Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#161

Post by jiggawatts » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 12:01 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

What a lot of people replying to this are missing is that nobody wants visual drag & drop systems. Not coders, not "no-coders". Not anybody.

This is the root cause of an endless series of failed ventures and products.

The successful no-code products are something else entirely, merely masquerading as no-code. Excel is probably the prototypical example of this: it is a reactive dataflow system, but you'll never find any dragable widgets with little input ports and output ports you can connect.

It's trivial to get started with Excel. It's trivial to connect cells and get some computations going. It's then a nice smooth transition all the way up to multidimensional analysis, and not once do you have to break out into a full programming language.

That's what people want.

What you imagine they want is something childish and useless. To be honest, it's simply arrogance. By assuming the user can't code, it's natural to assume that they think at a level of a young child and need only toys.

For fuck's sake, Excel is 64-bit and fully parallel! Did you know that? I've seen 60 year old ladies from accounting produce spreadsheets that can bring a 16-core terminal server to its knees, and that spreadsheet was doing entirely legitimate, useful, productive computation. Show me the last system you built that can efficiently utilise a modern high-core CPU for a single user!

Your market is adults. They need power tools, not toys.

Start thinking like that, and you'll have a successful product.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#162

Post by ahelwer » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 12:33 PM UTC

lobotryas wrote: post #153

Guest19023892 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this makes sense for a number of reasons. 1. As you said, the costs involved. You'd probably need to charge people something like $10 per interaction with a voice actor, plus $2 per minute. This makes for a very limited market. 2. Actors need to be waiting for a request on a wide range of characters since there would not be enough demand for them to consistently play the same character all the time. So,…

A lot of these issues can be solved with ML ala “deepfakes” Purchase a license to use an actor’s voice/likeness. Have them complete a training set. Now you have their digital doppleganger who can act almost any role required of them.

As the other commenter said, the big appeal of this approach is the ability to improvise dialogue or even actions.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#163

Post by ptttr » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

tmaly wrote: post #87

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

I think low code/no code could really change thing if they can figure out how to make declarative code fast. Think Prolog etc

You're on to something.

Low code platforms, at their core, allow you to define the software with data (from predefined components usually through UI) and that's how they enable super productivity, until you hit a wall.

Data Declarative programming paradigm could potentially achieve the same levels of productivity without its limitations but it's very difficult to get the right implementation.

The most interesting development in this area I had found, is Fulcro Rapid Application Development Tools [1] - a fullstack clojure framework that's performant, declarative and extensible. RAD is still alpha but it bases on battle-proved Fulcro. Once you hit the limits of declarative RAD you can easily extend it with regular Fulcro components which are, in their essence, a cheap abstraction over React/React Native components - offering industry standard performance.

[1] https://github.com/fulcrologic/fulcro-rad

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#164

Post by giantg2 » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #145

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

They tried this in the 90s and 00s. It was such a spectacular failure it's funny to see it recycled. And for you to claim you wouldn't have to worry about maintenance is especially comical. It was extremely high maintenance and expensive, and it often broke. Programmers don't just code a problem, they solve the problem. Teasing out the actual business logic is as much a part of the job as anything else, and one that…

"Teasing out the actual business logic is as much a part of the job as anything else..."

That's the definition of a programmer analyst or business analyst. If the business is too cheap or clueless to create business process maps or hire someone as a process efficiency expert, then they are certainly too cheap fund properly developed software and too clueless to intelligently answer the questions that an IT resource has to use to tease out an answer.

I do agree that no-code is not going to replace the need for software professionals.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#165

Post by kybernetikos » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

Guest19023892 wrote: post #104

ahelwer wrote: post #5

One idea I've had (heavily influenced by The Diamond Age, I must admit) - a premium video game experience where NPCs you meet are sometimes voiced/acted by actors hired real-time on-demand with face or even body mocap. The NPCs revert back to regular AI versions if an actor is unable to be hired at that time. The player could interact by speaking with their own voice, naturally role-playing the scene. This would of c…

I don't think this makes sense for a number of reasons. 1. As you said, the costs involved. You'd probably need to charge people something like $10 per interaction with a voice actor, plus $2 per minute. This makes for a very limited market. 2. Actors need to be waiting for a request on a wide range of characters since there would not be enough demand for them to consistently play the same character all the time. So,…

I think the best approach is to arrange the game so that players are rewarded for acting in the appropriate ways. I saw one game where to level up you had to complete tasks that included social components (like helping another player). Rather than needing to pay someone real money to act, you can probably pay players in XP or in game gold and they might even think it's fun...

I could imagine having a very small number of paid actors for key roles, maybe the two opposing kings of a region or something, but eve online doesn't need to pay the heads of corporations, and plenty of interesting stories emerge naturally.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#166

Post by anotheryou » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

jppope wrote: post #49

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

Every VC in the world right now is betting on this becoming a thing... problem is that No Code/ Low Code as a product doesn't actually solve the problem that they are trying to solve. The overarching concept of No Code/ Low Code is that "code" is the hard part of building software, ergo if we can make it so "normal" people don't have to code the problem is solved. Of course we all know that code isn't the hard part o…

isn't there wordpress devs that don't code and make (for now) slow loading websites?

I think low-code is basically just graphical programming. If you want it more powerful/universal you need to code just the same. There might just be more or less big library helpers/blocks. Maybe it's just the next step of being "high-level" and now is indeed the time for it.

Also if you manage to write something as a nice XML/yaml/json you might as well put a nice UI on it.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#167

Post by jppope » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

brianhorakh wrote: post #133

jppope wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that?

Requires skills in both science and tech that only commercial farmers have, big companies don't share good. Plus Lots of data points, proper measurements require self calibrating "field suitable" lab equipment that doesn't exist or is highly cost prohibitive. Im actively spend 60+ hour weeks solving this. Have been for almost three years (im solving for spacex/mars missions, but it'll work here on terra firma too) Ex…

any links to your work or way I can follow what you are doing?

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#168

Post by juancn » Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

I’ve been part of a couple no code/low code platforms. They pop up every decade and do ok for a while and then wither and die, only to be replaced by the next gen of them.

4GL (fourth gen languages), BPM systems, things like clipper or dbase, access, even VB is a low code kind of platform.

The new generation focuses on web tech and mobile, and they’ll do well for a while, until the landscape changes enough and they accumulate enough cruft to become unwieldy to use.

In 10 years or so we’ll be talking about something like that again.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#169

Post by muzani » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

lubujackson wrote: post #83

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

I think the real shift will be in "no code experts" who get paid more than actual programmers because they learn how to deal with the limitations and extend them for businesses who already have sunk costs in them. A perfect example is Excel experts who can do very well because Excel has symbiotically intertwined with how many businesses operate. Or COBOL experts who get paid because nobody learns COBOL but places ref…

I feel like this will be like WordPress at best, and Cordova at worst.

WP lets someone with no formal CS training do wonders, and I think it's a good thing.

Cordova tries to save time and cost, but you need people with above average skill to hack things, know all the gotchas and bugs of the no-code system, all the undocumented bits, but still deal with the risks. Nobody wants to do the plumbing, nobody wants to dedicate their career to it, and so it ends up overpriced to the buyer and underpriced to the seller.

You could also end up with something like Parse, which had some of the best handovers from closed into open source, but the stigma of being dropped by a major tech company made people avoid it.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#170

Post by muzani » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #31

Electric aircraft for shorter trips instead of trains. The battery energy density still needs to improve somewhat but that is happening. They’d allow for serving more direct (point to point) routes than trains as the infrastructure cost is so much lower than laying and maintaining tracks. Rail serving high volume routes still makes sense, especially while electric plans remain relatively small.

Sounds like "flying motorcycle". Just find a way to go from work to the office, without all the turns, speed bumps and traffic. A friend's company did a prototype of this and it was quite good, but all the negative publicity demotivated them.