re…

it was soooooo slow though. But yeah, the comparison to Electron et al is spot on.

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

#662

Post by teddyh »

barbs wrote: post #613
bitwize wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acce…

Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?

It’s not that mouse pointers today are normally laggy; they aren’t, as you correctly say. But when a modern system is very busy, it’s normal for the keyboard and mouse input to lag too, but that wasn’t normally the case with older systems, since human input peripherals were typically given their own special higher priority interrupts or whatever.

This was of course done because the systems back then were so slow that they would be in danger of regularly dropping key presses or clicks otherwise, which would have turned people off these newfangled electronic typewriters. But the result was that the interactive experience with respect to latency was given great importance in the design of those systems, unlike today, when it is taken for granted that people will accept whatever laggy system they are given, and will just be directed towards a CPU upgrade if they complain about it.

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

#663

Post by [deleted] »

ZirconiumX wrote: post #595
baldfat wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

[deleted]

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

#664

Post by MichaelGG »

F#. Back in 2006 I first stumbled upon it and was amazed. It had so much potential. Everything C# did, and more, better. I was sure we'd see 20% of MS devs moving to it.

I underestimated the momentum of MS, the power of embarrassment of hiring a high-profile figure to be shown up by a researcher, the incredible anti-FP and even anti-generics...resentment(?) that MS kept towards them. Plus the insane comments from actual developers that literally did not understand the basics of C# ("C is a subset of C#" and "var is dynamic typing" I've basically given up hope on programming becoming better over time. A lot of apps are boring grunt work anyway, so the edge in using better tools can be beaten just by throwing a lot of sub-par people at it.

On the plus side, for people looking to strike it rich in "tech", knowing tech isn't really a prerequisite. Persistence and the 'hacker' spirit, even if it means you spend all night writing something in PHP that would literally be one line if you know what you were doing, hey, that's what leads to big exits.

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

#666

Post by disease »

shove wrote: post #606

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.

There is still demand for interactive, animated and "flashy" websites in the educational sector.

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

#667

Post by GistNoesis »

theklub wrote: post #577
GistNoesis wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already there working 24 hours a day in many makers home. Why isn't it taking the world faster ? This is a classic chicken and egg problem which is being solved daily via the market invisible hands. As a maker, what reduced my printing usage a few years back was the cost of the filament (which is now cheaper but can still be reduced by a 10x factor), and the noise of the machine (which can be made now noiseless)…

Off-topic but, what printer do you recommend for starting out?

I use a Lulzbot Taz4 (with diy rudimentary enclosure), but a 3d printer is very dependent on the maker and what he intend to do with it, how much time, money and effort he is willing to invest so that's quite hard to answer. If you can find a local hackerspace, they usually have people which can give you good advice after a talk.

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

#668

Post by yangyang »

barbs wrote: post #613
bitwize wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acce…

Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?

I found this post about latency of input devices very interesting: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

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

#669

Post by hyperpape »

barbs wrote: post #613
bitwize wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acce…

Oh come on, there's no way you can tell the difference in latency between a mouse of that era and a USB mouse today. Surely there's enough demand in the e-sports scene to lower input latency as much as possible?

Wouldn't count on it: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

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

#670

Post by criddell »

ZirconiumX wrote: post #595
baldfat wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

> From a revenue point of view, streaming is not a very good way to support an artist

I wonder what percentage of the top 100 artists on streaming services even own their rights? I don't know for sure, but I suspect more money flows to the rights holders when I listen to a Pandora station while I work than if I turned on an actual radio.

> 238 streams to cover the cost of a single CD

This is just one data point, but before I signed up for Google Music, I was buying two CDs a year and spending around $35. Now I'm paying $10 / month. How does the amount spent on streaming today compare to the spending on CDs in 1990? Does the equation change if you consider environmental costs of making those CDs and getting them to consumers?

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