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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

Graphene is mentioned every 6 months in articles and magazines I read and I cant remember how long this has been going on. Same goes for quantum computing.

I really hope at some point it will actually become a reality. The skeptics at the bottom of article dodnt believe graphene will work for digital applications.

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I recall reading about printable, flexible OLED displays in the 1990s, but it wasn't until recently that OLED displays reached consumer technology, and even more recently that they began improving in size and color fidelity relative to cost. Give graphene another 10-20 years and we might see applications.

My guess is that most of these "miracle technologies" won't work out the way we hope, but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting to track their progress. Plus the research being done on them might still be useful. Ultimately, there might be some property of graphene that makes it unsuitable for widespread use, but some other related material might slide into its expectations.

Unfortunately, we get attached to certain big names and lay all our hopes and dreams on their backs, and they so often don't work out. We are only human, and we can't follow the whole of all technology that lies on the horizon, but even if the big names don't work out, there's still a lot of promise in this area, and I get excited by the research.

Came here to say pretty much the same thing. I dont know if it is due to impatience, or this being over hyped, or what. I read articles ranging from graphene will revolutionize everything from battery tech to nanotechnology. It will be able to cheaply build a car that weighs thousands of pounds less than a car made of steel or aluminum. It can be produced by a dvd burner. But I never hear mention of mainstream use. Is this similar to solar power being perpetually 10 years away from breaking through to the mainstream?

quantum computing might become reality faster than you think. the next gen d-wave with 256 qubits has the potential find a commercial niche im super computing. they already have demos where a combo of d-wave and classical supercomputer can perform some annealing tasks much faster than classical only.

There was a recent article here on HN that seemed to debunk the d-wave machines, that showed that a classic (non-quantum) algorithm was probably the best candidate for the results the d-wave produces.

In light of that, true quantum computing may be farther off than you're expecting.

You mean the paper that has been countered with [1]? Regarding this I'd wait and see what the reaction to the counter is going to be, I for one am certainly not convinced that modeling one particular implementation classically would disprove quantum computing for any of the implementations. As far as I've read we have enough examples where only quantum models fit, which all would have to be debunked.

[1] http://dwave.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-recent-how-quantum...

I think we will manufacture graphene in larger scales before we hit larger scale quantum computing. They are both awesome technologies that are very promising.

But can you build a memristor with graphene? That's the real question here.

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