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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?

#691

Post by krapp »

narrator wrote: post #71
School-Cotton wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin.

I knew about Bitcoin quite early, but I was convinced the government would shut it down. I am mystified as to why they didn't.

Some governments have banned it, many haven't. It's likely that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general) aren't, and never were, the existential threat to governments as a whole that anarcho-capitalists wanted it it to be.

States and law enforcement are more likely to be concerned with what Bitcoin is used for, than the mere fact that it is used.

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

#692

Post by lolive »

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.

Thanks for mentionning it.

Beyond some very nice pieces of software created by clever SW developpers (let's mention DBPedia Spotlight, RelFinder, Semantic MediaWiki, N3.js) I mostly agree with your argument.

To be the devil's advocate, in my opinion, data lakes are just a new buzzword that will eventually become what the Semantic Web was supposed to be. With some millions dollars, companies will aggregate and interlink their datasets. There are then one step away from extracting their master data from their data lake & publish it as Linked Corporate Data. From that, the public part of will be published as Linked Open Data.

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

#693

Post by kazagistar »

CreepGin wrote: post #658
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. In fact, I started to realize I've been using sites like The Pirate Bay just to get a sense of what people are watching, new releases etc. Ratings would tend to be very low, of course, it's their culture to say that any movie sucks; but at least I can get a list of titles and then search for them in paid service providers.

I use Rottentomatoes

It's a very different measure, because the sort of people who rate media have certain characteristics to their taste that are more likely.

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

#694

Post by turc1656 »

Paypal used to have this feature that allowed you to install a browser add-on and you could generate a CC number on the fly that was good for either one time use or recurring use (for subscription services). This feature served two primary purposes: 1) to be able to pay using PayPal on sites that didn't support it 2) to help prevent against fraud which was becoming a massive problem at the time. If the number was stolen, it immediately wasn't good anymore and a hacker/thief could not use the CC number to purchase/steal anything.

It was that second aspect that I thought would totally eliminate all credit card fraud and make people comfortable with online purchases on smaller sites. I have no idea why PayPal killed the program, but even before it did, not many people used it. I was the only person I knew that was even aware it existed.

EDIT - if anyone is curious, I looked it up. Two ex-PayPal employees explain here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-PayPal-discontinue-their-one-t...

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

#695

Post by gilbetron »

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.

WebGL is fantastic, but writing compelling software with it is significantly more difficult than just using "normal" web libraries because you have to be able to think in rendering terms, use linear algebra (a bit), etc. And the thing is, it turns out it is really difficult to find something to do using WebGL that isn't easier to understand in a normal 2D visualization.

I think there is great stuff to be done (and is done) with WebGL, but most of it is in the background and subtle. "Walking through a data world" is just a dumb idea, for lots of reasons. But using WebGL to speed up 2D visualizations works great, as is using it to make more interesting 2D visualizations. However, that is a subtle art.

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

#696

Post by mirimir »

Animats wrote: post #92

Virtual worlds. The "metaverse" of Snow Crash. "Snow Crash", the TV series, has been green-lighted by Amazon. That may drum up more interest. Second Life comes close. They've had a working system for over a decade and have with adequate solutions to most of the problems. But it's hard to use, and not that many people are interested.

Yes, fully immersive VR. As in SF, using one sort of "trode net" or another. It predates cyberpunk. I vaguely remember a story from the 60s.

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

#697

Post by TallGuyShort »

Adapteva's Parallela. I don't follow the semiconductor industry that closely, so perhaps very similar architectures are becoming more common, but as someone with a passing interest in HPC I was very excited about their crowd-sourced board for playing with parallel programming on an architecture built just for that, but it suffered from many problems typical of crowd-sourcing. It was delivered late with a lot of business problems leading up to it. I played with it a bit and haven't heard of it otherwise since.

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

#700

Post by gilbetron »

grumblestumble wrote: post #108

E-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.

E-Ink is a technology that couldn't be developed well enough, it just never got there. I mean, I love my Kindle paperwhite, but without color and rapid (60hz+) refresh, it won't ever be quite good enough. It's a fascinating case of a technology path that fizzles out.
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