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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?

#951

Post by lj3 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #14

The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…

> I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.

That's the fundamental flaw in the blockchain, IMHO. The amount of resources in terms of computing and electricity you need to verify transactions at scale is ridiculous. Nobody's going to bother with that unless there's a serious payoff involved.

I find it helps to mentally replace the word 'blockchain' with 'triple entry accounting.' You don't expect much groundbreaking tech work to come from something like triple entry accounting.

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

#952

Post by lj3 »

barrkel wrote: post #32
tlrobinson wrote: post #2

The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?

YouTube - it didn't look profitable and I thought they'd go out of business

YouTube loses billions of dollars a year. If they weren't being subsidized by Google search profits, they would be out of business.

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

#953

Post by marcosdumay »

mcphage wrote: post #878
marcosdumay wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-ink isn't good enough for any of those yet. I don't know how much research is ongoing into it, and I do think it's underutilized (I can't understand why smart watches use LCDs), but there are many breakthroughs before we can get those things you mention. I still expect it to get all over the world, eventually.

> I can't understand why smart watches use LCDs Refresh rate. If all a smart watch did was be a watch, it would be sufficient, but there would be no reason for it to exist. Once you want it to do non-watch things, you need a better refresh rate.

Ok, I don't know all that a watch is expected to do because I don't own one. But AFAIK, messages, fitness tracking, and remote controls do not need anything above what some e-paper can get you.

Now (after some time to think) I do think it's mostly a design restriction. Nobody was able to make an e-paper watch look futuristic and expensive.

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

#954

Post by aryehof »

I thought that we would see a world where we would increasingly "mash-up" a solution using different services accessible through APIs. One where service and data providers would provide a programmable interface to their functionality (and data), perhaps in addition to their own user-interface.

It was conceivable for a time, however it didn't occur to me that doing so would mean no advertising dollars for them, unless they made their offering as "walled gardens".

Truly to me, it seems that "advertising, marketing and consumerism" are what makes the world go around.

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

#955

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

leggomylibro wrote: post #821
swyx wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. imagine my shock when as a young technology analyst I discovered that E-Ink was a smallcap tech company in Taiwan and basically produced kindle displays, store price tags and that cool double sided phone that one time. I thought it was a huge deal when they managed to do color E-Ink. but no one cared.

You can buy 3-color (white, black, and read all over) ones for ... I want to say about 20 yuan which is like $3? I haven't looked into driving them yet; that's step 3 and I'm still on step 1 (monochrome OLEDs) but I think you might have to do some funky temperature adjustment stuff to get good results out of them...maybe that hasn't quite been integrated into the display controller chips yet?

> "(white, black, and read all over)"

Isn't that supposed to be "red all over"? Or are you making a pun?

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

#956

Post by rimliu »

chubot wrote: post #178
swyx wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a web developer i am bemused at every other comment on here that seems to agree with your sentiment that the world is walling up. yes, app stores will be a control mechanism for ever and consumers may not understand what they are opting into. but equally the open web will never go away and that's what general purpose computation has shifted to, thats basically all we've done this century. am i misunderstanding wha…

Can a program written for the web access all the great sensors on your Android or iPhone? Can it access new movies and TV shows? The web is a big success story, but it's not all there is in computing.

Amusing, how people fear monoculture on one hand, but a longing to have everyting as the web app on the other. For what is worth it is good web apps cannot access everything.

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

#957

Post by grkvlt »

dkersten wrote: post #360
btown wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance,…

> its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware For 2009 hardware running javascript in a browser, you mean? I was running much fancier native stuff much faster (including 3d games) on low-to-mid tier 2009 hardware. > So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do. I think it definitely accomplished its goals technically , but it certainly failed on adoption. I personally…

But, 3D in a browser is much easier since the GPU takes care of it. Low-latency audio is much harder.

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

#958

Post by nayuki »

Kiro wrote: post #231
nayuki wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XHTML5 works today, and my site is live proof. It helps catch dumb typos when typing HTML code by hand. It also means the CSS is more likely to be applied to the correct DOM tree.

I had a look at your site and it looks like normal HTML to me, except at the top. How does that help anything?

The biggest difference is serving with the header "Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml". This triggers strict XML parsing in the browser, and any syntax error produces a big ugly yellow screen.

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

#959

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

christophilus wrote: post #928
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreeing with you, mini rant time: Why in the fuck do desktop computers have user-based permission models? Don't answer that, I know why, it's because they inherited them from the server-OS ancestors, but it's retarded. Desktops are personal computers, there is no reason to stop the user from doing what they want because it is their computer. Some might say, "oh, well, we can protect the system from malicious softwar…

There are desktop computers which are in shared environments (computer labs, public libraries, kiosks, teller lines, etc). So user-based permission models make a lot of sense for desktops.

Not really. There are better solutions than user permissions for those situations, we used them all the time in the 90s when multi-user didn't even exist in the Windows or Mac Desktop world.

Network resources, hosted on servers, need user permissions. Not desktops.

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

#960

Post by Tharkun »

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…

Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old geezer, but that was kind of socialising was my favourite thing about the internet. It's a shame I haven't been able to experience it in over a decade.

It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.

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