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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?

#811

Post by leephillips »

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…

Doesn't clojurescript use GWT? If it does, then GWT has certainly lived on. If I'm confused, sorry.

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

#813

Post by jd3 »

tmerr wrote: post #680
astura wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++

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

#814

Post by philipodonnell »

malyk wrote: post #802
philipodonnell wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MasterCard was clearly on board with the process. They might have been when it started, but clearly something changed. If it was desirable, the moment PayPal decided not to continue, MasterCard would have started looking for alternatives. Since they didn't (and haven't), its pretty reasonable to assume they decided intentionally not to pursue it. The two other functioning alternatives listed in this thread, getfina…

My mastercard had the same feature sometime along the way that they advertised strongly to me on the website. I think I might have used it once, but it was too much of a hassle to log in to my account, generate the number, go back to the website that I was purchasing from, etc. Hell, i just looked it up and they still have it: https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...

Ha, I didn't know that either and I have an eligible card!

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

#815

Post by adrianmsmith »

leephillips wrote: post #811
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…

Doesn't clojurescript use GWT? If it does, then GWT has certainly lived on. If I'm confused, sorry.

I'm no expert but I think Clojurescript takes the Clojure language (spelt with a "j") and converts it to unoptimized Javascript, which then gets processed by the Closure compiler (spelt with an "s"). The Closure compiler takes unoptimized Javascript and emits optimized/minified Javascript.

Closure is from Google, but is independent of GWT which is also from Google, despite the two projects having similar aims. Closure is modern, whereas GWT is not.

The open source team who maintain GWT now (after Google abandoned it) are in the middle of a re-write, which will be called GWT 3 (current version is GWT 2). GWT 3 will convert Java to unoptimized Javascript and use the Closure compiler to optimize it etc (as Clojurescript does). Current GWT 2 does not use Closure but does its optimizations itself.

I may have got some of that wrong, corrections welcome!

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

#816

Post by Terretta »

drcongo wrote: post #729
Terretta wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I'd consider the latest iPad Pro better for sketching, thanks to high frame rate and no lag, pressure sensitivity control, pencil "angle" control, and iPad-native software options have BnL surpassed desktop.

// Digital ink junkie since the Newton, currently own and use latest models of Wacom Cintiq, Surface, iPad, and Remarkable.

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

#817

Post by platinumrad »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #627
platinumrad wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.

> I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consu…

I completely ageee that they belong in tablet land but tablets did not exist in the mid 00s. All of my older relatives who now use iPads exclusively all used OS X back then for both ease of use and aesthetic reasons.

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

#818

Post by Jaruzel »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #363

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…

I mainly blame Facebook for this, but these days it's now viewed as seedy and odd to try and be friends with strangers across the internet. Each new 'social service' that now appears is not only silo-ed by it's own protocol, but also promotes the continued siloing of users into their own (existing) friendship groups.

Back in the day (yeah, I'm old), you could drop into an IRC channel of strangers and be having a good conversation within minutes[1]. ICQ, as mentioned, had a 'find friend' feature, and many other early social platforms encouraged like-minded strangers to interact.

So we all end up just talking to the same 20 or people we've always spoken to, re-enforcing the echo-chamber-effect, and never introducing new ideas and viewpoints into our lives.

---

[1] IRC these days, if you are lucky to find an active channel, is now so cliquéy that any interlopers are largely ignored.

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

#819

Post by wadkar »

jd3 wrote: post #813
tmerr wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++

Well, depends on the campus ;-)

We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google.

We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++

The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.

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

#820

Post by wils1245 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #363

I don't know if this has a name, but... ICQ-like "searchable" instant messaging. Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago. But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age bet…

I think as others have mentioned, spam is a big problem, but the more fundamental problem with this idea is supply/demand. For a sufficiently large system, the number of people that are interested in talking to person X about topic Y isn't likely to be well matched with the number of people person X is interested in talking about topic Y with.

Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches?

The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem.

Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).

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