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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?

#921
post #831
post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. Unprecedented in human history. Wide-ranging social, cultural and economic impacts.

What's unprecedented is the insane population explosion of the last ~100 years. It's only good to have major reduction to saner levels.

Yes, but not before a lot of pain. All our current economic models are built on population growth.

Slow growth essentially means that the population pyramid becomes too top heavy. You’re going to have trouble if your country is filled with 70 year old pensioners and the trickle of tax paying 20-40 year olds slows down.

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

#922
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)?

Don’t think so. This isn’t a case of population declining because of a one off event, killing off the old and infirm first and leaving behind a (relatively) healthier population.

This is more of a gradual decline AND ageing. The decline isn’t happening because the old are going away; its happening because there are too few young people being born.

That just leads to stasis. Nothing wrong with that, but it completely messes with all our current economic and governance models

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

#923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Halving” vehicles has been possible for long time, also seen it mentioned numerous times over the years. Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society. As for the RV, you still need parking…

> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.

Will there ever be more than a fringe of the population willing to be exposed to the mortality risks motorcyclists are exposed to? Last time i looked your chance of being killed is an order of magnitude higher on a motorcycle.

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

#924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript. I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better t…

TypeScript is better than JavaScript in most situations. JavaScript is all that remained after the plugin-based alternatives were killed off. It’s not that TypeScript is a terrible language, but being a better language is a low bar to clear when you consider that we have 20+ years of extra experience since the early days of JS and a new language also wouldn’t inherit all the baggage. Things that IMHO have the potenti…

I agree that improvements are possible in the areas you've listed, my point was that I don't believe they'd be significant enough to get the 2x productivity you later mention. They're all, in my view, at or above the 80% good enough mark for the current paradigm of what a web app is or needs to do, and any further improvements would yield rapidly diminishing returns. I think the fact that JS has been used for 20+ years, and now TS for most of the last decade, is partly (not wholly) because of this.

That's unless the paradigm of most web apps fundamentally shifts - ie your distributed systems point.

Don't get me wrong, if such a 2x productivity increase over TS is possible I'd love to be wrong here and see that happen - not least just out of pure interest of how that language could be so much better, because clearly I'd be learning a lot there :-)

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

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend is to de-scale it, most probably airplane tickets will get even more expensive (I'm talking about things here in Europe), not to mention accommodation. It will suck for countries like Greece or Spain, which depend a lot on tourism money, but there's not much that they can do about it.

That's not really solving it, that's just adjusting the point on the pricing curve. That means an increasing amount of unmet demand right?

You're looking from the pov of the tourism industry (either consumers, in the form of tourists, or from the pov of providers, in the form of tour operators, accommodation hosts and the like), hence the talk about the price curve and the need to adjust it.

I was talking more from an outside perspective, and, more importantly, from the pov of an outside direct influence (via more taxes/charges). I do not think air-fuel costs are going to get cheaper again, to the contrary, I think the externalities of airplane flight will start being included more and more into the final price. The same goes for accommodation prices, which are dependent on energy prices (you need gas/electricity to keep a room at reasonable temperatures during the summer and in winter). Those are not going back to cheaper prices, either. And there are all the other related prices, for example car rental prices have also increased dramatically and will most probably remain that way, there's no IC cars replacing the current fleets in the near future (for the simple reason that they won't make them anymore) and we won't build enough EVs at reasonable costs to keep the current car rental market exactly as it is (or as it used to be until very recent, that is).

As for the "unmet demand", too bad for the consumers (i.e. potential tourists). The same way the mass tourism industry was invented in the 1930s (give or take), the same way it can be scaled back "societally", by saying things like "if you still want to be a tourist you will do great harm to the ecosystem shared by all of us" (which is most probably true) and similar stuff. No (service) industry has to live forever.

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

#926
post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should eat what requires the fewest resources (water, land), and is completely nutritious for all stages of life: plants, and plants only. It’s mind boggling how tight the Venn diagram is between People Who Are Fearful of Climate Crisis and People Who Refuse to Stop Eating Animals.

When you consider arability constraints and nutritional efficiency, meat is more efficient and less destructive than plants in many cases. Soy production, for example, sufficient to meet global demand requires destroying the Amazon; meat production is much less destructive to land, taking place either on non-arable scrubland or via consuming human-inedible surplus feedstock. (Or on land already depleted by plant farm…

> without becoming malnourished, weak, and unhealthy. Right now, this is not technologically possible.

Millions of people “survive” on a vegan diet and have for decades. They’re doing just fine and aren’t “malnourished, weak, and unhealthy”

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

#927

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…

> 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. Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomic…

Isn’t there also a marginal safety advantage for AC in that because it’s an alternating current, you can let go of whatever is live you’ve grabbed and is shocking you? Whereas with DC, your muscles stay contracted and you can’t let go.

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

#928
post #28

Energy? I feel like it's been talked about a lot but maybe not? Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do). Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh. Taken toge…

yeah, sure, sounds great... but how to afford a house on which I could put those panels on?

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

#929
post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sync work process is inefficient. 80% of the time I would define work process to be asynchronous e.g. with git branch, pull request, docs, backlogs. This is efficient collaboration. Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big. Ideally, I would go 100% async work if possible.

Figma is a pretty good example of real-time collaboration while still maintaining an asynchronous primary workflow.

Pair designing could happen while meeting where there's not only approval process but also some tweaks here and there. In normal workflow, work should be done as single responsibility (feature) per designer. Synchronous workflow within tool is not that better than it's done by talking (letting 1 person doing it)
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