Remote learning technology is what I would like to dig deeper in.
I imagine software development skills becoming as widespread as math skills worldwide in 50 years. Its impact will be exponential.
Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
91–100 of 127 posts
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#92The C/C++ replacement landscape is getting more attention than ever.
Odin, Zig, Jai, and Rust all seem promising in their own respects.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#93What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots. I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc. The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new develo…
I love space, and get excited about seeing BlueOrigin/ SpaceX/ Virgin now flying tourists - but I think I am still missing the actual business case. Where do you see the value beyond novelty? What's the killer application? Settlements on Mars, or something more short-term? I think I'm still stuck in a 'a computer on every desk - yeah, but why would anyone need a computer!?' stage, and it bugs me to no end! ;-)
SpaceX is Moore’s Law for space - as cost per ton to orbit keeps getting lower, qualitatively different tech starts getting relevant.
- Space tourism: luxury zero G hotels, etc.
- Space construction: robots and materials for building large structures in space
- Mining operations
- Zero G manufacturing (I’m not expert but I understand it makes creating certain materials, semiconductors, biopolymers, etc much easier)
- Communications (every country wants to build their own Starlink now)
- Edge compute (once a billion people are serviced by Starlink-type comms, they need low latency access to stuff which should be colocated in space)
- Base building: moon base, Mars base. Every advanced country wants one, soon large corporates will want them too.
- Military operations (refuelling, cargo, surveillance, etc) - every advanced country needs lower cost access to this
- Next generations of existing tech - as cost per ton to orbit goes down, the appropriate tech for building stuff in space will change. Sort of like software radically changed as CPUs got faster. So eg satellites can start using heavier but cheaper or more performant materials.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#94Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc. I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely…
I'm a physician and I've thought a lot about this in the context of the US healthcare system. Step foot in a hospital and the first thing you notice is that everything is single-use, thousand-dollar widgets. I've been into the idea of open-source medical hardware and software for a while. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the obscene cost of getting FDA approval for even the simplest medical device makes these types of initiatives a non-starter.
The way the marketplace is organizing, most local hospitals are being purchased and re-organized into large regional state-wide networks. At this scale I wonder if it might become economically feasible for a hospital system (or systems) to invest in getting open-source designs through the approval process and then have an in-house engineering department that could manufacture parts for the regional system.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#95Nothing. At least in terms of "Bits" Technology as a word has now blended to everything about "bits" or Information Technology. But my background is EE I am always more interested in "atoms". How "bits" should have helped "atoms" to make more interesting things. Instead we have SnapChat that now worth the same as Sony. I really do believe there are many many sector of our world and business that is not really help by…
I think that would be something well-adapted to our future of conserving energy. Less planned obsolescence, more maintainability. In a perfect world, we could put all our advances in the 'atom' world into appliances that make everyone's life better.
That's one reason why I really like 'simple' engineering projects that aim to translate scientific/technological advances to communities in developing countries (the good ones, there are many well-meant-but-too-high-tech projects). One of the best ones I can think of is the self-made charcoal barrel and based on that water filtration setup.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#96Something I’ve been thinking about is whether the current technological landscape, through positive and negative pressures, can enable a revival of small-scale production. Basically, making more of what you consume at home, in your neighborhood, etc. I think “human scale” technologies can help mitigate some of the more nightmarish horizons of the technological society we inhabit, though, obviously, neither completely…
I'm a physician and I've thought a lot about this in the context of the US healthcare system. Step foot in a hospital and the first thing you notice is that everything is single-use, thousand-dollar widgets. I've been into the idea of open-source medical hardware and software for a while. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the obscene cost of getting FDA approval for even the simplest medical device makes thes…
This immediately made me think of a cyberpunk dystopia where there are shiny, pre-packaged widgets for the elite and open-source medicine for the poor masses. But then I immediately remembered that there may just be no medicine for the masses instead.
Open source tools could be a boon to civilization though, especially in developing countries - one problem is materials though. Some optics projects are really clever, like that visual microscope malaria diagnostic kit with the glass ball lens. But then again, you think: hey, are real microscopes really that unaffordable? I really have to read up on how that was financed and why that road was taken.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#97Probably nothing. I think we peaked in early 2000s and now we're floating on a plateau. I don't think progress will be restored during my lifetime unless we first meet a shared catastrophe on the level of WW2.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#98Cheap solar combined with the electric transport revolution (courtesy of better batteries), and the likely implications towards the architecture of our future power generation and storage. It costs money, but it's now possible to live a first-world lifestyle - sports car and all - without burning any fossil fuels. Houses can be made self-sufficient. The biggest impediment to turning that into a massive distributed gr…
My take on this is that governments should be incentivising power/oil companies to create public infrastructure for electric car charging which would further speed up the move away from oil-based energy.
I'm not particularly well informed but I believe Barcelona city has made some steps on this by incorporating a jointly-held power company to add hundreds of charging points around the city. Public infrastructure achieved but via private investment.
More here - https://www.endolla.barcelona/en/
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#99Seeing all those comments about low tech being exciting to people here has really made my day. It's something that I've been increasingly interested in over the years, but I thought I didn't have much company in that.
Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?
#100I am excited about dedicated servers. Yes, dedicated, not cloud servers in AWS or something like that. I am interested in running my own server for decades, but nowadays, since about 2 years, you get extremely powerful and reliable servers for already 40 bucks a month. That is amazing. The power you can deliver today compared to the costs reached a very good ratio. This was unthinkable 5-7 years ago and open a lot of…
The cloud is really just the centralized computing paradigm of the old days with a new coat of paint.
This fascinates me because people seem to have forgotten that the reason personal computing was such an incredible thing is that it freed people from that old paradigm. I suspect that, over time, people will lean anew why it was that being freed of it was such a great thing.