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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?

#881

Post by billconan »

billconan wrote: post #879
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.

I thought about the this. The reason that 3D web hasn't been big is because, the most effective way of making and consuming content is via natural language, or text. text, by its nature, is 2D. 3D won't be mainstream, because it's too demanding to make.

unless, people invent some device like camera, which simplifies 3d content capturing, making it as easy as taking pictures and video.

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

#882

Post by kyle-rb »

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 really cool, but in my personal experience, pretty hard to pick up, at least with no prior experience in graphics rendering type stuff. There's a lot of overhead to do relatively simple stuff. (In 3D anyway.)

In retrospect I maybe should have just started with ThreeJS or another higher level abstraction.

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

#883

Post by foobarchu »

kazagistar wrote: post #693
CreepGin wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true for certain genres. If you want schlocky horror movies, for example, RT isn't going to do you any good because reviewers hate all the things that make those films good.

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

#884

Post by foobarchu »

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…

Depends on how much you listen to as whether you're contributing more or less. I listen to spotify all day while I work, cycling through songs that I like often once every day or two. An artist that I like enough to have purchased a cd in the past will get multiple plays a day. That means less than a year to generate one cd's worth of revenue from me, and it's going to keep paying out after that because I'll keep listening to it years down the road if I really like it.

Also worth noting that 238 streams is ~20 playthroughs of your average 12 song album, for those who frequently listen to entire albums.

Add to that the fact that streaming services have made discovery a much bigger thing. The less mainstream artists are now getting the benefit of appearing on streaming radio and such, making their growth that much easier (after they've passed a certain threshold of course).

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

#885

Post by sterex »

mmgutz wrote: post #868

MS Silverlight. I thought the world needed a better Flash and with MS behind it and IE was still popular enough. I was a corporate C# developer so I saw everything through Microsoft. It turns out iPhone killed Flash. MS could hardly get anyone to adopt Silverlight.

This happens quite a bit even now. Many corporate Microsoft technology developers have a myopic view of the software world. This is on a downward trend, but still exists.

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

#886

Post by nsporillo »

astura wrote: post #851
jd3 wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++

Depends... Public school? Probably not. Tech school? Absolutely.

Yeah RIT students run an underground DC network.

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

#887

Post by tmzt »

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…

Not using Java, but I'm working on non-JS iso rendering of web applications.

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

#888

Post by zimpenfish »

lookACamel wrote: post #873
zimpenfish wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that non-geeks aren't really interested; it's that it has a whole bunch of barriers as well for those that are interested. 1. You need a reasonably powerful PC or PS4 ($$$) 2. You need the VR kit itself ($$) 3. You need space to use it 4. You need to be physically able to use it 5. You need a lack of motion sickness, etc. 6. There's bugger all games at the moment 7. Probably something else I've not thou…

7. You need to find time to use it. (Pairs nicely with reason 3.) Currently, VR is a separate activity which doesn't fit into one's existing activities. It's a nice experience the first time, but what's the compelling reason to turn it into a habit?

8. Wildly unportable (pairs with 7 and 3) - you can't play it whilst commuting, travelling, etc.

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

#889

Post by grahamburger »

grahamburger wrote: post #134

3D printing. Turns out making little plastic shapes isn't all that useful. Seems obvious in hindsight.

After reading replies I guess I should have been more specific. Early on there was some hype around the idea that 3D printers would become as ubiquitous in homes as paper printers once were. I bought in to that a little bit, but it seems like that is (and probably always was) tremendously unlikely.
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