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

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

#61

Post by jensneuse » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #53

jensneuse wrote: post #23

Managing APIs like dependencies, with a package manager-like developer experience. (npm for APIs). The number of APIs is continuously growing. It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future. I wrote about our approach to solve the problem here: https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/architecture/manage-api-de... I'm curious what others think of this problem space.

Honest feedback, the whole point of this is to make things easier, but the examples on your post seem quite contrived. Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate. I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.

Thank you, great feedback. You're right in that we should provide better examples. If you find anything else that bothers you, please keep it coming.

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

#62

Post by verdverm » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

zh3 wrote: post #34

Pity it's not possible to open-source execution. So many good ideas fail due to poor execution (these days, quite possibly a larger number are killed by birth by bigco's - that's still a 'failure to execute' though, in a certain sense).

To be fair, there is a lot more information and educational material out there on how to build new products more effectively, the last 10 years or so. It still takes time to learn even the basics.

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

#63

Post by thom » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.

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

#64

Post by abrichr » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:31 PM UTC

katmannthree wrote: post #6

abrichr wrote: post #5

Conscious realism and the cosmological polytope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813 According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions. The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fund…

That's a lot of words in those links. What falsifiable predictions does this make?

It's a good question, and as a layman I don't have the answer. However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.

In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.

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

#65

Post by moralestapia » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:32 PM UTC

sacrosanct wrote: post #4

Clean Energy, Water Desalination, Nigeria's crackdown on anonymous SIM cards, Monkeypox, Separation of Church & State in a post-Roe world, Computer chips made out of light, The managed decline of Britain, Crackdowns on E2E encrypted messaging apps, Quantum-resistant cryptography, Tesla cars charged by burning coal.

>Separation of Church & State in a post-Roe world

Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American.

While I don't diminish the impact it could have over there, that's irrelevant to the daily lives of literally the rest of the world.

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

#66

Post by YossarianFrPrez » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

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-bikes.

* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.

* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.

* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.

* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?

* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.

* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.

* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.

The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.

Also:

* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.

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

#67

Post by wizofaus » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

If by "few people" you mean "few people of the sort you might encounter on HN" then I'd be willing to bet the next big not-much-discussed thing comes out of China, maybe India. The sheer number of engineers in those two countries virtually guarantees some of sort revolutionary tech being developed there and taking the world by storm (I wouldn't exactly call TikTok revolutionary but it's a foretaste of what's to come).

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

#68

Post by valbaca » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #12

CUE ( https://cuelang.org | https://cuetorials.com ) will become the common language of config & devops, enabling a whole new level of reuse, sharing, and safety. The philosophy is quite sound ( https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic )

You should really give a mild caveat that you're a contributor to this project.

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

#69

Post by saalweachter » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #58

handelaar wrote: post #37

DC home electricity. If your future home has solar and local storage, and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans. Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring…

Ooh, fascinating. AC is better for long distance transmission, which solar + local storage obviates. Do you happen to know of the efficiency we might stand to gain from switching appliances to DC?

So you've two competing losses: transformers and voltage drops over long DC circuits.

When I was last looking into this myself -- and lamenting you couldn't find PoE LED lights for love or money -- it sounded like (IANAEE) voltage drops start becoming a thing you have to care about around 50 or 100 feet, depending on the gauge; wiring a house with DC isn't impossible but it might require a little bit of care or some thought.

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

#70

Post by cassianoleal » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 8:42 PM UTC

shafyy wrote: post #27

jazzyjackson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wish I remembered what podcast I was listening to... it was someone running a company developing synthetic milk and eggs explaining why meat will never scale up, the problem is the growth medium for muscle is also the perfect environment for bacteria, and we basically need to reinvent immune systems before you're going to get a cubed inch of healthy chicken to grow without contamination

This is probably not the one you're referring to, but Pat Brown, co-founder of Impossible, also has quite a strong opinion on cultured meat. If somebody figures out how to grow animal parts artifically and reliably, there are much more interesting applications than to eat it. Such as medicinal applications. I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, t…

So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Not much to see here.

I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information.

> I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.

Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.