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Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

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101–110 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#101
I wonder what the future holds for WebAssembly.

If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.

On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.

Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#102

EVs and the ability to power your house for several days. I think the combination of solar and and EV provide the ability to store power when the sun goes down. This starts to solve one of solar's paradoxes IMO.

I thought about this too and came to the conclusion that home and EV batteries probably have different requirements.

For instance, a home battery might have to be more durable (so withstand more charging cycles) but on the flip side can be heavier.

That said there might be synergies by repurposing worn out EV batteries as home or grid storage batteries.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#104
post #75

I don't know about "big" in terms of a viral hit, but in terms of what will change in our day-to-day experience... Here are some wild guesses, mostly along the theme of a societal conversation about and re-thinking of "sustainability" on nearly all levels. * Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bik…

> Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect. It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap! Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?

Especially given that the time to plant the trees is now rather than when they are really going to be needed. There is likely a way to do it / provide shade with native plants too, that would require less up-keep...

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#105
Memristors (sorta)

Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.

As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#106
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something about this cannot be right, surely? You are saying one can invest in a solar setup and have 7+ years of free electricity, and all that starting after 3.5 years?

Why is this hard to believe? Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason. In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.

One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail.

Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.

Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#107
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this hard to believe? Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason. In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.

One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail. Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free. Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well…

What if energy companies also invest in "free" energy?

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#108
Rebellion against the Surveillance Capitalism/State.

We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system.

Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian.

Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#110

Tooling for developing real-time collaborative remote working environments is about to take of dramatically. CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode…

Another project to add to the list is Replicache https://github.com/rocicorp/replicache
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