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

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71–80 of 176 posts

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

#71

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.

I might be wrong but this seems like a very US-centric idea. For most of the developed world trains fill this need very well, while the US has had problems with their rail network for reasons partially based on geography, partially based on population density, and partially based on their own fault. I think this explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ The solution is not aircraft, the sol…

IDK, high-speed rail doesn't seem to be taking off outside of Europe and a handful of Asian countries.

That leaves most of Asia outside India/China/Korea/Japan, and pretty much all of Australia/Oceania, Africa, the Middle East, and the entire New World.

I would love to see high-speed rail take over the world, but there's a lot of sparsely-populated places out there, and it makes sense to investigate technologies to support them.

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

#72
post #7

Generically engineered plants for the home

You mean "genetically"? They already are.. Like roses, or most patented strains. Lots of research into cannabis. What do you think these plants do?

This is what genetic recombination has made possible in tropical fish in just the last ten years:

https://www.glofish.com/

I don't doubt we will see CRISPR and friends applied to ornamental plants the way they are already applied to food crops.

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

#73
post #49

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…

I agree with this. I do wonder if low/no-code products will ever become good enough that you'd feel comfortable actually using one. I believe a part of this is having infrastructure/system that can describe itself in sufficient detail. Then the ability to modify itself with sufficient variety. Fundamentally I've seen ORMs/APIs/integrations that are more or less a crap shoot as to whether or not they're going to work, god forbid if a version of something is upgraded. The fallibility of it all will prevent this from happening.

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

#74
post #63

Web 3/Dweb minus the crypto built on IPFS (or something similar). I believe many developers will soon come to realize that you don't need a blockchain to build most decentralized applications. Products like like Google Docs, social networks, messaging app, etc don't depend on a proof of stake, and we shouldn't be running miners to power such simple operations. All these applications need isa decentralized form of mes…

How is IPFS different from torrent?

[This](https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/208) summarizes it well. [Related.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18650670)

TLDR: IPFS acts as a single swarm (i.e. universal deduping) and has more projects like IPNS, IPLD, and Filecoin under its umbrella.

In my opinion, the project is more of an effort to evolve of decentralized technologies to a point where they can be used for mainstream products.

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

#75
post #49

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…

Technology is no longer a tool for economic growth, it is now almost entirely a tool for economic control. So investors should adjust their strategy to the new reality.

"Does this technology provide a means for seizing control of the existing economy?" That's the question which investors should be asking.

I think cryptocurrency is the only technology which can achieve this due to the way it transcends existing legal frameworks in terms of ownership rights; a bit like the notion of corporate personhood allowed corporations to gain an upper hand and transcend the legal frameworks of its time.

Corporate stocks were vehicles for inter-generational wealth transfer and the next vehicles will be cryptocurrencies.

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

#76
post #4

Augmented Reality. Apple seems poised to release some AR Glasses based on the patents they've been registering and the investment they've made in the ARKit framework. This will probably become another iPhone-like platform for developing apps on, and will likely present opportunities like the early days of the App Store. There's a cool project trending on Github right now showing how magic-like some of the technology…

can you recommend some AR people i should follow on Twitter?

Anyone at PTC should be good:

https://www.ptc.com/

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

#77

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 like, and use these tools. Getting it right is hard though. Google just shuttered their AppMaker, which I thought was one of the better attempts.

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

#78
post #49

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…

I came here to write basically this. I agree, and by the way, "wantrepreneur" is perfect.

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

#79

Web 3/Dweb minus the crypto built on IPFS (or something similar). I believe many developers will soon come to realize that you don't need a blockchain to build most decentralized applications. Products like like Google Docs, social networks, messaging app, etc don't depend on a proof of stake, and we shouldn't be running miners to power such simple operations. All these applications need isa decentralized form of mes…

I agree with most of what you described. However I feel that CRDTs aren’t quite there yet. I also see IPFS becoming internally useful but externally I see L8 multiplexed H3 as a possibility.

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

#80
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, the best and most successful no-code low-code product was and is Excel.

Excel is spreadsheet application. It is not related to the parent post, which discusses networked CRUD application, with various integration points, DB, caching, redundant deployments, etc..

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