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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?

#721

Post by madenine »

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…

Unforunately, the rise of streaming content services has kinda killed off the need for file sharing for most people.

Back in the day of mytunes on a school network, I had HDs full of mp3s. I actively browsed friends (and complete strangers) libraries to find new things, complete an artists discography... etc.

Now? Spotify Premium is probably the best value/$ of any purchase I make in a month.

Even if I wanted to go back to my old ways... its just not there any more. I believe iTunes patched out the features that made mytunes possible, and people don't have computers full of mp3s discoverable on a network anymore.

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

#722

Post by j_s »

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…

Perhaps V8 + baseline hardware performance pushed Electron over the threshold to usable.

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

#723

Post by astura »

turc1656 wrote: post #694

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 sto…

It's not just PayPal. I think Discover and American Express both had that feature but killed it off. Bank of America still has it and (IIRC) Chase does too.

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

#724

Post by swsieber »

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 never took off because once it reached a profitable niche, it stopped being developed. And it's patent encumbered. I expect E-Ink development will resume around 2030 or so if it first appeared in 2010.

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

#726

Post by wbl »

api wrote: post #286
wbl wrote: post #76

Nuclear power. Carbon free. Reliable. No waste if you reprocess. Cheap fuel.

Three things are killing it: It is exponentially harder to finance a few huge super costly projects than loads of small ones. It has a high "PITA factor." That stands for pain in the you know what. A high PITA factor means there is a very long tail of non obvious problems that compound and multiply. It looks much better on paper than in real life because on paper that stuff doesn't show up. An exponential is now in p…

It would surprise me. Battery chemistry has already tried everything on the periodic table together, and storage remains expensive. Right now more solar leads to more natural gas to cover loads when the sun doesn't shine. Load shifting can only go so far.

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

#727

Post by Avshalom »

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…

Oh you're not nearly pessimistic enough:

>>In the U.S., recording artists earn royalties amounting to 10%–25% (of the suggested retail price of the recording[37] depending on their popularity but such is before deductions for "packaging", "breakage", "promotion sales" and holdback for "returns", which act to significantly reduce net royalty incomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment#Mechanical_roy...

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

#729

Post by drcongo »

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.

Do you think it would work well for someone who sketches for a living? My wife is a fashion designer and her minimum setup of a MacBook Pro + Wacom is pretty unminimum.

[edit: Reviews I read said that the drawings are scalable vectors, but two posts below talk about poor resolution, so maybe not the right device for her]

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

#730

Post by j_s »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #494

GWT. To create client-side web apps, rather than writing Javascript, write Java and have it transpiled to Javascript. Java has IDEs, isn't a new language to learn (like Dart), has static type checking, support for refactoring in the IDEs, etc. GWT could do tree shaking, obfuscation, etc. You could write your server code in Java, and "call" remote server methods from your client code, "passing" Java objects transparen…

In C# land, it also has yet to catch on. There is commercial backing right now, though.

https://bridge.net/

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