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

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

#581

Post by thesuitonym »

HideousKojima wrote: post #351
maverick74 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amazes me is how little we talk about hydrogen (H2) fuel cell vehicles. Because, unless we get a tremendous breakthrough in the next 5 years, electric battery vehicles will be a very big pain. -Batteries are terribly expensive (and prices are not going down as fast as expected) -Batteries degrade too fast -Batteries take too long to charge -Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage…

Biggest problem with hydrogen is the lack of refueling infrastructure. With electric, there's an electrical grid to build chargers on top of and worst case you can charge in your garage etc. With hydrogen we would need to create tons of new gas stations designed for hydrogen as well as the delivery vehicles, refineries, etc. to supply them. I've got a relative who works for Toyota (who are making significant investme…

Charging in your garage isn't really the worst case scenario. For most drivers, it's actually the best case scenario, because your average commute won't even come close to depleting the battery, and can be trickle charged over the course of a night, extending battery life over fast charging.

The only reason a person should ever need to charge at a station is on a long haul trip, and that problem is getting better all the time.

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

#582

Post by entropicgravity »

feoren wrote: post #571
entropicgravity wrote: post #566

Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric. First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reaso…

I think this is a good insight, and I hope this comes to pass, but a couple points: > the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery? > only EV's that are half the width of a normal c…

Yes there are a lot of corner cases that I didn't belabor in my post. Most of the very heavy vehicles you mention are in fact already diesel electric. ie a diesel motor operates as a generator to provide electricity for the electric motor that moves things along. Just replace the diesel with a battery and you're there. (not as simple as it seems but right in theory)

With small cars in a city core these cars rarely go faster than 40 mph and on average about 30mph with traffic lights so you don't need the separation that you would want on a freeway. Several vehicles like this are already available or under development. I suspect that a Smart Car would come very close to meeting this spec already.

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

#583

Post by adamckay »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #478
Geee wrote: post #284

General purpose humanoid robots. They're kind of mainstream idea, but very few people talk about them or take them seriously. Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future. Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software wil…

Sorry but this is just fantasy. Robots are not even remotely close to being able to replace humans for 90% of tasks. Robots do not deal with uncertainty well and in my opinion only ever will in scenarios where there are very tight bounds on the task. A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you, because there are far too many snafus in the process to deal with. The real world is too fucked up for a…

> A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you

Agreed. But when that robot has something like a large scale 3d printer, why would it build with logs?

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

#584

Post by elicash »

moralestapia wrote: post #569
elicash wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar at all with this space. Is vertical farming a possible solution here?

It would be very expensive. One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes. But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vert…

Was not aware these projects were trying to be self-sufficient! Yeah, that's pretty wild. I assumed from your comment they just wanted to have their own tomatoes or something.

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

#585

Post by s1artibartfast »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #398
emehex wrote: post #347

I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today! [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...

Would that mean the population then will be much wealthier (as happened after the Black Plague)?

probably the opposite.

In the black plague, most of the wealth was durable physical assets like land, tools, farmhouses, ect.

In modern economies, wealth usually buys services and consumables. Less cheap labor will be a big hit to these costs. To make things worse, the workers will have to financially support a large aging population with a shrinking young demographic.

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

#586

Post by wcoenen »

Using power from solar panels to synthesize food (or at least, food components like starch). It turns out this can be done much more efficiently than photosynthesis.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...

I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.

It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.

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

#587

Post by mdip »

feoren wrote: post #571
entropicgravity wrote: post #566

Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric. First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reaso…

I think this is a good insight, and I hope this comes to pass, but a couple points: > the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery? > only EV's that are half the width of a normal c…

   > Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Probably would be a problem. I don't know that the author was thinking "a car that is half the width of a normal car" as "a vehicle that takes up substantially less space". Perhaps we'll all be riding around in Go-Karts, who knows? :)

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

#588

Post by CraftingLinks »

Having gone through a lot of top posts in this thread, it's kind of disappointing how relatively boring these predictions for the future are. That's a sign were in a great wave of pessimism of what the future will bring. That pessimism may well be justified, but there's also an underlying 'hopelessness' emanating from the suggested unambitious 'next big thing'. Otoh, there's no shortage of CGI moonshot projects that feel like scams, so they fail to offset the depressing feeling.

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

#589

Post by WesleyJohnson »

Flatcircle wrote: post #307

There’s a real possibility housing prices might go down or sideways for a decade or more. Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.

Can you elaborate on what newer tech would make older homes worth less?

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

#590

Post by kickout »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #563
kickout wrote: post #208

Autonomous machines operating in farm land in the USA. Several billion dollar companies could be spun up. Ripe for the taking right now/

John Deere can and likely will swallow up anything that seems interesting in this space. They already largely are. Source: Worked on AI in the Ag Industry.

I can't disagree with your take. Eventually (hopefully) there will be someone that doesn't sell out. Achieving Level 4/5 in corn/maize fields will be easier than Level 4/5 FSD in cars. My own theory is Deere knows/thinks it can't sell 200-600K tractors when a smaller, more lightweight unit can do the same so it is actively swallowing up competitors to protect its moat.
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