Ask HN: Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Idea for a blog: whydontwehaveityet

16 pointstocomment15 comments

So seeing that -2F superconductor story a few days ago. I got to thinking, someone really needs to follow up on this story and see if anything comes of it. And there are all kinds of articles where they hype some new technology that we're supposed to have in 5 years. I think it would be an interesting blog to do investigative type reporting to talk to the people involved in inventing and commercializing these things and find out what the hold up is, how well they're actually coming along, possibly even what people can do to help.

Here are some technologies I'd like to see covered just off the top of my head:

Reservatrol

Anything with stem cells

Carbon nanotubes

That -2F superconductor

That super capacitor mentioned a few years ago (estor?)

Memristors

Some super efficient way to process titanium I heard about (we were supposed to have super cheap titanium by now)

Anyway, just wanted some general feedback on the idea. I'm probably too shy to do it alone, I wouldn't want to be calling strangers all over the world to track down the technologies. But I'd be happy if someone else picked up this idea and did it.

Check out Technology Review (TR) published by MIT. I was a long-time subscriber.

http://www.technologyreview.com/

Yes this is good thing, but I think the issue is trying to understand how the technologies are maturing. TR doesn't follow through on most of the technologies it features.

Yes, I agree. I wanted to point out that their initial reporting on technology is superb.

agreed.

Sounds like a job for "crowdsourcing." If you can't reach original sources, perhaps you can get responses from people who know people, work in the same field, etc.

Like a Science HN. I guess there's a Science Reddit now ("I'm a stem cell researcher--ask me anything").

Edit: Maybe that's what we really need--Reddit with only "I'm a" posts from qualified, authoritative sources. Of course that's what rating systems are supposed to be for.

that's a good point. Maybe if I used crowd sourcing I wouldn't have to call anyone.

Funny, I was thinking about almost exactly the same topic just yesterday. Much of the problem absolutely has to be patents. I have several awesome ideas which I will never put one second of effort into because I know I would get patent trolled to death and none of them are software related.

If we TRULY wanted to evolve mankind at the fastest rate possible, we would instantly share new discoveries and methods and allow anyone to use, profit or build upon them with no restrictions. The conundrum is that, while this greatly benefits mankind, the inventor gets the proverbial shaft. Sadly, I don't see this problem being solved any time soon.

That's an interesting idea. Maybe we could use some interesting automatic means to "cluster" information from these new technology areas. Suppose a system allowed someone to create a new technology area by defining all the entities involved in it (Names of people, research center, location of research center etc). A web crawler could use these as filters to pick out the latest info from it and supply it to the interested folks.

That's a cool idea.

Not as high-tech, but that Power Mat [1] device seems like a good example. I remember reading about it a few years ago, and just saw the first commercials for it this week.

Its a good premise for a blog, and would have plenty of topics. Like all blogs, it would depend on whether you stuck with it long enough to get in the groove.

[1] http://www.powermat.com/

It's a very nice idea actually. I'd contribute to it. What happens in most cases is that that one of the party (researchers, PR, ....) has oversold the potential product in the first place. Another part of the story is that in the process of maturing, or increasing their technology readiness levels (TRL) some technologies just don't make it because they do not find a niche market to evolve in and grow.

That super capacitor mentioned a few years ago (estor?)

Someone periodically comes up with a new longer lived/more potent battery or a very compact capacitor. The problem is not making such devices. The problem is making them safe and cheap to manufacture.

Here's another suggestion: wireless electricity. There's the new Sony wireless tv but it's an idea that should've picked up way more than it has, especially for stuff like cell phones.

Flying cars; medical tricorders; food replicators; space vacations; gravity boots; anti-gravity boots; Rosie the robot; basically, anything from Star Trek or the Jetsons.

Flying cars -- this deserves it's own blog. Or perhaps blog/ghetto would be a better way to put it. Or maybe just a single Snopes-like blog entry that people could permalink to whenever this comes up.

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