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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?

#671

Post by sli »

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'm impressed that Direct Connect is still kicking while all those services slowly died off.

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

#672

Post by mncolinlee »

Near-field communication (NFC).

It came out in 2010 for Android and Microsoft phones, but has been hamstrung by Apple for most of its development. I had several startup ideas which required NFC market penetration on phones, but which even today are impractical due to Apple's chokehold on NFC APIs for fear of a payments competitor.

In order to even find "tap to pair" devices, you often need to seek out the one manufacturer or option available. There should be personal phone-to-phone "tap to pay" by e-cash or cryptocurrency. "Tap to auth" using your phone. "Tap to key exchange" should be part of doing business, sending "business card" contact details as well. Samsung had S-Beam, "tap to share files" securely with WiFI Direct.

But even with the addition of Core NFC, you need to find a responsible adult with an Android phone to even write a single bit as an iPhone owner.

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

#673

Post by ashleyn »

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…

Microsoft flirted with it as far back as Windows 95, in the form of the HTA (HTML Application).

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

#674

Post by sotojuan »

scoggs wrote: post #527
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, personally, felt that Audiogalaxy was the hallmark program from this era. It was the most surefire way to get the songs you were looking for and discover plenty more in the process. You'd set the music folder you wanted to share (there was no opting out) and so long as you had the program open your files were available for download by other users. The program operated like an always on satellite torrent program wi…

Soulseek is still alive with the same system. The program does not make you share anything but users can disable sharing files with users who don't share files.

At least in 2012-14 Soulseek was very popular with extremely niche and obscure music fans (stuff not even on What.cd!). Not sure how it is now.

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

#675

Post by mattferderer »

michaelmior wrote: post #576
SteveMoody73 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen reMarkable? Doesn't seem to have a browser from what I can see but more capable than a kindle. https://remarkable.com/

I got mine a few weeks ago. It's true there's no browser but the note-taking capabilities are great. It's running Linux so I can only assuming it's a matter of time before someone starts releasing some custom updates.

I was looking into this a while back. Would love to hear more reviews on it. The ability to write notes with a pen is the one feature I wish my Kindle had. The Kindle is a great device for reading, bookmarking & highlighting but you can't write in the margins... When I first seen this I was hoping the next version of Kindle would try to accomplish this for the holiday season but unfortunately they did not.

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

#676

Post by deerpig »

For me it was VRML. I was working with SGI (not for) in Hong Kong at the time and it was amazing what you could do with it. They were even pushing it for use in interactive 3D banner ads. I went to the Tokyo event where they streamed someone in a motion capture suit in Mountain View with the animated figure being rendered on a browser in Tokyo. Very cool stuff. I wish it had taken off.

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

#677

Post by luck_fenovo »

Terretta wrote: post #517
olavgg wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a Norwegian startup that has decreased the latency dramatically. https://remarkable.com/ https://youtu.be/zpUPpiV7gAo

I have one. Really is remarkable. No meaningful latency while writing unless you draw fast large figures while watching for lag. Upsides: Feels like pencil on paper. With iPad Pro I keep going back to paper. With this... it’s paper. Downsides: Mobile software clunky, doesn’t connect to all WiFi, hardware paging buttons should not have been on bottom.

I have one too. The drawing/writing is pretty great, though once it's transferred back to a PC, the resolution seems kind of poor. Not too bad, but I'd like it to be smoother.

The only other major issue is software stability especially when reading. I've had it hardlock while reading something, then have to wait for the battery to drain because it won't respond to any input, then once I have it back up it forgot where I left off so I lost progress. So for the time being it sits, though once a software update or 2 come out I'll try again.

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

#678

Post by shove »

disease wrote: post #666
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.

Any way you slice it, demand is probably less than a tenth what it once was.

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

#679

Post by matt4077 »

meigwilym wrote: post #477
hans_mueller wrote: post #416

Earlier 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.

I think My Language is a good compromise. The only problem are not My Language speakers and other communities who disdain My Language for patriotic, historic or political reasons.

I'm a native speaker of German, and anytime someone wants to try their mediocre German on my, I cringe, and quickly move to English to move the conversation along.

For some reason, it's not half has horrible to listen to broken English. Unless it's by Germans, in which case I usually leave the room. Or drop the class, as it happened during my studies.

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

#680

Post by tmerr »

astura wrote: post #644
PeterisP wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that DC++ file sharing had a model like that, but the torrents outcompeted it for most purposes; most people don't want friend-of-a-friend filesharing, they either want the most effective way to get the latest goods from whoever has it, or the ability to upload stuff while remaining mostly anonymous.

Minor nitpick, Direct Connect (DC) was the protocol, DC++ was merely a popular client but by no means the only client. It wasn't even the official client. Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.

I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.
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