3 ms·

Not dead, just resting: How discredited technologies can be unexpectedly resurrected

15 points by robg 18y ago

mixmax 18y ago
I wrote about something very similar a while back: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html
davidw 18y ago
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767 I think it's an interesting idea though. How many things sort of fade, or don't take off, only to be resurrected and achieve popularity elsewhere?
- robg 18y ago
  I'm stumped these days on how to handle dupes. I had been deleting them when folks pointed them out (except the print version over the multipage one). But here it's apparent that a bunch of folks didn't see the original. I wish I could transfer the karma points to you, or link this submission to the original, though I imagine that would introduce many more new complications. What do other folks think about duplicates?
  - davidw 18y ago
    > What do other folks think about duplicates? I don't really care - unless pg creates some kind of market for the karma points I have accumulated, they're worthless (like ideas?:-)
    - robg 18y ago
      Why do folks (hint, hint) point them out though? I can't say my memory is good enough to recognize dupes. I know on a few occasions I've submitted something I had previously submitted.
      - davidw 18y ago
        Shrug... part ego gratification, part "hey, this system might be better at catching these things".
    - eru 18y ago
      I thought about creating a prediction market where you can gamble away your karma.
      - maxwell 18y ago
        As others have said before, the trouble with contemporary karma implementations (like here and on reddit) is that everyone has unlimited upvote potential and it doesn't cost anything to post. This means karma totals are more or less "chronocratic" -- those who spend the most time on the site have the loudest voice and those who submit the most invariably have the highest karma. (The only exception seems to be dhh, who has, let's see, 259 points for 18 posts. I can't find pg's post giving the highest per post average stats (SearchYC seems to be down), but dhh's 14.4 is certainly an outlier.) So, I don't think any kind of market using current karma as the currency would work at all. Karma will only start becoming dangerous (in raganwald's sense) when it's transactional and capped, and thus scarce, and thus competitive with national currencies as a wealth proxy.
        eru 18y ago
        I would just use the karma on this site as a credit limit. Of course if my market became more important than hacker news I could not just piggy back any longer because it would pay to hack your karma up here.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
mechanical_fish 18y ago
The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can recognize". You can discredit any technology -- or overestimate it, for that matter -- by analyzing it on a short enough time scale, just as you can take a random walk and interpret it as a series of dramatic surges and crashes.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Look at Smalltalk, for example: Sometimes things don't need to be directly successful to have a huge influence.
nailer 18y ago
Best recent example is Social networking. Friendster was a joke before MySpace, er, made it popular before making it a joke again. Later Facebook may have succeeded in not making it a joke.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  Online video-sharing as well. This was a joke in the first dot-com boom: everybody tried including RealAudio on their pages, but too many people were on dialup, the player was unreliable, and quality was too grainy. Then YouTube came along in 2005, after everyone had gone to broadband, and suddenly succeeded.
helveticaman 18y ago
I hope Dvorak starts picking up traction.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  Anecdotally, it seems to have gotten a big boost when Microsoft (and Linux!) started including the Dvorak layout in system software and providing an easy way to switch between layouts on a per-program basis. The first time I tried out Dvorak, I had to hack around in ResEdit, make a new keyboard layout, and then glue labels to a keyboard cover. If I weren't 12 years old, I would never have had time to bother. And even then, I gave up after a few days because I had homework due that I needed to type up fast, and couldn't afford to put up with hunt-and-peck. When I tried again in college, everything was all preinstalled, and I just had to change a Keyboard setting. And I could alt-shift to go back to Qwerty, so if something urgent came in - say, I had to respond to an instant message - I could do that and then go back to learning.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Computers have been much kinder to alternate keyboard layouts than typewriters. (Another Dvorak user here.)
coglethorpe 18y ago
I remember a comment a long time ago that paper would never die because it is too "user friendly." That was back in the late 1980's when that phrase was thrown around a lot, but it looks like it is true.

15 points by robg 18y ago

I wrote about something very similar a while back: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-bubble-burst.html

davidw 18y ago

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=328767 I think it's an interesting idea though. How many things sort of fade, or don't take off, only to be resurrected and achieve popularity elsewhere?

robg 18y ago
I'm stumped these days on how to handle dupes. I had been deleting them when folks pointed them out (except the print version over the multipage one). But here it's apparent that a bunch of folks didn't see the original. I wish I could transfer the karma points to you, or link this submission to the original, though I imagine that would introduce many more new complications. What do other folks think about duplicates?
- davidw 18y ago
  > What do other folks think about duplicates? I don't really care - unless pg creates some kind of market for the karma points I have accumulated, they're worthless (like ideas?:-)
  - robg 18y ago
    Why do folks (hint, hint) point them out though? I can't say my memory is good enough to recognize dupes. I know on a few occasions I've submitted something I had previously submitted.
    - davidw 18y ago
      Shrug... part ego gratification, part "hey, this system might be better at catching these things".
  - eru 18y ago
    I thought about creating a prediction market where you can gamble away your karma.
    - maxwell 18y ago
      As others have said before, the trouble with contemporary karma implementations (like here and on reddit) is that everyone has unlimited upvote potential and it doesn't cost anything to post. This means karma totals are more or less "chronocratic" -- those who spend the most time on the site have the loudest voice and those who submit the most invariably have the highest karma. (The only exception seems to be dhh, who has, let's see, 259 points for 18 posts. I can't find pg's post giving the highest per post average stats (SearchYC seems to be down), but dhh's 14.4 is certainly an outlier.) So, I don't think any kind of market using current karma as the currency would work at all. Karma will only start becoming dangerous (in raganwald's sense) when it's transactional and capped, and thus scarce, and thus competitive with national currencies as a wealth proxy.
      - eru 18y ago
        I would just use the karma on this site as a credit limit. Of course if my market became more important than hacker news I could not just piggy back any longer because it would pay to hack your karma up here.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

mechanical_fish 18y ago

The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can recognize". You can discredit any technology -- or overestimate it, for that matter -- by analyzing it on a short enough time scale, just as you can take a random walk and interpret it as a series of dramatic surges and crashes.

silentbicycle 18y ago
Look at Smalltalk, for example: Sometimes things don't need to be directly successful to have a huge influence.

nailer 18y ago

Best recent example is Social networking. Friendster was a joke before MySpace, er, made it popular before making it a joke again. Later Facebook may have succeeded in not making it a joke.

nostrademons 18y ago
Online video-sharing as well. This was a joke in the first dot-com boom: everybody tried including RealAudio on their pages, but too many people were on dialup, the player was unreliable, and quality was too grainy. Then YouTube came along in 2005, after everyone had gone to broadband, and suddenly succeeded.

helveticaman 18y ago

I hope Dvorak starts picking up traction.

nostrademons 18y ago
Anecdotally, it seems to have gotten a big boost when Microsoft (and Linux!) started including the Dvorak layout in system software and providing an easy way to switch between layouts on a per-program basis. The first time I tried out Dvorak, I had to hack around in ResEdit, make a new keyboard layout, and then glue labels to a keyboard cover. If I weren't 12 years old, I would never have had time to bother. And even then, I gave up after a few days because I had homework due that I needed to type up fast, and couldn't afford to put up with hunt-and-peck. When I tried again in college, everything was all preinstalled, and I just had to change a Keyboard setting. And I could alt-shift to go back to Qwerty, so if something urgent came in - say, I had to respond to an instant message - I could do that and then go back to learning.
silentbicycle 18y ago
Computers have been much kinder to alternate keyboard layouts than typewriters. (Another Dvorak user here.)

coglethorpe 18y ago

I remember a comment a long time ago that paper would never die because it is too "user friendly." That was back in the late 1980's when that phrase was thrown around a lot, but it looks like it is true.