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Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#301

Post by terminalcommand »

soulchild37 wrote: post #295
terminalcommand wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interning at a law firm, two days ago I spent 4+ hours searching through public announcements on a government website. Me and a my colleague searched through the announcements of 500+ companies in the last 3 years. We ctrl+f'ed certain words, if they were present we noted the decision date, it was that simple. But the government website had a flashy UI with Ajax that required multiple clicks to get a list of anno…

I remember someone posted a comment regarding why Lawyer doesnt want to improve productivity before in HN. It's because lawyer usually charge client per hour, the more hour the lawyer spend on work the more he/she get paid, there's a negative incentive on reducing work hours this way.

Lawyers bill by the hour, that's right. However there is almost always a race against time. You can always do the work slower/write more hours. But you can't speed up the work, if you don't have the tools.

In large offices, IMHO people get billed with their capacity to pay. It has not much to do with the hours lawyers put in. If the client has the money, lawyers put in more hours. Every piece of paper lawyers print gets billed to you. Every cab fare, every x and y, you imagine. On top of all this lawyers need to bill hours so they don't get fired. But I'd rather bill hours doing serious research than manual labor.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#302

Post by gcb0 »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #284
jostylr wrote: post #39

Textblade: https://waytools.com/ Single row keyboard that has minimal finger movement. It was to be delivered March 2015 or so, but it has yet to be released. They have testers who rave about it and it looks incredible, but it is perpetually around the corner. Originally designed as an ultra-portable phone keyboard, those who have used it tend to use it for all their machines. It has jump slots to quickly switch from…

I saw the videos and it looks really innovative and great. Although, my concern is that it will not catch on, because people don't usually like to learn "two" keyboards, even though Textblade is essentially a QWERTY keyboard. The same happened with Dvorak and other variations of the keyboard. While it's easier to type on Dvorak (my own experience), you're going to have to type in QWERTY on other computers. Sometimes…

and worse: learn another keyboard that can only be used on a desk, where space is not limited.

this product is a flop. why people even know about it?!

wake me up when I can use it as a real phone keyboard. like the priv already does.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#303

Post by gcb0 »

lj3 wrote: post #265
bch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like a very large, performant-enough display for solely for editing in vi. Even that is still just a dream, as far as I can tell.

Have you taken a look at the Dasung Paperlike yet? http://www.dasung.com/english/

have you? how's real world usage? is ghosting as bad as every other eink?

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#304

Post by TeMPOraL »

Trundle wrote: post #235
baron816 wrote: post #130

Much of what people have mentioned here will be really great. I think self-driving cars have the most potential to impact people lives day to day, followed by AR. I guess infinite, cheap, clean energy could also spark another industrial revolution. But all these things aren't likely to impact the happiness and life satisfaction of those living in the developed world. The internet has been huge, but it really hasn't m…

>but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole. Serious question. Has any technology done this? We don't appear to be happier than any other animal. Even in the developed world plenty of people are downright miserable. Unless primitive humans were just far sadder than the average animal, I can't see how technological advancement has made us happier as a whole, because we're not all that happy. If antibiotics, elect…

Yes. Alcohol and various drugs, for example.

I jest, but only a little bit. The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology. Humans are good about noticing what is not OK to them and focusing on that - while also growing resistant to persistent problems. So they keep the baseline.

Things have changed a lot, however - we've been moving up on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Thanks to technology, most Westerners no longer really worry about food, shelter, personal security and forming relationships. We've moved upwards - that's why we have time and will to bitch about abstract topics on the Internet. The very controversies our society has is the evidence just how far our technology has lifted us. Starving people don't fret about identity politics and gender imbalances in hot industries.

This is a realistic goal for technology - lifting us up and solving the problems we identify. Feeling happy is something we either need to learn individually, or brainwash (or engineer) ourselves into.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#305

Post by caseymarquis »

nulagrithom wrote: post #218

New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…

I work in industrial data collection and communications. I'd caution that if you're going to go this route (introducing tech where there wasn't any), you need to focus on the low hanging fruit and solve actual pain points. I see a lot of companies pushing data collection without a use for the data or an understanding of the real problems companies need to solve. Sounds like the parent avoided these pitfalls.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#306

Post by phkahler »

auxym wrote: post #297
tnecniv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait to never use MATLAB again.

What's keeping you on Matlab? In my experience it's mostly the domain-specific libraries or Simulink. The core matrix-y stuff can pretty much all be ported to Python with similar or better perfomance, especially using Numba.

Don't forget the core matrix-y stuff can be directly run in Octave. But that's just a cost issue, it doesn't get away from the weird language.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#307

Post by valesco »

jedberg wrote: post #191
Jach wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the glasses can name people from your contacts, it's only one more step to name and recognize everyone it can including strangers, including showing any related info like reddit aliases (known and suspected), reputation in some reputation tracker or even criminal history, favorite alcoholic beverages and other interests to help with dating... enough people don't want that so they'll ban AR devices and punch out pe…

At one point there was an Android app that could identify strangers. They nerfed it so that it couldn't do that anymore. I'm sure they could do the same for the glasses. But yeah, that's why it would have to be real subtle.

Wasn't it an app by a Russian guy that looked on the social network for people's name? I think it served as a brilliant demonstration of the current state of privacy.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#308

Post by pkalinowski »

elihu wrote: post #242
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not an expert, but I tend to trust them. and blockchain proponents want an infallible system audit-able by the public, instead of having to trust anyone. they haven't figured it out completely, they push towards it. in any case blockchain networks can function without computers. very cumbersome though.

Voting systems are hard because most democracies expect ballots to be confidential. Is there a blockchain-based voting system that allows a voter to have high confidence that their vote was counted, but doesn't allow someone else to be able to know how that voter voted?

Aparrently, someone has it figured out: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fra...

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#309

Post by bobosha »

The advent of AI-based search. I'm not sold on the siri/cortana et al conversational agent approach. AFAIK it's mostly UI/UX layered atop the "keyword->10 links" paradigm. Search is missing the key concept of iteration and exploration and (hopefully) someone somewhere is working on it.

Re: Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about?

#310

Post by [deleted] »

nulagrithom wrote: post #218

New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean boring , old industries. There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is. For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator…

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