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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?

#901

Post by anjc »

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…

Facebook worked like this up until recently, and now sort of works like this.

"females who are single, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing" would have returned precise results.

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

#902

Post by ci5er »

philipodonnell wrote: post #786
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…

I don't think its too tin-foily to assume that there are non-technical reasons why the credit card networks don't want one-time-use credit card numbers, and that PayPal would care more about its relationships with those networks than it does for a product that didn't immediately take off. This is how the innovater's dilemma works. Big entrenched company, too scared to make changes that will jeopardize existing partne…

The one-time PAN patents (and the merchant or tx-bound PAN) patents of the late '90s are largely expired at this point, so it is open art now. I see more and more companies starting to implement it more broadly (Citi, BofA, CapitalOne). It's nifty because you don't have the hefty "Verified by Visa" type integration (nor any of that SET stuff also from the 90s).

The last time I logged into my PayPal pre-paid debit card portal, they still had this functionality (sans Browser plug-in), but I don't recall seeing it on PayPal proper for a while...

The last time I talked to the MC folks (granted, it has been a long while), they actually thought it (OTP) was a nifty client-side (plus closed-loop) technique and was a nice (and orthogonal) add-on to the types of security that they are pushing vis-a-vis tokenization on the merchant side...

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

#903

Post by shove »

culot wrote: post #858
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.

Back in like 1994 I was certain that RoboBoard BBS software was the future of the online world. But no.

That’s a pretty deep troll

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

#904

Post by dabockster »

twelvechairs wrote: post #712
sotojuan wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes strange that soulseek seems to have been the one that has lasted longest. Probably its just flown under the radar and hence not been targeted legally or otherwise like Napster Kazaa Limewire Edonkey etc . I dont think its in any particular way more technologically advanced. In any case today YouTube is now surely the biggest repository of illegally shared music by some distance yet seems accepted in general by th…

> yet seems accepted in general by the recording industry

YouTube (Google) pays the recording royalties out of their own pocket for those videos to keep user engagement on the site. If YouTube actually banned this sort of content, everyone would have left the site a long time ago. (IIRC, some gamers moved to Twitch after ContentID flagged their channels on YouTube.)

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

#905

Post by dabockster »

starsinspace wrote: post #896
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…

Peer-to-peer was killed by the advent of home routers doing NAT, making arbitrary inbound connections impossible. Configuring port forwarding was generally too difficult for "normal users", the web-UIs offered by typical home routers didn't make it easy enough. NAT traversal methods exist, but from my experience they are generally unreliable and/or slow. I still remember the days when P2P connections over the interne…

IIRC, consumer wifi routers supposedly support a protocol that allows a computer to request a temporary port forward and release it when its finished using it.

Anyone remember what that protocol is called?

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

#906

Post by wbl »

lastofus wrote: post #822
RyanZAG wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's more a case of functional programming trying to target the wrong segment - albeit out of necessity. There's two kinds of programs being made. First most common one is the kind you're talking about here: grunt work. It's not about the code, but more about having the code do a straight forward task with very flexible constraints. A web app that talks to a database and does a few simple transformations -- li…

I think there is a third segment where FP fits well: large difficult problems that can afford a 10-20% performance hit. The examples you gave of difficult problems are mostly soft realtime, which not everything needs to be. Granted this is a relatively small subset of problems.

It's all the problems where you get a nice clear market if you solve it.

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

#907

Post by Veratyr »

bsaul wrote: post #263

BeOS . That was the best os at the time by far, stellar performance, fantastic C++ api usable by a newbie, i still haven’t found a GUI as responsive as this one. DVD-audio. Great multi channel, high rate, high resolution audio. But it required the whole production chain to upgrade as well as new consumer equipement, and they competed with sony own format ( which was also a failure)... But it would have given the reco…

On DVD-audio, there's R.E.M. released an album using spatial audio on Blu-Ray: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/11/spatial-audio-is-the-...

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

#908

Post by zerostar07 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #624
zerostar07 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are 2 ways for that. I would go for changing the pronounciation rather than the writing

What's your linguistic background (eg mother tongue)? I, naytiv British, wud go for speling reform in preference to pronouncing "wo-uh-ld" or "deb-t'", et cetera .

greek.

oh no don't do that! that's like british teenage slang. even their parents cannot understand tem!

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

#909

Post by Simulacra »

mszcz wrote: post #193
Simulacra wrote: post #175

Google Glass. I thought this would become standard, miniaturized, and used in all aspects of life. Perhaps I read Daemon too much, but I was sure Glass would fly

Yeah, that would have been so awesome. I told everyone I would wear one even despite the fact that I would look like a total dork. I got super excited when they said it would be available around the end of 2013...

I have, regrettably, invested in just about every Kickstarter, Indegogo, and CES vaporware to bring a fully wearable lifeblogging camera to fruition. ZionEyez still smarts... I desperately want to be able to record the world around me, and use AI to pick out, identify, and catalog everything. Ever since I read Daemon by Daniel Suarez, and more importantly, the Halting State series by Charles Stross, I've wanted this ability. We have two pairs of Google Glass and I keep them on a bookshelf, as a reminder of how close we've come to this reality.

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

#910

Post by nikanj »

phillc73 wrote: post #191
nikanj wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 most used file transfer tool seems to be Dropbox. I put stuff into mine, give you a link and everything magically works.

Yes, that's a nice workflow for non-technical users. However, if you're transfering 50GB files, this takes some time. UDP behind the scenes could fix that. I guess consumers just aren't punting 50GB of data around all that much, so there's not enough wait time pain to justify it.

I just realized I have no idea if Dropbox uses UDP behind the scenes. And I love it.

From a larger "tragedy of the commons" point of view, using UDP to force maximum packets down the shared pipes is not fair towards everyone doing TCP. Congestion detection/prevention tries to make traffic more fair to everyone.

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