Ask HN: Most overhyped technology of 2016? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Most overhyped technology of 2016?

What do you folks think is the most over-hyped technology out there today. Is that self-driving cards, video chat apps, VR, bots? The barrier to entry into tech has dropped quite a bit lately, and a lot of "stuff" is being pumped out from every corner of the net. I am oversaturated and wondering how others are feeling.

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Virtual Reality.

As someone who has tried HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Playstation VR (I own PSVR) and even Samsung's foray into VR via its flagship Galaxy phones (S7 Edge) I would have to say that at present, it's still overhyped. The technology is so new that most companies are experimenting and finding their feet.

As cool as VR is, the cool factor wears off very quickly when you realise that screen technology hasn't quite reached the point where VR can compete with a 4K monitor on a gaming PC or even the level of immersion of a gaming console on a TV.

As someone who has changed career to work in VR (http://store.steampowered.com/app/488760 and more to come), I'd disagree with this one.

Is it early days? Damn straight.

Are some of the headsets a bit crap? Yep. TBH I'm only really interested in roomscale on the Vive right now.

Is the potential absolutely enormous? Yes. We're only just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with this tech.

And honestly, if I was looking at this for making-money potential rather than art and storytelling, I wouldn't even be touching entertainment. Enterprise / large-business applications - conferencing, design, anything where it's helpful for a bunch of people to be able to interact physically, on a whiteboard or a 3D model, without being in the same room. That's where the initial money seems to be for a smaller business at least.

I would say it's neat. But whoever thinks this has any use outside of entertainment, in ecommerce for example, is wrong IMO.

Not even for virtual meetings for companies that have a lot of remote staff?

Edit: or actually, a better use case...how about a quadriplegic that can no longer walk or move around easily?

Considering the state of audio/video conferencing, I have zero hope that virtual conferencing will ever be achievable.

computers where not hyped when it was 320x240. Virtual reality doesn't have to be about gaming. If it can open new ways of thinking, interaction, then it doesn't need 4k. The resolution is more than adequate. It's more about finding utilization.

Interesting point to belabor further. I am not old enough to know/remember what computers were like in the early day. Can anyone shed a light on what it was like when personal computer were in the same stage as VR today? I get a hunch computers were indeed less "hyped", but perhaps that's just the nature of the world we live in now. In 2016 it's no longer enough to have a good product, you have to shove it in the consumer's face or your competitor rips it off and does it first. Maybe hype is just a necessary evil?

"Deep learning" and virtually any other kind of "data science". I teach classes in analytics and I think ninety percent of what people really need is better understanding and visualization of the simplest statistics: sums, averages, counts, time series. Fancy statistical algorithms have some applications for example in fraud detection, but for most business people I think a great dashboard that lets them visualize patterns with their own two eyes is much more robust and useful.

I'm too old...

1. Microsoft awesome way cheaper than apple

2. Amazon .. None of my friends will ever buy anything over the internet...

3. Google Cool..but nobody will click on those tiny ads.

4. Facebook kinda dumb why not use email.

5. Twitter the dumbest thing I've ever heard of

6. Uber seem useful but I'd never used it.

7. AirBnb just plain creepy...

8. snapchat, Instagram, tinder ... don't you already have facebook?

I would take my predictions with a grain of salt... but I don't really get AI bots? Sure they could work someday just not sure how you get a break out company from it.

> 6. Uber seem useful but I'd never used it. > 7. AirBnb just plain creepy...

AirBnB is at least as useful as Uber if you travel. I've used it for multiple trips in five countries now and always had a good experience - the accommodation is always what was advertised, the user interface is easy to use (especially when in a country with a foreign language), and the pricing has always been competitive. I do have concerns about the impact of it on locals but I'm also not sure that AirBnB is exerting more pressure than many places have always had from other factors (tourist towns always have a balance between tourist prices and locals trying to make a living - more often than not that balance tips in favour of the tourists).

He might be referring to the thought of sharing the home of a person while they're in it.

Ah. We've only ever booked a whole unit for that reason .

I stopped using Airbnb when I realized that most of the units I was booking were just hotels and guesthouses, and I could get a huge discount by just booking via their own website. Especially if you are visiting a tourist town or a big city, Airbnb is generally a waste of money.

My experience has been the opposite - renting whole apartments in Copenhagen, Madrid, and London for less that I would otherwise pay.

It likely varies depending upon the market.

Everything Elon Musk. Even the good stuff (power wall) is over hyped, he's a walking hype machine.

Completely agree.

I think Hype is a great force in our modern, connected, globalised world and entities like Elon Musk identify this and fuel it to their advantage, to the max.

It is the best marketing/ad delivery channel. There is ad blockers everywhere. So what is the channel that cannot be blocked and scales really well?

People talking. In other words, identify a population group that are gullible, provide stuff that can make them talk about you and your company. You got free, perpetual, scaleable, targeted publicity. What more do you need?

You just need to keep providing stuff that they can talk about. Like Hyperloop, Mars colonies etc etc. No one cares if they are bogus and wouldn't work. People have short term memory anyway.

But then he puts rockets into space. So not just hype?

It's a massive amount of hype for something we've been doing for 50 years.

"We" haven't, the governments of the world have.

Hyped or not, the privatization and commoditization of space travel is new and interesting.

I'm biased on the matter, but I believe it would be interesting if we had more focus on open sourcing space technologies too.

Except for the landing and reusing part, no? (Yes, they recaptured and reused the Shuttle's SRBs, but it's a different scale and the economics are very different.)

The landing part was cool, but considering the extra fuel/weight required to do it then it seems to be more hype than practicalness too.

I'm not saying he doesn't do some cool stuff, but everything he does gets talked up like it's the second coming.

SpaceX produces rockets capable of carrying heavier payloads than the competition, and for a fraction of the cost.

EV's would not be a thing right now if it weren't for Tesla, and the other co-founders would've failed if it weren't for Elon.

The hype is real.

I agree. E.g. the hyperloop, the concept and technology has been around for 50 years or more, and suddenly he is the inventor of the thing?

In my opinion it's Javascript. Everything is javascript now and I see it as step backwards.

Private blockchains: everything there could be built before Bitcoin. It can be just replaced with fintech in general. Other technologies like VR are easy to understand even if they fall short.

Can you please explain a bit more on this. Why do you think blockchain is hyped? Also did anything similar to blockchain (distributed decentralized information store) exist earlier?

> Can you please explain a bit more on this.

Yes, sure. The bitcoin innovation was solving the duplicate transaction (or spend) problem in a trustless network. In a private blockchain you have trust between the nodes so this innovation does not apply.

> Also did anything similar to blockchain (distributed decentralized information store) exist earlier?

Yes, databases supported this configuration before and the idea of smart contracts predates Bitcoin. Also, there are a lot of articles before Bitcoin about secure transaction logs.

From a web dev perspective, I've heard a lot about React lately, so I learned it. I'm not saying it's bad, but I expected it to do a lot more.

I've heard a lot about Vue.js lately, apparently it's even better. But yeah, they're just small view libraries. If you want something that does a lot more, then you should check out Ember.

Chat bots. Still don't think I've heard of one that is actually useful.

thank you! and most people that I've spoken with that found out they are speaking with a chat bot get really, really pissed off.

Virtual reality (and augmented reality), self-driving cars, bots, internet of things, assistants (Siri, Cortana, etc), Apple Watch, bitcoin..

yes to all that EXCEPT internet of things (IoT)!

One word: NEST! The NEST (or Ecobee, smart HVAC etc) is eventually going to be in every house in 5+ years.

Lightbulbs, refrigerators, smart watches, CAMERAS! alarm systems, or even frameworks (Zwave etc) - (some more than others) are all taking off at a very fast pace.

The idea of the Nest systems (in a very distant way) was good. Nest itself won't be able to deliver. However, the idea Nest used to push itself wasn't a new one. It's something that's been repeating for years, that existed on display in movies, and that many (who are rich enough) already have (fully automated and "cool" home systems).

Also, the way they are implementing all of these things seem brute force, crude, and bulky. The house is a finite space filled with a specific set of things. Linking them all together (and to a central control) and having them all work together automatically seems like a very straightforward thing. So much so that many hobbyist Engineers already have their home systems working that way (and in a much more elegant and scalable way than the crap being pushed).

The only thing I'm really excited about are the LED light bulbs. Not the wireless control and programmable nature of them (though that's cool), but the range of color temperatures and intensities they make available and then the fact that they can programmatically be controlled/changed/accessed.

That is, it's cool to me to be able to buy a light bulb, then be able to link it with a clock and light sensor, then have it automatically adjust the intensity and color temperature of its output throughout the day as necessary.

But then LED light bulbs (programmable in that way, even) have been around for years.

Big data where big is volume, as in the mainstream. Influencers do not know statistics, do they?

Haha, I never thought about that. I think you're saying that you can gather meaningful insights by looking at a small sample of data, instead of collecting and processing absolutely everything. Is that what you mean?

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